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This indicates to me that America, even the bobo class, had not entirely thrown away all of its common sense. We all know that the problem with poor people is not that they lack money, but that they behave poorly. No one has too much of a problem living next to poor college students, who are technically poor because they lack income and assets. College students occasionally are over-exuberant in their partying, but you don’t have to worry about them mugging you, or that their children will beat up your children.

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We now live in a world in which we are required to believe lies, where telling the truth is condemned as “hate,” and where strangers feel qualified to diagnose you as suffering from an irrational “phobia” if you refuse to cooperate with their political agenda. As I remarked a couple of months ago, “Until I started studying radical feminism, I never thought of ‘normal’ as an achievement.”

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Cheating already? According to an IAEA report released Friday, Iran’s nuclear stockpiles have grown by 20 percent over the last 18 months, despite the Obama Administration’s claim that Tehran’s program was “frozen” during that time. The Administration now finds itself with an even harder sell to make: convincing Congress and America’s wary allies that Iran will get rid of 96 percent of its stockpile in only a few months following the conclusion of a deal.

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For ISIL even the threat of civilian losses to air strikes had proved a valuable asset in Syria and Iraq. In this respect ISIL is benefitting from pioneering work done by the Afghan Taliban to make it more difficult for Western air forces to use their smart bombs and superior sensors to find and cripple Islamic terrorists on the ground. American, Iraqi and other Arab leaders are complaining that the restrictive American ROE (Rules Of Engagement) are and how these rules severely limits the number of targets that can be hit. As a result ISIL can move around more freely despite the constant presence of coalition aircraft overhead.

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Truly, there is nothing new under the sun.

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So why do people steal copper cables, pipes, and wires year after year? The main factors are simple: copper is all over the place, and it is valuable.

The old saying that people will steal ‘anything that isn’t bolted down’ doesn’t matter in the world of metal theft. “People will steal the bolts.” says Kevin Whiteacre, an expert on metal theft who teaches Criminal Justice at the University of Indianapolis.

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Well, eight and a half, at most. Nobody can (with a straight face) that Lindsay Graham is ‘on the GOP side’ in any meaningful sense.

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Considering what Arabs — and Turks — have done to Kurds over the last, oh, three hundred years, it’s hard to blame them.

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Hint: No.

Is there any evidence that even a single non-terrorist suffered any bad consequences because of this NSA phone tracking?

Sure there is; why, a piece of the sky hit me on the head!

For the sake of those not paying attention — and I can hardly blame you — the issue is not that the NSA is listening in on people’s phone calls, WHICH IT ISN’T, but rather that they are getting from the phone companies their business information: who called whom, when, and how long they talked. This information is not the property of the telephone subscriber, who has no legitimate privacy interest in it (although a lot of them apparently think they do).

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In a bizarre aberration, the New York Times debunks one of its old shibboleths, population explosion.

No one was more influential — or more terrifying, some would say — than Paul R. Ehrlich, a Stanford University biologist. His 1968 book, “The Population Bomb,” sold in the millions with a jeremiad that humankind stood on the brink of apocalypse because there were simply too many of us. Dr. Ehrlich’s opening statement was the verbal equivalent of a punch to the gut: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over.” He later went on to forecast that hundreds of millions would starve to death in the 1970s, that 65 million of them would be Americans, that crowded India was essentially doomed, that odds were fair “England will not exist in the year 2000.” Dr. Ehrlich was so sure of himself that he warned in 1970 that “sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come.” By “the end,” he meant “an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity.”

As you may have noticed, England is still with us. So is India. Hundreds of millions did not die of starvation in the ’70s. Humanity has managed to hang on, even though the planet’s population now exceeds seven billion, double what it was when “The Population Bomb” became a best-seller and its author a frequent guest of Johnny Carson’s on “The Tonight Show.” How the apocalyptic predictions fell as flat as ancient theories about the shape of the Earth is the focus of this installment of Retro Report, a series of video documentaries examining significant news stories of the past and their aftermath.

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A British trial brought “spectacular” results, with tumours shrinking or disappearing completely in half of inoperable skin cancer patients.

The findings came as a series of studies showed that the drugs, which use the body’s defences to combat the disease, were effective against some of the most deadly tumours, including those of the lung, bowel, liver and head.

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There’s a ‘man bites dog’ story for you.

For the record, I don’t have a problem with it.

Jim Goad lays it out.

It is impossible to simultaneously understand the theory of evolution and to believe in blank-slate cognitive equality among human groups of different continental origins.

Both propositions—evolution and equality—cannot simultaneously be true. You have to pick one. Choose wisely, because you can’t have both.

Salon is being Crustian again.

Legacy preference in college admission, or the practice of selecting the offspring of alumni over other qualified candidates, was originally a strategy developed to grandfather Jewish applicants out of admission. Though the policy’s intention has changed, it remains the reality that as American students head back to campus this fall, 10 to 25 percent of them do not deserve their spots. They’re “legacy admits,” the kids who got a boost via birth.

Yet not a word about the 10 to 26 percent ‘diversity admits’, who also ‘got a boost by birth’, and who also ‘do not deserve their spots’. Funny how that works.

Read it.

If Hillary has lost hipster Voice of the Crust Salon, she’s got no chance.

(Remember, Hillary: Pillage first, then burn.)