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Of course, it will take 20 years to reverse the laws that make them illegal….

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With a single shot to the brain, researchers can rid rodents of all symptoms of the disease for months. The injection, a relatively low dose of a tissue growth factor protein called fibroblast growth factor 1 (FGF1), appears to reset powerful neural networks that can control the amount of sugar in the blood.

So far, it’s not completely clear how exactly FGF1 does that, researchers report in Nature Medicine. Early experiments found that FGF1 didn’t appear to lower blood sugar levels in some of the most obvious ways, such as curbing the rodents’ appetite and spurring sustained weight loss. Nevertheless, because FGF1 is naturally present in human brains, as well as those of rodents, researchers are hopeful that the lucky shot may translate into a useful treatment.

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Last week, the majority of Massachusetts state legislators voted in favor of a constitutional amendment to enact a “millionaire’s tax.” The organization, Raise Up, collected the necessary signatures needed in order to bring the millionaire’s tax measure to the legislature. This proposal would apply a 4.0 percent surtax on income above $1 million, which would be levied on top of the Bay State’s 5.1 percent flat income tax. The good news is, despite legislative action last week, enactment of such a tax hike is far from imminent. The Boston Globe’s Evan Horowitz explains:

“For one thing, backers need something more than a new law; they need a constitutional amendment — because at present the state constitution doesn’t allow for differential tax rates.”

An 80 percent tax surge would hit small businesses especially hard, as the majority of small businesses file under the individual income tax system. The IRS accounts that more than 3,000 small businesses in Massachusetts report incomes over $1 million. The proposed millionaire’s tax would severely burden small business and stymie future economic growth for the Bay State.

Plenty of room in Texas still.

Read it.

I am actually curious as to how people like this actually get admitted to college.

For sure I support the notion that they are all wet.

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Tomorrow, at a church in Hamburg, a Protestant pastor and an imam will officiate at a service to commemorate a young man who joined the jihad and died in Syria last year.

I am not making this up.

Read it.

The importance of HSAs is why Congress should pass H.R. 5324 and S. 2980, the Health Savings Account Expansion Act of 2016, legislation introduced this week by Congressman Dave Brat (R-Va.) and Senator Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.). This legislation contains a number of important reforms that will make HSAs even better.

First, the legislation more than doubles HSA contribution limits. Current HSA contribution limits are $3,350 for a single filer and $6,750 for a joint filer, and this legislation increases that to $9,000 for single filer and $18,000 for joint filers per year.

Second, the HSA expansion act lifts Obamacare restrictions on over the counter purchases and penalties placed on certain withdrawals.

Third, the bill allows HSA funds to be used to pay premiums and direct primary care expenses.

Lastly, superfluous regulatory requirements would be streamlined with the high deductible health plan mandate eliminated.

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Sure, put the government in charge. What could go wrong?

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In most cases, investing in low-tax nations isn’t illegal; the problem for high-tax nations and those at the World Bank is that it’s getting in the way of maximum tax extractions for countries such as France. They also claim that their fight against tax competition is a fight against tax evasion. However—as we have seen after the release of the Panama Papers, which were stolen from Panama-based firms—for the most part, taxpayers are pretty honest. Politicians, not so much.

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For such a nondescript city in Iraq, Fallujah has name recognition beyond its importance. In Western military circles at least the name is synonymous with the 2004 battle that turned into the bloodiest urban assault undertaken by the US military since Vietnam.

This time around, though the circumstances are different, it is once again a fight against Sunni insurgents who have had the benefit of long periods to establish defensive positions above and below ground. Regardless of the number of fighters inside the city, the urban environment offers the defenders many advantages, and diminishes the effectiveness of some of the attackers’ advantages, particularly air power.

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Hey, that’s what government agencies do … for your protection, of course.

Indigenous communities have been sustained by thousands of years of food knowledge. But recent federal food safety rules could cripple those traditional systems and prevent the growth of agricultural economies in Indian Country, according to advocates and attorneys. Of the 567 tribal nations in the United States, only a handful have adopted laws that address food production and processing. Without functioning laws around food, tribes engaged in anything from farming to food handling and animal health are ceding power to state and federal authorities.

To protect tribal food systems, those advocates and attorneys are taking the law into their own hands, literally, by writing comprehensive food codes that can be adopted by tribes and used to effectively circumvent federal food safety codes. Because tribes retain sovereignty—complicated and sometimes limited though it may be—they can assert an equal right with the federal government to establish regulations for food handling.

We didn’t eat tacos in Ireland, so I refuse to eat them here.

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Several visitors to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art this week were fooled into thinking a pair of glasses set on the floor by a 17-year-old prankster was a postmodern masterpiece.

Khayatan previously had similar success with a baseball cap and a bin.

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Just when I thought our elected representatives had reached the apex of moronic ideas. Senators Angus King (I-ME) and Joe Manchin (D-WV) want to tax opioid medicines–needed by very ill and disabled patients to treat severe pain–to pay for addiction treatment programs.

(I-ME) means ‘Idiot-Maine’.

Isn’t this just typical of our political leadership these days? Make medicine more expensive for those who need it–or for insurance companies that fund the treatment–to pay for the care of people who abuse those medicines.

Yeah, that’s a pretty fair statement. Witness the notorious ‘medical devices tax’.

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Once upon a time, way back in 2003, the federal government set up a list where Americans could register their phone numbers, and telemarketers could no longer call them. It was the National Do Not Call Registry, and it was glorious.

And it really worked—and then, one day, sometime around 2010 or 2011, it didn’t.

…

The problem is not that the government isn’t enforcing the Do Not Call list. It’s not that it isn’t upholding laws banning automated calls to cellphones. Instead, it’s that telecom giants could take more steps to make life better for customers, and they haven’t. And to top it all off, their lack of aggressive action has allowed the government to take the bulk of the blame. “If you want to be mad at someone,” says Tim Marvin, the campaign manager for the Consumers Union’s End Robocalls campaign, “call your phone company.”

Of course Slate, Voice of the Crust, can’t blame government; that would be contrary to the Narrative.

So how do we end the madness? The Consumers Union, the famed consumer advocacy organization, claims it would be possible for phone companies to offer their consumers easy access to services such as Nomorobo, which works on VoIP lines to block most robocalls. Then there are apps that would make a serious dent in robocalls to cellphones—which is a good thing, since the vast majority of automated calls to cellphones are illegal thanks to a 1991 law, whether or not the number is listed on the Do Not Call registry.

Noborobo is available for free to consumers right now. Why do companies need to ‘offer’ something?

Read it.

Some 336 meters into the cave, the caver stumbled across something extraordinary—a vast chamber where several stalagmites had been deliberately broken. Most of the 400 pieces had been arranged into two rings—a large one between 4 and 7 metres across, and a smaller one just 2 metres wide. Others had been propped up against these donuts. Yet others had been stacked into four piles. Traces of fire were everywhere, and there was a mass of burnt bones.

These weren’t natural formations, and they weren’t the work of bears. They were built by people.

Recognizing the site’s value, the caver brought in archaeologist Francois Rouzaud. Using carbon-dating, Rouzaud estimated that a burnt bear bone found within the chamber was 47,600 years old, which meant that the stalagmite rings were older than any known cave painting. It also meant that they couldn’t have been the work of Homo sapiens. Their builders must have been the only early humans in the south of France at the time: Neanderthals.

Dan Brown, I have your next best-seller.

Check it out.

I am not making this up.

The end times are upon us.

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Hey, it could happen. You know what sheep are like.

Swansea Councillor Ioan Richard said the sheep had already been causing havoc in Rhydypandy, Swansea and one had previously been killed after straying into the road.

Mr Richard told the South Wales Evening Post: “There is already a flock of sheep roaming the village causing a nuisance.

“They are getting in people’s gardens and one even entered a bungalow and left a mess in the bedroom.

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The lawyers said they “are concerned that snippets or soundbites of the deposition may be publicized in a way that exploits Ms. Mills’ image and voice in an unfair and misleading manner.”

Since that’s exactly what they’d do if the tables were turned, of course they’re concerned. Those who spin for their supper are always on their guard against being spun.

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Victories against the Obama regulatory juggernaut are rare, and thus all the more worthy of note. Congratulations, then, to Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt and Republicans in Congress over the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s decision on May 10 to drop its quest to list the lesser prairie chicken as an endangered species.

Fish and Wildlife’s decision in 2014 to list was never about helping that particular range bird. It was part of an attempted federal land grab by green activists. Using a strategy called “sue and settle,” these groups propose species for protected status under the Endangered Species Act, then sue the Obama Administration to follow through. The agency then settles the suits on terms that the greens want.

Their goal in the case of the prairie chicken was to impose development restrictions on private landowners in five western states. Because the prairie chicken’s range is so wide, the greens hoped to shut down oil and gas drilling in much of the West, especially and around the fossil-fuel rich Permian Basin.

Read it.

Well, well, well. I’m pretty sure she has qualified immunity, but these days  you never know.

Read it. And watch the video.

Last night in Albuquerque, rioters attacked a Donald Trump rally. Several tried to disrupt the event and had to be removed from the crowd. Most remained outside, throwing rocks at the hall and burning objects at policemen.

This was characterized by the Drive-By Media as ‘protests’. Sorry, but it was a RIOT.

Thomas Sowell looks at the new clerisy.

Two themes seem to dominate Commencement speeches. One is shameless self-advertising by people in government, or in related organizations supported by the taxpayers or donors, saying how nobler it is to be in “public service” than working in business or other “selfish” activities.

In other words, the message is that it is morally superior to be in organizations consuming output produced by others than to be in organizations which produce that output. Moreover, being morally one-up is where it’s at.

The second theme of many Commencement speakers, besides flattering themselves that they are in morally superior careers, is to flatter the graduates that they are now equipped to go out into the world as “leaders” who can prescribe how other people should live.

In other words, young people, who in most cases have never had either the sobering responsibility and experience of being self-supporting adults, are to tell other people — who have had that responsibility and that experience for years — how they should live their lives.

In so far as the graduates go into “public service” in government, whether as bureaucrats or as aides to politicians or judges, they are to help order other people around.

Read it.

Why abolish it when you can ignore it?

…

Accepting the National Rifle Association’s endorsement last week, Donald Trump warned that Hillary Clinton “wants to abolish the Second Amendment.” CNN corrected him, noting that Clinton “has never called for the abolition of the 2nd Amendment.”

Although that’s technically true, Clinton has done what amounts to the same thing. She has interpreted the Second Amendment so narrowly that it imposes no practical limits on gun control laws, and that interpretation is sure to guide her Supreme Court nominations if she is elected president.

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A Florida Planned Parenthood abortion business was evacuated Monday as seven people were taken to the hospital for medical evaluation and hazmat teams responded to emergency calls over the discovery of an “unknown substance.” It turned out to be baby food.

Sarasota Police Department spokesperson Genevieve Judge said 38 people inside the Planned Parenthood clinic were evacuated and decontaminated at the scene, reports Associated Press. A local school was also placed on lockdown. Some individuals reported shortness of breath in response to the substance, and some were carried out on stretchers.

Yeah, I can see where they would fail to recognize it.

Steve Sailer reminds us of some history.

Clearly, Trump is accusing the Mexican ruling class—the politicians and billionaires like Carlos Slim, the largest single shareholder of The New York Times—of dumping their surplus population on the United States.

…

Just as the Saudi royal family protects itself by dispatching its young Muslim fanatics to preach jihad in Europe, Castañeda asserted that Mexico’s ferocious inequality is made tolerable only by illegal emigration to the U.S. Without the open border, Mexico would dissolve into another revolution as vicious as the one a century ago that killed at least a million and sent refugees pouring into Texas.

…

You might think that this question of what would happen in Mexico would be a subject of intense concern to American elites. Instead it doesn’t really seem to come up much.

One reason that nobody in the U.S. pays attention to Mexico is because Mexican elites have wanted it that way.

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Two years after the movement process began the only land-based Aegis anti-aircraft/missile system in existence (in New Jersey) has been taken apart, packed into 60 large (40 foot) shipping containers and sent to Romania where Aegis where it has been be put back together, tested and became operational in May 2016 as an anti-missile system. This took six months longer than expected but this was seen as a possibility because this was the first time land-based Aegis was disassembled and moved and then set up in a combat zone. The U.S. is building two more ground-based Aegis systems; one in Poland and one in Hawaii. All three, including new Aegis components for two of them and needed missiles (24 per location) and launching hardware for all of them will cost $2.3 billion. That’s nearly $800 million per system.

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Heather Mac Donald, writing in the Wall Street Journal, describes the crime wave that is sweeping the nation, and attributes much of it to the Ferguson effect. She notes that even some who initially denied the Ferguson effect now admit that the phenomenon is real.

Mac Donald points to Richard Rosenfeld, a criminologist at the University of Missouri, St. Louis, who was an early and influential critic of the Ferguson effect. Rosenfeld changed his mind after taking a closer look at the worsening crime statistics. “The only explanation that gets the timing right is a version of the Ferguson effect,” Rosenfeld said recently. “These aren’t flukes or blips, this is a real increase.”

Mac Donald also points to a study in the Journal of Criminal Justice. It found that homicides in the 12 months after the Michael Brown shooting rose significantly in cities with large black populations and already high rates of violence. This is precisely what the Ferguson effect would predict.

No peace, no justice.

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Masalha went on a stabbing spree which killed U.S. citizen Taylor Force and injured 11 others, before being killed by Israeli police.

After the attack, Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah faction and the PA glorified Masalha as “the heroic Martyr.”

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Oberlin College’s activist community is ready to call it quits. Progressive students are dropping out of college, citing academic and emotional difficulties stemming from their mental health problems and overall disgust with the toxic culture on campus.

That’s according to a fascinating piece for The New Yorker by Nathan Heller, who interviewed a number of exhausted activists at Oberlin. They perceive that other students, faculty members, and the administration are completely against them, and have made it impossible for them to live on campus. Some are dropping out.

And their parents are paying how much for this school?

Salon descends into Pravda territory.

The neofascist reaction, the force behind Trump, has come about because of the extreme disembeddedness of the economy from social relations. The neoliberal economy has become pure abstraction; as has the market, as has the state, there is no reality to any of these things the way we have classically understood them. Americans, like people everywhere rising up against neoliberal globalization (in Britain, for example, this takes the form of Brexit, or exit from the European Union), want a return of social relations, or embeddedness, to the economy.

The Trump alliance desires to remake the world in their own image, just as the class representing neoliberal globalization has insisted on doing so. The difference couldn’t be starker. Capitalism today is placeless, locationless, nameless, faceless, while Trump is talking about hauling corporations back to where they belong, in their home countries, fix them in place by means of rewards and retribution, like one handles a recalcitrant child.

The whole thing reads like an undergraduate Gender Studies paper. They actually pay people money to write this stuff.

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I am not making this up.

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I am not making this up.

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I am not making this up.

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More than $22 billion per year in new regulatory costs were imposed on Americans last year, pushing the total burden for the Obama years to exceed $100 billion annually.

Hey, it’s what Democrats do.

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Every time the government makes a new law or regulation (nowadays, pretty much the same thing) restricting the freedom of employers and employees to set the terms of the employment, it enables more ‘black market’ off-the-books relations.

You’d think that Prohibition might have taught them some basic economics, but apparently not.

Read it.

News reports often make it seem like gerrymandering, and redistricting in general, as being a simple matter of politicians being evil to a greater or lesser extent, when it’s actually much more interesting that. Similarly, it’s something that mathematicians and computer scientists often see and think is trivial – and there are actually a lot of interesting problems in gerrymandering to which math and CS can be applied that definitely aren’t trivial, which I’m always excited to share.

Glenn Reynolds blows the whistle.

But, of course, the CIA’s “accident” was only the latest in a long rash of “accidental” losses of incriminating information in this administration. The IRS — whose Tea Party-targeting scandal is now over 1,100 days old without anyone being charged or sent to jail — seems to have a habit of ”accidentally” destroying hard drives containing potentially incriminating evidence. It has done so in spite of court orders, in spite of Congressional inquiries and in spite of pretty much everyone’s belief that these “accidents” were actually the deliberate, illegal destruction of incriminating evidence to protect the guilty.

Then there’s Hillary’s email scandal, in which emails kept on a private unsecure server — presumably to avoid Freedom of Information Act disclosures — were deleted. Now emails from Hillary’s IT guy, who is believed to have set up the server, have gone poof.

“Destroy the evidence, and you’ve got it made,” said an old frozen dinner commercial. But now that appears to be the motto of the United States government.

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The “five second rule” – the urban food myth, ever-justifying your decision to eat a dropped tasty treat – does exist, according to two NASA engineers.

The 87 per cent of people who admitted they would happily eat food after it had fallen on the floor in a 2014 survey, will be pleased to know there is legitimate science behind the rule, although certain conditions do apply.

Speaking on the Science Channel’s The Quick and the Curious NASA engineers, Mark Rober and Mike Meacham, explained the amount of moisture in your food and the surface upon which it is dropped are major factors in how much bacteria it will pick up.

“The ‘five second rule’ is really the ’30 second moisture and surface rule’,” they say.

Watch it.

… we could all go home early.

Read it.

Well, thank goodness.

Among the slew of pop culture icons said to be afflicted with so-called Resting Bitch Face (alternatively known as Bitchy Resting Face), the vast majority are women, though Kanye West is among the male examples. All of them have been mocked by Internet commenters for having a certain unintentional expression when their faces are not in motion  — a look best described as vaguely annoyed, maybe a little judgy, perhaps slightly bored.

Hillary Clinton.

The cues are understated, yet the machine detects and interprets them the same way our human brains do, she said. “Something in the neutral expression of the face is relaying contempt, both to the software and to us.”

Yup, Hillary Clinton.

John C Wright ponders the Potter milieu.

Asking on a questionnaire whether one is open to diversity is like asking whether one likes raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens. And the caricature of conservatives as cretins who applaud deadly force and torture, intolerance and cruelty, is as much of a world make-believe as Voldemort himself.

Finding that no one in real life believes what bigoted leftists pretend conservatives believe does not mean most people lean left: it means leftists are bigots.

Well, yeah.

For better or worse, reality is conservative. Because of this, drama in any form tends to be conservative: readers still enjoy reading love stories and heroic adventures. Hence a book like Harry Potter, which is based on archetypes as old as cave paintings — wise men with long gray beards, evil serpents, trusted comrades, the unloved orphan (who, like Hercules or Moses, is chosen by fate to slay monsters or evil lords and save his people) — is innately conservative.

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Sure, why not, everybody else is.

A group called the Asian American Coalition for Education plans to file an official complaint tomorrow with the federal Department of Education and Department of Justice noting that Yale, Brown, and Dartmouth have “unlawfully discriminated” against Asian-Americans in their admissions policies.

The Coalition, “which is composed of more than 100 local, state and national organizations,” claims the colleges “have the lowest acceptance rate for Asian Americans,” and maintain quotas for the (racial) group.

It also points out that Asian-American enrollment at Yale has declined “despite the number of college-aged Asian-Americans more than doubling since 2011.”

Read it.

‘Introduces’? One of my fondest memories of Yale was stepping out of the shower spring term of my freshman year in Byers Hall and finding a young lady wrapped in a towel brushing her teeth at one of the sinks. This was 1975.

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Guess it didn’t work.

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Sauce for the goose….

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A test, administered on April 29 in Professor John Traxler’s Healthcare Economics class, told students that “[o]ne of the main functions of government is income redistribution,” then asked them to explain what the statement meant. The correct answer was C: “Taxing the wealthy and giving it to those in poverty.”

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IRS Commissioner John Koskinen will not appear at a Tuesday impeachment hearing examining allegations of his misconduct despite an invitation to testify from the House Judiciary Committee.

As reported by Politico, the IRS says the Commissioner Koskinen does not have time to “fully prepare” because he just returned from China. The agency claims that he was not given enough notice of the hearing, which was scheduled more than a week ago.

Hey, what does he need to prepare? An alibi? Either he did what they say he did or he didn’t; either way, he ought to know.

The hearing is the first step in examining findings from the House Oversight Committee, which last year called for Koskinen’s impeachment.

Following the revelations that the IRS had been applying improper, politically motivated scrutiny to tea party and conservative organizations, Koskinen was appointed head of the agency promising reform and transparency.

Guess it didn’t work.

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BLUF: American taxpayers ought not to have to pay to support a Third World kleptocracy.

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If Mohammed is the perfect Muslim that all Muslims are to emulate, and an imam in a mosque preaches jihad and a worshipper then commits jihad, is the imam’s speech protected religious speech or speech that incites violence which may not be protected by our constitution?

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Think of it as evolution in action.