DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

We have seen the future, and it sucks.

Archive for May, 2013

Bar Brawl Involved Cop Biker Gang

10th May 2013

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Whiskey Row in the Arizona mountain town of Prescott has seen its share of bar fights, biker gangs and rowdies.

But the bar fights aren’t supposed to involve a biker gang made up of police officers carrying brass knuckles and knives. The fallout from such a brawl in December has led to the retirements of a police chief and two senior sheriff’s officials and recommendations of felony charges against the former chief for his alleged role in trying to cover it up.

Hey, it’s Arizona — what else is there to do? It’s not as if they’re allowed to arrest illegal immigrants, after all.

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IRS Workers Protest Spending Cuts

10th May 2013

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I’ll just bet they do.

Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on IRS Workers Protest Spending Cuts

The Incredible Talking Weiner

9th May 2013

John Derbyshire looks at your typical Democrat Congressman.

Rep. Weiner became ex-Rep. Weiner after Tweeting suggestive pictures of himself to female e-acquaintances and then lying about the matter. He resigned his seat, sub-editors at the New York tabloids showered so many puns and double entendres on the city that the Sanitation Department had to clear them from the streets with snow plows, and those of us who’d never seen eye-to-eye with Weiner (sorry, it’s contagious) assumed we had heard the last of him—that his premature withdrawal (sorry, sorry) from public life would be permanent.

Given the manner of Weiner’s leaving Congress, he didn’t seem very electable. As the New York Post opined, Weiner’s road to the mayoralty would surely be “long and hard.” Possibly so; but at the end of April Weiner was holding his own (look, you try writing with a straight face about this guy) in the polls.

Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on The Incredible Talking Weiner

Head Start Teachers Name Obamacare as Biggest Problem

9th May 2013

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Head Start teachers and administrators told The Daily Caller that their most pressing concern is not budget impacts from sequestration but changes coming from President Barack Obama’s health-care law.

In 2014, the impact of 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act “is probably going to be a 9 percent [cost] increase, and significantly more the next year,” said Nancy Nordyk, director of the Head Start program in southern Oregon.

Rising healthcare costs will likely force Oregon to reduce some Head Start workers’ hours so they’re not eligible for the medical program, said Nordyk, who spoke to TheDC during a national Head Start conference held just outside D.C. in Maryland.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Head Start Teachers Name Obamacare as Biggest Problem

Survey: Top 10 Business States All Led by GOP Governors

9th May 2013

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My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

The bottom states are, of course, all Blue states.

Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on Survey: Top 10 Business States All Led by GOP Governors

Tax Collections From Wealthy Are Saving Government

9th May 2013

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Which will only encourage them to spend more. As Maggie Thatcher said, the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.

Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Tax Collections From Wealthy Are Saving Government

Lockheed Martin’s ADAM Laser Blasts Enemy Rockets With Its HEL Beam

9th May 2013

Read it. And watch the video.

We have the technology.

 

Posted in Is this a great country, or what? | Comments Off on Lockheed Martin’s ADAM Laser Blasts Enemy Rockets With Its HEL Beam

Humor of the Day

9th May 2013

Two tweets:

http://legalinsurrection.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Twitter-@meghanmccain-Sanford-hypocrite.jpg

http://legalinsurrection.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Twitter-@iowahawkblog-Meghan-McCain.jpg

Posted in Is this a great country, or what? | Comments Off on Humor of the Day

“Diversity” Is Counter-Productive; See Princeton

9th May 2013

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It is no accident, as we conspiracy theorists say, that campuses that are the steamiest hothouses of “diversity” — often the most elite, selective institutions — frequently experience the most dissatisfaction with their racial “climate.” When race is like a constantly picked scab, the sore never heals.

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The Bionic Ear Is Closer Than You Think With New Apps, Implants, and Biomimetic Mics

8th May 2013

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It’s not a secret that replicating what the human brain and senses do naturally still presents a substantial challenge in engineering. New advances in restoring and improving hearing are getting closer to the real thing by going mobile and taking cues from nature.

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We’re “80% of the Way” to Fake Meat That’s Indistinguishable From the Real Thing

8th May 2013

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Oh, boy.

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White Lies, Black Borders, and Red Lines

7th May 2013

Guy Somerset doesn’t believe the same things that everyone else believes.

Every schoolchild is taught that the evil Germans invaded Poland in 1939 because they loved killing people (usually infants). This crippled account of history with hatred as its crutch continues throughout high school and university only to be mended, to the extent it ever is, in graduate school or by self-education. Then the inquisitive mind learns that the war was perhaps not entirely caused by Germans’ insatiable need for babies’ blood.

Lamentably an area known as the Danzig Corridor was to drag Britain and France into a continent-wide conflict that resulted not in the legitimate surrender of a Polish strip of historically German land, but instead the sacrifice of Poland to decades of Soviet tyranny. Some heroic individuals foresaw this and attempted to avert it.

In the end, Britain and France blundered into a charnel house that need never have existed, and it was largely in the service of promises, assurances, and treaties with Warsaw. After all, they reasoned, had not Germany crossed a red line?

Thankfully history never repeats itself and the United States is blithely in the process of threatening the Syrian government over a set of red lines that the US drew.

That’s sarcasm, incidentally.

Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on White Lies, Black Borders, and Red Lines

If Amanda Marcotte Made You a Sandwich, Would You Eat It?

7th May 2013

The Other McCain is not afraid to ask the hard questions. (Well, not so hard, in this case.)

What did Mitt say to provoke Marcotte’s bizarre rant? He simply gave this advice to college seniors: “If you meet someone you love, get married. Have a quiver-full of kids if you can.” But Amanda Marcotte hates babies. She is such a bloodthirsty enthusiast for abortion that one imagines that she would have paid Kermit Gosnell for the opportunity to come to his clinic and help kill babies.

Amanda Marcotte is not “pro-choice.” She is pro-death.

Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on If Amanda Marcotte Made You a Sandwich, Would You Eat It?

Damn Those Pesky White People!

7th May 2013

John Hinderaker faces a serious problem.

It is not easy to select the dumbest article to appear in the New York Times in any given week. Even if we exclude columns by Paul Krugman and Tom Friedman on the ground of lifetime achievement, there is plenty of idiocy to choose from. My nominee for this week is this piece by Nancy DiTomaso, titled “How Social Networks Drive Black Unemployment.” Ms. DiTomaso, a professor at Rutgers business School, undertakes to explain persistently high unemployment among African-Americans. Some would say the obvious culprit is the anti-growth policies of the Obama administration, but Ms. DiTomaso is not interested in turning over that particular rock. Her starting point is quite different….

Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on Damn Those Pesky White People!

Chinese Culture and the Uniqueness of Islamic Jihad

6th May 2013

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In March 2013, the writer Harold Rhode at the website of Gatestone Institute commented on a recent Chinese report that tried to explain what holds the Muslim world back compared to other countries and cultures. Some Chinese observers, in behind-the-scenes discussions, kept saying they were perplexed about the Muslim world’s — and particularly the Arab world’s — inability to deal with the challenges of modern society.

The Chinese and the Muslims, they thought, had both suffered humiliation by foreigners over the past two centuries, but their reactions to these experiences are very different. “We also suffered,” the Chinese said, “but now we control our destiny, and are doing everything we can to learn from these foreigners so that we can benefit from the modern world and ensure that we do not suffer this humiliation again. We Chinese ‘look to the future.’”

The Muslims, on the other hand, seem to have a different approach: Instead of looking to the future they “are mired in the past,” more concerned about taking revenge against foreigners who they believe humiliated them long ago than about dealing rationally with contemporary problems to improve their societies and futures.

Posted in Living with Islam: The world's most intolerant—and intolerable—religion | Comments Off on Chinese Culture and the Uniqueness of Islamic Jihad

Homeschooler Uprising in America?

6th May 2013

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Homeschoolers typically score higher on the ACT than their public school counterparts and have higher grade point averages (GPA) than other students once they are in college. Nevertheless, homeschoolers are schooled by their parents at a cost around $500-$600 per year. In public schools, the cost per student averages $10,000 per year.

Recruiters from colleges are noticing the trend, since the majority of homeschoolers graduate and obtain a four-year bachelor’s degree at a much higher rate than public school and some private school competitors. Colleges such as MIT, Harvard, Stanford and Duke have begun recruiting homeschooled students.

Another knock on homeschoolers is that they miss the socializing aspect of student life. According to a
National Home Education Research Institute (NHERI) survey, homeschoolers have “healthy social, psychological, and emotional development, and success into adulthood.” Homeschoolers typically have core groups of students and do not operate completely alone, contrary to popular perception.

Posted in Is this a great country, or what? | Comments Off on Homeschooler Uprising in America?

The Last Refuge From Scandal? Professorships

6th May 2013

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 After a sex scandal forced Eliot Spitzer from the governor’s mansion in Albany, he turned up at City College, teaching a course called “Law and Public Policy.” After another sex scandal forced James E. McGreevey from the governor’s mansion in New Jersey, he turned up at Kean University, teaching in the global M.B.A. program.

More recently, Parsons the New School for Design announced that John Galliano, the celebrated clothing designer who lost his job at Christian Dior after unleashing a torrent of anti-Semitic vitriol in a bar, would be leading a four-day workshop and discussion called “Show Me Emotion.”

And David H. Petraeus, the general turned intelligence chief turned ribald punch line, will have not one college paycheck, but two. Last month, the City University of New York said he would be the next visiting professor of public policy at Macaulay Honors College. On Thursday, the University of Southern California announced that Mr. Petraeus would also be teaching there; he will split his time between coasts.

The traditional path to an academic job is long and laborious: the solitude and penury of graduate study, the scramble for one of the few open positions in each field, the blood sport of competitive publishing. But while colleges have always courted accomplished public figures, a leap to the front of the class has now become a natural move for those who have suffered spectacular career flameouts.

The Crust takes care of their own.

Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on The Last Refuge From Scandal? Professorships

California Dullards

6th May 2013

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Tony Bandermann was at work when he got the call. His son, Braden, was on a camping trip sponsored by California’s Garden Gate Elementary School when teachers discovered he had brought a small Swiss Army knife. Officials had suspended the boy for a day, and they wanted Bandermann to drive 100 miles, pick him up and then bring him back when the suspension was over. Bandermann refused, telling them they were overreacting. So teachers made the boy serve the suspension at the camp, isolating him from the other students, making him eat his meals by himself and not allowing him to take part in any activities for one day.

Posted in You can't make this stuff up. | Comments Off on California Dullards

Apprenticeships Could Help U.S. Workers Gain a Competitive Edge

6th May 2013

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The problems lie not with college-educated engineers or graduates with general bachelor’s degrees but in the dearth of skilled machinists, welders, robotics programmers and those who maintain equipment.

Apprenticeships could help reduce youth unemployment, widen opportunities for young people who do not want to sit in class all day and help ensure that the potential resurgence in manufacturing is not thwarted by a mismatch of skills. With effective apprenticeship systems, highly developed economies sustain jobs in manufacturing. Employment in manufacturing accounts for 20 percent of jobs in Germany and 16 percent in Switzerland but only 10 percent in the United States.

But nobody in authority cares because these jobs aren’t taken by Scions of the Crust, all of whom have to go to college and take glorified finger-painting degrees until their trust funds come through.

Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Apprenticeships Could Help U.S. Workers Gain a Competitive Edge

First 3D-Printed Gun Fired on Video, Blueprint Files Available to Download

6th May 2013

Read it. And watch the video.

Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen: Which fascist Democrat legislator will be first in line to ban it?

Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on First 3D-Printed Gun Fired on Video, Blueprint Files Available to Download

Senate Dems Prepare to Throw Obama Under the Obamacare Bus

6th May 2013

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And it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

We’ve been saying for some time that Obamacare will be a central issue in the 2014 election, and that it offers Republicans the hope, if they nominate solid candidates, of taking control of the Senate. Now, Senate Democrats have figured this out, as well.

It’s not as if they’d be sacrificing anything like a principle, after all.

Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on Senate Dems Prepare to Throw Obama Under the Obamacare Bus

Male Execs Are Afraid to Mentor Young Women, and It’s Holding Them Back

6th May 2013

The young women, that is. Lefty rag Business Insider examines the conjunction of feminism and our litigious society.

In Sheryl Sandberg’s new book, “Lean In“, she suggests that part of the problem facing women in the workplace is reluctance from male executives to mentor younger female employees.

Actually, it’s reluctance to get sued for sexual harassment.

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Does It Pay to Know Your Type?

5th May 2013

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INTJ here.

Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Does It Pay to Know Your Type?

Utopian for Beginners

5th May 2013

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Many conlanging projects begin with a simple premise that violates the inherited conventions of linguistics in some new way. Aeo uses only vowels. K?len has no verbs. Toki Pona, a language inspired by Taoist ideals, was designed to test how simple a language could be. It has just a hundred and twenty-three words and fourteen basic sound units. Brithenig is an answer to the question of what English might have sounded like as a Romance language, if vulgar Latin had taken root on the British Isles. Láadan, a feminist language developed in the early nineteen-eighties, includes words like radíidin, defined as a “non-holiday, a time allegedly a holiday but actually so much a burden because of work and preparations that it is a dreaded occasion; especially when there are too many guests and none of them help.”

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Is Safe, Green Thorium Power Finally Ready for Prime Time?

5th May 2013

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Answer: Not as long as the eco-nazis freak every time they hear the work ‘nuclear’.

Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Is Safe, Green Thorium Power Finally Ready for Prime Time?

World’s Biggest Rubber Duck Floats in Hong Kong Waters

5th May 2013

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

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National Offend a Feminist Week Begins Tomorrow

5th May 2013

The Other McCain is on the case.

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Islamic Terror in The Press: An Examination of David Sirota and the Impotence of Deduction.

5th May 2013

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A few months ago, when a clip aired revealing that current Arab Spring president of Egypt Morsi had, before he was elected, maintained that the Jewish people are “apes and swine”, it became apparent to any rational observer of the mainstream media that the mainstream media’s knowledge of Islam is an inverse limit approaching zero. Like one of those horrendous calculus strings as things go from bad to worse, the media either didn’t report Morsi’s sentiments because it is salaciously inconvenient, or chose to obfuscate by appeals to western ignorance of the nuances of the region, alleged Israeli atrocities, and its flagship ideology, Islam.

Obfuscation is the latest and only tactic left for the media in all matters concerning Islam and Muslims, a tactic not afforded to any other group. It has hallmarks of an affirmative action mindset, where everything is reduced to grievance and historical justification, and causes are deduced from those grievances.  And in so being, it is highly incoherent. Tangentially, as an easily accessible example, the conclusion that is often nimbly deduced from this mindset is that nationalism is bad because nationalism is the cause of the abuse of which Muslims have been subjected; whether it be the French, the British, Israelis or the Russians, a nation and their xenophobic national pride or colonial avarice is to blame.  But without an idea of a collective nation or culture, what use is the argument of collective grievance? And if it is of no use in regards to the French, but in fact a source of great self-deprecation, why is it used in respect to the Chechens, the Palestinians, or, for that matter, the Tibetans?

Nobody bothers to answer these questions because nobody bothers to ask them. Rather, the western powers are subjected to the idiocy of a one David Sirota when its civilians are killed and maimed.

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The End of Full-Time Work in the American Retail Service Sector

5th May 2013

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Late last year, within the service world, this change was already occurring – at restaurants, at hotels, and in retail stores, managers were already formulating plans.  In a large sense, by making this prediction, I was betting on the score of a game that had already been played — all we are doing now is waiting for the media to catch up and report the results to the public at large.

And you can thank Obama for putting the final nail in its head. Aren’t you proud?

But one thing has been very clear:  The best way to be “safe” and avoid the costs imposed by the law was to have one’s workers be classified as “part-time”, or for this particular law working less than 30 hours per week.  The other fact that emerged from some IRS rule-making (yes, the IRS is in charge of creating and enforcing many of the rules, and doesn’t that make you feel better) was that whether a worker was to be classified as part-time on January 1, 2014 would be based on his or her work patterns in 2013.   This is why savvy companies, including ours, were planning hard for work force changes last year.  Our goal was to get every worker in the company under 30 hours a week before 2013 even started.

All part of the long-term Democrat program to make every American who isn’t a Scion of the Crust one of the welfare-dependent class.

The service industry generally does not operate 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, so its labor needs do not match traditional full-time shifts.  Those of us who run service companies already have to piece together multiple employees and shifts to cover our operating hours.  In this environment, there is no reason one can’t stitch together employees making 29 hours a week (that don’t have to be given expensive health care policies) nearly as easily as one can stitch together 40 hours a week employees.   In fact, it can be easier — a store that needs to cover 10AM to 9PM can cover with two 5.5 hour a day employees.   If they work 5 days a week, that is 27.5 hours a week, safely part-time.  Three people working such hours with staggered days off can cover the store’s hours for 7 days.

Based on the numbers above, a store might actually prefer to only have sub-30 hour shifts, but may have, until recently, provided full-time 40 hours work because good employees expect it and other employers were offering it.  In other words, they had to offer full-time work because competition in the labor market demanded it.  But if everyone in the service business stops offering full-time work, the competitive pressure to offer anything but part-time jobs will be gone.  The service business may never go back.

How soon before erstwhile fully-employed middle-class people drop below the ‘poverty line’ (which keeps inching upward) and start depending on SNAP and Medicaid to keep body and soul together? We see before us the modern equivalent of the Company Store: The politicians who provide you with food and education and health care are going to demand (and get) your vote,  or else the trough goes empty. Like immigrants at the turn of the 20th century, what used to be the backbone of the country are going to be working two or three jobs just to keep afloat.

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Tech Firms: Pro-Democrat, Pro-immigration, Pro-Rubio

5th May 2013

The Lion of the Blogosphere deals out some inconvenient truth.

1. Despite the myth in the conservative blogosphere that big business and rich people are Republican, in fact big business and rich people are far more Democratic than conservative-blogosphere types want to believe.

2. They are putting massive support behind more immigration so they can fill up their cubicles with cheap computer programmers from India.

The Republican party hasn’t been the ‘party of the rich’ since FDR. It is, however, the party of the Real Middle Class who run the small businesses of America and who are getting it packed up their pooper by the quasi-fascist alliance of the Crust Corporate and the Crust Political. All this noise about ‘soaking the rich’ is just handwaving to disguise the fact that (a) there aren’t enough rich to pay for all the promises coming out of Washington and (b) ‘the rich’ aren’t scared by tax increases any more than people who live on a hill are scared by flooding.

Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Tech Firms: Pro-Democrat, Pro-immigration, Pro-Rubio

The Way We Live Now

5th May 2013

Read it. And watch the video.

George Will explains it all to you. This is one of the reasons why you want to go to someplace like Yale.

Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on The Way We Live Now

Silicon Valley and the Reinvention of Food

5th May 2013

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Fake meats have been around for years, but a new crop of Bay Area startups backed by tech investors think they can make meat substitutes good enough to compete with the real deal. Beyond Meat — backed by Twitter founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone via their company Obvious Corp — created an eerily accurate chicken substitute, for example.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Posted in Think about it. | 1 Comment »

‘How I Became a Hipster’

5th May 2013

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You know you’re in hipster Brooklyn when someone who looks like a 19th-century farmer tells you that his line of work is “affinity marketing.”

So I decided to embed myself among the rooftop gardeners and the sustainability consultants and the chickeneers. I wanted to see what the demographic behind nanobatched chervil and the continually cited show “Girls” could teach me about life and craft cocktails. I wanted to see what sullen 25-year-old men had to tell me beyond “Leave me alone during this awkward period of beard growth.”

Only in New York. (And they laugh at ‘flyover country’….)

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Jockeying for Position: How Boxers and Briefs Got Into Men’s Pants

5th May 2013

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

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The Triumph of Suburbia

5th May 2013

Joel Kotkin lays out some inconvenient truth.

A funny thing happened on the way to the long-trumpeted triumph of the city: the suburbs not only survived but have begun to regain their allure as Americans have continued aspiring to single-family homes.

People want their own space, the more the better. That’s why, when people get rich, they buy bigger homes rather than smaller ones. You have to be an intellectual to ignore evidence like that.

Read the actual Brookings report that led to the “Suburbs Lose” headline: it shows that in 91 of America’s 100 biggest metro areas, the share of jobs located within three miles of downtown declined over the 2000s. Only Washington, D.C., saw significant growth.

Your tax dollars at work, that.

Suburbs have never been popular with the chattering classes, whose members tend to cluster in a handful of denser, urban communities—and who tend to assume that place shapes behavior, so that if others are pushed to live in these communities they will also behave in a more enlightened fashion, like the chatterers. This is a fallacy with a long pedigree in planning circles, going back to the housing projects of the 1940s, which were built in no small part on the evidently absurd, and eventually discredited, assumption that if the poor had the same sort of housing stock as the rich, they would behave in the same ways.

The reason we lived close together was because in the Old Days it took time to get information from Point A to Point B, and those who got their information before others tended to have an advantage. Well, information travels a lot more quickly now, as do other things, and so the rationale for living cheek-by-jowl went away — and people responded appropriately.

The new low-cost suburbia, wrote Robert Bruegmann in his compact history of sprawl, “provided the surest way to obtain some of the privacy, mobility and choice that once were available only to the wealthiest and most powerful members of society.”

One of the reasons that the Crust like living in urban cores is that they still have plenty of space because they can afford it, and having plenty of proles around makes the Servant Problem less acute.

 

Posted in Is this a great country, or what? | Comments Off on The Triumph of Suburbia

Advice On How To Make Better Decisions — Tailored Just for You (Courtesy of Sherlock Holmes)

5th May 2013

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Sadly, life doesn’t come with an instruction manual custom designed for you.

But you can make one.

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Junk Degrees and the Gender Divide

5th May 2013

Freeberg, as usual, has some good stuff to say.

The medication explosion is both a cause and a symptom of the forced female-friendliness. It is a cause because drugging a boy so that he can pay attention to what he’s being told, is a different thing entirely from drugging a boy so that he will engage the problems and make effective decisions. Our drugs yield passive, not active, participation. This difference has deep meaning. I wonder why more people don’t make something of it.

And it’s a symptom because — again, I speak from personal experience — participating in any class structure that is female-friendly, when you’re a boy, is boring as snot. That, too, is another deeply meaningful point that people don’t talk about as much as they should, if they really want to make the situation better, and I’m left wondering why.

It’s difficult for me to use actual English words to describe the utter lack of respect or sympathy I have for people who claim to have difficulty capturing the attention of boys. Oh, I suppose I can relate to it a little bit. The problem comes about when they conclude that it can’t be done, and it’s time for some little blue pills. Have you ever taken a gaggle of zoned-out boy kids outside, and moved the subject matter around to something they want to learn? It’s quite a striking effect. Think of an old metal three-pound coffee can filled with mice, with a blowtorch put under it. It’s like that — but reversed, approach instead of avoidance — lots of writhing and jostling as everyone struggles to get a look. What we should be studying here, is not what drugs force the boys to concentrate on girl-stuff, but what subject matters bring about this writhing and jostling and sudden interest.

Very well said.

We could use the movies as an example. Men who actually enjoy being around their wives will take them to see Titanic, The Notebook, The English Patient, even the latest Barbra Streisand Farewell Tour. But a Twilight movie crosses the line into “I’ll do anything for love, but I won’t do that.”

Well, when it works for the movie house, it works for school. If the clock and the window are the most interesting things to watch in the classroom, there’s a problem.

Yup.

Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Junk Degrees and the Gender Divide

Are Libyans Culturally Enriching Italy?

5th May 2013

Steve Sailer isn’t afraid to ask the hard questions.

When I did the Backpack Tour of Europe in 1980, I came to the same conclusion as just about all those young aristocrats who did the Grand Tour of Europe in the 18th Century: Italy is the best country to visit as a tourist.

He also quotes some interesting bits from Christopher Caldwell in the Financial Times (unfortunately behind a paywall):

     Much commentary about immigration to Europe is written as if no reasonable person could possibly care who, specifically, a country’s residents are and where, specifically, they come from.

Another problem is that Italy is the land of Dante’s The Divine Comedy and the Sistine Chapel. It might be possible to convince an American or an Australian to believe (or to say) that a big arrival of migrants will be a cultural “enrichment”. It is a harder case to make in Italy, even in the 21st century. Immigration may enrich Italy in many ways, but is unlikely to do so culturally.

 

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HAPPY DANCE SUNDAY

5th May 2013

Christos Anesti

Indeed, He is risen.

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Dhimmitude in Sweden

5th May 2013

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Last March, a local administration’s decision to approve for the first time the reciting of the Muslims’ call to prayer from the minaret of the Grand Mosque had strengthened the ties between Muslims and Sweden.

The move had also been hailed by Turkey as Europe Minister Egemen Ba??? had thanked Sweden in an official letter expressing his gratitude for the decision.

Posted in Living with Islam: The world's most intolerant—and intolerable—religion | Comments Off on Dhimmitude in Sweden

San Jose State University Meteorology Decides Burning Books They Don’t Agree With Is Better Than Reading Them

4th May 2013

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I suppose that in a Blue State having educators burn books is not that big a deal.

Posted in Dystopia Watch | 1 Comment »

Blue State = Third World (A Tale of Bureaucratic Extortion)

4th May 2013

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So when the owners needed a bartender last year, they sought someone who knew the territory. “Energetic and enthusiastic men and women with an appreciation of craft beer, good food, whisky and real football (a k a soccer),” the Craigslist ad read in part. “Being British definitely works in your favor.”

The résumés trickled in. One applicant, however, was not really looking for a job. She already had one: trolling the classifieds for the New York City Commission on Human Rights.

Soon, Longbow received a legal notice. The bar, it said, had violated discrimination law “by giving a preference to employment applicants based on their national origin.”

The commission offered to settle the matter for $2,500.

How generous. Nice to know that justice in New York can be bought.

 Justin Brannan, spokesman for the local city councilman, Vincent J. Gentile, had some choice words for the commission’s efforts, including “quintessential ‘letter of the law,’ versus ‘spirit of the law’ ” and “predatory ‘gotcha’ enforcement” that he said belied the city’s pro-small-business cant. “They’re not enforcing these laws to protect the public,” said Mr. Brannan, who is also president of a club, the Bay Ridge Democrats, that has held events at Longbow. “They’re enforcing them to generate revenue.”

Oh, ya think? (And to look good in front of their bosses.)

 On Thursday, Ms. Colbert said, she got a call from a commission official who warned that the fine could rise to $7,500 if she went to trial before an administrative law judge. “He also had the audacity to tell me that according to my requirements, I was not qualified to work in my own pub,” she added.

The official, Ms. Colbert said, urged her to pay the fine before the date of a coming “conciliation meeting.” The meeting is to be scheduled for next month, she said.

In other words, pay us now or pay us more later. Stand up for your rights and common sense, and the price goes up.

Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Blue State = Third World (A Tale of Bureaucratic Extortion)

Why Are Campus Hate Crime Hoaxes So Common?

4th May 2013

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Because ‘progressives’ are compulsive liars? Because they need an enemy, even a fictional one, in order to feel good about themselves?

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The Whole Problem Is That There Is No Housing Boom in Silicon Valley

4th May 2013

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In the technology capital of the world, we’re making very scant use of the technologies of steel frame construction and elevators. Land is scarce in the corridor running between I-280 and US-101 from San Jose up to San Francisco, but it’s not all that scarce. It’s just not being used very intensively. Because zoning generally mandates low-density uses and because the California Environmental Quality Act perversely hyper-empowers NIMBYs to block projects even though California’s pleasant climate makes it one of the most ecologically sustainable places for new housing to go. There is no housing boom there, but the region—and the country as a whole—would be a much better place if there were.

And this is in the heartland of people who vote for politicians who constantly push for higher and higher urban densities, along with its traditional infrastructure, such as rail lines.

Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on The Whole Problem Is That There Is No Housing Boom in Silicon Valley

Dracula, Blogged

4th May 2013

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You can find anything on the Internet.

Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Dracula, Blogged

Ohio ‘Republicans’ Sell Out

4th May 2013

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Republican leadership in the Ohio Senate has received nearly $200,000 in labor union donations since 2011, secretary of state records reveal. Senate President Keith Faber (R-Celina) announced on May 1 that he does not expect the Senate to pursue workplace freedom, signaling majority support for forced unionism.

Nine of Ohio’s top ten Republican recipients of union contributions since January 1, 2011 are state senators – and three of those are members of Senate leadership.

Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Ohio ‘Republicans’ Sell Out

How Colleges Scam the Working Class

4th May 2013

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Students today can choose courses on prostitutes or “queer gardens”; on brain science or ancient democracies. But how is a freshman supposed to figure out whether it’s better to take the class on women in the European Union or the one on the Korean War — to know which is most important, which will be of lasting value and which would form a good foundation for the study of other subjects?

As Mark Bauerlein of Emory University notes, “You’re handing the choice to people who don’t know what to choose. They don’t think five years ahead and say, This will be better for me when I’m 25. The kind of discretion that the student-centered progressives want to give is actually damaging to students.”

It’s “a catastrophe,” says Peter Berkowitz of the Hoover Institution. “On the one hand, colleges have abandoned any actual structure,” so kids need help figuring out how to put together a serious plan for graduating. “But the faculty aren’t there. They’re off studying ‘queer gardens.’” He calls it a maze — and one where “those who come from poor academic backgrounds will do even less well.”

Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on How Colleges Scam the Working Class

Anatomy of a Robocar Accident

4th May 2013

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People often ask who would get sued in a robocar accident. They wonder if it will be the occupant/passenger/driver, or the car company, or perhaps the software developer or some component maker. They are concerned that this is the major “blocking” issue to resolve before cars can operate on the road.

The real answer, at least in the USA and many other countries, is that in the early years, everybody will get sued. There will be no shortage of lawyers out to make a reputation on an early case here, and several defendants in every case. It’s also quite probable that it will be the occupant of a robocar suing the makers of the car, with no 3rd party involved.

Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Anatomy of a Robocar Accident

The Cult of Positive Attitude and Always Saying Yes

4th May 2013

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A day doesn’t go by where some boss doesn’t shut down discussion of something he wants to do by saying, “You need to have a positive attitude. You need to work on saying yes instead of no all the time.” It’s important to note that this is not an argument on the merits of his idea or the criticism of it, it’s an attack on the attitude of his critics, and really it is no different than if he had covered his ears and screamed “la la la la la, I can’t hear you!”

Yeah, I really hate those guys.

Posted in Think about it. | 1 Comment »

That 3D-Printed Handgun You’ve Been Waiting For Is Here

4th May 2013

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Remember when Defense Distributed’s Cody Wilson promised to unveil an entirely 3D-printed handgun made of ABS plastic with the firing pin its only metal part? Well, he’s apparently done it. Forbes’s Andy Greenberg was given a sneak peek of the result, and it looks and appears to be quite an achievement. If all goes well, the plans will be unveiled at Defcad.org next week.

Posted in Is this a great country, or what? | Comments Off on That 3D-Printed Handgun You’ve Been Waiting For Is Here