HEH: ABC Tells Democrats to Keep Debate Clean. Looking at You, Beto.

I’ll provide live drunkblog coverage of tonight’s debate at the PJMedia home page, starting around 7:45pm Eastern.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: You’re not ‘demisexual’…you’re a normal human being.

Comparing a person who doesn’t experience sexual desire separate from genuine human connection to an ‘asexual’ (i.e. a person who does not experience sexual attraction at all), as Seventeen magazine did last year, explaining that, ‘demisexuality is within the asexuality spectrum,’ signals to me that we’ve gone way too far down the porn culture rabbit hole. If I can offer any advice as the wise elder I am, it is to get off your phone and interact with people in the real world. If nothing else, you’ll learn a lot about yourself and others, and will at least be able to avoid wasting your time DM’ing someone who you can’t have a conversation with in person, never mind make out with. I may be pegged a radical for saying this, but let’s normalize humanity, not objectification.

Read the whole thing, as our current weird inflection point in time between the Sexual Revolution and the left’s recent #MeToo and Kavanaugh freakouts plays itself out.

THIS IS GOOD ADVICE:

CHRISTINE BLASEY FORD’S FATHER SUPPORTED BRETT KAVANAUGH’S CONFIRMATION:

While there was no evidence to support Ford’s claim other than her testimony, some believed her because they said she would have no motivation to lie. Critics point to the nearly $1 million she raised in GoFundMe accounts and the honors that Sports Illustrated and Time Magazine bestowed on her. New books featuring her cooperation downplay the copious problems with her account.

So what was the point of the cavalcade of unsubstantiated allegations? Ford’s attorney Debra Katz offered not so much a hint as a confession. Ford testified that she had no political motivation. But in remarks captured on video, Katz admitted that Ford’s allegations against Kavanaugh were at least in part driven by fear he might not sufficiently support unregulated abortion on the court.

“We were going to have a conservative” justice, she said, “but he will always have an asterisk next to his name” that will discredit any decision he makes regarding abortion. What’s more, she added, “that is part of what motivated Christine.”

As Noah Rothman of Commentary wrote last week in a piece titled “Giving up the Game,” “This is an admission entirely against interest, in part, because you do not have to announce the presence of an asterisk if it truly exists. The Democratic partisans who insist Justice Clarence Thomas has been similarly undermined are screaming into a void. His concurrences and dissents still carry as much moral and intellectual weight as any other justice. He still influences the evolution of legal thought as much as or more than his colleagues on the bench. His clerks still get confirmed to federal judicial appointments in striking numbers. The notion that Kavanaugh’s reputation had been irreparably tarred in some way by his confirmation hearings isn’t an observation. It’s a self-affirmation.”

DISPATCHES FROM THE FORMERLY GOLDEN STATE: Sacramento trying to kill packs of enormous rats that infested city lot near downtown.

FASTER, PLEASE: Could an Extracellular Matrix Gel Rebuild MI-Damaged Hearts?

SOUTH PARK’S MATT STONE ON CANCEL CULTURE:

“It’s new,” Stone says of cancel culture, the term used to refer to boycotts started (usually via social media) when a person or group is offended by a star or brand. “I don’t want to say it’s the same as it’s always been. The kids are fucking different than us. There’s a generational thing going on.” Currently, Dave Chappelle is in the crosshairs for his latest Netflix stand-up special, Sticks and Stones. “I know some people have been canceled for genuinely, like, personal behavior, but Dave is not getting canceled anytime soon,” Stone says, joking that South Park and Chappelle are “grandfathered” out of the culture.

Stone also shared his theory as to why critics were so hard on the latest Chappelle special, while viewers seemed to enjoy it far more. “I feel bad for television critics and cultural critics,” he explains. “They may have laughed like hell at that, and then they went home and they know what they have to write to keep their job. So when I read TV reviews or cultural reviews, I think of someone in prison, writing. I think about somebody writing a hostage note. This is not what they think. This is what they have to do to keep their job in a social media world. So I don’t hold it against them.”

Which dovetails well with this item from Sunday, which I dubbed “An Army of Fredrick Werthams:” How Twitter Transforms Regular People Into Woke Crusaders. Watch a comic book writer transform her opinion of The Joker, once her favorite character, to being (wait for it) “problematic,” because that’s how she’s expected to respond to the new film starring Joaquin Phoenix.

It’s like social media is a virus of the mind or something, to coin an Insta-phrase.

(Via Stephen Miller.)

TROLL LEVEL: PRESIDENTIAL. Giant Anti-Socialism Banner To Fly Over Houston Before Democratic Debate, Paid For By The Trump Campaign.

RELATED (From Ed): Is this a Trump 2020 ad? Greenpeace activists have shut down the Houston Ship Channel to protest fossil fuels.

As we hang here, the Democratic candidates are getting ready for the #DemDebates just a few hours from now here in Houston.

We challenge every candidate on stage tonight to promise to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable if they become president.

Nice of Greenpeace to make an in-kind contribution to Trump’s reelection campaign. As Bryan Preston wrote after CNN’s seven hour “climate change town hall” last week, “Seriously, if you see all of the above — which is just a sample — and vote for any of these people for any office at any level, it’s on you. If you like Venezuela, voting for any of them will bring you a whole lot of Venezuela. Thank you, CNN, just for letting these people talk.”

UPDATE (From Ed): Troll-level, Texas-sized, from the Texas Railroad Commissioner:

(Bumped.)

BREAKING: US attorney recommends proceeding with charges against McCabe, as DOJ rejects last-ditch appeal.

FLUOROQUINOLONES SHOULD NOT BE USED LIGHTLY: Commonly used antibiotics may lead to heart problems, study says.

AT AMAZON, Shop Amazon Warehouse Deals – Deep Discounts on Open-box and Used Products.

Plus, Shop Amazon Outlet – Clearance, Markdowns and Overstock Deals.

SKYNET SMILES: Soft Self-Healing Materials for Robots That Cannot Be Destroyed. “It’ll take more than having its fingers chopped off to stop this robot hand.”

INSERT COSTCO JOKE HERE: New Evidence Hints All Comets in The Solar System May Come From The Same Place.

A LEGACY WRITTEN IN PENCIL ON SAND: Trump Admin To Undo ‘Oppressive’ Obama-Era Water Regulation.

THEY GIVE YOU TAX INCENTIVES TO BUY THEM, THEN CHARGE YOU MORE FOR THE PRIVILEGE, BECAUSE GOVERNMENT IS STUPID: States hit electric vehicle owners with high fees, Consumer Reports says.

WHAT TO EXPECT DURING TONIGHT’S DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE. Jim Geraghty ponders when Joe Biden will fire the depth charge against Elizabeth Warren:

You don’t go after Warren on hypocrisy. Any rival who wants to nuke Warren’s campaign, particularly in a Democratic primary, should go right at her glaring weakness: “You’re not a woman of color, you were wrong to describe yourself as a woman of color, and when you claim you had no idea that Harvard Law School was touting you to the public as a woman of color, I don’t believe you.” The notion that Harvard was running around describing Warren this way and she simply never noticed it in any of their statements, press materials, or other documents is the most implausible aspect of Warren’s explanation. Even if you buy her story, it means she wasn’t following the debate about minority representation at the law school back in the 1990s, a pretty heated controversy at the time. No demographic likes a white person trying to benefit from fraudulent minority status. Warren will insist she never benefited from any affirmative action program, but many voters are unlikely to believe that claiming a minority status at an Ivy League law school faculty didn’t bring her any professional benefit at all.

My guess is that Bernie Sanders will never play that card, as he likes Warren too much that would be too personal an attack on a longtime ally. (Oh, and Sanders has his own racial controversy; in a 1997 book he used the n-word repeatedly in a critique of American racism. No one’s saying he’s used the term out of racial animosity, but there are people who will bristle at him using the term in any context.)

As Geraghty writes, “Biden won’t play that card against Warren until he needs it. But if you’re a Warren fan, you’ve got a difficult choice. Would you rather she face that storm in the Democratic primary, or in the general election against Trump?”

SPEAKING OF DUMB FADS: Trump Administration Jumps Aboard Vaping-Ban Bandwagon.

By all appearances, the “vaping deaths” are coming from illicit THC products, not commercial preparations.

DISPATCHES FROM THE INTERSECTION OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY AND THE VIRGINIA CLOWN SHOW: “Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax has filed a $400 million lawsuit against CBS, alleging the company defamed him when it broadcast interviews with two women he says have falsely accused him of sexual assault.”

OUR MORAL BETTERS IN THE ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY: Fox Settles ‘Bones’ Suit, Ending Profits Case That Stunned Hollywood.

SCIENCE: Transgender conversion therapy linked to psychological distress, study says.

Conversion therapy may be leading more transgender people to attempt suicide, new research shows.

Those who underwent gender identity conversion attempts were more likely to experience suicidal thoughts in the last 12 months or severe mental distress in the previous month, according to research published Wednesday in JAMA Psychiatry. Previous work has shown about 180,000 people in the United States have gone through some form of this therapy.

Traditional medicine was very cautious about this, in recognition that the true disorder is rare, and that interventions are dangerous. Now it’s everywhere. This is a dereliction of medical duty, driven by an irresponsible fad among our irresponsible, hysterical, fad-prone elites.

CHANGE: U.S. becoming world’s top oil exporter. “Booming shale production has allowed the U.S. to close in on, and briefly overtake, Saudi Arabia as the world’s top oil exporter.”

YOUR DAILY TREACHER: Hillary Clinton Is Still Pretending She Won.

She’s like Teddy Brewster in Arsenic and Old Lace, who was convinced he was actually Teddy Roosevelt. Everybody played along because it was just easier that way. But eventually, they had him committed to a mental institution for his own good.

I hope Hillary’s loved ones don’t do that to her. I don’t want her to go away to the funny farm. I want her to keep running around in public, humiliating herself for my amusement. I want her to serve as a constant reminder that things could always be worse.

I’m With Her (Downward Spiral)!

Heh. Read the whole thing.™

I SUSPECT THIS NUMBER WILL FALL WITH ACTUAL PRACTICE: More than Half of Americans Trust Law Enforcement to Use Facial Recognition Responsibly.

I’M QUOTED IN THIS EXTENSIVE TREATMENT OF SPACE COLLISION ISSUES, from Motherboard.