Read it.

Markets work, even when some people don’t want them to, and even when some people try to stop them.

California, which in 1989 became the first state to ban so-called assault weapons, has expanded that category twice since then: in 1999, when the legislature added a generic definition to the original list of specifically proscribed models, and last week, when Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill aimed at a device that legally circumvented the ban. With the ink barely dry on the new law, another workaround is already available.

The 1999 law covered any semiautomatic centrefire rifle with a detachable magazine and any of six “military-style” features: 1) a flash suppressor, 2) a grenade launcher or flare launcher, 3) a thumbhole stock, 4) a folding or telescoping stock, 5) a forward pistol grip, or 6) a pistol grip that protrudes conspicuously beneath the action of the weapon. But regulations issued by the California Department of Justice defined “detachable magazine” as “any ammunition feeding device that can be removed readily from the firearm with neither disassembly of the firearm action nor use of a tool being required.” The regulations specifically said “a bullet or ammunition cartridge is considered a tool,” which left the door open to “bullet buttons” that release the magazine when you insert a cartridge into them. Since guns with bullet buttons did not technically have detachable magazines, they could legally include the features that offended the sensibilities of California legislators.

Read it.

The American house is growing. These days, the average new home encompasses 2,500 square feet, about 50 percent more area than the average house in the late 1970s, according to Census data. Compared to the typical house of 40 years ago, today’s likely has another bathroom and an extra bedroom, making it about the same size as the Brady Bunch house, which famously fit two families.

This expansion has come at a cost: the American lawn.

Read it.

The advent of electronic form for stories is no doubt helping this along. Ordinarily so short a story wouldn’t justify separate publishing, so would need some larger vehicle such as a magazine or an anthology. But in an era where bits are bits, they can economically be put up for sale by themselves.

David Cole ‘fesses up.

When the Paulists started making a stink during the 2012 GOP primary, I was called into action for my—how would Liam Neeson put it?—“very particular set of skills,” namely my research abilities and a steady hand with a poison pen. It’s funny looking back on that election year, when the GOP establishment’s worst problem was Ron Paul, and let’s be honest, he was at best a persistent but nonfatal tick on the fur of the big Republican dog. Truth is, we didn’t know how good we had it (you know, compared with how things are now). But back in 2012, the Ron Paul challenge was seen as a major headache that needed to disappear.

I’ve always thought of Paulists as more of a distraction than anything else, the libertarian equivalent of the Ralph Nader PIRG crowd, but I admit that I don’t pay that much attention to ‘politics’ in the sense of who-gets-what-office-this-election-cycle; my interest is at a higher level, logically speaking, more what-are-these-idiots-doing-now and that sort of thing.

Read it.

The Green Party’s likely presidential nominee said federal officials should prosecute Hillary Clinton for mishandling classified information and endangering national security.

In a Wednesday statement, Jill Stein echoed Republican criticism of the Obama administration, saying that the FBI “is giving Clinton a pass” by declining to recommend criminal charges related to her use of a private email system while serving as secretary of State.

“All the elements necessary to prove a felony violation were found by the FBI investigation,” Stein said in a statement. “Her staff has said Secretary Clinton stated she used her private email system because she did not want her personal emails to become accessible under [Freedom of Information] laws,” she added. “This is damning on two counts — that she intended to disregard the protection of security information, and that she had personal business to conceal.”

‘Greens’ are crazy but evidently not stupid.

John Stossel gets back to basics.

A century ago in the U.S., government at all levels took up about 8 percent of the economy. Now it takes up about 40 percent. It regulates everything from the size of beverage containers to what questions must not be asked in job interviews.

How can people be expected to keep up with it all?

Government has two jobs:

1. Keep people safe.
2. Keep people honest.

Everything else is statist bullshit.

Read it.

Increasingly, we live in a world where shared, universal experiences are fewer and further between. Where once you could count on a few tens of millions of people watching a TV show with you—and often at precisely the same time—these days DVRs and streamed video means you can watch things literally years after they make their cultural splash, and even if you do watch them at the same time as just about everyone else, chances are a much smaller number of people are watching it with you.

Which leads to the most ridiculous of all ridiculous First World Problems: Trying to find a TV show everyone at a dinner or other gathering has watched completely in order to have something to discuss passionately. It’s a lot harder than it should be.

Jeff Somers is one of my Recommended Writers (see column to right).

Ross Douthat pulls the cork out.

Genuine cosmopolitanism is a rare thing. It requires comfort with real difference, with forms of life that are truly exotic relative to one’s own. It takes its cue from a Roman playwright’s line that “nothing human is alien to me,” and goes outward ready to be transformed by what it finds.

The people who consider themselves “cosmopolitan” in today’s West, by contrast, are part of a meritocratic order that transforms difference into similarity, by plucking the best and brightest from everywhere and homogenizing them into the peculiar species that we call “global citizens.”

This species is racially diverse (within limits) and eager to assimilate the fun-seeming bits of foreign cultures — food, a touch of exotic spirituality. But no less than Brexit-voting Cornish villagers, our global citizens think and act as members of a tribe.

They have their own distinctive worldview (basically liberal Christianity without Christ), their own common educational experience, their own shared values and assumptions (social psychologists call these WEIRD — for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic), and of course their own outgroups (evangelicals, Little Englanders) to fear, pity and despise. And like any tribal cohort they seek comfort and familiarity: From London to Paris to New York, each Western “global city” (like each “global university”) is increasingly interchangeable, so that wherever the citizen of the world travels he already feels at home.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the ‘elite’ colleges. Take any senior from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Duke, or Berkeley, and no matter what country they originally came from, no matter what the color of their skin, no matter what their native language, they’re all as alike as peas in a pod. A very elegant pod, but a pod nevertheless.

Read it.

Hint: Surprisingly well.

Freeberg has been thinking.

I was making a bee line toward the checkout stands in a grocery store the other day, with a bottle of wine in hand. Just that. 1.5L of white wine, nothing else. And I found myself thinking about this scam we have going…supposedly we live under a system of just laws, because the laws are written and ratified by elected officials who are beholden to us. The reason I was thinking it was a scam, was because the self-checkout lanes were all empty and the human-monitored checkout lanes were all full. The lines were snaking backward, into the aisles.

You can’t buy alcohol in a self-checkout lane.

The problem is not that the law happened to be inconvenient to me, in the moment. There is a defense against that, that pretty much all laws are inconvenient now & then, that’s why they have to be laws. That much is reasonable. The problem is a question: Who the fuck wanted this? Whoever said “Without government, who’s going to stop me from buying alcohol in a self-checkout lane”? And while we’re pondering that one, we can think about another question that rises to confront us: With all the self-checkout lanes empty, and all the human-checkout lanes full, who does this law help?

Read it.

We believe job loss won’t be catastrophic but there will be some on the margins, and it’s a nasty experience for the people who do lose their jobs. They tend to lose them for the rest of their lives. But the fear is overstated. Computers don’t tend to replace whole jobs; they replace specific tasks. Also, it’s a relatively slow process to eliminate jobs. There are just as many bank tellers now as there were in 1980. It’s not a profession that’s growing and no one would recommend it for their child, but it takes quite a while to replace jobs.

Read it.

Bear in mind that Nate Silver has been wrong on every one of his Trump predictions so far.

Read it.

Switzerland has rejected citizenship requests from two Muslim girls for refusing to take part in swimming lessons with boys at school.

The 12- and 14-year-old will no longer be considered for naturalised citizenship because they have not complied with the school curriculum, authorities in Basel said.

The girls are understood to have refused to take part in school swimming lessons because boys were present and their religion forbade that form of interaction, according to USA Today. Their applications for Swiss passports have now been overturned.

Meanwhile, the father of two other girls who refused to let his daughters swim with boys was fined $4,000 swiss francs (around £2,900) by a district court in another part of the country.

Stefan Wehrle, president of the country’s naturalisation committee, told TV station SRF that “whoever doesn’t fulfil these conditions, violates the law and therefore cannot be naturalised.”

There has never been a Muslim terrorism incident in Switzerland. Maybe they know something that we don’t know.

Read it.

What headache? When are Democrats ever held accountable, especially by other Democrats?

It’s not as if any Democrat A.G. knows the meaning of the phrase ‘appearance of impropriety’ anyway.

Read it.

School has nothing to do with freedom. First, there are state laws mandating that you have either attended school or have learned the very specific kinds of things you’d learn in school. That form of education is not a choice: it is legally compulsory.

But schooling is culturally compulsory as well. That’s what Austrian philosopher and Roman Catholic priest Ivan Illich said.

Illich was a critic of state education systems who, in 1970, wrote a now celebrated book called Deschooling Society, in which he boldly argued that, like the separation of church and state, we need a corresponding right protecting people from state establishment of education.

…

How have we succumbed to such a narrow understanding of education? Simply put, when anything is legally mandatory, it becomes universal, and when anything is universal for long enough, the culture forgets that there were ever any alternatives.

David Cole is having a great time.

Sadly, the one type of American voter who grates on me like a nursery full of shrieking, colicky newborns is the infernal species I’m doomed to live among here in L.A.—the leftist hipster. Leftist hipsters have neither the Trumpkins’ aw-shucks humility nor the anti-Semites’ worshipful admission of the Jews’ place as overlords in the human pecking order. Leftist hipsters are defined by their smugness, their pseudo-certainty, and their unyielding belief that their views are based on science and rationalism, whereas everyone else’s are based on ignorance, superstition, and fear.

There is nothing that is not foul about leftist hipsters. They traffic in the very fear, ignorance, and superstition that they accuse others of employing. Leftist hipsters will be the first ones to accuse conservatives of being “racist,” yet almost every political move the leftist hipster makes is in some way rooted in a pathological hatred of white people, a hatred that leftist hipsters—most of whom are themselves white—view as the ultimate self-critical virtue-signaling: “Look how evolved, enlightened, and noble I am—I’m willing to hate my own skin color.”

…

But sadly, as deluded as leftist hipsters are, they can still read the writing on the PBR can. Sanders is on his way out, and with Trump on track for the GOP nod, it’s going to be Hillary versus “like, literally Hitler.” So of course the hipster crowd needs to find a way to support a warmongering drone-loving Wall Street-backed unremittingly corrupt rapist-defending Democrat.

My younger brother would be a hipster if he could afford it — unfortunately, he picked the wrong parents — but he still talks the talk.

Check it out.

When I published Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think in February 2012, I included about 80 charts in the back of the book showing very strong evidence that the world is getting better.

Over the last five years, this trend has continued and accelerated.

This blog includes additional “Evidence for Abundance” that you can share with friends and family to change their mindset.

We truly are living in the most exciting time to be alive.

It won’t last. ‘Progressives’ will screw it up with their constant compulsion to change.

Read it.

It’s sugar, not fat, that causes heart attacks.

Steve Sailer looks at Brexit.

The near universal response of the punditry to a majority of Brits voting to leave the E.U. has been so enraged that the average voter must have begun by now to notice that their furious elites just plain don’t like them. As a Bizarro World Sally Field might have exclaimed in wonder, “You hate us, you really hate us!”

The past week has been the mirror image of the Stale Pale Male taunting and touchdown dances that followed Obama’s reelection. Then, it was Democracy Rules (because we’ve imported millions of ringers). Now, it’s Democracy Sucks (because voters are stupid).

Read it.

Liberals believe in the rule of law; in individual rights to speech, worship, assembly, and private property; in an independent judiciary and civilian control of the military; in representative institutions founded on the consent of the governed; in democratic elections, not as ends in themselves but as checks on the power of government and as a means of gauging and forging popular support for policies pursued by public officials in the name of the common good.

Progressives believe in all of that, too, but they add something else: a quasi-eschatological faith in historical progress that gives the movement its name. This belief has many sources, and it takes many forms. One stream flows from liberal Protestant theology on down through Woodrow Wilson’s hopes for moral advances at home and an end to armed conflict abroad — with both of them realized by an elite class of public-spirited experts. The same theologically infused faith informs Barack Obama’s frequent invocation of an “arc of history” that “bends toward justice.”

As I have often said.

Politics in this expansive sense will come to an end in the imagined progressive future because there will be nothing left to debate. The big questions of politics will already be answered, the big disputes settled once and for all. Everyone will understand that all particular forms of solidarity are morally indefensible (just various forms of racism) and that all strong political stands against humanitarian universalism in the political realm are politically unacceptable (just various forms of fascism).

This is erroneous, because Progressivism demands constant change, because change produces Progress and one can never have enough Progress.

It would be one thing if progressives understood their universalistic moral and political convictions to constitute one legitimate partisan position among many. But they don’t understand them in this way. They believe not only that their views deserve to prevail in the fullness of time, but also that they are bound to prevail.

And this is also right on. This guy is so close to understanding the dialectic….

Read it.

It ain’t gonna happen. But it’s fun to talk about.

Jim Goad explains it all to you.

As a graduate of journalism school, it took me many years of tireless research to conclude that most journalists are so full of shit, it’s a wonder they don’t explode. I’ve learned to be especially wary of anyone who makes a point of referring to themselves as a “journalist”—more often than not, you aren’t dealing with an objective fact-digger but rather a robotic ideologue who will mercilessly mangle facts to fit his narrative while swiftly discarding any fact that even slightly subverts it.

The most depressing thing about trying to deal exclusively in facts is the fact that most people don’t care about facts. Fact is, they believe what they want to believe.

Read it.

In a reversal of stereotypes, “Democrats have become a party of the wealthy” admits Fredrik deBoer in the Washington Post. Meanwhile, Republicans–much to the chagrin of some Republican “elites”–have become a party of the working class.

The Antiplanner was reminded of this when I saw a report saying that 29.4 percent of Americans were now “upper middle class,” which the report defines as having incomes of $100,000 or more for a family of three (or roughly $82,000 for a family of two, $115,000 for a family of four, etc.–see page 3 of the report). This highlights something the Antiplanner has said several times before: the real social divide in America is not between the 1 percent and the 99 percent, but between the 30 percent and the 70 percent. Specifically, about 30 percent of working-age Americans are “knowledge workers,” and generally have college degrees, while 70 percent do physical labor, and generally don’t have college degrees.

…

Thus, when you read articles or listen to stories about the “hollowing of America’s middle class,” they don’t mean something is happening to the college-educated middle class. They mean that middle-income families are declining in importance as incomes are bifurcating into those with college educations having upper-middle incomes (or better) and those without having lower-middle incomes (or worse), with fewer having middle-middle incomes.

Joel Kotkin connects the dots.

Brexit also represents a shot across the bow to all the elites, not only in Brussels, but also in Westminster, both left and right, much as the Sen. Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump campaigns have been here in the U.S. The EU pushed policies aimed at the mundane pleasures of the middle class, such as affordable electricity, cheap air travel, cars and single-family housing. Those who opposed the edicts were often excoriated as unenlightened and even racist. The “betters” behind the “Remain” campaign waged a kind of class struggle against the British grassroots – and lost in shocking fashion.

Read it.

A butcher has begun selling meat using the imperial system, following the UK’s decision to leave the European Union.

It was because of an EU law that the UK formally adopted the metric system.

But Gratton’s Butchers in Barnstable, Devon, is now giving customers the choice of pounds and ounces or grams and kilograms.

…

The move has been popular among his customers who voted for Brexit: “All the customers wanted it back in pounds,” Mr Gratton said.

Real freedom includes the freedom not to change if you don’t want to.

That is a freedom that ‘progressives’ cannot permit.

Since, in their view, progress is inevitable, and progress requires change, any resistance to change is a choice against progress, and people who resist change are both Evil and Stupid.

As with Islam, progressivism is an oppressive totalitarian ideology with which no co-existence is possible.

Read it.

In case you’re wondering, I would have voted to Leave, based on a superficial analysis from the other side of the globe. It’s the idea of being a nation that answers to itself. I can understand wanting to join a common economic community. But when people you didn’t elect pass a law affecting the strength of your hairdryer to lessen energy consumption and prevent the planet from having a mean temperature of 156 degrees C by 3047, and there’s nothing you can do, people get peeved. Of course nationalism has its excesses. But the excesses of transnationalism are accumulated incrementally and smother all differences, and for people who are constantly droning on about diversity they seem dreadfully keen to impose a bland uniformity of laws. Culture survives for a while, but eventually the laws are your culture.

This same relationship is what caused the American Civil War, and poisons relations with the Federal government even today.

How you regard the Brexit as an American might say something about how you view the role of government, and the efficacy and desirability of international organizations. There’s a certain Star-Trekky well of course attitude towards international organizations, as though they are insulated from the poisons of tribalism and hence rational, wise bodies that make proper decisions based on The Good of the Many. But it depends on what they believe, and what they want, no? The idea that a transnational organization is superior in its nature to a government that arose organically from a thousand years of culture and reflects the national will and character is wishful thinking, and there’s one big example that comes to mind: the USSR. No, the EU is not the USSR, but given their druthers they’d love the scope of control the USSR had. Over the proper things. For the Good of the Many, of course.

I think it pretty obvious that this is Obama’s attitude, and Hillary’s.

Read it.

University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Professor Jack Stauder says his political and ideological conversion away from socialism and Marxism occurred when he actually witnessed these systems in action.

After traveling to more than 110 countries to pursue various forms of research, notably cultural anthropology, Stauder described his conversion from Marxism as a process of disillusionment.

“I gradually became disenchanted with Marxism by visiting many of the countries that had tried to shape their societies to conform to its doctrines. I was disillusioned by the realities I saw in … socialist countries – the USSR, Eastern Europe, China, Cuba, etc,” Stauder told The College Fix via email.

“I came to recognize that socialism doesn’t work, and that its ‘revolutionary’ imposition inevitably leads to cruelty, injustice and the loss of freedom,” the professor continued.

The designation is not confused, he’s a professor of UMass at Dartmouth, Massachusetts, apparently a local campus.

Today’s Book: It Takes a Village (to Raise a Child).

A decade ago, then First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton chronicled her quest — both deeply personal and, in the truest sense, public — to help make our society into the kind of village that enables children to become smart, able, resilient adults. It Takes a Village is “a textbook for caring…. Filled with truths that are worth a read, and a reread” (The Dallas Morning News).

Your assignment: Identify the village in which Chelsea Clinton was raised.

Update: No, Sidwell Friends School (annual tuition $37,750) is not a village.

Read it.

Having serenaded a woman as she walked by and cleaning up litter ahead of previous matches, the Irish have now gone one step further.

One fan managed to dent a cars roof after standing on it to try and gain a better view of the street celebrations that were taking place in Lille ahead of Wednesday’s match against Italy that will decide their Euro 2016 fate. While the act of standing on someone’s car is not to be applauded, it was their reaction that made it another moment to remember.

A number of fans began to wedge money in the door of the car in the hope that they would cover the cost of the damage, but others decided that they would “fix the car for the boys in green”.

They began to hit the roof of the car around the area that had formed a large dent, and as any good panel basher knows, if you hit it in the right spot, the dent should pop out. That’s exactly what happened, sparking wild celebrations and more chanting – and amid all the cheering there was probably more dents too.

…

A quote from a bar owner in Paris praised the spirits of both sets of Irish fans, commenting: “Paris has been morose since the attacks [in November]. It does us good to see such happy people.”

For the great Gaels of Ireland
Are the men that God made mad,
For all their wars are merry,
And all their songs are sad.
–G.K. Chesterton

Read it.

When we have an episode of lunatics with guns:

• One side wants to control the guns.
• The other side wants to control the lunatics.

Say… wait a minute… What if we got together and…?

Nah, that’ll never happen.

…

If lunatics are deprived of guns, we would need worry only about their car bombs, suicide vests, hijacked airliners, and retail knife attacks. Or perhaps simply cars driven at high speed into crowds of pedestrians.

Scott Adams continues his masterly analysis.

A very-rich entrepreneur recently told me that the secret of hiring a good team of people is being ruthless in firing your mistakes. Lewandowski was the right guy for the primaries – evidently – but perhaps not a good fit for the general. If Trump can fire a close advisor and personal friend in this situation, do you worry that he can do it while President?

Hmm.

Jeb Bush’s campaign funding didn’t help him against Trump. So we have one data point telling us that political ads don’t work in 2016, at least against Trump. One data point isn’t a trend, and primaries aren’t the general election. But if television ads are persuasive in 2016, would we have GOP nominee Trump? It seems unlikely to me.

The Clinton team is fighting the war of 2008, using the tools of that era. Trump is dominating social media and gobbling up free TV time. Those are the tools of 2016.

Do you know why you didn’t realize TV ads are less effective these days? Because the only people who could tell you that rely on political ads for their profits. You won’t hear anyone on CNN or FOX tell you that ad dollars are less useful than they were in the past.

Saw that coming.

Read it.

Makes you wonder what else they might be wrong about.

Read it.

Read it.

Hint: Some scary shit.

Read it.

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

Read it.

Hint: Yes.

A while back I posted about a few examples, but since then there have been some more, so I thought I’d note them. Naturally, such examples will be rare. Even in states which allow concealed carry, there often aren’t people near a shooting who have a gun on them at the time. Many mass shootings happen in supposedly “gun-free” zones (such as schools, universities, bars, or private property posted with a no-guns sign), in which gun carrying isn’t allowed in many states. And there is no central database of such examples, many of which don’t hit the national media, especially if a gunman is stopped before he shoots many victims. Moreover, at least some examples are ambiguous, because it might be unclear — as you’ll see below — whether the shooter had been planning to kill more people when he was stopped.

Read it.

This article isn’t my attempt to justify anything to you?—?it’s not a defense of what’s in my gun safe or of the AR-15 itself. If, for you, my AR-15 ownership is prima facie evidence of my mental instability, sexual inadequacy, lack of a conscience, or what-have-you, then I honestly don’t care what you think about this issue. You can go back to broadcasting your own moral superiority on social media, and I can go back to tuning you out until your rage therapy session is over.

No, this article is for the genuinely curious?—?those who assume that 5 million of their fellow Americans are not inhuman or insane, and who want to understand what set of rationales, no matter how flawed and confused they may ultimately turn out to be, could make an otherwise normal person walk out of a gun store with an “assault weapon.”

Read it.

This is why Trump is so successful.

Obama would not have said that even if you had threatened to deliver his wife and daughters to ISIS.

Read it.

It would not be remarkable to observe that politicians lie. Many people lie. What is remarkable is that politicians keep telling the same lies over and over again. Few people do this. (Donald Trump, who tells a new lie almost every time he opens his mouth, is not a counterexample to this observation because he is not really a politician.)

I am unable to recall a time when politicians were not promising to balance the budget by eliminating “fraud, waste, and abuse,” or to help the poor by increasing the budget of a federal program, or to create energy self-sufficiency, or to stem the tide of illegal immigration by controlling the border, or to reduce gun violence by adopting stronger gun control measures, or…you get the idea.

Now, politicians are generally not stupid people. If there is one thing they know well, it is how to get people to vote for them. So if they are constantly repeating assertions that consistently turn out to be false, it must be because doing so has this effect. But why? Why does the public never seem to catch on? To answer this question, I want to describe something I call the “20 minutes game.”

Wakey wakey.

Stickers and posters featuring a rainbow-colored version of the Gadsden flag and the hashtag #ShootBack were raising eyebrows in West Hollywood on Thursday morning in the wake of the massacre at a gay nightclub in Florida.

The signage was affixed to electric boxes, light poles, trash cans and other fixtures near West Hollywood City Hall, the Pacific Design Center and along Santa Monica Boulevard. Several were hung near the Abbey Food & Bar, a well-known gay lounge.

The posters featured a coiled, striking rattlesnake, similar to the yellow Gadsden flag that reads “Don’t Tread On Me” and often is used by the Tea Party movement. The West Hollywood signs were rainbow-colored, like the gay pride flag.

“We are disturbed by them,” West Hollywood Mayor Lauren Meister said of the posters. “We don’t believe in an eye for an eye, and we advocate against gun violence.”

Which is why there are 50 people dead in Florida and a similar number in the hospital.

Read it.

What is it about blue states that makes people so eager to leave them? That’s a question worth pondering after seeing the results of Gallup’s latest State of the State poll, which, for the first time in eight years, found that more states lean Republican than Democratic. Only 14 states, the survey determined, are either solidly Democratic or trending that way, while in 20 states, the majority of residents are either solidly Republican or leaning right. Gallup deemed the rest toss-ups, with no clear advantage for either party.

The poll revealed other trends. Blue-state residents were far more likely to report that they wished to relocate. Seven of the eight states that residents are keenest to flee are solidly blue—led by Connecticut, where 46 percent of people want to follow the state’s leading employer, GE, to the exits. Also near the top of the list: New Jersey, Illinois, Rhode Island, Maryland, Delaware, and New York. The only state in the Top Eight not predominantly Democratic is Ohio, which Gallup considers “competitive” (neither Republican nor Democratic). Rounding out the Top Ten are Republican-leaning Indiana and Nevada.

The flip side of those results—that is, the list of states that people are least anxious to leave—is also suggestive. Of the 11 states leading in this category (two tied for tenth place), just three are Democratic, led by blue-leaning Oregon and Washington. Six are Republican, led by Montana and including Texas and North Dakota. The others are toss-up states.

Read it.

Of the approximately two million Chinese Koreans living in China, about half reside in Jilin Province, one of the country’s three northeastern provinces. Jilin comprises most of China’s border with North Korea and includes the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture — one of 30 administrative districts within the People’s Republic of China that are ruled, to some degree, independently of the central state. Given such a strong Korean influence on the region, it may seem logical that of Jilin’s ethnic Korean population many (if not most) would identify with one or both of the Koreas. Ethnic Koreans are, after all, described in Korean as tongpo; brethren abroad, compatriots borne of one ethnicity but living beyond the borders of their native land.

However, while this characterization generally holds true for older Chinese Koreans, in particular those who fled across the border to North Korea during the famine years of the Great Leap Forward and the mayhem of the Cultural Revolution, it is by no means applicable to the youngest generation. For them, the contemporary connection with South Korea is little more than functional, while that with North Korea barely exists at all.