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The ‘Affordable Care Act’, a gift that keeps on giving.

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“When people analyze samples from people who are ill, they have some idea in mind. This is probably an enterovirus, or maybe it’s a herpesvirues. They then do a specific assay for that particular agent. They don’t usually have the capacity to look broadly.”

The new system, known as VirCapSeq-VERT, barrels past this limitation. Lipkin, together with fellow Columbia professors Thomas Briese and Amit Kapoor, designed it to detect all known human viruses, quickly, efficiently, and  sensitively. By searching for thousands, perhaps millions, of viruses at once, it should take a lot of the (educated) guesswork  out of viral diagnosis.

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The gentrification of the “Dumbo” area of Brooklyn was good news for P.S. 8. (New York City calls its grades K-5 schools P.S. schools). The school became predominately SWPL and thus a safe place for white parents (as well as SWPLfied Asians) to send their precious children.

But too much of a good thing is now a bad thing because the school now has too many children for the size of the building. The city’s solution? Send some of children now zoned for P.S. 8 to nearby P.S. 307 that primarily draws students from the housing projects.

Not surprisingly, the SWPL parents who thought they were zoned for a free and safe public school are outraged. But somewhat surprisingly, the parents in the projects don’t want a bunch of white kids invading their school either!

And you can hardly blame them. As George Carlin famously said, ‘ You can bet the Eddy, Vinny, and Tony can easily beat up Tyler, Kyle, and Tucker.’

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Even as the White House continues to focus on the raw number of insured Americans in the lead-up to the next ACA sign-up period, the evidence continues to mount that the fundamental dynamics of U.S. health care are still hitting Americans where it hurts: the pocketbook. A new study show that costs are rising across the system, not especially dramatically, but consistently, making care more unaffordable year by year.

Like most recent legislation, the name of the law is precisely the opposite of what it winds up doing. No Child Left Behind is more accurately No Child Gets Ahead, and the Affordable Care Act is (wait for it) giving us care that isn’t affordable.

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It’s trickier than you might think.

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And I went to the battle on a dog with no head….

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Given that many Europeans, especially those with left-wing sympathies, have great love for Palestinians, let us have a closer look at what some Palestinian Arabs think about Europeans. At the famous Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem,[1] the third holiest site in Islam after Mecca and Medina, the leading imam Sheikh Muhammad Ayed gave a speech in 2015 to Palestinian Muslims.[2] He said that Europe was facing a demographic disaster with low birth rates, and urged Muslims to have children with Europeans so they could “trample them underfoot, Allah willing.” Since Muslim women according to traditional Islamic law are forbidden from marrying or having children with non-Muslim men, he was essentially calling on Muslim men to conquer Europe through its women. Muhammad Ayed further stated that “We will give them fertility. We will breed children with them, because we shall conquer their countries.”

Just in case you haven’t been paying attention.

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Students affiliated with the Black Lives Matter anti-racism movement have promised to remove Wesleyan University’s student newspaper, The Argus, from its stands and pressure the student government to deny funding to the paper unless certain conditions are met.

In response to a recent Argus op-ed that was mildly critical of BLM’s tactics, the protest group launched a petition calling for newspaper staff members to undergo diversity training and set up a space on the front page specifically for “marginalized groups/voices.” If no one submits content for this space, Argus staff members are instructed to instead print an advertisement “for your voice.” More than 100 students and faculty members have signed the petition.

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Beer, that favorite beverage of football fans, frat boys, and other macho stereotypes—at least according to the advertisers—actually has a very long, distinguished heritage. It’s older, in fact, than wine, older than whiskey, older perhaps even than bread (or so some scholars have thought). As soon as humans settled down and learned to cultivate grains, some 13,000 years ago, the possibility for fermentation—a naturally occurring phenomenon—presented itself. But it isn’t until the 5th century, B.C. that we have sources documenting the deliberate production of ale in ancient Sumeria. Nonetheless, beer has been described as the “midwife of civilization” due to its central role in agriculture, trade, urbanization, and medicine.

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The TSA, it appears, is just simply bad at everything. The nation’s most useless government agency has already made it clear that it is bad at knowing if it groped you, bad at even have a modicum of sense when it comes to keeping the traveling luggage of citizens private, and the TSA is especially super-mega-bad at TSA-ing, failing to catch more than a fraction of illicit material as it passes by agents upturned noses. And now, it appears, the TSA has demonstrated that it is also bad at pretending to give a shit.

In case you missed the recent news, the TSA’s specially designed master key to open all of the specially designed TSA-recognized luggage locks were especially super-hacked by someone with access to such privileged information and equipment as a newspaper subscription and a 3D printer. By using a picture in the Washington Post of a TSA agent’s master key and some documents from Travel Sentry, a group that generates and enforces TSA protocols, one security researcher was able to create 3D printer files to create his own master key.

The TSA is rapidly replacing the Post Office as the poster child for government incompetence.

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Distracted, inexperienced, and reckless, it’s no secret that teens make terrible drivers: the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death of 16- to 20-year-olds.

Think of it as evolution in action. Cull them from the gene pool before they breed (although these days that’s a close-run thing….).

For generations, training teens to be safer drivers has been based on scare tactics: gory screenings of Red Asphalt and clunky drunk glasses to emulate the challenges of inebriated driving. But recently, automakers have begun taking a different approach: letting parents and onboard systems have greater control over how their teens drive.

Good training for Loving Big Brother in a future Democrite-controlled world.

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Accusations that Iranian aid to Iraq is a danger to American troops there is based on past (2005-2011) actions by Iran against U.S. troops there. Much has been made of how Iran aided Islamic terrorists in Iraq after 2005, especially those who were trying to kill American troops. Iran is not known to be doing that now, but the fact that they did it before and are still calling for the destruction of the United States has a lot of Americans uneasy.

Because of some uniquely Iranian weapons it was possible to trace a specific number of American deaths in Iraq to Iran. Since 2014 the number of such deaths was commonly put at 500. That was known to be an estimate and the U.S. Department of Defense finally completed a search of its records and reported that the actual number Americans killed was 109. These uniquely Iranian weapons apparently first appeared in 2006, but in small numbers. That increased so that by 2007 a lot more Explosively Formed Penetrators (EFPs) bombs were showing up. In January 2007 about thirty of them were used to attack U.S. troops. That rose to 65 by April, and 99 in July. By the time U.S. troops left in 2011 it was estimated that about 120 American troops had been killed by EFP and over 600 wounded. Hundreds of other American troops were believed to have died, usually at the hands of Iran supported Iraqi militias, but the use of EFPs was unambiguous and Iran was the only source.

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Hey, everybody knows that the Christian God is no good at punctures.

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In addition to designing Zipf Chancery (duh), he also did two of my favorite fonts, Palatino and Optima. I’ve always considered Palatino the most beautifully readable font ever; whenever a program offers me the chance to use it, I do.

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Mr. Brewer, whom the president described in a statement as having a “brilliant mind, a big heart, and an insatiable desire to give back,” was participating in a Ride to Conquer Cancer fundraiser on Saturday when the accident happened. He lost control of his bike at a turn in Mt. Airy, Md., north of Washington, crossed a double yellow line and collided with an oncoming car, police said.

Think of it as evolution in action.

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Son of Your Father

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Dartmouth College this month appointed Susan Taffe Reed as director of its Native American Program. In a news release, the college noted Taffe Reed’s academic background (a Cornell University Ph.D. and postdocs at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Bowdoin College), her research interest (ethnomusicology) and something else: Taffe Reed, Dartmouth noted, is president of Eastern Delaware Nations Inc.

If Dartmouth expected applause for hiring someone with a strong academic background and a personal background that would appeal to its Native American students, whom the program serves, it was mistaken.

Not all Native Americans recognize Eastern Delaware Nations as an Indian tribe. Nor do federal or state governments. So leading the group wasn’t seen as a plus, but as a minus. And then a blog ran a detailed genealogical post about Taffe Reed’s grandparents (from whom she draws a Native American connection) alleging, with legal documents, that they are white European immigrants and their descendants. Dartmouth and Taffe Reed dispute the blog post, but did not issue a detailed rebuttal.

For those not in the know, an Indian is the Dartmouth mascot. The racists.

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On September 15, Brigitte Meier, Commissioner for Social Affairs in Munich, spoke at a meeting of the SPD (Social-Democratic Party of Germany) in Berlin about the “refugee” crisis in her city. She told the audience that Munich had reached the limit of what it could cope with, and unless the government could open up a rail hub further up the line, so that refugees could be transferred onwards, her city would be facing a humanitarian catastrophe.

The Other McCain yanks back the curtain.

The naked partisanship of Stephanopoulos is not merely “liberal bias”; it is outright propaganda on behalf of the Democrat Party, which reflects ABC News policy of supporting Democrats. All of the producers and executives at ABC News are also partisan Democrats, so that the network has an organizational mission of advocacy on behalf of the candidates and policies of the Democrat Party. This is not only dishonest (because it presents partisan propaganda as objective “news”), but also dangerous, in that individuals like Stephanopoulos and organizations like ABC News cannot be expected to report honestly about the failures of Democrat officials and policies. The public is deliberately misled about, for example, the effectiveness of the Obama administration’s foreign policy, because many millions of citizens are spoonfed disinformation from Democrat partisans like Stephanopoulos.

Not really news but a useful reminder.

Chair That Unfolds Into a Bed. Best one of these I’ve seen.

K-Pod Soup.

Finger Cookies.

When I gassed up my car this morning, the price was $1.87 a gallon.

You people in California: Texas is a big state, we got plenty a room, y’all c’mon down.

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Gavin MacInnes is fed up.

That’s America today: easily duped and way off course. Whoever whines the most gets the most attention even if they’re a tiny fraction of the population—even if they’re lying. The crybaby generation is driving this boat and they don’t know how to drive. This is what’s so great about Trump. In an era where dupes are easily led, you need a great leader. Trump doesn’t pander to one-percenters of any sort. He’s even pushed for tax hikes on the very rich. When someone tells him to stop saying “anchor baby” he asks what their solution is, and after hearing how long it takes to say “American-born child of undocumented immigrants” he responds, “No.” Republicans already support Israel and are pro-life. Shut up about it and move on to genuinely contentious issues. We want to hear about immigration, and Trump was the first one to get the ball rolling. For the first time in decades, we have a presidential election that gets into what real Americans care about. And the rest of the politicians and pundits are floundering. They like debates to revolve around meaningless politically correct discourse. Can we call #BlackLivesMatter a terrorist group or is that too mean? Is air-conditioning sexist? When is it time to retire football? Fuck off.

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American higher education: Prolonging childhood unto the fourth generation.

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Did you ever wonder what you would cook in 16th century England? The new book The Tudor Kitchen, What the Tudors Ate and Drank, by Terry Breverton, has over 500 sumptuous – and more everyday recipes, enjoyed by the rich and the poor, all taken from authentic contemporary sources.

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Far from being an aberration, the Islamic State is Islam expressed in real-world terms.

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Whenever the government is put in charge of anything, it always winds up costing more and working less well.

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Europe is experiencing a series of cascading border closures, rippling outward like circuit breakers tripping during a power surge. A week ago, Denmark suspended its rail link to Germany. On Monday, Germany closed its border with Austria. Austria, Slovakia, and the Netherlands all clamped “temporary” border restrictions into place.

If something can’t go on forever, eventually it will stop. You can fool some of the people all of the time, and you can even fool all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.

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GERMAN authorities were blocked in their attempt to deport a known terrorist who stabbed a Berlin policewoman in the neck today…because EU officials feared he would face the death penalty in his native Iraq.

So hang him in Germany. Problem solved. Oh, wait, they probably abolished the death penalty, being a ‘modern’ ‘enlightened’ country.

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

Steve Sailer blows the whistle.

From the New York Times, an article that makes pretty clear who started the violence, while still giving some non-factual spin to make it seem like the leaders of Hungary are reminiscent of Hitler, Saddam Hussein, and Attila the Hun.

HORGOS, Serbia — In one of the worst bursts of violence that this tense refugee summer has seen, Hungarian riot police responded on Wednesday to rocks, taunts and small fires set by agitated migrants at the border crossing here with water cannons, head-cracking batons and both tear gas and pepper spray.

…

One young man held up an orange sign reading “Right to Travel.” Others read, “Europe, your humanity is lost” and “Hungaria Please Help Us.”

What language were these signs in? Arabic? Hungarian? As a general rule, when people hold up signs not in their own or in a relevant local language but in English, they are trying to put something over on the low-information globalist audience.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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On Sunday, August 23, a Coptic Christian soldier was killed in his army unit in Egypt. Baha Saeed Karam, 22, was found shot dead with four bullet wounds at the headquarters of his battalion in Marsa Matruh. Although transferred to a hospital in Alexandria, he was pronounced dead upon arrival.

According to Baha’s brother, Cyril, the Coptic soldier had recently told him that he had gotten into arguments with Muslim soldiers in his unit and that one had threatened him with death.

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Europe is finally waking up. How about that.

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In a bizarre rant, Omar Hussain also complained that his fellow terrorists talk loudly when he is trying to sleep, invade his space, and steal his shoes.

Their bad driving, habit of staring at people, and using his charger for their mobile phones also come under fire.

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I know I am.

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They’re right — rather than using pigs, they ought to have used animal-rights activists. The patterns would be more realistic, and they wouldn’t be wasting valuable animals.

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Now Elizabeth Sattely, an assistant professor of chemical engineering at Stanford, and her graduate student Warren Lau have isolated the machinery for making a widely used cancer-fighting drug from an endangered plant. They then put that machinery into a common, easily grown laboratory plant, which was able to produce the chemical. The technique could potentially be applied to other plants and drugs, creating a less expensive and more stable source for those drugs.

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Marines: When you care enough to send the very best.

Steve Sailer is on a roll.

About a decade ago, I coined the term Occam’s Butterknife to characterize the contemporary liberal insistence upon implausibly convoluted explanations.

But now that race man Ta-Nehisi Coates is back with a giant article in The Atlantic about “The Enduring Myth of Black Criminality,” I need a more all-encompassing term to describe this increasingly fashionable rejection of reality. Let’s try: Occam’s Rubber Room.

In “The First Rule of White Club,” I reviewed Coates’ best-selling mini-book Between the World and Me about how as a nerdy child he had been terrified of Baltimore’s black thugs, which, due to redlining by the Roosevelt administration, were all the fault of white people. Or, excuse me, of “people who think they are white.”

Fortunately, The Atlantic’s staffers have edited out of the new article some of Coates’ more eye-rolling verbal tics (such as “black bodies”) and left us with 18,000 words of generic professional magazine prose. In the wake of a swarm of derisive comments citing the abundant statistical evidence that black criminality is no myth that greeted a preview of the article, the title is now “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration.”

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They could give her to Planned Parenthood to be sold for parts.

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One of the world’s most firmly global-warmist scientists says that even if humanity deliberately sets out to burn all the fossil fuels it can find, as fast as it can, there will be no troublesome sea level rise due to melting Antarctic ice this century.

Dr Ken Caldeira’s credentials as a global warmist are impeccable. He is not a true green hardliner – he has signed a plea to his fellow greens to get over their objections to nuclear power, for instance, and he doesn’t totally rule out geoengineering as a possible global-warming solution. But that’s as far as he’ll go: in Dr Caldeira’s view, it is plain and simple unethical to release greenhouse gases into the air. There’s no middle ground on that as far as he’s concerned – he’s not OK with gas power as an alternative to coal, for instance.

But he’s a scientist, and like all proper scientists he’s willing to admit inconvenient truths. In this case, the truth in question is his own prediction that no matter what humans do in the way of carbon emissions, sea levels are not going to rise by more than 8cm this century due to melting Antarctic ice. For context, the seas have been rising faster than that for thousands of years. They rose 17cm just during the 20th century, and the Antarctic cap is far and away the biggest body of ice on the planet.

So all those natives worried about their islands being swamped by the ocean can STFU.

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Gee, I wonder why.

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Don’t think that there isn’t anyone making money off of the ‘refugee crisis’, chiefly at taxpayers’ expense.

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The President’s string of misjudgments on the Middle East—on the peace process, Erdogan, withdrawal from Iraq, Libya, ISIS as the “J.V. team”, and Syria—is one of the most striking examples of serial failure in the annals of American foreign policy.

Generally speaking, what the President seems worst at is estimating the direction in which events are flowing. He thought Erdogan was taking Turkey in one direction; Erdogan was going somewhere else. He thought there was a transition to democracy in Egypt; there never was a prospect of that. He has repeatedly been caught flatfooted by events in Syria. And Putin keeps running rings around him.

Jimmuh Carter loves the hell out of Barack Obama, because Barack Obame means that Jimmuh Carter won’t go down in history as the Worst President Ever. No wonder you always see him with a big grin.

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And just a touch of fennel and a dash of oregano….

That’s why the Mediterranean people’s rule the world! Oh, wait….

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Oh, no! Really? They wouldn’t do that, would they?

The Pope wakes up and smells the jihad.