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Guess “Star Wars” really works. You’d think that this would be front-page news. Nope, page A07 in the WaPo. No sign of it on the evening news that I’ve seen or heard tell of.

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President Bush, whose administration has been dominated by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the global battle against terrorism, helped break ground yesterday on a $185 million facility for the U.S. Institute of Peace — a government-funded think tank with the mission of preventing conflict and helping promote postwar stability operations.

And if you believe that one, they’ll tell you another one.

Just another rack of sinecures for the Chattering Class. Your tax dollars at work.

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It’s the good thing the government regulates these things, otherwise we’d be in deep doo-doo.

Oh, wait:

The federal agency that oversees oil trading, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, has exempted these firms from rules that limit speculative buying, a prerogative traditionally reserved for airlines and trucking companies that need to lock in future fuel costs.

The CFTC has also waived regulations over the past decade on U.S. investors who trade commodities on some overseas markets, freeing those investors to accumulate large quantities of the future oil supply by making purchases on lightly regulated foreign exchanges.

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California. ‘Nuff said.

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People always seem so surprised when a Communist country acts like a Communist country. *sigh*

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Well, yeah. Duh.

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What’s it like to be a real African among African-Americans?

The word “racist” should be banned. It is like a sweater wrung completely out of shape; it has lost its usefulness. It makes honest debate impossible, whether about small realities such as little boys who won’t say hello to black babysitters or large realities such as who is more likely to get the death penalty. In place of “racist,” descriptive, albeit unwieldy, expressions might be used, such as “incidents that negatively affect black people, which, although possibly complicated by class and other factors, would not have occurred if the affected people were not black.” Perhaps qualifiers would be added: “These incidents do not implicate all non-black people.”

Of course, this particular African has bought into the whole “victim” mentality of modern black American culture — otherwise you don’t get published in the Washington Post — but it’s an interesting perspective.

Perhaps Africans coming to American ought to be given a pamphlet explaining the ways in which American black culture is dysfunctional and that, for better or worse, they will be assumed to be a part of that culture, by both white and non-white alike.

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One imagines that it would be a much happier world if Leftists faced reality and entered into an honest discussion about just how present-day circumstances might modify or channel the moral impulses that we all have. What they in fact do is refuse to have any discussion, just as they so often refuse to look at the full facts of a matter. Quite clearly, they do all they can to avoid the irrationality in their arguments being exposed. They are in deep fear that they would lose a rational argument. In short, morality is just one of the many realities that Leftists ignore — to our almost certain detriment. It is only the fact that we DO live by rules that makes civilized life possible.

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Boy, those Zimbabweans are sure lucky they’re no longer under the boot of that oppressive white regime.

Thank God for the U.N. and the international community, or who know what sort of hell they’d be living in now.

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The agreement sets the fines lower than the $357,500 proposed in December by the U.S. Department of Education. The fines, to be paid to the department, are for violating the federal Clery Act, which requires schools to accurately disclose campus security information.

Life at a government school.

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Now don’t say that we don’t deal with important matters here.

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I tell you, that Republican “culture of corruption” is just disgusting.

Oops, sorry, they’re all Democrats. Never mind.

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

Yaacov Ben Moshe takes a look at the looney French Overclass.

Read it.

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And about time, too. Our government needs to cease lending credibility to these oxymoronic international corruption-fests.

Cringely has an excellent discussion of the fuels problem.

And, by the way, there’s a couple in Indiana who just might be solving it for us.

Enter SwiftFuel, the Splenda of motor fuels because it is made from ethanol yet contains no ethanol. SwiftFuel is the invention of John and Mary Rusek from Swift Enterprises in Indiana. To your airplane SwiftFuel looks and tastes just like gasoline. It has an octane rating of 104 (higher than the 100 octane fuel it replaces) yet contains no lead or ethanol. SwiftFuel mixes with gasoline, can be stored in the same tanks as gasoline, and be shipped in the same pipelines as gasoline. It is made entirely from biomass, which means it has a net zero carbon footprint and does nothing to increase global warming. Its emission of other polluting byproducts of burning gasoline are significantly lower, too. SwiftFuel has more energy per gallon than gasoline so your airplane (or your car) will go 15-20 percent further on each gallon.

Oh, and based on an average $1.42 per gallon wholesale cost for the ethanol used as its feedstock, SwiftFuel costs $1.80 per gallon to produce, meaning that it ought to be able to sell for $3 per gallon or less no matter what happens in the Middle East.

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No good deed goes unpunished.

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National Health Service is what you get when the government runs the health care system.

Let’s profit from Britain’s mistakes, can we?

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Recessions are caused by government interference in free trade, not by free trade. You ought to know that by now.

Today is D-Day.

It’s also the anniversary of RFK’s assassination.

So what’s important to Google?

A picture about Velazquez.

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Environmentalists are stunned that their global warming agenda is in collapse. Senator Harry Reid has all but conceded he lacks the vote for passage in the Senate and that it’s time to move on. Backers of the Warner-Lieberman cap-and-trade bill always knew they would face a veto from President Bush, but they wanted to flex their political muscle and build momentum for 2009. That strategy backfired. The green groups now look as politically intimidating as the skinny kid on the beach who gets sand kicked in his face.

Good news? How’d that get in here?

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Hmmmmm….. That would explain a lot.

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Take that, vile miscreants!

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We have new technology for voting — unfortunately, it depends on old technology humans.

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D.C. Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier announced a military-style checkpoint yesterday to stop cars this weekend in a Northeast Washington neighborhood inundated by gun violence, saying it will help keep criminals out of the area.

But D.C. has the strictest gun ban in the country! Surely that prevents gun violence!

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Ya think?

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

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Just because we have the technology doesn’t mean that it actually works.

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

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Hey, if you’re serious about food….

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Could very well be. We have the technology.

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No word on the elderberries.

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You knew it had to happen.

1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
2. Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here. Probably in California.

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A useful concept that explains much of the modern world.

Mencius Moldbug continues his disquisition on progressivism.

The great power center of 2008 is the Cathedral. The Cathedral has two parts: the accredited universities and the established press. The universities formulate public policy. The press guides public opinion. In other words, the universities make decisions, for which the press manufactures consent. It’s as simple as a punch in the mouth.

Government is not a science because it is impractical to construct controlled experiments in government. Uncontrolled or “natural” experiments are not science. Any process which is not science, but claims to be science, or claims that its results exhibit the same objective robustness we ascribe to the scientific process, has surely earned the name of pseudoscience. Thus it is not at all excessive to describe 20th-century “public policy” as a pseudoscience. A good sanity check is the disparity between its predictions and its achievements.

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Why? Because it’s conclusions are Politically Incorrect, of course.

The board had delayed an April vote to approve the report after concerns were raised that findings were based on subjective measures, such as elementary report card data, and that they would fuel negative stereotypes.

Board member Phillip A. Niedzielski-Eichner (Providence) said yesterday that he plans to propose at a June 19 meeting that a vote on the report be postponed indefinitely.

Don’t like the facts you find? Sweep them under a rug and push on. That’s the government way.

Read it.

And where was the Washington Post when Mugabe was installed as President by the “international community”, including Bishop Tutu, thirty years ago? You know where.

Boy, it’s a good thing that Zimbabwe isn’t suffering under that oppressive white regime any more, isn’t it?

George Will points out that our government is keeping gas prices artificially high.

One million barrels is what might today be flowing from ANWR if in 1995 President Bill Clinton had not vetoed legislation to permit drilling there. One million barrels produce 27 million gallons of gasoline and diesel fuel. Seventy-two of today’s senators — including Schumer, of course, and 38 other Democrats, including Barack Obama, and 33 Republicans, including John McCain — have voted to keep ANWR’s estimated 10.4 billion barrels of oil off the market.

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

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Must be Global Warming. Wake up AlGore.

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