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The food industry is grappling with just how far to bend to consumer whims about chemicals—even when those whims seem clueless. And this is giving America’s food scientists indigestion.

“There’s a level of psychological stress,” says John Coupland, a former president of the Institute of Food Technologists, a professional association.

Food scientists refined the recipes for many common packaged foods over decades to reduce spoilage, contamination and costs. Now some of the same researchers say they are being told to get rid of ingredients just because consumers can’t pronounce them.

Bake your own bread and cook your own food and it’s not a problem.

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The counter-invasion proceeds.

Apparently, all it takes to be ‘far-right’ these days is to object to your country being swamped by foreigners.

Can you really call it a ‘war’ when nobody is getting shot at?

Hyperbole appears to be official media policy in Britain.

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Now, these are from CNN so you’ll want to see corroboration before you believe them.

I must say, this is looking good for Trump — there’s nobody in the top 5 that he couldn’t pound into the ground like a tent peg.

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From what I can tell, the term “employee engagement” was popularized by Gallup over a decade ago. They define it as “those who are involved in, enthusiastic about and committed to their work and workplace.”

The last time I felt that way about a job was in the Navy fifty years ago, chiefly because we got to kill people and break things. Working in IT is fairly pallid by comparison, although much more remunerative.

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Not that bad. I do it all the time.

If someone becomes important to me, I’ll eventually learn the name. If not, why waste the storage?

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Nearly three quarters of a century after his death, Hitler’s shadow continues to fall across Europe. Any dissent from any modern orthodoxy, no matter how silly, soon meets with the argumentum ad Hitlerum, to the effect that something or other is the beginning of the slippery slope to Auschwitz. Guilt by association is now the highest form of refutation—other than outright abuse, of course.

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We have the technology.

(Full disclosure: I own Apple stock.)

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The New Dating.

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Alexa is obviously a Democrat.

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I repurposed a ‘bento box’ for packing my wife’s lunches. It works pretty well.

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Because that whole democracy thing is just for the yokels, don’t you know.

Scott Adams asks whether black people really want to be part of the ‘Guilty Until Proven Innocent’ Party.

UPDATE: Will Kavanaugh Realign Racial Politics?

Read it.

I’m going to set up a new category for Lindsay Graham On Fire. He’s starting to sound like Mark Levin.

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It wouldn’t matter to the DeShawns and Latrinas of the world.

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Now that’s comedy.

When science disagrees with ideology, ideology always wins.

UPDATE – Steve Sailer: Amazon discovers Robot-White Male Axis of Evil

Scott Adams has created a useful new term: Political Warming. Much like Global Warming, it depends on media-stoked ‘cathartic theater’ with no basis in reality.

ZMan points the finger.

In the 1980’s, one of the great puzzles for conservatives was how left-wing economists could not bring themselves to acknowledge the obvious. The Soviet economic model was a failure in absolute terms, as well as relative terms. Even long after the Soviets collapsed, guys like Paul Krugman remained puzzled by the inability of the communist system to keep pace with the West. His answer was that the Soviets either lost their will or lacked the moral fiber to make revolutionary socialism work in the face of capitalist cynicism.

As Greg Cochran has pointed out, the failings of socialism were obvious to anyone willing to look at what was happening behind the Iron Curtain. Once the Soviet Empire fell, it was undeniable, but economics never paid a price for being so wrong. In fact, the status of the field went up in the years following the Cold War. Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph Stiglitz become something of a shaman to the ruling class, despite a miserable track record. He’s another guy who thinks the morality of socialism should make it work.

Economists are like TV weather people — they are wrong more often than not, often by quite a bit, yet people still turn to them for advice … because they’re the only people doing what they do, and people will grasp at straws when straws are all that’s available.

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Note to self: Avoid Sweden.

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Make Africa Home Again? Speed the day.

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The midsummer reunion in a suburb west of the city looks like any other, but these family ties can’t be described with standard labels. Instead, Arroyo, a 21-year-old waitress from Orlando, is here to meet “DNA-in-laws,” various “sister-moms” and especially people like Sophia, a cherished “donor-sibling.”

Sophia and Arroyo were both conceived with sperm from Donor #2757, a bestseller. Over the years, Donor #2757 sired at least 29 girls and 16 boys, now ages 1 to 21, living in eight states and four countries. Arroyo is on a quest to meet them all, chronicling her journey on Instagram. She has to use an Excel spreadsheet to keep them all straight.

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The astronaut Scott Kelly has just provided the world with another salutary lesson on social media. The other day, Mr. Kelly chose to make a public intervention on Twitter relating to magnanimity and victory. Unfortunately, in doing so he quoted Winston Churchill.

Oops. ThoughtCrime! Deviationism! Burn the witch!

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Sometimes even proglodytes can’t stand their children.

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Yeah, that’s the sort of thing I go to Popular Science to get.

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But that was another problem with the ‘draft Barrett’ idea: although the conservative writers pushing it liked her for her presumed views on abortion and thought of themselves as being clever political strategists for suggesting a woman, in fact they were playing to the very style of politics that the centre-left dominates — that is, they were conceding the narrative that Republicans are bad for women and only a woman could negate the GOP’s justly-acquired bad reputation among women. This didn’t work when John McCain put Sarah Palin on his presidential ticket. It wouldn’t have worked for Amy Coney Barrett, either — though she may indeed make a fine justice one day. Just as the politics of ‘compassion’ doesn’t work for conservatives (as opposed to the politics of jobs and American industry), the politics of ‘see, we can too find women who like us!’ concedes everything to conservatism’s enemies. It doth protest too much.

The protests liberals whipped up against Kavanaugh this weekend, on the other hand, revealed too much about their own weakness. Washington, D.C. is a majority Democratic city with a black majority. But the Democratic votes out there yelling about Kavanaugh were as white as any country club gathering of Republicans. They looked like a line of Starbucks patrons — Caucasian, professional, largely millennial, with earth tones and earnest expressions aplenty. Men and women wore the same fashionable glasses and more or less the same clothes. It was a Pumpkin Spice Riot.

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God, I hope so.

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

Just bear that in mind.

Absolutely nothing.

Read it.

It’s a debate that plays out in everyone’s head during a weekend brunch: Should I be eating this much bacon? Researchers have been diving into the question, too, specifically as it relates to cancer.

Well, not exactly everybody. But if you’re a Voice of the Crust, I can see how you would think that. After all, isn’t everyone worried about what the Cool Kids who write for LiveScience are worried about?

Read it.

I have no desire to see this movie, but it appears to encapsulate a lot of the realities of life that Progressives Were Not Meant To Know:

Searching for a surrogate through an online agency, they are confronted with the economic pressures that are driving people like them out of the Lower East Side, and driving college students to sell their eggs. An Ivy League ‘donor’ has a waitlist for her ova. The biracial woman with a BA in Journalism and Cinema Studies does not. Nor does the waitress at their local cafe, whose appearance on their screen reminds them that they are buying the genetic material of fellow human beings. ‘My God, it’s like The Handmaid’s Tale,’ says Rachel, continuing anyway because a child is priceless, and a her life without one already seems pointless.

A girlfriend I had in college once discussed the possibility of selling her eggs. ‘Blonde hair – blue eyes – Yale degree – Mensa IQ – bwah-ha-ha!’ as she rubbed her hands together. She eventually decided against it, but watching the decision process in action was … instructive.

Read it.

I spent the Jewish High Holidays this year attending services at Temple Micah on Wisconsin Avenue in Washington, DC, a congregation affiliated with the liberal Reform Movement. Its cognitive-elite-type members include prominent policy intellectuals, a lot of law degrees from Yale and Harvard, media types from the Washington Post, CNN, etc. And while they may disagree on whether Elizabeth Warren or Cory Booker would beat him on 2020, they all share one thing in common: they hate, like really hate, in a quasi-pathological way (you know what I mean) President Donald Trump and anyone and anything associated with him.

Say something nice about the American economy under Trump and you’ll get that ‘are-you-a-Nazi-or-something?’ kind-of-look from the ultra-progressive congregants who accept it as a given that the elderly grandfather of three little Jewish kids residing in nearby 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is ‘like Hitler’ (the more moderate members could live with the Mussolini or David Duke analogies).

Apparently American liberal Jews are on the verge of proclaiming Israeli Jews to be Nazis. Who knew?

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Just as the congressional vote in 1846 on the so-called Wilmot Proviso revealed that the fault-line in American politics was about slavery, not party, the Kavanaugh nomination shows what American politics is, at heart, about. It is about “rights” and the entire system that arose in our lifetimes to confer them not through legislation but through court decisions: Roe v. Wade in 1973 (abortion), Regents v. Bakke in 1979 (affirmative action), Plyler v. Doe in 1982 (immigrant rights), and Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015 (gay marriage). The Democrats are the party of rights. As such, they are the party of the Supreme Court. You can see why Ted Kennedy claimed in a 1987 diatribe that the Yale law professor Robert Bork would turn the United States into a police state. For Democrats, an unfriendly Supreme Court is a threat to everything.

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Damn! Lindsey Graham is on fire! How did that happen? Was John McCain’s death like throwing the One Ring into the Crack of Doom and set him free to be a Republican again?

ZMan turns over a rock.

Something that has gone unremarked in the latest outburst of female hysteria is why these purple-faced rage-heads we see on television and on social media, call themselves survivors. The word turns up in all of their materials and their self-descriptions. It’s clear the word has taken on a spiritual meaning, imbue with sacred properties. The survivor, they insist, is incapable of error or dishonesty. We must not only believe survivors, we have to follow their orders. To do otherwise violates some unexplained, yet sacred code.

Read it.

Eeeeewwww.

Next step: Hug your flat tire. You’ll be glad you did.

Eeeeewwww.

Steve Sailer finds the key.

Read it.

I’ll bet there’s a story there.

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After Trump’s surprising success in the economy and surprising success on the world stage, many people are surprised that Trump won the Kavanaugh nomination. I’m surprised at the surprising number of conservatives who are surprised at the surprisingly consistent record of one success after another of President Trump.

Some of us are here waiting to say ‘Told You So’.

Read it.

She must not be paying attention. That’s the whole point of Trump appointing Justices. Wakey wakey.

John Hinderaker at Powerline looks at the future.

Brett Kavanaugh will be confirmed to the Supreme Court tomorrow, bringing to a close one of the most appalling episodes in American political history. The Democrats’ shameful treatment of Robert Bork in 1987 has distorted our politics–not just the politics of the Supreme Court–for the last 30 years. But the slanders the Democratic Party directed toward Kavanaugh were, if anything, even more disgraceful. We will feel their impact for many years to come.

So, looking to the future, what are the notable features of our political landscape?

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All fields have at least a few weak journals. All fields can boast of plenty of lousy journal articles. All fields are embarrassed by occasional frauds. All fields suffer from ideological biases or conflicts of interest that interfere with good scholarship.

But I can’t think of any serious field in which an amateur who’s done a few month’s reading could even produce a plausible parody, let alone a paper that would be taken seriously by dozens of editors and peer reviewers. If that’s all it takes, a PhD is a meaningless five-year waste of time.

Gee, how did that come about?

They can’t be treated as dumping grounds for impassioned mediocrities and then ignored.

If they are, and everyone tacitly agrees to sweep away the whole episode because the hoaxsters didn’t get IRB approval or something, it just gives the game away: these fields exist only to placate troublemakers, and nobody in the serious parts of the university cares about them.

So these fields are basically a parking garage for people who would otherwise just be troublemakers, and whose only utility is that they pad out headcounts in universities who then paid for them through federal student aid programs. Traditional universities who wail and moan about the frauds being perpetrated on unsuspecting students by for-profit vocational schools are essentially doing the same thing in a Clever Plastic Disguise.

Read it.

I hope it happens. That would be entertaining.

In fact, I hope it happens no matter how Murkowski votes on Kavanaugh. The Murk has been treading the RINO path for far too long.

Read it.

And if you’ll believe that one, they’ll tell you another one.