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Eric Goldman calls our attention to a rather astounding story out of Florida, involving how various Florida police departments are engaging in what appears to be basically sham “sting” operations online to arrest and shame men as child sexual predators, then steal their cars (sometimes offering to sell them back), and then doing everything possible to hide the records. The whole thing is quite crazy, and I recommend reading the entire thing. It also comes as little surprise that one of the sheriffs deeply involved in this is Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd — who we’ve written about a few times before. Back in 2009 we wrote about Judd using Craigslist to find and arrest prostitutes… and then blaming Craigslist, the very tool he used to track down the lawbreakers. A year ago, Judd got a lot more attention for his plan to arrest parents of some girls who were accused of bullying another girl into committing suicide (though, eventually charges were dropped and almost no evidence of any bullying was found).

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The President is fond of invoking “The Folks” in his droning speeches. Now, in rural Minnesota, your “folks” are your parents. But he is referring to those “little” people who make up the once-vast middle class in America. The not-rich and unfamous. The God-fearing, gun-totin’ clingers. In other words, people he has never ever hung out with in his entire pampered life and has total contempt for; he doesn’t have a clue what makes us tick.

And that’s cool. I don’t pretend to know what it’s like to be so rich that I lose track of how many homes I own. Or to be able to spoil someone’s wedding reception in order to golf. Or to whine about being flat broke while giving six-figure speeches. Now, praise God, I’ve never been a homeless junkie either, but I’ll tell you what flat broke was for the working poor, Missy Hillary.

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Last summer, the American Federation of Musicians hit videogame composer Austin Wintory (Monaco, Journey) with a $50,000 fine for working on The Banner Saga in violation of its (nonexistent) game music contract. Thanks to the union’s own stubbornness and greed, none of its members were allowed to compose music for videogames. A contract put together in 2012 without the input of AFM’s members was so skewed towards the union that no videogame producers were willing to agree to it. (It wasn’t until 2014 that Microsoft agreed to the terms of AFM’s revamped contract. It remains the sole company to do so.)

When Wintry worked on the game without its permission, AFM got angry and threw its toys out of the crib. Its own Local 47 (Los Angeles) took issue with the union’s BS and issued a resolution supporting Wintory in October. Perhaps due to this internal pressure, the AFM reduced Wintory’s fine to $2,500. Now, it’s threatening to expel Wintory because he hasn’t paid up.

…

So, who’s working for who? Unions are supposed to represent their members. That’s why members pay fees. AFM seems to genuinely have no concern about the well-being of its artists. (It doesn’t care much for the general public either.) It fines them when they seek to do work they’ve been locked out of by a contract they never wanted and it keeps its negotiations with other entities secret until the ink has dried on all the signatures — none of which belong to the members supposedly being “represented.”

Whatever use they once had, labor unions are now only about hiring and paying union officials.

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This is really cute.

Gavin McInnes lays out some inconvenient truth.

Yesterday, we learned of a high school wrestler from Cincinnati who was about to bomb D.C. because he’s Raheel Mahrus Ubayda now. The Portland Seven were all radicalized here. Same goes for the D.C. Five and the Herald Square Bomber. Jihad Jane is a blonde from Michigan and five of the Buffalo Six were born in America. The Muslim population in Buffalo is soaring as the number of Jews and Christians declines. This has parents such as Muzzammil S. “Mo” Hassan worrying their children will become radicalized. Mo prefers more moderate acts like beheading his wife.

What makes this trend even more dangerous is that the press denies it. They call the terrorists mentally ill lone wolves and insist their religion is irrelevant. As Marc Lamont Hill over at CNN said, “People behead for all sorts of reasons.” When Anton Nolen decapitated Colleen Hufford in Oklahoma, MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry called it “workplace violence” and neglected to mention he had recently changed his name to Jah’Keem Yisrael and wouldn’t shut up about Islam. His Facebook page featured the Koran’s “smite ye above their necks” verse.

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Official Palestinian Authority policy provides monthly payments for convicted terrorists held in Israeli jails. The longer the sentence, the more the terrorist’s family receives.

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I am not making this up.

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Stockholm syndrome occurs when hostages express empathy, sympathy, and/or positive feelings about their captors, even to the point of identifying with and/or defending them. The Washington Post, whose reporter Jason Rezaian has been imprisoned in Tehran for more than five months, appears to be experiencing something resembling Stockholm syndrome.

Of course, if he were being held by a civilized government, they’d be marching in the streets.

Read it.

Oh, ya think?

Roder says the students called it blasphemy and he had to explain that blasphemy is a religious concept that doesn’t exist in French law.

“That was very difficult to explain because their point of view, their lives, are very religious. And they are convinced that the religion is above the law of the French Republic,” he says.

Yeah, that’s the point. A Muslim’s first loyalty is to the Umma, rather than whatever country he may happen to be living in.

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So Michel Houellebecq quit promoting his new book. Instead he’s hiding out somewhere in the provinces.

Houellebecq, whose name I despise having to spell, is the French satirical novelist who was featured on the last Charlie Hebdo cover before the January 7th deluge of Islamist blood-whining. I have no inside information as to whether he retreated from the capital out of writerly dramatics, or real fear for his life; the news reports are cagey and I am not, alas, a personal acquaintance of the dour genius who was dragged into court in 2002 for calling Islam the stupidest of all religions.

Houellebecq lost a friend in the Charlie Hebdo shooting, and he is famously indifferent to the safety of his neck and liver, so perhaps he’s more in mourning than in hiding—or it could be that the possibility of a Kalashnikov nudging him in the temple for his blasphemies against the unpleasant prophet is suddenly not so abstract.

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You, too, can look like a beta male hipster.

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All this means, as I understand it, that these transgressions should be forgiven or written off, because this behavior is not typical of them. They, or we, can only be called to account if it is something they or we do regularly, and the general public is to accept that this was not the case.

Well, baloney.

Typically it’s used in circumstances where the truth would be ‘Well, that actually is who we are, but that’s not what I’d like you to believe we ought to be.’

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Pretty sad when Arabs are smarter than Americans. (Well, Obama, anyway….)

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Overall, the labor participation rate in the United States has been tanking since 2000. So while the financial crisis plays a big role, especially among older workers who took buyouts and retired, it’s not the whole story. Neither is the general aging of the population, which tends to lower the participation rate.

Indeed, the real issue is the very long-term participation rate of men, which has been on the downslope for generations now.

…

Disability claims skyrocketed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, not because more people were suddenly injured but because such a program represented a way to get money as unemployment and other benefits ran out.

And over the long haul, it’s become easier and easier to claim disability and effectively opt out of the work force (other well-meaing programs add to the trend too). For many people, work is effectively optional if they can scratch together a bare minimum of revenue from other sources. As the grandson of an Irish immigrant who quit working as soon as he could live off his wife’s and children’s earnings, I can recognize that impulse as a dark mirror of the American Dream.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

‘For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.’ — Rudyard Kipling

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Each country has its own invasive species and rampant plants with a tendency to grow out of control. In most, the techniques for dealing with them are similar – a mixture of powerful chemicals and diggers. But in the US a new weapon has joined the armoury in recent years – the goat.

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Poison ivy, multiflora rose and bittersweet – the goats eat them all with gusto, so Knox now markets their pest-munching services one week at a time from May to November.

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A herd of 35 goats can go through half an acre of dense vegetation in about four days, which, says Knox, is the same amount of time it gets them to become bored of eating the same thing.

Steve Sailer looks  at the situation in France.

Last week’s Paris massacres of cartoonists and Jews might suggest to a dispassionate observer that endless mass immigration to France from the continent of Africa isn’t working out as well as expected, and thus it’s time to cut back.

After all, when you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is to stop digging.

But there hasn’t been much willingness on the part of the European establishment to admit mistakes. I’m going to suggest a simple, relatively low pain way for the French ruling caste to swallow their pride and rationalize backing away from their unsustainable immigration policy.

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Up through the 1970s, progressive Westerners encouraged Africans to engage in population control. But then they stopped, because racism. Why should Africans take responsibility for moderating their own fertility when African mothers can simply immigrate to the banlieue outside Paris, where their sons can amuse themselves by burning cars?

Read it.

You, too, can be a cliche. (I don’t see an entry for Grump, but no doubt I would feature prominently.)

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Well, you know, the winter nights are long, and there really isn’t a lot to do….

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Beyond the normal trials of being in Manhattan, they mean.

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Short answer: 60 miles wide, give or take.

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Unlike pneumatic tires, which cushion rides using a bed of pressurized air, the X Tweel uses a combination of deformable polyurethane spokes, a steel-and-rubber outer rim, and rigid metal hub. The outer rim—called a shear beam—carries most of the load. The spokes and hub distribute the load across different parts of the shear beam as the tire rolls over objects.

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Since 2008, the Highway Trust Fund (HTF) has spent $55 billion more than it takes in. This persistent overspending has caused some politicians to call for an increase in the gas tax. Before even considering increasing the gas tax, politicians should implement reforms to ensure that current gas tax revenue is spent efficiently. With hundreds of thousands of dollars of HTF outlays recently going to projects like squirrel sanctuaries and driving simulators, there is much work to be done.

Well, duh….

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At least 69 people died after drinking poisonous beer at a funeral in southeastern African country Mozambique, health authorities confirmed. The beer was locally brewed and is believed to have been poisoned with crocodile bile during the funeral.

The toll of the people affected did not stop there. At least another 169 victims remain at the hospital according to Paula Bernardo, the district director for Health, Women and Social Action, quoted in Reuters.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

Well, yeah.

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In a groundbreaking study, researchers have shown why a chemical once thought to be a safe alternative to bisphenol-A, which was abandoned by manufacturers of baby bottles and sippy cups after a public outcry, might itself be more harmful than BPA.

University of Calgary scientists say they think their research is the first to show that bisphenol-S, an ingredient in many products bearing “BPA-free” labels, causes abnormal growth surges of neurons in an animal embryo.

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Well, that didn’t take long.

According to Teamsters Local 853 International vice president and secretary-treasurer Rome Aloise, a majority of drivers working for Compass Transportation have signed union authorization cards, reports USA Today. Compass currently employs about 120 full-time and part-time drivers to shuttle workers at Apple and other tech companies back and forth between work and home.

Note that the initiative came from the union, not the bus drivers.

At the heart of the matter is a huge wage disparity between workers with non-skill jobs, like drivers and security guards, and tech employees earning six-figure salaries. Also an issue is the so-called “gentrification” of San Francisco, where longtime residents are being displaced by wealthy tech workers.

In other words, envy leading to extortion — and that’s what unions are all about.

Read it.

That’s ‘people’ as in ‘people’s republic’.

Meet a kinder, gentler Google bus — not the sleek and occasionally despised charter service that transports thousands of Googlers to the company’s suburban headquarters each morning, but a free public shuttle that launched here this week.

The electric-powered Mountain View Community Shuttle is Google’s gift to a hometown still grappling with the weight of being the corporate hub for a global Internet giant. The two-year pilot program also helps the company sustain its do-gooder image amid rising anxiety over the Bay Area’s real estate prices and economic inequality, both frequently blamed on the meteoric incomes of tech workers.

Lesson: If you’re rude and noisy in public, and your target is not a Fashionable Minority, you will get paid to shut up.

Since you always get more of what you pay for, look for more of this sort of thing in the future.

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There is a Clock ringing deep inside a mountain. It is a huge Clock, hundreds of feet tall, designed to tick for 10,000 years. Every once in a while the bells of this buried Clock play a melody. Each time the chimes ring, it’s a melody the Clock has never played before. The Clock’s chimes have been programmed to not repeat themselves for 10,000 years. Most times the Clock rings when a visitor has wound it, but the Clock hoards energy from a different source and occasionally it will ring itself when no one is around to hear it. It’s anyone’s guess how many beautiful songs will never be heard over the Clock’s 10 millennial lifespan.

At least it’s not a government program at taxpayer expense.

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So they can give IDs to illegal immigrants, of course, and — oh, yes — provide yet another  source of municipal graft.

That’s not in your copy of the story, of course….

Read it.

The Phoenix-based company crowdsources the design of its cars (like the oddball Rally Fighter), and it’s showing a refreshed version of its 3D-printed Strati model here. But here’s where it gets weird: Local Motors is building the Strati right on the floor of the North American International Auto Show in Detroit with printing and routing equipment that it brought in just for the occasion. The machines, encapsulated in glass for safety’s sake, don’t take much more room than a very small apartment (or a very big closet, depending on how you look at it).

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On December 2, Attorney General Eric Holder, the top law enforcement official in the country, went to Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church to announce that the Justice Department would soon “institute rigorous new standards-and robust safeguards-to help end racial profiling, once and for all.”

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But by focusing on the role of race to the exclusion of other contributing factors in these cases, both the powerless in the streets and the powerful in the suites were letting an important culprit off the hook: power itself.

Start with the grand jury process that produced both non-indictments. “The system is under the complete control, under the thumb, of prosecutors,” Cato Institute Criminal Justice Director Tim Lynch told CBS News in December. “If they want an indictment they are going to get an indictment. If they don’t want an indictment it won’t happen.”

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In practice, the only class reliably protected by grand juries is people that the local prosecutors don’t actually want to prosecute. Namely, cops. The conflicts of interest here are beyond blatant: Prosecutors absolutely depend on the work and testimony of police to send defendants to jail. Grand juries absolutely depend on prosecutors to present information and guidance on whether to indict. There is no impartial judge, no adversarial check on the power of law enforcement.

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Another thumbsucker about how oppressed women are, from the New York Times. (They should take a look at ‘speaking while white male’ if they want to examine oppression.)

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Björn Söder, who is also a Deputy Speaker in the Swedish parliament, wrote the comment on Facebook after 12 people were killed in the Charlie Hedbo offices in Paris earlier this week.

On Friday morning, the Dagens Nyheter newspaper reported that Swedish MP Veronica Palm of Prime Minister Stefan Löfven’s Social Democrat party had reported Söder to the police for racial agitation (hets mot folkgrupp).

“It’s not legal to offend people based on their race, and I think this should be treated as racial agitation,” she told the paper.

Remind me again what ‘race’ Muslim is. (The Thought Police are everywhere in Sweden.)

Steve Sailer is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

I don’t recall seeing a complaint before about secret ballots, but it struck me that in the age of the Social Media Justice Warrior, the idea that citizens — many of whom are no doubt racist and sexist — are allowed to vote however they want in the privacy of the voting booth without any electronic paper trail exposing them to the threat of public shaming and advertiser boycott would increasingly seem intolerable.

Read it.

Boko Haram is waging a ruthless war throughout northeast Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country. On Wednesday, Boko Haram militants laid siege to Baga, a city that has resisted them, setting fire to buildings and killing residents indiscriminately. Hundreds of people fled into Lake Chad and attempted to swim to a nearby island. Many drowned along the way. Those who didn’t are now marooned without food and shelter and have no defense against the island’s swarm of malarial mosquitos. The death toll in Baga reportedly exceeds 2,000. Some 20,000 others are now displaced.

The New York Times story on this deadly siege appeared on page A6 of Saturday’s print edition, while the paper’s story of the suicide bombing landed on page A8.

Hey, Paris is important and Nigeria is, well, just Nigeria; nobody at the New York Times knows anybody in Nigeria, nor do they go there on vacation.

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One of the ways liberal politicians and commentators have used to minimize terrorist attacks is to attribute them all to “lone wolves.” Being a lone wolf is a step below the junior varsity, apparently. In the case of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, countless media outlets rushed to give it the “lone wolf” label, even though there were at least two “wolves” involved, and they acted with military precision.

As more facts have come out, the lone wolf designation has become risible. The Kouachi brothers likely had accomplices, and they both trained with al Qaeda in Yemen. We don’t know yet whether al Qaeda directed the Charlie Hebdo attack. Further, there was close communication between the Kouachi brothers and Amedy Coulibaly, who followed up their attack with an assault on a Jewish deli. Authorities have said that there were something like 500 telephone calls between Coulibaly and his fellow terrorists. In addition, Amedy Coulibaly’s girlfriend, Hayat Boumeddiene, is now believed to have fled France the day before Coulibaly’s assault in the company of an unidentified man. She is now with ISIS in Syria.

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Under the Affordable Care Act, large employers are required to provide health insurance to employees working full time or pay a hefty penalty. Full-time work is currently defined as 30 hours per week, but both the House and Senate are working on passing legislation that would redefine it as 40 hours a week.

Inside Higher Ed reports that many colleges and universities have started limiting the number of hours adjunct faculty can work to keep them under than 30-hour threshold and keep them as part-time workers.

Obamacare, the gift that keeps on giving.

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I think it safe to say that any course of action receiving the approval of Jimmy Carter constitutes a damned stupid thing to do.

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Another evidence of Moral Retardation, aside from an utter inability to distinguish between opposites, is an utter inability to distinguish between differences of magnitude, as when, for example, the Moral Retard equates an insulting act, such as throwing a harmless metal baseball called a practice grenade into a mosque, with an act of war, such as having trained commandos attack the offices of a satirical magazine and kill the civilians in a grisly mass murder.

The favorite game of the Moral Retards is the game of ‘Moral Equivalence’ where any criticism of any of the favored allies or mascots of the Moral Retards is answered by saying the crimes of the mascots are no worse than the crimes of whatever group the critic is (or can be said to be) a member of.

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Tom Wolfe once observed how curious it was “that the dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe”.  That maxim must have been on Jonah Goldberg’s mind when he Tweeted, following the attack on a supermarket in Paris, that “the anti-Muslim backlash in France that many people were expecting this week seems to have somehow resulted in the murder of Jews.”

But as anyone who remembers the Three Stooges will know, retaliating against an innocent party is perfectly natural. When Curley Joe wants to hit back at Moe, he swats Larry instead.  To strike Moe would be too dangerous because Moe would hit back.  When you’re not with the one you long to strike, strike the one you’re with.

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When politicians are stumped they often do what doctors without a cure occasionally try: treat the symptoms and hope for the best.  What the state knows how to do is restrict, rule and regulate and therefore they’ll increase our doses of that.

Jim Goad wants to make sure that all news is treated equally.

Many black people on Twitter—as well as untold legions of their white enablers and allies—appear very pissed that the NAACP story never really got “legs,” as they like to say in the publishing biz. Or as the blacks like to say, there may be a bit of “player hating” going on here by disgruntled African Americans who feel nudged out of the victimization spotlight, however temporarily. They decry the fact that the racist media cares about a dozen dead white Parisians much more than it does about the slightly scuffed side of a building in Colorado.

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In what may have been a deliberate attempt to make things look worse than they were, progressive white MSNBC host Chris Hayes, a verified friend of the black man, covered the bombing story while a photo montage that unfolded behind him included a still photo of massive destruction to a storefront that turned out to be from the recent unrest in Paris rather than outside the NAACP office in Colorado Springs. Hayes apologized for the network’s faux pas by writing “Our bad” on Twitter. Just when you think Chris Hayes couldn’t get any worse, he goes ahead and says “Our bad.”

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Sigmund Freud said the founder of civilization was the first person who hurled an insult instead of a rock. He was almost right. The true founder was the first person to respond to an insult with an insult of his own.

Some modern-day people have yet to reach the stage achieved by some of our ancient forebears. Muslims who treat offensive depictions of the prophet Muhammad as grounds for execution are the most conspicuous examples of that tragic failure to evolve.

Reminder for the dimwitted: Islam is an oppressive totalitarian ideology, masquerading as a religion, with which no co-existence is possible.

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Asians have emerged as the fastest growing of the three major ethnic and minority populations in the United States. According to Census Bureau data, the number of US native and foreign-born Asian residents rose 56 percent from the 2000 Census to the 2013 American Community Survey (one year release). This is calculated by comparing estimates based on interviews with residents who have classified themselves as a single race and Asian. In the last two censuses, respondents have been asked to designate their race, with the option of selecting more than one (“combinations”). For simplicity, this analysis uses “one race” rather than “combination” data for Asians and African-Americans as well as all data for Hispanics or Latinos. In 2010, 4.8 percent of the nation’s population was “Asian alone” (not in combination with another race or ethnicity).

I regard this as an encouraging trend. To paraphrase John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, there is very little wrong with any large American city that a million ethnic Chinese wouldn’t fix.

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The basic idea is that because your body uses energy to maintain a normal body temperature, exposure to cold expends calories. The vest’s inventor, Wayne B. Hayes, an associate professor at the University of California at Irvine, claims that wearing it for an hour burns up to 250 calories, though his data are very rough. A little more than a year ago, he began selling the vest, which he calls the Cold Shoulder, out of his Pasadena apartment. Name notwithstanding, people won’t ignore you when you wear it.

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George Osborne, the chancellor of the Exchequer, said this month that in 2015 Britain would repay part of the country’s debt from World War I, and that he wanted to pay off other bonds for debt incurred in the 18th and 19th centuries.

That includes borrowing that may have been used to compensate slave owners when slavery was abolished, to relieve the famine in 19th-century Ireland and to bail out the infamous South Sea Company, which caused the bubble in 1720.

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Much good it did them.

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In what’s becoming a yearly tradition for Ars, we met up with Austin-based TrackingPoint at CES to see what was new in the world of “Precision Guided Firearms”—the term the company uses to refer to its Linux-powered rifles. Last year, TrackingPoint had just taken the wraps off of its AR-15 PGF (which we got to shoot a few months later), and this year we got to take a peek at a new prototype weapon that can accurately put rounds on targets up to a mile away—targets that can be moving up to 30 miles per hour.

Dubbed the “Mile Maker,” the prototype was described by TrackingPoint representative Anson Gordon as “mostly” representative of the final product. The weapon at least for now is built around an enormous, enormously heavy, custom-milled steel barrel, which fires what TrackingPoint is calling “338TP”—a round somewhat similar to .338 Lapua Magnum but with some customized attributes. The company decided to continue on with their own cartridges for the longer-range rifle instead of moving up to a bigger round (like .50 BMG) because of the superior ballistics of the .338 bullet over the bigger .50 round.

Peter Hitchens is as good a writer as his brother and far more intelligent politically.

Once again we are ruled by a Dictatorship of Grief. Ever since the death of Princess Diana, we have been subject to these periodic spasms when everyone is supposed to think and say the same thing, or else.

We were told on Friday that ‘politicians from all sides’ had lined up to attack Ukip’s Nigel Farage for supposedly ‘exploiting’ the Paris massacre.

Mr Farage had (quite reasonably) pointed out that the presence of Islamist fanatics in our midst might have something to do with, a) uncontrolled mass migration from the Muslim world, and b) decades of multicultural refusal to integrate them into our laws and customs.

Rather than disputing this with facts and logic (admittedly this would be hard), the three ‘mainstream’ parties joined in screeching condemnation.

…

Great mountains of adjectives piled up on every corner, much like those hills of flowers and teddy bears we like to place at the scenes of tragedies.

You can feel the presence of the snarling conformist mob, waiting for some dissenter on whom they can fall, kicking and biting. So-called social media, in fact an intolerant and largely brainless electronic mob, has made this much worse since the sad death of the Princess.