Babylon Bee.

The California State Legislature passed a law today which requires every American flag in the state to have the stars representing anti-LGBTQ states removed. Governor Gavin Newsom signed the bill in rainbow ink this morning and then blew a kiss to the CNN camera in front of him.

Read it.

Guess you can’t trust a Muslim, even a NATO ally.

Read it.

Sometimes it is good to be the Fortunate Son.

Read it.

The National Immigration Institute, the department that manages Mexico’s immigration affairs, announced late Wednesday that it flew 311 Indian nationals from Toluca, Mexico to New Dehli, India. The move is being hailed by the Mexican government as first of its kind, and further illustrates its efforts to stop the flow of illegal migrants reaching the U.S. southern border.

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

Just remember that.

Absolutely nothing.

The Other McCain looks at the Democrat field.

Once the debates began, it became apparent that Biden is not a viable challenger to Trump. He is simply too old, and has too much baggage — not least of which being his son’s deals in Ukraine and China — and cannot inspire the left-wing grassroots. The idea that Biden is a “moderate” who can appeal to blue-collar voters was, perhaps, wishful thinking for Democrats, who have become the anti-white, anti-male, anti-American party. If they nominated Biden, Democrats would be symbolically repudiating everything on which their identity-politics “social justice” agenda is based. Therefore, even if Biden could win the primaries, this would set up the Democrats for defeat in November 2020, because so many of their supporters — especially of the purple-hair feminist SJW variety — would not bother to vote.

Read it.

Gee, I wonder how that happened. We all know that walls don’t work.

Scott Adams lays it out. (Start at the 22:00 minute mark.)

What’s the crisis? Can somebody describe to me what the crisis is? Now, I’ve heard the speculative what-if crisis … the what-if speculative crisis goes like this: If people can’t trust the United States because of our President abandoning the Kurds, that will hurt us later, in ways that we can’t quite specify.

But will it? Is there a country that won’t do a trade deal with us because of this? No. Is there a country that won’t partner with us militarily because of this situation? No, cause what are their other options? Partner with us to defeat your local enemy, or don’t partner with us, and good luck.

It turns out that when you’re the strongest country in the world, people are still going to work with you, because the second choice is way worse.

Who is not going to work with the United States? No one. Which countries uncritically trusted the United States under all conditions when we promised we’ll do something? Which countries believed that we’ll definitely do something if we way we’ll do it? How about nobody? How about nobody believed that. Because at the very least we elect a new President every now and then. Is there some county that could trust that the next President won’t reverse everything that this President did? No. Nobody could trust that. We have a system–because democracy–our system guarantees that we can’t be trusted. We can never be trusted. Because we’ll just vote in a different government and we’ll  have different priorities.

So there’s one thing that people can be sure of, that the United States can’t be trusted, forever, because our priorities change and our government changes. They all know that.

Amanpour Lets Jane Fonda Tout Climate Alarmism, Inspired by Thunberg  Of course she does.

Aussie Left Retreating from Vote Losing Climate Extremism?

London Bans Extinction Rebellion Protests After Blackrock Offices Targeted

Is Greta Thunberg A Putin Puppet? German Politician Demands Answers

Holiday Flights are OK for Extinction Rebellion Climate Leaders

There are three types of climate change denier, and most of us are at least one

Extinction Rebellion celebrities admit they are ‘hypocrites’ for backing protests despite ‘high carbon lives’

Extinction Rebellion Blockade Google HQ

Alberta Government Won’t Be Welcoming Greta Thunberg When She Visits Oil-Rich Canadian Province This Week

Was this zoologist punished for telling school kids politically incorrect facts about polar bears?

Babylon Bee.

I’m holding out for a plenary indulgence.

David Bahr is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

And so I made an inventory unique to WFB (though I encourage you to choose a Minor Prophet at random and try this experiment for yourself). I catalogued his intellectual and practical toolkit to see if I could think through whether or not it would have been sufficient to address our problems in 2019—and, say, the next few decades. Without going through the laundry list, let’s agree that Buckley was a master of the medium of his time. He understood television and print, and wielded both to great effect. He mastered the use of those tools and used them in specific ways. So did each of the Minor Prophets.

But how would they fare today, in a world of new modes and orders? A world of half-baked integralists, Bronze Age Perverts, and Lord knows who else? Do Buckley and Kristol and Reagan still matter to young conservatives, and therewith to the future of intellectual conservatism, as they once did? Are the next conservative intellectuals—serious intellectuals, mind you—stressing about AEI and WSJ internships? Do they have an online subscription to National Review? Do Jonah Goldberg, Ross Douthat, or David Brooks move them any which way? Can they name a Founding Father?

ZMan looks at modern American politics.

Now, the reason the Left wins even when they lose is not because they are shrewd or even that the Right is dumb. It’s that they reject that central premise of popular government, where the losers accept the results of an election and the winners reach a fair bargain with the losers. For the Left, what is theirs they keep. What is yours they seek. This is the central cause of the ratchet effect in American politics. One side exploits the rules, while the other abides by the rules.

Facts About Methane Ignored to Support Climate Narrative

Barfly: It Is A Cult, After All

Opinion: Think fossil fuels are bad? Nuclear energy is even worse

How to Glue Yourself to a Plane, According to Science

‘Time to get London moving again’: Police finally get tough on Extinction Rebellion as officers clear Trafalgar Square  I’m curious as to why they didn’t do this immediately. Do the police need hormone injections or something?

Ancient artefacts are melting out of Norwegian glaciers

The Environmentalist Case for Roundup

Climate change could push Ebola into untouched regions, report warns  Detroit, say.

Babylon Bee.

We have the technology.

Read it.

The most recent IRS data, from 2016, shows that the top 10 percent of income earners pay almost 70 percent of federal income taxes. However, after the estate tax, the federal income tax is the most progressive part of the U.S. tax code.

Americans also pay less progressive payroll taxes, corporate taxes, excise taxes, and at the state level, property and sales taxes.

Looking at all federal taxes, the Congressional Budget Office shows that the top 1 percent pay an average federal tax rate of 33.3 percent. The data shows tax rates decline with income, and the poorest 20 percent of the population pays an average tax rate of just 1.7 percent.

The left-leaning Tax Policy Center shows similar results.

Babulon Bee: A grim report indicated Wednesday that the count of people murdered by known hate group Chick-fil-A has risen to 0 this year.

David Cole is delightfully dyspeptic today.

Sometimes you get the hero you need, sometimes you get the hero you deserve, and sometimes you get a worthless dumbass who is neither. And if you’re really unlucky, you might get a whole flock of worthless dumbasses. I speak, of course, of the “conservatives” who spend every minute of every day desperately trying to convince the world how safe and nonthreatening they are. “Frugality, morality, and God bless our troops. Who can hate that? Down with Trump! Please like me!”

New York Times Former Reporter: Toss ‘Climate Troglodytes’ Like Trump, Inhofe Out of Office  Eaay to say, hard to do.

Sorry Greta, India needs more coal to power growth

Exposing the myth of plastic recycling

Realist Catholic Climate Declaration

First Paper to Link CO2 and Global Warming (1856)

Climate Change Activists Target BlackRock Headquarters In London As Hundreds Occupy Financial District  Pissing people off is a great way to persuade them to your side.

Jane Fonda, Climate Scientist, to the Rescue

Read it.

Hmmm.

Mark Krikorian responds to Bevo Beto O’Rourke.

Robert Francis O’Rourke’s pledge last week to end the tax exemption for churches that don’t embrace same-sex marriage isn’t just the cry for attention of an also-ran. As the editors noted on Friday, several of his fellow presidential candidates have co-sponsored legislation that would limit religious liberty. (Pete Buttigieg did say on Sunday that he opposed O’Rourke’s proposal, though his comments seemed to suggest that the intersectional pickle of stripping mosques of their tax-exemption was the real problem.)

But the left’s totalitarian goals aren’t confined to religious institutions. Just last month the House Ways and Means Committee held a hearing to make the case for stripping the non-profit tax status of organizations labeled as “hate groups” by the disgraced Southern Poverty Law Center. These groups include not just those with a religious orientation, like the Family Research Council and the American Family Association, but also secular groups like the Center for Security Policy, the David Horowitz Freedom Center, and the Center for Immigration Studies (which I head). You can watch the September hearing here, including the tutorial by the sole Republican witness, law professor Eugene Volokh, on the bedrock constitutional principle of viewpoint neutrality: “There is no constitutional right to a tax exemption, but there is a constitutional right not to be discriminated [against] based on viewpoint in the grant or denial of a tax exemption.”

Read it.

The dirty little nonsecret for years has been that modern dishwashers don’t clean dishes well. The culprit is federal efficiency standards, which have been tightened to use less energy.

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Or maybe not. We report, you decide.

Read it.

Maybe students are tired of being lectured on diversity.

Funding of climate change countermovement players (2013)

Climate change activists are focused on all the wrong solutions

BBC: Its Important to Let Climate Worriers Talk About Murdering Their Own Children  Anything we can do to help, just call. Feel free to call collect.

Flight-Shaming Catching On In Europe

Freeberg invents a new term.

A grenade is the furthest you can get from any kind of precision instrument. There’s no scope-sighting, no aiming, no plan to adjust for wind, downgrade, muzzle velocity, bullet weight in grains…just an explosive projectile lobbed in at an approximate location. Such people demand and require uncontested control over whatever is happening. Everything in earshot or line-of-site has to be exposed and subject to their frag. They are the last to compromise on anything and the first to ostracize any dissenters who show too much recalcitrance or hesitation to “get with the program.” If you continue with your not-getting-on-board bad behavior, you will find yourself subject to some passionate gossip while your back is turned, sure as the sun rises in the East.

“Grenade Person” is awkward; how about a related construct “Grenado”?

Read it.

Presumably bolstered by the fiery claims of Greta Thunberg and the general theme of Climate Week, people on Twitter have been declaring that capitalism threatens humanity. This angst rekindled interest in a Guardian article that ran a few months ago, in which author George Monbiot argued that the very nature of capitalism is “incompatible with the survival of life on Earth.” Not only do such claims ignore the obvious progress of humanity staring us in the face—and the environmental activists are supposed to be the empirical ones in this debate—but even if Monbiot’s worries about the climate were correct, capitalism would still be the best social system to deal with the crisis.

Monbiot is one of the most muddle-headed writers that the Guardian employs, and that’s a high bar.

To begin with, there is no necessary connection between ‘capitalism’ (and I doubt that Monbiot actually understands the meaning of the term) and a need for growth. The fact that they often occur together is Yet Another Instance of the Correlation Implies Causation fallacy. ‘Capitalism’ (i.e. the use of machines to leverage labor by automating production processes, more accurately ‘industrialism’) is a means of production, not a way of structuring economic activity. One can use machines to produce goods from recycled inputs if one desires to do so; not many do because that’s more effort than using fresh raw materials, but it can be done. So Monbiot has his head up his butt in this respect.

His other complaint is that private property (not capitalism, although I’m sure his muddled understanding of ‘capitalism’ includes private property as a feature) somehow constitutes a ‘seizure of common goods’, thereby leading to all sorts of Bad Things. Well, the assumption that all goods somehow belong to everybody in common is certainly an axiom of socialist thought (of which I assume that Monbiot is a practicioner), but still represents an assumption for which neither evidence nor argument is presented. Interestingly enough, two of the Bad Things on his list of the sins of capitalism, ‘immiseration of other people by an economy based on looting’ and ‘translation of economic power into political power’ are both essential characteristics of socialism, the first arising from the necessity of comprehensive theft in order to set up the socialist system to begin with and the consequent dependence on the socialist administrators of the ‘collective means of production’ which historically all socialist governments use to shackle the political activity of their clients — Venezuela being only the most recent example. So Monbiot has his head up his butt in this regard as well.

Read it.

Over the last few days, a host of former Obama officials have been repeating this story, which is highly misleading, to say the least. Rice and her colleagues would have us believe that Team Obama created a highly effective plan for stabilizing the Middle East by working through groups like the YPG, and Trump, mercurial and impulsive, is throwing it all away by seeking a rapprochement with Ankara. That’s nonsense.

In fact, the close relationship with the YPG was a quick fix that bequeathed to Trump profound strategic dilemmas. Trump inherited from Obama a dysfunctional strategy for countering ISIS, one that ensured ever-greater turmoil in the region and placed American forces in an impossible position.

Read it.

Politicians on both sides of the aisle insist that they can trust the American people. Since I have also believed there are reasons to have faith in our citizens, I always silently nod in agreement at these words. But this morning, I asked myself: What does that statement even mean?

At first glance, I assume that those of us who make this remark believe that ultimately citizens will learn/recognize/figure out the truth of a complex political situation. But do we really believe they will make that effort? Do we honestly think that the American people will get through the maze and hyperbole of the information they receive from the media to get to the “truth”?

…

The public has demonstrated that even though it doesn’t trust the media, it continues to go to them for information. The public insists that it can weigh all the information and come to a legitimate conclusion, even though it doesn’t actually read the original sources or trust those who publicize this information. As long as the Left continues to control its message, we need to worry about the 2020 election.

Frankly, I don’t trust the American people.

I don’t either.

Read it.

I have a question: Would the Usual Suspects be so excited about this if he were white? Or Asian?

Matt Taibbi.

’ve lived through a few coups. They’re insane, random, and terrifying, like watching sports, except your political future depends on the score.

The kickoff begins when a key official decides to buck the executive. From that moment, government becomes a high-speed head-counting exercise. Who’s got the power plant, the airport, the police in the capital? How many department chiefs are answering their phones? Who’s writing tonight’s newscast?

When the KGB in 1991 tried to reassume control of the crumbling Soviet Union by placing Mikhail Gorbachev under arrest and attempting to seize Moscow, logistics ruled. Boris Yeltsin’s crew drove to the Russian White House in ordinary cars, beating KGB coup plotters who were trying to reach the seat of Russian government in armored vehicles. A key moment came when one of Yeltsin’s men, Alexander Rutskoi – who two years later would himself lead a coup against Yeltsin – prevailed upon a Major in a tank unit to defy KGB orders and turn on the “criminals.”

We have long been spared this madness in America. Our head-counting ceremony was Election Day. We did it once every four years.

That’s all over, in the Trump era.

Read it.

In the course of “preserving the commons for all of the people,” a frequently stated mission of national parks and protected areas, one class or culture of people, one philosophy of nature, one worldview, and one creation myth has almost always been preferred over all others. These favored ideas and impressions are at some point expressed in art. And it is through art that our earliest preconceptions and fantasies about nature are formed.

Read it.

If you see a telepresence robot, break it — it won’t know why.

Climate Protest Fury: “they should be doing is getting off their a*** … instead of blaming everybody else”

Extinction Rebellion protests: Belgian princess ‘arrested in Trafalgar Square’

PG&E gas employees wined and dined just before mass power outages

Ignore Climate Hysteria: Brazil Set To Post Record Harvest

Extinction Rebellion protests: Activists accuse group of failing to prepare members for being arrested

Vancouver has ‘coldest Oct. 10 in 123 years’ as temperatures tumble across B.C.  Gotta love that Global Warming.

Another Newsweek Conspiracy: ‘Greta Thunberg Snubbed for Nobel Peace Prize’ By Big Oil

Will Jane Fonda Getting Arrested Save The Environment?

Read it.

Read The Whole Thing.

Megan McArdle.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Read it.

Plenty of room in Texas, y’all. But leave your Blue State attitudes up north.

Ancient Mayans caused their own ‘climate change,’ shocking study says

A Statement for Advocates of Climate Stasis

CNN’s Bernstein Trashes ‘Fundamentally Corrupt,’ ‘Increasingly Unstable’ Trump  As predicted.

Brazil’s Rainfall Remains Healthy: Susceptible to Natural Climatic Events, Not Anthropogenic Global Warming

Extinction Rebellion to launch ‘Hong Kong-style’ occupation of London City Airport

Australian state proposes two-year prison sentence for possession of Extinction Rebellion ‘human lock’

Back from the dead: Some corals regrow after ‘fatal’ warming

State Birds May Be Forced Out of Their States as the World Warms

State AG’s and activists trying to forge attribution link between weather and climate

BBC Andrew Neil Shreds Extinction Rebellion’s Climate Claims

Read it.

This is part of an occasional series of essays that discusses ongoing scientific controversies, a specific type of which are often referred to in the science press and elsewhere as “Wars” – for instance, one essay covered the “Salt Wars1” and another the “Obesity War” — and one which appears most commonly here at this web site: “The Climate Wars”. The purpose of the series is to illuminate the similarities and differences involved in these ongoing controversies, as part of the social culture of science in our modern world.

Read it.

When you’re on the Slippery Slope, those who try to dig in and keep things from going over a cliff have a desperate struggle ahead of them.

Read it.

Turns out, humans aren’t really designed to stand for long periods with feet flat on the floor. This contributes to stress on the spine, and you can feel it in your lower back. A foot rail allows us to redistribute the load on our feet—first one foot, then the other—and alter the tilt of our spines. “Bartenders were probably the first ergonomics experts on the planet,” write the authors of Deskbound, a 2016 book about the hazards of the sedentary life. “A standing-height drinking table that you can lean on, with a place to rest your foot? Genius.” Also genius: A foot rail is not only better for your back, but helps you cut a better figure. Standing flat-footed renders everyone a bit oafish; raising one foot results in a more rakish profile.

Read it.

Ukrainian MP Andriy Derkach revealed on Wednesday that former Vice President Joe Biden received $900,000 from Burisma Group for lobbying activities, according to Interfax.

Quid Pro Joe!

Read it.

Damn. That means my copy is incomplete.

The Other McCain is disgruntled.

If these murders had been committed by a deranged white man, the story would be getting wall-to-wall coverage on CNN, the killer portrayed as a Trump-inspired perpetrator of a “hate crime.” But the suspect is an immigrant from the Dominican Republic, and so . . . crickets chirping.

Read it.

Like the history of racism in the Democrat party, nobody much mentions the fact that rich people these days are more likely to be Democrats than Republicans.