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This week, Starbucks Coffee Company announced its “Race Together” initiative, which encourages employees to strike up conversations with customers about race relations in America. Yes, you read that right. Baristas will be encouraged to write “Race Together” on cups, offering a gentle psychological nudge and suggesting it’s a good idea to discuss hot-button and largely misunderstood issues with complete strangers who are also armed with piping hot beverages.

Also, is it just me, or has that guy with the laptop at the prime corner table been locked in the same hunched-over position with his stuff sprawled all over for the past three days? Why isn’t he at a smaller table? Are those cobwebs in his beard? Wait. Is he even ALIVE? Welcome to Starbucks, friends. Let’s go talk to that guy about race. Maybe then he’ll actually leave.

Mickey Kaus points a finger.

Most of the mainstream broadcast and cable networks avoided giving excessive coverage to the recent congressional fight over the Department of Homeland Security, which was all about Republicans trying to block Obama’s executive amnesty by attaching restrictions to DHS funding. NBC Nightly News went a step further and avoided mentioning the immigration issue even when covering the funding fight — treating the threat of a DHS shutdown as if it were some sort of out-of-the-blue natural disaster.

But it’s one thing for Dem-friendly NBC to go to bat for Obama’s causes.  It’s another if Fox does it too. Fox is supposed to be the feisty opposition network. You’d think it would wage a rousing campaign against Obama’s executive actions on immigration, which are surely wildly unpopular among its viewers, both because of their ends (de facto legalizing of illegals) and their means (presidential overreach).

You’d think that.  But you would be wrong.

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The terrorist attack at Tunis’ Bardo museum (one of the world’s great museums) which killed 20 foreign tourists, is not just a blow to Tunisia’s political stability, but also a strike against its economy.

Though the government has been downplaying the role of organized Islamist radicals in the attack, a new group calling itself the Uqba ibn Nafi Battalion posted a video online which seemed to betray a detailed knowledge of how the attack took place. Praising the strike (while not yet taking full responsibility for it), the group went on to outline a strategy aimed specifically at foreigners….

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No doubt they want to make sure that it’s not designed to catch actual terrorists but rather reflects the diversity that is America.

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Eyelashes? More like why-lashes. A team of scientists from the Georgia Institute of Technology wanted to understand the function eyelashes serve in mammalian species. So they tested fake eyelashes in a wind tunnel.

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

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Some would quote Ms Hillary, ‘At this point, what difference does it make?’, but not me. I love the smell of conspiracy in the morning.

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Hint: It’s not good.

Over a period of nine years covered by the study, people who regularly drank diet soda gained almost triple the amount of fat in the abdominal area as those who didn’t consume it, researchers at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio say.

Their increase in waist circumference was three times that of people who didn’t drink diet sodas, and even people who consumed diet soda only occasionally had double the increase over people who drank no diet soda, they reported in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.

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Happy St Patrick’s Day.

Jesse Walker reports back.

“I think the reason we think conspiracy theories exist is because they exist,” he declared.

It was neither the first nor the last contentious moment of the conference, which took place on the university’s Coral Gables campus from March 12 to 14. The event had been organized by Joseph Uscinski and Joseph Parent, a pair of political scientists who did a commendable job of looking past their own field to invite people from different disciplines. And when I say “different disciplines,” I don’t merely mean “people who study different things.” I mean “people with entirely different tool kits for understanding the universe.”

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist.

It’s important to keep in mind the distinction between inequality and poverty.  To confuse the two (as is common today) risks addressing the wrong malady.  Just as we do not blame a cancer victim’s suffering on an unequal distribution of good health – that is, just as we recognize that a cancer victim’s illness is not caused by the good health of others and cannot be cured by making healthy people less healthy – we should recognize that a poor person’s poverty is not caused by the prosperity of others and cannot be cured by making wealthy people less wealthy.  Indeed, recent research suggests that simply transferring more money to relatively poor people in rich societies does not provide much relief; poverty persists for reasons that run far more deeply than the fact that some people earn more income than do others.

The whole ‘inequality’ fetish is the perennial refuge of low-information people  who mistakenly believe that an economy is a zero-sum game, i.e. if X has more then Y necessarily has less.

I blame Rawls and the professors who make him required reading.

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You remember Castro? Obama’s new Latin American buddy?

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In 1992, when The Man from Hope established a new standard for campaign trail empathy, there were no smartphones, no wireless activity wristbands, no life-tracking apps, no cloud. Bill Clinton felt our pain, but couldn’t do much about it. In contrast, today’s government caregivers have a vast new arsenal of tools at their disposal. They can feel our pain, aggregate it, analyze it, and implement policies that will reduce it by at least 10 percent. Or at least they can aspire to such grand ambitions.

Steve Sailer is irate.

I’ve been covering for at least 4 years the scandal of “birth tourism” — pregnant women from China paying a lot of money to hole up in Southern California for a couple of months so their upcoming baby can be granted the pecuniary benefits of American birthright citizenship — because the advertisements in Chinese are so clear about what chumps we Americans are with our schmaltzy ideas about immigration.

Finally, early this month the federal government raided 20 birth tourism operations in SoCal.

But it looks like most of the Chinese customers are going to get birthright citizenship for their future kid anyway, sending a message to foreigners to keep engaging in this scam.

Hm. Given the choice of which sort of people are getting anchor babies, I’d pick rich Chinese over poor Mexicans any day.

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So much for shopping at Starbucks. I guess they want all the non-hipsters to go elsewhere. Good luck with that.

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At least one writer at the Voice of the Crust Washington Post is forced to admit the truth.

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The whole point of Obamacare was precisely this, to mandate health insurance levels that people can only afford if subsidized by the government, and thereby nail down another corner of dependency on government.

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Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have discovered that when a certain aggressive leukemia is causing havoc in the body, the solution may be to force the cancer cells to grow up and behave.

After a chance observation in the lab, the researchers found a method that can cause dangerous leukemia cells to mature into harmless immune cells known as macrophages.

That sounds pretty useful.

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And ya gotta love that.

Author Nate Lewis and his colleagues at Caltech created a thin coating of nickel oxide that can be applied to semi-conductors made of silicon or other materials–a setup that acts like an artificial leaf, using sunlight to power the system. When introduced to water, one side of the ‘leaf’ oxidizes the water, releasing oxygen, while the other side gathers the hydrogen.

A membrane keeps the newly separated hydrogen and oxygen isolated from each other, which helps reduce the risk of explosion. If heat (or electricity) is added to a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen the results can be incredibly explosive, much more so than each gas on its own. Check out the differences in burning oxygen, hydrogen, and a mix of the two in the video below.

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At least the Communist Chinese won’t come whining to us to kiss it and make it better.

The Guardian is a dependable source of ‘progressive’ drivel.

The gap between the richly rewarded few of tech firms and banks and the rest of us is growing wider. Blame the digital revolution.

Note the assumption: gap between the ‘richly rewarded few’ and ‘the rest of us’ is a Bad Thing, and Something Is To Blame. Nothing ever happens without the activities of a villain, or villains; a very animistic point of view. The fact that ‘the rest of us’ live incomparably better lives because of that same digital revolution is of no importance; one speck of shit in the wine makes it shit all the way down.

Someone once observed that the difference between Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher was that whereas Thatcher believed that she was always right, Blair believed not only that he was right but also that he was good. Visitors to the big technology companies in California come away with the feeling that they have been talking to tech-savvy analogues of Blair. They are fired with a zealous conviction that they are doing great stuff for the world, and proud of the fact that they work insanely hard in the furtherance of that goal. The fact that they are richly rewarded for their dedication is, one is given to believe, incidental.

Irony of ironies: Tony Blair and those who write for the Guardian share the same syndrome. And there’s the real rub: Those who write for the Guardian, I suspect, are not as richly rewarded for their dedication as the geeks of Silicon Valley, AND IT BURNNNNNS!.

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

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The great psychological advantage of conspiracy theories is that they explain the most disparate phenomena effortlessly and indubitably. They thus satisfy man’s intellectual longing to understand the world, but also, as importantly, man’s desire to be superior in his understanding to his fellows. To have penetrated the mystery of things is an achievement not given to everyone. Those who have developed a conspiracy theory both want to keep it to themselves so that they can retain their superiority over others and spread it as far as possible to recognized for their enormous contribution to human understanding.

I love the smell of conspiracy in the morning.

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If electronics stalwart silicon and futuristic graphene had a child, it would be silicene. And silicene is growing up. A University of Texas-Austin engineer has made the first transistors from silicene, moving the material closer to its potential to create more powerful devices.

Silicene is made of an atom-thick layer of silicon that, like graphene, can move data much faster than the silicon found in current electronics. While it lacks some of graphene’s other impressive qualities and is still extremely difficult to make, researchers are interested in it because of its relationship to silicon. Modern electronics rely on a highly developed silicon-manufacturing industry. Once silicene production is more reliable, it wouldn’t be as complicated or expensive to switch to silicene as it would be to switch to graphene.

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The Environmental Protection Agency has long been in the forefront of Obama administration lawlessness. Don’t forget: before Hillary Clinton’s secret email server came to light, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson was conducting government business off the books as “Richard Windsor,” which, she explained when caught, was the name of her dog.

The EPA’s current usurpation, an effort to remake America’s power supply system, is much more serious. The EPA has proposed a far-reaching regulation of power plants that would drive many of them out of business in the name of global warming. The EPA’s proposed regulation constitutes a statutory framework that Congress perhaps could have enacted, but didn’t. It represents the most extreme case, so far, of an administrative agency run amok.

The EPA is a major reason why Richard Nixon will rot in Hell for all eternity.

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For half a century, memories of the Holocaust limited anti-Semitism on the Continent. That period has ended—the recent fatal attacks in Paris and Copenhagen are merely the latest examples of rising violence against Jews.

Since this is the Atlantic, of course, a Voice of the Crust, a ritual spit against Emmanuel Goldstein is required:

Renewed vitriol among right-wing fascists and new threats from radicalized Islamists have created a crisis, confronting Jews with an agonizing choice.

Sorry, but I don’t see any right-wing fascists (oxymoron) threatening Jews in Europe; it’s the ANTIFA (anti-fascist ‘progressive’ street thugs) and (wait for it) militant Muslims that are causing the problems.

I’d say it’s time for the Jews of Europe to lock & load and dish out a little of what they’ve been taking. But that’s me.

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Perhaps because the U.S. Congress is incapable of doing anything constructive? That’s just a guess, you understand.

American defenders of Israel generally see the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) as one of the worst UN agencies, an organization that harbors terrorists, teaches militant conflict with Israel and anti-Semitism in its schools, and perpetuates the Palestinian refugee issue as a source of tension. Yet the paradox is that the United States has consistently been the largest single-state donor to UNRWA.

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Administrators at a middle school in central Virginia suspended a sixth-grader last September for one-year after discovering a marijuana leaf and a lighter in his backpack. The sheriff’s department became involved as well and filed drug possession charges against the 11-year-old boy.

Months later, prosecutors had to drop the charge. Why? The leaf had thrice been tested for marijuana and come back negative.

The boy, unnamed in this excellent story in The Roanoke Times, returned to school this week. But officials have been loathe to admit that any mistakes were made—they now maintain that since “lookalike” drugs are also prohibited, the boy may still have violated district policy.

Well, of course, first they have to demonstrate that it’s a ‘drug’. Don’t see any hint that they even tried to do that.

Homeschooling is looking better and better. Just sayin’.

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There are few Voices more Crustian than Salon, and obviously the idea of a place where people can be free from interference from, well, the sort of people who write for Salon quite naturally fills them with horror.

Of course, such people have to be subjected to the Two Minute Hate, so they set up the shot with the crack about ‘One Percenters’, as if the people who underwrite Salon were ordinary middle class folks:

Salon has been unprofitable through its entire history. Since 2007, the company has been dependent on ongoing cash injections from board Chairman John Warnock and William Hambrecht, father of former Salon CEO Elizabeth Hambrecht. During the nine months ended December 31, 2012, these cash contributions amounted to $3.4 million, compared to revenue in the same period of $2.7 million.

Warnock is one of the founders of Adobe, and I doubt that he worries about where his next Aston-Martin is going to come from. Hambrecht, after Princeton, went on to help launch Netscape and Amazon; another fellow with a well-padded investment account.

Bryan Caplan with some more inconvenient truth.

The global poor migrate to the First World, kiss the soil, then permanently go on welfare. Idle immigrants: Nothing short of outright criminality does more to tarnish the image of immigration. It smacks of ingratitude and parasitism. And while the prevalence of immigrant idleness is overstated, it is a very real problem, especially in Europe.

As a cosmopolitan libertarian, my first reaction is point fingers at the welfare state. If the problem is government subsidies for indefinite idleness, the solution is to curtail not immigration, but redistribution. When the law allows it, plenty of natives permanently go on welfare, too. Rhetorically sliding from the generic evils of the welfare state to the selective evils of immigrants is effective demagoguery, but fuzzy logic.

Yet on reflection, my first reaction misses a major part of the story. Countries with ample redistribution also tend to have strict labor market regulations. Despite their feel-good popularity, labor market regulations have a big negative side effect: unemployment.

This collateral damage is clearest for regulations that explicitly push up wages: If the law requires a 10% raise, employers can reduce the damage to their bottom line by employing fewer workers. But unless wages are perfectly flexible, any “pro-worker” regulation risks this disemployment effect. If the law makes employers give workers free health insurance, and workers bitterly resent offsetting pay cuts, hiring fewer workers is employers’ best remaining defense.

The moral: When you see an idle immigrant, you shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that he’s a lazy parasite. There’s another possibility: Labor regulations have priced him out of a job. He’s on welfare not because he doesn’t want to work, but because he’d rather go on welfare than starve.

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And many of them occupy elective office.

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The Guardian, of course, is determined to call upon government to solve a problem that government action caused, by land use restrictions and greenbelt requirements. When you lower the supply of something and the demand remains the same, prices go up, sometimes a lot. This is a concept to which people whose notion of economics begins and ends with Marx are impervious.

“Every day I cry,” says an activist on a stall in Stratford, east London, that is shared by housing campaign Focus E15 and the Revolutionary Communist party. “How many thousands of people are suffering?”

Personally, I think that anything that makes an activist cry probably has much to recommend it. But that’s me.

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I guess the ‘progressive’ hipsters in Seattle want to get rid of all those underclass dweebs that are cluttering up their city.

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The average (male) Londoner of the early 1800s, out and about, was quite happy to relieve himself in the nearest alley. Urinals were becoming more common – usually outside pubs – but typically one found a quiet corner and had a pee.

Those who lived in said alleys, or who owned commercial property adjoining, were not entirely forgiving of this practice, as this quote from 1809 suggests:

in London a man may sometimes walk a mile before he can meet with a suitable corner; for so unaccomodating are the owners of doorways, passages and angles, that they seem to have exhausted invention in the ridiculous barricadoes and shelves, grooves, and one fixed above another, to conduct the stream into the shoes of the luckless wight who shall dare to profane the intrenchments. 

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And about time, too.

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I love the smell of conspiracy in the morning.

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Fitness apps are all the rage. A raft of new companies and products want to track your steps and count your calories with the aim of melting that excess blubber. There’s just one problem — most of these apps don’t work. In fact, there is good reason to believe they make us fatter.

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Large American tech companies hire armies of lobbyists to convince politicians that there is a shortage of United States–based science, technology, engineering, and mathematics graduates, and hence companies need lower-wage foreign workers.

That is the lie.

A 2013 study by the Economic Policy Institute showed that American universities graduate 50 percent more students in computer, information science, and engineering each year than are hired in those fields. Of computer-science grads not entering the information-technology workforce, one-third say it is because such jobs are unavailable. Inflation-adjusted tech wages remain at 1990s levels. “The data strongly suggest that there is a robust supply of domestic workers available for the [information technology] industry,” concludes the Economic Policy Institute.

The National Association of Colleges and Employers projects that the starting wage for new computer-science graduates will drop 9 percent to $61,287 this year. Says the journal Science, “Ordinarily, rapidly falling salaries indicate a glut, not a shortage.”

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Hint: New minimum wage law.

Hey, regressives, be careful what you wish for, you might get more than you intended.

Steve Sailer sets the record straight.

The World’s Most Important Place™ is fraternity row at the U. of Oklahoma. I realize that some of you may feel you have a vague recollection that it was some other place that was in the news a lot, maybe some place in a state bordering Oklahoma, but we have always been at war with Oklahoma. And, no, TWMIP™ was never fraternity row at the U. of Virginia. You are completely deluded about that.

C’mon, people, focus: fraternity row at the University of Oklahoma.

Suit Up With These 3 Pieces of Bulletproof Businesswear.

Hello Kitty Chainsaw.  I am not making this up.

Pop-Up Cardboard Furniture.

Home-Made HDTV Antenna.

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A report compiled by Ernst & Young comparing U.S. corporate tax rates to the rest of the developed world has found that America’s inefficient corporate tax regime is hurting U.S. competitiveness – namely through double taxation on economic decision making.

According to the report, the U.S. has the second highest top integrated tax rates amongst 38 developed countries, including the 34 members of the Organisation for Economic Development (OECD) along with Brazil, Russia, India, and China (BRIC). The report calculates integrated tax rates by combining corporate-level taxes with investor-level taxes on dividends and capital gains at national and subnational level.

Most developed countries (but not the U.S.) provide some form of relief from double taxation on corporate profits. Double taxation is a drag on the economy because it distorts important economic decisions, including discouraging capital investment which can lead to the misallocation of resources. It also encourages firms to favor debt over equity financing which can leave them vulnerable during periods of economic weakness.

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The Export-Import Bank has been in the news a lot in the last week. That’s because for the first time in its 80-year history, freedom has a chance of winning over rampant cronyism, and Congress may kill the New Deal era agency. Understandably, the bureaucrats at Ex-Im are in panic mode. They have been super active on the lobbying front for months, but in the last few weeks they have doubled down on their “outreach” (translation: special interests’ political pressure) to Congress.

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Be the first on your block to suggest that you ought to be subtracted from the gene pool.

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A good sign. Wish I’d done that myself.

Ammo Grrrl lays it down.

In the early days of The Movement, it would be generally agreed that Black Women had it pretty rough. But then ideological camps would form on who was more oppressed Black Men or White Women? The political arguments were fierce, if patently ridiculous.

Most of the people involved in these discussions were trust-fund wastrels, Red Diaper Babies (people whose own parents were Communists), limousine liberal professors, and work-averse idiots in their 20s (self-described “community organizers”) who had never been “oppressed” for even a day in their lives. But becoming part of a Protected Class turned out to be very lucrative. Why, you could become a Harvard Law professor just with imaginary high cheekbones in your round fat pale face!

Then new categories of victims were added, seemingly daily. What about a gay Black man versus a disabled Hispanic woman? What weight to give what alleged obstacle? Transgendered was far in the future. And now that glorious future has arrived!

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States, though, have struggled to maintain supplies of the most commonly used drugs — or find suitable alternatives — as more suppliers have refused to let their drugs be used in executions. Recent executions that took much longer than planned have brought more scrutiny around the method. In January, months after Oklahoma bungled the execution of Clayton Lockett, the U.S. Supreme Court said it would examine Oklahoma’s lethal-injection protocol.

Fine. Let’s go back to hanging, a perfectly sensible solution that requires common materials.