ASK AND YE SHALL RECEIVE. Shot:
Chaser: Emmy Viewership Falls Under 7M For 1st Time To All-Time Low. Down 32% from last year and 39% from the year before. Plus: “Forget the Monday broadcast of 2018, but Sunday to Sunday, last night’s TV Academy show toppled 36% from 2017 and 56% from the Andy Samberg-hosted night in 2015.”
They don’t like you. They really don’t like you. Or as we say, get woke, go broke.
UGH: Military unit apologizes for tweet suggesting stealth bomber would be sent against Area 51 crowd.
According to Reuters, the DVIDS tweet referred to another post on Friday that targeted people who planned to break into the Nevada Air Force facility after a joke campaign, titled “Storm Area 51,” went viral earlier this year.
In the since-deleted tweet, DVIDS reportedly shared a photo of military members standing in front of a B-2 stealth bomber.
“The last thing #Millennials will see if they attempt the #area51raid today,” the tweet reportedly read.
The only thing they did wrong was apologize and delete an obvious joke.
SUMMER GOES OUT WITH A BANG: 26 shot, 5, fatally, in Chicago weekend violence.
SIGN OF THE TIMES: More Palestinian flags than British flags in evidence at British Labour Party conference. (H/T Jonathan Sacerdoti).
REVASCULARIZATION IGNORED? “With about 800,000 acute heart attacks occurring in the U.S. every year, and heart disease being the number one killer, you would think that a new clinical trial showing benefits from opening up all significantly blocked heart blood vessels in addition to the blocked artery responsible for the acute attack would merit big headlines. Think again. You would be wrong. Not only were there no big headlines, there was no coverage at all.”
GOVERNMENT IS JUST ANOTHER WORD FOR THE THINGS WE CHOSE TO DO TOGETHER: Florida Woman Facing Possible HOA Fines For Taking In Bahamian Friend Displaced By Hurricane Dorian. “Lavalvo faces a fine of $100 a day if she can’t find a home for them by this week.”
THIS IS WHY WE CAN’T HAVE NICE THINGS: Millennials make Amtrak nix overly cozy dining cars on Penn Station trains.
Starting Oct. 1, the financially strapped rail carrier will eliminate freshly made hot meals on three routes as it does away with the trains’ kitchens and revamps their classic table-sharing dining cars to cut costs — and because young people want more personal space, Amtrak officials say.
“Some people, especially our new millennial customers, don’t like it so much,” said Peter Wilander, Amtrak’s head of customer experience, to the Washington Post of the dining cars’ current cozy layout.
“They want more privacy. They don’t want to feel uncomfortable sitting next to people.”
Among the routes trading their on-board kitchens and white-linen table cloths for a more “contemporary” experience will be the Cardinal (New York-Chicago), Crescent (New York-New Orleans) and Silver Meteor (New York-Miami).
The change will also impact the Silver Star, another New York-to-Miami service, starting next year, officials said.
Meanwhile, sleeping-car customers will receive a “flexible dining service” where pre-made options can be delivered to their room.
Instead of a juicy steak dinner or savory French toast, they will now choose from pre-packaged meals such as an Asian noodle bowl, chicken fettuccine or a buffet-style breakfast with hard-boiled eggs and muffins.
“We continue to evolve our onboard accommodations and dining experience to meet the needs of today’s customers,” Amtrak CEO Richard Anderson said in a statement.
The changes are expected to save about $2 million a year, officials said.
Which, as the article alludes above, is the real reason for the change, sucking up to millennials notwithstanding.
SHOCKING NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: Physics shows criminals more likely to find accomplices in big cities.
ARTHUR CHRENKOFF: When Greta goes to Guangzhou.
While China now produces more CO2 than the United States and the European Union put together, the Asia-Pacific region (which does include a few industrialised countries, like Japan, Taiwan and South Korea, but is mainly in the “developing” category, with China, India and Indonesia the most prominent examples) emits nearly twice as much CO2 as the United States and the European Union combined. And rising.
This is what you always have to keep in mind whenever you hear about the great progress being made in China (and to a lesser extent in India) in embracing the renewables. It’s a case of “yes, but…” It might be true, as far as it goes, yet still India’s coal-powered electricity generation capacity is expected to increase by over 22 per cent to 2022; China itself, for whatever else it’s doing with wind and hydro, is also building hundreds of new “old” power stations as it’s creating the largest middle class in history. And while it’s true that in emissions per capita the developing world still leads the rest of the world where all the billions live, the climate only cares about the absolute numbers.
St Joan of Arc of the Children’s Crusade against Carbon, Greta Thunberg, should be going to Beijing or Bangalore and staging her protests there instead of, or at least in addition to, Sweden or New York. She should be hounding President Xi and Prime Minister Modi about their shameful emissions. She should be leading throngs of Asian kids out of schools for her Friday student strikes. She should be castigating the industries and the consumers of the developing world for destroying the planet and killing humanity in the process. She should be doing all this if she were serious about the global nature of the problem. But I won’t be holding my breath.
Read the whole thing.
THE CLASH OF PALLADIUM AND SILVER: “Okay, well, that’s enough of that hippy s**t. Happy 40th anniversary to the famous Paul Simonon bass smash photo. And to The Clash’s London Calling. Thanks for reading and thank you Pennie Smith, for showing up with your Pentax and your Tri-X and ambition and giving us something to consider.”
It’s an awesome album cover — it sets a mood in and of itself, it harkens back to the early days of The Who smashing their instruments, and in 1979, it made for quite a contrast with the elaborately staged and beautifully photographed album covers by Hipgnosis, so favored by the Jurassic “boring old fart” dinosaur bands The Clash hated. Read the whole thing.
THIS IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Biden 2018: You’re damn right I ordered the US-aid-money Code Red on Ukraine prosecutor going after son’s company.
Will Bill Weld call for Biden’s execution?
ANTITRUST: Snap Detailed Facebook’s Aggressive Tactics in ‘Project Voldemort’ Dossier.
A number of Facebook’s current and former competitors are talking about the company’s hardball tactics to investigators from the Federal Trade Commission, as part of its broader antitrust investigation into the social-media giant’s business practices, according to people familiar with the matter.
One of them is Snap Inc., SNAP 0.95% where the legal team for years kept a dossier of the ways Facebook was trying to thwart competition from the buzzy upstart, according to people familiar with the matter. The title of the documents: Project Voldemort.
The files in Voldemort, a reference to the fictional antagonist in the popular Harry Potter children’s books, chronicled Facebook’s moves that threatened to undermine Snap’s business, including discouraging popular account holders, or influencers, from referencing Snap on their Instagram accounts, according to people familiar with the project. Executives also suspected Instagram was preventing Snap content from trending on its app, the people said.
In recent months, the FTC has made contact with dozens of tech executives and app developers, people familiar with the outreach said. The agency’s investigators are also talking to executives from startups that became defunct after losing access to Facebook’s platform in addition to founders who sold their companies to Facebook, according to people familiar with the conversations.
Assimilate or die.
I SWEAR I’M NOT MAKING THIS UP: Sheila Jackson Lee Confuses AR-15 for 10 Moving Boxes and a Heavy Machine Gun.
PAUL MIRENGOFF: The fiction of non-partisan judges and Justices.
THE MORE THINGS CHANGE…: John-Paul Pagano at NRO on modern blood libel:
Despite its lethality, anti-Semitism is the form of racism most often erased, excused, and even encouraged by people who identify as “antiracist.” One explanation for this phenomenon, increasingly dangerous as harassment, vandalism, and violence against Jews rise across the West, is the failure of Holocaust education to emphasize the importance of conspiracism in Nazi ideology. For their part, soi-disant American antiracists render Jews “white” and “privileged” through a limited lens of race and power, taking an approach that is an allotrope of anti-Semitism and disqualifies Jews from concern.
So when U.S. representatives Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar resolved to visit Israel in August to showcase to the world its peculiar evil, and it emerged that Miftah, the Palestinian non-governmental organization co-sponsoring their trip, had published on its website that Jews bake Christian blood into their matzoh, most major media ignored it. For them the story was the erosion of liberal democracy by the tag team of Trump and Netanyahu, who had barred entry to the congresswomen. There is little indication that the blood libel stirred concern on the left where just a month earlier “Never again” was intoned relentlessly about Trump’s “concentration camps” at the border….
Under intense criticism, Miftah eventually retracted and apologized, but the medieval pitch of the piece was so true that I browsed their website for similar material and quickly found an article by Bouthaina Shaaban, who is now Bashar Assad’s media adviser. There Shaaban writes that Israel stole “Ukrainian children in order to harvest their organs.” The blood libel was transferred to the Arab world by Christian missionaries, surfacing in a famous case at Damascus in 1840. Today it is a recurring feature of Arab and Muslim anti-Semitism.
WHY IS IT THAT THE PEOPLE WHO ADVERTISE THEMSELVES AS A SANER ALTERNATIVE TO TRUMP ALWAYS SEEM TO TURN OUT TO BE BATSHIT CRAZY? GOP Challenger Bill Weld Floats Death Penalty For Trump Over Ukraine: ‘The Only Penalty for Treason is Death.’
Not only is Weld batshit crazy, he’s also clueless on the law. Nothing he accuses Trump of amounts to treason, and the statute doesn’t have death as the only penalty. Weld was counsel to the House Judiciary Committee, and was head of the Criminal Division at Justice as well as a US Attorney. Either he needs to be checked for dementia, or those institutions are in even sorrier shape than I thought.