Babylon Bee.

Can’t be too careful, after all. These tragedies must be STOPPED.

Read it.

Q. How can you tell a vegan?

A. You don’t tell a vegan, the vegan tells you.

Babylon Bee.

It had to happen.

Read it.

And who could blame them?

USF-led team deciphers sea level rise from the last time Earth’s CO2 set record highs

Extinction Rebellion Demands a “Citizens Assembly” to Oversee Climate Policy

Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #374

The Thermageddonites are “studying” us. Be afraid – be very afraid

The lazy assertion that Hurricane Dorian is caused by climate change

For a lower climate footprint, vegetarian diet beats local  Take whatever action you think appropriate. I’m going to order some meat from ButcherBox. (Use the offer code RICOCHET.)

Extinction Rebellion co-founder reveals she was inspired to begin the climate change protest movement after taking ‘psychedelic medicines’

Slate Editor on CNN: Trump Makes Us ‘Physically Ill,’ Constantly Does Impeachable Things  Brian Stelter always reminds me of somebody they got at the last minute to fill in for someone more worthwhile.

Read it.

Okay, I’ll bite: Why is that a bad thing?

Sure, I dislike seeing useful things go to waste as much as anybody. But I don’t become a ‘campaigner’ about it. In my experience, people who can be described as ‘campaigners’ specialize in hectoring other people about how they ought to live their lives, always in favor of what the ‘campaigner’ would prefer. I have a name for such people and it isn’t ‘campaigner’.

We live in glorious times, in which prosperity is sufficiently widespread that more and more people can throw clothes away rather than pinch and scrimp and save and make do the way that poor people do. Of course, to Certain People that’s unfortunate. They’d rather all of us live like poor people, even if we’re not.

Cars are too convenient; we need to use bicycles and trains. Airplanes are too convenient; we need to use trains and … wishful thinking, I suppose. (I’m waiting for Tesla to come out with an Electric Horse. The Left Coast will go crazy.)

Babylon Bee.

Well. There it is.

My local public library has, at any one time, over 300 books that occupy its list of New Adult Non-Fiction. Over 95% of them have a colon in the title. I find that mildly disturbing.

In general, books with titles of the form ‘What the Bible Really Teaches About …’ will tell you a lot about what the author wishes the Bible would teach but very little about what the Bible really teaches.

This is a good time for Japanese authors, from Zen monks wishing to share the secrets of life to knitters wishing to share patterns to Japanese housewives wanting to teach you how to be Japanese housewives.

Have you ever heard of Ludwig Bemelmans? Apparently his biography is of interest to suburban Republicans in north Texas.

Apparently the best way to get published is to write 400 pages explaining why you’re a victim and how it’s everybody’s fault but your own.

Apparently you can become a Hero merely by cooking and eating the correct ecologically-sound and nutritious food. Who knew?

Apparently, being rich (not becoming, but being) is something that can be taught. Color me surprised. I would have thought that a winning lottery ticket would somehow be involved but I guess not.

Evidently you can become a beekeeper with no actual effort on your part — which sort of makes sense, since really the bees are doing all of the work. Presumably there is some way to convince the honey to just walk itself into the jar.

It would seem that unlocking the minds of serial killers and predators is something that a lot of people are eager to do. I would not have guessed that.

The moon is very popular, both as an object and as a metaphor.

It would also appear that just being Black is sufficient to get a book published. Go for it.

Read it.

Chen Guangcheng is a member of the faculty of the Institute for Policy Research and Catholic Studies at the Catholic University of America, and a distinguished senior fellow in human rights at the Witherspoon Institute.

Read it.

’ve mentioned before that it’s difficult, if not impossible, for Republicans to win the votes of African-Americans through policy proposals. These voters are loyal to the Democratic party. In any case, the Dems invariably will outbid the GOP through more blatant race conscious policies than the ones Republicans propose.

Democrats too can find it difficult to bid for black votes — when they are running against each other. Take the case of Elizabeth Warren.

Read it.

And it is important.

It’s time to whack greenhouse gas Endangerment Finding

Edmonton city council declares climate emergency

The Next Great Extinction Event Will Not Be Global Warming – It Will Be Global Cooling

Have Environmentalists Killed More Europeans Than Islamic Terrorists Did?

Google discriminates against conservatives and climate skeptics

Sea ice melt in the Arctic Basin leaves an area for polar bears larger than Greenland

Scientists Avoid Bias When They Know They’re Being Tested

Banning mini shampoos from hotels won’t really reduce plastic or save the environment

Climate change: Big lifestyle changes ‘needed to cut emissions’  Or we could just tell the Nannies to STFU.

Climate Theology

The air conditioning trap: how cold air is heating the world – Environment  Gee, that’s too bad.

CNN Vs. What the Science Says

The Hazards of Covering Climate Change

Read it.

We’d certainly be better off without California.

This week we talked to Chris, a 35-year-old white man from rural Pennsylvania. Chris wrote in that he thought, “the U.S. should have a velvet divorce,” a reference to the peaceful dissolution of Czechoslovakia — now the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic — in 1993. Chris went on: “I live in heavy Trump country but know he’s an idiot, but even Trump haters wouldn’t agree to break up the U.S. And certain areas (the South, the Midwest) would be horrible for minorities and destroy the environment. But it’s obvious the U.S. has run its course.”

Notice they never print interviews with people who actually like Trump and know he’s not an idiot.

The Narrative, the whole Narrative, and nothing but the Narrative, shall see print.

Read it.

A series of small experiments inspired by early proto-writing systems such as cuneiform and hieroglyphs. Here, new writing systems are created by challenging two neural networks to communicate information via images. Using the magic of machine learning, the networks attempt to create their own emergent language isolate that is robust to noise. This is similar to a machine learning architecture called generative adversarial networks (GANs) except that the networks are collaborating and not competing.

Read it.

Google’s decision to wipe “deceptive” and “exploitative” payday loans from the Android operating system has been met with criticism from short term lenders who slammed it for treading on the British government’s toes.

Loans that require repayment in full in 60 days or less, also referred to as pay-cheque advances or short term loans will soon be banned, Google has warned app developers in an email.

This is a good instance of the harm that ‘woke’ tech firms can do to their customers by embracing the political agenda of the Nanny class. Observe that the same people who think that abortion ought to be a decision solely of a mother and her doctor are loath to extend the same respect to a loan that ought to be the decision solely of a borrower and his (her?) lender.

You can kill your child without a qualm on our part but we shrink from the horror of allowing you to borrow money under circumstances that we find undesirable.

Read it.

As with many other libertarian screeds, this essay assumes that things headed to Hell in a handbasket must not fail to arrive there. Britain once had a species of public debt that was perpetual, i.e. the borrower could at no time demand return of his investment, but was forced to depend upon being able to sell it to someone else. These were called ‘consols’, and figure prominently in British fiction. They were, however, finally redeemed in 2014, and so no longer exist — an excellent illustration of the folk wisdom ‘never say never’.

Read it.

President Trump’s detachment of the United States from the wagon of the Iranian regime was a mighty deed. What can be said about the Obama administration’s funding of the regime and blessing of its nuclear program? Perhaps that it made the Munich Agreement look good by comparison. At least Neville Chamberlain didn’t agree to fund Hitler’s regime. The abject humiliation of the United States by the terms of the the JCPOA and its secret side deals must have proved an irresistible attraction to the great minds of the Obama administration.

Read it.

This weekend marks the end of summer, and therefore the end of white-bucks season Unless you’re Pat Boone, who, like college men in the ’30s, wore his year-round. His above collection is from 1959. Go here for a CBS News slideshow on the clean cut idol, who in mid-life made a heavy metal album.

Read it.

Yeah, if you say so.

Become an Orthodox Christian. That way you can fast on Wednesdays and Fridays and get points that can be traded for valuable prizes later.

Tyler Cowen, a Real Economist, has some bad news.

There is a new culture war in America, between the ordinary and the transcendent. And the ordinary is winning.

…

The largest recipient of Patreon funds is the Chapo Trap House podcast, whose 31,000-plus donors send in more than $138,000 per month. This podcast is a leading voice of what one of its hosts has dubbed “the dirtbag left,” which Wikipedia calls “a style of left-wing politics that eschews civility-for-its-own-sake in favor of subversive, populist vulgarity.” Not my cup of tea, I thought, but OK; 49 more entries to go.

Alas, reassurance was not forthcoming. Eight of the top 50 are marked “NSFW” (not safe for work). Podcasts are the most common kind of project on the list, but too many are along the lines of the Timesuck podcast of Dan Cummins, which describes its subjects as “serial killers, historical events, enduring mysteries, paranormal encounters, conspiracy theories, cryptozoology and more — nothing is off limits if it’s interesting.”

And,  of course, a sign of the times:

Joel Kotkin survey’s the scene.

For the past 125 years, Labor Day has been a time to celebrate the relevance, and political power, of the American working class. As recently as the 1990s, organized labor’s big day was an important milestone on the political calendar, particularly for Democrats..

But in recent decades, America’s working class has had precious little celebrate. In contrast to the conditions that prevailed in the aftermath of the Second World War, when the incomes of lower quintiles surged by roughly 40%, five times faster than the top echelon, during the past four decades, those in the bottom 80% have enjoyed no consistent gains. Meanwhile union membership — the key to working class political power — has plunged from 28% in 1954 to 11% today.

ZMan is uncompromising.

I’ll take it further and say I vehemently oppose adding girls to sportsball. In fact, I’m OK with ending girls sports entirely. Girls should not be playing sports. They should be learning how to be proper women. Exercise is fine, but teaching girls to compete like men is as dumb as trying to teach a fish to ride a bicycle. Sure, a bear playing piano, a monkey drinking a beer and girls playing basketball can be amusing. Building a society around freak show attractions, however, is barbaric madness.

I don’t do sports — never have — so I don’t have a blog in this fight. But some people take it seriously.

Read it.

Some ‘tech advances’ can profitably be skipped altogether, like Twitter and Facebook.

Read it.

Amazon’s “two-pizza teams” are well-known; they’ve been written about in Fast Company and the WSJ. But almost everyone misses the point. They aren’t about team size—they’re about autonomy and accountability.

Two pizzas works out to about eight people, by an amazing coincidence [not really] the pretty-standard size of a squad in most military services.

Read it.

To many people, including myself, the most infuriating thing about the GOP is that they don’t try to win elections. I mean, sometimes it even seems that they are actively trying not to win elections.

Batteries: A Forlorn Hope

Get Ready for a Hurricane of Nonsense

A Climate Alarmist Sued A Skeptic For Defamation… And Lost

L A Times Amazon fire anti-science propaganda revisited

Forget The Amazon Hype, Fires Globally Have Declined 25% Since 2003 Thanks To Economic Growth

UN flies in 5,000 people to Salt Lake to complain about fossil fuels

Politico: Melting Glaciers Unlocking Vast New Resources is Bad

The “Bern” Vows to Prosecute Oil & Gas Industry: Laws? We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Laws!

Read it.

Patience may be a virtue, but it could also be a key economic indicator.

Read it.

Victor Davis Hanson.

Yes, Virginia, ‘WHITE PEOPLE BAD’ is racist.

Read it.

New term: ‘Whitespreading’.

Read it.

This is very entertaining and contains a lot of truth.

Read it.

I wasn’t aware that there was such a thing as a ‘Chinese New Right’.

Maybe this is like ‘journalists’ calling pro-Communist Soviet apparatchiks ‘conservative’.

Read it.

I find the spatial layout of a hotel room to be well suited to working, especially to writing. The desk is usually set in a corner, and very small, almost risibly so, as if to hint that work done seated, at a table, is a dumb idea. The bed is the room’s dominant feature. It occupies the centre, and allows different workspaces by configuring the pillows (throw and regular). The nightstands on either side double as storage and work spaces. No wonder that Vladimir Nabokov completed Pale Fire, my favorite book, while living in a suite at the Montreux Palace hotel.

True, working lying down brings its own challenges: it’s hard to avoid dozing off every few minutes. My solution is constant snacking, the fear of choking acting as a stimulant.

I’m in.

Tyler Cowen does a review.

The author is Garett Jones and the subtitle is Why You Should Trust Elites a Litlte More and the Masses A Little Less, coming soon to a theater near you, early 2020.

If you believe in judicial independence, you do not believe in complete democracy.

If you do not think we should elect judges, sheriffs, and dog catchers, you do not believe in complete democracy.

If you believe in those European proportional representation systems, with post-election bargaining, you do not believe in complete democracy.

If you are a fan of the EU…etc.

Read it.

Who would notice?

Climate Catastrophe News Cabal Ramps Up

This picture spoke a thousand words about ‘climate change’ – until it didn’t @CNN @BBC @AlGore

YouTube ‘Corrects’ Conservative Comic on Global Warming

Read it.

In the state’s rush to go green, the Public Utilities Commission is reviewing a proposal to achieve a state of “decarbonization,” a radical shift likely to lead to banning natural gas as an energy source in new homes and commercial buildings and replacing it with electricity.

No longer could restaurants connect to natural gas in new buildings — even though 98 percent of chefs in one survey preferred gas over electric. Nor could natural gas be used to heat water, dry clothes, and fuel furnaces, pool and spa heaters in newly built homes.

Hey, guys, plenty of room (and natural gas) in Texas.

Babylon Bee.

Now that the ten candidates have been finalized for the next Democratic presidential debate, the ground rules for the debate are being decided. One early rule is to ban all use of facts and logic from the debate, as they’ve increasingly been a tool of far-right extremists and have fallen out of favor with the Democrats’ progressive base.

Uh, that’s been true since the 1960s….

Snyder: Experts Brace For Apocalyptic Future As Earth’s Forests Burn

No U.S. Warming Since 2005

NBC Joins CBS, Fails to Include Inconvenient Tidbit About Global Warming Teen’s Voyage  Why spoil the show?

Holidaymakers face flight chaos as Extinction Rebellion splinter group target drones at Heathrow

Prepare to retreat before climate change!

The most dangerous thing about the Amazon fires is the apocalyptic rhetoric

The Amazon Scam

Aussie Government: UNESCO Should NOT cite Climate Risks to the Great Barrier Reef

Read it.

This will surprise absolutely no one who has actually encountered a vegan in the flesh, if you’ll pardon the expression.

Read it.

I had my six-month dental cleaning and check-up. I didn’t expect to see the same hygienist. At my last visit, she was planning a move, possibly to Portland but I told her she may want to re-think that. She got back yesterday and said parts of Oregon were beautiful, breathtaking, the waterfalls, cool breezes, deep emerald green forests and didn’t want to leave. They hiked every day. She grew up here in Florida and is ready for a change. What she wasn’t ready for was Portland. She said she’d never seen anything like it, and was shocked by the enormous homeless population. Tents everywhere. “They don’t bother you, she said, or panhandle”. But “you couldn’t help but feel ill at ease,” walking from the donut shop with a bag of fresh-baked donuts. She walked by a young man at 7:15 AM, shooting up in broad daylight. Drugs that come in from Mexico and China. She said another’s face was beaten to a pulp. The smell was awful. But Oregon she said, was truly breathtaking…

Well, just stay out of Portland. Problem solved.

Read it.

So having gay people raise kids is going to work out really well. I see.

Victor Davis Hanson.

Trump! Is there anything he can’t do?

ZMan prognosticates the coming fight.

The 2020 presidential campaign will be two sides of the 60’s Boomer culture, facing off against one another in one final battle. The male side, represented by Donald Trump, is nostalgic for an America that no longer exists. Trump sees himself as this generation’s Ronald Reagan. Instead of morning in American, though, it is dusk in America. His tenure is a cargo cult of sorts. He and his supporters seem to think if they carry on like it is 1985, it will suddenly become 1985. Trump is pure nostalgia.

Warren is the feminine side of this battle. Unlike Trump, she is not pining for a return to Reagan’s America. She is all of the liberal Boomers in the 80’s and 90’s, who talked about the terribleness of Reaganism, while enjoying the benefits. Just as Boomer feminists talked like Betty Friedan, but lived like June Cleaver, this side of the Boomer political culture publicly hated Reagan and the 80’s economic boom, but privately benefited from it. The conscience of the 60’s was always forgiving.