Read it.

Destroying the Earth is harder than you may have been led to believe.

You’ve seen the action movies where the bad guy threatens to destroy the Earth. You’ve heard people on the news claiming that the next nuclear war or cutting down rainforests or persisting in releasing hideous quantities of pollution into the atmosphere threatens to end the world.

Fools.

The Earth is built to last. It is a 4,550,000,000-year-old, 5,973,600,000,000,000,000,000-tonne ball of iron. It has taken more devastating asteroid hits in its lifetime than you’ve had hot dinners, and lo, it still orbits merrily. So my first piece of advice to you, dear would-be Earth-destroyer, is: do NOT think this will be easy.

Watch it.

Read it.

Over the last week, there has been a flurry of focus on antibiotic resistance. The attention stems from a recent article reporting the discovery of an antibiotic-resistant bacterium in the United States. While at first glance, this may not seem to be a reason for panic, the actual target of resistance–a class of antibiotics known as colistins–has led some to suggest the end of antibiotics is near.

This would appear to be an appropriate time to do some gene-editing on antibiotics to restore effectiveness.

Read it.

It’s now official. Burlington College is closed, largely due to Jane Sanders, wife of presidential candidate Bernie Sanders.

More here: How Bernie Sanders’ Wife Destroyed Burlington College

Read it.

The idea that these elite fighters can adapt solely by addressing emotional trauma, some experts said, is badly misplaced. Their primary difficulty is not necessarily one of healing emotional wounds; they thrived in combat. It is rather a matter of unlearning the very skills that have kept them alive: unceasing vigilance; snap decision making; intolerance for carelessness; the urge to act fast and decisively.

“I don’t even leave my house much,” said Jeff Ewert, who served with the Marines in Iraq and now lives in Utah. “I’m scared not because I’m an über-killer or anything. I just minimize my exposure because I know how easy it is to cross that line, to act without thinking.”

Ronald Bailey lets us peek behind the curtain a bit.

Climate change is a moral issue on a par with slavery. Abortion is a moral issue. Gun control is a moral issue.  Same sex marriage is a moral issue. Genetically modified crops are a moral issue. Human enhancement is a moral issue. Premarital sex is a moral issue. Childhood vaccination is a moral issue. Pornography is a moral issue. Immigration is a moral issue. Recycling is a moral issue.

Partisans often seek to frame their views as a “moral issue” as way of saying that whatever it is that they favor is beyond the grubby realm of mere costs versus benefits and the sordid practicalities of reaching a compromise with opponents. Such framing works according to a new study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. The researchers report that “merely labeling an attitude as moral increases its strength.” For example, take recycling.

Please….

Read it.

Couldn’t happen to a nicer place.

You will note that the Big Money, especailly from the Other Left Coast, is going to Hillary.

But I thought that the Republicans were the Party of the Rich [tm]?

John C Wright points out why this is significant.

Here is another man’s opinion on the desecration of Captain America I’d like to bring to your attention. Mr. Tanaka pens a column titled Why What Happens to Captain America Matters

A few choice quotes:

But the triviality of it is precisely what makes it important, because it is in such things that the real mindset of these people is revealed. Someone might be hesitant to claim that anyone who is concerned about millions of Muslims flooding Europe is literally a Nazi is less hesitant to put their words into the mouth of a fictional character who is a Nazi. Nick Spencer, the man who produced this offal, might not care to claim in public that he believes America is an essentially evil nation, but by turning Captain America into a Nazi, he’s essentially saying that in the oblique language of literature.

You see, fiction and art and “pop culture” in general are the weak spots in the dam of civilization. They are the points where the flood of chaos and barbarism can most easily work its way through and subvert the whole structure. And they are weak precisely because they are trivial: because most people don’t pay attention to them, or think it worth protesting when writers slip in a poisonous idea.

Read it.

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

Markets exist, even when you don’t want them to.

Read it.

In jihad, there are no non-combatants.

Read it.

The Jerry Brown administration’s obsession with becoming a global model for reducing greenhouse gases is leading to an unprecedented drive to completely reshape how Californians live. Rather than focus on more pragmatic, affordable steps to reduce greenhouse gases – more efficient cars, rooftop solar systems and promoting home-based work – the goal increasingly seems like social engineering designed to force Californians to adopt the high-density, transit-oriented future preferred by Brown’s green priesthood.

The newest outrage comes from the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research in the form of a proposed “road diet.” This would essentially halt attempts to expand or improve our roads, even when improvements have been approved by voters. This strategy can only make life worse for most Californians, since nearly 85 percent of us use a car to get to work. This in a state that already has among the worst-maintained roads in the country, with two-thirds of them in poor or mediocre condition.

The OPR move reflects the increasingly self-righteous extremism animating the former Jesuit’s underlings. Ironically, the governor’s proposals to impose this road diet rest partly on expanding the California Environmental Quality Act, which Brown, in a more insightful moment, described as a “vampire” that needs a “stake through the heart.” Now, instead, the inquisitors seize on vague legislative language and push it to what the Southern California Leadership Council has dubbed “an undesirable and unmanageable extreme.”

Never a better time to flee California and escape to Texas.

Read it. And watch the video.

Camille Paglia is a National Treasure.

Daniel Pipes reviews the current scene.

Since the creation of Israel, Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims have been the mainstay of anti-Zionism, with the Left, from the Soviet Union to professors of literature, their auxiliary. But this might be in process of change: as Muslims slowly, grudgingly, and unevenly come to accept the Jewish state as a reality, the Left is becoming increasingly vociferous and obsessive in its rejection of Israel.

Read it.

The continuing decline of the Washington Metro Rail can be traced to two mistakes made by the people who planned it. Their first was to chose an expensive, obsolete technology that most American cities had already abandoned. Of the hundreds of cities that had rail transit in 1910, only eight were left when the Metro Rail system was planned in the late 1960s.

By sharing infrastructure with cars and trucks, buses cost far less than trains and can go anywhere there are streets. The high costs of rails means they can only reach limited destinations.

The second mistake was to fail to plan for maintenance and rehabilitation costs. Such costs start out low but rapidly grow rapidly as rail lines approach thirty years of age.

Governments exist to keep people safe and to keep people honest. Once they wander outside of their natural sphere, they screw things up.

Read it.

Tough to decide on who gets the honor of our Academic Absurdity of the Week award. I was inclined to give it to the ingenious author of “Humor and Parody in Finnish Rap Music Videos,” since I’m still trying to recover from the mistake of listening to a Finnish rock band in a park in Helsinki last summer. (Their “music” sounded to me like a whale being waterboarded.) I can’t even imagine what “Finnish Rap Music” must be like.

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

Read it.

Oh, you mean like a plant?

The chemist who gave us the artificial leaf has genetically engineered bacteria to absorb hydrogen and carbon dioxide and convert them into alcohol fuel.

Fine. Does it scale? What does it cost?

When Harvard Professor of Energy Daniel G. Nocera announced he was working with bacteria last year, other scientists cautioned it would be difficult to achieve a productive level of efficiency. At the time, Nocera was aiming for 5 percent efficiency—about 5 times better than plants. This month at the University of Chicago, he announced his bug converts sunlight ten times more efficiently than plants.

Nice, if true. (How would you like to be a ‘Professor of Energy’? Sounds cool, doesn’t it?)

“I can just let the bugs grow exponentially. They’re eating hydrogen, that’s their only food source, and then they breathe in CO2, and they keep multiplying. They procreate, and that goes into an exponential growth curve.”

Cue the eco-nazi freakout about this stuff ‘escaping into the wild’ and converting all of the oceans to alcohol. (You know it’s going to happen.)

Jim Goad is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

A horrifyingly racist Chinese detergent commercial threatens to drive even deeper wedges between the black and Asian communities, further impeding their righteous mission of uniting as people of color toward their natural common enemy—namely, the white community.

In what is being billed as “The most racist Chinese laundry detergent commercial you’ll see all year,” a black man toting a paintbrush and paint bucket with his face and shirt smeared with fresh paint wanders into a room to discover a sultry Chinese woman motioning for him to come hither. As he leans in for a kiss, she jams a detergent packet in his mouth, shoves him into the washing machine, and sits atop it gleefully while he screams in pain. She then appears spellbound as a gleamingly light-skinned Asian male emerges from the washing machine, cleansed of all his blackness.

CNN called the commercial “staggeringly offensive.” You should watch it. It’s pretty cool.

Read it.

A sociology professor at DePaul University announced her resignation in a public Facebook post Friday morning in which she denounced the idea that universities should be “neutral platforms for ‘equal’ exchanges of ideas” and said that “so-called free speech” is “delusional.”

Dr. Shu-Ju Cheng, who goes by the first name Ada, posted a copy of an email she apparently sent to university president Rev. Holtschneider to a Facebook page affiliated with the DePaul University sociology department.

“To believe that universities are simply neutral platforms for ‘equal’ exchanges of ideas, the so-called free speech rooted in the market ideology, is delusional,” she wrote. According to Cheng, “that positional objectivity ends up reinforcing the exact inequalities and dominant ideologies upon which this institution is built.”

Spoken like a true daughter of Mao.

Yiannopoulos responded to news of Cheng’s resignation by declaring victory. “Splendid. I told you I was winning,” he said. “One down, the rest of the American educational establishment to go.”

We need to book Milo on a ‘housecleaning’ tour of liberal colleges. Do a clean sweep.

Read it.

Russia is touting its Iron Man — a humanoid military robot — in the new global arms race that has sprung up over high-tech weaponry.

“The development of a special military robot is one of the priorities of military construction in Russia,” the Russian daily newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda reported recently.

The purpose of Iron Man, the newspaper continued, is to “replace the person in the battle or in emergency areas where there is a risk of explosion, fire, high background radiation, or other conditions that are harmful to humans.”

Komsomol was the Soviet equivalent of the Hitler Youth, and Komsomolskaya Pravda was its house organ.

David Brooks writes like a conservative about once a year just to show he knows how.

The argument against this sort of pure moral heroism is that fanaticism in the relief of suffering is still a form of fanaticism. It makes reciprocal relationships difficult, because one is always giving, never receiving. It can lead to a draconian asceticism that almost seems to invite unnecessary suffering.

Love, by its nature, should be strongest when it is personal and intimate. To make love universal, to give no priority to the near over the far, is to denude love of its texture and warmth. It is really a way of avoiding love because you make yourself invulnerable.

And then, of course, he has to walk it back.

Yet I don’t want to let us off the hook. There’s a continuum of moral radicalism. Most of us are too far on the comfortable end and too far from the altruistic one. It could be that you or I will only really feel fulfilled after a daring and concrete leap in the direction of moral radicalism.

Read it.

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

Perhaps they need a German Lives Matter movement.

Read it.

Wherever humans have changed the environment—and you’d be hard-pressed to find a place we haven’t—there are winners and losers. Cities around the world shelter pigeons, naturally adapted to life on rock ledges. Farms allow weedy plants to thrive between their fields. Oceans—plagued by rising temperatures, depleted fish populations, and acidifying waters brought on by human activity—are no exception. New research shows that these changes to marine environments are leading to a surge of cephalopods, the invertebrate group that includes octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish.

Release the Kraken!

Read it.

I still don’t have my flying car….

Read it.

Never mind he’s not even President yet – greens are already trying to pin the blame for the embarrassing slow motion collapse of the Paris Climate Agreement on US Presidential Candidate Donald Trump.

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

‘Progressives’ invariably blame others for the fact that their silly programs never work; unlike many, Trump doesn’t seem to mind.

Molekule air purifier.

Dino-Lite USB Microscope.

Read it.

Really, you can’t make this stuff up.

Read it. And watch the video.

Say the girl in the red bandana got ahold of the black cop’s gun and it went off, killing him.

Where would we be?

The Administration has been egging on urban unrest by blacks, which has already led to two outbreaks of undocumented shopping in Ferguson and a big one in Baltimore. And the media have been urging on anti-Trump rioting by supporters of illegal immigration, as we saw again this week. The press has been spinning the anti-Trump mobs as Trump is causing the violence against his own supporters, but in an age when smartphone video goes viral, that kind of propaganda power is harder to maintain than in the past.

Steve Sailer connects the dots.

A big factor is that the nice white liberal Democrats of New York defeated five consecutive Democratic candidates for Mayor from 1993 through 2009, instead electing crime-fighters Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg. You can see Bloomberg’s stop-and-frisk program in the graph below of “Change in Weapons Cases Since 2001.” While there is a lot that the Democratic politicians of Chicago can get away with, what with being Democrats and all, they can’t get away with that.

Read it.

And about fargin time, too.

When all you have is a gun and a bunch of missiles, every problem looks like something to blow up. The Army’s Apache helicopters are very good at blowing stuff up, but there are times when they need more precision.

On the other hand, blowing shit up works more often than you might think.

Better lasers and more lasers are one way the Pentagon plans to get around the cost imbalance of its weapons. Missiles and precision bombs, released from sophisticated helicopters and planes, are effective, but they’re not cheap, and they’re single-use. The cost of a weapon may make sense against a tank, but not against a truck carrying a machine gun. Lasers are expensive to develop, but their cost of use is expected to be very low, around $1 a shot. At that price, destroying trucks and buildings with lasers suddenly makes a lot more sense than using bombs.

Read it.

Well. There it is.

Read it.

Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

Read it.

Ultimately he said, it is modernity — that all-devouring force that is changing societies at breakneck speed — that is killing the Persian carpet, Iran’s pride and joy. “People simply are no longer interested in quality.”

Or in paying for it, he might have added.

Read it.

Prediction: Nobody will get fired, nobody will go to jail.

Flying on an airline these days is like marching up to the front gate of Dachau and asking for a job.

Just don’t.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Victor Davis Hanson lays it out.

If Donald Trump manages to curb most of his more outrageous outbursts by November, most Republicans who would have preferred that he did not receive the nomination will probably hold their noses and vote for him.

How could that be when a profane Trump has boasted that he would limit Muslim immigration into the United States, talked cavalierly about torturing terrorist suspects and executing their relatives, promised to deport all eleven-million Mexican nationals who are residing illegally in the U.S., and threatened a trade war with China by slapping steep tariffs on their imports?

A number of reasons come to mind.

Read it.

When the Marine Corps developed the V-22 Osprey in the 1980s, the vision was pretty simple: fly troops ashore in amphibious assaults launched from beyond the range of anti-ship missiles. Now they’re turning the Osprey into a gas station. The Marines clearly envision the tiltrotor as a sort of flying Swiss Army knife.

Read it.

Yesterday, the Washington Post’s editors weighed in on the new report from the State Department’s Inspector General regarding Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server. Their editorial is a classic example of a familiar genre — expressing disapproval of misconduct by politicians one likes, while dismissing without analysis the possibility that the behavior is criminal.

The Post has even come up with the perfect phrase with which to pull this off. It finds Hillary guilty of “willful misjudgment.” “Misjudgment” suggests innocent mistake. “Willful” suggests some level of wrongdoing.

I’m not sure there can be such a thing as a “willful misjudgment.” The term certainly doesn’t apply to Clinton’s use of the email server after being told (including by a memo she signed) that this is improper.

If you “judge” that you can use a private email server but then receive authoritative notice that you shouldn’t do so, this is no longer a “misjudgment,” it is a willful violation. If the notice comes from you, then to call the violation a “misjudgment” is as cynical as it gets.

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

Watch it.

It requires 25 MW. The new Zumwalt destroyer produces over twice that.

WSJ article here.

Read it.

Investigative reporter Tom Steward records what happened when residents of rural Buffalo, Minnesota got an up-close view of “green” energy:

The project’s owner, multinational conglomerate Enel Green Power, recently clear cut hundreds of mature hardwood trees to make way for tens of thousands of solar panels later this summer. Angry residents posted dozens of photos of the carnage on the township’s Facebook page, too late to save 11 acres of maple, ash and oak from the chainsaw.

Read it.

Remember Eric Holthaus? He’s the activist who said that he’d get a vasectomy and stop flying to save the planet from climate change. Yet, he couldn’t do either of those, had a child anyway and still flies airlines. If a committed eco-activist can’t keep his promises, one wonders how this plan could ever work? of course, Holthaus isn’t exactly prone to rational thought, but that sort of ridiculous and ugly behavior from climate alarmists is nothing new.

Gay sex causes earthquakes and ‘disgusts’ Allah, says Muslim cleric in Ghana

Senior Saudi cleric bans people from taking pictures with cats

Saudi Arabian man ‘shoots doctor for assisting wife in labour’

Pakistani woman left with horrific burns after acid attack for rejecting marriage proposal

Elderly Christian woman stripped naked and paraded through streets by mob. Egypt.

Sharia courts in UK face Government inquiry over treatment of women

Indian women sold for £4,000 in Saudia Arabia and Bahrain, minister claims

An Iranian woman explains why she cut her hair short to bypass morality police. Ah, but can she use the men’s bathroom?

Muslim schoolboys told to shake hands with female teacher or face £3,500 fine in Switzerland. That seems excessive.

British special forces ‘blow up Isis suicide truck in Libya’

Somalia: One Thing Everyone Can Agree On

British Muslim women face ‘double bind’ of gender and religious discrimination, report warns. Sorry — ODF.

Isis in Iraq: Citizens trapped in Fallujah fear destruction of the city as government forces advance

Isis falsely claiming they have carried out series of executions, claims Bangladesh

Taliban in Afghanistan appoint new leader after death of Mullah Akhtar Mansour in US drone strike

Portland State Students Donate Money to Hamas for the Destruction of Israel

Hamas Diverts Most of the Civilian Cement Sent Into Gaza

The Brutal Murder of Niklas P. Was Not an Isolated Incident

Egypt deports French journalist in latest crackdown on press. Mind you, I don’t blame them.

Canada Home to Islamic Radicals

Iraqi government forces clearing booby traps set up by ISIS outside of Fallujah

Terrorists likely ‘stockpiling explosives in Europe’, says EU security official

Isis in Raqqa: Syrian and Kurdish rebels announce military campaign against militants north of stronghold

Isis ‘destroys’ Syrian airbase and four Russian helicopters

Prison for British Muslim convert who planned to bring up her children under Isis

El Shafee Elsheikh: Fourth member of ‘The Beatles’ Isis death squad named

Isis in Iraq: Jihadists unleash death squads as Iraqi forces advance on key stronghold of Fallujah

How British citizen El Shafee Elsheikh became one of the most notorious members of Isis

School bomb scare: Thousands of UK pupils evacuated as caller threatens to ‘behead children’. Okay, but I get to pick the children….

Blind acid attack survivor gang raped by three men in Pakistan

Syria: Isis attacks kill more than 120 people in Assad’s coastal heartlands

Yemen suicide bombings: Isis claim responsibility for attack which killed at least 40 people in Aden

Fallujah: Iraq says it has begun major assault on Isis-held city

Isis threatens attacks in India and urges Muslims to travel to the ‘Caliphate’

ISIS Testing Chemical Weapons In Iraq

At least 60,000 have died in Assad regime’s jails during Syrian war, monitoring group says

Iraqi forces prepare offensive on Isis-held Fallujah, warning residents to flee

Only 1 in 8 British jihadists returning to UK from Iraq and Syria prosecuted

Suicide bomber attacks military convoy in Afghanistan, no US troops hurt

Western fighters joining the Kurds to fight Isis in Iraq and Syria

Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mansour ‘likely killed’ by US air strike

Calais crisis: First ever quantitative survey in the Jungle reveals thousands of refugees still trying to reach the UK

Two Girls Molested at Multicultural Street Festival in Berlin

Iranian women cut their hair off and dress as men to avoid morality police. Same here, without the police excuse.

Doctor hacked to death with machete in brutal Isis attack in Bangladesh

Protesters storm Iraqi Prime Minister’s office

Rights of women in Libya severely restricted under oppressive Isis regime

Read it.

If you were suddenly awoken in the middle of the night and needed to go outside to fight off a threat or evacuate from your home, in what order would you don your clothes? Does it matter?

Hint: Yes.

Read it.

They’re making fuel from thin air at the USC Loker Hydrocarbon Research Institute.

For the first time, researchers there have directly converted carbon dioxide from the air into methanol at relatively low temperatures.

The work, led by G.K. Surya Prakash and George Olah of the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, is part of a broader effort to stabilize the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by using renewable energy to transform the greenhouse gas into its combustible cousin – attacking global warming from two angles simultaneously. Methanol is a clean-burning fuel for internal combustion engines, a fuel for fuel cells and a raw material used to produce many petrochemical products.

“We need to learn to manage carbon. That is the future,” said Prakash, professor of chemistry and director of the USC Loker Hydrocarbon Research Institute.

The researchers bubbled air through an aqueous solution of pentaethylenehexamine (or PEHA), adding a catalyst to encourage hydrogen to latch onto the CO2 under pressure. They then heated the solution, converting 79 percent of the CO2 into methanol. Though mixed with water, the resulting methanol can be easily distilled, Prakash said.

John C. Wright lays it out.

I am not a Trump fan, but I am a fan of his fans. I trust the common sense of the common man, and the common man is sick of being lied to, and about.

And that pretty much sums up my opinion as well.

We are all, Republican or not, all of us heartily and deeply sick of Leftwing racists calling us racist because we are antiracists, we who want a colorblind society where a man is judged on the content of his character, not the color of his skin.

We are all of us heartily and deeply sick of Leftwing baby-killers protesting, mocking, feminizing and dismantling our military, while calling our soldiers and heroes baby-killers.

We are all of us of us heartily and deeply sick of Leftwing fruit baskets spending our grandchildren into unrecoverable debt, and then lying about how sound the economy is. You morons have brought us to the point where it will take a minor miracle to prevent the Yuan from becoming the default currency of the international banking system, and a major miracle to prevent a second Great Depression.

And that Depression happened to grown ups, who worked their way out of debt by hard work. The coming Depression will happen to lazy and self-absorbed children, degenerates and weaklings who hate the free market and do not understand how ‘work’ works. They will riot if not feed bread and circuses from Caesar’s hand. Every city will be Detroit, and every township Ferguson.

And that about says everything that needs to be said.

Read it.

A common political strategy among environmentalists is called “sue and settle.” An environmental group will sue the EPA, alleging a failure to do one thing or another, likely something that wasn’t within the EPA’s powers in the first place. The lawsuit is collusive, so, after a decent interval, the EPA will agree to a settlement that results in a court order requiring EPA to do something that it wanted to do all along. This technique is wholly corrupt, but effective.

Something similar is at work when leftist students mount protests at leftist universities. Radical students make demands to which radical administrators are only too glad to accede. I have sometimes wondered, is the whole thing a put-up deal? Was the supposed protest against a “reactionary” administration set up with radical professors or administrators from the beginning?

Usually, we have no way to know. But at Harvard Law School, the truth is leaking out: left-wing students met with left-wing professors to plan their supposedly adversarial demands on the school.

Yeah, well, Harvard.

Read it.

The Iowa cheating rings are the latest evidence of how a vibrant East Asian industry is corrupting the U.S. higher education system by gaming entrance exams, concocting college applications and completing college coursework on behalf of students. These nimble operators not only help students cheat their way into universities. They also help them cheat their way through.

The companies are prospering by exploiting two intersecting interests: the growing demand by Chinese nationals to study overseas, and the desire by U.S. colleges to profit from foreign students willing to pay full tuition.