Read it.

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

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And they complain about Texas being overgunned….

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With the debut of passenger elevators some 150 years ago, cities were forever changed. Freed from the tyranny of stairwells, architects built as high as they liked. That is, until they ran into another barrier: the weight of steel cables. A new elevator design from German company ThyssenKrupp may solve that problem by trading cables for tracks that employ magnetic levitation, or maglev. Unconstrained by a linear pulley system, the cars–to be tested in Germany next year–will travel higher and in new directions, moving horizontally and even diagonally. The system, called Multi, may help make possible buildings of unprecedented size and energy efficiency, like this conceptual Edison Tower. Patrick Bass, CEO of ThyssenKrupp North America, says supertall, power-producing skyscrapers could help accommodate booming urbanization.

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“People come here because they say they can hear the electrics,” she replied. “I don’t know if it’s a real condition or not. But the electro- sensitives swear it is, so… to each their own, I say.” She didn’t look convinced. “I don’t really mind not having a cellphone,” she added. “You get used to that. And a lot of us have Wi-Fi in our homes anyway, so that’s OK.”

Hang on, so in The Town Without Wi-Fi, there is in fact quite a lot of Wi-Fi? I worried that this would not make for as catchy a headline as I had hoped. “Not publicly, but at home some of us do. It’s not illegal, but the observatory has a truck that can sense it. They’ll come round and ask you to turn it off.”

Read it.

Back in 2009, Russian design house Art Lebedev introduced the dramatically titled Transparentius concept for improving road safety. It was remarkably simple: put a camera on the front of large, slow-moving trucks and connect it to video displays on the back, thereby informing trailing drivers whether it’s safe to overtake the big rig. That’s the exact same idea that Samsung is now pursuing with a new prototype truck. Making use of its abundance of outdoor displays, the Korean company has stitched together a video wall of four displays at the rear of the truck, which transmits video captured by a wireless camera at the front.

Great idea. How much is it going to cost?

I smell another government mandate that will cost consumers and benefit a big company.

Read it.

The Korean math prodigy at one of the nation’s top high schools had Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg on the phone, personally encouraging the teenager to attend Harvard University. She received letters from Harvard professors, encouraging her to bring her brilliant abilities to Cambridge next fall instead of accepting her admission to Stanford University on the opposite coast.

As the student struggled to decide between five-figure scholarship promises from both schools, she received a novel offer: She could spend two years at each elite school as part of an arrangement just for her. The exciting dual-enrollment opportunity garnered star-struck coverage from Korean media outlets, which dubbed her the “Genius Girl.”

But none of it was true.

John Hinderaker does a little fisking.

Democratic presidential contender Martin O’Malley is pissed about the Charleston shootings. That is what he said in an email to supporters. So, is he pissed at the murderer, Dylann Roof? Don’t be silly! He’s pissed at Republicans. When you’re a Democrat, it’s all politics, all the time.

Every bad thing that hits the news is yet another stick with which Democrites try to beat Republicans, even when Republicans as such had nothing to do with it.

And yet  cities that are run by Democrites and undergoing major meltdowns, like Detroit, or murder machines, like Chicago, are apparently nobody’s fault, or else everybody’s fault, like Global Warming.

The real issue relating to straw purchasing is lack of enforcement. Under the Obama administration, federal prosecutions of gun-related offenses have declined by 30% to 40% compared with the Bush years. Eric Holder’s politicized Department of Justice had higher priorities than prosecuting actual crimes. As is so often the case, it makes much more sense to enforce laws already on the books than to pass new ones.

But Democrites get Election Points for passing new cool-sounding laws, even if they don’t do anything effective, rather than, you know, enforcing existing law, which might leave them open to Being Evaluated On Performance, to which they react like Bela Lugosi to garlic.

I’d be more interested in whether O’Malley is ‘pissed’ about the crime wave in Baltimore, of which he was once mayor and of which he is at present Governor, and just what he plans to do about it. Oh, wait, that would be Being Evaluated On Performance, and we can’t have that.

Read it.

Three culture-enriching “British” sisters have decamped from Albion for the sunny sands of Syria. Given that it is in the throes of a particularly bloody civil war, Syria is not currently the most popular holiday destination, so we must assume that the lure of the Islamic State is what drew the Dawood sisters to contract with people smugglers to get them across the border from Turkey. And one of the sisters indicated as much to other members of her family: she was fed up with the filthy, impure infidel environment of Modern Multicultural Britain, and longed to make hijra to the Caliphate.

What makes their situation out of the ordinary is that the Dawood sisters took their children along with them, nine of them, based on the account given in the news video below. This is big news in Britain at the moment, the most sensational tear-jerker to hit the media in recent months.

But wait, there’s more:

Revealed: How Isis Sisters Used British Benefits To Pay For Trip To Join Terrorists

The whole reason all these immigrants are killing themselves (so to speak) to get to Britain is that Britain, under successive Labour governments, has a hold-your-hands-out benefits system under which more and more people are rationally deciding that it makes no sense to hold down a job. Those who look fondly on the Democrite desire to establish such a system here ought to take note where such a system leads (but won’t — Oh, It Can’t Happen Here).

Read it.

More to the point, leaving the factory floor — where they’ve pretty much taken the jobs of the sort of people whom the Guardian champions (whether they like it or not) — and heading to take the jobs of the office drones into whose corner the Guardian is being forced because their traditional constituency (assembly-line proles) are going extinct.

Sky Is Falling – Film at 11 – Women and Minorities Hardest Hit. Wake me when we get there.

The problem is that the world is become a place that has a lessening need for people on the left side of the IQ bell curve, and the solution is to find ways to encourage such people not to reproduce. (But that would be raaaaaaacist….)

Read it.

Perhaps because nobody is surprised that a business that depends on politicians has a lobbying group. Does this come as news to anybody? Anybody Bueller?

Allow me to translate this headline out of Voice-of-the-Crust speak: ‘The biggest lobby of which we don’t approve that no one is bad-mouthing as much as we think ought to be happening.’

The Washington Post, like the New York Times, is shocked, shocked, that there is lobbying going on — and it’s always things they don’t like. Funny how that happens.

The Economist indulges in the Aggregation Fallacy.

Obviously, ‘the world’ isn’t running out of food, however much certain parts of the world may be ‘running out of food’.

Peer into any case where a district is ‘running out of food’ and you will find government policies (including those of wannabe-governments like the U.N.) that prevent people from growing or buying enough food.

Read it.

‘Sky is falling. Film at 11. Women and Minorities Hardest Hit.’

What is obviously in no danger of extinction is disaster-predicting academics. Let’s put this with the ‘peak oil’ and ‘population bomb’ predictions.

Read it.

This is the Oceansphere, a gigantic highly automated fish farm that will grow 1,000 tons of ahi and bluefin tuna from eggs to harvest size at a depth of 1,300 feet a few miles off the coast of Hawaii.

There’s lots to say here about the technology, which includes an automatic feeding system, water quality sensors, and thrusters that keep the sphere stationary, but let’s all just marvel at the fact that the Fish Matrix is real and set to begin installation by the end of the year. Hawaii Oceanic Technology CEO Bill Spencer told West Hawaii Today that this first sphere is mostly about refining the technology, but that after installation and testing the earliest harvest could occur in late 2017.

Considering all of the hand-wringing about low fish stocks and endangered fish species, ‘farming’ fish seems an obvious thing. What is less obvious is why it’s not bigger than it is.

The Oceansphere project has been years in the making — the video above is from 2008 — and HOT has been fighting legal and regulatory battles the entire time to make it reality. According to West Hawaii Today, 1,700 people signed a petition opposing the sphere, and 400 more wrote letters opposing the extension of construction deadlines in 2012. “The bottom line is the benefit does not outweigh the risks, no matter what kind of fish they plan to grow,” Diane Kanealii of theKailapa Community Association in Kawaihae told the paper, while Rob Parsons of Food & Water Watch is quoted calling it a “factory feedlot in our ocean.”

Well, there you go. No good deed goes unpunished. ‘What risks?’, I hear you ask. Unfortunately, I don’t hear an answer.

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”

— G. K. Chesterton, The Thing

Dance to the Music

Chcck it out.

Apparently I have the eyes of a dog. Who knew?

Read it.

(This is the journalistic ‘we’, in which a dork assumes that we’re all dork’s, too.)

Instead of being thought of as a part of a family unit or as a supportive parent, Dad is more often associated with bad, embarrassing jokes; socks with sandals; and unironic use of a fanny pack. Many of the characteristics that make someone good at being a parent — frugality, responsibility, selflessness — have become punchlines for an entire generation when it comes to talking about dad.

Theodore Dalrymple decries the modern age.

When a Nobel Prize winner can be hounded from his university chair by the harridans of the Internet (or any other self-constituted group of fanatics), the outlook for freedom of speech is not good. The West, having undergone its own Cultural Revolution, has taken up the baton of Maoist self-criticism.

Read it.

Affinity has become primary.  It’s not the people who murder in the name of their identity that feel they must explain themselves any more.  It is those who for some quaint reason are stubbornly patriotic to that most lost of causes, the nation of memory or the brotherhood of man, that are called upon to justify themselves. When people are willing to renounce an American, Australian, British or German passport for the privilege of killing strangers in the name of their hyphenated prefix it clearly raises the question of whether the glue that Western society is counting on to hold things together has any more adhesive power.

Read it.

Norway, supplied with information on known Islamic terrorists, compared that list with one of the most recent Moslem refugees it had accepted and found at least ten of these asylum seekers had an Islamic terrorist background. Similar discoveries are being made in other countries that accept these refugees via a UN resettlement program. For over a year intelligence agencies have been warning Western governments that ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant) and other Islamic terror groups have been sending members along with refugees entering, often illegally, Europe and the West in general. Despite this risk the United States has been the major participant in this resettlement program for Moslem refugees. At the same time the U.S. refuse to accept most Syrian and Iraqi Christian refugees.

One of the primary sources for these ISIL infiltrators is the flood of illegal migrants travelling by boat from Libya to Italy. For ISIL, taking control of this people smuggling was a natural as it brought in cash and so much money was being made (over a thousand dollars per passenger) that there was enough profit for the gangsters (in Libya and Italy and elsewhere) as well as ISIL. The cash (several hundred thousand dollars a day for ISIL) pays smugglers to bring in food and equipment, as well as weapons and explosives that cannot be obtained (stolen or bought) locally. ISIL also finds that it can send ISIL men to Europe in the refugee boats and European counter-terrorism agencies are beginning to detect this. In part because ISIL profits most from the people smuggling the rival Tripoli and Tobruk governments both interfere with the smuggling operations more frequently. This forces some of the smuggler operations to move to ISIL controlled ports. There aren’t too many of those, but enough to keep the smuggling going.

Read it.

If we executed everybody who has a tattoo, the world would be much improved thereby.

Discuss.

Really?

Jeez, guys, let it go….

Amazingly Automated Sewing and Embroidery Machines.

Quick searing knife toasts bread as you slice it.

Millenium Falcon MultiTool.

Water Bottle Underwear.

Balancing Knife. This is really slick.

Read it.

Two young Israeli hikers stopped to help a Palestinian who waved them down. It was a fatal mistake: the Arab opened fire, killing one of the Israeli men and injuring the other.

…

Hamas, now regarded as a legitimate political organization in many quarters, praised the murder:

“We welcome the unique and heroic operation that took place near Ramallah,” said Hamas spokesman Husam Badran. “We, and with us all our people, view with the utmost respect and appreciation those pure hands who held on to the resistance and turned their fire toward the occupier.”

Flagging down a passing motorist, and then shooting him when he stops to help–how heroic can you get?

Read it.

The good news is electric car battery maker A123 Systems is finally on track to turn a profit.

The bad news is taxpayers don’t figure to see any of the $133 million the federal government spent and the estimated $141 million in tax credits and subsidies secured from Michigan to help the company take off in 2009, only to see A123 Systems crash, declare bankruptcy in 2012 and then get purchased by a privately held Chinese conglomerate.

“In the case of A123, they created some jobs and a year or two later those jobs were gone, so taxpayers weren’t getting that money back,” said Jarret Skorup, a policy analyst at Michigan’s Mackinac Center, a free-market think tank.

Read it.

The future is here, it’s just not evenly distribueed.

(Look for an appropriate government program to hit Congress any day now.)

Read it.

Bahrainian authorities announced earlier this week that they had seized explosives and bomb-making materials that were planned to be used in Bahrain, as well as in neighboring Saudi Arabia. Bahrain’s police chief, Major-General Tariq al-Hasan, accused Iran of being behind the explosives, calling the act “a significant escalation”, and claiming that the explosives bore “clear similarities” to those used by proxy groups of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp. “The professionalism with which these seized materials are assembled and concealed is a clear indication of international support and sponsorship,” Hasan added.

And Obama thinks he can make a deal with these people that they will abide by. Incredible.

Read it.

Civil-rights groups and the country’s largest teachers union are at odds over the role of testing as Congress moves to fix the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, also known as No Child Left Behind, setting up a battle among Democratic-aligned groups that could make it tough to forge a bill that will garner necessary votes for passage.

In a letter to senators, officials with the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and three dozen other organizations said the current Senate bill, the Every Child Achieves Act, doesn’t have sufficient provisions to identify poor schools and hold them accountable when students do not meet performance goals based on test scores. In addition, the civil-rights groups asked for requirements around data-reporting and equal funding for schools.

…

“The highest priority of civil rights community for improving this law is also the National Education Association’s highest priority to defeat,” said Ms. Haycock.

Leaders of the National Education Association, the country’s largest teachers union, say that the heavy reliance on testing to assess teachers and schools creates a toxic environment for schools. While testing could be one variable in that mix, union leaders maintain that it cannot be the only measure. They advocate instead for a “dashboard” of indicators on student progress.

Since laws can’t magically increase the intelligence and diligence of children, the only sure way to leave no child behind is to make sure no child gets ahead.

Read it.

Read it.

The ginger cat was picked up by Cat Protection helpers in County Armagh last week. When animal welfare officers took him to the vet for a health check, it was discovered that he had been micro-chipped in Australia.

Read it.

Peter Szijjarto, the Hungarian foreign minister, claimed the 13ft tall fence would not contravene international law and was necessary to “defend” his country.

“The Hungarian government is committed to defending Hungary and defending the Hungarian people from the immigration pressure,” he said on Wednesday.

These aren’t Serbs or other Europeans; they’re Iraqis, Somalians, Turks, Syrians, and such like.

The Western Balkan route is used by migrants moving out of countries in the region and refugees coming from further afield who entered the EU from Turkey via Bulgaria or Greece.

…

The Serbian government had already asked for help stopping people arriving over its southern borders.

Freeberg nails it yet again.

Very first test I apply to any presidential candidate is they have to be FOR something.

Bernie Sanders passes the test, Hillary doesn’t, Carly Fiorina does, Jeb Bush doesn’t, Ted Cruz does, Lindsey Graham doesn’t, Sarah Palin would if she was running, Ben Carson probably not, Chris Christie definitely not.

This is just the very first test. It’s asking so little. A candidate’s long-held personal-pet-peeve, would suffice.

It is positively shocking that half the candidates, on both sides, flunk. They’re just outspoken and so wonderful, with name recognition, and it’s their turn! But, they don’t stand for anything.

We just don’t need it.

YES!

Read it.

In recent years, the Eye of Soros has been bored with racial disparities in public school teacher hiring, but that grace period may be coming to an end.

…

The general pattern relating to disparate impact enforcement is that our society can’t afford to impose this logic on all parts of society at once. For example, back five or six years ago when liberals were all worked up over not enough black firemen, I frequently pointed out that Silicon Valley seemed to be immune to denunciations for discrimination. Eventually, that changed and right now the SJWs aren’t interested in fire departments and are obsessed with Silicon Valley. But ten years from now the SJWs might be all worked up over, say, Hollywood film crews and sullenly aware that you can’t just hire a bunch of Michael Browns to write code.

Read it.

Read it.

This could be huge.

Read it.

It ain’t pretty.

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She said: “I haven’t had a DNA test. There’s been no biological proof that Larry and Ruthanne are my biological parents.”

Describing herself as “transracial” she added: “I definitely am not white. Nothing about being white describes who I am. I’m more black than I am white.”

Denial is not just a river in Egypt any more….

Read it.

And, really, have been for some time. It’s just now becoming too obvious to fake.

There’s more than a bit of cognitive dissonance in the merger of Democrats with plutocracy – rule by the wealthy. After all, the party’s brand is supposed to be “party of the people.” For Democrats, the allure of corporate cash – in campaign contributions and, later on, in of corporate patronage – may be overwhelming, but it does pose a threat to the party’s positioning.

Oh, I don’t know — Democrites have never had a problem saying on thing and being another.

Steve Sailer jumps on the bandwagon.

As you may have noticed, the more denunciations we hear of Cisgender Straight White Male Privilege, the more the evidence mounts that, all else being equal, the rewards in 2015 tend to lie on the other side.

If you want to know which side is more powerful at present, just observe who is wielding the rhetorical whip hand. It’s human nature to fear, respect, and even admire those with the power to harm you. Hence, it’s popular to side with the strong to denounce the weak.

…

A common contributor to examples of transracialism is coming from a foreign culture with different racial standards. For example, one of my son’s college roommates remarked that in America everybody calls him black, while back home in Jamaica everybody calls him white.

Read it.

“Ford Shifts Grant Making To Focus Entirely on Inequality” is the headline on the Chronicle of Philanthropy news article about the Ford Foundation, which has more than $12 billion in assets.

…

The Ford Foundation’s most recent tax return reports that Mr. Walker’s predecessor, Luis Ubinas, was paid $1,891,441 in compensation and $109,294 in benefits for his final year, a sum that “INCLUDES SALARY OF $898,571 FOR THE PERIOD FROM 01/01/13 TO 09/05/13, POST-EMPLOYMENT COMPENSATION OF $954,622 PAID IN 2013 AND PREVIOUSLY UNTAXED DEFFERED COMPENSATION OF $38,248 PAID IN 2013. EXCLUDES $249,045 OF PREVIOUSLY TAXED DEFFERED COMPENSATION THAT WAS REPORTED ON A PRIOR YEAR(S) 990-PF AND PAID IN 2013.”

The foundation’s staff also included a $1.3 million a year director of investment administration, a $927,148 a year director of private equity, an $889,992 a year director of asset allocation, and a $723,728 a year director of hedge funds, according to the tax return.

Maybe if the Ford Foundation is so concerned about inequality, they might think about giving away the $12 billion — not just the income it generates, but the principal — to everyone equally, and shut down themselves, their highly paid staff and their fancy New York headquarters.

Read it.

In the last week of May, the Qatar-based Arabic news network Al-Jazeera polled its Arabic-language audience on the question: “Do you support the victories of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in your region?”

The results were shocking. Of the 56,881 Arabic-speaking respondents, a whopping 81% voted yes. The results of this online survey may not be scientific. But they do provide anecdotal evidence of what many see as a rise in the support of Islamism in the Arab Middle East, among Muslims in the Indo-Pakistan subcontinent, and in the diaspora in Britain and France.

On Monday, a 17-year-old Briton became that country’s youngest suicide bomber after he blew up a brand new SUV packed with explosives in the northern Iraqi town of Baiji. Talha Asmal had Arabized his name to Abu Yusuf al-Britani and is the latest young person used by jihadi Islamists as cannon fodder in their quest to establish an Islamic caliphate. This is laid out in sharia law, as a precursor to the Islamic Armageddon enshrined in Hadith literature, based on Prophet Mohammed’s prophesy.

Read it.

Read it.

Iranian artist and activist Atena Farghadani, who was charged with “insulting members of parliament through paintings” for a caricature she drew lampooning debate on a bill that would outlaw some forms of contraception, has reportedly been sentenced to 12 years and nine months in prison.

Details out of Iran are still sketchy and few international media outlets have picked up the sentencing story as of this writing, but the Washington Post’s Michael Cavna discussed the case with representatives from Cartoonists Rights Network International, including board member and Iranian cartoonist in exile Nikahang Kowsar, who has first-hand experience with what Farghadani is going through now. Kowsar was imprisoned in 2000 for drawing a crocodile with a name similar to a powerful Ayatollah’s.

Just a reminder — if one is needed — that Freedom of Speech is NOT a Muslim value.

Read it.

In theory, Middle East studies programs are a good idea. One of the biggest impediments to countering modern jihadism has been the lack of historical knowledge about the region and Islam. But even the attention and urgency that followed the terrorist attacks on 9/11 have not led to such knowledge. The result has been policies pursued both by Republicans and Democrats that are doomed to fail, as the current chaos in the region attests.

Rather than enlightening citizens and policy-makers, Middle Eastern studies programs have darkened our understanding. As Martin Kramer documented in his important 2002 study Ivory Towers on Sand, most programs have become purveyors not of knowledge but of ideology. Under the influence of literary critic Edward Said’s historically challenged book Orientalism––”a work,” historian Robert Irwin has written, “of malignant charlatanry, in which it is hard to distinguish honest mistakes from willful misrepresentations”­­––Middle East studies programs, Kramer writes, “came under a take-no-prisoners assault, which rejected the idea of objective standards, disguised the vice of politicization as the virtue of commitment, and replaced proficiency with ideology.” The ideology, of course, comprised the old Marxist narrative of Western colonial and imperial crimes, a Third Worldism that idealizes the dark-skinned, innocent “other” victimized by Western depredations, and the juvenile romance of revolutionary violence.

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Double divorces have come to prominence in recent months thanks to the case of millionaire Ecotricity founder Dale Vince, whose wife Kathleen Wyatt has been given permission by the Supreme Court to seek a payout 30 years after they divorced.

Without a financial order severing their respective finances, an ex-spouse can bring a new claim against their former partner, even years after the marriage was dissolved. Many couples fail to obtain a court order to formalise their financial agreement when they divorce, often because they have reached their own informal settlement.

Moral: DO YOUR PAPERWORK.

Read it.

“America is the land of opportunity,” “There is only one race, the human race” and “I believe the most qualified person should get the job” are among a long list of alleged microaggressions faculty leaders of the University of California system have been instructed not to say.

Actually, this is perfectly consistent with their ongoing efforts to make sure it is no longer a land of opportunity. They’re just being honest.

These so-called microaggressions – considered examples of subconscious racism – were presented at faculty leader training sessions held throughout the 2014-15 school year at nine of the 10 UC campuses. The sessions, an initiative of UC President Janet Napolitano, aim to teach how to avoid offending students and peers, as well as how to hire a more diverse faculty.

A very good reason to avoid California, especially the schools (if you can still call them that).

Read it.

The number of people employed by New York City taxpayers will reach a record high this month — 282,767.

That’s according to the Office of Management and Budget, which estimates that by the end of June, the city will have increased its rolls by 11,000 in just the past year.

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

Get it.

It’s free, so you have no excuse.

Kathy Shaidle jerks back the curtain.

That Watt-Cloutier was co-nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize along with Al Gore isn’t something I’d personally brag about, but it gets us to the message of her book, which is basically “global warming is melting stuff up here and wrecking our way of life.” Said way of life in Nunavut amounting to paying ten times the price for groceries flown up from the part of the country where we actually grow and make stuff, then sitting in the dark half the year getting drunk.

Carrie Saxifrage, who wrote the second book in question — The Big Swim: Coming Ashore in a World Adrift — also changed her name in adulthood, but for pretentious, First World white lady reasons:

She and her husband named themselves after a white flower that grows on mountaintops, and, as she recounts, “Our families didn’t know what to make of our earnest explanations of how we were claiming relationship to those pure, high places[.]”

I pray that being “high” had something to do with this couple’s rejected-Portlandia-script name-change. The notion of anyone undertaking such an endeavor stone cold sober chills the blood.

…

The very notion of “climate change memoirs” provides minutes of fun. One eagerly awaits the release of Confessions of a (Locally Sourced, Organic) Opium Eater and Go Ask Alice (About Bee Colony Collapse.)