Read it.

There are actually people out there (typically CEOs, who have private offices) who think that ‘open floor plan’ offices have some sort of positive benefit. They don’t.

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Cue Leftist asses being burned.

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Authorities charged a Hampshire College student with assaulting a member of Central Maine Community College’s basketball team over a dispute about cultural appropriation. Really.

The Hampshire student, 20-year-old Carmen Figueroa, allegedly started a fight because the basketball player had braided her hair in a manner that upset Figueroa. She walked up to the visiting player—during a basketball game—and demanded that the player remove the braids from her hair, according to masslive.com.

Figueroa is a female student of color. The basketball player was a member of the women’s team. Her ethnicity is not stated in news articles, though it seems likely she’s either white, or belongs to some other race whose members aren’t allowed to braid their hair Latina-style, according to Figueroa’s world view.

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President Donald Trump’s administration is walking out of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) — whose membership includes many states notorious for routinely violating human rights.

Long overdue. Cue hand-wringing and vapors from the Usual Suspects.

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

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Well, yeah. Especially if the Social Justice Warriors keep throwing poor people out of work by jacking up the minimum wage.

This past July, the BratWurst Bot, developed by the Forschungszentrum Informatik (FZI) Research Center for Information Technology in Karlsruhe, Germany, flawlessly took orders, cooked, and served over 200 meals for a salivating garden party crowd. “We had a few people at the party surprised that robotics can do something like this,” Arne Roennau, the department manager of robotics at FZI, said. “People are not aware that technology has come this far.”

…

As fast-food employees continue their Fight for $15, restaurant corporations have begun to look for, and invest in, technological replacements.

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The world is divided into people who sit on the floor and those who sit on chairs.

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For centuries, cellulose has formed the basis of the world’s most abundantly printed-on material: paper. Now, thanks to new research at MIT, it may also become an abundant material to print with — potentially providing a renewable, biodegradable alternative to the polymers currently used in 3-D printing materials.

“Cellulose is the most abundant organic polymer in the world,” says MIT postdoc Sebastian Pattinson, lead author of a paper describing the new system in the journal Advanced Materials Technologies. The paper is co-authored by associate professor of mechanical engineering A. John Hart, the Mitsui Career Development Professor in Contemporary Technology.

Cellulose, Pattinson explains, is “the most important component in giving wood its mechanical properties. And because it’s so inexpensive, it’s biorenewable, biodegradable, and also very chemically versatile, it’s used in a lot of products. Cellulose and its derivatives are used in pharmaceuticals, medical devices, as food additives, building materials, clothing — all sorts of different areas. And a lot of these kinds of products would benefit from the kind of customization that additive manufacturing [3-D printing] enables.”

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With the first billionaire in the White House, Wall Street booming and, for the first time in almost a decade, very solid and broad based job growth, one would think America’s business elite would be beaming. But that’s not so because the country’s moguls are more divided than at any time in recent history.

This conflict stems largely from divergent interests among rival factions of the putative ruling class. Trump’s backers tend to have links with the “real” economy, that is, those people who make things, such as energy producers, domestic manufacturers, agribusiness, suburban home-builders, and aerospace firms. These interests are increasingly concentrated in parts of America Trump painted “red”—the South, the Midwest, the Great Plains, and Appalachia.

On the other side lies the “ascendant” ephemeral economy, based in such industries as media, entertainment, software, and social media, as well as their financial backers. These industries are less affected by environmental regulations than those in more tangible lines of business. They are also concentrated in the deep blue slivers along the coasts and in college towns, the very places where the progressive social and environmental agenda is most deeply entrenched.

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For a climate activist, having babies is apparently a troubling ethical dilemma, a distressing personal contribution to the global anthropogenic carbon footprint. But somehow they keep popping them out.

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Now refrigerators last 8–10 years, if you are fortunate. How in the world have our appliances regressed so much in the past few decades?  I’ve bought and sold refrigerators and freezers from the 1950’s that still work perfectly fine. I’ve come across washers and dryers from the 1960’s and 1970’s that were still working like the day they were made. Now, many appliances break and need servicing within 2-3 years and, overall, new appliances last 1/3 to 1/4 as long as appliances built decades ago. They break more frequently, and sooner, than ever before. They rust and deteriorate much quicker than in the past. Why is this happening, and what’s really going on? I’ve been wrestling over these questions for years while selling thousands of appliances, and more recently, working with used appliance sellers and repair techs all across the country. The following is what I’ve discovered.

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If a federal judge allowed a lawsuit to proceed alleging that police led participants in a far-left protest rally into a gauntlet of violence-prone right-wing counter-demonstrators, and that several protesters were pummeled and hurt as a result, it would be nationally prominent news.

But the national establishment press, and the California press outside of the San Francisco Bay area, have just demonstrated that when the political affiliations of those involved are different, it’s not news, even when the aggrieved protesters win a significant court victory affirming their depiction of events.

On Tuesday, pro-Trump supporters at a June 2016 rally in San Jose, California, who allege that police led them into a mob of anti-Trump protesters and then stood by as they were violently attacked, won a major court victory when a federal judge allowed a portion of their legal action against the City and the police officers directly involved to proceed.

(If the American Civil Liberties Union was the organization it claims to be — working “to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties that the Constitution and the laws of the United States guarantee everyone in this country” — it would be heavily involved in this matter, or at the very least would have denounced the violence when it occurred. Nope.)

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Dees also started a nonprofit, which he named the Southern Poverty Law Center. But he gave up neither the high life nor the direct-mail business. He lives in luxury with his fifth wife and still runs the SPLC, which has used the mail-order model to amass a fortune. Its product line is an unusual one: For the past 47 years, Morris Dees has been selling fear and hate.

The business model is simple, albeit cynical, and best illustrated by its most famous case. In 1987, a Dees-led legal team won a $7 million judgment against the Ku Klux Klan in a wrongful death suit on behalf of Beulah Mae Donald, the mother of a 19-year-old kid murdered by members of the racist group. But the defendants’ total assets amounted to a building worth $52,000. That’s how much Mrs. Donald, who died the following year, received. But Dees reaped $9 million for the SPLC from fundraising solicitations about the case, including one showing a grisly photo of Michael Donald’s corpse.

Today, the center boasts a treasury of more than $300 million, the richest civil rights group in the country.

But with the Ku Klan Klan literally out of business, how was the SPLC able to frighten people into still donating? That’s where the AEI’s Charles Murray reenters our story, along with many other mainstream conservative groups. Scaring the bejesus out of people requires new bogeymen, and lots of them.

Scientology for Social Justice Warriors.

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The U.S. diplomatic press corps was deeply angered when the Department of State announced it did not intend on bringing any members of the press corps aboard the secretary’s aircraft. “The State Department Correspondents’ Association is disappointed that Secretary Tillerson chose to travel this week to North Asia without a full contingent of the diplomatic press corps or even a pool reporter,” the group said in a statement.

Tillerson defended his action, saying, “There’s this long tradition that the Secretary spends time on the plane with the press. I don’t know that I’ll do a lot of that. I’m just not … that’s not the way I tend to work. That’s not the way I tend to spend my time. I spend my time working on this airplane.”

The squealing sound you hear is the pigs being kicked away from the trough.

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

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One of my cousins recently attended an event at a suburban church and I tagged along. I’m amoral and omnivorous. I’ll go to any house of worship on the odd chance I might actually learn something useful – and I often do. And I meet a lot of really nice people along the way. But mostly I like to explore the landscapes other people inhabit. Church provides an intimate glimpse into what people are thinking and feeling in a particular location.

…

I was immediately impressed with how much this church looked and functioned like a shopping mall. The size, shape, and general construction of the buildings and surrounding parking lots were indistinguishable from a large retail center. I spent more time than I probably should have trying to figure out which denomination it was. Catholic? Definitely not. Lutheran? Not exactly. Baptist? Meh. Mormon? Nope. It was a generic all inclusive Christian arrangement that celebrated the lack of any specific affiliation. Come and worship. We take all kinds. And enjoy the ample free parking and food court while you’re here. There was a well populated Christian school, a substantial auditorium, and all manner of programs and facilities. It was a highly successful suburban version of Big Box Jesus.

The Dallas term is ‘Godatorium’.

But then I looked out at the parking lot. How many people paid cash for their cars? I explored the subdivisions all around the church. How many people bought their suburban homes with cash? How many people are capable of setting aside even a sliver of savings on a regular basis ever. How many people bought their clothes and shoes and had their hair done with a credit card that got rolled over into a big ball of vague but gradually mounting debt? How many people are approaching middle age and still paying off student loan debt?

I understand the dynamics of contemporary accounting. Carrying mortgage debt provides a substantial tax advantage. Using “other people’s money” at a low interest rate to invest in an asset that consistently rises in value is smart and frees up cash to be deployed in other more productive ways. Putting cash into savings is inefficient since it sits in a bank earning near zero interest these days. Stock values keep rising so investing in equities is a no brainer.

You can’t go around wearing thrift store clothes and sporting a bowl haircut and expect to be taken seriously in a professional business setting. You don’t want to drive around in an old clunker and put your family at risk when you could have the latest safety and reliability features of a newer car bought on credit. If you can buy that car with a home equity loan and get the tax deduction, all the better. Everything about respectable modern life is predicated on people spending a certain amount of money in a very specific way that is nearly impossible to achieve on a cash basis. And that set of arrangements is in direct conflict with the traditional virtues of frugality, saving, and self reliance. Big Box Jesus takes Visa, Mastercard, and American Express.

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Of course not. They all have food stamps and section 8 housing vouchers and MedicAid.

Why work when Uncle Santa Clause will support you?

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Over the last 15 years there has been a steady and disconcerting leak of young people away from the labour force in America. Between 2000 and 2015, the employment rate for men in their 20s without a college education dropped ten percentage points, from 82% to 72%. In 2015, remarkably, 22% of men in this group – a cohort of people in the most consequential years of their working lives – reported to surveyors that they had not worked at all in the prior 12 months. That was in 2015: when the unemployment rate nationwide fell to 5%, and the American economy added 2.7m new jobs. Back in 2000, less than 10% of such men were in similar circumstances.

What these individuals are not doing is clear enough, says Erik Hurst, an economist at the University of Chicago, who has been studying the phenomenon. They are not leaving home; in 2015 more than 50% lived with a parent or close relative. Neither are they getting married. What they are doing, Hurst reckons, is playing video games. As the hours young men spent in work dropped in the 2000s, hours spent in leisure activities rose nearly one-for-one. Of the rise in leisure time, 75% was accounted for by video games. It looks as though some small but meaningful share of the young-adult population is delaying employment or cutting back hours in order to spend more time with their video game of choice.

Think about it:

No fat ugly feminists screeching about The Patriarchy.

No welfare queens complaining that drinking milk is raaaaaaacist.

No nerd little shrimp of indeterminate sex complaining about what pronoun she/it is entitled to.

No minimum wage pricing out of the only jobs you’re qualified for.

No gangbangers whupping your ass because you looked at them on the street.

Just peace – and quiet – and fun.

What’s not to like?

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Don’t you feel safer?

Don’t you wish these fine people could run your health care system, too?

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Equity, in its statement Tuesday barring Mr. Pryce, said that it could not ”appear to condone the casting of a Caucasian in the role of a Eurasian.” …

I am not making this up.

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Experts have warned for years now that our rates of geographic mobility have fallen to troubling lows. Given that some areas have unemployment rates around 2 percent and others many times that, this lack of movement may mean joblessness for those who could otherwise work.

…

The brain drain also encourages a uniquely modern form of cultural detachment. Eventually, the young people who’ve moved out marry — typically to partners with similar economic prospects. They raise children in increasingly segregated neighborhoods, giving rise to something the conservative scholar Charles Murray calls “super ZIPs.” These super ZIPs are veritable bastions of opportunity and optimism, places where divorce and joblessness are rare.

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Special snowflakes: They never outgrow their need for racism.

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The University of Maryland (UMD) is so concerned about President Donald Trump’s resolve to enforce immigration laws that it is creating a special position to protect illegal immigrants from those laws, Campus Reform reports.

The same taxpayer-funded university that is currently at work on creating a Muslim prayer room in every major building will soon hire an “undocumented student coordinator.” The successful applicant will satisfy student demands last semester for “full-time Undocumented Student Coordinator to advocate for, advise, represent, and protect undocumented and DACAented students,” according to UMD’s Camus newspaper, The Diamondback.

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The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.

To see Bernie Sanders’ America, look at Chavez’ Venezuela.

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I am not making this up.

Fake Science is on the march.

Required reading: In Fifty Years We’ll All Be Chicks

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Any time a Leftist disagrees with a policy, a person, or an idea, if he has already used up the tedious racist/sexist/whatever deal, and hasn’t started rioting yet, he has one more lame argument in his bag of tricks. He has learned from ex-President Obama, to point his nose skyward and assert, “That’s not who we are!” Please. Do us the courtesy of not telling us who we are when you don’t even know us. You know precious few Heartland Americans, as we can tell by the movies you make about us. They ring as true as Hillary’s mortifying black preacher accent when she’s “no ways tahrd.”

Barry’s other go-to threat was that we would end up on “the wrong side of history.” But History just kicked him in the nuts, as History will sometimes do, so it’s back to telling us who we are.

Halal-Butchered Wife on the Streets of Kiel

Dutch elections: Turkish minister claims ‘holy wars will soon begin in Europe’ after Geert Wilders beaten

Mosque Raided in Hildesheim

Suicide bomber kills at least 25 at Palace of Justice in Damascus on sixth anniversary of Syrian civil war

Erdogan’s Enemies Ask for Asylum in Switzerland

Jihadis using religious visa to enter US, experts warn

Isis commander of Mosul’s Old City killed as government troops near key bridge over Tigris River

Egypt’s Leading Imam: Christianity and Judaism Create Terrorism No Less than Islam

Culture-Enriching Gang Rapists to be Deported From Sweden

Pakistan ‘violates Kashmir truce’ with India for third time in 24 hours

How anti-immigrant anger threatens to remake the liberal Netherlands

Angry Students Protest Publisher Of Mohammad Cartoons

Turkey President Erdogan: ‘Nazism is Alive in the West’ Because Netherlands, Germany Not Allowing Pro-Erdogan Rallies

Arab Factions Praise Jordanian Terrorist For Killing Israeli Schoolgirls

‘We Are Finding New Ones Every Day:’ ISIS Mass Graves Unearthed

A New Genocide for Egypt’s Christians?

Al-Qaida Returns To Prominence In Syria As ISIS Continues To Be Beaten Back

Assad Calls New US Troops Deployed To Syria ‘Invaders’  Just think of them as undocumented guest workers.

Sweden Realizes It’s Been Financially Supporting Hundreds Of Terrorists For Years

Coalition official: ISIS-held Mosul completely surrounded

The Lessons of Omar Abdel Rahman

Jordan releases soldier who massacred seven Israeli schoolgirls

British volunteer crowdfunds third ‘tour’ fighting Isis in Syria

We are looking into a future where Turkey is an enemy, not an ally

Ancient palace revealed under destroyed Mosul shrine

Turkey vows to retaliate in ‘harshest ways’ after Netherlands expels minister

Netherlands ban Turkish ministers as dispute escalates

Turkey seals off Dutch embassy citing ‘security reasons’ as diplomatic row escalates

Syria: At least 40 killed in dual Damascus bombing targeting Shia Iraqis

Erdogan calls Dutch government ‘Nazis’ after Turkish foreign minister’s plane prevented from landing in Netherlands

Turkey’s Purge Reaches Its Largest Defense Corporation

Marine Le Pen: “I am Doing my Job When I Denounce ISIS”

Bulgarian Vigilantes Patrol Turkey Border to Keep Migrants Out – NBC News

Turkey’s determination against Kurds alienates U.S., Russia

U.S. airstrike in Kunduz signals a new chapter in Afghanistan

Iran Opposition Unveils Secret IRGC Tactics

ISIS Leaders Flee Raqqa, Leaving Their Men To Die

Top US General: Iran Poses ‘Greatest Long Term Threat’ To Middle East Security

Mayor Calls Criticism Of Muslim Prayers In School ‘Hate Speech’

Trump’s Sending 2,500 More Troops To Support ISIS War

Read it.

Ideal for beta males who are afraid to commit.

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And a mouth-watering list it is, too.

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Until recently, bathrooms were one of the remaining places in society where men were not permitted to be with women and vice versa. Because of that clear barrier, even the sight of a man pushing open the door to a women’s restroom would raise eyebrows—and deter any would-be assailant with half a brain.

But all that is changing, as rules designed to protect privacy between the sexes are upended. Shortly after Target made its big announcement, a man recorded himself walking into his local Target and asserting his new right to use the women’s restroom. He did not state that he identifies as a woman; he simply said he wanted to make sure he had the right to use the women’s restroom. In the video, a manager assures him that he does, and when asked what the store will do if any women are upset, the manager says he will “take care of it.”

Apparently it was not long before Target’s lawyers got wind of the viral video; it was taken down almost immediately.

But the video was not an isolated incident. The following month, The New York Times ran the headline “Men Are Posting Videos of Themselves Testing Target’s New Bathroom Policy.” The piece reported, “Multiple videos have popped up on YouTube showing men confronting store managers about the policy and asking what would stop them from entering the women’s bathroom inside the store. In the videos, the managers can be seen (or heard, since some of the video is poorly shot) patiently saying that nothing would stop the men from using the women’s room.” Nothing.

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Note that this is Fake News:

The evidence is still anecdotal — and The Washington Post was unable to speak directly with immigrants who chose to cancel their SNAP benefits.

So there’s no proof. This is just hand-wringing and tendentious hearsay from obviously partisan activists.

Yet this is reported as news.

ZMan blows the whistle.

Celebrity intellectuals are not famous because they have offered up a great insight or discovery. There’s no money in that. New ideas challenge the orthodoxy. The people with the money to help an aspiring celebrity intellectual live the sort of life they deserve tend not to like challenges to the orthodoxy. Instead they gravitate to people who confirm that the current arrangements are as the heavens ordained. That’s [Malcolm] Gladwell. His celebrity is rooted in his ability to flatter the Cloud People.

The typical path to celebrity for these guys is not much different than the way mediocre comics get rich and famous. The game is to flatter the right audience. Making a bunch of bad whites in the hill country feel good about themselves is not a path to the easy life. You can make a nice living, but you’re not going to be doing Ted Talks or getting five figures to do the college circuit. Figure how to let the Cloud People on the Upper West Side feel like champions and you have the golden ticket.

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Influenced by Edison and honed via experimenting on patient, hand-sore librarians, library hand focused on uniformity rather than beauty. “The handwriting of the old-fashioned writing master is quite as illegible as that of the most illiterate boor,” read a New York State Library School handbook. “Take great pains to have all writing uniform in size, blackness of lines, slant, spacing and forms of letters,” wrote Dewey in 1887. And if librarians thought they could get away with just any black ink, they could think again real fast. “Inks called black vary much in color,” scoffed the New York State Library School handwriting guide.

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And you and I pay the bill. Aren’t you proud?

Sungevity was one of seven residential solar power companies, which Congress announced in September it would formally investigate for wrongfully receiving billions in tax credits from the government. The federal government likely handed out roughly $25 billion in cash grants and tax credits to these companies.

I guess that’s why they call it ‘green energy’.

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A three-year-old girl has been forced into marriage in order to settle a dispute between her father and another man, it has been reported.

The child has been married to a nine-year-old boy in Pakistan’s Neelum Valley, in the province of Azad Jammu and Kashmir, after her father failed to pay a penalty for allegedly having an affair Dawn.com reports.

Pakistani police have called the incident a case of Vani, a custom in which young girls are forced to be married by way of punishment for a crime committed by a male relative.

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Wow, a whole 32 incidents.

Compare that with the black-on-black murder rate in Chicago (762 in 2016).

Compare that to the 69 threats against 54 Jewish community centers as of mid-February in 2017.

I’d say that Muslims are doing better than average.

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There’s no pleasing some people.

(‘Right-wing joggers’ is a concept like ‘left-wing gun nuts’ — I need to see it before I believe it.)

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By Persons of Color, of course.

White Privilege means never having to prove you’re Bad by acting like an asshole.

ZMan blows the whistle.

Unless you have been in a cave the last year, you are well aware of the fact that most of what we call news is just made up. Any story with “sources say” in it is fictional. The writer simply conjured the sources and most likely the things they would have said, if they existed. Maybe someone did say something like what was reported, but the so-called reporter was not there to hear it. At best, they got it from the gossip chain or from some C-level talking head, cooling his heels in a cable television green room.

The worst for this is sports reporting, as they no longer even pretend to do be doing real reporting. They just make stuff up and slap the words “according to sources” on it and it is posted as news. Trade rumors are where you see this all the time. Since the people doing the deals for the sports clubs are not talking about their business on camera, the fake news reporters are free to just make up what they want, so they do. It’s all pitched as “rumors” so when it never happens, the fake sports reporters can “report” on that.

Even fake news needs content, which is where fake science comes in. There’s nothing better for a fake news story than a quote from a fake scientist, especially when the topic is human health. Turn on the local fake newscast and there’s always at least one fake story on health or diet. Many of these shows now have a recurring health segment where one of the bubble heads puts on their serious face and talks into the camera about some new threat to your health, usually your diet. It’s all fake.

…

The root cause of the replication crisis in the soft sciences is mostly due to the fact that it is it not science. It’s market research. They try to quantify some behavior in order to pitch an idea already popular in the mass media or with the managerial class. By slapping the word “science” on it, they are pitching their role as an authority. Bill Nye, the toaster repairman, has made a killing claiming to speak for science on behalf of the cult of Gaia worship. The Cornell Food Lab does the same thing, but for nutrition and food marketing.

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Thereby certifying that the Left in this country – and indeed around the world – have become throroughly corrupt; the biggest case of ‘regulatory capture’ in human history.

It is perhaps long past time that conservatives switch places with liberals in attacking big business and the rich generally—especially the Silicon Valley rich.

But if you want a really stunning portrait into the corruption of the rich left, take in a new report from the Brookings Institution (yes, the Brookings Institution!) about ill-liberal arts colleges. Like, oh I don’t know—perhaps Middlebury?

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My first breakthrough on this idea was with salt. It’s the most basic ingredient, but it can also be hellishly complex. A chef can go crazy figuring out how much salt to add to a dish. But I believe there is an objectively correct amount of salt, and it is rooted in a counterintuitive idea. Normally we think of a balanced dish as being neither too salty nor undersalted. I think that’s wrong. When a dish is perfectly seasoned, it will taste simultaneously like it has too much salt and too little salt. It is fully committed to being both at the same time.

Try it for yourself. Set out a few glasses of water with varying amounts of salt in them. As you taste them, think hard about whether there is too much or too little salt. If you keep experimenting, you’ll eventually hit this sweet spot. You’ll think that it’s too bland, but as soon as you form that thought, you’ll suddenly find it tastes too salty. It teeters. And once you experience that sensation, I guarantee it will be in your head any time you taste anything for the rest of your life.

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I’d be more interested in finding out which bathroom Lindsey Graham uses than anything to do with Trump’s tax returns.

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I am not making this up.

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Hey, I had a crappy hamburger from McDonald’s the other day. I’ll just bet it’s Donald Trump’s fault.

Steve Sailer celebrates blowing up the Internet.

Congressman Steve King (R-IA) has noticed just how extremist today’s respectable conventional wisdom has become. So King has been exercising a Trump-like knack for trolling the Establishment with blunt truths that enrage goodthinkers into revealing just how much their worldview is founded upon hatred of average Americans.

…

King is particularly hateful because he represents Sioux County, Iowa, which Stanford economist Raj Chetty’s big 2015 study of IRS returns from 1996 to 2012 found to be the single best county in America for raising children who are upwardly mobile. Sioux County is extremely white, Protestant, native-born, traditionalist, and prosperous. It represents the egalitarian essence of everything that coastal elites find deplorable about the people they currently preside over.

Numerous talking heads responded to King that taking care of “somebody else’s babies” is what America has always been about. John Adams and the other Founding Fathers weren’t fathers looking out for the interests of their progeny. Instead they were inseminating an idea: that America exists for the benefit of the huddled masses of not-yet-arrived immigrants who are, by definition, the only true Americans.