WELL, YALE’S BRAND HASN’T BEEN ABOUT INTEGRITY FOR A WHILE: Jesse Singal: Yale’s “Integrity Project” Is Spreading Misinformation About The Cass Review And Youth Gender Medicine. Part 1 of a two-parter that is not going to increase your faith in highly credentialed experts. “McNamara et al. is an exceptionally misleading, confused, and fundamentally unprofessional document. The authors make objectively false claims about the content of the Cass Review, badly misrepresent the present state of the evidence for youth gender medicine, and, just as alarmingly, exhibit a complete lack of familiarity with the basic precepts and purposes of evidence-based medicine. In some cases, the errors are so strange and disconnected from the Cass Review that they can only, realistically speaking, be attributed to malice, a severe lack of curiosity and reading comprehension, or both. This might sound harsh, but you’ll see what I mean shortly. It is genuinely surprising that any of the co-authors would agree to put their names on a document like this.”

HE’S JUST ANOTHER DEFECTIVE PRODUCT OF BOEING: Is Mike Luttig A “Prominent Conservative”? “That may have been true about two decades ago, but conservative is as conservative does.”

WHAT, THE SECRET SERVICE WASN’T HIRING? ‘Most Wanted’ fugitive sought in 2004 murder found working as police officer.

HAHA:

Rumors Swirl That Kamala Harris Is Being Influenced By Russian Agent https://t.co/KNKAC2xmro pic.twitter.com/7QDQnesvqi

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) August 19, 2024

Is the incoherence that they’ve relabeled “Joy” really the product of Kamala being drunk? Or is she just not capable of speaking coherently in general? And do we want two presidents like that in a row?

JOEL KOTKIN: The Democrats Didn’t Just Take Over California, California Took Over The Democrats.

New York is only the fourth most populous state; its influence is waning while California, with all its problems, has a far greater economy, as well as greater cultural and technological influence.

Much as Ronald Reagan defined the Republican ethos until the emergence of Donald Trump, figures like Newsom and Harris will shape the post-Biden Democratic Party. Both come from progressive central casting in the deep-blue haven of San Francisco; both Newsom and Harris have built their careers around support from lawyers, tech oligarchs, progressive trust-funders, Hollywood and public employee unions, especially teachers.

Yet here’s the rub. Buying the California model today is increasingly like buying a lemon, and not the tasty kind we grow in our front yards. California today is not the land of opportunity that it was in the Reagan, or for that matter the early Jerry Brown, years.

Of course Newsom, Harris and other boosters claim the state as a social justice model. “Unlike the Washington plutocracy,” Newsom boasts, “California isn’t satisfied serving a powerful few on one side of the velvet rope.” But this view, still widely accepted by many progressives and their media acolytes, seems out of touch with reality. Nearly one in five Californians — many working — lives in poverty (using a cost-of-living adjusted poverty rate); the Public Policy Institute of California estimates another fifth live in near-poverty — roughly 15 million people in total.

The old ideal of California as the apex of the American dream has been shattered. Since the 1970s, middle-class incomes, once ebullient, have stagnated. The state may be home to the most billionaires in the nation, but it also suffers the widest gap between middle and upper-middle income earners. It also faces a deep budget deficit, tepid job growth and the nation’s highest unemployment. The state is home to 30 percent of the nation’s homeless population, with some now living in caves.

In contrast, key competitors such as Texas, Florida, Arizona, Georgia and Nevada have over the past three decades enjoyed considerably faster income and job growth. This reflects the sad fact that the lodestones of California supremacy, culture and technology, are clearly in decline. When Reagan was an actor and president of the Screen Actors Guild, and even into his time as president, Hollywood reigned supreme. To be sure it was primarily liberal in its leanings, as Reagan himself was once, but its cultural product was tailored to conventional tastes. Today’s Hollywood prefers to impose a new race and gender orthodoxy, even at the once family-friendly Disney. Not surprisingly, the entertainment business, one of the state’s high-end industries, has also lost jobs, due to technological changes and incentives offered by other states and countries.

“The audience,” as one film historian recently told the Los Angeles Times, “has moved on.” And where are they moving? To places like Nashville and Austin whose country music more often reflects the primacy of patriotism, heterosexual relationships and the ethos, and pain, of hard, often physical labor. These messages do not stir the MFAs and MBAs who now dominate Hollywood and much of the cultural community.

Forget your audience.

WELL, YES: NYT’s Dowd: Celebrate All You Want, Dems, But It’s Still a Coup. Link’s not to NYT, but Dowd writes: “It’s going to be a glorious coronation — except that everyone’s mad at one another. Top Democrats are bristling with resentments even as they are about to try to put on a united front at the United Center in the Windy City. A coterie of powerful Democrats maneuvered behind the scenes to push an incumbent president out of the race.”

Related:

'I'm Not Dead Yet!' Insists Biden As He's Loaded Onto Cart Of Corpses https://t.co/TCGZKBa9Om pic.twitter.com/0NdDkYTuB2

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) August 19, 2024

OUT: EVERYBODY NEEDS A 303.

IN: Everybody needs a .50. “Before we go one step further, I want to go on record as stating that every American son of liberty should have access to and experience with a rifle that fires the greatest cartridge that John Moses Browning ever made, the .50 BMG (Browning Machine Gun) round.”

OPEN THREAD: Don’t hide your light under a bushel.

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY:

NEW: At the pro-abortion rally in Chicago: "Reproductive justice means Palestinian liberation." pic.twitter.com/MaTvcxMwFs

— Tony Kinnett (@TheTonus) August 18, 2024

Lone counter protester holding up an American flag in front of the @MarchOnDNC2024’s stage. He is SURROUNDED by event organizers and pro-Palestine protestors.

Before he said: “God bless America”

Crowd shouted back: “F—- America.” pic.twitter.com/DHRYHkZaeM

— Tim Kennedy (@TimKennedyJr1) August 19, 2024

Totally sane. Good for appealing to moderate voters.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: Orbex working towards 2025 first launch.

THEY’RE ALWAYS ERASING WOMEN, BUT WOMEN STILL VOTE FOR THEM:

In the press filing center at the DNC, organizers took away the ladies room. pic.twitter.com/YsnVbacjEW

— Susan Ferrechio (@susanferrechio) August 19, 2024

Well, unmarried women, mostly.

WHY IS THE COLLAPSE OF THE ICON OF A VICIOUS THEOCRACY A BAD OMEN? ‘Bad Omen’: Ancient Pyramid in Mexico Collapses Into Pile of Rubble. I mean, we’re tearing down statues here.

R.I.P. PHIL DONAHUE. “The humorist Erma Bombeck, a friend of his from Dayton, described Mr. Donahue as ‘every wife’s replacement for the husband who doesn’t talk to her.'”

I like to remember him for this gem:

Imagine how Milton Friedman would be treated on The View.

GOOD: WATCH: Pro-Palestinian Activists Fail to Block Christian, Jewish Pro-Israel Counter-protesters.

WOEING: Space Suit Designs Could Stall Boeing Starliner Astronauts’ Return From the International Space Station. “Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, the two astronauts Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft ferried into space in June, face an interesting conundrum about how they finally get home. Their ride back to Earth is in question thanks to issues with Starliner, and NASA is poised to make critical decisions on the issue soon. One of the toughest questions about their return trip from space has nothing to do with rockets. Instead, the latest issue centers around space suit sockets and seats. . . . The problem is simple: Should Butch and Suni need to fly back aboard SpaceX’s vehicle, their suits won’t fit in Dragon’s seats.”

HMM: Feeling Less Fulfilled? It Could Be an Early Sign of Dementia. Or, you know, of the current administration/economy.

MOSTLY LEARNING FROM FAILURE, ALAS: Ten Months of Lessons from the Red Sea. “Since the Houthi joined a second front with the Gazans against Israel by attacking international shipping in the Red Sea and its approaches, the US Navy has led the international response and has been engaged in continuous combat operations facing almost all anti-ship weapons that any navy would expect to face in 2024.”

VIDEO: Blue Origin New Glenn Status and Factory Tour. I want Blue Origin to be successful, but at this point I need them to show me something.

COPY EDITORS? WHAT COPY EDITORS?

This is what happens when you airdrop a candidate who received zero votes and delegates. 🤷 https://t.co/1DShi1p4v5

— Dan Crenshaw (@DanCrenshawTX) August 19, 2024

WELL, THEY COULDN’T RISK ENCOUNTERING THE REALITY OF WORKING-CLASS TRUMP SUPPORT WHILE KAMALA WAS POSING AS A WORKING CLASS HERO:

Everything about the Harris campaign is fake.

Prior to her stop at Primanti’s (the PA sandwich chain), every single customer was kicked out and replaced with actors.

pic.twitter.com/zJ15D6jcM2

— John LeFevre (@JohnLeFevre) August 19, 2024

Related:

Not a single store in Milwaukee boarded up their businesses when thousands of Republicans came to the RNC.

These business owners are boarding up ahead of the DNC.

Why are Democrats always so violent? pic.twitter.com/jOz8ciX80I

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) August 18, 2024

Flashback: Working-class people of color hate the riots the lefty elite keeps cheering.

Plus: You can tell it’s a working-class election by the lies Harris and Walz choose to tell.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Why We Practice. “Over the years, I have tried to find ways to get the most out of my practice sessions. I quickly found that marathon sessions, spending hours as the shooting range, were generally a waste of time. Short sessions, where I really focus, seem to be the most productive.”

This is my approach. It works pretty well. I’m a competent, but not brilliant, shooter.

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Methamphetamine-involved psychiatric hospitalizations have increased, study says.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: Rocket Report: ULA is losing engineers; SpaceX is launching every two days.

WHEN THE BILL FOR THE GRIFT COMES DUE: Clean Fuel Startups Were Supposed to Be the Next Big Thing. Now They Are Collapsing: Hydrogen and biofuel projects have become money pits, threatening climate progress.

Startups promising to power planes, ships and trucks with clean fuel are sputtering before they get off the ground, showing how hard it will be to wean many industries off oil and gas.

A company backed by United Airlines that raised hundreds of millions of dollars to turn trash into jet fuel appears to have shut down. Another, backed by Airbus, JetBlue and GE Aerospace, that was working on using hydrogen to power planes went bust. Chevron, BP and Shell, meanwhile, are scaling back projects to make biofuels from cooking fats, oils, greases and plant material.

“The excitement of the early days has not lived up to the hype,” said Andy Marsh, chief executive of Plug Power, a startup that recently opened one of the country’s first plants making green hydrogen, a potential replacement for fossil fuels in industries such as steel making and chemical production.

Shares of Plug Power have tumbled more than 90% since the passage of the U.S. climate law two years ago. Shares of biofuels startup Gevo, where Marsh is a board member, are down about 80% in that span.

The failures and delays are all but extinguishing the early optimism after the climate law passed. Rising costs have pushed out project timelines and made it more difficult for companies to raise money. The government’s delays in completing tax credits are adding to the challenges.

Without clean fuels, emissions at many companies are expected to keep climbing, threatening U.S. and global climate targets. Industries including aviation and shipping are counting on the new fuels because wind and solar power and batteries can’t meet their huge energy needs.

Emissions are the least. If the greens had practiced sound science and replaced coal with nuclear plants 40 years ago, we’d have plenty of cheap power and a cleaner environment.

HE’S NOT WRONG:

Make it to the Olympics and be the 12th best swimmer out of 8 billion people in the world, and you win nothing.

Be the 12th best plumber in a city of 1 million people, and you are set for life.

Life is a game. Be careful which games you play.

— Brandon Avedikian (@bavedikian) August 4, 2024