Read it.

Hint: Too many.

While we are on the topic, would you like to know the difference between the United States Code and the Statutes at Large? According to the Government Printing Office, “the Statutes at Large, is the permanent collection of all laws and resolutions enacted during each session of Congress.” The laws are arranged by public law number and are published in the Statutes at Large. The set also includes concurrent resolutions, proclamations, proposed and ratified amendments to the Constitution, and reorganization plans. Until 1948, treaties and international agreements approved by the Senate were also published in the Statutes at Large. This set is organized by year. So, if you are interested in locating the laws of passed in 1996 you need to consult the volumes for that year.

As for the United States Code, the Government Printing Office explains that “the United States Code is the codification by subject matter of the general and permanent laws of the United States. It is divided by broad subjects into 51 titles and published by the Office of the Law Revision Counsel of the U.S. House of Representatives.” It is clear that the United States Code is a compilation of laws arranged by subject. However, similar to the Statutes at Large,  it does not include case law or regulatory provisions.

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An economics professor has filed a lawsuit against Citigroup accusing the bank of using an unusual federal tax break during the financial crisis to avoid paying $800 million in New York State taxes.

In a lawsuit transferred to Federal District Court in Manhattan on Oct. 2, Eric B. Rasmusen, a professor of business economics and public policy at the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University, challenged the validity of the unusual federal tax break for the bank’s New York State returns. His claim, originally filed under seal in New York State Supreme Court in 2013, seeks treble damages, or $2.4 billion, under the False Claims Act.

Eric and I were at Yale together, and (certainly coincidentally) I have an MBA from the Kelley School of Business at I.U. (Which was just the Graduate School of Business at the time, but money will get you name.) He was a nerdy little weed when I knew him, but it’s good to see that he’s made a success of himself. The world is indeed a small place.

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During a recent long car ride whose soundtrack was a medley of NPR podcasts, I noticed a verbal mannerism during scripted segments that appeared on just about every show. I’ve heard the same tic in countless speeches, TED talks and Moth StorySLAMS — anywhere that features semi-informal first-person narration.

If I could attempt to transcribe it, it sounds kind of like, y’know … this.

I have always been a fan of radio voices. News broadcasters in the 30s and 40s had a very distinctive style of speaking that is immediately identifiable. So, apparently, do the people on NPR.

The best radio voice now living is James Lileks. You can catch him on the Ricochet podcast.

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In the ascendance during the Reagan and Clinton booms, our kulaks—the roughly 10 million businesses under 500 employees that employ 40 million people—are clearly in secular decline, with grave implications for the economy, employment, and the future of democracy.

Rather than a new age of democratic capitalism imagined by Reagan era conservatives, we increasingly live in a world dominated by large companies. The overall revenues of Fortune 500 companies have risen from 58 percent of nominal GDP in 1994 to 73 percent in 2013. At the same time, small business start-ups have declined as a portion of all business growth, from 50 percent in the early ’80s to 35 percent in 2010. Indeed, a 2014 Brookings report (PDF) revealed that small business “dynamism,” measured by the growth of new firms compared with the closing of older ones, has declined significantly over the past decade, with more firms closing than starting for the first time in a quarter century. Only 35 percent of small business owners, according to a recent survey by the National Small Business Association, express optimism about the economy.

…

The Obama administration’s progressive-sounding rhetoricmay offend some of the thinner-skinned members of the oligarchy, but his economic policies—the bank bailouts, super-low interest rates, and growing federal power—have also improved the balance sheets of the corporate hegemons and the super-rich. In contrast, these policies do little, or less than little, for the yeoman class. Money today is made far more easily today by playing games with the market than making or selling on Main Street.

Progressives just love big businesses because (a) they serve as convenient whipping boys when an oppressor needs to be found for all of the ‘victims’ in their political base and (b) they serve as willing ‘partners’ in government-centric consolidations.

Lord Ridley reminds us of some inconvenient truth.

Innovation is a mysteriously difficult thing to dictate. Technology seems to change by a sort of inexorable, evolutionary progress, which we probably cannot stop—or speed up much either. And it’s not much the product of science. Most technological breakthroughs come from technologists tinkering, not from researchers chasing hypotheses. Heretical as it may sound, “basic science” isn’t nearly as productive of new inventions as we tend to think.

Suppose Thomas Edison had died of an electric shock before thinking up the light bulb. Would history have been radically different? Of course not. No fewer than 23 people deserve the credit for inventing some version of the incandescent bulb before Edison, according to a history of the invention written by Robert Friedel, Paul Israel and Bernard Finn.

The same is true of other inventions. Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell filed for a patent on the telephone on the very same day. By the time Google came along in 1996, there were already scores of search engines. As Kevin Kelly documents in his book “What Technology Wants,” we know of six different inventors of the thermometer, three of the hypodermic needle, four of vaccination, five of the electric telegraph, four of photography, five of the steamboat, six of the electric railroad. The history of inventions, writes the historian Alfred Kroeber, is “one endless chain of parallel instances.”

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An analysis of the Ahmed the Clock Faker scam.

Nokero Solar Light Bulbs.

Palm Pistol.

Sandflex Sanding Block.

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An Iraqi who lives in Finland has a low opinion of the current flood of “refugees” into the country. His attitude is similar to that of the migrant in Berlin who wants Germany to stop admitting any more immigrants. Except this guy presumably speaks better Suomi than the other fellow did English.

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The price of bureaucratic malfeasance is that much taxpayer money is spent but nobody gets fired and nobody goes to jail.

Lois Lerner is off the hook.

The former Internal Revenue Service staffer, who for the last two years has been at the center of an investigation into whether the tax agency improperly targeted conservative political groups for extra scrutiny, won’t be charged, the Department of Justice (DOJ) said in a letter today, according to CNN. And neither will anyone else.

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When we’re being sensitive, nothing but the best will do for our special victims.

A four-star hotel in the German town of Halle (in Saxony-Anhalt, the former DDR) was abruptly converted into “refugee” housing. Hotel employees and business owners received little or no information about the closure beforehand, and many were taken by surprise, finding themselves locked out and suddenly unemployed.

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Another feminist intellectual finds herself in the crosshairs of the safe-spacers: Germaine Greer, a feminist academic and author, is scheduled to give a lecture at Cardiff University in Wales next month, but students are circulating a petition demanding the cancellation of the talk.

That’s because Greer, a self-proclaimed Marxist anarchist who opposes hierarchy and capitalism, is nevertheless out of step with the modern left on transgender issues: she does not recognize “men who believe that they are women and have had themselves castrated to prove it” as women, according to her 1999 book, The Whole Woman.

Pass the popcorn.

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Women sold as slaves. Women beaten in the streets. Women raped for sport. Girls as young as 8 or 9 years old forced into marriages with strangers, and bound to sexual servitude.

The reports of the atrocities perpetrated by the Islamic State against girls and women – most of them Yazidi – seem as unending as they are despicable and senseless. But the latest may yet be the most depraved: women and girls being raped repeatedly as a way to “make” them Muslim.

According to a CNN report, a new directive from ISIS’s self-appointed caliph, Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, instructs men to rape the women that they capture. A woman who is raped 10 times, it says, will then become a Muslim.

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On my recent road trip to and from Arizona to Minnesota, I had to pass through a checkpoint in New Mexico. Several uniformed Border Patrol men and vehicles were clustered around. A few relaxed drug-sniffing dogs were hanging out as well. Everybody hates someone who holds up the line, especially when it’s 110 degrees and you have to roll down your window. So, with uncharacteristic restraint, I didn’t ask, “What do you do if you find someone who is not here legally?”

Because the answer, of course, is “Absolutely nothing. We’re not allowed to.” The only way an illegal could maybe possibly get deported would be if he refused to bake a cake for a gay wedding.

…

The Democrats will soon get nine to eleven million more voters, distributed nicely to change every red state to blue for all time. The Chamber of Commerce will get the cheap labor they salivate for. The rich liberals will get nannies and housekeepers from Guatemala and El Salvador and yard guys from Mexico. And the open-borders crowd will get to congratulate themselves on how open-minded they are, how morally superior to us crude “nativists.” At least until some thug shoots their daughter.

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The Japanese seem to devote a lot of attention to toilets.

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An electric wheelchair that can climb most stairs, including spiral staircases, has been developed by Zurich-based students.

The Scalevo Wheelchair can mount one stair per second and was designed by 10 students at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich) and the Zurich University of the Arts.

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Last month’s news that Volkswagen had been illegally rigging its diesel-powered cars to cheat on pollution tests has sparked all sorts of outrage. Hearings, lawsuits, fines, general opprobrium. And rightly so; the company’s deception was appalling.

But there’s a broader, more consequential problem here that a lot of coverage has danced around or hinted at only indirectly. So let’s say it: Europe’s promotion of diesel vehicles as a green transportation option has been a disaster thus far — for reasons that go well beyond the Volkswagen scandal.

…

One main drawback of diesel cars is that they can emit higher levels of other harmful air pollutants like particulates and nitrogen oxides. And those ended up being much harder to clean up than experts initially predicted. We now know that Europe’s regulators have failed spectacularly to control diesel pollution, relying on weak rules and flimsy testing procedures. Lots and lots of automakers — not just Volkswagen — have been manufacturing diesel cars that emit far more gunk than they’re supposed to. It’s one reason why cities like London and Paris are still clogged with unhealthy levels of air pollution, causing thousands of premature deaths each year.

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The injury helped police identify the alleged attacker.

I imagine it did.

The alleged attacker was … wait for it … not a white person.

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The material, sulphur-limonene polysulphide, is very cheap to produce, and the pair now hope it could one day be used in environmental cleanups, or even to coat water pipes.

Mercury pollution, due to the extreme toxicity of the chemical, is a big problem. Half of the world’s mercury emissions come from volcanoes, but the other half comes from human activity like the burning of fossil fuels and mining.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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Sure, that’ll work. When has a visit from a U.N. kleptocrat ever had a beneficial effect?

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They pay money to people to write this stuff.

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Late last week the EPA launched an investigation in to the nation’s federal ethanol mandates. It described the move as “discretionary” and, in its own words, intended to “ensure public health and the environment are protected.” The government agency has been spurred to action by mounting evidence that the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS)—the ethanol program first enacted by President Bush and eventually championed by the Obama Administration—isn’t the unalloyed “green” policy it is often sold as. Now, as Clean Technica reports, a new study from a team of scientists at the University of Tennessee has confirmed that the RFS has been, on balance, bad for the environment….

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

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Cue Progressive Magic Word Awareness.

So long as you Raise Awareness, you don’t actually have to Do Anything.

Oh, except wear a colorful ribbon as a badge of your Awareness (and hence Moral Superiority). That’s very important.

On this same date in 1740 the Batavia Massacre, in which 10,000 ethnic Chinese were slaughtered, came to an end. Not as important as stuttering, of course, so now that your awareness has been raised, feel free to lower it to its previous levels.

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Thank you, Barack Hossein Obama. (um…um…um)

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A recently arrived culture-enricher in Berlin is unhappy with the inadequate and tardy services being provided by the German government. He blames the “refugees” that have arrived in Berlin since he got there, and wants Germany to pull up the ladder before the country is ruined by all these new riff-raff.

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Bonirob, developed by Bosch’s Deepfield Robotics, is billed to eliminate some of the most tedious tasks in modern farming, plant breeding, and weeding. The autonomous robot is built to be a mobile plant lab, able to decide which strains of plant are most apt to survive insects and viruses and how much fertilizer they would need, and then smash any weeds with a ramming rod.

How does it know? Bonirob employs a type of machine learning (a stab at artificial intelligence) called decision tree learning. Researchers show Bonirob lots of pictures of healthy leaves that are tagged to be good, and pictures of weeds that are tagged to be bad, and the machine makes a series of choices based on observed in new data to judge whether a plant in the field is good or bad. Those algorithms are tweaked as the machine collects its own new images.

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According to the Sun, government professor Andrew Little suggested hiring Republicans would compromise the quality of Cornell’s professors. He was quoted saying, “Placing more emphasis on diversity of political beliefs when hiring [would] almost certainly require sacrificing on general quality or other dimensions of diversity.”

“It is not surprising that faculty at Cornell find the anti-scientific rhetoric of many in the Republican Party to be troublesome,” Professor Kenneth McClane, English, said. “Many of us here are scientists — we believe in global warming, since we believe what the research tells us.”

“Our job is not to mold the minds of young students — they’ll go out into the world and do that for themselves,” Professor Richard Bensel, government, stated. “Cornell does not have to be a banquet that offers every viewpoint.”

And by that time they love Big Brother so it doesn’t matter.

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Last April, police in Sicily reported that Muslim migrants hurled as many as 53 Christians overboard during a crossing from Libya. The motive was that the victims “professed the Christian faith while the aggressors were Muslim.” Another report cited a boy seen praying to the Judeo-Christian God. Muslims commanded him to stop, saying “Here, we only pray to Allah.” Eventually the Muslims “went mad,” in the words of a witness, started screaming “Allahu Akbar!” and began hurling Christians into the sea.

It gets worse. When Christian refugees finally do make it to Western shores, they continue to be attacked by Muslims, or fellow “refugees.”

According to a September 30 report, in Germany, “Many Christian refugees from Syria, Iraq or Kurdistan are being intimidated and attacked by Muslim refugees. In several refugee centers set up by the local authorities, Sharia law is being imposed and Christians—which are a minority—are the victims of bullying.”

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A student group at Williams College that hosts speakers who challenge the campus’s biases has rescinded a speaking invitation to Suzanne Venker, a conservative author and vocal critic of feminism, in response to furious condemnation from other students.

The decision to disinvite Venker is steeped in irony, given that the group’s lecture series is called “Uncomfortable Learning,” and the sole reason for ditching Venker seems to be that she was a good fit.

And not one of those dimwits at Williams College gets the point.

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Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., is one of the most liberal neighborhoods in the country. In 2012, President Obama won Ward 6, which includes Capitol Hill, with 87.3 percent of the vote.

The Hill has remained firmly Democratic even as African-Americans have moved out and white professionals have moved in. In 2000, Ward 6 was 64 percent African-American; by 2010, with gentrification rapidly increasing, the black population had fallen to 43 percent.

What? No protests about the neighborhood being ruined for poor people diversity?

A 22.3 percent increase in violent crime over the past year on Capitol Hill is driving the debate. From mid-October 2013 to mid-October 2014, there were 298 such crimes: robberies, assaults with a deadly weapon, rape and murder. For the same period in 2014-2015, there were 364 such crimes, according to the Metropolitan District Police.

Well, that’s what happens when you let liberals move in. The neighborhood goes to the dogs.

A small sampling of recent day-in, day-out neighborhood crime highlighted on the listserv includes a midafternoon sexual assault on a mother by an intruder who “violently beat and assaulted her while she worked from home”; a flash mob attack on a local 7-Eleven; and the videotaped beating of a 69-year-old man by a 19-year-old at a subway exit.

Not mentioned, because it will give the game away, is the ethnic group to which all of these perpetrators belong, IYKWIMAITYD.

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Harsh words and heartfelt sentiment were exchanged by community members and local officials on racial issues in Central Minnesota at the St. Cloud NAACP Community Conversation with Gov. Mark Dayton.

Sometimes the two are the same. Mark Dayton is an heir to the Dayton-Hudson retail chain (now Target). After he graduated from Yale, he did teaching, social work, and politics — in other words, he’s never had a productive job in his life. (Oh, and he married a Rockefeller.) As you can see, all rich people are Republican reactionaries. Just ask Hillary or Barack.

From the start of the event, Dayton bluntly stated his opinions on the racial tension in St. Cloud and across the state in regards to immigration.

“Look around you. This is Minnesota,” Dayton said. “Minnesota is not like it was 30, 50 years ago. But, this is Minnesota and you have every right to be here. And anybody who cannot accept your right to be here and this is Minnesota should find another state.”

Now there’s a poster child for tolerance and inclusion. The very thing that everybody loves about Democrats — they welcome you with open arms, as long as you think as they do.

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For those of you with too much time on your hands.

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It is widely assumed by “xenophobic” writers such as myself that the flooding of Europe with “refugees” and “asylum seekers” is a planned event. The evidence is overwhelming — all the policy announcements by Western European political leaders of different parties in different countries at different times take the same positions and use nearly identical wording. This is true for EU and non-EU countries alike, and applies to those within the Schengen Area as well as those outside it.

Great map of the current Muslim invasion of Europe.

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The traffic deaths aren’t distributed equally though. Native Americans, Hispanics and blacks are much more likely to die as pedestrians in traffic accidents than whites or Asian-Americans, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

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Hillary Clinton has proposed a new tax on stock trading. The tax increase would only further burden markets by discouraging trading and investment. Inevitably, costs associated with this new tax will be passed on to millions of American families that hold 401(k)s, IRAs and other savings accounts.

Clinton always comes up with an excuse for why she needs to raise even more taxes on the American people. This time, she claims that her plan will curb “unfair and abusive trading strategies” – as defined by her and her future appointees in the federal government, of course — and levies a tax on Americans who make “excessive” order cancellations when trading on the stock market. The campaign has not said what is considered “excessive” or how high this new tax will be.

Hillary’s only virtue is that she isn’t as bad as Bernie Sanders.

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DreamstimeIn a democracy, the people get the government they deserve. But Everett Middle School in San Francisco is not exactly a democracy, and Principal Lena Van Haren withheld publication of the results of a student council election because she didn’t like the outcome—too many of the winners were white.

And everybody knows that white people are incompetent to hold even such formality jobs as a Middle School Student Council.

That is consistent with the attitudes of every school principal I have ever met.

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The Obama administration is having trouble selling insurance plans to healthy people. That’s a big problem: When the young and healthy don’t enroll, premiums have to be hiked to cover the costs of older, sicker people, discouraging even more young people from signing up.

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The Daily Caller reports that the University of Delaware is launching a $1 million “diversity” initiative in response to a non-existent hate crime. The “hate crime” consisted of “nooses” supposedly found hanging from a tree on campus. But the police found, and demonstrated through a video, that the alleged nooses were just the remnants of paper lanterns from an earlier campus event.

No matter. One administrator said the mere thought that paper lanterns could have been nooses shows the school has a toxic racial environment. That will be $1 million, please.

‘Do something even if it’s wrong.’ is the ‘progressive’ mantra. If you can do it with taxpayer money, all the better.

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Now scientists report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences their success in manipulating the genome in 3D. The human genome that’s squeezed into every microscopic cell in the body measures more than two meters long. To stuff it into a space just a few microns wide (the human hair, by comparison, is 40 to 50 microns in diameter) requires some masterful origami-like transformation.

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The most interesting thing about Henry Kissinger’s analysis and rescue plan for American foreign policy, A Path Out of the Middle East Collapse, is the how little hope and optimism it excited.  Few appear to regard the article’s recommendations as feasible, and it has been received with the passivity air of a beaten boxer hoping only for a rematch.

This fatalism is especially depressing in the light of Kissinger’s diagnosis that Obama has basically unwound every foreign policy achievement of the last 40 years.   His considered belief that an outside chance of survival of the American position is still possible have struck not a spark.  The atmosphere is as funereal as the locker room of a team down 40 points at halftime after the failed pep talk of a former winning coach that has only served to remind the players of what an invidious contrast there is to their present one.

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

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In July the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit upheld a Connecticut regulation “whose sole purpose is to shield a particular group from intrastate economic competition.” Last week the Institute for Justice, a public interest law firm, petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to review that questionable ruling. The Supreme Court should take the case.

At issue in Sensational Smiles, LLC v. Mullen is a regulatory rule promulgated by the Connecticut Dental Commission forbidding non-dentists from shining low-powered LED lights into the mouths of paying customers during the course of teeth-whitening services. Violation of this rule is a felony punishable by up to five years in jail or $25,000 in fines.

In more enlightened times, the passing of special interest laws (technically known as ‘privileges’, although ‘progressives’ are ruining the language there as well) in return for appropriate consideration (in the form of campaign contributions and often votes) would be termed ‘corruption’.

These, however, are not those times.

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Think of it as evolution in action.

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It’s really very simple. Hillary Clinton sucked as Secretary of State and dropped the ball very badly in Bednghazi. The Republicans want to hang her for it and the Democrats want to save her ass because she’s the only non-ludicrous candidate they’ve got to run for President this election cycle.

This is just Bill Clinton’s impeachment part two. I predict that she’ll walk; nobody in the government ever loses a job or goes to jail for being incompetent.

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Assume for the purposes of discussion that catastrophic global warming from human CO₂ emissions can be reliably predicted. Here’s a thought: since we know trees sequester carbon (but couldn’t be planted on a scale large enough to mitigate 30 billion tons of annual CO₂ emissions), why not go one step further and investigate whether there might be technologies that would remove carbon dioxide from the air? The idea is called “air capture,” but whenever the idea is brought up, you can hear the crickets chirping among the climatistas, for whom nothing less than destroying hydrocarbon energy will suffice as atonement for humanity’s sins of emission. (Near as I can tell, the IPCC completely ignores the idea.)

Which just points up the fact that the ecoNazi agenda is not about climate change but about how much human beings suck and so how much human beings must be penalized for not being animals.

In more enlightened times, ‘environmentalists’ would be recognized for what they are, rabid reactionaries dedicated to a new religion that opposes progress and human welfare, and would be opposed by ‘progressives’ however defined.

These, however, are not enlightened times.

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The murder of nearly 100 people in a terror attack is shocking wherever in the world it happens, or whoever commits it. But the Ankara attack was hardly a total surprise. This author has mentioned at least a few times the findings of an August 2014 poll, which found that 11.3% of Turks did not view the Islamic State as a terrorist organization. Eleven percent is in no way a marginal figure: If a “mere” 11.3% of Turks thought so generously of ISIS, it meant that there were nearly nine million Turks sympathetic to jihadists. And only 5% of that would mean an army of nearly 450,000. The two suicide-bombers on October 10 were most likely just a two of that big bunch of 450,000 or so sleepers inside Turkey.

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n fact, TV is doing pretty well across the LGBTQ spectrum as a whole – MTV’s teen hit Faking It has gay, lesbian, bi, questioning and even intersex characters. The Fosters has biracial queer parents and Caitlyn Jenner is pursuing equal opportunities for reality television in I Am Cait.

But while this public celebration of same sex love is great, it’s somehow all a bit…samey.

Take Orange is the New Black. While Ruby Rose was voted by straight girl social media users as ‘most likely to turn them gay’ (despite the fact that she identifies as gender fluid), out lesbians Samira Wiley and Lea DeLaria – a woman of colour and a curvy butch woman respectively – have yet to be clutched to the heterosexual audience’s collective bosom.

It’s almost like there’s still a massive double standard at work.

It’s not enough to be a pervert, you have to be the right kind of pervert.

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

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Lucas Kinney, the son of a film director who worked on Hollywood blockbusters including Indiana Jones, was raised in the home counties but converted after dropping out of university

Certifiable beta male rage. I will gladly contribute toward his suicide vest.

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Nevertheless, we’re all going to die when the sea covers the land because all of the Antarctic ice has melted. it’s a consensus! The Science Is In! Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!