WINNING: U.S. Manufacturers to Pick Up Turkey’s F-35 Parts Business.

IT’S (NO LONGER) A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD: Nuclear Nations at Total War with Each Other – but Don’t Use Nukes?

(Dueling references in the headline.)

THEY’RE STILL NOT ACTING AS THOUGH THEY REALLY BELIEVE IT’S A CRISIS: ‘Climate Action’ Flops at the G-7.

JUSTICE: Prosecutors Want Death Penalty for Alleged Pittsburgh Synagogue Shooter Robert Bowers.

CHRISTIAN TOTO: Is Chappelle’s ‘Sticks & Stones’ the Woke Tipping Point? “The comedy giant shreds Cancel Culture in his new Netflix special. Is this the beginning of the end for the PC Police?”

I certainly hope so. I for one really miss comedy that was, you know, funny.

PROGRESS: The startup behind the world’s first marijuana breathalyzer just raised a fresh $30 million and offered a glimpse at how the device works. “If successful, the technology could help employers and police distinguish between people who’ve used cannabis legally — in the past — from people who are currently impaired, either while driving or on the job. As more states legalize marijuana, investors are betting that demand for such a device could be substantial.”

I LIKE THE CUT OF HIS JIB: Trump Skips G-7 Climate Meeting, Says Won’t Risk US Wealth On “Dreams.”

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Obama Blows $15 Million on Mansion Doomed by Rising Tides He Failed to Slow. “As the price of luxuries falls year after year, the cost of feeling smug rises faster than the sea levels ever could.”

MATH IS HARD: Sorry, Bernie: America’s Poorest Are Richer Than 60 Percent of Developed Countries.

NEXT? Even Gillibrand’s Former Staffers Think She Should Drop Out.

RELATED: Gillibrand Spending Thousands on Giveaway In Attempt to Make Debate Stage.

SCENES FROM DE BLASIO’S NEW YORK: Video shows NYPD struggling to arrest man as onlookers taunt them.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: MGGA (Make Greenland Great Again)! “We haven’t done a major real estate deal in over 150 years and we’re certainly not picking up any new territory via warfare these days, so buying Greenland is looking better and better if the U.S. is going to remind the world what’s what.”

IMPRESSIVE, MOST IMPRESSIVE: Technically Feasible Huge Next Generation Space Station.

This space station would have 11 million cubic meters of pressurized volume versus 931 meters for the International space station. This would be 12,000 times larger volume. It would be 488 meters in diameter. It would have 1.6 times the diameter of the largest stadium dome (300 meters in diameter) in the world which is a sports stadium in Singapore.

It will have the volume of about 20 of the largest cruise ships.

The space station would spin like the space station in 2001. It would generate its own gravity. It would be designed to very comfortably hold 1500 staff and guests.

They have created a technically feasible engineering design. Von Braun Station creation will also form a space construction industry with bots, pods, drones, construction arms, new space suits, and large-scale truss building machines designed for building large structures in space.

And if Psyche 16 turns out to be as metal-rich as is believed, we won’t even have to heavy-lift most of the building materials into orbit.

GOVERNMENT MEDICINE: I Was a Physician at a Federally Qualified Health Center. Here’s Why I No Longer Believe Government Health Care Can Work.

For example, one of the requirements for federally qualified health centers is that they must maintain a certain number of physician assistants and nurse practitioners. Rural health clinics were the first sites to receive a federal mandate to hire non-physician practitioners.

For me, this meant supervising a physician assistant from day one. And within a few months, a brand new nurse practitioner was added to my list of responsibilities. Despite this extra workload, there was no time allotted in my schedule to provide education, review charts or discuss cases—nor was I compensated for my extra duties.

Federal regulations also create massive amounts of paperwork. While the medical staff worked hard to move patients through the registration process, my schedule often ran hours behind as forms were signed and documents reviewed.

This bottleneck often led to me starting my day late and working into the evening. When I started coming in a bit later than my assigned start time, knowing that patients would not be ready for me, I was given a stern warning by administrators.

Medicine is going to get worse, as those best-qualified to become doctors decide the bureaucratic BS isn’t worth the bother.

And do read the whole thing.

VIDEO: Joe Biden in Keene, New Hampshire: “What’s Not To Like About Vermont? What A Neat Town.”

AND IF TRADITION HOLDS, THEY’LL GRAB IT WITH BOTH CLOSED FISTS: Republicans Have a Huge Opportunity With Minority Voters.

OH: Portland Man Says He Was Beaten Outside a Bar for Wearing a MAGA Hat.

THE NEW CIVILITY: CNN’s Jim Acosta Heckles Trump As He Walks Off Stage During G7 Summit In France.

VENI, VIDI, VINUM: How Two Italians Achieved a 200-Year-Old Dream of Virginian Wine. “Since Thomas Jefferson first tried, growing European vines had always failed.”

This is actually from last year, but ran across it while enjoying a little light reading with lunch:

Op-eds criticized them as buffoons. Locals cracked jokes about them being in the Mafia. An arsonist burned down the barn housing their winery. Farmers who had planted French-hybrid vines spoke out against them. Officials viewed them with suspicion—as if the endeavor were actually a ruse to undermine the East Coast’s so-called wine industry or mislead local farmers.

When Virginia’s commissioner of agriculture ascertained what was happening, he summonsed Rausse to a conference room in Richmond. For two hours, 24 scientists and professors took turns lecturing. Plant pathologists explained American diseases and virologists told of native viruses. One after another, they said Rausse would fail. The meeting adjourned with the commissioner pointing to a cigar box: “Tobacco is the real future of agriculture in Virginia, not wine.” A Virginia Tech professor added, “The moment you get a Virginia farmer excited about something that does not make any sense, we have a duty to step in and stop you.”

Rausse says he did not like being told what he couldn’t do.

He then went on to make lots of award-winning Virginia wines, and in the process almost single-handedly jump-started quality East Coast winemaking.

I very much doubt our experts in any field have gotten smarter, better informed, or wiser in the last 40 years. Or as Heinlein wrote just a few years before Rausse was told what he couldn’t do, “Always listen to experts. They’ll tell you what can’t be done, and why. Then do it.”

WHEN MARY SUES GO BAD: Star Wars Episode IX Teaser Revealed, Fan Reaction Mixed. “The teaser ends with the tagline, ‘The story of a generation comes to an end.’ The burned cynic in me hopes this is true. Please, please, please let it end. The eight-year-old kid in me is just dying for a few more Star Wars movies that don’t suck. This D23 preview makes me think my inner eight-year-old is about to become a burned cynic.”

THE FIRST AMENDMENT LIVES: Religious Freedom Win for Artists Who Refuse to Create Same-Sex Wedding Videos.

YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BLOG: Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update for August 26, 2019. “Inslee and Moulton are Out, Sanders wants to bring U.S. Postal Service efficiency to powering your house and car, and there’s a rumor Grandma Death may arise from her crypt.”

RELATED:

HMM: Beijing is manufacturing the circumstances to justify brutal intervention in Hong Kong.

The normal Beijing playbook for managing dissent has just not worked in Hong Kong, for four main reasons. First, the protest movement in Hong Kong is what Beijing truly fears—a mass movement whose scale is undeniable. And there’s no clear leadership group Beijing can arrest or intimidate to decapitate the protests, although the authorities have continued to arrest those they think might be important.

On top of this, the protesters have been incredibly innovative in shifting the nature, location and tactics of the protests, making containment impracticable. They’ve drawn on international sources of inspiration, as we saw with the kilometres-long ‘human chain’ on the weekend, which echoed the ‘Baltic Way’ protests in 1989 that helped topple Soviet rule in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

And lastly, the protests have been broadcast virally by multiple eyewitnesses through social media and have been covered extensively in the international media. Pretending they’re just by a small group of extremists or about low-level issues, which has worked in the curated information environment of mainland China, just hasn’t washed with international audiences and governments.

So, we’ve got to a point where the playbook needs to turn a page.

Read the whole thing.

SEE ALSO: CLINTON AND BOTH BUSHES (AND BIDEN IF GIVEN THE CHANCE). Trump is right to confront China, reversing Obama’s policy of weakness and appeasement.

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Silicon Valley Copycats China’s Orwellian Social Credit Scheme.

Think of it as a digital Stasi. Your neighbor catches you smoking in a non-smoking area, and reports on you with his phone. The state telecom notices you’re spending too much time playing online videogames. Your latest social media post gets too many downvotes. Or maybe someone at work you’re having problems with just makes something up. It could be almost anything, but once your social credit score turns negative, your life can become a living hell, and with no legal recourse. You’ll have to become a conspicuously good little Communist to turn your credit positive again.

Or as the government itself says, “Keeping trust is glorious and breaking trust is disgraceful.”

Silicon Valley says: “Hold my soy latte.”

Much more at the link.