The Other McCain fills you in.

What’s going on here is that Hillary is caught between her lifelong allegiance to the Democrat Party — with its propaganda mythos of being for “the little guy” — and the reality of her own success. Politics can be a very lucrative business, and she and her husband have parlayed their investment in liberal politics into a fortune, or at least, what most people would consider a fortune.

The typical Democrat voter looks at a number like $100 million and can only think of hitting the lottery as a way to get it. But the Clintons haven’t gotten where they are in life by hanging around typical Democrat voters. Successful politicians spend most of their time in the company of the rich and powerful and, quite naturally, view their own financial situation in comparison to the power brokers and big-money donors whose support they must routinely solicit.

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The mayor of Springfield, Massachusetts has asked the federal government for a moratorium on sending refugees to the city, claiming that newly arrived families create a strain on city resources and the school system and do not receive sufficient aid from resettlement agencies.

Domenic Sarno, a Democrat, made his request in a letter sent Thursday to Rep. Richard E. Neal, D-Mass. Copies were also sent to Senators Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey, as well as Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick.

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Arsuaga and his colleagues think the fossils show that the Neanderthal lineage did not get all its distinctive anatomical features as a complete set, but rather, these appeared individually in “a mosaic pattern of evolution, with different anatomical and functional modules evolving at different rates,” in the words of the Science paper.

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For understandable reasons, the IRS scandal has largely focused on the political question of whether the White House deliberately targeted its opponents. To date there’s no evidence that it did. That’s good for the president, but it may not be good for the country, because if the administration didn’t target opponents, that would mean the IRS has become corrupt all on its own.

…

Now, I don’t believe we are becoming anything like 1930s Russia, never mind a real-life “1984”. But this idea that bureaucrats — very broadly defined — can become their own class bent on protecting their interests at the expense of the public seems not only plausible but obviously true.

Freeberg has some thoughts.

One of the ways we might assess that a society has become soft and spoiled, is the observation that its demands have begun to take on the profile of the supplies. In other words, lots of people “need” something simply because it’s there to be had. What’s been going on with tattoos would be an apt illustration of this. The tattoo ink artist paying the rent by swiping the credit cards held by guilted and bullied small-em moms, ultimately, is a solution in search of a problem. Kids want the tattoos because the tattoos are there. And all the other kids have them. Because they’re there.

I make it a general practice to steer clear the things indulged in by the majority of the criminal population — tatoos, smoking, recreational drugs. I figure, maybe they know something I don’t know, and ought to avoid.

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On June 18, Stephanie Klowlek–the inventer of Kevlar–died.

Klowlek invented Kevlar in 1965 and it has been used in bullet-proof vests, helmets, tires, “airplanes and armored military vehicles,” and more.

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I don’t ordinarily pick up anything from DailyKos, but this attracted my attention.

The problem, at least in the USA, is that those unvaccinated children tend to be clustered in small geographical areas where individuals who share the typical characteristics of many vaccine deniers tend to live.

Love that term: ‘vaccine deniers’.

The complication is that the herd immunity can break down rather quickly when the vaccination uptake drops below 80-90% in these clusters. And all it takes is one person carrying a vaccine preventable disease from an area, where it is endemic, to then start an outbreak or epidemic very quickly in one of these low vaccine uptake clusters.

In evolutionary terms, this would seem to be a self-correcting problem — the offspring of those who are inclined to refuse vaccination get the disease; either they form the same immunity that those of us did who went through it before the vaccine was available, or they die, thereby removing their offspring from the gene pool.

Maybe I’m missing something….

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Ed Klein, author of The Amateur, an unflattering account of Barack Obama’s presidency, has a new book coming out. It promises to be fun. If you thought the Hatfields and McCoys didn’t like each other, just wait until you read about the Clintons and the Obamas.

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The incessant attacks on income inequality and inherited wealth arise not only from faulty economic reasoning, as Mankiw points out, but also from envy and resentment.

Envy and resentment are found among non-achievers, of course, but they are rampant in the ranks of the affluent. There we find pseudo-academic poseurs like Paul Krugman and Robert Reich, leftist pundits, well-heeled politicos, and cossetted bureaucrats who feast on the spoils of the welfare state. These hypocrites can’t attack “the rich” with a straight face, so they attack “the very rich,” a class that they define (conveniently) to exclude themselves.

That said, I can’t resist the temptation to add to Mankiw’s short list of links to posts and articles that are critical of Piketty’s analysis.

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The Israeli’s are the poster children for the concept If You’ve Got A Gun Pointed At Your Head 24/7 You Let Nothing Fall Through The Cracks.

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This ‘the iDog ate our e-mails’ schtick is not only a lie but a barefaced lie, to which the IRS cling because they know there’s no chance of anybody going to jail or losing their jobs under this President and this Attorney General.

Mafia Rule #2: If you’ve got the cops in your pocket you can break the law with impunity.

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Standard Multicultural imagery functions as a visual shibboleth. Businesses, charities, educational institutions, and all levels of government must display the correct icons of diversity or expect to be cast into cultural outer darkness. The ideological guidelines are fairly rigid at any given moment, but they shift over time. Imagery that was acceptable and even laudable to display in 1960 has become doubleplus ungood, and hence unthinkable here in the second decade of the 21st century.

The next time you hear somebody say ‘Diversity is our strength!’ say ‘Prove it.’ and watch them blubber and turn red.

Try searching Google images for “diversity business”. I spent an hour or so last night doing exactly that, and the results were fascinating, albeit frightening. Diversity really is a huge business. Someone is shelling out billions and billions of dollars to all those consultants, think tanks, seminars, and focus groups.

As George Carlin famously said, ‘If somebody nails together two things that have never been nailed together before, some schmuck will buy it from you.’

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, opines.

The state ideology–“political correctness,” “the Narrative”–seems to me quite robust. I don’t expect it to change over the next 20 years.

…

With ever fewer jobs for the left side of the bell curve, a universal dole–a federally-guaranteed minimum income–will be in force.

…

To the degree that party politics is of any importance, we shall be in a period of Democratic Supremacy. The Republican Party will either have contracted to its conservative (that is white, Christian, Southern) core and be nationally irrelevant, like 18th-century British Tories, or it will continue to offer the Narrative fronted by different personalities, as at present.

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Yet another ‘green energy’ scam runs headlong into the Reality Wall.

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For 75 years, Finland’s expectant mothers have been given a box by the state. It’s like a starter kit of clothes, sheets and toys that can even be used as a bed. And some say it helped Finland achieve one of the world’s lowest infant mortality rates.

…

The tradition dates back to 1938. To begin with, the scheme was only available to families on low incomes, but that changed in 1949.

“Not only was it offered to all mothers-to-be but new legislation meant in order to get the grant, or maternity box, they had to visit a doctor or municipal pre-natal clinic before their fourth month of pregnancy,” says Heidi Liesivesi, who works at Kela – the Social Insurance Institution of Finland.

So the box provided mothers with what they needed to look after their baby, but it also helped steer pregnant women into the arms of the doctors and nurses of Finland’s nascent welfare state.

And steering people in the the arms of the ‘nascent welfare state’ is what it’s all about.

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Well, it’s a start.

Unfortunately, none of them were Congresscritters.

Read UNSHELVED. Every day. I tell you three times.

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When cholesterol accumulates inside blood vessels, they sometimes burst into clots that block the flow of blood to a person’s brain. This is what we call a stroke. But even though doctors have understood what goes on during these events for quite some time, researchers still don’t fully grasp what causes heart attacks and strokes to happen in the first place. Now, two new studies, published independently yesterday in The New England Journal of Medicine, may yield some clues, as researchers have found that patients who posses a broken version of a gene that normally transforms fat particles into triglycerides are 40% less likely to experience a stroke, or a heart attack.

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Is food freedom—as I define it, your right to grow raise, produce, buy, sell, share, cook, eat, and drink the foods of your own choosing—really under attack?

Indeed it is. And as my definition makes clear, it’s not just that federal, state, and local governments have intruded on your right to eat what you want. It’s that the growers, the producers, and the sellers of food often face senseless and insurmountable regulatory obstacles.

Check it out.

The Planet Is Going To Die And It’s Your Fault.

Vessyl. More here.

Gerber Artifact.

Tool Trolley. (Yes, it really is $1781.)

Jim Beam Pancake Syrup. (If you can’t afford the Tool Trolley.)

Star Wars X-Wing Knife Block.

Nose Up Bridge Straightening Beauty Clip.

CaffeinAll.

Laptop Beverage Holder.

Shell Stools.

Anti-Cheating Ring.

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Thank God there isn’t anything more important going on in the world for the White House to deal with.

On the other hand, this ought to be within their demonstrated limited sphere of competence.

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Crapitalism at its worst.

A taxicab is a car remade by government, modified dozens of ways by edicts within subsections of articles of the city’s taxi code.

“Everywhere on this car has been regulated,” John Henry Assabil says. “Look at it!”

He throws up his arms in the direction of his gold-colored 2012 Ford Transit Connect. The car’s medallion number — 813 — is painted in black plain gothic figures (must be black plain gothic figures) on the driver’s-side hood, on both passenger doors and, for good measure, on the rear. Inside, there is a camera mounted over the rear-view mirror, a dispatch radio bolted to the console, a credit-card reader snapped to the passenger headrest.

From the back of Assabil’s seat hangs a sign — lamination required — spelling out the city’s fare structure: $3.25 for the base rate, $2 for the airport departure/arrival tax, $50 vomit cleanup fee. Everywhere, there are mandatory stickers. “That one costs a dollar,” Assabil says of a window decal reminding passengers to LOOK! before opening the door into the possible path of cyclists and pedestrians. “The fine for not having it is $100.”

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A little Afghan girl whose love of painting won the hearts of U.S. doctors who fitted her with a prosthetic arm returned to the United States on Thursday, after the group that sponsored her first visit said it learned her newfound celebrity made her a subject of death threats at home.

…

Najjar said all the attention has made the girl a target of insurgents in Afghanistan, who railed against her exposure to Western culture.

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

The male words tend to center on transportation, weapons, and science, while the female words mostly relate to fashion, art, and flowers.

That sounds about right. Reality is a Republican.

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Obama megadonor Kareem Ahmed was indicted Tuesday by a California grand jury in an alleged multimillion-dollar insurance kickback scheme, TPM reports.

Ahmed was a major Obama donor during the 2012 election. He gave $1 million to Priorities USA Action in 2012. He also donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to other Democratic candidates.

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

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When Bill de Blasio crushed his Republican rival, Joe Lhota, by 49 points in 2013, more than a few New Yorkers were worried. De Blasio was an unabashed leftist who proudly served with Nicaragua’s Sandinistas and fervently condemned economic inequality, especially the pro-business administration of billionaire Mayor Bloomberg.

…

In a nutshell, de Blasio has turned out to be less a Lenin and more a Santa Claus and this pleases everyone. Unlike past soak-the-rich revolutionaries, he has ignored inequalities in power and instead uses government to bestow countless social welfare benefits on the poor. He has made the city’s poor so dependent on government for their daily existence that a revolution to upend the status quo is now unthinkable. Why would any poor person riot when that might interrupt the conveyor belt of government-supplied goodies? Thus understood, Mayor de Blasio’s policies are conservative in the sense of strengthening the status quo, even if that status quo undergirds capitalism.

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

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Planning of outer southeast Portland has failed so badly that even the planners are recommending that the city slow densification of the area. As reported in the Oregonian late last year, the city upzoned the area to much higher densities but failed to install basic urban services to support those densities. The result is just one more disaster in the model of urban planning called Portland.

Planning only works when the people doing the planning know what they’re doing. Case in point: American foreign policy. But the world is full of people who are convinced down deep in the bottom of their souls that they know better than you do how you ought to be living your life. Case in point: the Democrat Party.

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The violent jihad in Syria and Iraq is the big guy we all can see. He makes sure we can see him. It’s absolutely necessary that we see him, because his job is to strike terror into the hearts of the unbelievers, as required by Allah.

The little guy that we can’t see is somewhere else. His most recent invisible appearance was at the Vatican, during an event I call Imamgate, when an imam accredited by Al-Azhar University prayed (in Arabic) for Allah to grant victory over the unbelievers.

This incident received very little media attention, yet it was one of the most important stories of the decade. We are in the midst of an information war with Islam, and we are being roundly trounced. What happened at the Vatican received plenty of notice in the Arabic media, and is understood (correctly) by Muslims as a great victory for Islam. Using stealth and deception, the Al-Azhar imam penetrated the innermost sanctum of Christendom and claimed it for the Ummah.

An excellent article by someone who really understands what’s going on — unlike most of our government.

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On January 20 Breitbart News reported PTR Industries was leaving Connecticut for the greener and more gun-friendly pastures of South Carolina. On June 18 Breitbart News sat down with PTR Industries vice president of sales and administration John McNamara, so he could update us on where his gun company–which builds roller-lock rifles–stands in relation to South Carolina and firearm production.

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More than 5,000 French Jews are expected to leave France for Israel due to the struggling economy and the rise of radical Islam and the far-right political party, Fox News reports.

The economic prospects for France coupled with an increase in anti-Semitism are the two driving forces for this mass emigration.

I guess France is the new Germany.

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Rahatul Ashikim Kahn, 23, was arrested at his home in the Austin suburb of Round Rock and charged with terrorist activities, including “committing violent jihad,” according to court documents unsealed on Wednesday.

The other man, Michael Wolfe, 23 also known as “Faruq,” was arrested at Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston on Tuesday. He was charged in a separate federal criminal complaint with “attempting to provide material support to terrorists,” prosecutors said.

Boy, those names just scream ‘Texas’, don’t they?

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Apparently they didn’t love Big Brother enough.

Mark Steyn perfectly encapsulates a pseudo-scientific movement.

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Not her, of course, because they have People to do that for them, but the Little People.

“We are going to be talking to Department of Education about finding a way to reinstitute the notion of survival skills,” she said. “We can’t call it Home Ec because that’s got a bad connotation. But something like that for young men and young women that allows them … the tools they need to survive nutritionally, economically, financially. No kids are getting that anymore.”

A proper Democrat solution: (a) a government agency has to be in charge, because otherwise it won’t get done, and (b) changing the name from Home Ec, ‘because that’s got a bad connotation’, to something else, will totally fool everybody.

(And the feminists say … [chirp] … [chirp] … [chirp]….)

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he roommate of released U.S. soldier Bowe Bergdahl testified Wednesday about the freed soldier’s questionable mental state and demanded that Bergdahl be prosecuted as a deserter for the “ultimate betrayal” of allegedly leaving his post in Afghanistan and endangering fellow U.S. troops.

Retired Spc. Cody Full, who served with Berdgahl in the Blackfoot Company and was his roommate, declared that Bergdahl’s “desertion was premeditated” and that the released U.S. soldier “should not be characterized as serving with honor and distinction,” as Obama administration officials have maintained.

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

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San Marino, California, Mayor Dennis Kneier has been cited for littering after he was caught on video tossing a bag full of dog feces onto a neighbor’s yard. The neighbor, Philip Lao, says he believes Kneier was upset by his opposition to a city dog park. Kneier faces a fine of $250 to $1,000.

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This is insane.

Like many of you I’ve been more or less averting my eyes helplessly from what I’ve come to call The Flood — i.e., the overwhelming number of “children” who have been permitted — nay, encouraged, enticed — to cross America’s southern border, where those nice people are waiting for them, herding the little peeps into buses and planes for an exciting journey even further into the interior of the continental forty-eight states. They will be provided for until their parents arrive to take them home to be joyfully reunited here and begin their new lives as Democrat voters. “Immigration laws”? They don’t need no stinkin’ laws, just do it. That’s the gist of the real “Dream Act” which is in reality America’s Waking Nightmare. It’s coming soon to a street near you.

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Islam has bloody borders, as the late Samuel Huntington famously said. Kenya is one of those border areas: although not a Muslim country (an estimated 8%-10% of the population is Muslim), it is subject to sporadic outbreaks of jihad-related violence.

Last year’s Westgate Mall massacre was the jihad attack that brought the situation in Kenya into public awareness. But Muslims were massacring Kenyan infidels before Westgate, and they have continued since then.

Steve Sailer isn’t impressed.

Thank goodness that Mark Zuckerberg and Eric Cantor have a plan to address the crisis of soaring salaries among American workers by increasing H-1B visas. And kudos to the Obama Administration for having the foresight to invite in so many Central American adolescents to bolster America’s thinly stretched strategic supply of child labor.

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“Michigan’s cities must retain and attract more people, including young knowledge workers, to its cities by making them attractive, vibrant, and diverse places,” reads a 2003 memo from the National Governor’s Association about Michigan’s “Cool Cities” campaign.

But the campaign struggled. “Government can’t mandate cool,” reflected Karen Gagnon, the former Cool Cities director. “As soon as government says something is cool, it’s not.”

And that, in a nutshell, is the failure of every attempt to have the government solve a problem that the government has no business being involved with.

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Trust the Washington Post to be attracted to a method of keeping non-‘progressives’ out of their hip-and-trendy gentrified neighborhoods.

Move to Texas. If you’re a communist, go to Austin or one of the other urban behavioral sinks and live on the south end of the downtown. Otherwise, you’re good to go. Problem solved.

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Scientists have successfully tested a “bionic pancreas” on 20 adults and 32 teenagers with Type 1 diabetes for five days, reports the Associated Press. The pancreas is a wearable device that continuously monitors a patient’s blood sugar levels and administers insulin automatically, when needed. And, unlike other wearables currently in the works, this one was able to correct low blood sugar levels, as well as high.

Mark Steyn totes up the score.

Let it be said that there is more than enough blame to go round. I see Senator Lindsey Graham has been all over the airwaves saying we need to work with Iran to help save Iraq from ISIS. This is the same Lindsey Graham who’s been calling for the US to assist Syrian rebels in trying to overthrow Assad, Iran’s client. The Syrian resistance is dominated by the same guys currently overrunning Iraq – the Sunni jihadists of the “Islamic State of Iraq and Syria”. Consider the now largely erased Syrian/Iraqi border: On the eastern side of this vanished line, a disaffected Sunni who takes up arms against an Iranian client in Baghdad is an enemy of the United States whom we must join with Iran in destroying; but, on the western side of this vanished line, a disaffected Sunni who takes up arms against an Iranian client in Damascus is a plucky Arab Spring freedom fighter entitled to the full support of the United States. Granted that this isn’t the easiest part of the world in which to distinguish friend from foe, the way around this abiding problem is not to locate both of them within, literally, the same person.

So Senator Graham is making even less sense than usual.

I wonder how much better a place the world would be if people like Senator Graham were put in Gitmo.

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Dana Milbank is a columnist for the Washington Post who serially exaggerates or distorts what he writes about. It’s just what he does. This has been established so many times by so many people that it’s disappointing to see he is still given prominent perch in his paper and that people who made it past their sophomore year in high school take him seriously. My contribution to the cataloguing of his hackery is “Dana Milbank Is Incoherent On Marriage,” which shows how he just made stuff up when covering a panel of women at the Heritage Foundation.

Well, thank God he’s the only one at the Washington Post who does that … oh, wait….

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Can’t say that he’s wrong.

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Over the weekend, U.S. special forces captured Ahmed Abu Khattala, who is alleged to be a ringleader of the September 11, 2012 attack on the State Department’s Benghazi complex. Khattala was seized near Benghazi and will be returned to the U.S. to stand trial.

Watch the Obamanation find some way to set him free or perhaps trade him for a draft pick to be named later.

I still don’t understand why a terrorist who led a military attack on an American facility overseas should be brought back to the U.S. and prosecuted under a criminal statute. It would make more sense to process him through a military tribunal and then (assuming his participation in the attack is confirmed) shoot him. The criminal prosecution route suggests that the Obama administration has no intention of punishing any more of the hundreds of terrorists who participated in the Benghazi attack, but rather will let Khattala stand in, symbolically, for the whole. But no doubt we should be grateful for even this small measure of retribution.

Well, that would take a Real President — like, say, FDR or Truman — rather than the pretend President we have now.

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Children of the Crust will never want for a place. Too bad her name isn’t Clinton.