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Researchers at the Gladstone Institutes in California have discovered a potential treatment route for the primary genetic risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease, a gene called apoE4.

Scott Adams gives us a useful new word: “These are what I call ‘half-pinions’. A half-pinion is where you just look at the cost of something, or just look at the benefit, and you just sort of pretend that the other stuff doesn’t exist.”

We see a lot of that these days, especially among ‘activists’.

Severian draws some parallels.

If I were a betting man, I’d wager that the Dems’ nominating convention in 2020 will look a lot like the Chicago convention of 1968, the famous “Chicago Police Riot.” (Ahh, the power of The Media to shape The Narrative. SDS goons do everything in their power to provoke a confrontation with the authorities; when the authorities eventually crack down, all the jock-sniffers in The Media, high on the romantic self-righteousness of self-proclaimed “revolutionaries,” proclaim that it’s the cops who started the whole thing).

In case you’re not familiar with the ’68 spectacle, you had an establishment goon representing business-as-usual (Vice President Hubert Humphrey, pinch-hitting for LBJ); a ditzy “good government” Liberal riding his brother’s coattails (Robert F. Kennedy), and a goofy hippie peacenik (Eugene McCarthy). Plus George McGovern, a slightly less goofy hippie peacenik who was so bad at politics that in 1972 he ended up getting outflanked as a peacenik by the guy who was actually right at that moment running the war.

If back in my professin’ days I was teaching this stuff, I’d assign a project: Which way did The Media break? They were all in the tank for the Democrats, of course — plus ça change and all that — but there were still enough grownups in the newsroom in 1968 that the #Wokest (if you’ll forgive an anachronism) wouldn’t automatically get all the Media love. There was no way to disguise the fact that McCarthy was the hippies’ candidate. Nor was there any way to disguise the fact that Humphrey procedurally cornholed the other two via delegate selection shenanigans, a la Hillary Clinton. All of which let Richard Nixon, of all people, campaign as the only honest man on the stage. How did it play out in that long, hot, strange summer?

Sounds like a win for Trump to me.

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

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Foreign-worker programs that import stoop labor represent an intervention by government specifically designed to prevent the inevitable rise in farm-labor costs in modern societies caused by urbanization and increased employment opportunities elsewhere.

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Lard didn’t just fall out of favor. It was pushed. It was a casualty of a battle between giant business and corporate interests.

NPR — for all your corporate conspiracy needs.

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All revolutionary movements seek to sanctify their lawless behaviour as a spontaneous eruption of righteous fury. In some cases, such as the Euromaidan movement in Ukraine, this conceit is justified. But usually their violence is a pre-meditated tactic to intimidate adversaries. Or as Bolshevik theorist Nikolai Bukharin put it, “In revolution, he will be victorious who cracks the other’s skull.”

Read it.

But you have to bear in mind that Trump has accomplished ABSOLUTELY NOTHING during his term in office.

Just remember that.

Absolutely nothing.

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June 21 marked an important milestone for the University of California at Santa Cruz. The school made the extraordinary decision to remove a monument known as the “El Camino Real Bell.” Spanish Franciscan friars placed the bell in Santa Cruz in 1906, but critics have said the bell is “racist.”

I doubt I could tell a racist from a non-racist bell if my life depended on it.