From illustrator Bob Staake, via Boing Boing, one of a growing meme:

Also from Boing Boing, a chart showing that being sprayed by pepper spray is worse, in terms of Scoville units, than having sliced habaneros rubbed in your eyes.

This is a man-bites-dog story: a New York lawyer who ran a notorious foreclosure mill has shut down his operation. Excerpt:

The announcement caps a remarkable fall for the state’s dominant foreclosure law firm, which until recently handled 40 percent of all foreclosures statewide. That’s also made it a lightning rod for criticism and anger during the mortgage crisis, particularly downstate in New York City and Long Island, where foreclosures have been much more severe than in upstate and Western New York.

The firm had already been denounced by consumers and consumer advocates for its work on behalf of lenders even before the “robo-signing” controversy thrust it into the middle of a nationwide crisis over the legitimacy of the legal process underpinning many foreclosures.

Since then, the firm has been criticized for participating in “robo-signing” and allegedly improper foreclosures, with critics saying it helped speed up foreclosures to benefit its lender clients by allegedly authorizing the “assignment” or transfer of mortgages from one lender to another when critics say it lacked authority to do so.

And it’s been vilified by advocates, other attorneys, politicians and even judges for submitting sloppy and allegedly fraudulent paperwork that is riddled with legal errors, including faulty affidavits and notarizations.

On the down side, at least 90 employees, and as many as 600, will lose their livelihoods. Sad for them, but they were in on a bad business. I’d say Joe Nocera now has a scalp. As Nocera wrote in an earlier column:

I saw the firm operate up close when I wrote several columns about Lilla Roberts, a 73-year-old homeowner who had spent three years in foreclosure hell. Although she had a steady income and was a good candidate for a modification, the Baum firm treated her mercilessly.

Nelson Muntz to ya, Baum.

Oh, oh, oh, here we go:

Belgians deported to Nazi Germany in World War II to work as slaves for the Third Reich have now received tax demands from Berlin.

Belgium’s finance minister Didier Reynders has vowed to confront Germany over the ‘morally indefensible’ tax demands which have been arriving in the mailboxes of elderly war survivors over the past few weeks.

‘It is shocking that people who during World War II were forced to work by the Nazis have now received tax demands from the authorities related to the compensation eventually paid for that work,’ he said.

They haff vays…

Says reader CL, who tipped me off to this story: “Welcome to the New Europe.”

The anonymous Victim One in the Sandusky case has withdrawn from his high school because of bullying. Why? Read it and weep:

Officials at Central Mountain High School in Clinton County weren’t providing guidance for fellow students, who were reacting badly about Joe Paterno’s firing and blaming the 17-year-old, said Mike Gillum, the psychologist helping his family. Those officials were unavailable for comment this weekend.

The name-calling and verbal threats were just too much, he said.

And people still wonder why it takes molestation victims years to come forward. Lord have mercy. Central Mountain High School, the shame is yours.

This is the dark side of small town life. The same kill-the-messenger phenomenon, but without the sex, could be seen 30 years ago in the small south Louisiana town of St. Gabriel. A local pharmacist, Kay Gaudet, noticed something odd and troubling:

First she started tracking the number of miscarriages in this tiny Mississippi River town. Then came the newsmen and the publicity. And at that point, her business slowed to a trickle.

“It was like you could notice it overnight,” she said.

What Gaudet found out was startling. In this community of 2,100 people, 63 women suffered 75 miscarriages in a three-year period from 1985 to 1988. One woman who lives next to a benzene plant has had four miscarriages in a row, including twins. Gaudet began to ask if there might be a relationship between the miscarriages and the smoke that belches from the petrochemical plants along the river. Others now wonder that as well.

I helped produce a segment for German television on this case. You would think that the town would have been thankful to Gaudet for exposing the possibility that they were being poisoned by petrochemical discharges from area plants. Just the opposite happened. People didn’t want to know it. Those plants were the economic lifeblood of their community. The community pressure on Gaudet and her husband got so bad, she told our TV crew, that their priest asked them to leave the parish.

Stop whatever you’re doing and watch Nigel Farage, UK Independence Party delegate to member of the European Parliament, let the EU chiefs have it with both barrels, right to their faces. Fear not, it’s safe for work:

Boy oh boy, when this thing blows up, they’ll be taking the European Parliament building apart brick by brick, and using them to crack the heads of Eurocrats like Easter eggs. It ain’t gonna be pretty.

(Via McArdle).

Andrew Sullivan gave John Derbyshire an Yglesias Award (Sully’s prize given to someone who ballsily tells the truth to his or her own side) for calling Newt Gingrich a rotten hypocrite. Derb said:

Newt’s chutzpah knows no bounds, though. Back during the 2008 presidential campaign, he told a Fox News interviewer that then-Senator Obama ought to return contributions he had received from Freddie Mac and its sister racket, Fannie Mae. Just last year Newt brought out a campaign book in which he argued for getting rid of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. Now here he is in Iowa this week defending Freddie Mac. Quote: “Every American should be interested in expanding housing opportunities.”

Know who else deserves an Yglesias Award? The NRO combox commenter “Barry,” who, on Derb’s anti-Newt thread, lit into those jumping on Derb:

So because Derb doesn’t like Gingrich, he’s obviously a shill for Romney? That seems to be what many of these posts are saying. In fact, it’s a common theme for NR commenters in general: if there’s a post related to the primary race, and it doesn’t attack Romney unremittingly, then it’s obviously the work of a Rombot, which, of course, includes everybody at NR (including Derb, which is laughable on the face of it), which is, after all, part of the evil, never-to-be-trusted “establishment,” whatever that is. Probably whatever Rush says is the establishment, while pulling down nine figures.

Reading these comments drives me to despair. There’s little more thought here at NRO than an average Krugman column. We may says we oppose the left, but we’ve totally adopted their methods and ways of thinking.

… than willingly sit through Clint Eastwood’s “J. Edgar.” Is there anything less appealing on screens right now than Leonardo DiCaprio as J. Edgar Hoover? Besides Adam Sandler as a woman, I mean? John Podhoretz’s review is funny. Excerpts:

[W]e now know from the makeup work done on its pretty-boy star that when Leonardo DiCaprio gets old, he will look exactly like Jon Voight. This comes as troubling news. Do we really need two Jon Voights? Isn’t one Jon Voight enough?

Heck yeah. More:

If you make the mistake of going to see J. Edgar, you will emerge much older by the time the movie finishes, even though only two hours will have passed. Forget all that questionable talk about how those newly tested subatomic particles move so quickly that they violate the rules of time and can order a drink before they walk into the bar. It is Clint Eastwood, Hollywood’s only functioning octogenarian director, and not a subatomic particle, who has figured out a way to breach Einstein’s relativity theory. In the theaters in which his movies play, time literally slows down to the speed of an ant. I was so ancient by the time J. Edgar was done that I went home and watched five reruns of Law and Order.

I felt that way about Eastwood’s Bird, which I deeply wanted to lie, but … zzzzzz. Hoover is, of course, one of the great characters of 20th century America, but it sounds like Eastwood has explained him away by depicting him as a closet case — of which there is, as Podhoretz explains, no evidence at all. That dress thing? Didn’t happen. It’s fun to believe, though, so people believe it. I wonder if Jon Voight looks good in a dress. I wonder if he looks better than Adam Sandler.

One of the reasons Julie is in St. Francisville now is to buy a refrigerator, washer, and dryer for our new rental house. They need to be installed before we move in. My father told her that our family typically buys its appliances from a merchant in a nearby town, because their home repair work is so reliable. Julie and I decided ahead of time that we would try these folks out, but that we would also comparison-shop elsewhere. Which is, of course, completely normal.

Julie just phoned to tell about her experience there. When she told the man behind the counter what she was looking for and when she needed it, he replied that Julie would qualify for some kind of discount because she was buying so many things. Unfortunately, the woman who handles those special sales is out today, the man said, “because her Daddy’s having surgery,” but that the woman could do the arrangements on Tuesday.

The man noticed Julie’s last name, and asked if she was related to Mr. Ray and Miss Dorothy. Yes, she said, they’re my in-laws.

“Your sister-in-law died not too long ago,” he said. “I’m so sorry. She and my wife were good friends. I’ve done all kinds of work with [Ruthie’s husband] Mike.” And then he goes on talking about their connections.

“So here’s what we do,” he told Julie. “We’re not going to be able to get this stuff delivered before you go back to Philadelphia, but you leave the key with Mr. Ray and we’ll have it installed and ready to go before y’all get here.”

Julie hasn’t bought the appliances yet — she’ll have to do that tomorrow — but now she’s more or less obliged to buy them from this place. She can’t really go comparison-shop elsewhere. I mean, she can, but it would be thought rude. If she did this, I doubt it would be held against her, but it would be noticed. What she realized, though, is that she might pay a little more for appliances at this particular store, but her money is not just buying goods; it’s buying a relationship. 

“This is the man who’s going to be fixing our appliances if they break,” she said to me. We are not just customers to him. We’re Mr. Ray and Miss Dorothy’s people. We’re Mike Leming’s people. We’re related to Ruthie, Who Died.

“It’s amazing how many doors open up down here when you just mention the family  name,” Julie said. It’s not that my family is privileged; it’s that people know them, and so much depends on personal relationships.

This is a different world for us as consumers. Julie said in Philly, she would have heard the guy at the store say she couldn’t have what she wanted exactly when she wanted it, and would have walked out and gone to a merchant who could meet those demands. “It’s funny how conditioned we are to have all our demands met exactly as we want them,” Julie said. “We’re going to have to unlearn that.”

From her tone, I gather that she didn’t think this was such a bad thing. Neither do I.

Lord Sacks, the chief rabbi of Great Britain, calls the consumerist society “the most efficient mechanism ever devised for the creation and distribution of unhappiness.” More:

He went on: ”What does a consumer ethic do? It makes you aware all the time of the things you don’t have instead of thanking God for all the things you do have.

”If in a consumer society, through all the advertising and subtly seductive approaches to it, you’ve got an iPhone but you haven’t got a fourth generation one, the consumer society is in fact the most efficient mechanism ever devised for the creation and distribution of unhappiness.”

The newspaper that reported this, the Sydney Morning Herald, observes that Lord Sacks is one of the first religious leaders to go beyond condemning bankers and politicians for their role in the financial crisis, and to criticize ordinary people for their disordered materialistic habits. More:

In an attempt to highlight the link between faith and happiness, Lord Sacks pointed out that on the Jewish day of rest, the Shabbat, the devout spend time with their families rather than spending money.

Lord Sacks, who has represented Britain’s 300,000 Jews since 1991, said: ”The answer to the consumer society is the world of faith, which the Jews call the world of Shabbat, where you can’t shop and you can’t spend and you spend your time with things that matter, with family. Unless we get back to these values we will succeed in making our children and grandchildren ever unhappier.”