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Let’s see. The current Democratic standard-bearer (and U.S. president) believes that Ho Chi Minh was inspired by America’s founding fathers and, apparently, that Harry Truman should have cooperated with the mass murdering Vietnamese Communist.

The previous Democratic standard-bearer, John Kerry, considered the U.S. troops who fought against Ho Chi Minh’s forces to be like “the Army of Genghis Khan.” Kerry is now the U.S. Secretary of State.

It almost makes you nostalgic for the days when the Democratic standard-bearer was merely a war-hating draft dodger.

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Note: AFTER the election. There’s a politician’s wife.

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Even a blind pig finds an acorn every now and again.

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Despite having no horses, the water and sewerage department for the city of Detroit employs a horseshoer.

Yet even with a department so bloated that it has a horseshoer and no horses, the local union president said it is “not possible” to eliminate positions.

Look for … the union label….

Read it. And watch the video.

A very successful CiCi’s Pizza franchise owner says he had to sell his top performing pizza restaurants because he couldn’t afford the $221K in penalties that ObamaCare was going to impose on him.

Memo to Barack: Your plan to destroy small business in America is working like a charm.

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In ancient times, rich men vied with each other to build monuments to glorify their city and enhance its reputation.

The same thing happens in modern times, except that they aren’t spending their own money, but yours.

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Really, they deserve what they get.

The Other McCain tells it like it is.

Liberal bias is not a matter of unfairness, but rather a matter of dishonesty — deliberately ignoring some facts, and misrepresenting other facts, in order to misinform the public by portraying to them a politically falsified view of events and personalities.

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Who would know better what a piece of shit this law is?

Read it. And watch the video.

America’s renewable fuels policy is a fiasco that drives up the cost of both fuel and groceries, to no purpose. Well, there is a purpose: lots of people are making money off the renewable scam. But probably not you.

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Hartwell, who has vast experience defending clients under investigation by the Justice Department, believes that, absent Holder, Lerner might well cooperate with a Justice Department investigation in order to avoid prosecution. But as long as Holder is the Attorney General, and in the absence of a special prosecutor, he can block the prosecution of Lerner. And Lerner has every reason to believe that Holder will do so, however hard career DOJ lawyers lean on her.

Indeed, notes Hartwell, Lerner and her attorney (both reportedly staunch Obama supporters) know how protective Holder is when it comes to the friends and supporters of the president. They know that Holder has declined vigorously to enforce the law against the Black Panthers in Philadelphia when they didn’t even contest the charges; that he has refused to investigate all sorts of vote fraud allegations, not to mention schemes to defraud assorted federal entitlement schemes; that he has repeatedly stonewalled Congress on the Fast and Furious operation; and that he has already declined to prosecute the IRS for leaking confidential taxpayer information on conservatives.

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Just think what they could do with the government.

Think about getting your driver’s license renewed. Now think about checking it at a car rental counter. Why can’t the former be as efficient as the latter?

10 Lifehacks from 100 Years Ago

Turducken

Mushroom Packaging

This tiny, wearable patch makes you invisible to mosquitos

David Weekly’s Practical Computer Science Primer

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Attorney General Eric Holder has launched a war against Texas, and in doing so is defying the Supreme Court of the United States. The imminent judicial beat-down of Holder highlights that this case is not about the rule of law and instead abuses the federal courts for political purposes to rile up the far left and demonize Republicans.

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

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Forbes provides a breakdown. First, he’ll forfeit over 44% to the United Kingdom, despite spending all of two weeks there.

Then, U.S. tax collectors get in on the fun. Although Mickelson can avoid being double-taxed by writing off his gains as a foreign tax credit, he’ll pay in other ways. Mickelson is still subject to a self-employment tax and a Medicare surtax. To the state of California, he’s obligated to pay another 13.3% of his earnings. In total, one of the world’s most successful golfer’s is losing 61% of the money he made from the tournaments.

USA Today points out that if the governments gouging him of his gains are not bad enough, “that’s before Mickelson pays his caddie, pays for his hotel and expenses, pays his agent, etc,” and speculated that when all is through, Mickelson will be left with a meager 30% of his original winnings.

‘Hi! We’re from the government, and we’re here to stick our hands in your pockets.’

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Needed: An app to measure how fast most of them get sold on the street.

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Change.gov, the website created by the Obama transition team in 2008, has effectively disappeared sometime over the last month.

While front splash page for for Change.gov has linked to the main White House website for years, until recently, you could still continue on to see the materials and agenda laid out by the administration. This was a particularly helpful resource for those looking to compare Obama’s performance in office against his vision for reform, laid out in detail on Change.gov.

Down the Memory Hole!

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I guess Disney was right.

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In “Chocolate habits of Nobel prizewinners”, published in Thursday’s edition of Nature, Beatrice Golomb of the University of California, San Diego, notes that of the 23 Nobel laureates she surveyed, 43 per cent revealed that they ate chocolate more than twice a week, significantly more than the 25 per cent reported by a control group of 237 subjects matched by age, education, and sex.

Well. There it is.

Freeberg waxes philosophical.

The thing that is not pointed out, is this: Humans who live in civilized societies, have a hunger for, and a fascination with, equality; the idea that anybody can grow up to become anything. Humans who live in civilized societies have a hunger for, and a fascination with, inequality as well. Deep down, we are programmed to admire the caste system. It’s in our wiring. In fact, we have to do some work to get away from it. Here in America, we consider that our patriotic duty. The “don’t care about the baby” types have completed that intellectual struggle, and they perceive, wrongly in some cases, that the “look at that pretty dress Kate’s wearing” people have not done this and therefore have betrayed their birthright.

It has been made a sensitive issue now that we are living in the age of Obama. All Americans with common sense and a decent, working, long-term memory, have seen how this glorification of living idols can mask over — and perhaps encourage — glaring and dangerous defects in judgment on the part of those living idols, or on the part of their peers or subordinates. For those who lack this working long-term memory, there are the stories of Bob Filner and Anthony Weiner. More democrat men tripping over their own dicks. Twice in rapid succession, we get to repeat the Kennedy/Clinton/Hart/Edwards/Spitzer waltz, with the moves now committed to muscle memory: Contrite apologies in front of banks of microphones, with the wife dutifully standing by…which everyone knows are just apologies for having been caught. We also know the wife isn’t standing by out of love, she’s standing by as a business partner, because with democrat politicians that’s what the wife is. And, since the unfaithful husband is a democrat, there will be the expected and obligatory defiant refusals to step down. The democrats can’t fail standards they never had in the first place. Oh yeah, and “blah blah blah performance in public office blah blah blah private life.”

Steve Sailer looks out at the wasteland of American political thought.

With Barack Obama solemnly recounting for us last Friday how being black in America has personally burdened him, race is back in the news.

Actually, race is always in the news. Still, it’s worth using this particular intersection of inanity—during which the president and the Attorney General have made themselves look more foolish than Geraldo Rivera—to think through the most important question about race in the 21st century: How horrible would it really be if it became respectable to discuss racial realities seriously and intelligently?

Oh, as if THAT would ever happen….

The lesson that the prestige press tells us to take away from the Trayvon affair is that “profiling” (i.e., pattern recognition) inevitably leads to murderous frenzies. Some of the virulence of the media’s denunciations of George Zimmerman for putatively profiling stems from an underlying chain of logic in elite thinking that I find scary: If young black males really do tend to be more crime-prone, then…oh, no, the Nazis were right! So if Americans ever become embarrassed by the insipid political correctness we instruct them to spout, they will immediately thaw out Hitler’s cryogenically preserved brain and elect it president. Or something.

Not so much a Slippery Slope as a Cliff.

The day before the president’s speech about the “historical context” behind the Obama Administration’s War on Zimmerman, Detroit announced bankruptcy. Should Detroit’s failure be assessed within the context of four decades of black rule, the first 19 years under the overtly anti-white Coleman Young?

Whether it should or not, it won’t be. The Left spends most of its day with fingers jammed in ears saying LALALALALALALA.

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 It’s interesting that the National Council of La Raza appears to be hoping in the future to just go by their acronym NCLR, although that might not please the the National Center for Lesbian Rights.

Like the other great explicitly racist organization, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, I’m sure they’d prefer that people not dwell on their explicit racism.

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Friedrich Nietzsche, the 19th century German philosopher whose polemic writings still resonate today, was among the first few people in the world to use a typewriter. Or, as it was called at the time, a writing ball. Crafted by Danish inventor Rasmus Malling-Hansen, the writing ball had a number of advantages over competing designs: it was quieter in operation, simpler in construction, cheaper, and more portable. In retrospect, you can also add that it had the iconic appearance of a product of the mechanical age.

Ron Unz turns over a rock.

My expectations proved entirely correct, and the correlations between Hispanic percentages and local crime rates were usually quite close to the same figures for whites, strongly supporting my hypothesis that the two groups had fairly similar rates of urban criminality despite their huge differences in socio-economic status.  But that same simple calculation yielded a remarkably strong correlation between black numbers and crime, fully confirming the implications of the FBI racial data on perpetrators.

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

I am sitting in my air-conditioned house, where it is 75 degrees, and I need light bulbs. Do I go outside where it is 100 degrees and drive the half-mile to Target to get them, or do I click with my mouse to get them cheaper and wait for two days for them to arrive at my doorstep? The question answers itself.

Steve Sailer spreads the word.

To be precise, economics takes issue with the industry’s argument. In contrast, economists, on average, have been shamefully reticent about pointing out that the Silicon Valley billionaires are denying the basic findings of economics (e.g., supply and demand) to add to their billions. Why? Maybe they figure if they are nice to the billionaires, the billionaires might be nice to them.

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No wonder Bloomberg wants to ban it — the Crust don’t want their children to have the competition.

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In early 2006, miners drilling a new natural gas well in the Indonesian district of Porong struck a problem. Not far from their workings and not long after they did some drilling, hot mud started bubbling to the surface.

Lots of hot mud.

So much mud that at least 30,000 people were displaced and 10,000 buildings destroyed.

Levees built in 2008 have contained the mud, but the stuff is still bubbling up and causing problems, not the least of which are subsidence caused by its weight.

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The remains of the deceased, 12-foot-long pinniped – which may have weighed as much as two tons when alive – were discovered in a coffin interred in a St Pancras graveyard during excavations for a new railway terminal. This was actually some time ago, but today we learn that investigating archaeologists, having finally given up on unravelling the mystery intercontinental dead-walrus-by-gaslight affair, have placed the animal’s remains on display in a Hackney museum.

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Much the best thing I’ve heard about Google in years. (The Guardian is, of course, a long-time Voice of the Crust, so they have to denounce any deviations from the Party Line.)

The horror….

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Not really news, but a useful reminder.

Get Ignored, As Usual

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For Kevin Pace, the president’s health-care law could have meant better health insurance. Instead, it produced a pay cut.

Like many of his colleagues, the adjunct music professor at Northern Virginia Community College had managed to assemble a hefty courseload, despite his official status as a part-time employee. But his employer, the state, slashed his hours this spring to avoid a Jan. 1 requirement that all full-time workers be offered health insurance. The law defines “full time” as 30 hours a week or more.

“We work so hard for so little pay,” he said. “You would think they would want to make an investment in society, pay the teachers back and give us health care.”

I guess not.

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Foodies! They’re everywhere….

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Think of it as evolution in action.

Baron Bodissey at Gates of Vienna allows us a peek into his life.

Why is Gates of Vienna dangerous?

Two possibilities suggest themselves. The first is the obvious one: speaking out in the manner commonly seen at this site may result in the loss of employment, official harassment, intimidation, and/or arrest (at the hands of the civil authorities). It may also invite death threats, physical attacks, serious bodily injury, and/or death (at the hands of Muslims or the thugs of UAF and its ilk). So danger lurks on all sides for anyone who decides to publicly oppose the Islamization of Britain.

Yet there is another kind of danger in such activities for those who inhabit the privileged heights of British society: ostracism, loss of status, being dismissed from a lucrative sinecure and forced to take a lesser one, the contempt and mockery of one’s peers, etc. It takes a steel backbone to endure to this sort of treatment and remain upright.

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No, it’s not Obama throwing his supporters under the bus.

 “Space has been expanding since the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago,” said Dr. White, 43, who runs the research project. “And we know that when you look at some of the cosmology models, there were early periods of the universe where there was explosive inflation, where two points would’ve went receding away from each other at very rapid speeds.”

“Nature can do it,” he said. “So the question is, can we do it?”

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In China, of course — in the U.S., the government would shut him down six ways from Sunday.

Pretty pitiful when a Communist dictatorship has more freedom for entrepreneurs than America.

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The film set in the Sahara desert – situated near the namesake of Darth Vader’s home world, the Tunisian city of Tataouine – will be soon buried by a crescent-shaped sand dune, or barchan. The dune appears to be poised to “eat” the city in this time-lapse gif of collated Google Earth images from Kotaku.com. Sand dunes move across Earth 10 times faster than the sands of Mars sweep across the Red Planet.

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Zimmerman was one of two men who came to the aid of a family of four — two parents and two children — trapped inside a blue Ford Explorer SUV that had rolled over after traveling off the highway in Sanford, Fla. at approximately 5:45 p.m. Thursday, the Seminole County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement.

Those ‘white Hispanic’ racists — always helping people. Makes you want to cry sometimes.

Ron Radosh takes a look behind the scenes.

You may not have heard of Leon Keyserling, but he was one of the bright young men who rushed to our nation’s capitol to work for FDR after he was elected President, and who helped to fashion a great deal of the New Deal legislation. As his obituary in The New York Times pointed out, “as an aide of Senator [Robert F.]Wagner, a Democrat, [N.Y.] Mr. Keyserling helped draft such measures as the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933, the Social Security Act of 1935 and the National Labor Relations Act, also known as the Wagner Act.” Later, as his Wikipedia entry shows, he went on to work for President Harry S. Truman and continued to advise him on major domestic programs.

…

Mary Keyserling became enthusiastic about communism after she visited the Soviet Union in 1932, and wrote that she became “sympathetic to Communist not only as a Russian idea but as a feasible program when altered for many other countries.” She wrote home that “many of us have come round to an acceptance of the major elements of Communism- altho I think we or I shall work thru the Socialist Party for a while.”

As for Leon, Storrs notes that he became converted to the doctrines of Marx while studying at Columbia University. “Economically,” he wrote to his father from college, “socialism is probably sound…the rich and the poor should not be ‘equal’ before the law. The law should help the weaker party.” In 1932 he supported Communist candidate William Z. Foster for President, and hoped that he would get two million votes that “will mark in the future the definite turn toward socialism in this country.”

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Shocking news! Washington state officials have discovered that hiking taxes on cigarettes way above that inflicted on the residents of neighboring states gives people reason to buy smokes in bulk across the border and peddle them to bargain hunters. Who ever would have guessed? Well, aside from anybody with a brain, that is.

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

Nationally, cigarette smuggling is a big business, largely because taxes have been hiked sky-high in a nanny-state effort to deter smoking. Putting the emphasis on neo-prohibitionism rather than revenue has resulted in 60.9 percent of cigarettes consumed in New York being sourced from the black market. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (that’s a party!) says state governments lost $5 billion in 2010 because Americans preferred to purchase black market cigarettes rather than get mugged by the authorities.

State officials could lower cigarette taxes to take the profit out of smuggling, but they’d rather use the tax code to send a message. That message seems to be that going to the black market is a great way to save a buck — or make a mint.

Dymphna connects the dots.

Perhaps because there is a disappointing lack of widespread “burn-baby-burn-and-bust-me-some-cracker-heads” outbreaks across the country, our President chose to make a surprise speech today. That is, the occasion was a surprise, but the speech was the usual narcissistic insertion of himself into the story in order to generate a crisis. The man loves crises but mostly all he’s managed to create are scandals. And they go on and on. So he needs the race riots he keeps begging for.

So now we have a disgraceful and profoundly disrespectful ‘spontaneous’ speech about how he and Trayvon are soul mates. Trayvon Martin was a throw-away kid. He’d been suspended from school numerous times and was headed to a life as a petty criminal. He lived among various relatives because no one wanted him from Day One. Obama, on the other hand, was – and remains – a child of privilege. Though he and his groomers have done their best to erase the man’s past, we know he went to private schools until he hit Columbia. And his way was paid through private Harvard Law School, though we have little to no access to his records there or to his writings before his ascent to the White House. There is a short recording somewhere of an interview when he was a state senator.

Watch it.

We have the technology.

Care for a sinkhole?

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A health insurance actuary at Humana testified in a Kentucky Department of Insurance rate filing document made publicly available today that his company’s individual health premiums need to go up eighty percent in 2014 and that sixty percent of that increase is due to the ObamaCare requirement for all applications to be accepted.

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

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Summer movies are often described as formulaic. But what few people know is that there is actually a formula—one that lays out, on a page-by-page basis, exactly what should happen when in a screenplay. It’s as if a mad scientist has discovered a secret process for making a perfect, or at least perfectly conventional, summer blockbuster.

The formula didn’t come from a mad scientist. Instead it came from a screenplay guidebook, Save the Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need. In the book, author Blake Snyder, a successful spec screenwriter who became an influential screenplay guru, preaches a variant on the basic three-act structure that has dominated blockbuster filmmaking since the late 1970s.

When Snyder published his book in 2005, it was as if an explosion ripped through Hollywood. The book offered something previous screenplay guru tomes didn’t. Instead of a broad overview of how a screen story fits together, his book broke down the three-act structure into a detailed “beat sheet”: 15 key story “beats”—pivotal events that have to happen—and then gave each of those beats a name and a screenplay page number. Given that each page of a screenplay is expected to equal a minute of film, this makes Snyder’s guide essentially a minute-to-minute movie formula.

Next step: Robots that write blockbuster screenplays, union agitation to save screenwriter jobs, government interference that leaves everyone involved worse off than they were before.

We’ve seen this movie before….

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Well, John, you’ve actually got to put up a fight in order to win. I guess winning is just not in your nature.

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No, it’s not Michelle Obama.