STEVEN HAYWARD: Propping Up Obama. “The left-liberal establishment is in crisis at the moment. They can’t make up their mind between desperately trying to prop up Obama, and giving up on him and increasing their distance.”

DEMOCRATIC OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES: “Meet the Press” covered Rand Paul’s pro bono eye surgery in Guatemala and larded it with impugnment of his motives. Obama golfs and they defend him; Paul fixes poor third-worlders and they impugn him. That’s who they are, that’s what they do.

THE MORE THEY TALK ABOUT INCLUSIVENESS, THE QUICKER THEY ARE TO EXCLUDE: Excluded By “New York’s Premier LGBT Synagogue” For Being Zionists.

THINK HOW HE’D BE POLLING IF THEY TREATED HIM LIKE BUSH: Kyle Smith: Why comedians and ‘SNL’ are shielding President Obama.

IT’S DUE PROCESS WEEK, at College Insurrection.

FASTER, PLEASE: ‘Sticky’ lubricant stays in place to ease arthritis pain. “A lubricant that doesn’t wash away could ease arthritis pain in knees and shoulders, keep artificial joints working smoothly, and even make contact lenses more comfortable. Biomedical engineers discovered a way to bind the lubricant to a sticky manmade molecule that then essentially locks it in place on the surface of cartilage and eye tissues.”

REMEMBERING Duke Kahanamoku.

AT AMAZON, Labor Day Savings: 50-70% off Clothing, Shoes, Jewelry & Watches.

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THIS IS CONSISTENT WITH MY OBSERVATIONS: Environmentalism and the Fear of Disorder: Greens engage in rituals to allay their anxieties.

Why do people recycle and buy organic foods? According to Marijn Meijers and Bastiaan Rutjens, a couple of social scientists at the University of Amsterdam, they do it to realize a sense of personal control stemming from their fear that disorder is increasing in the world. Technological optimists, meanwhile, are more likely to eschew the comfort of such rituals.

This also explains why they’re largely immune to facts and reason: It’s basically something more like a religion, or maybe compulsive hand-washing.

NEWS FROM WISCONSIN’S “DEEP STATE:” ‘Retaliation’: Unsealed docs show prosecutors’ broad search tactics against conservatives.

WAGING WAR on Hepatitis C.

RICHARD FERNANDEZ: Paradigms Lost: ISIS, Ferguson, And The Left In Crisis. “Like a man in a swimming pool who belatedly realizes that he can’t swim, his first step must be to extend his foot to see if he can reach bottom. If not, then where is the nearest gutter? The problem is the floundering man in the pool had introduced himself as the next Michael Phelps. Now he has to save himself without letting on.”

UPSIDE: A VIABLE CAREER FOR UNEMPLOYED COLLEGE GRADS. Alzheimer’s patients to be treated with the blood of under-30s.

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IMAGES: How Curiosity Looks After Two Years On Mars.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Hook-Up Culture at Harvard, Stanford Wanes Amid Assault Alarm.

They told me if I voted for Mitt Romney, our colleges would be taken over by prudes who fundamentally disapproved of coeducation. And they were right!

I LIKE THE CUT OF HER JIB: Egyptian Female Activist Poses Nude and Poops on ISIS Flag. Yes, Really.

THIS IS SMART: Tesla Wants To Pay Hackers A Full-Time Salary To Break Into Its Cars.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 472.

WHO COULD HAVE SEEN THIS COMING? Federal Program To Help Unemployed Leaves Many Jobless And In Debt.

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: U.S. Sends Second Carrier to Asia Amid Tensions with China.

FIRST, THEY’D HAVE TO IMPORT SOME BLACK PEOPLE: Elite northeastern college town very worried about becoming Ferguson. “The point is, Ithaca is probably about one of the safest places you could be in the country and there is so little racial diversity that worrying about a police state cracking down over the color barrier is like preparing for a drought in Seattle. And yet, these kids certainly do seem to have a lot of time to protest. And they love to protest a lot.” Takes their mind off student loans. Just in case the University-provided vibrators fail to do the trick, I guess.

COMING TO YOUR DINNER TABLE: California’s Drought.

That does not mean that California will become an uninhabited desert, scattered with wind-scoured ruins providing a silent and reproachful testimony to Man’s hubris. California has enough water to support quite a lot of population growth — if it cuts out a lot of that agriculture. It may even be able to support most of the agriculture — if people start leaving. The problem is, it may not be able to manage both unless the rains return or it finds some clever way to reclaim low-cost potable water from the sea.

In a worst-case scenario, my money is on agriculture losing out; its lobbyists are motivated, but they’re simply outnumbered by all the city dwellers. So it’s worth contemplating what a dramatic scale-back in California’s agricultural production would do to California — and the rest of us. . . .

If California’s agriculture has to scale back, the first and most obvious effect is that the quality of food would decline to something closer to, though still at least somewhat better than, what you get in a major urban area in the Mid-Atlantic states. The second and almost as obvious effect would be on the rest of us: Much of the produce in your supermarket would become dramatically more expensive, especially in the winter. The Midwest could basically take over the job in the summer, and imports from South America could probably make up some of the remaining difference, but most of us would be relying a lot more on frozen fruit and vegetables, and a lot less on fresh.

That’s not all bad — I actually prefer frozen fruit for cooking, because it’s picked and frozen ripe, rather than picked green and rotten by the time it hits store shelves. But it would be a massive change in how many of us cook. It would also widen the divide between how the upper middle class and beyond eat, and how the rest of the country does.

Widening the gap between the upper-middle classes and beyond, and the hoi polloi, is one of the main functions of environmental and land-use rules.

MICHAEL TOTTEN: The Worst Fate Possible For A Journalist.