TEXAS GARDENERS PREPARE FOR MONARCHS: On Saturday, while running errands in the car, I flipped on the radio to get some news. The host of the Saturday morning gardening program was discussing growing plants in your home garden that will nourish monarch butterflies as they pass through Texas enroute to Mexico. He indicated that for years gardeners living in the US “migration corridor” have been running highly distributed garden cafes and truck stops for the butterflies, with milkweed the primary menu item. Milkweed, he said, earnestly. Milkweed, he repeated.

I knew about the decline in monarch butterfly populations and efforts to protect habitat, particularly in Mexico’s winter “monarch colonies.” I’m a fan of monarch butterflies. As a kid I lived in West Texas during the worst years of the great 1950s drought. Migrating monarchs were explosive orange blossoms among the tumbleweeds.

But what intrigued me most was the host’s “we do this ourselves” approach. The effort he described sounded like an authentic volunteer operation by American citizens — “do your bit where you live” because you can and you care.

I wondered it was self-organized. A little internet research suggests that the project is a volunteer effort, for the most part self-organized though encouraged by university agricultural programs and government agencies. The US Department of Agriculture has a finger in it, and engages in some non-coercive cheerleading. This Fish and Wildlife Service webpage has a vague echo of doom-mongering.

In 2015 Fish and Wildlife put $3.2 million into restoring and conserving monarch-supporting habitat with special focus on “the I-35 corridor from Texas to Minnesota…” Texas has an interesting and extensive state program.

Monarch populations began declining in the late 1990s. Harsh weather (2013-2014) in the monarchs’ Mexican winter quarters took a heavy toll. The Fish and Wildlife Service now says populations (based new data) are rebounding.

Which brings us back to milkweed. The radio host preached the gospel of milkweed. Milkweed, he said, is the plant for spring– as we gardeners know, monarchs lay their eggs on milkweed. But what are the best plants we Texas gardeners can grow to provide sap to monarch butterflies flying south in late summer on their way to Mexico? Milkweed scores again.

As I turned the radio off the show host said returning monarchs will feed on nectar from other late blooming wildflowers. (Hence the term “nectar corridor,” used by the USDA.)

This site makes his point: “A mix of native flowers with different bloom times, including some overlap in flowering, to ensure a stable food source for butterflies.”

THE SCIENCE IS SETTLED: Eat organic, kill the planet.

But feel so good virtue signaling in the process.

FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: Joel Kotkin: The Meaning Of The Baby Bust.

Once an exception to demographic decline, our country may be falling into the dismal pattern that is now common in other high-income countries, notably in East Asia and Europe. Europe’s demographic crisis is one reason European Union officials, particularly in Germany, opened the floodgates to mass migration from the Middle East and other unstable areas. In many parts of Europe, more people are dying than are being born.

Now America may be joining the downward fertility spiral. Since the recession, the number of new children has plummeted, and it’s dropped the most precipitously for new mothers. The number of households with their own children in 2014 was 33 million, down from 35 million in 2005, even as the total number of households has shot up by nearly 6 million. By comparison, there are about 43 million households with dogs, according to the ASPCA’s low-end estimate.

Shifts in child bearing will profoundly affect our geography, politics and economic future. Children, after all, define our future society, and provide the primary motivation for parents and grandparents. Without a strong familial structure, we will be facing a rather grim future, as an expanding older population grows ever more dependent on a shrinking base of young working-age people. Demographer Sami Karam notes that the 1980s Reagan boom benefited from demographics of that period, with a rising proportion of working people to retirees. With trends headed the opposite way, he suggests, no such expansion may even be possible today.

To some, of course, an increasingly childless future represents something of an ideal. Many greens regard offspring as unwanted additional emitters of carbon, and historically have proposed limiting families. It also provides manna to those high-density developers who no longer will have to worry about renters seeking to establish themselves in homes best suited for raising children.

Birthrates always plummet under socialism.

IT’S COME TO THIS: In an age of narcissism, we need to protect professors by putting cameras in the classroom, argues Amir Azarvan, an assistant professor of political science at Georgia Gwinnett College.

MEGAN MCARDLE: Treat Rape Like Any Other Crime. If we did that, agitators would lose an opportunity to agitate, so expect bitter resistance.

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JOHN HAWKINS ASKS, How Many People Have To Die Because Of The #BlackLivesMatter Movement?

ANALYSIS: TRUE. South Carolina Lawmaker: Media ‘Most Likely’ America’s Biggest Problem, Not Race…

THE CLIMATE POLICE CRACK-UP: THOSE EXXON MOBIL SUBPOENAS? NEVER MIND. “We hope Exxon attempts to disbar all state Attorneys Generals involved in this assault on free speech.”

THE MARINES ARE LOOKING FOR A FEW FAT MILLENNIALS:  “You are watching the death of one of the greatest fighting forces in the long history of this planet…In order to accommodate those muscular superstars of the Millennial Generation, the Corps is also relaxing the rules on pull-ups for men and women.”

(Via Newsalert.)

SHOCKER: Pew: Overwhelming Majorities Unhappy With EU’s Handling Of Refugees. “Much of the disaffection with the EU among Europeans can be attributed to Brussels’ handling of the refugee issue. In every country surveyed, overwhelming majorities disapprove of how Brussels has dealt with the problem. This includes 94% of Greeks, 88% of Swedes and 77% of Italians. The strongest approval of EU management of the refugee crisis is in the Netherlands, but that backing is a tepid 31%.”

OBAMA’S BIGGEST FAILURE: The president has substantially set back race relations in the United States.

Obligatory:

A QUESTION WE SHOULD HAVE ASKED IN 2008: How To Avoid 1968?

CATHY YOUNG: Rape Culture in the West is as Real as ‘Witchcraft in Salem.’

SAY, HAS ANYONE INFORMED BEN RHODES OF THIS SHOCKING DISCOVERY? German Intelligence: Iran Seeking Nukes.

“I don’t suppose anyone, not even the perennially clueless Barack Obama, is surprised that Iran is proceeding full speed ahead with its nuclear weapons program,” John Hinderaker writes at Power Line. “That being the case, why did we give the mullahs the $100 billion? The obvious explanation is that Barack Obama and John Kerry are trying to weaken the United States and strengthen our enemies. That can’t possibly be right, of course. But what, then, is the alternative explanation? I haven’t been able to think of one.”

THE RETURN OF PRESIDENT SEE-NO-EVIL. Professor Obama: Ya Know, It’s Hard To ‘Untangle The Motives’ Of The Dallas Shooter.

THINK OF HOW MUCH IT WILL REDUCE THEIR CARBON FOOTPRINTS! The Time Has Come For Law Reviews (Led By Harvard, Yale & Stanford) To Only Publish Online.

BUT HAVE YOU NOTICED THAT WE GET THIS STUFF RIGHT BEFORE EVERY ELECTION WHERE THE DEMOCRATS ARE WORRIED ABOUT BLACK TURNOUT? Some Want a Race War, But Dallas Won’t Deliver.

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): Daycare Nightmare: Female Worker Confesses to Raping Children in Employee Bathroom.

MOLLY MACAULEY, ONE OF THE WORLD’S FEW SPACE ECONOMISTS, was stabbed to death while walking her dogs last night.

YEAH, THAT’S PRETTY MUCH THE POINT: Identity Politics is Killing Solidarity and Fuelling Fascism.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Video on How to Make Your Bedroom Studio Sound Great, from Russ Berger, Gavin Haverstick, and Sweetwater’s Mitch Gallagher (Video):

I know from talking to all three men that they definitely know their stuff when it comes to acoustics. I would also add that if you’re recording using a drum machine and/or pre-recorded drum loops and guitar modeling gear and/or software synthesizers and just recording your vocal tracks live, a Reflexion filter and some duvets on the wall behind the singer (and perhaps on the ceiling as well) can do wonders to tame some otherwise pretty crappy sounding rooms. (It works equally well for recording a podcast, or voice-over narration, incidentally.) Any additional steps in sound treatment to make a room sound better will often pay far more dividends when recording than thinking that an expensive microphone without any room treatments will do the trick.

AFTER CYCLIST IS INTENTIONALLY KILLED BY CAR, NYPD GOES AFTER…CYCLISTS.

To be fair, I think many cyclists could use a friendly reminder that “share the road,” as the road signs say, works both ways.

QUESTION ASKED: What Is Your Earliest Sports Memory?

For me, I think it was probably when the ’74 Philadelphia Flyers won the Stanley Cup, though I do remember watching an earlier, funnier, less politicized Bryant Gumbel hosting NBC’s AFC football coverage in the mid-‘70s, an era one sports author (of a pretty good history of the era) described as “The Last Headbangers,” before the Dallas Cowboys and San Francisco 49ers transformed the NFL into a slick, corporate made for TV sports league.

What’s your earliest sports memory?

JOHN SCHINDLER: J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI Wouldn’t Have Punted Emailgate. “Although Comey stated that security violations of the sort perpetrated by Secretary Clinton were something ‘no reasonable prosecutor’ would take to court, his own FBI prosecuted a Navy reservist just last year for less serious infractions. . . . All the same, no matter what the Kremlin may or may not do, the real loser in EmailGate is the FBI, whose professional reputation has been indelibly tarnished by its handling of this sordid affair. This is no small matter for our country. The FBI is not only the world’s most famous law enforcement agency, it’s also America’s secret police force—with all the power that implies. Malfeasance by the FBI, its bending to political winds, is a matter that should concern all Americans, regardless of their politics. . . . The long-dead Hoover has been a hate figure for so many Americans for so many decades that it’s difficult to remember what he got right. But what he got right was important, and it’s also what’s altogether lacking in today’s FBI.”