THE SCIENCE IS SETTLED — OR ELSE: Calls to punish skeptics rise with links to climate change, hurricanes.

Calls to punish global warming skepticism as a criminal offense have surged in the aftermath of Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, but it hasn’t discouraged climate scientists like Judith Curry.

A retired Georgia Tech professor, she argued on her Climate Etc. website that Irma, which hit Florida as a Category 4 hurricane on Saturday, was fueled in large part by “very weak” wind shear and that the hurricane intensified despite Atlantic Ocean temperatures that weren’t unusually warm.

That is the kind of talk that could get policymakers who heed her research hauled before the justice system, if some of those in the climate change movement have their way.

“Climate change denial should be a crime,” declared the Sept. 1 headline in the Outline. Mark Hertsgaard argued in a Sept. 7 article in the Nation, titled “Climate Denialism Is Literally Killing Us,” that “murder is murder” and “we should punish it as such.”

Shut up, they explained.

WELL, GOOD: Up to 7 years of hormone therapy is safe for postmenopausal women, new data show.

IT’S ALMOST LIKE THEY JUST HATE AMERICA OR SOMETHING: ‘Racist Anthem’ spray painted on 106-year-old Francis Scott Key statue in Baltimore.

ANOTHER LEFTY-CAPTURED INSTITUTION COMMITS SUICIDE: Jemele Hill’s Trump comments have turned into an ESPN firestorm.

All ESPN had to do, a couple of years ago, was say “we do sports, politics are for those other cable channels.” That would have drawn in the many Americans who are sick of 24/7/365 politics. Instead, ESPN decided to do politics, but with less balance than MSNBC. Shockingly, this has not drawn more people in.

THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: Bombshell Report Catches Pentagon Falsifying Paperwork For Weapons Transfers Linked To Organized Crime.

THE DEMS’ PROBLEM: “MANY VOTERS” HAVE SEEN THROUGH THE SCAM. “The call for free college tuition fosters both resentment at ivory tower elitism and regret from people who have degrees but are now buried under debt. Many voters see ‘free’ as a lie — either they’ll end up paying for tuition some other way, or worse, they’ll be paying the tuition of someone else who’ll be getting a degree for free.”

THE 21ST CENTURY IS NOT TURNING OUT AS I’D HOPED: San Diego begins ‘sanitary street washing’ of downtown after pooping homeless people cause deadly hepatitis outbreak.

BURMA CALLING: Al-Qaeda Orders Jihadists to Rescue Rohingya ‘by Force.’

REMEMBRANCE: While Hillary Used Her Book Tour to Spread the Blame, Here’s What the CIA Was Up To.

No one was safe from the finger-pointing — everyone from former FBI Director James Comey and Joe Biden to the Russians and the angry women who didn’t start marching early enough got a taste of the blame.

And after the book’s release on Tuesday, September 12, she continued to promote it — and push her alternate theories of responsibility.

Meanwhile, the CIA embarked on a very different mission: to honor two of the men many blame Clinton for deserting six years ago in Benghazi.

Read the whole thing.

HEH: Apply background checks for gun purchases to voting. “Democrats have long lauded background checks on gun purchases as simple, accurate and in complete harmony with the Second Amendment right to own guns. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has bragged that the checks “make our communities and neighborhoods safer without in any way abridging rights or threatening a legitimate part of the American heritage. . . . If Democrats really believe that the National Instant Criminal Background Check System doesn’t interfere ‘in any way’ with people’s constitutional rights to own a gun, doesn’t it follow that the same system would not constitute an infringement on people’s right to vote? This would give Republicans a system for stopping vote fraud and Democrats a system that they have already vigorously endorsed.”

IF THEY CAN’T TAKE YOUR GUNS, THEY’LL TAKE YOUR AMMO – AND YOUR TRUCK: CCP gun owner has truck confiscated over a clip of ammo in the glove box. On telling the CBP officer to get a warrant to search his phone, the officer responded, “I’m sick of hearing about your rights. You have no rights here.” Civil asset forfeiture in action, ladies and gents.

CHANGE: German right-wing party on course to enter parliament.

NO, REALLY: It’s nice to see that Republicans are not letting a Democrat crisis go to waste.

A LITTLE PIECE OF POLAND, A LITTLE PIECE OF FRANCE… Wary NATO Eyes Turn to Moscow’s ‘Zapad 17’ in Belarus.

General Philip Breedlove: Zapad is not new. It’s a recurring exercise that Russia typically does in its central and western districts.
…
This year is a little different in that it is going to be accomplished largely in Belarus, and a large [Russian] force will move into Belarus. I have no personal sources other than repeating the things I have heard from Belarusians and from others in the eastern NATO nations that this exercise can be between 70 to 100,000 troops – that is a large number. As I said, it’s probably not all in one location, but it will be a grouping of exercises in the west that would come to some numbers like that. There also have been numbers used that say there are over 4,000 railcars being ordered for this year’s exercise.

So there is some chance that this year’s exercise will be much larger than others in the past.

TCB: There’s been reporting in American media that the railcars and the troops in Belarus could be used as a kind of Trojan horse to leave equipment and people in Belarus – potentially in preparation for some kind of attack. What are the similarities and differences that can be drawn from past experiences with Russia when they’ve done something similar – like before the invasions of Georgia and Crimea?

Breedlove: This is exactly what has been talked about. And some even point back to the late 1930s and how Russia comported itself there before World War II. So this is a concern.

Now Zapad is not a snap exercise; it is an announced exercise. But snap exercises, and especially large snap exercises, in the recent past have been used to cover movements of troops, movements of equipment, set preparations for things like Crimea and the Donbas. So many share concern that this might happen. I don’t personally use the Trojan horse analogy – but what I have heard is that there’s great concern in several areas about the fact that a lot of force may come forward and it may not all go home.

NATO hasn’t held an exercise comparable to Zapad since the end of the Cold War, and the new NATO nations on Russia’s western flank have never been included in one.

EXCLUSIVE: GEN. McMASTER SPARKED A ROW WITH THE ISRAELI DELEGATION AT A WHITE HOUSE MEETING ON HEZBOLLAH.

Friction between General McMaster and the Israeli delegation did not end with Israel’s demand that Ali leave the room.

Sources reported that McMaster went on to explicitly dismiss the Israelis’ specific concerns about Hezbollah….McMaster was said to “blow off” this major Israeli concern, and to be “yelling at the Israelis” during the meeting.

Read the whole thing.

DEM CONGRESSMAN: Single-Payer Healthcare ‘Clearly Resonating’ with Trump Voters.

THE RATCHET EFFECT: Sanders’ single-payer push splits Democrats.

Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin on Tuesday became the single-payer bill’s first supporter from the class of Senate Democrats up for reelection next year in states Trump carried. But other politically imperiled incumbent Democrats have said no to Sanders.

Sen. Claire McCaskill said in a brief interview that lawmakers have more work to do to keep health care costs in check “before we would think about expanding that [Medicare] system for everyone.”

Single-payer on a national level would have “a lot of problems,” McCaskill added, although she came out in support of allowing individuals as young as 55 to buy into Medicare. That idea is also backed by Baldwin and two other red-state Democrats up for reelection next year who are declining to endorse Sanders’ bill: Sens. Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Debbie Stabenow of Michigan.

Stabenow, also a member of Democratic leadership, said Tuesday that she would keep working on her Medicare-at-55 plan “because I think there is some bipartisan interest in that.” She said the party’s first order of business should be shoring up the Obamacare markets, followed by other goals.

That’s this year. By 2020, support for single payer will likely be the Democrats’ new litmus test.

CAN DC SWALLOW AMAZON?

Last week, Amazon announced that it was looking for a site for a new headquarters. Cue a dating contest to rival “The Bachelor,” as adoring cities figuratively hurled themselves at the feet of CEO Jeff Bezos, lauding their own best features and squealing how excited they were by the thought of having the tech giant for their very own.

Many theories have been advanced for Amazon’s best interest; many cities have been extolled. But one in particular caught my eye: Richard Florida, the poet laureate of the Creative Class, deemed my own fair city — Washington, DC — the most likely resting place for Bezos’s wandering eye. . . .

Dump 50,000 Amazon employees into this housing market, and the federal service’s GS-13s will find themselves in even more frenzied bidding wars for the area’s tight housing stock. Won’t they revolt? These are, after all, folks who know how to work the government. They already spend quite a bit of time working to tame Amazon; Jeff Bezos might not want them to spend more.

Maybe. But Washington’s metro area is half again the size of Seattle’s; our housing market is tight, but it’s not going to be as distorted by tech wealth as Seattle was. And there are reasons that those folks might want Amazon here. Washington is fundamentally a company town, its economy ringed in concentric circles around the federal government. That can be rather cozy (everyone understands what it is you do at work), but it can also be rather dull. Most Washingtonians of this class would love to see the city diversify into real industries that think about problems other than what’s going on with the Federal Register.

And by the same token, the District of Columbia city government would probably be all a-quiver to get their hands on an Amazon headquarters, to the tune of many gorgeous tax concessions for the company. That’s because so many of Washington’s major employers don’t pay much in the way of taxes: the federal government pays none, and nonprofits may generate only a little ancillary revenue. From the city’s standpoint, a real, live large business that pays any taxes at all would be an improvement over almost any other potential use for the space.

I think the relationship between tech companies and DC is already too incestuous.

DO YOU WANT FRIES WITH THAT (340 EXTRA CALORIES FOR MEDIUM)?: Obamacare restaurant calorie labeling rules will drive up food costs. Domino’s, for example, will have to account for 34 million different pizza combinations. But of course they won’t stop people eating.

OH: South Korea detects radioactive gas from North Korea bomb test.

The Nuclear Safety and Security Commission said its land-based xenon detector in the northeastern part of the country found traces of xenon-133 isotope on nine occasions, while its mobile equipment off the country’s east coast detected traces of the isotope four times.

“It was difficult to find out how powerful the nuclear test was with the amount of xenon detected, but we can say the xenon was from North Korea,” Choi Jongbae, executive commissioner, told a news conference in Seoul.

The commission could not confirm what kind of nuclear test the North conducted, he added.

Xenon is a naturally occurring, colorless gas that is used in manufacturing of some sorts of lights. But the detected xenon-133 is a radioactive isotope that does not occur naturally and which has been linked to North Korea’s nuclear tests in the past.

If North Korea hasn’t yet tested a hydrogen bomb, they probably aren’t far away from one.

Related: More than ever, South Koreans want their own nuclear weapons.

HECKLER’S VETO: College cancels Charles Murray over ‘mere threat’ of Antifa. Why isn’t the Justice Department investigating Antifa like it did the Klan?

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CONGO’S VICIOUS KASAI WAR: My latest Creators Syndicate column.