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And about time, too.

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I want you to consider the possibility that your parents did not shape you as a person. Despite how it feels, your mother and father (or whoever raised you) likely imprinted almost nothing on your personality that has persisted into adulthood. Pause for a minute and let that heresy wash across your synapses. It flies in the face of common sense, does it not? In fact, it’s the type of claim that is unwise to make unless you have some compelling evidence to back it up. Even then it will elicit the ire of many. Psychologists especially get touchy about this subject. I do have evidence, though, and by the time we’ve strolled through the menagerie of reasons to doubt parenting effects, I think another point will also become evident: the problems with parenting research are just a symptom of a larger malady plaguing the social and health sciences. A malady that needs to be dealt with.

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Poor iddle babies.

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The study found evidence of the comet engraved on a pillar in the world’s oldest temple at G?bekli Tepe in Southern Turkey. The engraving indicates the comet killed thousands, wiping out many large animal species, and triggering a miniature ice age lasting 1,000 years.

Oddly enough, all life on earth was not destroyed. So I wouldn’t sweat the ‘global warming’ scare.

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Another lefty myth debunked.

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While many overdue woman resort to spicy food, sex, pineapple and bouncing on an exercise ball, the Buffalo Wing Pizza at Hawthorne’s New York Pizza and Bar in Charlotte, North Carolina has reportedly sent “multiple women” into labour, reports local news outlet Charlotte Five.

The paper spoke to three women who all gave birth to their children shortly after sampling the pizza which they did from hearing on the local grapevine that it was the place to visit if you were desperate to push your baby out.

Check it out.

Some people just can’t shake loose from playing with blocks.

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It has become painfully clear in recent years that partisan gerrymandering is one of American democracy’s worst illnesses.

Painfully clear, perhaps, to people who write for Slate on ‘law and LGBTQRSTUVWXYZ issues’, but for rational adults, the worst illness is democracy itself — a system of government in which, as the classical definition has it, ‘51% of the population can pee in the soup of the other 49%’. The key characteristic of American democracy is that it is constrained, viz. there are barriers in place to keep The Majority, no matter how overwhelming, from doing the dirty to minorities. This doesn’t always work well — ask Japanese-Americans who their favorite Democrat President is — but in normal times works much better than an unconstrained democracy might.

Although the Supreme Court held decades ago that the purpose of redistricting was to ensure “fair and effective representation for all citizens,” legislators often use the process to lock the minority party out of power.

Democracy itself locks the minority party out of power. (Funny how this complaint never surfaces when Democrats are in charge. Look at any big city and count how many Republicans are on the city council and try to say with a straight face that the minority party has any power.) For the ‘minority party’ to have any power directly undermines the essential nature of democracy.

Both Democrats and Republicans deploy partisan gerrymandering to dilute votes for their opponents, creating one-party rule and, arguably, greater polarization.

I just love that phrase, ‘dilute votes’, as if you can just add water to minority voters and watch them dissolve like dirt in the laundry. Whenever you see the phrase ‘dilute’ it indicates somebody trying to get power for a ‘minority’ that is greater than they would have under a strict democracy. Almost always this is a Democrat (the oxymoron party) complaining that Democrats don’t get to run things even when they lose elections. And if you want polarization, well, listen to a speech by Chuck Schumer or Hillary Clinton or Elizabeth Warran or any BlackLives Matter demagogue and you’ll see where the polarization is coming from.

I won’t bother fisking the rest of this article (remember, they actually paid somebody to write this stuff), but just move on to discuss ‘gerrymandering’ in light of what one might call ‘democratic theory’. Most arguments against ‘gerrymandering’ take the form of ‘but it makes districts less competitive!’, as if this were some sort of electoral Olympics in which the horse-race aspect of an election has some special virtue. In truth, it does not. ‘Effective representation’ (see Supreme Court reference above) is all about having representatives who believe the same way as the person voting, and the less ‘competitive’ a district is, the more actual ‘effective representation’ that voter has. It is obvious to the most casual observer who doesn’t live in his parents’ basement that if a Representative gets 75% of the vote the voters of that district who are on the winning side (and that’s what democracy cares about, remember) are more effectively represented than in a district where the Representative only gets 51% of the vote.

Think about it. I’ll wait.

The more ‘competitive’ the election, the greater the proportion of voters whose ‘representation’ isn’t effective. That’s the bottom line. From the point of view of DEMOCRACY, the more ‘uncompetitive’ districts one has, the more ‘effective representation’ one gets.

Sure, it’s possible to construct an academic exercise where one way of redistricting an area gives the ‘minority party’ less power than they would have under a different way of redistricting, but if you look closely, these claims (like claims for global warming) always depend for their validity on the truth of some very strong assumptions about voter behavior (typically that all Republicans vote the same way and all Democrats vote the same way), assumptions that have no necessary connection to real-life voter behavior. And no one (that I’ve seen) has yet come up with an actual redistricting scheme that precisely fits that strong-assumption exercise.

The reason why you hear all of the DemLegHump media jaw on about ‘gerrymandering’ is because ‘noncompetitive’ districts are boring. Without a ‘horse race’, they have nothing on which to report. People who went to journalism school because they wanted to Make A Difference get really frustrated when everything they do to Make A Difference doesn’t matter, because the election is only going to go one way. That’s the real reason they don’t like ‘gerrymandering’.

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Well, they could always leave for someplace else. It’s not as if they haven’t done that before.

Joe Bob Briggs investigates ancestry.

I’m loving all these Ancestry.com commercials where dim-witted actors say, “I thought I was a Tahitian Eskimo Mexican until I sent in my DNA test kit, and boy was I flummoxed when the results came back! I’m really Croatian with a mix of sub-Saharan! I guess I’ll be turning in my furry hat!”

Riddle me this: Why do sailors need to wear camouflage on board a ship? In order to better hide from work?

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Given its iconic hold on the American imagination, the idea that more Americans are leaving California than coming breaches our own sense of uniqueness and promise. Yet, even as the economy has recovered, notably in the Bay Area and in pockets along the coast, the latest U.S. Census Bureau estimates show that domestic migrants continue to leave the state more rapidly than they enter it.

The Middle East isn’t the only place that’s producing lots of refugees.

The movement away from expensive core regions reflects the basic preference among people for affordable, less dense housing. The new Census estimates have confirmed this national trend. Migration to both suburbs and smaller cities — and away from dense core counties — is now at the highest rate in a decade.

Population growth in big urban core cities, including New York, is now about half of what it was back in 2010. Last year, all 10 of the top gainers in domestic migration were sprawling, more affordable Sun Belt metropolitan areas in states like Texas, North Carolina, Florida and Tennessee.

These dispersive trends are clear in Southern California, where net migration out of Los Angeles County runs about four times the rate of neighboring, more suburban Orange County, as migration to places like Riverside County mounts. Despite all the national hype surrounding L.A.’s drive for densification, it’s not a model that most people, and particularly families, seem to be embracing.

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Missouri Governor Eric Greitens took part in a SWAT team competition over the weekend.

The Republican governor, a former Navy SEAL, was invited to compete in the Southeast Missouri SWAT Challenge with the St. Louis County SWAT team, his office said.

Funny how you never find former Navy SEALs running as Democrats.

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In 2013, a UK Medical Research Council team stopped brain cells dying in an animal for the first time, creating headline news around the world.

But the compound used was unsuitable for people, as it caused organ damage.

Now two drugs have been found that should have the same protective effect on the brain and are already safely used in people.

“It’s really exciting,” said Prof Giovanna Mallucci, from the MRC Toxicology Unit in Leicester.

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Unclear on the concept.

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Comedian Bill Nye accused CNN of doing a “disservice” to its viewers for inviting a well-respected physicist on Earth Day to argue about the legitimacy of man-made global warming.

Nye, who is well known for hosting a children’s TV show in the 1990s, scolded CNN’s “New Day Saturday” panel Saturday for pitting his environmentalist pedigree against the climate skepticism of physicist William Happer.

He also suggested the 24-news channel should instead drown out people like Happer with 98 scientists who believe in man-made global warming.

For the left, one needn’t be a Real Scientist; merely playing on on TV is sufficient.

Come to think of it, that explains AlGore pretty much.

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I guess picking up after yourself is Right-Wing.

Funny how people getting together to complain about how humanity is trashing the earth inevitably ends up trashing the earth. Well, their ‘science’ isn’t Real Science, either, so I suppose we ought not to be surprised.

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More troubling, any voice—including that of a stranger—can be cloned if decent recordings are available on YouTube or elsewhere. Researchers at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, led by Nitesh Saxena, were able to use Festvox to clone voices based on only five minutes of speech retrieved online. When tested against voice-biometrics software like that used by many banks to block unauthorised access to accounts, more than 80% of the fake voices tricked the computer. Alan Black, one of Festvox’s developers, reckons systems that rely on voice-ID software are now “deeply, fundamentally insecure”.

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They don’t even pretend any more.

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I am personally amazed by the number of recruiters who have sent us “vetted” professional coders who can’t actually code. This is such a serious problem that if a recruiter sends us three candidates who cannot pass our coding test, we fire the recruiter. We can’t afford to waste the time.

Tech recruiters charge 18 to 25 percent of the first year’s salary, but even the best recruiters we’ve worked with cannot truly vet the types of engineers we need. As far as I can tell, recruiters are not under pressure to learn, because high-end tech talent is so rare, hiring managers will take practically anyone who can fog a mirror. We won’t. And you shouldn’t.

In practice, we could train these workers, but not at market prices with added recruiter vigorish. We just can’t get enough value out of B-team players while they are in training, and by the time we help them become A-team players, their GitHub accounts and contributions will reflect their learning. At that point, they will be firmly on the radar of top-tier tech. And we would have played the role of pre-school for Facebook, Google, or Apple. Great for Zuck, Larry, or Tim, but not so great for us.

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What’s more medieval than a dragon? From Smaug to Drogon to Dungeons & Dragons, the look, menace, and sheer presence of dragons is one of the most iconic legacies of the western Middle Ages. Not without reason: the easy go-to embodiment for Satan was so popular among medieval people that by the thirteenth century, dragons were nevertheless pressed into service in religious art to represent Jesus. Why were dragons so popular—and what was a dragon in the Middle Ages, anyway? Here are a few things you might not know about medieval dragons.

The meat didn’t keep well prior to refrigeration.

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The team at King’s College London showed that a chemical could encourage cells in the dental pulp to heal small holes in mice teeth.

A biodegradable sponge was soaked in the drug and then put inside the cavity.

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The common cold is considered difficult to treat and protect against because it has so many different strains.

But Professor Valenta told The Independent the body’s immune system tends to attack the centre of the virus, which isn’t the most effective way to fight the disease.

Instead, his vaccine focuses on the virus’s shell, which facilitates infection by attaching itself to mucous membranes in the mouth, throat, nasal passages and stomach.

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That isn’t quite how the New York Times puts it, of course. In fact, the words “socialist” and “socialism” never appear in its otherwise unsparing account. But Venezuela under Chavez and Maduro illustrates the inevitable arc of socialism, from parasitism to gangster rule.

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In short, I don’t think even Reagan could have defeated Obama-Hillary and the transgendered, victim-mongering, sexual-schizophrenic Democrat loonies. Little did anyone, least of all me, know that there was a strange orange-haired being in the universe that had the odd characteristic of killing the fungus that was growing all over Washington DC. His very presence seemed to damage the up until then unstoppable fungal growth. Jonah, rather than continue to wildly rip the strange orange creature that neither you nor I fully understand, we should give thanks to a beneficent G-d who has heard our prayers and delivered us from the scourge of Obama-Hillary. Some things as just beyond our ability to predict or control.

Let Trump be Trump and let the fungus among us continue to die.

This ongoing discussion between James Gawron and Jonah Goldberg has an interesting take on the comparison and contrast between Reagan and Trump. I found it very thought-provoking.

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If the eco-Nazis will let them be used; after all, for them it’s not sufficient that the planet be saved, it’s also necessary that humanity suffer.

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My, what a surprise.

Novel Ultra-Low-Energy Consumption Ultrasonic Clothes Dryer.

Darth Vader Mask BBQ and Fire Pit.

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Apparently one is being run by political activists and the other by actual scientists.

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Because the Cloud People and the Dirt People are clean different things.

It turns out that many members of the Senate, while opposing private school choice policies that would benefit others, practice school choice themselves.

Since 2000, The Heritage Foundation has surveyed members of Congress to determine whether they had exercised private school choice by ever sending a child to private school.

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Hey, she was biodegradable; friends of the earth and all that.

Apparently the only species that isn’t endangered is humanity.

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Aya Hijazi, 30, a U.S. citizen and humanitarian worker, had been in prison for three years on child abuse and trafficking charges — which the U.S. dismissed as false — because she operated a nonprofit dedicated to helping kids on the street with her husband. Last week, an Egyptian court dropped all charges against her.

And where was Obama during all of this? Busy playing golf, perhaps, or perhaps bitching about racism and bitter clingers in the U.S.

“We’re very grateful that President Trump personally engaged with the issue. Working closely with the Trump administration was very important for my family at this critical time. It let us be reunited as a family. We’re so grateful.”

Not that he’ll get any credit from the Usual Suspects.

Popular Mechanics pursues its modern Leftist political agenda.

But of course it matters. Because if we can’t decide when a species becomes a species, it means we don’t have a very useful definition of “species.” And if we don’t have a good definition of “species,” then we can’t address issues like preserving biodiversity or saving endangered creatures. Much of the legislation that protects certain plants and animals depends on defining which species are endangered in the first place. And some creatures are already in danger.

In August 2016, a group called the Pacific Legal Association petitioned to take the coastal California Gnatcatcher bird off the protected list under the Endangered Species Act. They said that the coastal variety wasn’t a distinct species, so it shouldn’t be specifically protected. They did the same thing for the Southwest Willow Flycatcher, another Pacific coast bird with rapidly disappearing habitat. The coastal California Gnatcatcher retained its protections because a panel of experts determined that the coastal variety was different enough that it qualified as its own group, but the Flycatchers are still up for debate. It all hinges on how we define a species.

By that reasoning, black people aren’t a different species so #BlackLivesMatter is nonsense.

Funny how the same people who think that ‘race’ is a ‘social construct’ spend most of their time worrying about (wait for it) race.

ISIS Paris Shooter Was Previously Arrested For Going On A Police Shooting Rampage

Culture-Enriching Mass Murderer on the Dole in Düsseldorf

Paris Shooting Was Just The Latest In Series Of Attacks Against French Police

Palestinian officials warn of ‘new intifada’ against Israel if hunger striking prisoners die  Again? But THAT trick NEVER works….

ISIS Claims Responsibility For Paris Champs Elysees Attack  But of course they would.

Paris in the Spring — With Automatic Weapons Fire

Sharia Law-Supporting ‘Suffragist’ Makes TIME’s ‘100 Most Influential People’ List

Two Paris Police Officers Shot And Killed In Probable ‘Terrorist Act’

UN Puts Saudi Arabia On Commission Responsible For ‘Gender Equality And The Empowerment Of Women’  You can’t make this stuff up.

Islamist Attacks on Holidays  They’re off work and looking for some entertainment.

Government Approves $300 Million Sale Of Guns And Humvees To The Kurds

“Why Are You Doing This to Your Own People in Turkey?”

World’s Third-Largest News Agency Employs Anti-Israel Palestinian Activist To Cover Conflict

US troops still battling Islamic State near site of Afghan bomb strike

ISIS Starves Civilians To Force Them Into Fighting For The Caliphate

Middle School World History Test Insists Muslims Showed ‘Tolerance,’ Accepted Other Religions  They are teaching your children lies, and you’re paying for it.

Strangers on a Train, Italian Style

France election terror attack plot: Isis flag and wig found alongside explosives at home of extremists

Yemeni officials say suspected US drone kills al-Qaida men

Report: Weakening Syria’s government could help ISIS group

ISIS Launches Chemical Weapons Attack Against US, Iraqi Troops

Iraqi unit with US and Australian advisers hit by ISIS chemical weapon

Blood on the Streets in Duisburg

Germany: Culture-Enricher Sedates and Then Rapes Hospital Patient

Poll: Iran’s Hardliners Likely To Win Upcoming Election

French Police Foil ‘Imminent’ ISIS Attack Planned For Upcoming Election

Brawl and Conflagration at Grande-Synthe

Middle Easterners Issued 10,000 Fake Venezuelan Passports, Official Says

Why Is Easter a Magnet for Islamist Violence?

Young British Muslims think Isis fighters returning from Syria should be reintegrated into society, research finds  What could go wrong?

Halal-Slaughtering Sheep in the Garden

Conservative Conference Threatened By Heavily-Armed Muslim Man

Muslima Pulls a Knife in a Vienna Park

Fr. Guy Pagès: “Islam is an imposture, and all the more demonic because it claims to be divine”

Over 1,000 Palestinian prisoners go on hunger strike in Israel

Under Erdogan, Turkey has receded from the democratic world

Palestinian Intifada Leader Announces Hunger Strike Via the New York Times  And why not?

A Desperate ISIS Might Be Looking To Form An Alliance With Al-Qaida

NYT Fails To Disclose Terrorism Conviction Of Op-Ed Contributor  No, he wasn’t in the IRA.

Saudi Arabia Warns Iran Is Trying To Turn Yemen Into A ‘Missile Base’

US Unleashes More Bombs On ISIS Than Ever Before

Once Again, CAIR Shows That Islamism and Civil Rights Don’t Mix

Turkish Minister Says Europe Is Headed For ‘Wars Of Religions’

Boko Haram Expected To Quadruple Use Of Girl’s In Suicide Attacks This Year

Don’t Touch My Car, Infidel!

General: 2nd gas attack on Iraq troops in as many days

Turkey Slides Closer To Authoritarianism, Complicating US Efforts Against ISIS

Turkey’s President Erdogan claims victory in vote to give him sweeping new powers – but opposition cry foul

More Than Half Of 126 Killed In Syria Bus Bombing Were Children, Group Says

At least ’68 children among dead’ in Syria bomb attack

Turkey votes in knife-edge referendum on making President Erdogan supremely powerful

Isis and al-Qaeda are little more than glorified drug cartels, and their motivation is money not religion

Zana Ramadani: “No Other Religion Brings Forth So Many Murderers as Islam”

Syria: Bombing hits bus convoy carrying civilians evacuated from besieged towns under deal between regime and rebels

ISIS Adopts Nightmare Tactics Used By The Taliban In Afghanistan

The Number Of ISIS Fighters Killed By The MOAB Is Nothing Short Of Staggering

After ISIS: The Threat Of Iran’s IRGC

Christian persecution: How many are being killed, where they are being killed

Pakistan military: Officials foil ‘major terrorist attack’ on Easter Sunday

Local Muslims Try To Shut Down Sharia Law Patrol In Minneapolis Neighborhood

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Yeah, God forbid one of them should turn out to be another Bill Gates.

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Hate speech that he emits is okay, though.

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Obama is gone, but his spirit of WASTING TAXPAYER MONEY lives on.

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‘Partners’? Say rather, punching bags.

There’s no pleasing some people.

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If they exclude all of the white hipsters from Earth Day, they won’t be able to fill a minyan.

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Y’all keep on steppin’, heah?

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The United States has immigration laws. They were passed by Congress. Jeff Sessions went to Nogales, Ariz., last week and stated he will enforce those laws. All the right people are apoplectic.

After eight years of ideologically selective enforcement of immigration — and other — laws by Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch, Sessions’s otherwise anodyne statement was bracing: If aliens unlawfully enter the country a second time and certain aggravating circumstances are present, they will be charged with a felony. Horrors.

The unremarkable statements of Jeff Sessions and President Trump over the last few months already have had an effect: Since December, illegal border crossings are down an estimated 72 percent, to the lowest level in nearly two decades. Combine that with tackling visa overstays, withholding certain federal funds from sanctuary cities, expanding E-verify, and addressing H-1B visa abuse, and we might just reclaim our sovereignty and the rule of law.

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That’s like trying to push down on a brick that’s already in the air.

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Back in February, Yale Computer Science Professor David Gelernter, who may become the next White House science advisor, had this to say about the upcoming March for Science and its organizers: “It’s like this is some sort of Looney Tunes thing. I must be trapped in an alternate reality. They couldn’t possibly be serious.”

But with science marches now scheduled in many cities for this Saturday, timed to coincide with Earth Day, the organizers obviously are serious. Too serious, in our view. Using street protests to handle scientific controversies like climate change is only a few steps above using animal sacrifice.

I suppose that’s next on the agenda — ‘Wiccans for Climate Science’.

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What, a ginned-up scandal based on slander and lies in an attempt to destroy somebody the Left hates?

I guess they would know….,

I must confess that Bill O’Reilly has always rubbed me the wrong way. I never watched him and never felt even the faintest impulse to do so. He struck me as the sort of arrogant I’m-the-smartest-guy-in-the-room jerks that populate the Crust, mostly on the Left but sometimes on the Right, concerning which the gene pool would profit by their absence.

I have no idea whether there is any substance to the accusations that supposedly underlay his situation or whether this was a successful witch-hunt by the Usual Suspects. Rush Limbaugh suggests that it was a carefully calculated campaign engineered by the New York Times and various fell0w-travellers, and that may be true. In any event, I will shed no tears for his demise.

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In 2014, for the first time in more than 130 years, adults ages 18 to 34 were slightly more likely to be living in their parents’ home than they were to be living with a spouse or partner in their own household.

The Democrats are succeeding in creating a culture of dependency.

This turn of events is fueled primarily by the dramatic drop in the share of young Americans who are choosing to settle down romantically before age 35.

Thank you, militant feminism.

In 2014, more young women (16%) than young men (13%) were heading up a household without a spouse or partner. This is mainly because women are more likely than men to be single parents living with their children.

Due to the government giving young women who get pregnant outside of marriage support for housing, medical care, and food. Watch the black family as it goes down the tubes.