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a plant-hopping insect found in gardens across Europe – has hind-leg joints with curved cog-like strips of opposing ‘teeth’ that intermesh, rotating like mechanical gears to synchronise the animal’s legs when it launches into a jump.

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If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

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But I’m sure they’ve got explicitly racist groups like ‘Black Student X’ where X is anything that strikes their fancy.

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The study, published last year by economists at the United Kingdom and Israel doing novel work on archaeological and anthropological evidence, attempts to explain a strange pattern in agricultural practices. The most advanced civilizations all tended to cultivate grain crops, like wheat and barley and corn. Less advanced societies tended to rely on root crops like potatoes, taro and manioc.

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in our vegetables, that we are underlings.

Read it.

Everywhere politicians think that they can wish-away the basic laws of economics; then they are so astonished when reality intrudes.

Suction cup planters.

The Slammer.

CoyoteVest dog body armor.

Mini pick and hook set.

Weed killing steamer.

The Selfie Toaster.

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Next step: Artificial marijuana. (Betcha)

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I would have voted for Hillary Clinton three months ago. I believed that our elections are just, verifiable, and democratic—but then discovered how easy it is to hack a voting machine without a trace. I told myself that previous elections hadn’t necessarily been rigged—but then found evidence proving me wrong. I convinced myself that it didn’t mean this Democratic nomination was rigged?—?until I uncovered the truth.

I am an ardent skeptic turned fervent believer.

Over the course of this article, I will demonstrate that electoral fraud was committed favoring Hillary Clinton with a plethora of sources: exit poll data, statistics, mainstream and independent media articles, expert quotes and analysis, videos, anecdotes, and so forth. All of these sources can be accessed through clickable hyperlinks (the underlined text).

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Medieval people ate a lot of bread. A lot. They ate pounds of bread every day, and even used it as plates – or trenchers – which sounds both practical and delicious (although trencher bread was usually stale). But the bread they ate wasn’t always made of wheat, or even rye. In some parts of Europe, especially the mountainous regions of Italy, France, and Spain, they made their bread out of something that literally grew on trees: chestnuts.

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Again? But that trick never works….

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The University of Southern California cancelled its planned “Legends of the Games” event after the lone female participant signaled that she wouldn’t be able to attend. Administrators made the determination that an all-male panel was unacceptable, and killed the event—a mere four hours before it was supposed to start.

Because, as we all know, games are played almost exclusively by young women, and nobody would have believed an all-male panel.

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So I have always thought.

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Just to remind everybody that this blog is about what I’m interested in, which may not necessarily be what you’re interested in.

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Over the years I’ve belonged to a variety of different organizations that had the ostensible goal of accomplishing X or Y. At a certain point I would realize that all anyone was doing was exercising their fears and frustrations. Most of all they were trying to stop other people from doing things they didn’t like.

I’m impatient. I want to get on with the business of actually doing something tangible. Waiting for someone else to come along and accomplish your goals for you is a really bad plan. Trying to change government policy is endless. Expecting “the market” to magically solve problems isn’t realistic. So where does that leave any of us?

Writing a blog, maybe? It doesn’t get anything done but you feel better about yourself. Those of us with Native Indolence Syndrome tend to prefer the low-effort option.

Enter the Incremental Development Alliance. Let’s say you have a problem in your neighborhood. It needs a grocery store. It needs bike infrastructure. It needs more public gathering spaces. It’s in decline and needs new investment. It’s in the process of being gentrified and people are being squeezed out. Whatever. Why not be the person who brings the desired change? You. Right now. Go do it.

I doubt seriously that anyplace outside of mainland Europe ‘needs bike infrastructure’; that tends to be the compelling fetish of Hipster Whiteopias like Portland and Seattle and San Francisco. Nor do I see any compelling nned for ‘more public gathering spaces’ in a world where staring down at your cellphone is what most people below the age of 60 spend their day doing. And the innate contradiction between ‘in decline and needs new investment’ and ‘being gentrified and people are being squeezed out’ suggests that the author is either incredibly confused or writing for the incredibly confused. I’m not sure I want a confused person and his confused audience to ‘bring the desired change’; such people cause more problems than they solve.

Easier said than done, right? This isn’t easy stuff. There are zoning regulations, building codes, financing obstacles, bureaucratic landmines… The red tape is endless.

Said as if ‘red tape’ falls from the heavens on the just and unjust alike — which it does, of course, but unlike Global Warming it has an easily detectable cause. RED TAPE IS CAUSED BY GOVERNMENT. I’ll repeat that. RED TAPE IS CAUSED BY GOVERNMENT. Those who want to ‘bring the desired change’ need to GET THE GOVERNMENT OFF PEOPLE’S BACKS.

Read it.

Cue the Usual Suspects criticizing Trump because Mexican-flag-waving protesters indulge in violence at one of his rallies.

Good thing they weren’t waving Confederate flags, or they’d be In Trouble.

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More evidence that the F-35 is a flying piece of shit.

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If you’ve ever used crutches, you know that they can be awful tools that slowly torture you the longer you use them. Thankfully, Mobility Designed realized our long international nightmare and decided to do something about it. The company has designed a crutch from scratch that removes the pressure from underarms and forearms, the traditional load-bearing areas for crutches, and shifts support to the elbows

Read it.

Speaking in parliament on Monday to celebrate the fifth anniversary of Hungary’s new constitution, Viktor Orban said the document’s primary aim was to secure Hungarian language and culture.

The premier said the constitution meant the Hungarian government had to oppose any kind of mass migration that would imperil those principles.

He said: “We have the right to choose whom we wish to live together with and whom we do not wish to live together with.

“To be clear and unequivocal, I can say that Islamisation is constitutionally banned in Hungary.

The former Soviet client states of Eastern Europe, having experienced ‘progressive’ oppression first-hand, are more resistant to Political Correctness than most.

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I am not making this up.

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In a scene straight out of a Hollywood film, a Taliban fighter detonated his suicide vest by mistake, killing himself and his eight colleagues without a single civilian casualty.

It is so hard to get good help these days.

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Teodoro Obiang Nguema has never received less than 97 per cent of the vote in an election. On Monday, with partial results indicating that 99.2 per cent of the vote has gone in his favour, Equatorial Guinea’s leader was surely all set for another seven years in a seat that has no doubt molded to his figure.

One-sixth of African countries have an executive who has been in power for more than 20 years, which equates to nine out of 54 of the continent’s leaders. Mr Obiang, who took power nearly 37 years ago in a bloody coup, has Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, Isaias Afwerki of Eritrea and King Mswati III of Swaziland for company. But Mr Obiang is most similar to José Eduardo dos Santos of Angola.

Mr Dos Santos and Mr Obiang preside over Africa’s second and third highest crude-oil producers, respectively, and are accused of embezzling much of the resulting wealth, while not distributing it fairly, if at all, to their citizens. Equatorial Guinea, once a Spanish colony, has the biggest gap of any country worldwide between its per-capita wealth and its human development index – a sure sign that there are a few outliers skewing the per-capita figure way upwards.

No doubt they are victims of White Privilege.

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When is the last time that the entire New York subway was closed with 12 hours notice to make repairs critical to the safety of the system? Or when was the last such shutdown of the London Underground, the Paris Metro, or for that matter the Kolkata Metro or the Caracas Metro, much less the threat of closing lines for months at a time?

How many of America’s many light rail systems have shut down as a result of their having failed to sufficiently maintain their safety? There is plenty to criticize about the many new urban rail systems in the United States. They may not carry the number of passengers projected, and often have cost far more than taxpayers were told and they may not have reduced traffic congestion. But they have managed to provide safe transportation to their riders. Only one of America’s rail systems has failed so abjectly in the most fundamental of its responsibilities: America’s subway in Washington.

David Cole understands the dialectic.

Of course, just as the trolls on the right are planning their Tubman-bill stamp-a-thons, the perpetually outraged SJWs on the left are (guess what) outraged over the notion, and they are (guess what again) calling on the government to change and tighten the laws regarding currency defacement. The truth is, everyone is looking forward to the upcoming plague of Tubman-note vandalization. Every incident in which an ape face is stamped over a Tubman twenty will be another autopilot homepage piece for Salon and the Huffington Post. And of course the Salon and HuffPo writers will be unable to report the story without adding something anti-conservative, anti-Republican, or anti-white, which will lead to hundreds of posts in the conservative and right-wing press expressing outrage at the outrage. Every troll caught in the act of defacing the bills will become a reviled Internet superstar, and plenty of “people of color” will deface the bills themselves in order to sue for emotional pain and suffering after claiming to have received the defaced note as change from a purchase or a withdrawal from an ATM. The government will gleefully rush in to pass new laws tightening the definition of what’s illegal under federal statute 18 USC § 333, and probably a tech firm or two will earn a tidy profit by creating new technology making it impossible to use defaced or slightly altered twenties in vending machines.

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After an email exchange with the principal investigator, University of Michigan psychology professor Denise Sekaquaptewa, I found out that the press reports had some inaccuracies: for one, the study does not focus solely on men’s microaggressions toward women but also tracks offenses by women, toward other women and sometimes toward men. Yet, in a more basic sense, the critics were on point.  Whatever valuable data this study may yield, it is primarily an exercise in trivial pursuit coupled with speech policing—directed at a problem that may not exist.

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

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And he did it without any government help. Isn’t that amazing.

Cooking something “from scratch” can mean different things to different people. For some it means heading to the farmers market for some fresh ingredients. For others it means skipping the frozen goods section. But for Andy George, host of the show How to Make Everything, it means spending six months and $1,500 growing a garden, turning ocean water into salt, making cheese, and killing a chicken all so he can take a bite of a sandwich truly made from scratch.

Now, for all the work that went into crafting this chicken sandwich, you’d expect it to be the best thing George has ever eaten. You’d expect it to be a sandwich that would inspire future George to spend every Thanksgiving telling his patient family about the time he had a real sandwich. You’d expect it to be so good that he would consider spending six months and $1,500 to make another one. But it isn’t any of those things.

“It’s not bad,” George said. “That’s about it. It’s not bad. Six months of my life for not bad. Yeah.”

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Angela Merkel says that Islam belongs to Germany, but she may have reversed the relationship involved: based on the report below, Turkey is rapidly Islamizing Germany through the funding of mosques, imams, and other employees. The process is being done quite openly — Germany is becoming a province of Greater Turkey, and no one is trying to hide the fact.

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For decades, futurists have predicted that commercial miners would one day tap the unimaginable mineral wealth of the world’s ocean floor. Soon, that subsea gold rush could finally begin: The world’s first deep-sea mining robots are poised to rip into rich deposits of copper, gold, and silver 1,600 meters down at the bottom of the Bismarck Sea, near Papua New Guinea. The massive machines, which are to be tested sometime in 2016, are part of a high-stakes gamble for the Toronto-based mining company Nautilus Minerals.

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‘Progressives’ have to ask themselves this simple question: ‘Why do they hate us?’

Actually, the problem is not the ‘transgender’ people, who are too few on the ground to bother about. It’s the perverts pretending to be transgender people that are the problem.

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Markets work, even when you don’t want them to. Raise the cost of labor, and the money is going to come from somewhere.

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This is absurd. Why not just kick their asses out? Or, better yet, put them on a boat and dump their asses on the Libyan shore somewhere.

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When they say ‘Go Green!’ they’re talking about how much taxpayer money can be wasted.

The Other McCain is on the case.

We know that women directors can make box-office hits — Nora Ephron (Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail), Amy Heckerling (Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Look Who’s Talking, Clueless) and Penny Marshall (Big, A League of Their Own), for example — but I have no idea what the overall profit picture looks like on female-directed films. However, the feminists complaining about award nominations for women directors at Cannes don’t give a damn about profit, do they? Neither do feminists give a damn about audiences (the people who pay to see movies, and are thus the source of profit) and they don’t give a damn about the actual work that a director must do to deliver the product on time and under budget.

What feminists care about is an idea of “equality” that actually results in favoritism — quotas for women, or else they’ll file a lawsuit or organize a boycott or just protest and complain until somebody gives them what they want. And what do feminists want? More.

This constant demand — “More!” — is characteristic of totalitarianism.

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America’s toothless Tiger Moth, the F?35, has copped another backhander from US government auditors: the US Government Accountability Office reckons its logistics software isn’t ready for battlefield deployment.

The GAO also warns that the US$16.7bn Autonomic Logistics Information System (ALIS) could, instead, swallow anything between $20 and $100bn.

Those warnings are contained in a report (PDF) titled DoD Needs a Plan to Address Risks Related to Its Central Logistics System.

The GAO is also concerned that the DoD’s management of ALIS is so ad-hoc that the “full scale production” due-date of 2019 might not be met.

More evidence that the F-35 is a flying piece of shit.

Vanity Fair, a Voice of the Crust, allows some truth to seep out.

Yesterday’s primary handed victories to Trump and Clinton, and, if Michael Lind is right, Trumpism and Clintonism are America’s future. Lind’s point, which he made last Sunday in The New York Times, is that Trumpism—friendly to entitlements, unfriendly to expanded trade and high immigration—will be the platform of the Republican Party in the years going forward. Clintonism—friendly both to business and to social and racial liberalism—will cobble together numerous interest groups and ditch the white working class. Which might be fair enough, but Lind didn’t mention rich people. Where will they go?

The Democratic Party has not been a total slouch, offering policies friendly to health-care executives, entertainment moguls, and tech titans. In fact, financial support for Democrats among the 1 percent of the 1 percent has risen dramatically, more than trebling since 1980. Traditionally, though, the Republican Party has been seen as the better friend to the wealthy, offering lower taxes, fewer business regulations, generous defense contracts, increased global trade, high immigration, and resistance to organized labor. It’s been the buddy of homebuilders, oil barons, defense contractors, and other influential business leaders.

…

In a world of Trumpism and Clintonism, Democrats would become the party of globalist-minded elites, both economic and cultural, while Republicans would become the party of the working class. Democrats would win backing from those who support expanded trade and immigration, while Republicans would win the support of those who prefer less of both. Erstwhile neocons would go over to Democrats (as they are already promising to do), while doves and isolationists would stick with Republicans. Democrats would remain culturally liberal, while Republicans would remain culturally conservative.

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The problem is that ethanol’s benefits have been greatly exaggerated, leading to congressional regulations that required ever-increasing amounts of ethanol in our gasoline supply. The government requirement goes back to 2005, when gas prices were much higher and the U.S. was in the midst of the Iraq war. Ethanol was supposed to be a clean way to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. The growing mandate for ethanol has instead created an enormous, artificial demand that has had unintended consequences, many of them bad.

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And government regulation, and pandering politicians, and eco-Nazis, and fearful special snowflakes, and….

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A 20-year-old man has been arrested over allegedly tweeting a bomb threat during a Donald Trump rally.

Police accuse Sean Taylor Morkys, 20, of tweeting: “Is someone going to bomb the trump rally or am I going to have to?”

This message was reportedly followed by another tweet warning his friend to get his family to leave the rally so they wouldn’t get hurt.

Note that this is an anti-Trump person, not a Trump supporter.

Who’s bringin’ the hate now?

Saw that coming.

“Everyone deserves to feel like they belong. And you’ll always be accepted, respected, and welcomed at Target.”

Unless you’re normal.

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Alexis de Tocqueville was a more prophetic observer of American democracy than even his most ardent admirers appreciate. True, readers have seen clearly what makes his account of American exceptionalism so luminously accurate, and they have grasped the profundity of his critique of American democracy’s shortcomings. What they have missed is his startling clairvoyance about how democracy in America could evolve into what he called “democratic despotism.” That transformation has been in process for decades now, and reversing it is the principal political challenge of our own moment in history. It is implicitly, and should be explicitly, at the center of our upcoming presidential election.

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International team reports CO2 fertilization prompted plants and trees to sprout extra green leaves equivalent in area to two times the continental USA, or nearly 4.4 billion General Shermans (largest giant Sequoia tree).

Well. How about that.

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White, perhaps, but hardly a lady.

Melissa Click, the scowling face of campus repression and candidate for least self-aware person in academia, is attempting to rewrite history in her remarks to an all-too sympathetic reporter for The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Click’s confusion is such that she sees herself as a white savior of oppressed black students on campus while simultaneously believing that the university fired her because she was a white lady. She is also actively courting free-speech-martyr status, despite the fact that she repeatedly attempted to censor journalists and faculty members. Click isn’t sorry: she’s sorry she got caught.

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LOOKING somewhat like a stormtrooper from “Star Wars”, Martin “The Wolf” Söderström, a Swedish devotee of kung fu, raps a heavy fighting stick down onto the arm of his opponent, who is clad in similar attire. At the other side of the room a computer quickly determines if the blow would have caused a bruise or a fracture if his adversary had not been so protected. Welcome to a new world of violent martial arts brought to you by advances in materials and microelectronics.

Ordinarily, Mr Söderström would not be able to fight like this. His punches would have to be pulled to avoid causing serious or even fatal injuries. Chunky body protectors and helmets offer fighters more defence from harm, but such gear also slows and restricts their movements. Nor does it make scoring any easier. Would whacking that stick over his opponent’s head, for instance, have broken his skull, or delivered but a glancing blow?

The armoured body suit which Mr Söderström and his opponent are wearing is called the Lorica. It has been developed by Chiron Global, an Australian firm. At just 19 kilos, it is neither too heavy nor cumbersome to prevent even aerial cartwheels, but it is tough enough to render painless a powerful sword strike to the head or the chest, says Mr Söderström.

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Austria’s far-right, anti-immigrant party has come out comfortably on top in Austria’s presidential vote.

Early results released by the country’s election authorities appear to show the candidate of the right-wing Freedom Party taking 35 per cent of the vote, leaving his two establishment rivals with not much more than 10 per cent each.

Norbert Hofer has run on a pro-gun manifesto, carrying his Glock pistol with him on the campaign trail and declaring that the public arming themselves is a logical reaction to the influx of refugees as part of the pan-European crisis.

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And this is only worth mentioning because — wait for it —

The unique reef is already being threatened by oil drilling companies

Women and minorities hardest hit, of course.