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California’s upcoming, poorly thought out (beyond the political gains) massive minimum wage boost to $15 per hour does not grant unions an exemption. They will not be permitted to “collectively bargain” away the price floor in exchange for other benefits, just like businesses who are not unionized.

Hey, nobody claimed that these people were the sharpest knives in the drawer.

While most folks may assume that this has always been the case, in reality, cities and municipalities that have set their own minimum wages and other employment mandates have included exemptions for unions. Many people aren’t aware of it, and it may seem odd on the surface, given that the unions themselves are pushing for the increases.

This is what happened in Los Angeles when the city mandated a special minimum wage of $15.37 that applied only to hotel workers. It included an exemption for workers represented by unions, which essentially meant this minimum wage was really a fine for not being unionized. Over the weekend, the Los Angeles Times took note that there are union workers that feel betrayed by these agreements and realize exactly what they’re for—to help unions expand their power and membership, not to actually help workers.

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Well, you know, Australia. Priorities are priorities.

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German soldiers were forced to leave a four-week Nato military exercise in Norway after 12 days after using up all their overtime.

Currently, military personnel are allotted a 41-hour working week where overtime cannot be compensated by additional income but with corresponding free time.

Soldiers have complained to the German parliamentary watchdog that they are spending entire days doing nothing due to the country’s working restrictions.

Read it. And watch the video.

Romanian citizens took to the streets yesterday to protest a mega-mosque planned for Bucharest. The sentiments of the demonstrators may be summed up this way: “We fought the Ottomans for eight hundred years — we don’t want any mosques!”

Seems reasonable.

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Many of psychology’s concepts relating to the negative aspects of the human experience have expanded their meanings so that the now encompass a much broader range of phenomena than before, according to University of Melbourne pscyhologist Nick Haslam. In his article, “Concept Creep: Psychology’s Expanding Concepts of Harm and Pathology,” Haslam focuses specifically on the expansion of the concepts of abuse, bullying, trauma, mental disorder, addiction, and prejudice. These concepts have undergone both “vertical” and “horizontal” expansion over the past few decades. By vertical, Haslam the concepts meaning is less stringent and covers milder variants of the phenomenon to which it initially referred. Horizontal expansion occurs when the concept is applied in a new context.

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Haven’t seen much coverage of this.

Over the weekend a sensational spy saga appeared in the media, one that the U.S. Navy managed to keep out of the headlines for the last eight months. The Department of the Navy revealed that a career officer has been sitting in a brig in Norfolk, Virginia for months, suspected of espionage on behalf of a foreign power. Although the indictment was heavily redacted, it was obvious that the accused has done serious damage to our national security, not least because the charges—including communicating secret information “relating to the national defense to representatives of a foreign government”—could carry the death penalty.

It did not take long for reporters to uncover that the country the suspect stands accused of spying for is China, and the officer in custody is himself of Chinese origin. Neither of these facts can be considered shocking by those familiar with counterintelligence. Beijing spies aggressively on the United States, especially our navy, which is the major obstacle to China achieving its strategic goals in East Asia, while they mainly stick to their ethnic milieu in espionage. Indeed, Chinese intelligence operations against America that do not involve persons of Chinese origin or extraction are very much the exception.

The accused is Edward Lin, a career Navy officer, a lieutenant commander (equivalent to a major in our other armed services) and a naval flight officer. A graduate of the Naval War College who served as a navy liaison to Congress, his career was clearly going places. Particularly troubling is the fact that Mr. Lin spent much of that career assigned to maritime reconnaissance units, in other words squadrons that fly spy planes. He was assigned to very secret special units that collect signals intelligence from modified P-3 Orion patrol aircraft. In other words, Mr. Lin had to be a goldmine for Beijing, since he could reveal highly classified information regarding what the navy and American intelligence know about China.

Where’s a little profiling when you really need it?

Ties of ethnicity and foreign affinity are legitimate grounds for security inquiry. Countries like China, Iran and Russia, top spy threats all, routinely try to co-opt their nationals who have emigrated to the United States. Yet the mind boggles at the perversity of a navy security system that denies clearances to American Jewish dentists who join the service out of patriotism, but have relatives in Israel, yet allow dishonest Iranian immigrants to work on secret programs for 30 years. Something is very wrong here.

Indeed.

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

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“Where’s the beef?” asked a 1980s Wendy’s commercial, suggesting its burgers offered more hamburger than those of its fast-food rivals. The well-traveled phrase popped up during an April 4 hearing in the Legislature on the finances of the state’s high-speed rail project.

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Hinga Mbogo is a Kenyan immigrant who has owned Hinga’s Automotive Company in Dallas for 30 years. But because car repair shops are inconsistent with the local government’s vision for an arts district, he may be forced to close. Even worse, there is no legal obligation for Dallas to compensate Mbogo for his property.

The saga began back in 2005 with Planned Development District 298. The city rezoned Ross Avenue, home of Hinga’s, and made car repair shops illegal there. All other mechanics in the area have left as a result.

…

Because this is considered a simple zoning change rather than eminent domain—that is, the government’s “right” to expropriate private property for public use—Dallas does not even have to compensate the business owners affected.

Because Dallas is a Big City, that means (even in Texas) it is run by Democrats, who operate it to suit themselves and their rich hipster friends, which is what leads to such Liberal Fascist policies.

I’m happy to live in a nice Republican suburb.

Heather Mac Donald turns over a rock.

Feminists incessantly harp about a phantom “rape culture” in the United States and other Western countries. On New Year’s Eve 2016, Northern European cities experienced an outbreak of the real thing—and the opponents of patriarchy went silent. It turns out that a more powerful force exists on the left than feminist victimology: multiculturalism.

My, what a surprise.

As revelers gathered in the central square of Cologne, Germany, for the traditional New Year’s Silvesternacht celebrations, thousands of North African and Middle Eastern males started throwing firecrackers into the crowd and attacking passersby. They pickpocketed and robbed males and females, but they directed most of their violence against women: grabbing their breasts and buttocks, inserting their fingers into the women’s vaginas, and, in a few instances, raping them, while shouting sexual insults. A total of 653 victims filed reports with the police.

…

German police and political leaders covered up the violence for days. A Cologne police-force press release originally reported that the Silvesternacht celebrations had been peaceful, though officers had witnessed the attacks. Police employees are “afraid of talking about these things in the context of the immigration debate today,” a Stockholm police spokesman told the Guardian, in reference to Sweden’s experience with Muslim sexual attacks on New Year’s Eve and at a music festival in 2014.

Eventually, however, news of the assaults leaked out, and the most surprising cover-up of all began. Leading feminists across the continent and in Great Britain either ignored the incidents entirely or distorted their significance beyond recognition. Silence was justified on the grounds that acknowledging the attacks would encourage opposition to the mass Muslim immigration that had engulfed Europe over the previous year. (German chancellor Angela Merkel accelerated that migration by declaring in August 2015 that her country would accept all Syrian asylum-seekers who made it in to her country.) Feminists were “finding it difficult to speak up about the event because of concerns it might be used to encourage aggression against refugees,” explained British journalist Jessica Abrahams. When feminists were cornered into addressing the violence, they tied themselves into knots trying to change the subject back to their favorite topic: Western white-male patriarchy. “The problem of sexualized violence has already existed here for some time and can’t simply be ‘deported,’” said German feminist Anne Wizorek to Der Spiegel. “It cannot be allowed to become the standard in gender debates that only male migrants are considered to be those responsible [for sexual violence].” In other words, the New Year’s assaults were continuous with the routine terror inflicted by German men on German women.

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Much like Helen Thomas.

Speaking truth to stupidity.

The money for an increased minimum wage has got to come from somewhere, and there are only three places from which it can come: investors, in the form of lower profits; customers, in the form of higher prices; or workers, in the form of fewer jobs. Which group pays for the minimum wage hike depends on how competitive the marketplace is.

If competition for investment funds is intense, as is often the case, businesses will resist cutting investors’ profits. If competition for customers is fierce, as is nearly always the case, businesses will do almost anything not to raise prices. This leaves only the workers. There are always exceptions, but historically, firms have financed increases in the minimum wage by laying off minimum wage workers.

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Although the government disagrees, keeping it a ‘controlled substance’. One wonders sometimes who the government things they work for; they certainly don’t give any evidence of thinking that they work for the people who elected them.

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Genes, like people, have families — lineages that stretch back through time, all the way to a founding member. That ancestor multiplied and spread, morphing a bit with each new iteration.

For most of the last 40 years, scientists thought that this was the primary way new genes were born — they simply arose from copies of existing genes. The old version went on doing its job, and the new copy became free to evolve novel functions.

Certain genes, however, seem to defy that origin story. They have no known relatives, and they bear no resemblance to any other gene. They’re the molecular equivalent of a mysterious beast discovered in the depths of a remote rainforest, a biological enigma seemingly unrelated to anything else on earth.

The mystery of where these orphan genes came from has puzzled scientists for decades. But in the past few years, a once-heretical explanation has quickly gained momentum — that many of these orphans arose out of so-called junk DNA, or non-coding DNA, the mysterious stretches of DNA between genes. “Genetic function somehow springs into existence,” said David Begun, a biologist at the University of California, Davis.

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I’m sure Vegas has a line on when California implodes.

Even Jerry Brown admits that California’s newly mandated $15 an hour minimum wage is economically unsound, but we’re doing it anyway, Because Justice! Or something.

But it may not matter much, because California businesses may not have enough . . . electricity. Two headlines from the past week tell the story. First, you may have heard about a massive natural gas leak out near Newhall over the past few months. This was not a leaking production field, but was a huge underground gas storage formation that Southern California Edison draws from in the summer to run natural gas “peaker” plants when electricity demand soars during hot weather. Now that the leak is filled, the state has ordered than the underground formation not be refilled for the time being.

Guess what that natural gas was used for?

Such geniuses we have running California. Thank goodness we’re building high-speed rail. It’ll only take three times as long at twice the price of Southwest Air Lines to get up and down the state.

P.S. The necessity of conventional backup power for “renewables” is why the various mandates for expansion of renewable energy won’t translate into commensurate reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. It will be an amusing day when the data comes in showing that renewables have failed to reduce emissions, and everyone will be scratching their heads why. Green Weenies all around.

Yup.

Read it.

Not mentioned: How many illegal immigrants (excuse me, ‘refugees’) hitched a ride on their way to jihad in Molenbeek because robot drivers aren’t built to notice such things (that would be raaaaaaacist.)

Read it.

Tell the truth — how many errors can your brain correct with a splitting headache? I mean, really.

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Oh, it’s all about that cash, ’bout that cash, no Shari’ah….

Read it.

James Henry, a former chief economist at consultancy McKinsey and an expert on tax havens, has conducted groundbreaking new research for the Tax Justice Network campaign group – sifting through data from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and private sector analysts to construct an alarming picture that shows capital flooding out of countries across the world and disappearing into the cracks in the financial system.

Now, if you think that research conducted by any organization called ‘Tax Justice Network campaign group’ would find anything else, or that Voice of the Crust The Guardian would publish it, I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn I’m just sure you want to buy. (Does anybody actually believe this drivel? Somebody must, or they wouldn’t spend good money — well, socialist money — publishing it.)

Note the automatic assumption that money ‘flooding offshore’ isn’t ‘trickling down’. From people who spend their daylight hours bleeding over all of the Pitiful Poor People of the Third World, you’d think they would be delighted. But I guess not.

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The most famous violin in the world has never been heard. What’s more, it gained its reputation by being invisible. “The Messiah” sits in its glass display case just outside the Print Room of the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology in Oxford. Measuring just less than 23 inches, with a 133/16- inch body, the famous fiddle soon grew gargantuan in stature not because of its sound but because of its story. In fact, the conundrum is that nobody knows how the old fiddle actually sounds. A big part of its mystique lies in the fact that, as the only Stradivari in existence still preserved in pristine condition, it has virtually never been played!

The Messiah is not unlike clockmaker John Harrison’s H-4, the last of the four famous clocks that reside in the Old Royal Observatory at Greenwich, England, in the place where east meets west on the prime meridian—zero degrees longitude. All four Harrison clocks—H-1, H-2, H-3, and H-4—keep accurate time and so made the determination of longitude possible. But H-4 is the only celebrated clock of the four that never runs. As Dava Sobel explains in Longitude: “It could run, if curators would allow it to, but they demur, on the grounds that H-4 enjoys something of the status of a sacred relic or a priceless work of art that must be preserved for posterity. To run it would be to ruin it.”

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I wasn’t.

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The term “cuckoldry” isn’t strictly confined to duplicitous women duping husbands/boyfriends into believing the kid is theirs when it’s some other guy’s. Consider the marked increase in single motherhood since the Sexual Revolution; the statistic for abortion, the declining marriage rate and the fact that now, in westernized society, and the majority of births (close to 60%) are born to unwed mothers.

Now consider the social imperatives and zeitgeist of the past 70 years that promote women’s Hypergamous choices to the point that every woman’s sexual strategy and breeding choices are legislatively mandated to be supported. Men are mandated to support women’s breeding imperatives both directly and indirectly. Is that not the end purpose of cuckoldry?

Cuckoldry is implicative of far more than this woman’s narrow definition. And it’s narrow because women like Newitz are selling a salve to misdirect men in a larger society from considering that their cuckolding is really by and of their own volition. This is because men have been conditioned over the course of successive generations to think they are some kind of hero for ‘saving’ a woman from her own breeding decisions by directly or indirectly forgiving indiscretions and supporting and raising a child he didn’t father.

Just in case you thought Donald Trumpe was the worst thing you had to think about.

Attempting to calculate how much of the taxes you pay goes to support women whose ‘baby daddies’ are in the slammer is left as an exercise (in despair) for the reader.

Read it.

In the following post, adapted from his new book, Frank does a typically brainy thing. Since we’ve all heard for years about how the Democrats have been stopped from truly pursuing their political program by Republican experts in political paralysis, he turns to a rare set of places where, in fact, the Republicans were incapable of getting in the way and… well, let him tell the story.

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According to Llanberis Mountain Rescue, a 30-year-old man was part of a group of three who were climbing the Crib Goch ridge – which means “red ridge” in Welsh and is over 3,000ft above sea level – when the incident happened at around 1pm on Sunday.

It is believed the group had already turned back due to heavy snow.

Think of it as evolution in action.

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By now, virtually everyone has heard that “97% of scientists agree: Climate change is real, manmade and dangerous.” Even if you weren’t one of his 31 million followers who received this tweet from President Obama, you most assuredly have seen it repeated everywhere as scientific fact.

The correct representation is “yes,” “some,” and “no.” Yes, climate change is real. There has never been a period in Earth’s history when the climate has not changed somewhere, in one way or another.

Check it out.

You really have to work in IT to get full value from these but they ought to be sufficiently funny for everybody to enjoy.

My favorite:

Song of the Crust.

Read it.

How much fun must it be to work for the CIA?

I have been in the wrong business all my life….

And got an Ugandan instead.

I don’t even have to say anything, do I?

Read it.

Someday, when someone says you’re the very picture of health, they won’t mean your health.

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“The ship? Great God, where is the ship?,” wondered the fictional sailors crewing Captain Ahab’s mighty Pequod, right after the legendary whale Moby Dick rammed the vessel, tearing it asunder. The sudden, apocalyptic climax of Herman Melville’s iconic novel is rich with meaning, and nestled inside it is a deep, enduring scientific question: Could a sperm whale like Moby Dick actually ram a ship apart, and survive?

The answer, according to research from Olga Panagiotopoulou at the University of Queensland, is a resounding “probably.”

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

Read it.

You know — you grow….

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Sorry, when I think ‘Roman’ I don’t think ‘cavalry’.

Watch it.

I am not making this up.

Read it.

That would suggest a degree of long-range planning that he has singularly failed to exhibit since he left Harvard Law School, so I am reluctant to believe it.

The US reminds me on one of those mafia kingpins, who force other drug dealers out of a neighborhood, so that it can monopolize the business. For years, the US has been the leader in trying to close down tax havens. We’ve strong-armed other countries into providing us with information from secret bank accounts. And now the long campaign is paying off, as the US reigns supreme as the world’s most effective and secretive tax haven.

Read it.

Fats and cholesterol that build up along the insides of blood vessels can limit the flow of blood around the heart, causing heart attacks or strokes. To treat this condition, called atherosclerosis, millions of Americans take drugs every day—the most popular of these, statins, alone cost up to $13 billion per year in 2014, and these don’t work for every patient. Now scientists have discovered that a compound already approved by the FDA can dissolve away this buildup in the blood vessels more effectively than existing treatments. The researchers published their study in Science Translational Medicine.

The compound is called beta-cyclodextrin, and it’s already used in some pharmaceuticals to bind the active drug to fatty acids in the body where it is most needed.

Now, here’s the good news: beta-cyclodextrin is also the main ingredient used to make powdered alcohol. Pour booze into a heap of cyclodextrin, and the alcohol molecules cling to the ring-shaped cyclodextrin molecules, making a fluffy dry powder that packs a punch.

Isn’t that special.

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I am not making this up.

Oprah is probably on her way over as you read this.

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The sort of people who would do a Yelp review of a church are the sort who are looking for a ‘church home’.

Any resemblance between them and real Christians is only in their own minds, if I may so stress the language.

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How did these people get into college? That’s not even a joke, I really want to know.

And this is not some ass-wipe State U, but Stanford.

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Progressives place a bunch of constraints of the lives of the working poor, then they expect to be hoisted triumphantly into office on the shoulders of people they have harmed. When a worker making $800 on 50 hours of work has to go home and tell her family she is now making $600 on 40 hours of work because new federal rules on overtime pay make the 50 hour arrangement uneconomical, she doesn’t need to understand the theoretical subtleties of economics to understand what’s happened. Bernstein and the president’s other supporters believe workers will be pleased about this constraint. They seem to think that someone making $15/hour for 50 hours of work will now have the same schedule, but with an extra $75 for the week. Or, alternatively, that they will be reduced to 40 hours and $600, and be happy about it, because they were only coerced into those extra hours by their employers. And, this has the added bonus of creating more jobs, to replace the lost hours. (I wonder if anyone has ever written on the troubling trend of workers who have to hold multiple jobs to get by.)

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Does anyone read Kafka anymore? I doubt that high school and college students take him up as faithfully as we once did, but the bureaucratic tyrants running the Department of Education in the Obama administration appear to have drawn on Kafka’s Trial as a how-to manual rather than a modernist warning of a nightmarish future.

Why do we even have a Department of Education? It’s not as if they ever educate anybody. Oh, right, Jimmuh Cahtuh. ‘Nuff said.

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They’ve managed to sequence a bit of autosomal DNA from the Atapuerca skeletons, about 430,000 years old, confirming that they are on the Neanderthal branch.

Among other things, this supports the slow mutation rate, one compatible with what we see in modern family trios, but also with the fossil record.

This means that the Pygmies, and probably the Bushmen also, split off from the rest of the human race about 300,000 years ago. Call them Paleoafricans.

…

This means that language is older than some had thought, a good deal older. It also means that people with language are quite capable of going a quarter of a million years without generating much technological advance – without developing the ability to push aside archaic humans, for example. Of course, people with Williams syndrome have language, and you can’t send them into the kitchen and rely on them to bring back a fork. Is the sophistication of Bushman language – this means the concepts they can and do convey, not the complexity of the grammar – comparable with that of other populations? I don’t know. As far as I can see, one of the major goals of modern anthropology is to make sure that nobody knows. Or that they know things that aren’t so.

Read it. And watch the video.

The armor plating shown in the video is made in part from composite metal foams, or CMFs, which are both lighter and stronger than traditional metal plating used in body and vehicle armor.

…

The bullet used in the demonstration video is a 7.62 x 63 millimeter M2 armor-piercing projectile, and was fired using standard testing procedures established by the Department of Justice for evaluating armor types.

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Calling it a ‘university’ is of course an absurdity.

It is run by a man who used a recent sermon to invoke a Hadith commonly espoused by Muslim terrorists to kill Jews for causing “corruption in the land.” Waleed Idris al-Meneesey also has written that Muslims should place sharia law above “man-made” law.

During a November sermon, al-Meneesy referred to the Hadith, a saying from Islam’s prophet Muhammad, describing how Jews had been punished by God repeatedly for “corruption.”

“When the Children of Israel returned to cause corruption in the time of our Prophet Muhammad,” al-Meneesy said in a translation by the Investigative Project on Terrorism, “and they disbelieved him, God destroyed him at his hand. In any case, God Almighty has promised them destruction whenever they cause corruption.”

Islam is a plot by Satan in an attempt to destroy the Jews, God’s Chosen People. Just in case you were wondering. (Explains a lot, doesn’t it?)

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I think it’s fair to say that the Islamic Republic Iran is a serious enemy of the United States. The powers that be in Iran regularly proclaim their ardent desire for the death of the United States, and they take action aimed at bringing it about in one way or another.

With the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, President Obama has teamed up with the mullahs to finance their nuclear program and delay its fruition for a modest period of years if everything works out as indicated. Iran takes the money and dissolution of the sanctions regime up front. It can pull the plug on the deal at any time it sees fit.

The Constitution says ‘Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.’ Connecting the dots is left as an exercise for the reader.

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It should be awesome, we figure: our first sighting, not only of the She-Deity, but also of her millionaire internet-drone advance guard – boyish CEO putti of Cupertino and Mountain View, who have begun (it is rumoured) to flutter Democratically about her. Young-Titan Tesla guys with entrepreneurial dream-teeth and a no doubt healthy obsession with other men.(They’re good boys at heart: their artisanal leather wallets are made from 100 per cent organic Niman Ranch grain-fed beef.) The rail-thin wives should be there, too, of course: agile, urgent, newly hatched Clintonistas, vaguely dissatisfied with everything, but keeping it real enough with teal-green silicon eyeballs and pricey MRS degrees from Stanford. Not to mention the usual klatsch of ruling-class hangers-on: radical Botoxers; Pilates Instructors for Peace and Zero Body Fat; members of the pedicure-rights community – all Teetering-for-Hillary in black sheath dresses and fuck-me pumps.

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In politics, a dog whistle is a rhetorical device–an oral expression susceptible to two interpretations, one straightforward and one, metaphorically speaking, at a higher frequency. In his 2004 speech accepting the Democratic presidential nomination, John Kerry* asserted: “Let’s never misuse for political purposes the most precious document in American history, the Constitution of the United States.” A platitude to the ordinary ear was an endorsement of same-sex marriage at 30 kilohertz.

…

The thing we adore about these dog-whistle kerfuffles is that the people who react to the whistle always assume it’s intended for somebody else. The whole point of the metaphor is that if you can hear the whistle, you’re the dog.

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

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Have you ever wondered if you are a progressive? I’ve come up with a two-part test. If you believe in both of the following propositions, then you qualify as a American progressive, circa 2016:

Proposition #1: Free trade with low wage countries like Mexico steals lots of jobs from American workers. There is no way a Mexican-American worker paid $7.25/hour in El Paso can compete with an actual Mexican worker making $3.50/hour in Cuidad Juarez. NAFTA led to a giant sucking sound of jobs flowing south across the Rio Grande.

Proposition #2: Free trade between Texas and California does not cost jobs. A Mexican-American worker making $15 hour in Fresno can easily compete with a Mexican-American worker making $7.25/hour in El Paso, because there are studies “proving” that lower minimum wages in one state do not steal jobs from neighboring states.

In other words, trade steals jobs when it occurs across international boundaries, but not when it occurs across domestic boundaries.