THREAT EVOLUTION: Why U.S. Patriot missiles failed to stop drones and cruise missiles attacking Saudi oil sites. “The U.S. is having trouble defending against low-flying drones and cruise missiles after years of the Pentagon focusing on longer-range threats.”

TO BE FAIR, THE UN IS GENERALLY USELESS AT BEST, DESTRUCTIVE AT WORST: 2nd Ebola vaccine to be used in Congo, as UN efforts slammed.

FOX NEWS CUTS TIES WITH MICHAEL KNOWLES OVER GRETA THUNBERG COMMENTS: 

A spokesman for Fox News blasted Knowles in a statement to Mediaite: “The comment made by Michael Knowles who was a guest on The Story tonight was disgraceful – we apologize to Greta Thunberg and to our viewers.” Fox News also told The Hollywood Reporter that the network has “no plans” to book Knowles in the future. This is not an official ban, however, but still pretty gutless.

One thing is certain: Everything Knowles said was correct and easily verifiable. Thunberg has Asperger syndrome, selective mutism, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and suffered from depression. In 2018, she described her own illnesses in a TEDx Talk, where she explained that she fell into a depression and became ill when she was eleven years old. “I stopped talking. I stopped eating. In two months, I lost about ten kilos of weight. Later on I was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, OCD, and selective mutism—that basically means I only speak when I think it’s necessary.”

Any single one of these would be described as a mental illness. Calling them such is not attacking a child, but acknowledging the fact that this girl is being thrust into the spotlight despite her numerous problems. While may on the left cheer this, because Thunberg is the latest human shield they’ve found to champion their causes, many on the right see it for what it is: child exploitation and abuse. That Fox News was so quick to cut ties with Knowles for acknowledging this fact is just bizarre.

As Brandon Morse adds at Red State, “And with that, Fox News just lost a massive amount of credibility. What the most-watched name in news did is deny reality in the name of political correctness. Knowles, as he explained and even later explained online, was not deriding Thunberg for having a mental illness, he was clearly bringing it up to highlight the fact that the left has sunk to new lows and will take advantage of someone like Thunberg.”

You may not be interested in the Gleichschaltung, but the Gleichschaltung is interested in you. Even at Fox News.

THIS IS A LOVELY AND DIFFICULT ESSAY: I’m Watching My Father Die. “The pain of death is brutal. But it must never extinguish the absolute beauty of life.”

TO BE FAIR, IT WASN’T REWRITTEN FOR THEIR BENEFIT: California’s employment law was rewritten. Many independent contractors aren’t thrilled.

BUT THE NARRATIVE! The new law designed to support independent contractors gets thumbs down from rideshare drivers who prefer flexibility and freedom.

On Wednesday, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law Assembly Bill 5, which is intended to reduce worker misclassification by turning “independent contractors,” like rideshare drivers, into employees of the companies they work with. The new law would force giants like Lyft and Uber to do things like pay a minimum wage, provide health insurance benefits and paid sick days off.

As well-meaning as the change may have been intended, the consensus among the rideshare drivers waiting for pings from an LAX holding lot on a recent Friday said, thanks but no thanks.

Despite all of the complaints, protests and anger from drivers about their treatment from their so-called partners at Uber and Lyft, the top reason people endure the traffic and headaches of driving rideshare professionally in and around L.A. is that the hours are flexible. If you only want to drive after dropping off your kids at school, you can simply turn off the app when you’re done. If you want to take a month, two months, six months off from driving you won’t even get so much as an email from the companies inquiring your status. I should know. After being an Uber/Lyft driver for over five years, I stopped using the apps almost a year ago and have not heard a peep from either company asking me to return.

Other gigs might say they have flexible hours, but for all its faults, driving for Lyft and Uber is truly a side hustle with few peers. Thus, the proposition of losing that freedom in order to be an employee of a company that has rarely shown it cares about anything, including its bottom line, is something these drivers would rather quit over than embark into.

California’s AB 5 looks more and more like the Taxicab Medallion Protection Act.

JON GABRIEL: Climate Hysteria Is Harming Our Kids.

Those of us who have been around awhile are used to constant fearmongering about the environment. My first-grade teacher handed out maps showing how a pollution-caused ice age would soon cover our Chicago suburb with a glacier. Mom eased the panic with a reminder we were moving to Phoenix that summer.

After that, acid rain was going to kill us, then the ozone hole, then global warming, then “global weirding,” and now, climate change. (Granted, the climate has always changed, but progressives think it started a century ago.)

Despite the wildly different scenarios, from freezing oceans to boiling ones, the solution is always the same: curtail capitalism and let government control more of our lives.

The young, unfortunately, don’t have our luxury of perspective. And it’s destroying their emotional health.

Exit quote: “What Thunberg’s parents are doing to her borders on child abuse. Hyping increasingly apocalyptic claims is spreading that abuse to every other young person.”

HE SEEMS SANE: Bill Weld Says Trump Is Guilty of Treason, Deserves Death Penalty.

TAKE TWO ASPIRIN AND CALL ME IN THE MORNING: Aspirin may extend survival for head, neck, lung cancers. Hey, people used to laugh at that advice, but it turns out aspirin is some sort of wonder drug.

THEN BY ALL MEANS, FORCE EVEN MORE VAPERS TO TURN TO THE BLACK MARKET: Black market marijuana vapes containing substances like alcohol and caffeine may be to blame for spate of mysterious lung illnesses.

WHO NEEDS GOGGLES? Troops Could Have Night Vision Injected Into Their Eyes. Well, this is the 21st Century, you know.

JOHN SOLOMON: Democrats were first to enlist Ukraine in US elections.

Earlier this month, during a bipartisan meeting in Kiev, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) delivered a pointed message to Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky.

While choosing his words carefully, Murphy made clear — by his own account — that Ukraine currently enjoyed bipartisan support for its U.S. aid but that could be jeopardized if the new president acquiesced to requests by President Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to investigate past corruption allegations involving Americans, including former Vice President Joe Biden’s family.

Murphy boasted after the meeting that he told the new Ukrainian leader that U.S. aid was his country’s “most important asset” and it would be viewed as election-meddling and “disastrous for long-term U.S.-Ukraine relations” to bend to the wishes of Trump and Giuliani.

That’s different because shut up.

QUESTION ASKED: Did Joe Biden Implicate Barack Obama in Ukraine Quid Pro Quo Scandal?

Read the whole thing.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: N.J. Schools Pushing Far-Left Indoctrination. What the Hell Is Betsy DeVos Doing?

Melissa Barnett, a supervisor of English Language Arts in the Washington Township School District in New Jersey, caused outrage on Twitter by tweeting out a photo of hundreds of books in dumpsters. “This week, dumpsters were filled with books that should have left decades ago @TWPSchools and replaced with engaging, relevant, culturally diverse literature.”

* * * * * * * *

Amongst the “books that should have left decades ago” visible in these bins are “Hiroshima” by Pulitzer Prize winner John Hersey, a 1946 journalistic account of the lives of 6 survivors of the atomic bomb, which started some of the 1st debates about the morality of atomic weapons.

Along with “Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley, 1984, by George Orwell, Slaughter House Five, by Kurt Vonnegut, Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen, The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck, Dante’s Inferno, and Night, by Elie Wiesel.”

To be fair, why keep copies of 1984 on hand? It might remind the kids that they’re living it out first hand.

Related: “The Problem with Canceling History,” as Laura Ingalls Wilder and her  Little House on the Prairie are getting tossed down the Memory Hole.

CHANGE: Trump Administration To End ‘Catch And Release’ Immigration Policy, Says DHS Chief.

MASCOTS OF THE ANOINTED: The apotheosis of St Greta.

If you watch the footage, Greta leans forward excitedly at Trump’s approach. It’s almost as if she’s expecting he’ll do the same as every other leader, and seek her blessing, like the British parliamentarians who declared a ‘climate emergency’ for her, or Jean-Claude Juncker, the habitual drunk who is the unelected president of the EU, and who, in the manner of habitual drunks, made a show of kissing her hand when she came to pour brimstone on Brussels. But Trump keeps going, completely oblivious, and obviously with more important things to do than to kiss her ring.

Short of the detailed explanation that Dominic Green wrote above that “the Thunberg phenomenon is apocalyptic religion for rich whites,” (and do read the whole thing), or Thomas Sowell’s chapter on “Mascots of the Anointed,” from his 1995 book, The Vision of the Anointed, the best response to this recurring phenomenon, is something akin to Trump’s troll last night:

As Glenn wrote yesterday, “Poor kid — she’s just a younger, more vulnerable Cindy Sheehan, and like Sheehan will be discarded as soon as she’s no longer of use. In the meantime, her moral theatrics have grown tedious.”

1984 WAS NOT SUPPOSED TO BE A HOW-TO MANUAL: My Book Defending Free Speech Has Been Banned.

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: AOC Fails to Pay Back Taxes, Succeeds in Drawing a Primary Challenger.

NO. Dems Demand Ben Carson Resign After Media Twists His Words on Trans Issues.

GALAXY ABOVE: A C-5M Super Galaxy flies over the 2019 Thunder Over Dover Air Show, Sept. 14, 2019, at Dover Air Force Base, Delaware. Big plane? In this photo Marines off load a Navy MH-53 Sea Dragon helicopter delivered by a C-5. The C-5M is a “refurbished” and modernized C-5.

NOT TOUGH ENOUGH: For Democratic Hopefuls, Qualifying for November Debate Just Got Tougher.

The committee said Monday that candidates would need to reach at least 3% in four polls and attract at least 165,000 individual donors. The party is also creating an alternative way to hit the polling requirement, allowing candidates to qualify if they reach 5% in at least two polls in early-voting states such as Iowa and New Hampshire.

The requirements represent a slightly tougher standard than this month’s debate in Houston and the two-night event planned in October in Ohio. For those, candidates need 130,000 individual donors and at least 2% support in four polls.

Ten candidates qualified for the Houston debate, but one or two additional candidates are expected to make it into the next forum, likely pushing it into two nights, Oct. 15-16, in Westerville, Ohio.

Leave it to the DNC to tighten the rules yet still let in more contenders.

I had hoped we were done with these two-night debates, which turn simple drunkblogging into a marathon of ickiness. But at least they allow me to write off an even bigger portion of my liquor bill.

THEN WHY ARE THEY STILL IN COLLEGE? VIDEO: College students think world will end in 12 years.

POLICE STATE: China footage reveals hundreds of blindfolded and shackled prisoners.

The video, posted anonymously on YouTube last week, shows what appear to be Uighur or other minorities wearing blue and yellow uniforms, with cleanly shaven heads, their eyes covered, sitting in rows on the ground and later being led away by police. Prisoners in China are often transferred with handcuffs and masks covering their faces.

Nathan Ruser, a researcher with the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s international cyber policy centre, used clues in the footage, including landmarks and the position of the sun, to verify the video, which he believes was shot at a train station west of Korla in south-east Xinjiang in August last year.

It’s curious that the Muslim world outside of China isn’t putting up any fuss.