The lonesome death of Rina Shnerb  Yes, Palestinian terrorists are still blowing people up.

Read it.

A group called The Climate Mobilization which advocates for a dramatic “World War II-scale” takeover of the economy to fight global warming, condemned the media for pursuing “objectivity” by giving air time to “climate deniers.”

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A Monday night “Cuomo Prime Time” segment went completely off the rails after CNN commentator Angela Rye took issue with a GOP campaign strategist’s “interesting word choice” after the strategist said that two Muslim Democratic Reps. had “hijacked” the Democratic Party.

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Snopes’s creation of a new fact-check label and publication of a study suggesting satire is a “problem for democracy” has escalated the outfit’s feud with the Babylon Bee, a Christian satire website.

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In the world of education, the “three R’s” refer to the fundamentals of instruction: reading, ’riting, and ’rithmetic. In the world of the Democratic mainstream media, the three R’s sadly refer to: resistance, Russia, and racism. Since the election of Donald Trump in 2016, almost all legacy media outlets have fixated on resistance to his presidency, at the expense of traditional journalism. Until this summer, that resistance centered on the chimera of an insidious Russian conspiracy. Now, as that canard fades away, the new anti-Trump obsession of racism emerges.

Think I exaggerate? Then consider actual recent statements from the leadership of the once-vaunted New York Times. At its internal town-hall meeting last week, Executive Editor Dean Baquet bluntly conceded the Times’ preoccupation with the Trump/Russia saga, explaining that “we built our newsroom to cover one story.” But Robert Mueller’s milquetoast report and subsequent disastrous testimony effectively ended the lunacy of the whole Russia imbroglio. Acknowledging this conundrum, Baquet admitted, “Now we have to regroup.”

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Another “refugee rescue” vessel, another scam.

This time it’s the Open Arms, whose owners say is packed with desperate children in ill health. It turns out that the desperation is fake, the children are fake, and the ill health is fake — it’s Fake News about fake everything.

Joy Reid Guest: Trump Supporters Ignorant, Dems ‘Intellectually Curious’  As in ‘How very curious’.

Anti-Trump vets join Steyer group in pressing Democrats to impeach Trump | TheHill

HBO’s John Oliver Insults Melania Trump as ‘Semi-Autonomous’

Illinois State Senator Apologizes for Supporters Acting Out a Trump Assassination Sketch at Fundraiser

Afternoon Mirror: Ex-VF Editor Graydon Carter Calls Epstein, Trump ‘Two Birds Of A Feather’ With Young Women  ‘without evidence’

FEC Chair Says Trump ‘Undermines Democracy’ With Voter Fraud Claims  And I guess property rights are undermined by claims that people are stealing stuff. Sure, that makes perfect sense.

Dems Forced To Apologize After Mock Assassination Of Trump Enacted At Fundraiser

Rapinoe: My Fox News-Watching Parents ‘Need Therapy,’ Trump’s A ‘F–king Joke’  Certainly somebody needs therapy.

No. 4 House Democrat Ben Ray Luján Calls For Impeachment Investigation  This is news?

The Media’s Latest Smear of a Trump Judicial Nominee.

Democratic Strategist Has To Be Reminded That Trump Didn’t Ban Omar And Tlaib From Israel

Tlaib, Omar Condemn Trump And Israel’s ‘Oppressive’ Government

Former “Republican” Turned MSNBC Propagandist Nicolle Wallace: Trump Might Be Removed Via the 25th Amendment for the Alzheimer’s We’re Going to Conspiracy-Theorize Into Reality

Claim: Staying Positive After A Weather Disaster Impedes Climate Action

Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup # 372

Feeding the future: Fixing the world’s faulty food system  There is no problem that woke journalists cannot fix. Just ask them.

The Greening Earth

Renewable energy is a blackout risk, warns National Grid after chaos during biggest outage in a decade

Royals, Climate Change, and Private Jets

G7 must ban detergents that cause sea pollution, say French campaigners

CNN Invites 9 Democratic Candidates To Climate Town Hall. Here’s The Line-Up

See how climate science becomes alarmist propaganda

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Funny how that works.

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In a Monday front-page story “Amid the Kale and Corn, Fears of White Supremacy at the Farmers’ Market,” New York Times journalist Patrick Healy sounded the alarm about how the people at a farmer’s market in a “heavily white, liberal town of 85,000 that is home to Indiana University” have been fearing for their lives after it was discovered that a couple selling “tomatoes and kale were also white nationalists.”

I guess that White Supremacy Cooties are impervious to the healing rays of a woke college campus.

Read it.

A certain American professor – of sociology, naturally – called Matthew Desmond has decided to pleasure us with the ignorance of his knowledge of the subject under discussion, economics. I’m not the first to note this and doubt I shall be the last. But in his introductory paragraphs in the New York Times Magazine – a place where the editors clearly don’t know enough to catch such errors – he tells us that:

“Low-road capitalism,” the University of Wisconsin-Madison sociologist Joel Rogers has called it. In a capitalist society that goes low, wages are depressed as businesses compete over the price, not the quality, of goods…..

If the price of goods is constantly being depressed then what is that doing to the real wages of the workers? Good, excellent, you now know more economics than a professor of sociology. Actually, than two such professors plus the editorial team of the New York Times Magazine. For, just to explain for those who might be sociology professors or editors, if the price of things declines then you can buy more things with your labour. That’s what declining prices means. And, equally true and equally obviously so, being able to buy more things with the rent of your labour means that your wages have just risen.

Babylon Bee.

No fatted calf for you, racist.

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My, what a surprise.

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Did they pack it in a longship with ornaments and weapons and send it flaming off to sea?

That would have been cool.

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From wholesale to retail.

ZMan looks at Nicholas Taleb.

Taleb is a bit of gasbag and he certainly likes himself a lot. On the other hand, he could simply be a great example of someone with one good insight and not much else. Intellectual history is littered with people who had one great insight and a bunch of crackpot ideas. There were a lot of brilliant physicists in the last century, who were convinced international communism was the future.

Regardless, Taleb is a good reminder that smart people are right about things more often than dumb people, but they are still wrong about a lot of things.

Read it.

I’ll bet Russia or Trump or somebody is to blame.

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Apparently not.

Two years ago, we compared the opioid epidemic to the mortgage crisis that nearly cratered the global economy, noting how both were caused by corporate greed. Recent reporting in the Washington Post and other media outlets reveals an important difference between the two: unlike the regulators who were blithely ignorant of what was happening in the financial markets, officials at the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) knew exactly how many opioid pills were being distributed in the U.S. and where they were going. They simply chose to do nothing about it even though DEA investigators and line attorneys were pushing to hold at least one major drug manufacturer responsible for fueling the deadly epidemic.

The Obama administration’s decision to let drug company CEOs and managers off the hook runs parallel with its refusal to prosecute the big bank and brokerage officials who ignited the mortgage crisis. This eagerness to place Wall Street above Main Street is the key to solving the mystery that has confounded pundits, pollsters, and prognosticators since November 8, 2016: why did so many blue-collar and working class voters abandon the Democratic Party and vote for Trump?

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Congress may be almost evenly divided these days, but not on the liberal cable news networks. A new study by the Media Research Center finds that CNN and MSNBC host Democratic Representatives and Senators seven times more frequently than their Republican counterparts, and most often use Democratic talking points to question members of both parties.

Not really news, but a useful reminder.

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But it shows Trump’s ability to think outside the box and suck all the air out of the room, news-wise.

When did Joe Biden ever have an original idea? Kindergarten, maybe.

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Democrats decry Trump administration plans to reject asylum seekers and separate families. (I made that part up.)

“Oh My God, This Jackass”: The Mooch Explains Why He Thinks Trump Is “Crazy,” “Narcissistic,” And A “Paper Tiger” Who Will Drop Out By March 2020  Like being called ugly by a frog.

Rashida Tlaib’s Grandma: ‘May God Ruin’ Trump

CNN Found It Controversial that Trump Wants to Brand Antifa as Terrorists

MSNBC Panel Suggests Trump Removal Due to Alzheimer’s

The Mooch, Bill Kristol and the NeverTrump quest for relevance

Beef Tax Ahead? UK Government Announces a Major Climate Change Review of British Food Production

The water is so hot in Alaska it’s killing large numbers of salmon

Doh! Climate Messiah Greta Thunberg’s Plastic Boat Trip Will Require Four Transatlantic Flights

Where Do They Put the Thermometer, When They Measure the Temperature of the Earth?  Up Michael Mann’s butt is my guess.

Inside The Sausage Factory

New York Times Laments Enviros As Movie Villains, Wants More Climate Lectures

Fighting the Blacklist

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The food company is using a patented technique to turn the white pulp that covers cocoa beans into a powder that naturally contains sugar. This fall in Japan, Nestle will start selling KitKat bars with 70% dark chocolate under the new recipe, which doesn’t include any added sugar, the Vevey, Switzerland-based firm said. Until now, the pulp has never been used as a sweetener for chocolate, and usually it’s mostly thrown out.

John Hinderaker at Power Line is not afraid to ask the obvious questions.

f Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar had made their visit to “Palestine,” their time would have been devoted exclusively to bashing Israel. Their attacks would have combined American-style leftism with Palestinian religious solidarity. And yet, as Scott has pointed out more than once, there are obvious tensions between Islam and the contemporary Left, as embodied by the Squad. What branch of Islam is it, exactly, that celebrates abortion, homosexuality and transgenderism?

The common thread is, of course, anti-Americanism.

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Peaceful protesters who, for some reason, need to wear masks and carry clubs.

Sure, I believe that.

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A former classmate from Yale recently told me “monogamy is kind of outdated” and not good for society. So I asked her what her background is and if she planned to marry.

She said she comes from an affluent family and works at a well-known technology company. Yes, she personally intends to have a monogamous marriage — but quickly added that marriage shouldn’t have to be for everyone.

She was raised by a traditional family. She planned on having a traditional family. But she maintained that traditional families are old-fashioned and society should “evolve” beyond them.

What could explain this?

In the past, upper-class Americans used to display their social status with luxury goods. Today, they do it with luxury beliefs.

I suspect that a lot of it is just teenage rebellion hardening into habit, as with the Parlor Pink ‘socialism’ of the affluent throughout the 20th century. Like people who go to church because everybody else they know does but who do whatever they want during the week, there is no actual connection between What I Say and What I Do. They say what they say because they are expected to say it; they do what they do because that’s what they want. The hypocrisy of wealthy environmentalists is an enduring cliché, and it’s so endemic that people almost expect it.

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Even as she demonstrates why she is a leading candidate for the party’s nomination, Ms. Warren is facing persistent questions and doubts about whether she would be able to defeat President Trump in the general election. The concerns, including from her admirers, reflect the head-versus-heart debate shaping a Democratic contest increasingly being fought over the meaning of electability and how to take on Mr. Trump.

The tension between ideological purity and supposed electability is constant in any electoral political system. Do you vote for the person you want and let the chips fall where they may? Or do you settle for the least objectionable candidate that can actually win?

And, of course, sometimes they can’t actually win, as Republicans found out with Romney and McCain and Dole and Ford. Most Republicans, I suspect, are passing the popcorn watching Democrats impaled on the horns of the dilemma that Republicans so frequently face.

The agony will be acute for the Republican establishment anti-Trumpers. From now until November 2020 will not be a good time for them.

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Recently, a Chinese startup named Qihan Biotech raised $20 million to develop replacement organs for humans. The smallish deal would hardly have rated a headline, except for the fact that the Hangzhou-based gene-editing company is aiming to grow those organs in pigs and other animals. If successful, such transplants could well transform medicine. And, thanks to a unique confluence of need, money, timing and culture, China is poised to lead the way in developing them.

It will be interesting watching the people who want cheap transplantable organs go up against the animal rights crowd.

Read it.

The fall-out continues from Bill Maher’s HBO show this weekend. Yesterday I wrote about an opinion he expressed during Friday’s Real Time with Bill Maher – a recession would be worth it to get rid of President Trump in 2020. That idea put into a discussion with his panel of guests was deeply disturbing as it showed Maher’s willingness to wish harm to Americans to satisfy his political hopes.

Political partisanship is always about winning rather than improving. If one’s position is that one’s opponent’s proposal is defective, your natural incentive is to demonstrate it in reality by working to make sure that said proposal fails. This is an inevitable component of human nature.

Tlaib certainly knows that there is no chance that her ‘base’ will agree to boycott Maher’s show, but she only has a limited toolbox to work with.

Maher has supported so many left-wing bullshit purity tests over the years that it’s a puzzle why he objects to this one.

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They say there’s a smartphone app for everything, and doubters should know there are now at least two dealing with excrement on the sidewalks of San Francisco. The city has its official SF311 app, part of its “San Francisco at your Service” program, and last year a private developer introduced Snapcrap, which allows residents to upload a photo of an offending specimen directly to the SF311 website. This alerts the city’s new five-person “poop patrol,” which will follow up, presumably, with a smile.

I left my poop … in San Francisco….

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As a cucumber plant grows, it sprouts tightly coiled tendrils that seek out supports in order to pull the plant upward. This ensures the plant receives as much sunlight exposure as possible. Now, researchers at MIT have found a way to imitate this coiling-and-pulling mechanism to produce contracting fibers that could be used as artificial muscles for robots, prosthetic limbs, or other mechanical and biomedical applications.

The Other McCain sounds the alarm.

Saturday morning, we were driving across West Virginia, and my wife asked me to find some Christian music on the radio. So I’m searching down on the low end of the FM bandwidth — between 88 and 92, where such stations are usually found — and I come across an NPR broadcast in which a liberal woman is talking about how MEMES on the INTERNET are turning teenage boys into ALT-RIGHT WHITE SUPREMACISTS!

Memes! Memes! They’re everywhere!

‘Blood-Curdling’: Rachel Maddow Puts an ‘Ethnonationalist’ Smear on Trump Judicial Pick

Scaramucci and Omarosa Make Joint MSNBC Appearance To Bash Trump

California sues Trump over ‘public charge’ rule denying green cards to immigrants

NOAA Data Confirms July Was Hottest Month Ever Recorded  Women and minorities hardest hit.

The World’s First Solar Road Has Officially Crumbled Into a Total Failure

Plastic Apocalypse: Dangerous Microplastics Invade Alps To Artic, Found In Fresh Snow

Surprise! The Great Barrier Reef is Not Dying from Global Warming

From The B-School: A Plan To Win The Millennials’ War On Carbon

Climate Activist Greta Thunberg’s Yacht Trip To America More Harmful To Environment Than Flying

ECONcrete: Protection from hydrodynamic forces while generating marine habitat  If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

Greenland’s ice is melting at the rate thought as worst-case scenario in 2070  Pretty soon it may be habitable.

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A series of Saturday clashes between Antifa and right-wing groups were caught on video and posted to Twitter by journalists Andy Ngo, Elijah Schaffer and others.

Portland’s Rose City Antifa comprised one of the leftist groups there to oppose right-wing demonstrators from various organizations including Proud Boys, Oathkeepers, and Three Percenters.

The reason the browshirts in Germany used to win their street battles with the Socialists was that their ranks were full of ex-soldiers and just better at it. One of the disadvantages of modern education is an ignorance of history that will not serve Antifa well in these coming turbulent days.

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Right now they have backup humans on board, but eventually they will have a sufficient track record to go to the politicians and ask for permission to do without the people.

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NEARLY 1,500 MILES from the Menlo Park headquarters of Facebook, at a company outpost in Austin, Texas, moderators toil around the clock to screen and scrub some the most gruesome, hateful, and heinous posts that make their way onto the social network and its photo-sharing subsidiary, Instagram. They are required to view as many as 800 pieces of disturbing content in a single shift, and routinely turn to on-site counselors to help cope with the procession of stomach-turning images, videos, and text. But some members of this invisible army have complained, in a statement widely circulated within Facebook, that the outsourcing giant that officially employs them, Accenture, has repeatedly attempted to violate the confidentiality of these therapy sessions.

The world is full of people who like to pry. Not all of them end up in government.

Audacious Epigone  runs the numbers.

That the sentiments of Jewish Republicans towards contemporary migration into the US is about the same as that of gentile white Democrats would seem to explain a lot about why conservative outlets like The Daily Wire, National Review, and Prager University are consistently at odds with their putative readership over issues surrounding immigration:

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I think this takes being British to an unwarranted extreme….

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I’ve always thought it was because I was bone-lazy, but I could be wrong.

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Enquiring minds want to know.

The rest of us … not so much.

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I’ve always wondered.

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The National Observer reported that, of the 338 young attendees, 146 “identified as a visible minority” and 39 were Indigenous. “Many of you,” Campbell acknowledged, “are activists…for issues about which you feel passionately…who want to make changes…to fulfill your vision for the country.” But, she warned, anyone serving in Ottawa must remember that everyone else there “had exactly the same right to express their views.” Civility, Campbell added, “is even more important in the age of social media.”

That didn’t work out so well:

Within an hour of Campbell’s plea, approximately 40 delegates stood up at their seats and turned their backs on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to protest his expulsion of two female MPs from the liberal caucus the previous day. In March, Equal Voice had presented Trudeau with their annual EVE award for his “commitment to amplifying women’s role in public life.” Now, at an event he had made possible by sending tax dollars their way, young women were accusing him of ignoring misogyny, indigenous genocide, Inuit suicide, and Islamophobia. When Conservative Party leader Andrew Scheer spoke, dozens of delegates walked out of the chamber. The Green party leader Elizabeth May, on the other hand, was greeted with loud hoots of delight.

Unfortunately, Johnnie hit little Suzy back:

The protesting delegates were dismayed to find themselves criticized for these actions in the media and by many of their peers. Six of them contacted the National Observer, an independent newspaper, which then shared their story in a lengthy and highly sympathetic article. The six women, the Observer reported, had experienced “a series of discriminatory encounters” at the conference “that left them feeling unsafe, unacknowledged, and traumatized.” Equal Voice responded with an apologetic message on its website, which read, in part: “Of the 338 delegates, it was clear that the majority had an overall positive experience…Equal Voice sincerely regrets that some delegates experienced harassment in person or online.”

I tell ya, sometimes you just can’t figure out who’s the victim without a scorecard.

ZMan talks about money.

One way of looking at the mortgage crisis is as a form of currency devaluation. The global financial system is based in credit. That’s the base unit of value. Government debt and to a slightly lesser degree, corporate debt, is the foundation of the global financial system. Government issues debt, which increases the supply of money in the system, as that debt is used as collateral in the system. Central banks can buy and sell debt to control the supply of money in the system.

What no one thought much about, it seems, is how players in the system could devalue credit, in the same way governments devalued currency. That’s exactly what the mortgage brokers were doing. By lowering credit standards for borrowing, they were debasing a fundamental unit of currency in the system. This went unnoticed for a long time until everyone started noticing at the same time. The panic to unload the debased currency – those bad mortgages – set off the mortgage crisis of 2008.

Steve Sailer reports.

As I pointed out in Taki’s Magazine recently, San Francisco is like the Puerto Rico of billionaire cities when it comes to abysmal public school test scores. But don’t worry, the San Francisco school board has a plan to make its students even more ignorant.