Love’s Labour’s Lost; maybe.

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Lovebugs Are Dwindling

Beege Welborn, HotAir:

No, I'm not talking about millennials and their problems with communicating and forming relationships with other human beings.

I am talking about the clouds of insects peculiar to north Florida and the Panhandle in the summertime.

When we first got down here from Norf Cacklelackey in July of '99, my aunt was living over in Destin and able to fill us in on most things regarding Panhandle life. 

The one thing she said that was absolutely foreign to us was when she said how lucky we were to get here before "the lovebugs started their swarming." Having never heard of such things, it didn't sound too awful, and, sincerely, how bad can something with "love" in the name be?

Well, it turns out we had decades to look forward to of big gooey messes on our vehicles from said tiny, amorous insects. You never really see a lovebug - about a half-inch long, skinny, black with a red cape flying beetle sort of critter - until it's attached to another one in...well...that sort of way. 

And it's not one. It's hundreds, if not thousands, all managing tandem mating flights in a huge cloud of insectoid reproductive frenzy.

The swarms invariably are attracted to roadways and wind up splattering your vehicle from stem to stern, sometimes in impressive amounts of displaced bodily bug fluids, as you try to maintain vision through your windshield.

…..

But now it seems Science™ has zeroed in on the lovebugs as a poster child for Global Boiling. I have to admit, until I read this article, I hadn't realized the dearth of lovebugs lately, but, indeed, there...haven't been any.

Welborn:

…. The author explains that the lovebug, a "march fly species called Plecia nearctica," only lives for three or four days and spends up to twelve hours of those precious few days doing what comes naturally.

“The lady being interviewed has noticed that there are far fewer of them now frolicking than there used to be and worries that the little flies have flown into the great "unexplained."

...In a trend scientists say poses risks to all ecosystems, 40% of all insects are declining globally in “the insect apocalypse.” The lovebug, whose loss across Florida remains unexplained, joins them.

Welborn:

Forty percent of all bugs are 'declining,' huh?

I sure hope Science™ and the author will forgive my skepticism as I am fresh off relief that their bee colony apocalypse hysteria turned out to be so much overwrought hyperbole. I'll hold off sweating "40%" of bugs going bye-bye.

...Beekeepers adjusted to colony collapse. They divided remaining colonies to make new hives. Bee numbers increased by millions.

“We’re not in any way facing an apocalypse,” says Science journalist Jon Entine. “Things have never been better in terms of the numbers of bees.”

Entine runs the Genetic Literacy Project, which challenges scientific misinformation.

I remind him that the media continue to run scare stories.

“Bees are dying at an alarming rate,” says NBC.

CNN headlines: “Bee Population is Dying ... the food we eat is at risk.”

It’s so stupid. 

“They could have just Googled bee population and they would’ve seen them going up?” I ask.

“Absolutely,” responds Entine, “it’s farcical.”

The article bangs the climate cult drum...

...Behind the decline of insects lies human harm. Habitat degradation, pollution, pesticides and other stressors have insects facing “death by a thousand cuts.” 

Climate change, which is shifting global temperatures, rainfall patterns and seasons, threatens to deepen these cuts. For insects, which can’t generate body heat and might live out the entirety of their adulthood in the span of a day, even slight environmental fluctuations can disrupt life cycles, ranges and access to host plants. 

.… The lovebug began its love affair with the Southern United States in 1940, flying in from its original home in Central America and reaching Florida in 1949. ….

But now, alas ….

...Lovebugs may find their synchrony disrupted because of the warming climate, which could alter their seasonal peaks and allow them to extend their range north. Because lovebugs hail from the tropics, North and Central Florida will likely become less favorable to them, Leppla said, as the local climate becomes more temperate and less tropical. Changing moisture conditions could also spell trouble for the bugs, which rely on a particular range of soil moisture. Drying grasslands or heavier rains affect their ability to survive.

FWIW: Global warming is causing Florida to be less tropical? My guess is that: (a) most Floridians would welcome a relief from tropical summers — thanks, global warming (?); (b) they won’t miss these invasive beetles mashing against their windshields; and (c) the word of the lovebug’s demise is as exaggerated as that of the humble bee, who refused to listen to “experts”, and stayed right where they were, never leaving.

October surprise? Not at all.

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“But my funding would dry up!”

Olson-Kennedy is one of the country’s leading advocates for providing gender-affirming care to adolescents, and regularly provides expert testimony in legal challenges to state bans on such procedures.

A prominent doctor and trans rights advocate admitted she deliberately withheld publication of a $10 million taxpayer-funded study on the effect of puberty blockers on American children — after finding no evidence that they improve patients’ mental health.

Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy told the New York Times that she believes the study would be “weaponized” by critics of transgender care for kids, and that the research could one day be used in court to argue “we shouldn’t use blockers.”

Critics – including one of Olson-Kennedy’s fellow researchers on the study — said the decision flies in the face of research standards and deprives the public of “really important” science in a field where Americans remain firmly divided.

For the National Institutes of Health-funded study, researchers chose 95 kids — who had an average age of 11 — and gave them puberty blocking drugs starting in 2015. The treatments are meant to delay the onset of bodily changes like the development of breasts or the deepening of the voice.

After following up with the youths for two years, the treatments did not improve the state of their mental health, which Olson-Kennedy chalked up to the kids being “in really good shape” both when they started and concluded the two-year treatment.

However, the Times points out her rosy assessment contradicts earlier data recorded by the researchers which found around one-quarter of study participants “were depressed or suicidal” before receiving treatment.

The result also does not support the findings of a 2011 Dutch study, which is the primary scientific research cited by proponents of giving kids puberty blockers. That study of 70 kids found that children treated with puberty blockers reported better mental health and fewer behavioral and emotional problems.

Olson-Kennedy, the outlet points out, is one of the country’s leading advocates for providing gender-affirming care to adolescents, and regularly provides expert testimony in legal challenges to state bans on such procedures, which have taken root in more than 20 states.

….

When asked by the Times why the results have not been made public after nine years, she said, “I do not want our work to be weaponized,” adding, “It has to be exactly on point, clear and concise. And that takes time.”

She then flat-out admitted she was afraid the lack of mental health improvements borne out by the study could one day be used in court to argue “we shouldn’t use blockers.”

…..

Boston College clinical and research psychologist Amy Tishelman, who was one of the original researchers on the study, pointed out the obvious contradiction in withholding scientific evidence on the grounds that it doesn’t match an expected conclusion.

“I understand the fear about it being weaponized, but it’s really important to get the science out there,” she told the outlet.

“No change isn’t necessarily a negative finding — there could be a preventative aspect to it,” she said hopefully.

“We just don’t know without more investigation.”

Erica Anderson, a clinical psychologist and a transgender youth expert, told The Post she was “shocked” and “disturbed” about the decision to withhold publication of such vital research.

“We’re craving information about these medical treatments for gender questioning youth. Dr. Olson-Kennedy has the largest grant that’s ever been awarded in the US on the subject and is sitting on data that would be helpful to know,” she said.

“It’s not her prerogative to decide based on the results that she will or won’t publish them.”

She also wasn’t buying Olson-Kennedy’s rationale to hold back the study’s findings based on fear of backlash.

“It’s contrary to the scientific method. You do research, and then you disclose what the results are,” she said. 

“You don’t change them, you don’t distort them, and you don’t reveal or not reveal them based on the reactions of others. You report as scientists what you’ve learned.”

In a 2020 progress report submitted to the NIH, Olson-Kennedy hypothesized study participants would show “decreased symptoms of depression, anxiety, trauma symptoms, self-injury, and suicidality, and increased body esteem and quality of life over time.”

……

Olson-Kennedy appeared to attempt to muddy the waters in her interview with the Times when explaining how her hypothesis didn’t pan out, claiming participants had “good mental health on average.”

She made this assertion “several times” despite saying previously that 25% of the study’s young patients were suffering with various mental illness symptoms before treatments began.

When pressed by the outlet for an explanation for the seemingly contradictory findings, Olson-Kennedy attributed it to “data averages,” of which she said she was “still analyzing the full data set.”

In April, England’s National Health Service (NHS) disallowed puberty blockers for children following a four-year review conducted by independent researcher Dr. Hilary Cass, writing in her report, “for most young people, a medical pathway will not be the best way to manage their gender-related distress.”

Last year, Dr. Riittakerttu Kaltiala, a leading Finnish expert on pediatric gender medicine, said in a newspaper interview that “four out of five” gender-questioning children will eventually grow out of it and accept their bodies even without medical intervention.

October Surprise?

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Matt Margolis PJ Media

Someone's Pitching a Bogus 'October Surprise' Story to End Trump's Campaign

With the momentum benefiting Donald Trump in the final weeks of the campaign, the sign of desperation from the Democrats has reached a fever pitch, and the left has now entered a phase where bogus anti-Trump stories are starting to flood the news. A couple of bogus stories have already been published, and more are on the way. Sources are pushing one story in particular, waiting for someone gullible enough to run with it.

On Saturday night, Mark Halperin, discussing the recent Atlantic hit piece, which has already been debunked, revealed that he has been pitched a story that, if true, would "end his campaign."

"These last two weeks are gonna be filled with things like this, and I can tell you without going into detail that I've been pitched a story about Donald Trump now for about a week that, if true, would end his campaign," he said. "And, there's all sorts of things like that flying around. I'm not the only one who's been pitched it."

Halperin later clarified that he doesn't believe that the story is true.

"The point I was making is there's all sorts of things being floated out there," he said. "I know of one story that's been pitched to a major newspaper and to me — and, for all I know, to many others — that I don't believe is true. But if it's true, as I said yesterday, it would end Donald Trump's campaign."

"If those were true, it would end his campaign," he reiterated. "What we're seeing in the final days is a point I was making [which] is actors who want a certain outcome are on social media and in pitches to reporters. And in the case of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg writing himself, are trying to affect the end of the race because they're so desperate to try to ... pull a Comey."

"I'm not pursuing the story," he continued. "I don't think it's true. People in Mar-a-Lago, calm down. All I'm saying is there are people out there pitching stuff."

Nice little company you’ve got there. Shame if anything were to happen to it.

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Trio of Democrat senators threaten McDonalds after Trump visit

GOP Pennsylvania Senate candidate Dave McCormick slammed his opponent, incumbent Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa., for "retaliating against McDonald's" after former President Trump visited a location of the fast-food company in the Keystone State while on the campaign trail. 

A trio of Senate Democrats — Casey, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden — on Monday issued a letter to the CEO of McDonald’s, castigating the company for reported price gouging, just one day after Trump worked the fryer at a franchise of the fast-food chain during a campaign event in Feasterville, Pennsylvania. 

The trio's letter accused the business of inflating prices on consumers to grow profits, sparking McCormick to slam Casey for using "vindictive pressure tactics, simply because he doesn’t like Donald Trump."

Who’s the threat to democracy?

Democratic senators slam McDonald's for menu price hikes they say have outpaced inflation

“Corporate profits must not come at the expense of people’s ability to put food on the table,” read the letter from Sens. Warren, Casey and Wyden to the fast-food chain’s CEO.

Three Democratic senators are asking McDonald’s about its menu price hikes in recent years, arguing that the increases are higher than they should be — even with inflation and rising operating costs.

In a letter sent late Monday afternoon, Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Bob Casey of Pennsylvania and Ron Wyden of Oregon demanded that McDonald’s President and CEO Chris Kempczinski explain the chain’s pricing decisions.

“McDonald’s own reports indicate that the company’s price increases may be outstripping inflation,” read the letter, which was shared first with NBC News. 

Operating expenses at McDonald’s increased by 16.5% from 2020 to 2023, while its net profit margins increased from about 26% to 32% in the same period, according to the letter.

 “As a result, McDonald’s net annual income rose by over 79% — to nearly $8.5 billion — from 2020 to 2023,” it said.

Pure bullshit, but demagogues specialize in that. That, and threats and intimidation.

Ho Hum

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Continuing a long tradition, and always a sign that a campaign is failing.

Desperate Much? Yes, Kamala Harris Really Held a Press Conference Just to Call Donald Trump ‘Hitler.’

Red State’s Jennifer Van Laar (say, that sounds suspiciously German, nein?) does a nice takedown of this pathetic creature’s entire squawk, but this seems particularly apt, given the recent leak of Israel’s war plans by unknown actors in the Harris administration:

Kamalla:

In just the past week Donald Trump has repeatedly called his fellow Americans the enemy from within and even said that he would use the United States military to go after American citizens. And let's be clear about who he considers to be the enemy from within: anyone who refuses to bend a knee or dares to criticize him would qualify, in his mind, as the enemy within. Like judges, like journalists, like non-partisan election officials.

Van Laar:

It's very clear that the "enemy within" Trump refers to are people like Mahar Bitar, Rob Malley, Ariane Tabatabai, and more, who are more loyal to Islamic fascists than they are to the United States.

(Details on those spies here)

And then this:

Ed Driscoll, writing in 2016 (and updated in2020) Every Republican candidate for president has been compared to Hitler by Democrats since 1944:

FORMER WAPO LEGEND CARL BERNSTEIN INADVERTENTLY EXPLAINS TRUMP’S RISE.  Carl Bernstein Rejects Comparing Trump to ‘Principled’ Barry Goldwater: “I think Donald Trump is an authoritarian. He’s not an ideologue, he’s not a principled man in the way that Goldwater was….I think that the times are different and I think the people are altogether different,” Bernstein tells CNN’s Don Lemon. Earlier this week, as Mediaite notes, Bernstein “told CNN’s Brian Stelter that Trump is ‘a new kind of fascist in our culture’ with an ‘authoritarian demagogic point of view.’”

I’d much rather a proto-libertarian such as Barry Goldwater as president than a center-left celebrity candidate such as Trump. But to paraphrase the famous sign seen at Tea Party rallies in 2009 which read “It Doesn’t Matter What This Sign Says, You’ll Call It Racism Anyway,” it doesn’t matter who the GOP runs, you’ll call him a Nazi anyway. Celebrities from Louis CK to Sarah Silverman are pulling out all of the fascist references to Trump (Silverman even appeared with a brown uniform and tiny mustache to criticize Trump on Conan O’Brien’s show last week.) But no less a figure than Walter Cronkite on the CBS Evening News in 1964 insinuated that Goldwater the champion of small government, whose father was Jewish was a Nazi, as left-leaning Cronkite biographer Douglas Brinkley wrote in 2012:

As managing editor of the CBS Evening News, Cronkite seemed to relish pricking Goldwater from time to time for sport. In late July, he introduced a report from CBS correspondent Daniel Schorr, a hard-and-fast liberal working from Munich. With an almost tongue-in-cheek smile, Cronkite said, “Whether or not Senator Goldwater wins the nomination, he is going places, the first place being Germany.” Schorr then went on a tear, saying, “It looks as though Senator Goldwater, if nominated, will be starting his campaign in Bavaria, the center of Germany’s right wing.” The backstory was merely that Goldwater had accepted an invitation from Lieutenant General William Quinn for a quick holiday at Berchtesgaden, a U.S. Army recreational center in Germany. But Schorr made the takeaway point that Berchtesgaden was once “Hitler’s stomping ground.” Goldwater, trying to show off his NATO bona fides, had granted an interview with Der Spiegel in which he mentioned a possible trip to Germany soon. Some Democratic opposition researcher floated the idea that Goldwater was infatuated with the Nazis. It was ugly stuff.

Indeed it was; but then, every Republican presidential candidate, from Thomas Dewey (smeared as a Nazi by no less than Harry Truman) to the present will be attacked by the left in this fashion, no matter his temperament, or his small government, libertarian bona fides. Speaking of temperament, perhaps Bernstein would have preferred a more milquetoast CEO as president than Trump – say, Mitt Romney. But in 2012,  the Daily Beast ran one of Bernstein’s columns titled “Carl Bernstein on Mitt Romney’s Radicalism,” which, as Accuracy in Media noted at the time:

The article is based on anonymous sources who claim to be associated with the “moderate” wing of the GOP and are warning about the “crazy right” that might entice Mitt Romney to govern as an extremist as president. “Plainly put,” Bernstein says, “today’s Republican Party (and its Tea Party wing) represent the first bona fide radical political party to rise to dominance in Washington in nearly 100 years.”

At a time when we have a Democratic Party in power in the White House, led by a politician with links to communists and terrorists in Hawaii and Chicago, the Bernstein article has to be seen as ridiculous on its face. But Bernstein represents the mentality of much of the media who see the far-left orientation of the national Democratic Party as nothing unusual or worth commenting on.

Bernstein’s 2,100-word article is full of bizarre statements about Romney and the GOP.

Alluding to the Republican Party and the Tea Party movement, Bernstein writes, “It represents as extreme a shift in political philosophy as any of the radical ideologies that have prevailed in our history.”

Tea Party members oppose Big Government, excessive federal spending and debt. Bernstein is claiming that it is somehow “radical” to want to return to the founding principles of the United States and save America from financial bankruptcy and economic ruin. Who is the real radical?

To ask the question is to answer it. As Glenn noted earlier, in regards to David Brooks, “The Tea Party movement — which you also failed to understand, and thus mostly despised — was a bourgeois, well-mannered effort (remember how Tea Party protests left the Mall cleaner than before they arrived?) to fix America. It was treated with contempt, smeared as racist, and blocked by a bipartisan coalition of business-as-usual elites. So now you have Trump, who’s not so well-mannered, and his followers, who are not so well-mannered, and you don’t like it.”

Exit quote: “The lowest form of popular culture – lack of information, misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people’s lives – has overrun real journalism. Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage.”

—Carl Bernstein, 1992. Choose the form of your destructor.

UPDATE: In his 1944 State of the Union address, FDR smeared the laissez–faire Coolidge era of the 1920s as “the spirit of fascism:”

One of the great American industrialists of our day—a man who has rendered yeoman service to his country in this crisis-recently emphasized the grave dangers of “rightist reaction” in this Nation. All clear-thinking businessmen share his concern. Indeed, if such reaction should develop—if history were to repeat itself and we were to return to the so-called “normalcy” of the 1920′s—then it is certain that even though we shall have conquered our enemies on the battlefields abroad, we shall have yielded to the spirit of Fascism here at home.

Classy stuff.

And of course, Nixon was far from immune from receiving “Reductio ad Hitlerum:” “In 1971, the year before the Watergate scandal, President Richard Nixon was described by his Democratic rival George McGovern as a warmonger like Hitler. ‘Except for Adolf Hitler’s extermination of the Jewish people, the American bombardment of defenseless peasants in Indochina is the most barbaric act of modern times,’ said McGovern. After the arrests of the five agents who broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters, McGovern said Nixon’s involvement in the Watergate break-in was ‘the kind of thing you expect under a person like Hitler.’”

UPDATE (5/1/20): Since I’ve rounded up numerous examples of Republican presidents and candidates being slurred as National Socialists by the left in this post, I’m adding a link to “Democrats and Their Reductio ad Hitlerum Slander” by Steve Hayward of Power Line, which sets the clock back from ’44 to 1940:

By now we are used to Democrats calling Trump literally Hitler, just as they did for George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, etc., but [Fred Siegel in his 1984 book, Troubled Journey: From Pearl Harbor to Ronald Reagan] points out that this favorite liberal calumny began at least as early as 1940:

If Republicans diehards insisted that Roosevelt was “that Bolshevik in the White House,” ideological New Dealers returned the favor by denouncing conservative Republicans as fascists. Henry Wallace, the point man for the New Dealers, fought the 1940 election with the slogan “Keep Hitler out of the White House.” Wallace conceded that “every Republican is not an appeaser. But you can be sure that every Nazi, every Hitlerite, and every appeaser is a Republican.” Wallace glossed over the isolationism of leading Democrats like Burton Wheeler who were left-leaning at home yet impassioned appeasers. [Siegel might have included Joseph Kennedy here.] . . .

At their harshest, fervent New Dealers dropped the qualifiers and pronounced Wendell Willkie, Roosevelt’s middle-of-the-road Republican opponent, “the man Hitler wants elected president.”

Things really got rolling with the 1944 election, where the Democrats’ reductio ad Hitlerum argument was directed at Thomas E. Dewey.

Read on for the rest, which is a sneak preview of the attack Dewey would receive from Harry Truman as the 1948 election approached the wire.

Sure it's a silly story, but the state media has gone crazy trying to refute it, so it must be hurting

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Scott Johnson, PowerLine:

Meet the NYT’s McDonald’s source

Yesterday I weighed the evidence bearing on Kamala Harris’s claim of employment by McDonald’s in the summer of 1983. By contrast with the Washington Free Beacon story raising doubts about Harris’s claim, the New York Times asserted that there was no evidence to rebut Harris’s claim. “Donald Trump has claimed without evidence that Ms. Harris never worked at the fast-food chain,” the Times wrote said. “Her campaign and a friend say she did.”

However, the Free Beacon story included real evidence — indeed, evidence of a kind that would be admissible in court — raising doubts about the veracity of Harris’s claim. The Times story was limited to the word of one Wanda Kagan, who alleges that she heard from Harris’s deceased mother that Harris worked at McDonald’s. By my lights that left Harris’s claim hanging by a thread against the evidence compiled by the Free Beacon. No reasonable finder of fact would buy it. The Times story is a self-parodying piece of hack work.

…. Today the Free Beacon impeaches Kagan’s hearsay in “Meet the New York Times Source Who Claims Kamala Harris’s Late Mother Told Her That Her Daughter Worked at McDonald’s. She’s a Harris Campaign Surrogate Who’s Visited the White House.” It’s an intensely reported story. The story observes, for example:

“What the Times did not tell its readers is that Kagan is a full-throated Harris supporter who has appeared alongside the vice president at several campaign events. She also served as a surrogate for her old friend on television during the Democratic National Convention.

“ ‘It’s an emotional and chilling ride, and I’m just overwhelmed with happiness for my friend, and I’m happy to be alive to be able to witness her now fighting for the people of America’ Kagan told MSNBC during the Democratic convention in August.”

Johnson:’

All of the impeachment evidence lovingly compiled by reporters Joe Simonson and Chuck Ross was of course omitted by the Times. The rout of the Times by the Free Beacon’s happy warriors is complete. I can only add the comment that the Free Beacon may be having too much fun.

Yes, steam could be considered an "emission", but that's clearly not how Fox News intends for its readers to understand this picture or its caption

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Fox uses the photo above to illustrate today’s article on a suit to stop the EPA’s mandated conversion of trucks and farm vehicles to batteries: oooh, scary emissions! How awful!

The tone of the article itself is sympathetic to the plaintiffs, but the photograph is not, either through the ignorance of the editor and reporter, or malice — a combination of both is the safest way to bet these days.