Coffee and Provocation

This Headline is a Winner
Researchers Are Using Vibrators to Give Turtles Boners

Jeremy Corbyn on Immigration
Jeremy Corbyn says mass immigration from the European Union has been used to "destroy" the conditions of British workers. Cesar Chavez said much the same thing about illegal Mexican and guest worker labor in the U.S. in 1960s and 70s, a point echoed a generation earlier by Samuel Gompers. The bottom line is that open border trade and an endless pool of unfree foeign labor willing to work for a bucket of fish heads is antithetical to the interests of working Americans and poor Americans on the bottom of the economic ladder.

Mixed Alliances, Inbreeding, and Atrocities
The first King of Belgium was German, served in the Russian Army, married an English Princess, turned down the job of being King of Greece, and later married a French Princess of Italian lineage. It was a time of glorious inbreeding.  His son, Leopold II, was one of the greatest mass-murders in history, overseeing systematic atrocities in the Belgium Congo that killed over 10 million.

A Bout of Mental Illness?
A bout of mental illness is neither unusual nor permanent. What does that mean for law and order, guns and marriage, kids and cars?

ACLU Rips Bob a New One
This ACLU brief on behalf of John Oliver is the funniest thing you'll see today, and is a rare brief that is brief, entertaining, and educational.  A man-slaughtering mine owner gets ripped a new on.

Your Locks Are Not Secure
A phone app can take a picture of a key which can be used to make a duplicate. "Scan your keys in our mobile app, choose a design, and we'll mail you a perfect copy."

Paul Krugman on Malthus
Paul Krugman blogs that “over the roughly 60 centuries that have passed since civilization emerged in Mesopotamia, the Malthusian proposition — population pressure swallows up any gains in productivity, so that most people live on the edge of subsistence — was true for 58. It just so happens that the two centuries for which the proposition didn’t hold were the two centuries after Malthus wrote.”  And it's still not true today, as I have noted in the past.

CS Lewis Says
"The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid 'dens of crime' that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice."