SQUARING THE CIRCLE: New Documentary Explores How Hipgnosis Created Rock’s Greatest Album Covers.

UNEXPECTEDLY: Gavin Newsom embraces ‘dirty’ energy in bid to ease blackouts.

Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) has embraced “dirty” energy for California as he looks to stave off blackouts threatening the state’s strained energy grid.

While Newsom has pushed for a transition to renewable energy in California, the realities there have forced him to increasingly rely on nonrenewable energy sources to meet the state’s energy demands. Fighting off heavy criticism from environmental activists, the California governor has countered by pointing out the practical necessity of using some nonrenewables while stressing his efforts to transition to renewable energy.

“Gov. Newsom is committed to keeping the lights on while maintaining affordability for all Californians,” Newsom’s deputy press secretary, Daniel Villasenor, told the Washington Examiner.

Or not: CalMatters: Here’s why your electricity prices are high and soaring.

BIPARTISAN FOLLIES: The Costs of Protectionism. The Biden administration lambasted Trump’s latest tariff proposals, but it’s been doubling down on his protectionism. At Cafe Hayek, Don Boudreaux notes the damage from current tariffs, including an extra $726 annually for food and clothing in the average U.S. household.

CHRIS QUEEN: Can MLB Get Its Security Issue Under Control?

ILYA SHAPIRO: A Whale of a Tale for the Supreme Court: A case involving fishing regulations is the big one on next term’s docket so far. “Now before the Supreme Court, MI filed an amicus brief, joined by professors Richard Epstein, Todd Zywicki, Gus Hurwitz, and Geoffrey Manne. We argue that the Court should take this opportunity to overhaul the Chevron-deference regime, because this experiment in rebalancing the relationship between administration and judicial review has failed. It has led to agency overreach, haphazard practical results, and the diminution of Congress. Although intended to empower Congress by limiting the role of courts, Chevron has instead empowered agencies to aggrandize their own powers to the greatest extent plausible under their operative statutes, and often beyond. Courts, in turn, have become sloppy and lazy in interpreting statutes. It’s a vicious cycle of legislative buck-passing and judicial deference to executive overreach.”

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): Mom Ashleigh Watts accused of ‘sexually abusing’ 15-year-old twins in Chesapeake, Virginia, telling one she would leave her husband when he was old enough. “A 38-year-old mom demanded cops wait outside while she put on a bra as they tried to search her home for the missing teen she had been raping alongside his twin brother. Ashleigh Watts kept cops at Bay at her well-appointed $500,000 home in Chesapeake, Virginia, as they tried to search for a 15-year-old boy who had been missing for three weeks. Officers found the teen in late July, hiding inside the bedroom of the home. The boy was only wearing his boxers and was immediately taken into custody of Chesapeake Juvenile Services. When they questioned him about his relationship with Watts, the teen told authorities the mom-of-two promised to leave her husband and run away with him when he turned 17 years old. Now, Watts faces three felony charges for not only the alleged assaults of the boy, but his twin brother as well.”

UM, PROGRESS? Zuckerberg’s metaverse avatars now look slightly less ridiculous. “It hasn’t helped Meta that the company’s visuals have thus far have had a certain cartoonish quality to them – especially when compared with the sleek AR style of the recently revealed Apple Vision Pro. Perhaps the most mocked aspect of Meta’s avatars has been their lack of legs – but the limbs have finally been added.”

Virtual leg men, rejoice.

BOOK OF THE DAY: The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Hidden Conversation Within Our Bodies Impacts Our Mood, Our Choices, and Our Overall Health . #CommissionEarned

HMM: Mysterious, Unexplained Red Meat Allergies Reportedly Explode in Virginia. “I have reported previously at PJ Media that the CDC has been warning lately of an unexplained rise in what was previously a rare red meat allergy called alpha-gal syndrome (AGS) that develops in humans by way of a molecule passed into the bloodstream by a species of tick called the Lone Star Tick.”

If I were only slightly more paranoid, I’d think that the CDC had weaponized AGS and launched a test run for making us proles allergic to red meat. But give it a day or two and I might get there.

JOANNE JACOBS: Low-SES Asians are top students: Can ‘excellence gap’ be closed?

Thirteen percent of Asian-American Pacific Islander (AAPI) eighth graders from very low socioeconomic families (mom didn’t finish high school) scored “advanced” in math on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), concludes Fordham’s new report on “excellence gaps.” That’s more than any other group except for very high SES (mom completed college) whites, note Meredith Coffey and Adam Tyner. Reading is not quite as dramatic, but AAPI students again are very high achievers at all SES levels.

Coffey and Tyner analyzed data from 2003 to 2022. Asian students started as high achievers and improved significantly — especially those from less advantaged families.

This is why elite colleges can’t get the “diversity” they want by giving an admissions advantage to high achievers from disadvantaged backgrounds: Too many Asians.

“Too many Asians” or any other race is only a problem for actual racists.

THOU SHALT NOT CRITICIZE THE DOMINANT PARADIGM: Scientific American ‘targeting’ scholar critical of transgenderism, he says.

BUT IT’S ACTING LIKE ONE AND AT THE BEHEST OF ONE: RFK Jr. vs. YouTube Update: Judge Rejects Restraining Order Request, Claims Parent Company Google Is Not ‘State Actor.’

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Course uses ‘Pyramid of White Supremacy’ to teach diversity.

Nothing says diversity and inclusion like eagerly declaring new reasons to vilify one particular disfavored race.

ARNOLD KLING: Stories to Watch: Unsustainable Fiscal Policy: It’s hard to grow your way out of debt; the choice between hard default and hyperinflation; those of us who cried wolf should have been heeded.

HMM: Tesla’s hidden ‘Elon Mode’ has NHTSA regulators extremely concerned.

Despite its name, Tesla’s Full Self-Driving technology is not actually fully self-driving. Both FSD and Autopilot require the constant supervision of the driver with eyes on the road and hands on the wheel; the car is designed to “nag” the driver if and when that supervision lags. If the driver repeatedly ignores this nag, the feature could be disabled permanently.

But The Street reported in June that there exists a configuration hidden within Tesla’s software that doesn’t have this nag. Nicknamed “Elon Mode,” this iteration of self-driving was discovered by a hacker who then drove 600 miles with it enabled.

The hacker’s experiment with “Elon Mode” went viral, eventually catching the attention of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). The regulatory agency sent Tesla a letter and special order on July 26, demanding more details about “Elon Mode,” including the number of cars that have access to it.

The special order additionally requested a step-by-step rundown of how to enable the configuration, as well as Tesla’s “basis or purpose in installing the software in consumer vehicles.”

The NHTSA posted the letter and special order on its website Aug. 29.

I’m curious whether Elon Mode does anything other than disable the nags. If so, maybe it’s a useful development tool for Full Self-Driving. If not, it looks like another case of begging for trouble.

NOPE: The PRC’s Buildup Is Not A Jobs Program: It’s All Right There. “When a nation is clearly planning for something, it is best to acknowledge it and make your own plans accordingly. I don’t think we are, but this is the reality of what the People’s Republic of China has been doing as we’ve been engaged in imperial policing in central and southwest Asian backwaters.”

Plus: “What I think is they’re on their five year [plan], and if you go back three different budgets for them, or four years, over our 20 years in the desert, they focused very clearly on delivering a force capable to take on the United States. And the speed and acceleration that they have shown and they are delivering, right, when you talk about outputs, we all look at the Chinese to understand, truly, where they are, what they’re doing. The largest military buildup since World War Two, both in conventional forces and then strategic-nuclear. J-20s are in full-rate production, ships coming off their industrial baseline at numbers that only replicate what we did in the Lehman time and the 600 ship Navy kind of time frame. Again, nuclear build up… is the largest and continuous we’ve seen. So those are the concerning pieces. And that’s what we’re walking into.”

But the stupid Chinese will never catch us in the pronoun race!

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: DeSantis Not Letting Politics Distract Him From Hurricane Response. “DeSantis is off the campaign trail right now, dealing with the aftermath of Hurricane Idalia. It’s not a time for politics — at least to decent people. The American media, as we are all too painfully aware, is running low on decent people.”

PROF. JACOBSON: Social Media is “one of the worst things that ever happened to our society.”

Can confirm.

BEN DOMENECH: McConnell can resign without leaving the Senate.

Many Republicans point out that McConnell needs to stay in his seat to prevent Kentucky’s Democratic governor Andy Beshear, currently being challenged by McConnell ally Daniel Cameron, from naming a replacement. But that is a reason for McConnell to stay in the Senate, not one that requires him to stay on as its minority leader.

The truth is that McConnell is not so dramatically reduced in his capacity that he needs to step down as a senator. He shows far greater capacity than current Senate Democrats Dianne Feinstein or John Fetterman, nor does he have the health struggles of the likes of Thad Cochran or Johnny Isakson in their final years. But continuing on as minority leader headed into a critical election year is a different question entirely.

Yes.

PRIORITIES: Pentagon Officials Frantically Worked To Finalize Climate Plan During Botched Afghanistan Withdrawal, Emails Show.

A SMALL STUDY, BUT TROUBLING: mRNA vaccines weaken immune response in children. Given that kids almost never get very sick from Covid, though, this seems another reason not to vaccinate them.

PROGRESS: University System of Georgia bars diversity statements in hiring. “According to the Atlanta Journal Constitution, the University System of Georgia in July issued a new employee recruitment policy barring such statements, typically one-to-two-page documents in which applicants describe their understanding of diversity and detail experiences and goals related to advancing it. Another revised human resources policy states that mandatory employee training cannot include diversity statements.”

CHRISTOPHER RUFO: No to the Politics of Whiteness. The case against right-wing racialism.

THEY SEE THAT AS A FEATURE, NOT A BUG: The criminalization of politics to get Trump is endangering everyone’s rights.

NOT ALL OF HOLLYWOOD LEANS LEFT: Jon Voight Drops Rhetorical Bombs on Biden Admin Over Attacks on Trump.