Pun Salad

■ Proverbs 23:9 is short and sweet…

⁹ Do not speak to fools,
    for they will scorn your prudent words.

OK. Today's Flickr embed is (frankly) a better version of the proverb, from the Doobie Brothers.

■ At Reason, Katherine Mangu-Ward has an item to add to your "This Will Change Everything" list: Giant Ziplock Baggies Full of Lambs Are Going to Change Everything.

In April, researchers announced they had managed to keep several extremely premature lambs alive and growing in artificial wombs. After spending up to four weeks in a clear plastic "extra-uterine device" at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, each sheep transformed from a decidedly undercooked fetal specimen to a much more robust critter with long limbs and a fluffy wool coat, the sort of animal you wouldn't be terribly alarmed to see plop to the ground in a field on a spring afternoon.

And, yes, the plan is to, eventually, use the technology on humans. And, as Ms. Mangu-Ward notes, those lambikins are "already taking sledgehammers to some of the most precarious coalitions in American politics."

■ At Power Line, John Hinderaker notices that It’s True: Liberals Hate Western Civilization. And it's a fine compilation of unhinged Progressive responses to President Trump's recent speech in Warsaw. For example, Sarah Wildman at Vox, deemed it an "alt-right manifesto”:

In his address, Trump cast the West, including the United States and Europe, on the side of “civilization.” With an undercurrent of bellicosity, he spoke of protecting borders, casting himself as a defender not just of territory but of Western “values.” And, using the phrase he had avoided on his trip to Saudi Arabia, he insisted that in the fight against “radical Islamic terrorism,” the West “will prevail.”

Hinderaker comments: "Is this what is meant by 'alt-right'? I am so old, I can remember when 95% of Americans would have thought that such propositions verged on the self-evident."

As Arnold Kling notes, Trump is speaking a language that Progressives do not (and, largely, do not want to) understand.

■ I don't link to Jay Nordlinger as much as I should. Over at NRO, they're having a Trump-speech-inspired discussion of Western Civ, Universalism, and so on. In America, the West, and the Rest Nordlinger makes an interesting observation:

Some years ago, I was talking with a Falun Gong practitioner — a member of a group that has been persecuted by the Chinese Communist Party. There are all too credible reports of organ harvesting, for instance.

This man said, “The government is always saying that Falun Gong is foreign to China. But the truth is, Falun Gong has deep roots in China: our history, our culture. You know what’s a foreign imposition? Communism. Marxism-Leninism. It came from you guys, in the West! It was imposed on us in the 1940s, and it is utterly alien to Chinese culture. For instance, we have always placed great importance on the family. It was always the center of our lives. Then came this one-child policy.”

Ouch. Like many good points, that one stings a little.