DON’T SAY GAY — IF YOU’RE A LOCAL ATLANTA ABC AFFILIATE: Metro Atlanta couple charged with using adopted kids to make child porn.

Evergreen:

UPDATE: I normally pair the above tweet by Iowahawk with this tweet from Jim Treacher…

…But I wasn’t sure of the aforementioned couple’s political worldview. Andy Ngo writes that “they’re liberal activists” in a Twitter thread on their politics that’s worth your time:

(Updated and bumped.)

OPEN THREAD: The usual.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: South Korea’s first lunar orbiter on way to the moon.

WHY IS THE NEW YORK TIMES SO OBSESSED WITH LOATHING BRITAIN? It’s not just Brexit. It’s Oedipal.

They’ve done it again in the grey building on 826 Eighth Avenue, New York City, NY, USA. They – the editors of the New York Times – have launched a tumultuous broadside against the most degraded, pathetic, hopeless, rancid, ugly, stupid, ridiculous, doomed and offensively anti-democratic country in the entire world. That is to say, the United Kingdom.

This particular fusillade is quite something. Under the shouting headline The Fantasy of Brexit Britain Is Over, the author – Richard Seymour (and we shall come back to him) – serves up a grand, all-you-can-eat buffet of UK hatred.

Britain, according to Mr Seymour, is ‘economically stagnant, socially fragmented, politically adrift’. The right’s ‘Brexit fantasy’ is now a ‘nightmare’; the country is ‘corroded’, it is ‘unravelling’, its economy is ‘abysmal’, and its people are ‘dying in hospital’ in their ‘tens of thousands’. And all this is just a ‘familiar nightmare’ of ‘chaos’, ‘crippling strikes’, ‘structural problems’, and ‘chronic labor shortages’. What’s more, whenever we Brits do manage to raise a snaggle-toothed smile – for, say, the football – we are merely ‘flag-bedraggled, drunk and delirious’; we are horrible crowds ‘nourished by nationalism… roaming empty commercial streets’.

Nor does it end there. The writer gets so priapically excited by his thesis he actually questions whether Britain has a right to exist, or whether it even, you know, exists. As he puts it ‘what even is Britain’? He’s not quite sure of the answer, but that doesn’t matter, because he adds – and you can feel the author’s relishing spittle as you read the words – Britain is finally being ‘cut down to size’.

Don’t take it personally chaps — for decades, the New York Times hasn’t been sure that America exists — and if it does, the Gray Lady knows for sure that it definitely needs to be cut down to size.

LUCKILY, WE HAVE THE GENIUSES OF THE CDC TO PROTECT US FROM DISEASE OUTBREAKS NOW: Extinct Pathogens Ushered The Fall of Ancient Civilizations, Scientists Say.

WAIT, I WAS TOLD THE REEF WAS IRREVOCABLY DOOMED BY CLIMATE CHANGE: Coral cover increases in parts of Great Barrier Reef.

Doesn't fit the narrative, but

Great Barrier Reef: Better than ever

Two-thirds of all reefs hit all-time high in 2022https://t.co/qXPi5C5bCH pic.twitter.com/fklGXkf57p

— Bjorn Lomborg (@BjornLomborg) August 7, 2022

GASLIGHTING: How the Mainstream Media Tries to Drive You to the Left.

FASTER, PLEASE: Entertainment Companies Start Dumping Woke Content As Viewership Tumbles.

RIP: Magnum P.I. co-star Roger E. Mosley dead at 83. He portrayed helicopter pilot ‘T.C.’ alongside Tom Selleck.

UNSURPRISING NEWS: Social isolation, loneliness cited for raising heart attack risk.

EVERGREEN HEADLINE: Jemele Hill Just Can’t Stop Playing The Victim.

Jemele Hill continues to do what Jemele Hill does: blame her failures on everyone else. It’s usually racism, but occasionally it’s misogyny and this week it’s her political leanings.

In a puff piece written by USA Today, Hill claims she failed at ESPN because of the company’s “conservative culture” that didn’t allow her to be herself. The quotes came from an appearance Hill made on former ESPN’er Kenny Mayne’s podcast, “Hey Mayne.”

A “conservative culture” is not why Hill failed at ESPN, as the fisking by a conservative-adjacent former ESPN contributor that follows will demonstrate.

UPDATE: Elsewhere at the former sports-themed cable network: Jalen Rose Thinks ‘Mt. Rushmore’ Is An Offensive Term. “As we learned from the clip, Rose has a history of avoiding using names referring to Indian culture in any way (Redskins, Indians). But this might be his most ridiculous attempt to not harm people’s feelings.”

(Updated and bumped.)

IT’S WINE O’CLOCK SOMEWHERE: ‘I was told at the beach if I dug a hole deep enough we would reach China:’ Nancy Pelosi explains why she’s ‘always felt a connection’ to Beijing after rebuking their warnings and visiting Taiwan amid intense military drills.

BRINGING THE HAVOC HOME:

The problems at the border have been created deliberately by the Biden administration. They are not being “offloaded” by border states, which have no special obligation to bear them.

…is beginning to hit home in Washington, as hundreds of undocumented migrants arriving on the governors’ free bus rides each week increasingly tax the capital’s ability to provide emergency food and housing.

Yes, and what do you think the Biden administration’s pro-illegal immigration policies have done to tax the resources of border states like Texas and Arizona?

The Times’s pained reaction to having to share a tiny percentage of the border states’ pain–New York has gotten a handful of bussed illegals, like Washington, D.C.–validates the wisdom of Governors Abbott and Ducey’s policies. If blue voters experience a small taste of the evils caused by illegal immigration, maybe we can finally muster the collective will to enforce our country’s immigration laws.

I’m not sure why the Times is so concerned, when the Northeast Corridor offers a surprising number of housing possibilities for illegal immigrants:

UPDATE: Don Surber: NPR, that was the plan. “America has become a foolish nation. NPR is one reason. It failed to contact any of the Republican governors to find out what their plan was. Instead, NPR just flat-out said they had none. Oh, they had a plan: make those who support the invasion deal with its consequences.”

(Updated and bumped.)

LAWFARE FROM VIASAT: “Over a year and a half after tentatively winning $886 million in broadband funding from the government’s Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF), SpaceX is still trying to get paid by the Federal Communications Commission. One problem for Starlink — though not the only problem — is a series of objections from satellite company Viasat.”

VP HARRIS BREAKS TIE, SENATE PASSES DEMOCRATS’ ‘INFLATION REDUCTION ACT’ CLIMATE, TAX, AND SPENDING BILL.

LIZ CHENEY PREPARING FOR INEVITABLE CNN OR MSNBC GIG: Liz Cheney “would find it very difficult” to support Ron DeSantis in 2024.

A LEFTY’S WORST NIGHTMARE: Springfield Armory Hosts GUNFEST at the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally.

Weren’t all those bikers going to die of Covid after last year’s rally? I guess a handful must have somehow survived.

READER FAVORITE: The Ove Glove – Superior HEAT & FLAME Hand Protection. #CommissionEarned

THE TRUE MINIMUM WAGE IS ALWAYS ZERO: A bartending robot that can engage in personalized interactions with humans.

COLOR ME UNSURPRISED: Study finds full-occupancy, in-person teaching did not lead to SARS-CoV-2 in-class transmission at Boston University.

FASTER, PLEASE: Monoclonal antibody shown to be effective against malaria for up to six months.

USE IT OR LOSE IT: Bones age, weaken quicker with space travel, research shows. We need artificial gravity. Or continuous boost torchships. Or both!

SHOCKING NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: Social isolation, loneliness cited for raising heart attack risk.

COVID IS OVER: Democrats Nix COVID Precautions to Ensure Vote on Spending Bill in Senate.

ROGER KIMBALL: The Grasshopper Elite and Its Enemy. Unfortunately, those loud and troublesome pests, though few, control almost all the levers of political and state police power:

I do not remember when I first noticed these little injections of partisan squid ink, but by now they are ubiquitous in the anti-Trump fraternity. Just one example: in a column Saturday about Donald Trump’s weekend rally in Waukesha, Wisconsin, the writer claimed Trump “spent much of his speech focusing on his baseless claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 presidential election” (emphasis added). To the writing teachers out there, let me ask: Would that sentence have been better—less obviously partisan, hence more persuasive—had the word “baseless” been omitted?

Or how about this bit from later on in the piece: “Trump spent much of his speech touting the accomplishments of his term as president . . . and promoting the lie that the 2020 election was ‘rigged and stolen’” (again, emphasis added). What do you think?

Or how about this: Trump was in Wisconsin “ostensibly” to stump for Tim Michels, the person Trump backs for Tuesday’s GOP gubernatorial primary, but he devoted much of his speech “focusing on his baseless claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 presidential election.”

This last sentence offers connoisseurs of cant not one but two morsels to chew on. The first is the deployment of the word “ostensibly,” meaning “apparently so” but “not really.” You might have thought Trump came to Waukesha to help his favored gubernatorial candidate. Really, though, he came to dispense “baseless” claims that there was widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election.

I do not know whether this spreading linguistic tic is the result of a directive from on high—from editors demanding that their troops insert such adjectival props—or whether it is a more organic phenomenon, a matter of the zeitgeist pushing the adoption of these expressive ornaments and curlicues. It’s a little of both, I suspect. I don’t doubt the influence of management—and the diktats, I’d wager, come from much higher up the political food chain than any publisher’s office. But I suspect that in many, maybe most, cases, it is simply the expression of what the late Joe Sobran identified as “the Hive.” “Liberals laugh at conspiracy theories that assume that because there is a pattern there must be some central control,” Sobran observed; “but the fact that there is no central control doesn’t mean that there is no pattern.”

Read the whole thing.