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Right now, the chef of the future looks like a pair of robotic arms that descend from the ceiling of a very organized kitchen. And it makes a mean crab bisque.

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Having lived in United Arab Emirates’ capital, Abu Dhabi, for more than five years, William Janssen was already accustomed to drinking desalinated water — seawater treated in large machines that consume lots of energy. So Janssen came up with the idea of using solar energy instead to transform salt water into drinking water, a more sustainable, cost-effective method.

So Desolenator was founded in 2012, and the company has been working with Innovation Experience, a group that helps marry “clean tech development” with human-centered design, since 2013 to make the idea a reality. The company has since become part of London’s Imperial College accelerator program for clean technology startups, and just this week it met its $150,000 crowdfunding target on Indiegogo, with a week still to go.

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Siemens researchers have developed a new type of electric motor that, with a weight of just 50 kilograms, delivers a continuous output of about 260 kilowatts – five times more than comparable drive systems. The motor has been specially designed for use in aircraft. Thanks to its record-setting power-to-weight ratio, larger aircraft with takeoff weights of up to two tons will now be able to use electric drives for the first time.

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By now, you may have heard the story about how two TSA agents at Denver International Airport were fired recently after it was revealed that they had worked out a scam by which one agent was able to grope and fondle the genitals of male passengers he found attractive. The plan involved him signalling to a colleague who was working the scanning computer. That agent would tell the computer that the individual being scanned was female, which apparently would set off an “anomaly” alert for the groin area, allowing the male TSA agent to conduct a “pat down” of that area. Leaving aside the fact that these computers even have “male” and “female” settings and it can determine an “anomaly in the genital area” if they don’t match — this kind of thing was exactly what many insisted was going to happen when the TSA put in place these advanced screening procedures. And if you think that this is the only case of it happening, well, then, you probably think the TSA doesn’t rifle through and steal stuff from your luggage as well.

Now here’s the thing: this only came out because the TSA agent blabbed about it to a colleague, who then reported it, leading to an investigation. Many people find it odd that the two TSA agents (who are still unnamed) merely lost their jobs, rather than got arrested for this activity. Chris Bray, over at TSA News (found via Amy Alkon — herself no stranger to intrusive TSA searches), went and grabbed the actual Denver police report on the incident, revealing that it appears that the TSA set up its “investigation” in a manner to almost guarantee no criminal charges and that the names of the TSA agents would remain secret.

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Of course. They squander billions on an idea that any high-school kid could tell was stupid, and then act as if it’s somebody else’s fault.

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Garth, Taylor, Jen, Kim and Kanye: no need, evidently, to say Garth, Taylor, Jen, Kim and Kanye who, they are assumed to be as familiar to the reader as the persons living with them. And they themselves must presumably want to be familiar to others in this way: for whether a woman or a couple is trying for a baby is something that can be known only to her or to them, unless they want it to be known – or unless the magazines make the stories up out of whole cloth.

The psychology of modern celebrity is curious and interesting. There seems to be an implicit contract between celebrities and those who confer celebrity upon them. Celebrity is conferred on people almost, though not quite, at random: their talents are minor and their appearance pleasing, but they must not otherwise be remarkable or too far removed in their tastes and manner, at least in public, from those who give them their fame.

Mark Steyn tries to explain why things go wrong.

One of the differences between the left and the right is that the right is forever looking for another towel to throw in. The left doesn’t do this: They push on till they win. That’s one of the reasons why, with rare exceptions, two-party systems boil down to activist left-of-center governments alternating with placeholder right-of-center governments – and why all the adrenalin rush of Tuesday-night GOP landslides in November shrivels to the cold grey morning after of bipartisan rubber-stamping for money-no-object thousand-page bills come January.

…

One reason why Republicans are such losers (and yes, sometimes they “win”, but nothing changes) is because they wind up playing the game to the other side’s rules – letting the left frame every issue. Why does Jonah think it’s so brave to ask his friends to throw in another towel? You can hardly get in the ring at all for the mountain of towels the right’s tossed in there.

Ross Douthat finds that his bullshit detector has gone off.

A LIVING cartoonist lecturing his murdered peers makes for a curious spectacle, but that’s what transpired at journalism’s George Polk Awards a week ago. The lecturer was Garry Trudeau, of “Doonesbury” fame; his subject was the cartoonists for Charlie Hebdo, the Parisian satire rag, who were gunned down by fanatics because of their mockery of Muhammad and Islam.

Trudeau did not exactly say they had it coming, but he passed judgment on their sins — not the sin of blasphemy, but the sin of picking a politically unsuitable target for their jabs. By mocking things sacred to Europe’s Muslim immigrants, Trudeau lamented, the Hebdo cartoonists were “punching downward … attacking a powerless, disenfranchised minority.” This was both a moral and an aesthetic failing, because “ridiculing the non-privileged is almost never funny — it’s just mean.”

Trudeau is hardly the first writer to accuse the Hebdo cartoonists of “punching down.” That phrase, and the critique it implies of “Je Suis Charlie” solidarity, has circulated on the Western left ever since the massacre. And understandably, because it reflects a moral theory popular among our intelligentsia, one that The Atlantic’s David Frum, in a response to Trudeau, distilled as follows: In any given conflict, first “identify the bearer of privilege,” then “hold the privilege-bearer responsible.”

As Frum notes, at its roots (both liberal and biblical) this is an admirable idea. Better to live in a society that favors underdogs than one that just lets victors have their way.

But on the contemporary left, the theory’s simplicity is becoming a kind of intellectual straitjacket. The Hebdo massacre is just one of many cases in which today’s progressives, in the name of overthrowing hierarchies, end up assuming that lines of power are predictable, permanent and clear.

Which they are not, for several reasons.

Why anyone would consider rich white Yalie Garry Trudeau a moral exemplar on anything escapes me.

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Makes you wonder why the states run by Democrats never thought of it.

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The thing in this picture isn’t a photon torpedo. But, it’s close. It’s a photon cannon, currently under development by General Atomics. Small, versatile, and completely self-contained, it turns anything onto which you stick it into a powerful laser weapon. And at just two cubic meters in volume, you should have no trouble mounting it on the roof rack of your Volvo.

Me want.

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Forget personal freedom, it’s the toilets that are the important thing.

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Think about that next time a Democrat opens his (or her) yap about ‘taxing the rich’.

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Got it covered.

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Sky is falling. Film at 11. Women and minorities hardest hit.

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Does it help to push the buttons on pedestrian crossings, train doors and thermostats? Often the answer is “no”, as Chris Baraniuk discovers.

Air Vent Safe Features RFID Lock.

Bug-Blasting Blunderbuss.

Grab-It Gadget for cars.

Adjustable Reading Wedge Light.

Pill Remover Fabric Shaver. There were times when I would have killed for this device.

Magnetic Vest Holds Your Tools For You.

Self-Heating Butter Knife.

Rolling Cooler With Own Tables and Chairs.

Tactical Credit Card Axe. I am not making this up.

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The Webber Academy is an acclaimed secular private school in Alberta. It treats all religious faiths equally: no religious observance is permitted in school. No prayers, no worship services. Not for any religion. Period.

That is, until some parents of Muslim students filed a complaint with the Alberta Human Rights Commission. The HRC found against the Webber Academy, and ordered it to pay a fine, and to accommodate its Muslim students, to avoid discrimination.

For the dimwitted, I will explain that treating everybody the same is not discrimination, by definition.

In other words, Muslim students must be treated differently from all other students, otherwise they are being discriminated against.

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His rich NIMBY neighbors won’t allow him to build a movie studio so he’s going to put poor people there instead. Pass the popcorn.

(Of course, ‘poor’ for Marin County means ‘worth less than a billion dollars’ so it won’t be all that dramatic.)

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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Konrad Rykaczewski, an assistant professor of engineering at Arizona State University, has strived for years to develop a better anti-icing solution for airplanes. His drive is more than academic: He was once stranded for two days in London when a long snowfall depleted Heathrow Airport of the supplies of antifreeze it uses to keep ice off airplane wings.

Rykaczewski’s eureka moment came later on a Panama vacation, sparked by a chance encounter with a poison dart frog. The frog’s skin inspired him to design a novel anti-icing coating. He learned that poison dart frogs have various glands in their skin. Some glands always secrete lubricant, while others secrete bits of toxin when provoked.

Is this a great country or what?

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Especially illegal mass migration.

Notice that somehow these migrants are leaving Italy for the richer territories of Northern Europe. That doesn’t mean that Italy isn’t facing severe strain in having to take them in as they land. And Italy faces severe criticism from the rest of the EU for letting them get away.

There are other interesting stories on that page, featuring – for instance – huge numbers turned back by Turkey’s Coast Guard. But still they come. Reading just the increase in numbers of incidents gives one an idea of the masses of humanity involved. The smugglers are ever more agile in escaping if the authorities come near. Out of 524 incidents of capture by Turkey in 2014, involving over twelve thousand people, only 74 smugglers were charged.

The increase in numbers of captured migrants since they started keeping count in 2011 is 24-fold. And going up.

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Privacy is imperative because political workspaces are radically different from those of writers. The chief requirement of any email server or device for example, is that it must be able to disappear. The primary tool that public figures use is what might be called the moveable stage. The moveable stage is designed to provide a highly controlled viewpoint of the celebrity to convey the intended effect. In place of a laptop computer sending data into the Cloud,  politicians like Hillary have a portable movie set to broadcast messages to the media universe.

Like the peripatetic software developer who today works from Mexico and the day after tomorrow from Southern Italy,  modern politicians now work on location, broadcasting their screeds from the Temple of Hercules or the Brandenberg Gate. They orate before fake styrofoam Greek pillars or from the Chipotle restaurant in the company of “plain folks”.

Plain folks are the only people who actually live in the real world.  And they pay dearly for this misfortune. The degree to which the creators of memes and ideas now influence the world would have shocked Percy Shelley who extravagantly claimed that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”.   Never in his wildest dreams could he have foreseen that workers in the realms of “reason and imagination” could gain such power. Ben Rhodes, a speechwriter who majored in creative writing,  is  a deputy national security adviser in the Obama administration.

Perhaps this is dangerous.  Poetry and imagination were meant to give us a glimpse into possibilities but never to provide quotidian reality.  Formerly we delved into books to visit castles in the air, but we walked out the door to go to work. It’s sad to think that crummy walk-up apartment in New York with a laptop on a mattress now should be essentially equivalent to a high windy tower in Italy, or the back of a garbage truck as a workplace.  One hankers for the days when there were actual nymphs and spirits in the woods with whom we could talk and whose cellphones we didn’t confiscate.  But perhaps those days are gone, and even the nymphs speak into their lapels.  The world is the poorer for it.

The Atlantic, Voice of the Crust, tries to pull an Obama.

And if you believe that one, they’ll tell you another one.

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And you know why. ‘All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.’ — Benito Mussolini

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On Tuesday, President Obama announced that the U.S. is removing Cuba from its state sponsors of terror list. Hours later, FARC, a terrorist group long supported by Cuba, murdered 10 Colombian soldiers and wounded 17 others in a terror attack on a military base.

Just another fine day in Obama-land.

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The federal government took in $1,477,901,000,000 in federal tax deposits between October 1, 2014 and April 14 of this year—the fiscal year to date. That number comes courtesy of the U.S. government’s Daily Treasury Statement. The good folks at CNSNews.com did the math so that I don’t have to and found that this is “an all-time record for the amount of inflation-adjusted tax revenue brought into the federal Treasury from the beginning of the fiscal year through the April 15 tax-filing deadline.”

…

That same Daily Treasury Statement revealed a total public debt outstanding of $18,152,014,000,000. That’s $18 trillion give or take. Unlike tax deposits, it’s not a record number. It’s close enough though, since federal debt hit $18 trillion for the first time last November. Don’t expect it to drop much. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) anticipates expenditures to outstrip revenue, requiring more borrowing, into the foreseeable future. “[B]udget deficits are projected to rise steadily and, by 2039, to push federal debt held by the public up to a percentage of GDP seen only once before in U.S. history (just after World War II),” warned the CBO last summer.

No growth of wealth can match the spending prowess of a bureaucrat with his snout in the trough.

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A lot people think that rising human population poses a threat to society because, logically, there is a limited amount of dry land on earth, and so living space and farmland must “run out” eventually.

…

Obvious, intuitive, and wrong. It’s wrong because, while it’s true that Earth is not growing, the supply of land is not fixed. From an economic perspective, the resource “land” doesn’t mean “dirt above sea level.” Land’s capacity can change and expand in all sorts of ways, depending on its use and value.

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Hint: More than it’s worth.

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I’m surprised it’s that low.

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A Tax Day special.

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In his first chapter, Tamny argues that taxes are merely “a price placed on work” by the government. To demonstrate how, he doesn’t start with an economist or a chart, but instead with Keith Richards, the lead guitarist of the Rolling Stones. Richards explained that the band decided to leave England because of the high taxes: “We didn’t know if we would make it, but if we didn’t try, what would we do? Sit in England and they’d give us a penny out of every pound we earned.”

Progressive taxes (in England, the United States, and everywhere) are more of an impediment to people who are trying to become wealthy than to those who are already wealthy.

And what happens with all the money the government rakes in? Largely, it is squandered by politicians who want to buy popularity. Rock musicians make wiser use of money — the money they’ve earned — than do politicians who dip into the vast pot of tax dollars taken by force.

Emphasis added – what I’ve been saying for years. The reason why rich people are always saying that their taxes are too low is an attempt to persuade you that the taxes of people who are not yet as rich as they are (but are trying to be) are too low – after all, if a rich person thinks that the government deserves more of his money, nothing stops him from just writing a check … which, of course, the never do.

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At the top of our list is a group of cities that have long been identified with tech growth. Our No. 1 city, Austin, Texas, boasts the strongest expansion in tech sector employment of any of the nation’s 52 largest metropolitan areas from 2004 to 2014, 73.9%,  as well as 36.4% growth in STEM jobs, the fourth-highest growth rate in the country. Coming in a close second is Raleigh, N.C.,  part of the renowned Research Triangle region, home to outposts of multinationals like Bayer, BASF, GlaxoSmithKline, IBM and Cisco. The Raleigh metro area posted a 39% increase in STEM jobs from 2004-14, the fastest growth in the nation, albeit from a smaller base than many of the other biggest metro areas.

This is what happens when geeks have adult supervision, i.e. a state government that refuses to enact their groovy-granola fetishes into law and restricts them to what they do well.

David Cole walks us through a typical incident in Obama’s America.

By the time you read this, the Memories Pizza “gay wedding” story will have gone the way of every overhyped, outrage-inducing Internet meme, relegated to the “you’re still talking about this after two weeks?” graveyard of planned obsolescence. The story has completed its arc: ABC affiliate makes national news out of totally random small-town pizza shop owner’s hypothetical statement that she wouldn’t cater a gay wedding if asked; gays go nuts and pummel pizza shop; Christians and conservatives rally around pizza shop, raising nearly a million dollars through a crowdfunding campaign; gays decide that all of a sudden the story isn’t as important as they thought it was 24 hours earlier; people move on and balance is restored to the universe.

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Gregory Wallace and another man burst into the Kentucky home of Jordan and Tommy Gray and robbed them and their three-year-old daughter at gunpoint. But at Wallace’s sentencing hearing Judge Olu Stevens singled out the Grays, not Wallace, for criticism. Wallace and his partner are black, and the Grays noted in their impact statement their daughter still reacts in fear to black men. Stevens said those remarks offended him and accused the parents of fostering racist behavior in their daughter. He sentenced Wallace to five years probation.

And there you have Obama’s America.

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The plaintiffs in King v. Burwell argue that an IRS regulation unlawfully extends tax credit eligibility beyond what is expressly authorized under Section 1401 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA).  It appears that this sort of administrative rewrite of the PPACA may be more the rule than the exception, as there are at least two other instances of the IRS rewriting the PPACA’s tax credit eligibility requirements.

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

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On this 150th anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination, the Wall Street Journal’s William McGurn performs a public service today rebutting the relentless liberal/“Progressive” attempts to pry Lincoln from the Republican Party and claim that Lincoln, were he alive today, would surely be a Progressive Democrat:

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If it isn’t, it ought to be. (Roper: “That’s an ugly word.” More: “It’s an ugly thing.”)

While the “war on women” is a lie, “social justice warrior” describes the average leftie exactly, and it deftly exposes their most egregious conceit, that they are all non-violent activists that just want peace and justice.

I can understand that the average social justice warrior would prefer to be called a “social justice advocate” or maybe just an “activist,” losing the “social justice” part. That’s because “social justice” has an odor to it.

This is nothing new. Once upon a time “communist” was a wonder word. Then it got a bad odor, and lefties started to call themselves “socialist,” and when socialist went bad they became “social democrats.” In the U.S., the bright young things of the 1890s called themselves “Progressives.” But by 1920 the word had a bad odor and so Progressives rebranded themselves as “liberals.” That lasted for about half a century until the day that Republican politicians discovered that an easy way to win elections was to chant “liberal, liberal, liberal” at their Democratic opponents. So the Soros-funded lefties of the 2000s called themselves “progressives.”

This is such a wuss-fest.

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In 2010 the left-wing Center for American Progress published a monograph titled “The Progressive Intellectual Tradition in America.” Its purpose was to shine an admiring spotlight on the Progressive activists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, men and women who used government power to “promote true economic and social opportunity for all people.” The problem with that monograph, as I noted at the time, was that it failed to mention the Progressive movement’s widespread support for racist Jim Crow laws, sexist labor laws, and eugenics laws. It was, I concluded, “a fairy tale version of history, one that highlights what the authors see as the accomplishments of progressivism while totally ignoring anything that might detract from their lopsided narrative.”

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The rush, for everything from cardiology to cosmetic surgery, could be as much as three times Government estimates, a report will reveal this month.

Official figures put the number at 63,000 but a medical group found that vast numbers are so frustrated by NHS waiting lists they are scouring Europe for faster treatments.

How about that great free government-provided health care, hey? Don’t you just wish that we had a system like that in the United States.

Well, hold on, it’s coming….

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I always suspected as much.

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Lithium-ion batteries have been a boon for the modern world — they’ve replaced the heavier, single-use alkaline type in everything from wristwatches to jumbo jets. Unfortunately, these rechargeable cells are already struggling to keep up with our ever-increasing energy needs. But a new type of aluminum-ion battery developed at Stanford University is not only less explode-y than lithium, but also can be built at a fraction of the price and recharges completely in just over a minute. Best of all, “Our new battery won’t catch fire, even if you drill through it,” Stanford chemistry professor Dai Hongjie boasted in a recent release.

Richard Fernandez looks at the craziness of modern life.

As a child I saw an ad for movie — which I never watched — titled “Japanese Tank Versus American Armored Car”.  All these years I’ve wondered what I missed by not viewing that extraordinary confrontation. But there was no need to worry as more bizarre spectacles awaited. Decades later Twitter is alive with matchups for the next presidential like “Two White Histpanics Versus One Elderly Woman” or “Elderly White Woman Versus White-Looking Native American”.

If it sounds weirder than Nipponese Tank vs Detroit Armored Car it is because identity politics is being driven by the American kaleidoscope of identities into a kind of reductio ad absurdum. One Tweet captures how strange things look through the traditional liberal identity politics viewport now that Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz have declared their candidacy for president.

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What could go wrong?

Gates of Vienna is rather dyspeptic this day.

The more I watch our Western culture deteriorate, the more I am convinced of the Arab Effect. I’m sure you’re aware of the glorification of homosexuality here and in Europe. It is unfortunate particularly because it has led to a new plague of modern pedophilia every bit as bad as the old Roman Imperium permitted its children to suffer. Always, we must begin by protecting the children.

My prediction is that western culture will go the way of Japan, that the next logical step after homosexuality is asexuality. I am seeiing an increase in this movement toward asexuality in the generation coming up. The children imbibe culture’s strengths and weaknesses, and when they process them via their sexuality, we are given a clear and obvious reflection of what’s going on in the culture’s collective unconscious, which is where our past and future are contained. (The collective unconscious is not tied to temporality in the same way we think of time.) What is occurring now is a kind of die-out via asexuality.

Despite our concerns, it is probable that the Arabs will not prevail. They’re not intelligent enough; sheer brutality isn’t enough. But I do think the Chinese will prevail eventually. They are buying up much of European and North American and South African real estate. Heck, they own the Panama Canal and a lot of port space on both sides of the North American continent. It’s likely that if ‘hostilities’ ever break out it will be the Chinese who win the whole enchilada.

Why? Because their very old culture is also very adaptable — for example, a state-controlled version of Christianity already exists since Christian doctrine and practices placed within a Chinese framework ensures the productivity and usefulness of its adherents. And there is the educational edict that children must learn Western musical notation and play the piano.Again, for utilitarian reasons: internalize Bach and Mozart at a young age and math intelligence increases. Yes, the Chinese are great cultural borrowers and they’re not borrowing anything from the Arabs, are they?

So get out your Chinese syllabary and start practicing. Just imagine the many varieties of patois that will develop (though I think they will be like the Romans and leave local customs in place). In the hierarchy of inherited intelligence the Asians are above the Negro and Caucasian. Only Ashkenazi Jews are ahead of them.

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Upstate New York is becoming Detroit with grass.

Plenty of room for you guys in Texas. Remember, nobody ever retires and moves North.

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So much for the myth of the socially-irresponsible mad scientist.

Welcome to the Brave New World, where all the Chicken Littles gather together to petition the government to stop the sky from falling.

“But that trick never works!”