CHANGE COMES TO STARBUCKS: How About Just 17,000 Different Kinds of Coffee?

I HAD BEEN ASSURED THE VENEZUELA APARTMENT TAKEOVER WAS JUST RIGHT-WING PANICMONGERING:

BREAKING: Kids who live directly next to the apartment complex Venezuelan gangsters took over CONFIRMED to me that the gangsters "were doing a lot of bad stuff" like shootings and that they are happy the building got shutdown

Me: "What do you mean by bad stuff?"

Them: "Like,… pic.twitter.com/MntgTJ0NTH

— George (@BehizyTweets) September 10, 2024

QUESTIONS NOBODY IS ASKING: Is it offensive to call someone ‘middle-aged?’

A new victimhood group has just dropped: middle-aged people. Yes, according to language guides published by Bristol and York St John universities, it isn’t just ‘BAME’ or ‘BIPOC’ or ‘LGBTQIA+’ folk who must be protected from words that are too old-fashioned or insufficiently ungainly to be uttered in public. Apparently, those on the downward slope to 50 desperately need this kind of obsessive, paternalistic speech-policing, too.

According to these style guides, unearthed by the Sun, ‘middle-aged’ is basically the n-word for men greying around the temples and decked out in Superdry. ‘Language is a powerful tool. It can empower and be a force for change, but it can also offend, marginalise, trivialise, and perpetuate harmful attitudes and stereotypes’, proclaims York St John, before sternly instructing readers to say ‘Gareth is 49’ rather than ‘Gareth is middle-aged’. Apparently, OAP is out-of-order, too. ‘People of pensionable age’ is much better, says the guide. (Personally, I prefer the more elegant People of Age.)

Not to be outdone, Bristol’s guide suggests we should also ‘avoid using euphemisms or patronising language to describe older people’, including ‘silver surfer’ or ‘of a certain age’. In fact, we should forgo generational labels entirely, because ‘Generation X’, ‘Baby Boomers’, ‘Millennials’, etc, ‘can reinforce negative stereotypes’ – presumably about those snowflake Millennials, rich, racist Boomers and insufferably cynical Gen Xers.

“It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well…Don’t you see the beauty of that, Winston?”

NOW TALK ABOUT THE REST OF AMERICA: Streamlining energy regulations on Native American reservations could help alleviate poverty.

HMM: It Looks Like Trump May Have Helped Himself in the Debate. “Reuters interviewed ten undecided voters before and after a debate. Six of them shifted toward supporting Trump, three leaned toward Harris, and one remained uncertain. That’s a rather solid outcome for Trump.”

I THINK I AGREE WITH THE EXPERTS HERE: Nevada’s plan to let AI rule on unemployment claims is risky, experts warn.

PROGRESSIVE “JUSTICE”: Harris County Justice Cancels All Warrants. “A Harris County justice of the peace has recalled all warrants issued through his court thwarting law enforcement efforts in his jurisdiction to enforce traffic laws, pursue fraudulent check writers, and detain individuals who had failed to appear in court.”

COULD THE AI EVANGELISTS BE RIGHT ABOUT AI BEING GOOD FOR EDUCATION? Maybe, but first let’s see if we can get it to be able to correctly count the “r”s in “strawberry.”

OLD AND BUSTED: The Woke Left.

The New Terribleness? The Woke Right. Konstantin Kisin: Thou Shalt Not Criticise the Woke Right (Video).

SPACE: NASA needs Boeing’s Starliner, so development most likely will continue.

DISPATCHES FROM THE MEMORY HOLE: Gosh, Would Be a Shame If THIS Video of Kamala Telling David Muir She’ll TAKE Our Guns Went Viral (Watch).

HMMM: Taylor Swift’s Post-Debate Endorsement of Kamala Is Telling About the Democrats’ Confidence.

The timing of Swift’s endorsement makes it seem like the Democrats also knew this wasn’t going to go as well as they’d like and needed a distraction directly after the debate happened. Sure enough, here comes Swift’s Instagram post for the world to see and for news organizations to talk about.

In fact, if you were watching CNN last night, that’s exactly what they did. They stopped talking about the debate and started talking about Swift’s endorsement very, very quickly. CNN very rarely gets that kind of news out that quickly, at least about social media posts, which also suggests they had been informed this might happen.

On Monday, showbusiness bible Variety ran a story headlined, “If Taylor Swift Doesn’t Endorse Kamala Harris, She’d Be Entering a New Era,” the timing of which presupposed that an endorsement would soon follow, lest Swift be accused of playing footsy with white supremacists again by the DNC-MSM.

MATT MARGOLIS: Five Takeaways From the Trump-Harris Debate.

HAHA:

Democrats To Replace Kamala On Ballot With ABC Moderators https://t.co/jDJChb8Rf9 pic.twitter.com/t1xb0KoyoT

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) September 11, 2024

Plus:

Woman Who Made Career Singing About Her Bad Choices Endorses Kamala https://t.co/ElRh1qua7t pic.twitter.com/NRvZMaFb0g

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) September 11, 2024

SHOCKING NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE. Exercising can help develop healthier belly fat.

IN PLENTY OF TIME FOR THE HOLIDAY SHOPPING SEASON: Potential port strike has retailers, manufacturers scrambling. “For retailers, that means holiday shipments might not arrive on time. Manufacturers might not receive parts, materials and supplies needed for production, which will lead to assembly lines shutting down. And farmers won’t be able to get their products to overseas markets, which could lead to lost sales.”

Plus: “East Coast and Gulf Coast ports handle about 43% of all US imports.”

LIMITED TIME DEAL: Holikme Dryer Vent Cleaner Kit, Dryer Cleaning Tools. #CommissionEarned

STEVEN HAYWARD: Let Trump Be Trump. “I continue to think he is going to win, because I have a near mystical belief that he’s a world-historical figure of destiny. No, it’s not rational in any conventional sense, though perhaps I can spin a neo-Hegelian case. (But that wouldn’t be prudent.) I can give you rational reasons why he should be favored to win, too, but why crib from Nate Silver’s work. The point is, he may not be sufficiently articulate, but he has become the surprising and unexpected champion of everyone around the globe who has had it with our conventional ruling elite of nearly all historic political parties. The old order is dying, and a new one is struggling to be born, against fierce opposition and long odds. And while I am fully aware of Trump’s many defects, our ruling class, our corrupt institutions, universities, government bureaus, and mass media, deserve to lose to him.”

SCIENCE, UNSETTLED: Astronomers Stunned by Unexpected Discovery of New Celestial Bodies in the Outer Solar System.

IS CONGRESS UP TO ITS POST-CHEVRON CHALLENGE? When the Supreme Court nullified the Chevron Deference doctrine earlier this year, it threw down the gauntlet to Congress. Under Chevron, courts were required to defer to executive branch bureaucrats whenever there was confusion about congressional intent on a regulation.

Now, as I explain in my latest Epoch Special Report, with that deference no longer required, the monkey is on the back of Congress to tighten up the way it writes legislative authorizations to make its intent clearer and more precise as to what the bureaucrats can and cannot do.

But is Congress up for that challenge? Liberals love Chevron because it puts the bureaucrats in control. A lot of senators and representatives from both parties also love Chevron because it supposedly gets Congress off the hook for bad regulations.

But the Founders made Congress the First Branch for a multitude of reasons, the most important of which being to ensure the executive branch bureaucracy doesn’t become too powerful.

In recent decades, with the growth of the Administrative State, however, the bureaucrats are in control and Congress seems unable and/or uninterested in calling a halt and putting the executive branch back in its place.

They don’t like to talk about it, but responding to Chevron is among the most important challenges that will confront senators and representatives alike in the new Congress  come January 2025.

BIDENFLATION ISN’T DONE WITH US YET: Kiss Your Giant Rate Cut Goodbye.

ED MORRISSEY: Should Republicans Wet the Bed Over the Debate? Depends.

The fundamentals of this election cycle still favor Trump. Harris still belongs to a deeply unpopular administration, and Trump has more trust on the issues that matter most to voters in this cycle — inflation, immigration, crime, and national security. Trump needs to remain focused on those issues, and the rest of us need to put these game shows in the correct perspective.

Addendum: My pal Jim Geraghty is more pessimistic than I am about the debate, but on the same page about the impact:

So — again on paper — Trump was terrible, and you would think his poll numbers, nationwide and in the swing states, would nosedive. But what we saw Tuesday night wasn’t all that different from the same Trump we’ve seen year after year. And remember when Trump’s conviction was supposed to be a game-changer? The numbers barely budged.

Trump isn’t neck-and-neck in this race because Americans are charmed by his personality. He’s neck-and-neck in this race because of the national exhaustion with the Biden administration status quo, and frustration with inflation and the high cost of living, an insecure southern border, and a sense of growing chaos overseas. So, yes, in theory, this should have been a Harris knockout blow. But if this sort of contrast works, and one sort of performance is so much better than the other . . . why is Trump still so close to reaching 270 or more electoral votes?

I don’t think he was as terrible as people think, largely because they expected Harris to fold like a cheap suit under pressure. Mike Pence tried to warn people about setting that expectation this week. Jim’s correct, though, that the fundamentals haven’t changed.

Curiously, Trump supporters are shocked to discover that the House of Stephanopoulos was the House of Stephanopoulos last night. Jesse Kelly writes that the GOP will take serious action on their massively biased approach:

The GOP will have a severe response to ABC for this ridiculous, biased debate.

They’ll make them wait four years before agreeing to do another one on ABC.

— Jesse Kelly (@JesseKellyDC) September 11, 2024

UPDATE: Roger Kimball: ABC News is the big loser of the Trump-Harris debate. The immoderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis, repeatedly pecked at one candidate and not the other.

Unexpectedly!