AL GORE HARDEST HIT: Arctic Sea Ice Prediction Reaches 12 Year Mid-August High.

THAT’S NOT FUNNY! Hysterical Reinhart Meme Goes Viral After Twitter Ban. “Bad weather, a bottle of Early Times, and a bag of Oreos ain’t exactly a private jet with a willing busty underling, but some judges gotta take what they can get.”

A USEFUL ACCOUNTING: How We Gave Up On Salman Rushdie: Britain saw his fatwa and internalised it. “But the finest words of all, demonstrating how morbid it all was, came from a man dead for 10 years. In the first rounds of the fatwa, Christopher Hitchens had tirelessly stumped for Rushdie. Now, in this latest, unexpected round, Hitchens was summoned from his grave. All weekend, videos of him defending Rushdie were shared, videos where Hitchens spoke with an unimaginable frankness, videos where he spoke with more force, more intelligence, and more authority than anybody alive today.”

Plus:

In Joseph Anton, Rushdie writes that even his own defences of free speech had started to sound “stale in his own ears”. Something curdled in the 2010s. While he has escaped with his life long enough to become truly, especially bored of the fatwa, he begins to realise that the cause he is fighting for, the principle he embodies, is in decay. “Something new was happening here: the growth of a new intolerance. It was spreading across the surface of the earth, but nobody wanted to know.” What was happening? A simple, popular idea: if the collective felt upset, it had the right to silence the individual. This is what countless controversies, from Charlie Hebdo to The Lady of Heaven, scratching away in the background, proved. Authors like Peter Carey, who defended Rushdie in the Nineties, would not defend Charlie Hebdo in 2015, not weeks after the cartoonists had been slaughtered in their offices.

The world had turned. The idea had been internalised. It had spread far and wide, beyond religion, beyond anything Khomeini could have imagined, freakishly stretching and reaching into every cultural nook. The principle had a language: “It isn’t worth the fuss; it’s not a good look; it won’t play well.” . . . “Good men would give in to fear and call it respect,” Rushdie predicted in Joseph Anton. “Good men would commit intellectual suicide and call it peace.” He was right.

Garbage people can always find reasons to be cowards, or simply to side with the bullies. And God knows, they do.

SO WOKE, SO BROKE: Predictably, The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power Executive Producer Calls Critics Racists.

Executive producer Lindsey Weber predictably decided to attack The Lord of the Rings and Tolkien fans as racists.

Weber made it abundantly clear the production and show would be eschewing Tolkien’s work when she told Vanity Fair in February, “It felt only natural to us that an adaptation of Tolkien’s work would reflect what the world actually looks like.”

“Tolkien is for everyone,” she added. “His stories are about his fictional races doing their best work when they leave the isolation of their own cultures and come together.

Months after making it extremely clear that the show would not be following Tolkien’s works, Weber is now accusing critics of racism.

From everything I’ve seen and read, the woke casting is the least of the show’s many troubles. After watching the trailer — and trying to forget the painful promotional clips and photos — if you asked me what the show was about, the best answer I could give would be, “People run places.”

Amazon reportedly spent nearly half a billion dollars just getting the first season produced. The plan is for five seasons, and the first cost nearly $60 million per episode.

On top of production costs, Amazon paid an “insane” $250 million just for the rights to Tolkien’s lesser-known Middle Earth appendices, but have strayed so far from the source material that it’s a stretch to put “Lord of the Rings” in the title.

Considering that the producers are already at war with the Tolkien fans — whose word-of-mouth could break the show — The Rings of Power looks like it might end up the most expensive flop in history.

WHOA: Trump Says the FBI Stole Something Very Personal When They Raided His Home.

DAVID BOAZ: Phonics, Failure, and the Public Schools. At this point, leaving your kids in the public schools looks a lot like parental malpractice.

VDH: Why Merrick Garland Is Losing the People.

Despite Garland’s pious assertions, we know the modus operandi of selective leaking from the career of Andrew McCabe. The disgraced former interim FBI director admitted to lying to federal investigators about his role in leaking to the Wall Street Journal. And the inspector general found McCabe lied on several other occasions about his efforts to leak to and massage the media. At this point, we should assume that “sources tell us” and “according to unnamed sources” are indications that the sources are Justice Department and FBI contacts who were given the green light to manipulate the news by their superiors.

Let’s put Garland’s decision to approve the raid on Mar-a-Lago in the context of the past seven years. The Justice Department and FBI in 2016 interfered in a presidential election in two major ways: They exonerated Hillary Clinton’s clearly illegal use of a private server and her destruction of subpoenaed data. The FBI hired Clinton operative Christopher Steele as an informant and gave its “Crossfire Hurricane” imprimatur to the entire Russian collusion hoax, feeding a 2016 left-wing mantra that Trump was a Russian “asset.”

In 2015, we learned that candidate Hillary Clinton, as Barack Obama’s secretary of state, had emailed classified government materials using her own private server, likely as a way of skirting Freedom of Information Act requirements. 

In the thick of the 2016 campaign a year later, FBI Director James Comey reported that Clinton had, in fact, broken the law. Yet he assumed a role of federal attorney that was not his own, deciding Clinton’s wrongdoing should not lead to an indictment. 

In that improper role, Comey, not U.S. attorneys, declined to hold Clinton accountable. We learned later that Attorney General Loretta Lynch had met secretly on an airport tarmac (“a brief, casual, social meeting”) with Bill Clinton. 

Somewhere within this tangle of lies (both said they met only to talk about their grandchildren, not about whether the Justice Department would charge Hillary Clinton), we learned: 1) Lynch abdicated her role and simply let Comey play the role of investigator and prosecutor, and 2) Hillary Clinton had “bleached” thousands of emails, some of them under federal subpoena, and destroyed her communication devices and records—all federal felonies.

Trump won the election in 2016, but he never controlled the federal government. For 22 months, at a cost of $40 million, Robert Mueller investigated whether Trump had “colluded” with the Russians to take the White House. Ironically, there was ample evidence to show that Hillary Clinton may, in fact, have done exactly that.

Read the whole thing.

IT’S BEEN WORSE THAN INEFFECTUAL: Karol Markowicz: Disband the CDC Now.

PAPER THAT ONCE DECLARED “WE ARE SOCIALISTS NOW” SUDDENLY SQUEAMISH ABOUT NATIONAL SOCIALISM REFERENCES: Mega-thread shows that WaPo didn’t always have an aversion to Nazi comparisons and terms like ‘banana republic.’

NOT WIDELY PUBLICIZED, BUT IT HAPPENS ALL OVER: Another Armed Citizen Stops a Crazed Mass Shooter.

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY, CHAIRMAN XI: Video shows Shanghai shoppers scramble to break out of Ikea store after snap lockdown announced.

FIRE THEM. FIRE THEM ALL: Teachers union tells educators to ignore Florida law on not teaching gender identity in schools.

NEVER FORGET: It’s Been a Year Since Biden’s Botched Afghanistan Withdrawal.

READER FAVORITE: SHARPAL 191H Pocket Kitchen Chef Knife Scissors Sharpener. #CommissionEarned

MICHAEL WALSH: Alea Iacta Est.

Now in the vengeful attorney general Merrick Garland—whose nomination to the Supreme Court by Barack Obama luckily died in the Senate in 2017 with the arrival of the Trump administration— we have the second coming of Lavrentiy Beria, the head of the secret police under Josef Stalin in the country Democrats long most admired, Soviet Russia. (They’ve since transferred their affections to Communist China.) Never before in the history of our Republic—a phrase conservatives ought to be using as a counterweight to the Democrats’ deceitful “our democracy”—has the nation’s chief legal officer ordered an armed raid on a former president, in this case on Biden’s immediate predecessor and the leading contender for the GOP nomination in 2024.

It’s step of breathtaking audacity, but hardly surprising. Not for nothing is the Democrats’ unofficial motto “by any means necessary.” Since the days of Burr and Jefferson Davis and John Wilkes Booth, violence has always lurked just below the surface of their “higher” patriotism. Indeed, as the Sixties exemplified, it’s part of their appeal.

Read the whole thing.

WHAT IS COMING BY 2035? “The coming decade will likely see the biggest changes of our lives. These will be bigger than the internet and the smartphone.”

I’m not sure the biggest changes of the coming decade will be technology driven.

AP: Afghanistan marks one year since Taliban seizure as woes mount.

Ctrl-F “Biden” returns zero results, unexpectedly.

UPDATE: Joe Who? ABC Avoids Biden’s Name in Report on ‘Sad,’ ‘Hungry’ Afghanistan.

(Updated and bumped.)

ALSO, WHETHER YOU HAVE HAIR LEFT: Cortisol concentrations in your hair may reveal how stressed you have been.

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: American workforce continues to shrink, falls 400k since March after nearly hitting prepandemic levels.

For all the boasting the White House does about jobs, there are fewer Americans working after two years of “recovery,” and more of those who are working are forced to work part-time or work two jobs to make ends meet.

WELCOME BACK, CARTER! Grocery prices in July had largest price increase since 1979 — with one food staple rising by 38% on the year.

SECURITY HOLES: Bear scales barbed-wire fence at Air Force base in Florida.

KEVIN DOWNEY JR: A WEF Op-ed Is Calling for Global Censorship. We Really Need to Cut Ties With These Commies.

NIP IT IN THE BUD. Removing small kidney stones may prevent recurrent problems.

JUNK SCIENCE? A New Study Challenges the Reliability of Court Psych Exams. “A team of lawyers and psychologists reviewed 364 exams used in the legal system, finding a third of them don’t pass muster with forensic mental health experts.”

I ran across this article recently (yes, it is two years old but still relevant) and was not surprised that many of these evaluations that access high stakes decisions such as child custody or competency issues are just plain unreliable and done shoddily. The worst part is that rarely do judges or lawyers challenge these mistakes and if they do, they only succeed about a third of the time. Lawyers should start challenging the experts and their instruments (if they even use any) more often or hire an expert who can consult and help them understand what questions to ask to make it clear that some of these evals are suspect. Add in a program to educate judges on what should be in a forensic exam and maybe this will help clean up the problem.

HOW GRIGGS v. DUKE POWER CO.’S DISPARATE IMPACT THEORY HAS HELPED CREATE STUDENT DEBT:  “A Novel Plan to Reduce Student Debt.”

For the background all conservatives should have on disparate impact liability and why Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971), was an utter usurpation by the Supreme Court, please read “Title VII Disparate Impact Liability Makes Almost Everything Presumptively Illegal.”  Our legal system is soooo messed up.