I just saw a kid buy 6 boxes of these Juul things. She was 14 at the very most. Nobody asked for ID or anything of the kind. They do have nicotine in them, right? Is this allowed?

Said William H. Frey, the senior demographer at the Brookings Institution who conducted the analysis. “We think of immigrants as being low-skilled workers from Latin America, but for recent arrivals that’s much less the case. People from Asia have overtaken people from Latin America.”

I don’t know who the royal “we” is in this quote but I’ve been teaching exactly this in my lectures on immigration for almost 5 years. And I never teach anything unless I have a bunch of reliable sources.

I wonder why this is being presented as some sort of big news.

I have nothing but contempt for the Russian protesters who tried to come out against the pension reform in recent weeks. These weepy posts make me want to barf.

The Crimea is dying. The Northern part of the peninsula will have to evacuate. The rest will be dead within a decade. It’s an enormous ecological catastrophe.

The reason it’s dying is the lack of water. There is no way of bringing fresh water to the peninsula if not from Ukraine. There are also massive shortages of food but forget that. Without water to irrigate and flush out the waste, it’s all turning into a desert that stinks of sewage.

But what does it have to do with the people who protest the pension reform in Russia, you’ll ask?

As I reported back in 2014, Putin spent the federal reserves that guaranteed the stability of the pension fund on annexing the Crimea and invading the Donbass. This was not a secret. It was all openly discussed and voted for by the parliament.

As the vote was coming in, today’s “underprivileged protesters,” as the linked article refers to them, cheered. They were all ecstatic when Putin annexed the Crimea, invaded Ukraine, and sent troops to Syria. These very people were howling with joy after every invasion. They kept saying that they are ready to eat stones if that meant they could have the Crimea. I mean, that was actually a fashionable thing to say.

Now the time has come to pay for the fun they’ve had. It’s a costly and stupid kind of fun, but as Klara says sagely at the bookstore, “We always have to pay for our purchases, Mommy.”

The anger of these protesters is caused by the discovery that invading other countries isn’t cheap. That’s the extent of their political conscience. They want to invade and murder at will and not have to pay for it. And now they are really really pouty that this is not how life works.

The worst part is not that they are getting knocked in the teeth by the Russian police but that they won’t learn anything. Tomorrow they will cheer another invasion and then pout when it turns out that bombs, troops, and weapons cost money.