THIS IS BECOMING ROUTINE: Mall shooting suspect had blog with picture of ISIS leader. “The Turkish immigrant accused of gunning down five people at a Washington mall smirked at his first court appearance Monday even as reports revealed he had a blog with photo posts of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei. . . . Authorities said they have not ruled out terrorism as a motive in the shooting at the Cascade Mall in Burlington.”

WHO SAYS TRUMP WOULDN’T SHRINK THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT? 25 Percent Of Federal Employees Said They’d Consider Quitting If Donald Trump Elected President.

Faster, please. Though as with Hollywood celebrities threatening to move to Canada every presidential election if the GOP wins, unfortunately, they never follow through with their promises.

GOOD! F-16 autopilot system saves the life of an unconscious fighter pilot.

THE SOCIAL TYRANNY of Twitter.

ROGER SIMON: Trump Really Would Recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s Capital. “Several American presidential candidates – when running for office – have made pledges similar to Trump’s, then, upon election, basically reneged, usually by ignoring the situation or telling the Israelis to wait until the Palestinian question is resolved.”

SHMATTA, SHMATTA, SHMATTA — I CAN’T GIVE IT AWAY ON 7TH AVENUE. THIS TOWN’S BEEN WEARING TATTERS: The Latest Elite Fashion Trend? “Trashion.”

And thus, nearly a half century later, what Tom Wolfe dubbed “Funky Chic” reaches its ultimate conclusion. As Wolfe wrote in 1970, “Anti-fashion! Terrific. Right away anti-fashion itself became the most raving fashion imaginable . . . also known as Funky Chic. Everybody had sworn off fashion, but somehow nobody moved to Cincinnati to work among the poor. Instead, everyone stayed put and imported the poor to the fashion pages.”

Now joined by their (not so fresh) garbage.

I THOUGHT OBAMACARE WAS GOING TO FIX THIS: “The reaction to opening a medical bill these days is often shock and confusion — for the insured and the uninsured. Prices and deductibles keep rising, policies are drowning in fine print, and doctors are jumping on and off networks. So why hasn’t the growing burden of health care gotten more attention in the presidential campaign?”

PERHAPS THE DEFINING QUESTION OF OUR ERA: What are we allowed to say?

HOWIE CARR: The debate fix is in…for Hillary Clinton.

As David Sirota of the International Business Times tweets, “It would be more fun if every politician and professional activist group just posted their pre-written, post-debate press releases right now.”

WARNING: YOU COULD BE THE NEXT PERSON TO EXPERIENCE THESE DEBATE SIDE EFFECTS.

WHAT THE NFL CAN TEACH WASHINGTON ABOUT SOCIAL POLICY: “’Unknowingly making something worse’ is the unofficial motto of liberalism since the 1960s. Heck, the NFL’s rule committee could easily find jobs at the Department of Health and Human Services.”

Read the whole thing.

OF GODS AND GAMEMASTERS: Revisiting Religion in RPGs.

HENCE THE FIREWORKS TO COME TONIGHT: Donald Trump Leads in National Poll on Eve of First Debate.

ENDORSED! There Is Absolutely No Reason to Even Consider Eating Reduced-Fat Cheese, Says Science.

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:

Former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau today:

Former Obama speechwriter Jon Favraeu on the left in 2008:

Perhaps Favraeu is once again trying to bring us all “peace in our time” in his own special way yet again.

IF YOU THINK OF BLACK PEOPLE — AND RAPE! — WHEN SOMEONE MENTIONS A GORILLA, I’M PRETTY SURE IT’S YOU WHO’S THE RACIST: Clemson Housing Bans “Harambe references”: says they “add to the rape culture” on campus and are a form of “racism.”

HIGH HITLER: HOW NAZI DRUG ABUSE STEERED THE COURSE OF HISTORY — German writer Norman Ohler’s astonishing account of methamphetamine addiction in the Third Reich changes what we know about the second world war, the Guardian gushes.

But does it really? It’s been common knowledge for decades that Hitler consumed large quantities of pharmaceuticals, particularly at the end, when his personal physician in the bunker (Dr. Morrell, pictured with Hitler atop the Guardian’s article) was an astonishingly bad quack. But this article sounds like yet another example, as former PJM columnist Ron Rosenbaum has written, of a German author attempting to shift the blame for WWII.

There’s an industry of German writers, as Rosenbaum described in his recently updated book Explaining Hitler, producing material in which Hitler is made out to be some kind of superhuman beast to exculpate German responsibility for their crimes under the system of government known as National Socialism, or find some sort of excuse ala Citizen Kane’s “Rosebud” to explain it all away – being unloved by his parents, having malformed genitalia, etc. And/or books and films like The Reader, whose protagonist is depicted as illiterate while serving as a concentration camp guard to symbolically excuse the German people’s supposed lack of awareness over the terrifying scale of the crimes being committed on the outskirts of their towns and via their railroad system.

Claiming Hitler was high as the proverbial moonbat during much of WWII seems like yet another example of this cottage industry at work, and as Rosenbaum noted, winds up telling us much more about the authors who write them, than the actual history of WWII. But taken en masse, and with the number of Holocaust survivors dwindling, combined with what Glenn would call the education apocalypse, they’re likely having an effect on how future generations will view WWII.

OMAR MATEEN’S 911 TRANSCRIPT: Rukmina Callimachi has the link.

Note this: “By my count, he tells the operator that the US needs to end airstrikes against ISIS at least *five* times during the call.”

So anything we were hearing at the time casting doubt on whether this was ISIS-related terrorism was contrary to facts already known by authorities.

Meanwhile, where’s Omar Mateen’s wife/accomplice Noor Salman, whom the Justice Department “lost” several months ago?

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1236.

QUESTION ASKED: As social media thrives, why is Twitter falling behind?

Maybe because under CEO Jack Dorsey, Twitter has gone from being social media to social justice media.

SUCKING IN THE ‘70s: Want to Slow Climate Change? Stop Having Babies, demands Eric Roston, Bloomberg.com’s “Sustainability Editor.”

It’s Zero Population Growth, slight return! Everything old is new again; those of us who grew up in the ‘70s were exposed to such Chicken Little junk science on a near-daily basis. ZPG was even the title of a staggeringly bad sci-fi film starring Oliver Reed and Geraldine Chaplin and released in 1972:

As Wikipedia notes, ZPG was “inspired by the non-fiction best-selling book The Population Bomb by Paul R. Ehrlich,” a book that, along with Rachel Carson’s earlier Silent Spring was a one-two blow to the cerebellum that transformed previously optimistic New Frontier-era liberals into what Fred Siegel described as “Progressives Against Progress” at City Journal a few years ago:

Crankery, in short, became respectable. In 1972, Sir John Maddox, editor of the British journal Nature, noted that though it had once been usual to see maniacs wearing sandwich boards that proclaimed the imminent end of the Earth, they had been replaced by a growing number of frenzied activists and politicized scientists making precisely the same claim. In the years since then, liberalism has seen recurring waves of such end-of-days hysteria. These waves have shared not only a common pattern but often the same cast of characters. Strangely, the promised despoliations are most likely to be presented as imminent when Republicans are in the White House. In each case, liberals have argued that the threat of catastrophe can be averted only through drastic actions in which the ordinary political mechanisms of democracy are suspended and power is turned over to a body of experts and supermen.

Back in the early 1970s, it was overpopulation that was about to destroy the Earth. In his 1968 book The Population Bomb, Paul Ehrlich, who has been involved in all three waves, warned that “the battle to feed all of humanity is over” on our crowded planet. He predicted mass starvation and called for compulsory sterilization to curb population growth, even comparing unplanned births with cancer: “A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people.” An advocate of abortion on demand, Ehrlich wanted to ban photos of large, happy families from newspapers and magazines, and he called for new, heavy taxes on baby carriages and the like. He proposed a federal Department of Population and Environment that would regulate both procreation and the economy. But the population bomb, fear of which peaked during Richard Nixon’s presidency, never detonated. Population in much of the world actually declined in the 1970s, and the green revolution, based on biologically modified foods, produced a sharp increase in crop productivity.

But oh, the fun leftists had terrorizing the rest of us with their sandwich boards back then:

(Classical reference in headline.)

NEWS YOU CAN USE FROM OFFICER JACK DUNPHY: How to Avoid Getting Shot by the Police.

A PRACTICAL EDUCATION: Why Avoiding Student Loan Debt Was The Best Thing I Ever Did.

KATRINA ON THE HUDSON: The real scandal of New York City’s Sandy recovery.