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The city of Takoma Park, Maryland granted a waiver to its strict Nuclear-Free Zone Act this week in order to use Hewlett-Packard computers in its city library. The city of Takoma Park has been nuclear-free since 1983, meaning that the city is prohibited from supporting companies that work with US nuclear weapons production. HP is on this list of prohibited contractors, so when librarians received the shipment of new hardware for the library’s computer learning center, they packed them away and awaited the Nuclear-Free Takoma Park Commitee’s decision on the matter. The Committee denied the waiver for the equipment, but was overridden for the first time ever in a vote by city officials.

Posturing gets kicked to the curb when it might actually pinch.

My first girlfriend at Yale came from Tacoma Park; her parents were bureaucrats. Eventually she joined the Party of the Right. (You know — you grow.)

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

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A Chinese student forced to intern at Foxconn has complained that his two months on the gadget assembly line was like “military training” and unrelated to his degree, according to a local Chinese news site.

A group of students at Xi’an Technological University have complained about having to do work with with the iPhone manufacturers in order to pass their degrees, reports the Huashang News webite, via MicGadget. It’s particularly resented by arts and social sciences students, according to the Chinese news site, which reported that many felt the “work experience” was irrelevant to their studies.

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In early 1979, a pair of identical twin brothers who had been separated at four weeks were reunited after 39 years. Both named Jim, they discovered that they smoked the same brand of cigarettes, vacationed in the same town and both called their dog “Toy.” Struck by the story, psychologists at the University of Minnesota started studying separated twins that same year. Their efforts blossomed into the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart, which ran for a quarter century, attracting world-wide fascination and antipathy.

Nancy Segal’s “Born Together—Reared Apart” is a thorough history of the project and of the 137 pairs of star-crossed twins who made it possible. Ms. Segal, a key member of the Minnesota team, focuses on the many scientific publications that emerged from the data. But along the way, readers meet leading twin researchers and a whole lot of twins—including the “Jim twins,” the “giggle twins” (who both laughed almost nonstop) and, most incredibly, Oskar, raised as a Nazi, and his identical brother, Jack, who was raised as a Jew.

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The plaintiffs point out that Dodd-Frank grants the CFPB sweeping authority over consumer financial product and services firms. For example, the CFPB has the open-ended power to determine which lending practices are “unfair,” “deceitful,” or “abusive” under the Act. It can also unilaterally exempt any class of covered persons from rules it promulgates.

Dodd-Frank also grants the CFPB aggressive investigative and enforcement powers. It can issue subpoenas, conduct hearings and adjudicative proceedings, and file lawsuits.

In other words, it can freely ignore Friends of the Crust while oppressing those out of favor, backed by the full power of the modern state. But that’s the way they roll these days: Pass a law that criminalizes almost anything that anyone would want to do, then exempt your friends and the well-connected — and, eventually, those who are willing to let the bureaucrats and politicians ‘wet their beaks’.

Your tax dollars at work.

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Since “urban” is synonymous with minority and Black in American lexicon, anytime meteorologists start predicting heat waves for cities with vibrant, diverse populations like New York City, Chicago, St. Louis, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Memphis, Milwaukee, or Philadelphia, the great fear is that the risk of a “crime wave” rises with each uptick in the Fahrenheit temperature.

…

Violent crime committed by Black people in Philadelphia, Chicago, Newark, St. Louis, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Washington D.C., and Baltimore might increase, but it’s already at astronomically high rates (compared to the white population) that it’s hard to notice a difference.

But cities that are “overwhelmingly” white (does any newspaper ever say Detroit is “suffocatingly” Black… because they should) don’t have the same problem with increases in temperature.

Ross Douthat looks at the closet master-racers of the Crust.

But these same eugenicists were often political and social liberals — advocates of social reform, partisans of science, critics of stasis and reaction. “They weren’t sinister characters out of some darkly lighted noir film about Nazi sympathizers,” Conniff writes of Fisher and his peers, “but environmentalists, peace activists, fitness buffs, healthy-living enthusiasts, inventors and family men.” From Teddy Roosevelt to the Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, fears about “race suicide” and “human weeds” were common among self-conscious progressives, who saw the quest for a better gene pool as of a piece with their broader dream of human advancement.

And, indeed, the ACORN hasn’t fallen very far from the tree.

Thanks to examples like Irving Fisher, we know what the elites of a bygone era would have done with that kind of information: they would have empowered the state (and the medical establishment) to determine which fetal lives should be carried to term, and which should be culled for the good of the population as a whole.

That scenario is all but unimaginable in today’s political climate. But given our society’s track record with prenatal testing for Down syndrome, we also have a pretty good idea of what individuals and couples will do with comprehensive information about their unborn child’s potential prospects. In 90 percent of cases, a positive test for Down syndrome leads to an abortion. It is hard to imagine that more expansive knowledge won’t lead to similar forms of prenatal selection on an ever-more-significant scale.

Of course, if the parents have been properly conditioned by the Crust-controlled academic and media establishment, government doesn’t even really need to get involved. Like cultural mimes, they are hemmed in by walls that only they and their compadres can see.

Steve Sailer looks at why California sucks (despite the great climate) and Texas rocks (despite the shitty climate).

The struggles of even the best-connected California celebrities to nail down every last one of the permits they need to build on their own property helps demonstrate why differences in topography drive Californians toward voting for environmentalist Democrats and Texans toward pro-business Republicans.

…

Paradoxically, Democratic California is a nice place to be wealthy and white, while Republican Texas increasingly attracts the working class, especially minorities and immigrants.

It’s not paradoxical at all to those who keep their eyes open. The Democrats are the party of rich white people and their ethnic fashionable-victim clients, a conspiracy of the Overclass and the Underclass against the middle class — the Crusts versus the Filling. Republicans are people who don’t want to be tagged as Democrats, be their reasons pecuniary (such as Bloomberg and the New England RINOs) or philosophical (such as Jonah Goldberg and anybody who can read him without spitting up).

In contrast, most of Texas is so flat that few people can see much from their backyards, so they tend to mind their own business more. (Austin, the hilliest big city in Texas, is also the most liberal.)

The essence of being a Democrat is looking down on other people. If you’re rich, you can do that physically. If your poor or one of the fashionable-victim ethnic clients, you have to be content to do so morally. Even homeless bums can raise their noses high enough to look down them at the Politically Incorrect; you don’t have to be sober.

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I’m looking forward to the day that they can 3D-print a car. Unfortunately, the government will probably mandate that it be a hybrid.

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Don’t ever say we don’t have useful stuff here.

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Commerce Secretary John Bryson has resigned. Here’s a provocative idea: don’t replace him.

Bloomberg News observes that the Commerce Department has 47,000 employees and a $7.5 billion annual budget. America didn’t have a separate commerce department until 1913, yet somehow Americans managed to engage in commerce before that time without a federal government bureaucracy to assist them in doing so.

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Suddenly, abstinence looks a lot more attractive.

That’s some fine Religion o’ Peace™ you got there, Mohammed.

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My hypothesis is that it is precisely the dumbing down of U.S. education over the last decades that explains the increase in willingness to pay for education. The mechanism is diminishing marginal returns to education.

Typical graduate business school education has indeed become less rigorous over time, as has typical college education. But typical high school education has declined in quality just as much. As a result, the human capital difference between a college and high-school graduate has increased, because the first increments of education are more valuable on the job market than the later ones. It used to be that everybody could read and understand something like Orwell’s Animal Farm, but the typical college graduates could also understand Milton or Spencer. Now, nobody grasps Milton but only the college grads can process Animal Farm, and for employers the See Spot Run–>Animal Farm jump is more valuable than the Animal Farm–>Milton jump.

It is as I have long said — companies are requiring college degrees for positions that don’t really require a college education because that’s the only way they can guarantee that applicants will have what used to be considered a high school education.

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If you receive government benefits, about 150 million.

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Russia has confirmed that the cargo ship forced to turn back from British waters this week was carrying attack helicopters for Syria, and that it will now sail under the Russian flag.

Looks like we’re stuck in the sixties again.

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NHS doctors are prematurely ending the lives of thousands of elderly hospital patients because they are difficult to manage or to free up beds, a senior consultant claimed yesterday.

Professor Patrick Pullicino said doctors had turned the use of a controversial ‘death pathway’ into the equivalent of euthanasia of the elderly.

Gotta love that government-provided health care. Maybe the Obamassiah can get a system like that for us.

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Missing, of course, is any answer to the question ‘Why?’

People seem to think that it’s enough to say ‘Oh noes! X is endangered!’ to trigger a panic reaction on the part of all within earshot. Unless there is something uniquely useful about these languages (and I suggest that any who were uniquely useful wouldn’t be endangered) then I don’t see the point.

Languages are like Household Stuff. Just because it was useful once doesn’t mean it’s worth keeping forever. Sometimes you just have to Take Out The Trash.

If I were a Google shareholder I’d be thinking of some pointed questions to be asking at the next shareholder meeting.

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Guess that means they were losing.

This is, of course, a classic ‘hudna’, the truce that Muslims enter into with (stupid) opponents who are winning in order to pause and regain their strength before resuming jihad. Everybody in the Islamophile press uses the term ‘ceasefire’ or ‘truce’ but ‘time-out’ would be a more accurate term.

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In 2011, Congressional mandates for Cellulosic Biofuel cost refiners $6.8 million (New York Times story). In 2012, the mandated use of Cellulosic Biofuel is 8.6 million gallons.

The projected commercial availability of Cellulosic Biofuel for 2012 is 0.0 gallons.

Blenders must use their mandated quantity of Cellulosic Biofuel, or pay “offsets”, essentially a tax the EPA charges for failure to use the nonexistent product. Of course, refiners are not going to absorb this cost, they’ll merely pass it on to the consumer. (Two industry groups have joined in a lawsuit against the EPA and its absurd penalties.)

Paul Mirengoff at Powerline turns over a rock and watches what scuttles out.

Here’s how Politico writers Jake Sherman and Reid Epstein reported the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s vote to hold Eric Holder in contempt: “The Fast and Furious investigation has finally handed House Republicans a prize they’ve long sought: a legal smackdown of the Obama administration.”

Can anyone imagine this lead sentence if the House had found the Attorney General in a Republican administration, Alberto Gonzalez for example, in contempt? I can’t. Instead, Politico would no doubt be focusing on the obstruction (real or imagined) that led to the contempt vote, and very possibly touting the House’s action as a victory for truth, justice, and the American way.

Steve Sailer always has that inconvenient fact or two handy.

Marco Rubio:

“Many people who came here illegally are doing exactly what we would do if we lived in a country where we couldn’t feed our families,” he writes in An American Son, which was released Tuesday. “If my kids went to sleep hungry every night and my country didn’t give me an opportunity to feed them, there isn’t a law, no matter how restrictive, that would prevent me from coming here.”

Hm. Are people starving in Mexico?

Let’s take a look at the obesity by nation chart that Steve provides, taken from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Oh, look, the U.S. is #1, and Mexico is #2. Well. I guess not.

So what the fuck is Rubio on about? Or is this just Identity Politics infecting supposed conservative Republicans?

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Two adult lionesses, two young adults and two cubs were killed by a mob after they invaded a settlement in Kitengela on the outskirts of the park, Kenya Wildlife Service said.

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France is discovering the hard way that once you let Muslims cross your border in any numbers, the results are always … unpleasant.

Be careful not to step in the diversity.

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 The plan to use the government’s power of eminent domain to seize underwater home mortgages and sell them to private investors with ties to the Obama administration, reported here last week, is moving ahead.

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 People who track killings of environmental activists say the numbers have risen dramatically in the last three years. Improved reporting may be one reason, they caution, but they also believe the rising death toll is a consequence of intensifying battles over dwindling supplies of natural resources, particularly in Latin America and Asia.

Once again, we appear to have a Third World solution to a First World problem.

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 Capital Bikeshare, which rents bikes at more than 165 outdoor stations in the Washington D.C. area, serves highly educated and affluent whites.

There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, except that the program has received $16 million in government subsidies, including over $1 million specifically earmarked to “address the unique transportation challenges faced by welfare recipients and low-income persons seeking to obtain and maintain employment.”

And, of course, we all know how much welfare recipients and low-income persons seeking to obtain and maintain employment desperately need rental bicycles.

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 Nassau County, N.Y., had let go 71-year-old veteran lifeguard Jay Lieberfarb after he failed a swim test. Charging that the county had not always dismissed younger guards who had failed the same test, the EEOC proceeded to negotiate a $65,000 back pay settlement, a three-year consent decree and other relief.

Sometimes it is good to be the victim … or at least profitable. At taxpayer expense, of course.

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Assange was cuffed by Met police on a European Arrest Warrant in December 2010. He was later granted conditional bail by London’s High Court with a bond of £200,000, collected from Assange’s celebrity supporters.

One of those conditions was that Assange had to adhere to an overnight curfew at his bail address between 22.00 and 08.00.

Let us all pause and shed a tear for the celebutards now financially hosed by befriending a ‘progressive’ like Assange.

Pass the popcorn.

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If Aubrey de Grey’s predictions are right, the first person who will live to see their 150th birthday has already been born. And the first person to live for 1,000 years could be less than 20 years younger. A biomedical gerontologist and chief scientist of a foundation dedicated to longevity research, de Grey reckons that within his own lifetime doctors could have all the tools they need to “cure” aging — banishing diseases that come with it and extending life indefinitely.

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We’ve argued for years that many professions that require certain forms of “licensing” are often more about restricting supply. That’s not say those who set up the licensing effort didn’t have the best of intentions, but the end effect often doesn’t actually do much to benefit the public. I’m reminded of this after reading economist Charles Wheelen explaining why Albert Einstein technically wouldn’t have been “qualified” to teach high school physics after retiring from a distinguished career at Princeton.

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Under the Obama administration, spending on food stamps has skyrocketed, as an astonishing 46 million Americans, one-seventh of the population, are now on the program.

The Food Stamp President indeed. ‘What are you here for?’ ‘Money!’ ‘What money?’ ‘Obama money!’

So Senator Jeff Sessions tried to introduce a minimal amount of fiscal discipline into the food stamp program by offering amendments that incorporated two basic reforms: 1) preventing states from waiving federal eligibility requirements for the program, and 2) eliminating the bonuses that the federal government now pays to states that deliberately swell the ranks of food stamp recipients. Given that the federal government pays 100% of the program’s cost, such bonuses create perverse incentives in the states, with predictable consequences. And at least 28 states have no limit whatsoever on the financial assets a household can have, and still qualify for food stamps.

Tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect….

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‘With this device I could — dare I say it? — rule the world….’

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Thank you, Walmart.

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A famous mad professor who has previously called for Britons to starve their children into dwarfism so as to ease strains on the planetary ecosystem has reiterated his arguments, this time insisting that the amount of surplus flab carried by the human race will soon be equivalent to having another half-a-billion people on Earth.

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It’s time for 3d printing to address the Gothic.  And the first instance has already appeared, with an artist crafting lovely human skulls.

We report, you decide.

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A glamorous young Pakistani pop singer, who was forced to record her songs in Dubai after being threatened by the Taliban, has been shot dead in an apparent honour killing.

They couldn’t do Madonna, no, they had to go and whack somebody that I’ve never heard of.

That’s some fine Religion o’ Peace™ you got there, Mohammed.

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‘Yasser Lopez’? I guess we know what politics his parents espouse.

CNN is pissed that Congress isn’t passing enough laws.

The current Congress has worked just as many days as its legislative predecessors. It just has a lot less to show for it.

According to a CNN analysis of congressional records that looked at bills that became law and the number of days lawmakers worked, members of the House have spent more than 150 days and Senate just over 140 days in session so far, comparable to previous Congresses at this point in the term.

Color me cynical, but I think that’s a feature, not a bug. Of course a Voice of the Crust would think more laws better than less, but somebody ought to sit them down and explain that ‘number of laws passed’ is not the proper metric for a legislature. That way lies fascism.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, spreads some inconvenient truth:

The downside of our cheerful open-handedness is that it makes the USA a great magnet for freeloaders and unscrupulous lowlifes. In the news, or flitting around the edge of it, at any given time are always half a dozen stories of such.

Many of whom are being offered amnesty by the Obama regime.

US immigration, asylum, and refugee-resettlement procedures are subjects of intensive study in Third World countries. I doubt if one US citizen in ten thousand could tell you the difference between a K-1 visa and an H-4 visa; in Jakarta, Bogotá, Islamabad, and Ouagadougou, they speak of little else.

In any Third World bazaar there is a street of vendors offering help with getting into the USA. Some of the help is of a legitimate kind: translation services, college applications, connection with employers. Some is more…creative. It is highly unlikely that the cassette in the New York Times story about DSK’s accuser was made for the benefit of that one woman. More probably the production of such teaching aids is a major industry in West Africa.

No doubt the same people who are accusing us of being outrageous imperialists. Case in point:

Waad Ramadan Alwan and Mohanad Shareef Hammadi. Both these gentlemen were arrested in May on terrorism charges. Both had entered the USA in 2009 as refugees, in spite of active careers fighting against US troops in Iraq.

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

And there was no shortage of public funds to provide Mr. Alwan and Mr. Hammadi with the necessities of life—you know, stuff such as housing and health care—that you, Joe Citizen, have to work your ass off for.

You tax dollars at work.

Zeituni Onyango. Out of the news since her big break last year, Barack Obama’s Aunt Zeituni remains a poster gal for the propositions that: (a) If a US federal judge orders you to do something and you don’t do it, nothing whatever will happen to you. (b) If you make illegal contributions to the campaign of a presidential candidate to whom you are related, and that candidate becomes president, nothing whatever will happen to you. (c) No matter how deep a pit of debt the USA and its states and municipalities sink down into, there’s always $700 a month and free housing to spare for a foreign freeloader.

Is this a great country, or what?

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An unknown component of breast milk kills HIV particles and virus-infected cells, as well as blocking HIV-transmission in mice with a human immune system.

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Of course they do.

An environmental group wants the ailing San Onofre nuclear power plant to remain offline because it says Southern California Edison sidestepped regulatory rules when it installed new equipment.

Not a safety issue, but one of pure pettifoggery — they have no rational reason to oppose it, they just want to cancel the 20th century, so bureaucratic nitpicking is all they have.

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A Russian ship believed to be carrying helicopters and missiles for Syria has been effectively stopped in its tracks off the coast of Scotland after its insurance was cancelled at the behest of the British government.

There’s a First World solution to a Third World problem.

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Just as Tracy Morgan learned that “gay” trumps “black” in the media’s politically correct pecking order, the Cherokee are about to discover that “American Indian” does not trump “pasty-white, wealthy female leftist who could unseat a sitting Republican in the U.S. Senate.”

Sure sounds as if they’re being treated like family….

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Though Stewart distances himself from the “one-percenters” and bellows over their extravagance, his bank accounts bear all the marks of the “multi, multi, multi, multi millionaires” he mocks. The 49-year-old Stewart, born Jonathan Stuart Leibowitz, makes more than 300 times the median American salary, owns three luxury homes and sometimes doesn’t pay his taxes.

In January Stewart exploded on-air over Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s income level. “That’s almost — that’s almost $57,000 a day!” he gushed.

But Stewart’s own income level brings him and his wife Tracey approximately $41,000 a day. The celebrity income-handicapping website Celebrity Net Worth lists his annual salary as $15 million and estimates his net worth at $80 million.

Pot, meet kettle.

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 The Duchess lost a Victorian headpiece and a Cartier brooch along with three other pieces worth a total of £100,000 in 2006. The items went missing as she returned to Clan Campbell’s ancestral home, Inveraray Castle.

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And who should be in charge of measuring welfare, summing it, and weighing the gains and losses in order to arrive at a socially “just” distribution of income, whatever that is? Well, we know the answer to that question: It has to be the state — or more accurately — elected officials and bureaucrats: people not known for their perspicacity, objectivity, and even-handedness.

In the alternative, a just society could be one where individuals engage in voluntary, cooperative exchanges of goods and services for their mutual betterment, and from the fruits of which they voluntarily aid those whom they know to be in need of aid.

The alternative is inevitably attacked as “unjust.” But it should be noted that such attacks come from individuals (philosophers, politicians, do-gooders, etc.) who would impose their own views of “social justice” on everyone. How any such imposition can be considered more “just” than a regime of voluntary, cooperative, mutually beneficial behavior is beyond me.

Me, too.

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The real agenda, I suppose, is to force the rest of us to be vegetarians. The hoaxers and bureaucrats who stir up global warming hysteria would no more stop eating filet mignon than they would give up their private jets. They just want power over the rest of us. Thankfully, hardly anyone is silly enough to believe that humanity can regulate the Earth’s climate by eating tofu instead of bacon. Still, next time you are in a restaurant, it might be fun to order a 32-ounce Porterhouse. In addition to all the usual reasons, you will be defying some of the world’s most obnoxious busybodies.

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Oh, look, the top two are in Michigan. And there’s nothing from Texas on the list.

Imagine that.

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This is the real problem. Technology actually is approaching the magic point. You want to know how your laptop works. You can’t know. Even the people who made it don’t know. Apple has to call up LG or Sharp when it wants a high-density display. LG has to call Samsung when they want MLC flash storage. Samsung has to call NVIDIA when they want graphics cores. NVIDIA has to call ARM to make SoC architecture. Vertical integration is a thing of the past because no company can do it all. It took Intel five years and billions of dollars to develop just the processor your laptop runs today. The whole system is the culmination of a century of work by geniuses and specialists. Control over your hardware is the flimsiest of illusions. You only understand the snow frosting the top of the iceberg, and even then all you can do to fix it is pay for more.