IT IS HAPPENING, BUT PIECEMEAL, NOT ALL AT ONCE:  The Unborn Could Use a “Soylent Green” Moment.

DOESN’T MEAN IT’S THE BEST OF IDEAS:  Just Because You Can.

THEY COULDN’T HIT US BY CONVENTIONAL MEANS…  The Means of War.

OPEN THREAD: Hump Day.

WE CAN USE THEM TO DELIVER WATER TO MARS, TOO: ‘Devil Comet’ contains ‘strongest evidence yet’ that comets delivered water to Earth.

Of course, as Martyn Fogg demonstrated in his magisterial Terraforming: Engineering Planetary Environments, you need a fair number of comets, and bigger isn’t necessarily better. Past a certain size, the impact blows most of the water back into space. Although maybe you could slow them down before impact somehow . . .

CULTURE MATTERS:

Yes.
The Smithsonian takes government money and spends its time trashing this country. We are going to decide how to curate our history and no longer subcontract it out a bunch of anti-American leftist jerk offs.
I so voted for this. https://t.co/zescl3yYCy

— Kurt Schlichter (@KurtSchlichter) August 20, 2025

And if what’s in the Smithsonian’s exhibits doesn’t matter, then get rid of the Smithsonian. Because what’s the point?

BUT A .475 NITRO EXPRESS WOULD TAKE THEM DOWN IN THE SAME WAY: Giant Dinosaurs Would Have Chomped You Up in Very Different Ways.

WHAT DOESN’T GET PROGRESSIVES UPSET? Arrest at the National Mall Has Progressives Upset. “It was turning into the next BLM-style outrage video in real time. And then people got word from ICE who this guy was and why he was wanted. . . . ICE has sent a statement on this man’s detention, saying his name is David Perez-Teofani and that he was arrested in Fairfax County in 2024 and charged with aggravated sexual battery against a minor under 13.”

HEIGHTISM IS A REAL THING: ‘Being short is a curse’: the men paying thousands to get their legs broken – and lengthened.

Warning: Pretty graphic surgical photo.

SUNSET BOULEVARD: Freaks Unleashed: Fired ‘Mainstream’ Journalists Prove They Never Belonged on Television.

It’s been a rough few years for deranged left-wing hacks masquerading as “mainstream” or even “relatively sane liberal” journalists. In an effort to recapture a modicum of respectability, failing media outlets such as CNN and MSNBC have sought to purge their ranks of mindless partisans who seem incapable of forming an original thought that doesn’t involve Donald Trump and the word “fascist.” Time will tell if cutting these freaks loose will be enough to save these floundering companies, but in the meantime, the fired journalists keep reminding us why they never deserved our respect.

In his 1999 retrospective of Billy Wilder’s classic 1950 film Sunset Boulevard, the late Roger Ebert wrote:

Norma [Desmond] of course is not a wrinkled crone. She is only 50 in the film, younger than stars such as Susan Sarandon and Catherine Deneuve. There is a scene during Norma’s beauty makeover when a magnifying glass is held in front of her eyes, and we are startled by how smooth Swanson’s skin is. Swanson in real life was a health nut who fled from the sun, which no doubt protected her skin (she was 53 when she made the film), but the point in “Sunset Boulevard” is that she has aged not in the flesh but in the mind; she has become fixed at the moment of her greatness, and lives in the past.

Like the silent film stars displaced by the talkies of the 1930s, there will be many more journalists learning to code Substack, as the demise of traditional network and cable television continues to hove into view. In the meantime, be cautious when around the legacy media’s legacy consumers:

DC DEMOCRATS MAKE SURPRISE IN-KIND CONTRIBUTION TO JD VANCE 2028 PRESIDENTIAL BID: ‘Ignore These Stupid White Hippies’ Who Need a Nap: Vance, Hegseth, and Miller Visit Nat’l Guard in D.C.

You don't need to actually create ads at this point.

Just run the footage of angry white liberals being mad that crime is being fixed in DC. https://t.co/EcxVPfCLyz

— RBe (@RBPundit) August 20, 2025

During the first year of Trump’s first term, the DNC-MSM cranked out endless boilerplate about increased sales of Orwell’s 1984. Axios got into the game this past November as well. But these leftists are self-flagellating their own Two Minute Hate.

RECESSIONAL: How flying the flag became a symbol of revolt.

Hot on the heels of the pink ladies’ protests outside migrant hotels, Operation Raise the Colours is the latest organic, decidedly patriotic, social-media-driven initiative whose success can be measured in the outsized, outraged, utterly predictable reaction it is receiving. While councils continue to remove the flags, on health-and-safety and property-maintenance grounds, identitarian rent-a-gob Kehinde Andrews was invited on to Good Morning Britain yesterday to insist that the Saint George’s Cross is racist and this campaign is a faux-patriotic stunt by the fash. Presumably, Dr Shola was busy.

The sudden, nationwide explosion of Operation Raise the Colours is basically all the proof you need that this isn’t being driven by the far right – a pathetic fringe in British political life that has long struggled to fill a minibus. Apparently beginning in Birmingham, the campaign has since spread to Swindon, Bradford, Newcastle, Norwich and London. Like the migrant-hotel protests, it seems to be decentralised, leaderless, rallied on Facebook and group chats.

It’s a fascinating, bottom-up campaign against a now undeniable, galling double standard – that in ‘multicultural’ Britain all identities are to be celebrated except for Englishness and Britishness. Tellingly, England and Union flags began emerging in Northfield in south Brum around the same time that the Library of Birmingham was lit up in green and white for Pakistan’s independence day. While Birmingham City Council was quick to take down the England flags – insisting these fluttering pieces of polyester, zip-tied 10-feet-high on to lampposts, posed an intolerable risk to public safety – a leaked email has revealed local officials were so scared to remove the ubiquitous Palestine flags that have emerged in the city since the Israel-Hamas war began that council workers were given extra security.

If only someone had predicted at the end of the 19th century that England was about to face a systematic “recessional,” with dire and lasting consequences to the West at large. (Lest we forget.)

STAY COOL: BAMBOO COOL Men’s Ultra Breathable Underwear. #CommissionEarned

IT LOOKS TOO COOL TO ACTUALLY MAKE: Ford’s Modern Stripped-Down 2-Seat Bronco Roadster “Not Intended for Production:” Talk about rug pulls—Ford’s latest Bronco concept is inspired by the 1966 U13 Bronco Roadster and dripping with appeal.

CORN, POPPED:

🚨 BREAKING: Microsoft employees and "community members" calling themselves the "Worker Intifada" have established a "liberated zone," also known as an encampment, on the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington. pic.twitter.com/X4hHO2DroA

— Stu (@thestustustudio) August 19, 2025

CHRISTIAN TOTO: ‘Elephant in the Room’ Is the Perfect Rom-Com for Trump Era. “What if a dyed-in-the-wool liberal met a handsome MAGA man and, gasp, felt butterflies with every glance?”

Happens more often than Hollywood thinks.

UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN GETS THE MESSAGE: All it took for the fabled Madison-based center for left-wing campus activism to fold was a letter from the First Liberty Institute reminding University of Wisconsin officials that the First Amendment’s guarantees of religious freedom of practice and expression are not optional mandates. The letter is a superb presentation of both the law requiring religious accommodations and the rank hypocrisy of college administrators on the issue.

DISCIPLINE AND PUNISH: Prosecutors charge man who allegedly used botnet to take down X this spring.

“OUR MAGNIFICENT BASTARD TONGUE,” AS JOHN MCWHORTER CALLED IT, IS ALWAYS GROWING: Cambridge Dictionary adds ‘skibidi’ and ‘tradwife’ among 6,000 new words.

“Skibidi” is one of the slang terms popularized by social media that are among more than 6,000 additions this year to the Cambridge Dictionary.

“Internet culture is changing the English language and the effect is fascinating to observe and capture in the dictionary,” said Colin McIntosh, lexical program manager at Cambridge Dictionary, the world’s largest online dictionary.

“Skibidi” is a gibberish term coined by the creator of an animated YouTube series and can mean “cool” or “bad” or be used with no real meaning as a joke.

Other planned additions including “tradwife,” a contraction of “traditional wife” referring to a married mother who cooks, cleans and posts on social media, and “delulu,” a shortening of the word delusional that means “believing things that are not real or true, usually because you choose to.”

An increase in remote working since the pandemic has created the new dictionary entry “mouse jiggler,” a device or piece of software used to make it seem like you are working when you are not.

Still curiously absent, even after all these years, is one near and dear to my heart:

C’mon, Cambridge — it’s time.

A VERY BIG QUESTION WITH IMMEDIATE AND LONG TERM CONSEQUENCES: Can a NATO ‘Article 5-Like’ Promise Protect Ukraine From Putin?

Back in the not-so-long ago Cold War thermonuclear brink days:

The NATO Treaty’s Article 5 stated the political consequences of waging war in Europe. The glib call it The Three Musketeers Clause — one for all and all for one. The musketeers are fiction. Article 5 made a serious commitment in a very real nuclear-armed world.

NATO members agreed “that an armed attack against one or more of them … shall be considered an attack against them all.” Each member would then take “action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain” NATO security. The enemy had to attack a member’s territory or member “forces, vessels or aircraft” operating “in or over” NATO territory.

Actions backed the words. U.S., Britain and France stationed soldiers in West Germany, on the Soviet Union’s axis of attack. In the mid-1970s, I served in a U.S. Army armored unit deployed in the primary invasion route from East Germany to the Rhine River. We called ourselves human trip wires.

The Kremlin understood an attack on West Germany (or Norway, etc.) triggered a theater-wide war with the whole of NATO –from Turkey to Norway to the North Pole– and a global war with NATO strategic powers (U.S. primarily but also France and Great Britain).

August 2025. Ukraine is a hot war involving nuclear-armed Russia led by megalomaniac Putin. Trump seeks to end the war with his own blend of coercive diplomacy, hard talk, soft talk, big sticks, a few calculated carrots:

The U.S., Ukraine and the key European nations indicate that if a peace deal emerges, Ukraine will receive what is called “Article 5-like” security guarantees.

What is that? Is it Article 5-Lite? The better question is what constitutes a violation of Ukraine’s Article 5-like guarantee?

To really give peace a chance — and convince Putin Russian violations will be swiftly and harshly penalized — that question requires detailed answers backed by evident military preparations.

Article 5-Like is a calculated carrot. Perhaps by the end of October we will know what it means in real world terms –maybe.

STAY DRY: Repel Umbrella – Engineered to Withstand 85MPH Winds. #CommissionEarned

PREDATOR WATCH: Your Weekly Roundup of Terrifying Animal Encounters.

ABOLISH THE ATF: Why Is a Navy Vet Still Sitting in Prison When Nothing ATF Found in His Home Was Illegal?

PODCAST: The Invention That Changed Everything. “Salvatore Basile is the author of Cool: How Air Conditioning Changed Everything, a deeply researched book on air-conditioning—not just as a machine, but as a force that completely changed how we live. Salvatore has deep insights into how AC has affected our architecture, urban development, and work habits.”

I’M STILL NOT TIRED OF ALL THE WINNING: Tulsi Stares Down UK, Scoring Another Big Win for American Consumers.