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Thank God for all those strict gun control laws, or the place would look like Texas.

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Avery Gagliano was kicking some international piano-playing butt while maintaining straight As at her D.C. public middle school last year.

But traveling abroad for competitions meant she wound up with more than the 10 days of “unexcused” absences allowed by the district on her record. Despite her parents’ attempts to provide school administrators with supplementary materials about the educational nature of the trips, the district refused to budge.

In fact, this spring when Gagliano returned (victorious!) from a competition in Connecticut, D.C. Public Schools (DCPS) declared her officially truant and assigned an officer to her case.

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Back in the 1960s, many Americans paid for doctor and hospital services out of pocket or through modestly priced private insurance. Health care spending was about 6 percent of GDP.

Enter President Johnson and Medicare. He bought millions of votes by giving seniors free health care that they never paid for through payroll taxes during their working years. As insidious, he helped lay the foundations for the entitlement state with Medicaid. The latter, first conceived to help poor children, has been gradually expanded to include many working families.

Today health care spending is more than 17 percent of GDP. Life extending treatments are part of the jump, but Germany and Holland spend about 12 percent and have those. The extra US costs are federally mandated giveaways, inefficiencies and abuse—about $850 billion and much more than spent on defense.

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This is a fascinating tour of the ‘forensics’ of determining the authenticity of very old books.

Wilding obtained digital samples of unquestionably legitimate stamps from the book collection of Federico Cesi, the Accademia dei Lincei founder, and compared them in high-resolution detail. In each stamp, a lynx appeared at the center, framed by two oval borders, a wrap of Latin text (“From the Library of Federico Cesi, Prince and Marquis of Monticelli”), and a third oval border. Wilding then examined the stamp in Lan’s “Sidereus Nuncius.” In the genuine stamps, there was a gap in the innermost oval border just to the left of the lynx’s mouth. In Lan’s copy, the border was continuous. Wilding also checked the inventory of Cesi’s library, and found no listing of a “Sidereus Nuncius.”

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Science is a method, not a set of dogmas. The scientific method is pretty simple: you suggest a hypothesis, calculate what facts in the real world must be true if the hypothesis is correct, and then check the hypothesis against reality. If the hypothesis implies false propositions of fact, it is wrong. Case closed.

Climate alarmists stand the scientific method on its head. When their theories, as expressed in climate models, conflict with reality, they conclude that something must be wrong with reality. The heat that their models hypothesize must be “hiding” deep in the oceans, or whatever. This isn’t science: it is a combination of politics and religion. A proposition that cannot be falsified by experience is not a scientific proposition.

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And I have no doubt that they deserve it.

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Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

Stewart Brand indulges in a little historical revisionism.

Forget antiwar protests, Woodstock, even long hair.
The real legacy of the sixties generation is the computer revolution

Read it.

See it on the evening news? Of course not — it goes against the Narrative.

Eric Holder sending swarms of FBI agents to investigate? Don’t hold your breath.

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In fact, the evidence that abstinence from alcohol is a cause of heart disease and early death is irrefutable—yet this is almost unmentionable in the United States. Even as health bodies like the CDC and Dietary Guidelines for Americans (prepared by Health and Human Services) now recognize the decisive benefits from moderate drinking, each such announcement is met by an onslaught of opposition and criticism, and is always at risk of being reversed.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

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Shawyer’s engine provides thrust by “bouncing microwaves around in a closed chamber.” That’s it. There’s no need for a propellant of any kind like rocket fuel. When filled with resonating microwaves, the conical chamber of the thruster experiences a net thrust toward the wide end. These microwaves can be  generated using electricity, which can be provided by solar energy. In theory, this means that the thruster can work forever, or at least until its hardware fails.

…

Now, American scientists at NASA have given the EmDrive a go, and once again confirmed that it actually works. The test results were presented on July 30 at the 50th Joint Propulsion Conference in Cleveland, Ohio, and astonishingly enough, they are positive. The team behind the drive still doesn’t know why it works, just that it does.

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Mexico’s military colonists are not military. Often they aren’t even Mexican. But they have managed to take back California without firing a shot. Unless you count the occasional drive by shooting.

While the United States sent tens of thousands of soldiers to try and hold Iraq and Afghanistan only to fail; Mexico took California with a small army of underpaid handymen who claim entire cities and send back some 20 billion dollars a year. As conquests go, it’s not hard to see who did more with less.

…

In the decade since the US invaded Afghanistan, 24,710 Afghans successfully invaded the United States and received permanent legal status. That is an occupying force larger than US troop numbers were at any point in time in Afghanistan until the very end of the George W. Bush’s second term.

During this same period there were also 19,000 Afghan non-immigrant admissions. As invasions go, the Afghan invasion of America was far more successful than the American invasion of Afghanistan.

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The woman, Meredith Cole, told police she was sexually harassed outside the club by several of the black males on August 22. She quickly went inside to retrieve her boyfriend, Alex Vassey, a DJ at the Outland Ballroom. The pair then went outside to see if they could identify any of the harassers.

Once out on the street, a gang of six black youths snuck up behind them and started attacking the couple, beating them in their faces and kicking Vassey after he was knocked to the ground.

The video clearly shows Vassey being viciously assaulted, as well as showing the young woman being punched in the face and knocked to the ground twice.

Heard about this on the evening news? Of course not — it doesn’t fit the Narrative.

Heard about this from Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson? Of course not — it provides no grounds for them to shake down guilty white liberals.

The Other McCain is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

One of the rhetorical tricks of radicalism, a tactic at least as old as Karl Marx’s claim to have developed a scientific doctrine of socialism, is (a) to produce an elaborate theoretical explanation of whatever phenomenon they wish to criticize, (b) to denounce as a self-serving “myth” whatever common-sense justification is offered by defenders of the status quo, and (c) to claim that the inability of the status quo’s defenders to refute the radical challenge is proof that the “system” is illegitimate and must be destroyed. (It is certainly no accident that nearly all feminist theorists cite Friedrich Engels’s The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State in expounding their own critiques of “male supremacy.”) Defenders of any traditional way of life are always at a disadvantage in debate with radical intellectuals who, having built or borrowed some theoretical argument for revolution, scornfully dismiss the defense of tradition as mere sentimental prejudice in favor of the status quo. Hurling accusations of bigotry and ignorance at their antagonists, radicals insist that progress beckons us toward an enlightened future, if only we can overcome the irrational opposition of The Forces of Darkness who wish to keep society enslaved to the benighted past.

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I agree: Obama voters are incredibly stupid. That’s his ‘base’, and he works it like a stripper on a pole.

Obama frequently seeks to exploit the ignorance of voters, but here he’s telling us what he’s going to do and when, and counting on enough voters to ignore it to make it worth his while. He must think the voters are really, really stupid, and of course he can testify to their stupidity from personal experience, if only from the lies they repeatedly bought from him regarding the nondisruptive character of Obamacare.

It reminds me of the voters who put Connie Mack III over the top when he ran for the retiring Lawton Chiles’s Florida Senate seat in 1988. Mack narrowly won the race through the wisdom of the voters who pulled the lever for him because he was a woman.

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If teams recognized that the expected value of more fourth-and-short plays is positive and that “four down territory” is larger than they think, we would probably see more conservative play-calling on downs 1-3.

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Which is a different question from “What ought he to have known, and when ought he to have known it?” We are, after all, talking about a clueless slacker here.

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I find the idea of her defective genes not being propagated into the next generation strangely appealing.

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If you want to see the epitome of jejunosity at work (as Woody Allen put it in Love and Death) look no further than Hillary Clinton’s Washington Post review of Henry Kissinger’s new book, World Order. I almost wonder whether the Post published this as a deliberate act of cruelty to Hillary, who is obviously not ready for prime time.

The review begins with this profound gem: “When Americans look around the world today, we see one crisis after another.” When you see a lede like this, you can be sure you are in the presence of no ordinary mind. And sure enough, the rarified judgments just come tumbling one after another in a display of virtuoso brilliance not seen since Thomas Jefferson dined alone:

When I walked into the State Department in January 2009, everyone knew that it was a time of dizzying changes, but no one could agree on what they all meant. . .

Wait, this is supposed to be a review of a Kissinger book, right? Yes, but what book review by a Clinton wouldn’t turn into a vehicle for Clinton self-promotion and self-satisfaction? (And no jokes, please, about waiting for Bill Clinton’s self-satisfying review of Fifty Shades of Gray.)

Toastabags.

Flashlight Grilling Spatula.

Peanut Butter & Jelly Soda. I am not making this up.

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The project will be charted by Oval Films, which also helped to find Richard III’s remains in a car park in Leicester.

It will follow amateur historian Peter Burke, who has written two historical novels on the times of Harold, and claims the king was wounded but survived.

He believes he died 30 years later and was buried near the east wall of the former abbey that dates to the late 11th century.

And if he can get a best-selling book out of it, that’s good too.

Read it. And watch the video, for sure.

This is one of the most beautiful mockeries I’ve ever seen.

The Muslim Rape of Christian Nuns

Catholic, Orthodox Patriarchs Call for Islamic State’s Destruction

Online posts show ISIS eyeing Mexican border, says law enforcement bulletin

Syrian rebels attack peacekeepers in Golan Heights

Qatar’s role as US ally at odds with claims it sponsors terror

West will be next ISIS target unless there is ‘rapid’ action, Saudi King warns, as jihadists now behead a Lebanese soldier

Pakistan protesters storm state TV station, push toward prime minister’s house

Syria rebels clash with government forces in Golan Heights

Syria rebels issue demands in exchange for release of Fijian peacekeepers

White House confirms authenticity of ISIS video showing beheading of reporter

Raped and Slaughtered: Muslim Persecution of Christians, April, 2014

Iranian Grand Ayatollah Issues Fatwa Against ‘Immoral’ High-Speed Internet Connections

Rights group accuses ISIS militants of mass killing up to 770 Iraqi soldiers

Christians arm as Middle East perils mount

‘Frustration and confusion’ among US troops over mixed message on ISIS

ISIS using sophisticated network to attract foreign fighters

Jihad Interrupted: Feds Grab ISIS ‘Wannabes’ Before They Reach Syria

Gavin McInnes blows the whistle.

If we were to take today’s culture and graft it onto 1940s America, we’d have Nazis driving our cabs and refusing to take Jews. Instead of “loose lips sink ships” we’d have open borders where any Nazi can simply walk across. We’d have Nazi schools in Michigan where students can practice their doctrine freely and even train to fight against America. Being a Nazi would become the “in thing.”

This would be true all over the Western World. In the real here and now, the Boston Bombers were radicalized on our soil. The boy who decapitated James Foley learned to hate in London. He was taught by a particularly annoying cleric named Anjem Choudary, who recently made headlines for saying “Terrorizing the enemy is part of Islam.” This is after he was linked to the Foley decapitation.

Taki turns over a rock.

An American friend who is very well connected in Washington, D.C. was telling me he’s worried about Europe. So what else is new, I said. “No, I really mean it, future generations could grow up under Islamic rule.” It was a John McEnroe moment, as in you can’t be serious. He assured me he was. Let’s see, anything is possible, but an Islamic Europe? Well, Brussels is 40 percent Muslim, and there are 5.5 million Muslims in France alone, with no-go areas in Paris and other major cities. Britain has close to 4 million Allah followers, with thousands of imams teaching hate of the infidel to young and old alike while pusillanimous politicians and human rights lobbies ensure any dissenting Christian voices are stillborn. Would-be jihadists are free to come and go while European border controls subject middle-aged Europeans to stringent body searches, especially if Grandma is in a wheelchair.

…

How have we come to this? Easy. Step forward, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, along with Bahrain, the UAE, and other such crappy so-called states. Although the Saudis and Qataris are at odds, it was those two corrupt, illegitimate, and dictatorial regimes, both swimming in oil and gas money, that have for the past 25 years been the official sponsors of terrorism in Europe and the Middle East. (The Saudi backing of radical Islam goes back 50 years.)

Bryan Caplan pulls back the curtain.

Going to college definitely sounds better.  Almost every authority figure in your life – educators and family alike – recommend it to each and every student.  But as you may have noticed, authority figures are often untrustworthy.  Indeed, they usually bend the truth whenever honesty makes them look bad.  This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go to college, but it is a reason to second-guess the party line, to seek out ugly facts parents and educators would rather ignore.

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Last Sunday, a pedestrian was struck and killed by the Twin Cities new Green light-rail line, which opened for operation in June. Shannon Buchanan was apparently crossing a pedestrian way over the tracks and was hit by a train going about 30 mph.

…

The FTA no longer includes fatality data in the National Transit Database, but the last time data were available, light rail was involved in about 12 fatalities per billion passenger miles carried while buses were involved in only about 4 fatalities per billion. Apparently, it’s a lot safer to get hit by a 50,000-pound bus than a 300,000-pound train.

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The U.S. Navy is using Chicago’s Stoger Hospital to train and prepare doctors, medics, and nurses for battlefield conditions.

As with so many of the experiences awaiting military medical personnel once overseas, “Stoger Hospital… stands in the middle of a war zone… in its own way.”

Every cloud has a silver lining, if that’s what you can call the fact that the war zone into which each Democrat-machine-run city descends provide a domestic training ground for combat surgeons.

According to the AP, “the Navy doesn’t have any trauma training facilities in the U.S., [so] military medical teams” have to be sent elsewhere for “experience dealing with penetrating wounds.” And these teams have found that bullet wounds–“even a single bullet wound”–“[unleash] the same kind of massive infection inflicted by roadside bombs in Afghanistan.”

There are plenty of bullet wounds to learn from in Chicago, where Stoger Hospital has “one of the busiest… trauma units” in the country. In 2013 alone, Stoger Hospital “treated nearly 600 gunshot victims,” over 260 stab victims, “and almost 900 people injured in traffic [accidents].”

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During his Labor Day speech on Monday, President Obama attempted to invent a new constitutional right – one that should alarm all conservatives, especially during this time of grave national security concerns. As he ticked off his litany of principle rights he supports, such as “women’s rights and civil rights,” he added an item to the list – “immigration rights.”

It is with this oblivious utopian ideology that the Obama administration plans to grant amnesty to illegal aliens, including those who overstayed their visas, offering legal protection to thousands of individuals who pose as a security threat. He is also threatening to expand immigrant and non-immigrant visas without the support of Congress.

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Can interstellar travel be far behind?

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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When Ms. Furillo was 25, she was an active member of the Young Workers Liberation League, a youth arm affiliate of the Communist Party USA, and an editor of its Young Worker publication. She wrote in 1975: “It is clear that for youth today, there is no real and meaningful future under capitalism. Capitalism means joblessness, racism and degeneracy.”…

After Crain’s asked Ms. Furillo about her YWLL membership, a NYSNA spokeswoman said Ms. Furillo would no longer participate in an article and accused Crain’s of “red baiting” organized labor….

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

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Yep, barely a week into the fall 2014 semester, and we’ve already got our first official hate crime hoax of the school year.

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MyPlate serves as a good example of the sort of thinking I like to call “SimCity” progressivism. On this view, the government’s purpose is not necessarily to provide any particular goods or services, and not even (or only) the ones found in the Constitution.

No, the government’s purpose is to carefully curate the lives of the citizens—adjusting here, pruning there, maybe not necessarily forbidding, but managing, down to the last exquisite detail. Rather like one might do in a government simulator, only in real life.

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Liberal environmentalists, including billionaire Tom Steyer, are pumping cash into the Wolverine State to back up struggling Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Rep. Gary Peters (D-MI), opponent Terri Lynn Land (R) says.

That can’t be right — Democrats don’t have very many billionaires; Harry Reid told us so.

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“Green card? We don’t need no steenkin’ green card!”

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To show what the CryptoPhone can do that less expensive competitors cannot, he points me to a map that he and his customers have created, indicating 17 different phony cell towers known as “interceptors,” detected by the CryptoPhone 500 around the United States during the month of July alone.  Interceptors look to a typical phone like an ordinary tower.  Once the phone connects with the interceptor, a variety of “over-the-air” attacks become possible, from eavesdropping on calls and texts to pushing spyware to the device.

“Interceptor use in the U.S. is much higher than people had anticipated,” Goldsmith says.  “One of our customers took a road trip from Florida to North Carolina and he found 8 different interceptors on that trip.  We even found one at South Point Casino in Las Vegas.”

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What are those “immigration rights”? Legally, of course, no one has a right to violate our immigration laws, whether the Obama administration enforces them or not. So what does the president have in mind here? It seems clear that Obama isn’t suggesting that immigrants are somehow being denied their actual rights under American law. Certainly he made no such explicit claim. Rather, his point appears to be that some people–not everyone in the world presumably, but some unspecified group of people–have a “right” to enter the United States, or stay here, even though it is illegal to do so under U.S. law, as long as Barack Obama opposes the law in question.

No coherent theory of law or justice supports such a proposition, but when has that ever stopped Barack Obama? “Immigration rights,” implying the right to violate others’ actual, legal rights, has now become liberal dogma. Who in the Democratic Party news media will point out the absurdity of the president’s position? No one, I suspect.

Mark Steyn chronicles our slide into the abyss.

n Ferguson, Missouri, the “conversation”, as they say on MSNBC, is between the dependent class and the governing class that ministers to them and keeps them in line. If you’re a convenience store owner, your low-skilled service jobs are the only labor on offer, and, for your pains, you get burned and looted by the dependent class while your 911 calls go unanswered by the governing class, both of which you fund.

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Thank God for those strict gun control laws, or the place would look like Texas.

(Extra credit: How many of the victims were black? And how many news stories did you read about them?)

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For the same reason that rich people can talk about money without freaking out — guilt and envy. (This is the sort of article you will only find in a Voice of the Crust.)

But that’s fairly typical of the convoluted, shamefaced, defensive way we talk about class in America: An Ivy Leaguer mocking another Ivy Leaguer because his denunciation of the Ivy League is just so Ivy League.

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Our technology may be getting smarter, but a provocative new study suggests human intelligence is on the decline. In fact, it indicates that Westerners have lost 14 I.Q. points on average since the Victorian Era.

And socialism is more popular now than it was then. Coincidence? I think not.

What exactly explains this decline? Study co-author Dr. Jan te Nijenhuis, professor of work and organizational psychology at the University of Amsterdam, points to the fact that women of high intelligence tend to have fewer children than do women of lower intelligence. This negative association between I.Q. and fertility has been demonstrated time and again in research over the last century.

That’s it, blame it on women….

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The numbers tell the story. Among private sector employees — the ones who work for for-profit companies or non-profit organizations that are not part of the government — the percentage who belong to labor unions plummeted to a mere 7.5 percent last year, from 23.3 percent in 1977, according to UnionStats.com. By the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics’ more restrictive accounting, a mere 6.7 percent of private sector workers were in unions in 2013.

Among government workers, it’s a whole different story: 40.8 percent of local government workers — teachers, police, firefighters, librarians — belong to unions, according to the BLS numbers. The public sector rate drops to 35.3 percent (38.7 percent by the UnionStats.com numbers) if you include state and federal employees — postal workers, corrections officers. That’s so much higher than the private sector that it’s almost a tale of two labor movements — one, in the private sector, that is diminishing to irrelevance, and another, in the public sector, that retains substantial clout.

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Actually, the question ought to be phrased ‘Which states other than Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan are in the Midwest?’

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If Americans want a free society at home, then they must convince the U.S. government to give up its global empire. The militarized police recently on display in Ferguson was no freak coincidence: Antiwar activists and other civil libertarians have been warning for decades that an aggressive US foreign policy would eventually destroy domestic liberties. Americans can’t ask their government to subjugate foreigners with bombs but bow to their own wishes at the ballot box.

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“I discovered that using light at night is bad for people’s health and interferes with their sleep. I felt a moral obligation to do something about it, particularly when I learned it’s the blue component in ordinary white light that is suppressing the production of melatonin. And melatonin not only helps you sleep but is a marvelous material that has a very big influence on health in general; specifically, if you don’t have enough you may develop diabetes, obesity, heart disease, and even a couple kinds of cancer.” [emphasis added]

Sky is falling. Film at 11. Meanwhile, on the Kardashian front….

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The speech by former US Vice-President Al Gore was apocalyptic. ‘The North Polar ice cap is falling off a cliff,’ he said. ‘It could be completely gone in summer in as little as seven years. Seven years from now.’

Those comments came in 2007 as Mr Gore accepted the Nobel Peace Prize for his campaigning on climate change.

But seven years after his warning, The Mail on Sunday can reveal that, far from vanishing, the Arctic ice cap has expanded for the second year in succession – with a surge, depending on how you measure it, of between 43 and 63 per cent since 2012.

Oh, gee, AlGore was wrong? What news!