Christopher DeGroot explains it all to you.

Progressive companies are not only of rich sociological interest; they often provide wonderful unintended comedy. For close scrutiny shows that, on the whole, progressive companies are no better than “the greedy capitalists” whom progressives purport to oppose.

John Derbyshire does some fisking.

As we all know, a peculiar orthodoxy about human nature has come up among the Liberal Arts and Grievance Studies (LAGS) types who staff academic administrations, media, and government bureaucracies, including those that approve money grants to research scientists. A key tenet of this orthodoxy: There Is No Such Thing As Race. According to this tenet, race is a “social construct,” a sort of collective optical illusion.

(As weird as this is, it is not the weirdest thing LAGS folk profess to believe. You can, as I pointed out when addressing AMERICAN RENAISSANCE conference last year, find credentialed academics who will assure you that there is no such thing as sex: that men and women are biologically indistinguishable. We live in an extraordinary time: a good portion of our intelligentsia is clinically insane.)

For some reason, Prof. Reich feels the need to touch his forelock to this race denialism. That is not easy for him to do, as the science he’s been describing in the first three-quarters of his book makes plain what nonsense the LAGS orthodoxy is.

Prof. Reich spends the last three of his twelve chapters trying to square this circle, with results that are painful to read.

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Some years ago I read about a company that produced an accounting reported that talked about the company being “in the African-American.” Someone got too aggressive with find and replace.

Dem Lawmakers Introduced Legislation Calling For Scott Pruitt To Resign  But that trick never works.

Video: ‘Barack Obama’ Calls Trump a ‘Total and Complete Dipshit’

De Niro Eager for SNL Skit About Trump Being Thrown in Jail  Yup, a VERY rich fantasy life.

Wolf Blitzer Accuses Trump Of Ignoring Questions — Seconds Before Trump Answers A Reporter’s Question

‘Designated Survivor’ Becomes Third Show This Week to Discuss Removal of President  A VERY rich fantasy life.

New York wants power to prosecute criminals pardoned by Donald Trump  That trick won’t work, either.

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes Asks Cory Booker If Trump Is A ‘Criminal’

Evidence-Free Ron Brownstein on CNN: Comey Hurts Trump With White College Grads

Stormy Daniels Plans Donation to Planned Parenthood in Donald Trump’s Name  Presumably she expects to make it back a hundredfold from book deals, etc.

Ana Navarro: Trump Holds Positions ‘For Less Time Than You Would Hold A Yoga Position’  Another pretend-Republican claims to be a mind-reader.

De Niro Labels Reporters ‘Our Saviors’ During Rant About ‘Madman’ Trump  Don’t see much point in taking political advice from somebody who spends his time pretending to be other people.

Google Software Engineer Called For Trump’s Android Phone To Be Ruined

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I guess Wakanda was already taken.

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The team’s results are the first demonstration of an industrial, scalable method for manufacturing high-quality graphene that is tailored for use in membranes that filter a variety of molecules, including salts, larger ions, proteins, or nanoparticles. Such membranes should be useful for desalination, biological separation, and other applications.

“For several years, researchers have thought of graphene as a potential route to ultrathin membranes,” says John Hart, associate professor of mechanical engineering and director of the Laboratory for Manufacturing and Productivity at MIT. “We believe this is the first study that has tailored the manufacturing of graphene toward membrane applications, which require the graphene to be seamless, cover the substrate fully, and be of high quality.”

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I keep waiting for it to be stolen by scrap-metal thieves.

Even better would be that they both came alive and the bull pounded her into the pavement.

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More than 100 suspected members of MS-13 and other gangs were released in 2017 by sanctuary jurisdictions even though federal authorities had formally requested that they be held, according to data from the Department of Homeland Security.

This will not end well.

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Lingrove, the company behind Ekoa, developed the composite material from flax linen fiber that’s combined with bio-resin from industrial waste. Mold it, cure it under high heat and pressure, and the process produces a wood-like material that’s lighter than carbon fiber, stronger than steel, moldable like plastic, and carbon negative.

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

Women and minorities hardest hit, of course.

Michelle Malkin brings the heat.

Ground zero for the latest outbreak? The headquarters of The New Yorker magazine. This week’s issue online features the bigoted lament of writer Daniel Piepenbring, who decries the fast-food chain’s “creepy infiltration” of the Big Apple and warns against the company’s “pervasive Christian traditionalism.” Chick-fil-A opened its fourth location in the city last month. The largest franchise in the country, it seats 140, employs 150, and along with the other NYC locations, donates an estimated 17,000 pounds of food to a local pantry for the homeless and hungry. The company is reportedly on track to become the third-largest fast-food chain in the world.

What are the Chick-fil-A-phobes so afraid of?

A private business succeeding in the marketplace based on its merits, without coercion or cronyism.

An enterprise that values hard work, honesty and integrity.

A family-owned American Dream come true that creates jobs, pays taxes, satisfies customers of all backgrounds and gives back to the community.

Horror of horrors, what menaces these sandwich-sellers of faith be!

The witch-hunt for Heretics and Sinners proceeds apace. The problem is that the Left has Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals and the Right has no equivalent; it’s always easier to destroy than to build.

UPDATE: Some entertainment — Fisking the New Yorker in Defense of Delicious Chicken

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And Global Warming! Police are responsible for Global Warming!

And potholes! Surely police are to blame for potholes!

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The ones who can be depended on to vote Democrat, of course.

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I am not making this up.

Perhaps they ought to bash themselves in the head.

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Perhaps draining the swamp is a thing nowadays.

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Greg P. at Twitchy reports the attorney who pressured federal judge Kimba Wood into releasing Sean Hannity’s name is a lawyer for liberal media outlets.

According to reports from inside the courtroom, Judge Wood was ready to allow Michael Cohen to submit the name of his third client — who we now know is Sean Hannity — under seal, but an attorney for five news organizations, including CNN and the New York Times, convinced her otherwise.

When a ‘news media’ organization acts like a player, it deserves to be treated like a player, not like a bystander.

Read it. And by all means watch the video.

I am not making this up.

I don’t know which is worse — the entitlement mentality that proglodytes are cultivating among the black underclass, or the cowardice that they are cultivating among their white dhimmis.

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I suppose it seemed like a good idea at the time.

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This was billed as “New at Reason” but it is about as far from ‘new’ as Hillary Clinton. The only message out of tReason magazine more constant than ‘taxes suck’ is maybe ‘legalize weed’.

Still, it’s a good reminder.

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Socialism: Fails every time it’s tried.

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They’re going to look pretty silly if a Korean peace treaty comes ‘out of the blue’.

Steve Sailer consults his Victim Scorecard.

According to the Theory of Intersectionality, your lack of privilege points are the sum, or perhaps product (Intersectional theorists aren’t really into math), of all the Marginalized boxes you can check. Is “Harvard student” one of those deprived boxes?

Apparently so.

My understanding is that merely by being Black at Harvard involves automatic Oppression by White Privilege.

Or something.

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Women’s March co-president Tamika Mallory on Tuesday called for a boycott of Starbucks over the coffee company’s partnership with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a mainstream Jewish civil rights group.

The ADL previously criticized Mallory’s support of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, a notorious racist and anti-Semite. Mallory accused the ADL of “attacking black and brown people” on Tuesday and demanded Starbucks end its partnership with the group.

One of the chief problems with Identity Politics is that it shoehorns people with different interests onto the same bus and often drives that bus over a cliff. Nobody is allowed to be an individual any more; you have to line up with the other people of your color/’gender identity’/ethnicity or be tagged as a Heretic and a Sinner.

Read it.

Whenever you see the phrase ‘Trump’s America’, you know you’re reading a hit-piece.

There is no ‘Trump’s America’. There never has been a ‘Trump’s America’, except in the fever dreams of proglodyte bottom-feeders.

Yellow Journalism: CNN Spouts Off About “Pee Tapes” 77 Times in Five Days  That’s about their speed.

MSNBC Descends Into a ‘Wag the Dog’ Obsession Over Trump and Syria  They keep hoping.

Study: CNN Obsessed With Rumored Trump ‘Pee Tape’

Fragile Comedian Files Restraining Order Against Trump, Afraid of ‘Nuclear War’  Career obviously not going well.

Is it me or is Donald Trump’s administration becoming less like The Sopranos and more like Breaking Bad?  I think it’s pretty safe to say: It’s you.

Read it.

Half the results published in peer-reviewed scientific journals are probably wrong. John Ioannidis, now a professor of medicine at Stanford, made headlines with that claim in 2005. Since then, researchers have confirmed his skepticism by trying—and often failing—to reproduce many influential journal articles. Slowly, scientists are internalizing the lessons of this irreproducibility crisis. But what about government, which has been making policy for generations without confirming that the science behind it is valid?

David Cole steals a theory.

Trump’s barely been in office a year and a half, but already his presidency has been analyzed to death, with every new diagnosis contradicting the last. Trump’s a “4D chess master!” No, he’s a charlatan ill-suited for public office. Please, he’s an outsider with a grand vision, hobbled by a deep-state legion of leakers and traitors. C’mon, he’s clinically insane, with incipient dementia. Wrong again, he’s a crouching tiger, his seeming missteps merely a diversion to lull his prey into a false sense of security. Be serious, he’s Åke Axelsson’s chimp, mindlessly flinging paint at the wall as others foolishly debate the merits of his art.

Every theory, from every angle, has been stated and restated. Surely at this point there can be no fresh analysis of this man and his presidency. At least that’s what I thought, until a few weeks ago, when I spent the afternoon with Ann Coulter, having lunch at one of Beverly Hills’ most revered Jewish delis.

Ann Coulter and David Cole walk into a Jewish deli. I’ll let you write your own punchline.

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Some have suggested that it is parental malpractice to send your children to a public school. In many areas of the country, that proposition is hard to deny.

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And it will really torque off a lot of sanctimonious enviro-Nazis. Win-win!

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I doubt that it will help.

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Or not. In view of the government’s lack of success at tracking illegal alien humans, I have my doubts.

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A new digital humanities resource has been launched by the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Pennsylvania, geared to the medieval studies community to create research workspaces, editions, scholarship, collaboration and open access publications.

If you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you will like.

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Indiana just has that effect on some people.

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Well, shucks. I doubt that they’ve taken the Whitest City crown, though, Britain’s immigration policies being what they are.

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If there’s somebody out there brainless enough to pay that, I hope they sell.

A fool and his money etc.

Read it.

Still living the proglodyte dream. The witch-hunt for Heretics and Sinners proceeds apace.

I guess they really do miss those rallies at Nuremberg.

Read it.

Well, good. I guess the brownshirts of the Left aren’t as important as they thought they are.

Read it.

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

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“The Republicans in Congress have failed to hold the president accountable and have abandoned their historic beliefs and values,” Seth Klarman, a Boston hedge fund billionaire, told The Boston Globe. “For the good of the country, the Democrats must take back one or both houses of Congress.”

Unexplained: How giving political control of the country to Democrats is going to help implement the ‘historic beliefs and values’ of the Republican Party. That’s a pretty clear clue that his interest is in keeping political power in the hands of the Deep State where policy respects Deep Pockets, rather than allow outsiders like Trump to actually, you know, make America great again.

This guy needs a pie in his face, sooner rather than later.

Read it.

This is a typical Crustian New York Times thumb-sucker from an Ashkenazi Jew who has successfully assimilated into the Establishment. A brief look at his bio on Wikipedia shows the typical Crustian curriculum vitae: Selective NY magnet high school, Ivy league undergrad and law school, career on Wall Street leading to modern-day-mandarin jobs in public education and foundation work.

The unspoken assumption throughout the article is that it is somehow an Obvious Bad Thing that more kids from rich families go to college than kids from poor families. I’ll play straight man and ask: Why? More kids from rich families get to drive BMWs than kids from poor families; nobody appears to care about that. More kids from rich families get no-show jobs in government and NGOs than kids from poor families (yeah, I’m looking at you, Chelsea Clinton), yet nobody wrings their hands about it in the New York Times. What makes ‘poor kids’ so uniquely gifted that there needs to be a special effort to get them into college? Somehow this effort is needed ‘to make sure higher education is aligned with the democratic values we share.’ Really? How so? The answer is not provided.

The best thing ‘selective schools’ could do for kids from poor families is return to the system of academic merit that was trashed when too many grubby Jews (and, nowadays, Asians) started crowding the Children of the Crust out of ‘selective schools’. The problem with that, of course, is that too many offspring of the Fashionable Victim class would be rejected, and in today’s Politically Correct world that’s not only unacceptable, it’s unthinkable.

Read it.

A new meta-analysis published in Psychological Bulletin provides more reason for doubt. The authors averaged the results of 152 studies and found little evidence that bilingualism confers any general cognitive benefit. So what happened to all of the exciting “bilingual advantage” research that we hear so much about? When the authors of the meta-analysis compared effect sizes across the various studies, they found that the most imprecise studies — imprecise in the sense that their small sample sizes introduced a lot of random error — tended to report the most positive results. This is classic evidence of publication bias, whereby shaky studies are more likely to be published if they produce results that go in a favored direction. After correction for publication bias, the effects of bilingualism on cognitive inhibition, monitoring, shifting, and working memory were all effectively zero. Effects on attention and verbal fluency were actually negative, albeit small.

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He will be missed.

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TurboTax is an evil, parasitic product that exists entirely because taxes are confusing and hard to file. Worse than that, Intuit is one of the loudest voices on Capitol Hill arguing against measures that make it easier to pay taxes. Years ago, the Obama administration proposed a system of automatic tax filing, in which the IRS uses income information it already has to fill out your tax return for you. That would save millions of Americans considerable time and energy every year, but the idea has gone nowhere. The main reason? Lobbying from Intuit and H&R Block.

Don’t give Intuit money. Don’t give H&R Block money. To do so is to perpetuate the status quo in which you have to file your own taxes in the first place. The best way to escape this trap is for millions of taxpayers to start doing their own taxes in hopes of weakening Intuit and H&R Block and depriving them of money they could use to lobby against auto-filing. This requires privileging your own long-term interests ahead of your short-term ones; it’s mildly annoying to do your taxes by hand for now, but in the long run, if the plan works, you won’t have to do your own taxes at all.

There is no reason that the government oughtn’t to do your taxes for you — all of the relevant documents are sent to the IRS, and they will re-do your return anyway just to make sure you haven’t made any mistakes.

This isn’t a purely hypothetical proposal. Countries like Denmark, Sweden, Estonia, Chile, and Spain already offer “pre-populated returns” to their citizens. The United Kingdom, Germany, and Japan have exact enough tax withholding procedures that most people don’t have to file income tax returns at all, whether pre-populated or not. California has a voluntary return-free filing program called ReadyReturn for its income taxes.

You can imagine what the lobbyists had to say about that.

So why hasn’t return-free filing happened yet? The short answer is lobbying, and in particular lobbying by companies like Intuit.

My, what a surprise.

They haven’t stopped; in 2014, Day reported that Intuit was involved with an astroturfing effort meant to manufacture the appearance of grassroots opposition to automatic filing. Intuit spent $13 million lobbying Congress from 2011 to 2015, with 41 lobbying reports relating to taxes in 2015 alone. Most of the reports reference lobbying to “enhance voluntary compliance” — a euphemism for opposing automatic filing.

These companies are NOT your friends.

Read it.

Think of it as evolution in action.

(How do you get elephant tranquilizer in West Virginia?)

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Sounds like a win-win. How can we encourage this behavior?