MARK JUDGE: Stop Making Excuses for Hunter Biden’s Behavior. It Hurts Others Fighting Addiction.

In 1993, Francis F. Seeburger, a professor of philosophy at the University of Denver, wrote a profound book on the thought processes of addicts called Addiction and Responsibility. We tend to focus on the damage addiction does. A cliché among empathetic therapists, eager to describe addiction as a standard-issue disease, is that “no one ever decides to become an addict.”

But that is not exactly true, Seeburger shows. “Something like an addiction to addiction plays a role in all addiction,” he writes. “Addiction itself . . . is tempting; it has many attractive features.” In an empty world, people have a need to need. Addiction supplies it. “Addiction involves the addict. It does not present itself as some externally imposed condition. Instead, it comes toward the addict as the addict’s very self.”

Addiction plays on our strengths, not just our failings. It simplifies things. It relieves us of certain responsibilities. It gives life a meaning. It is a “perversely clever copy of that transcendent peace of God.”

And it definitely empowers the wannabe artist:

DON’T UNLOCK THAT: Researchers find an epigenetic key that unlocks common deadly cancers.

LEAKED EMAILS EXPOSE BIDEN WHITE HOUSE’S ATTACKS ON THE FIRST AMENDMENT:

[Jim] Jordan concluded, “These documents, AND OTHERS that were just produced to the Committee, prove that the Biden Admin abused its powers to coerce Facebook into censoring Americans, preventing free and open discourse on issues of critical public importance.”

Based on the evidence, it’s hard to disagree with that conclusion. When private platforms choose of their own volition to censor or moderate certain content, that’s not a First Amendment matter. (It still might be wrong or overzealous, and we’re free to criticize their decisions.) But when they do so in response to aggressive pressure from governmental officials, that tramples all over the spirit of the First Amendment. So, with perhaps narrowly tailored exceptions for national security, it shouldn’t even be legal for government officials to lobby private platforms to censor the public.

This is an outrage — and the backlash should be bipartisan. After all, do Democrats really want Republicans lobbying private platforms to get them censored when they’re the ones in office?

Flashback: What was Harry Reid thinking when he ended the Senate filibuster for federal judge appointments? “Senator Mitch McConnell stood on the Senate floor and issued a warning to the Democrats who then controlled the majority. ‘I say to my friends on the other side of the aisle, you’ll regret this,’ McConnell, then the minority leader, told them. ‘And you may regret it a lot sooner than you think.’”

WELL, GOOD: Study: Wearable ultrasound scanner could detect breast cancer earlier.

OLD AND CRUDE: Looking Back On The Golden Age of Driving.

We lived in our cars back in the Fifties and Sixties. We dined and went to movies in them hoping to get into a little hanky-panky, and some of us even went to drive-in churches. According to a wag disk jockey of the time named Emperor Hudson, their slogan was, “Come as you are, but stay in your car.” I didn’t go to a drive-in church, but I went through recaps on an annual basis back then.

And when I say driving, I am referring to accelerating, shifting, back-shifting, cornering, and braking—and occasionally, should the opportunity arise, going fast. As Alodus Huxley once said, “Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.” And when you think about it, not too many years before his day, 40 mph on a horse was about it for most people.

But for how long? As the late P.J. O’Rourke warned in 2009:

Cars didn’t shape our existence; cars let us escape with our lives. We’re way the heck out here in Valley Bottom Heights and Trout Antler Estates because we were at war with the cities. We fought rotten public schools, idiot municipal bureaucracies, corrupt political machines, rampant criminality and the pointy-headed busybodies. Cars gave us our dragoons and hussars, lent us speed and mobility, let us scout the terrain and probe the enemy’s lines. And thanks to our cars, when we lost the cities we weren’t forced to surrender, we were able to retreat.

Why, it’s as if, “At some point in the future, be it years, decades, or a century hence, the federal government will seek to ban driving.”

THE LANCET JUMPED THE SHARK 20 YEARS AGO WITH IRAQ-WAR PROPAGANDA: Formerly respected Lancet pulled a fast one on cold v heat mortality.

REPORT FROM THE BLUE ZONES: The Houston Independent School District, the largest public school system in Texas, will convert libraries into disciplinary centers.

HOW IT STARTED: Community groups pressure City Council members to defund Oakland police.

—ABC7 News, June 15th, 2020.

How it’s going: Oakland NAACP Blames ‘Defund the Police’ for Rampant Crime in City.

—Newsweek, Friday.

STEVE HAYWARD: Hot and Bothered About Heat Waves.

Does anyone trust the scientific community after our experience with Covid? The most recent revelation that leading scientists published a paper concluding Covid arose from natural causes while privately communicating among themselves that they strongly suspected it leaked from a lab is yet another instance of politics driving “science.” Like Covid’s mortality figures, the climate science community is constantly revising the estimated global temperature record as “new data” is generated and computer models are “refined,” but somehow the revisions always go in one direction: lowering temperatures from several decades ago and raising recent temperatures, thereby providing a more dire picture of the “climate crisis.” Notice that we’ve progressed from “global warming” through “climate change” to the current “climate crisis” and even “climate emergency.”

Heck, the euphemism du jour has advanced to “global boiling,” as the Grauniad notes: ‘Era of global boiling has arrived,’ says UN chief as July set to be hottest month on record.

But then, they tried to warn us at the beginning of 2009. If only Barack Obama had listened: President ‘has four years to save Earth.’

UPDATE: Strangely, an awful lot of these “climate change” wildfire were started by arsonists, not excess CO2.

YOU’RE GONNA NEED A MUCH BIGGER BLOG. John Nolte: The Six Reasons Hollywood’s in Real Trouble This Time.

Related: Why the Studios Are Risking Everything. An extended strike could kill off movie theaters.

REPORT FROM THE BLUE ZONES: One avenue in Queens is now an open line of brothels.

BOOK OF THE DAY: A Man, A Pan, A Plan: 100 Delicious & Nutritious One-Pan Recipes You Can Make Right Now! #CommissionEarned

CRITICIZING DEI POLICIES IS NOW BANNED: ONU moves to terminate conservative law professor for alleged ‘unprofessional’ conduct. The charges sound like BS to me.

DEAL OF THE DAY: Elite Gourmet Easy Egg Cooker . #CommissionEarned (Bumped)

NO THEY DON’T. JUST STOP TOLERATING THIS BULLSHIT: Prof: Algebra, geometry perpetuate white privilege.

GET WOKE, GO BROKE: Disney’s Dire Year at the Box Office Continues with Its Latest $150 Million Flop Bombing Even Harder Than Expected.

AD ASTRA, PER ARDUA: Falcon Heavy sends Jupiter-3 broadband giant toward geostationary orbit.

More: SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket launches giant satellite, aces double booster landing.

HE HAS A POINT: GOP senator calls for investigation into Hunter Biden’s defense team over ‘unethical conduct.’

STANDING LIKE BERNIE IN WEEKEND AT BERNIE’S: White House Report Card: Biden still standing after horror week. And held up by the media, who are visibly getting tired.

EVERYTHING IS SHADY NOW: New Details in Drowning of Obama’s Chef Leave Unanswered Questions.

HE MAY YET TURN OUT TO BE THE GAVRILO PRINCIP OF THE 21ST CENTURY: Hunter Biden Is a Geopolitical Disaster: His Ukraine dealings corrupted our government, impeached a president, and may have prefigured a war.

Mr. Biden was unlucky in his son, but he also allowed a family environment in which milking connection to Joe was de rigueur. Paralysis seizes our elite over what has ensued. Suppose a journalistic tick-tock were written today similar to 1969’s “On Borrowed Time,” Leonard Mosley’s microscopic account of events between the Munich Agreement of September 1938 and the invasion of Poland in September 1939. Today’s version would include: Hunter’s dealings in Ukraine, President Trump’s impeachment for asking about Hunter’s dealings in Ukraine, the laptop episode in which Russia was framed as an imaginary culprit to change the subject from Hunter’s dealings in Ukraine.

What did Vladimir Putin make of these events? How might they have figured in his bet that the U.S. would let Kyiv fall into his pocket? Maybe one day he’ll tell us.

Mr. Biden ultimately summoned the NATO muscle memory to stand up to Russia’s invasion, and this column congratulated him. But Republicans in an election year can rightly ask what else exactly was an American president supposed to do? They can also ask what Mr. Biden failed to do. His surrender on Nord Stream 2, after Mr. Trump quashed the pipeline, sent a message of appeasement. In the war’s opening days, his administration seemed unduly eager to cede Kyiv to the Russian advance and spirit President Zelensky to safety.

At some point, questions should also be asked of Barack Obama. Why allow Mr. Biden to control the Ukraine portfolio when he wouldn’t restrain his son? Was Biden family corruption the reason you skipped over your veep and endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016?

The story here is all the more remarkable for being untold. In short order, the Hunter mess has managed to taint our intelligence community, the FBI, IRS and now the Justice Department. If news sense is not completely dulled by neurotic compliance, some editors must also be starting to see the outlines of another approaching debacle, in which skeletons from the Biden closet elect Mr. Trump.

Neurotic compliance is all they have left.

FOLLOW THE SCIENCE: Stanford’s president is not the only researcher pushing unfounded and incorrect conclusions.

BECAUSE HE’S A JERK: Why is Biden withholding funding for schools with archery and hunting programs?

JOHN HINDERAKER: Down with colleges and universities. “It seems that their net effect is to make their students dumber. A case in point: American college students think their country is going downhill. Not in the ways it actually is going downhill, but in the ways it isn’t. . . . No doubt these students also have no idea that billions of people worldwide have been lifted out of poverty by the transition from socialism up to free enterprise. I seriously think the country would be better off if fewer of our young people went to college. And it would be much better off if young people were getting a decent basic education through high school, as they once did, in which case the remedial function that most colleges now play (badly) would be unnecessary. But that is looking like a pipe dream, for now.”

WELL, THE NEW YORK TIMES:

But Elon is not the only source of risk within the System. Surely there must be some variance arising from the barely functioning minds of the Shady Rest Retirement Home. It's ironic the System is more worried by genius than dementia.

— wretchardthecat (@wretchardthecat) July 29, 2023