JONATHAN LAST: Hillary Is In The Zone Of Maximum Danger. “It’s never good when a candidate is being linked to an ongoing FBI investigation, as Clinton is with her private State Department email system. And you can see this in Clinton’s poll numbers with Democratic primary voters: She’s gone from 63 percent in late July to 49 percent today. She’s not just sub-50 percent right now, but at her lowest ebb since a year ago and with a surging Bernie Sanders, who’s at 25 percent and climbing.”

SO IT’S LIKE UBER FOR COMPUTER CAPACITY, KIND OF: Use Autonomous Car Computers When They Are Parked. “Each autonomous car will probably have more computing power than a tricked out desktop computer of today. Even fleet cars will be idle most of the day and night because outside of commuting hours most cars are parked. If the cars are EVs plugged into the wall they can just as easily also have their computer network plugged in. So then their CPUs could be made available for other uses.”

NEWS YOU CAN USE: How To Build A Space Elevator From Scratch.

READER PRODUCT PLUG: Reader Frank Snyder writes: “If you’re interested in plugging a great product on Amazon, you might want to consider Kelly’s Delight Maple Bacon Cane Syrup. It’s pretty amazing when used in cocktails or ice tea. Disclosure: The owner is a friend and former student of my business-professor wife. But put a dollop in some bourbon or a little on some vanilla ice cream and it speaks for itself.”

GEE, I WONDER WHICH CHOICE THEY’LL MAKE? To regulate or not to regulate? EU to launch study on Uber.

THE LOOMING PROBLEM that could kill BitCoin.

A FADING CAMPAIGN: Scott Walker’s no-good month.

NAME THAT PARTY, SPECIAL 80th ANNIVERSARY EDITION: Boarded buildings and bullet-ridden walls: Pictures show the dark underbelly of one of America’s most dangerous cities.

Missing from the text of the London Daily Mail’s chilling Detroit-on-the-Delaware photo expose on the no-go zone in my old stomping grounds of South Jersey? “Frederick Von Nieda was Camden’s last Republican Mayor — he served until 1936.”

I WOULDN’T WANT TO OWN A PIZZERIA ON THAT STREET: Spike Lee’s Annual Celebration to Unveil ‘Do The Right Thing Way’ in Bedford–Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.

OH NOES: 7 Things That Happen When You Stop Having Sex.

YES, YOU MAY LOOK IT UP ON THE INTERNET: CONFESSIONS OF A PUZZLE-EVADER: “Hi, my name is Moe Lane, and I look up video game puzzle solutions on the Internet.” Moe’s latest gaming-related column is up at the PJ Lifestyle section.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 842.

PEGGY NOONAN ON DONALD TRUMP:

You know the latest numbers. Quinnipiac University’s poll this week has Mr. Trump at a hefty 28% nationally, up from 20% in July. Public Policy Polling has Mr. Trump leading all Republicans in New Hampshire with 35%. A Monmouth University poll has him at 30% in South Carolina, followed 15 points later by Ben Carson.

Here are some things I think are happening.

One is the deepening estrangement between the elites and the non-elites in America. This is the area in which Trumpism flourishes. We’ll talk about that deeper in.

Second, Mr. Trump’s support is not limited to Republicans, not by any means.

Third, the traditional mediating or guiding institutions within the Republican universe—its establishment, respected voices in conservative media, sober-minded state party officials—have little to no impact on Mr. Trump’s rise. Some say voices of authority should stand up to oppose him, which will lower his standing. But Republican powers don’t have that kind of juice anymore. Mr. Trump’s supporters aren’t just bucking a party, they’re bucking everything around, within and connected to it.

Since Mr. Trump announced I’ve worked or traveled in, among other places, Southern California, Connecticut, Georgia, Virginia, New Jersey and New York’s Long Island. In all places I just talked to people. My biggest sense is that political professionals are going to have to rethink “the base,” reimagine it when they see it in their minds.

I’ve written before about an acquaintance—late 60s, northern Georgia, lives on Social Security, voted Obama in ’08, not partisan, watches Fox News, hates Wall Street and “the GOP establishment.” She continues to be so ardent for Mr. Trump that she not only watched his speech in Mobile, Ala., on live TV, she watched while excitedly texting with family members—middle-class, white, independent-minded—who were in the audience cheering. Is that “the Republican base”? I guess maybe it is, because she texted me Wednesday to say she’d just registered Republican. I asked if she’d ever been one before. Reply: “No, never!!!”

Something is going on, some tectonic plates are moving in interesting ways. My friend Cesar works the deli counter at my neighborhood grocery store. He is Dominican, an immigrant, early 50s, and listens most mornings to a local Hispanic radio station, La Mega, on 97.9 FM. Their morning show is the popular “El Vacilón de la Mañana,” and after the first GOP debate, Cesar told me, they opened the lines to call-ins, asking listeners (mostly Puerto Rican, Dominican, Mexican) for their impressions. More than half called in to say they were for Mr. Trump. Their praise, Cesar told me a few weeks ago, dumbfounded the hosts. I later spoke to one of them, who identified himself as D.J. New Era. He backed Cesar’s story. “We were very surprised,” at the Trump support, he said. Why? “It’s a Latin-based market!”

“He’s the man,” Cesar said of Mr. Trump. This week I went by and Cesar told me that after Mr. Trump threw Univision’s well-known anchor and immigration activist, Jorge Ramos, out of an Iowa news conference on Tuesday evening, the “El Vacilón” hosts again threw open the phone lines the following morning and were again surprised that the majority of callers backed not Mr. Ramos but Mr. Trump. Cesar, who I should probably note sees me, I sense, as a very nice establishment person who needs to get with the new reality, was delighted.

Well, Peggy, he’s got you pretty well figured out. And yes, America has the worst political class in its history, average people are figuring it out, and — finally — the political class is beginning to figure out that average people are figuring it out.

Does this mean that Trump should be President? No, but it means someone capable of absorbing, and putting into practice, the things that Trump is making clear should be.

WELL, WELL, I HAD MISSED THIS: Russia Accidentally Reveals Its Massive Ukraine Body Count.

Buried in a mundane report on army salaries, Delovaya Zhizn (Business Life) noted that family compensation went to the families of 2,000 soldiers killed “taking part in military action in Ukraine.” The information was briefly online before Russian censors detected the fact and took it offline — but not before a Ukraine-based news site detected the admission and cached it online.

That some 2,000 Russian service members have died, all fighting a war that the Kremlin does not acknowledge exists, is a staggering admission of President Vladimir Putin’s commitment to the conflict in eastern Ukraine. The Ukrainian war has lasted for exactly 18 months — by comparison, the U.S.’ nearly 14-year involvement in Afghanistan has claimed the lives of 2,154 American soldiers.

Despite his bluster, I don’t think things are going especially well for Putin.

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GEE, DO YOU THINK? WaPo: In coverage of Roanoke killings, the right sees a racial media bias.

IT ALWAYS DOES: Printing Money Goes Haywire in Venezuela.

Part of the answer is that in the early days, inflating does make the government a little more money, and the point at which it starts to lose money is also the point at which the freight train is traveling 120 miles an hour, and it has a choice between slamming on the brakes and killing everyone instantly or waiting to hurtle over the cliff. Embezzlers and accounting frauds often start this way — they fudge things just a little to cover a temporary shortfall. Only the underlying problem doesn’t go away, and they need to fudge even more the next quarter to cover up both the gap they have now and the gap they covered up last quarter. They tend to be uncovered when the gap is so big that it can no longer be fudged. This is what happened to Bernie Madoff when the market collapsed.

The larger answer is that this is the end game of Chavismo. For about a decade, some sectors of the left hoped that Hugo Chavez represented an alternative to the neoliberal consensus on economic policy. Every time I wrote that Chavez was in fact direly mismanaging the economy, diverting investment funds that were needed to maintain oil output into social spending, I knew that I could look forward to receiving angry e-mails and comments accusing me of trying to sabotage his achievements for the benefit of my corporatist paymaster. And in fairness (though without minimizing his appalling authoritarianism), those policies undoubtedly did improve the lives of some incredibly poor people.

The problem was that the money he was using was, essentially, the nation’s seed corn. Venezuelan crude oil is relatively expensive to extract and refine and required a high level of investment just to keep production level. As long as oil prices were booming, this policy wasn’t too costly because the increase offset production losses. But this suffered from the same acceleration problem that we discussed earlier: The more production fell, the more the country needed prices to rise to offset it. Between 1996 and 2001, Venezuela was producing more than 3 million barrels a day. It is now producing about 2.7 million barrels a day. In real terms, the price of a barrel of oil is barely higher than it was in August 2000, but Venezuela is producing something like 700,000 fewer barrels each day. Policies that looked great on the way up — more revenue and more social spending — became disastrous on the way down as the population was hit with the double whammy of lower production and lower prices.

This was predictable. Indeed, many people predicted it, including me, though I was just channeling smarter and better-informed people, not displaying any particular sagacity. But the Venezuelan government either didn’t listen to the predictions or didn’t believe them. Now falling oil prices are crushing government revenues at exactly the time the country most needs money to help the people who are suffering great misery as the oil cash drains out of their economy. In the beginning, printing money may have looked like the best of a lot of bad options. By the time it became clear that the country was not fudging its way out of a temporary hole, but making a bad situation worse, it was committed to a course that is extremely painful to reverse.

Sooner or later, you always run out of other people’s money. On the other hand, this compassionate egalitarianism has made Hugo Chavez’s daughter a billionaire.

IT’S BEST TO STAY ON THE OFFENSIVE: John Hinderaker: Take a Lesson From Trump: Stand Up to the Media.

DEMOCRATS IN DISARRAY: Sanders: DNC using debates to rig primary.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) believes the Democratic Party is using its meager primary debate line-up to rig the nomination process.

“I do,” Sanders reportedly responded when asked Friday whether he agrees with former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley’s assertion that the debate schedule is “rigged.”

The two Democratic presidential candidates were speaking at the Democratic National Committee (DNC) Summer Meeting in Minneapolis on Friday.

“This sort of rigged process has never been attempted before,” O’Malley said in his speech earlier Friday.

The DNC has drawn criticism for scheduling only four debates before the early primary states cast their votes, and six total throughout the election cycle.

Hillary performs badly in debates, so the process was structured to protect her.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: I brushed my student loans under the rug when I graduated from college, and I’ll never be that naive again.

ERA OF NEW CIVILITY UPDATE: Business Insider Website posts picture of Donald Trump in crosshairs, after joining with their fellow leftists in the immediate aftermath in January 2011 of the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords (and a GHWB-appointed judge) by a crazed gunman to pin the blame on Sarah Palin’s clipart.

But then, being in the media also comes with a serious case of amnesia — forget the JuiceVoxers not knowing about the National Recovery Act of 1934; does anyone on the left remember what they wrote about civility and gun-related metaphors in January of 2011? Obviously, they never meant a word of it — it was just a way to further beat up Palin and establish some immediate leverage on the new GOP congressional majority.

Not that GOP politicians are immune from such postmodernism themselves; in his perceptive conclusion to “What’s The Deal with Trump,” Christopher Caldwell of the Weekly Standard notes that both parties are responsible for his stratospheric rise in the polls this summer:

First, the governing style of Barack Obama, which, by insulating presidential action from constitutional checks and balances, drove up the value of “deal-making.” Second, the corruption of the Republican party. If the Republican Senate permits the president to pass off his Iran nuclear weapons treaty as a “deal,” abdicating its prerogative to ratify or block, then a better “deal”-maker is all it can offer the country the next time around.

Candidates Jeb Bush and Rand Paul have fallen into this misunderstanding, treating Trump as a “fake conservative,” as if he were running for chairman of the Republican party. So have George Will and virtually everyone who writes for National Review. “Trump,” writes Daniel Foster, “is sucking the most talented GOP presidential field in a generation down the gaping event horizon that is his huge mouth.” This is dubious. The GOP may have talent, but it has squandered the trust that might win it the country’s permission to do anything with it. For almost two decades Republican leaders have been asking a country with which they have lost touch to be content with words. Since the Tea Party rebellion of 2010, they’ve succeeded, with empty promises, in getting their own dissidents to lay down their arms. For now, there appears to be little that any member of the party establishment can say to hale voters back.

And there’s no way for the MSM to regain the trust of its consumers – and since they won’t listen to us, we applaud Trump’s manhandling of Jorge Ramos, one of their most boorish Democrat operatives with bylines.

SEE, HE WOULD HAVE FIT RIGHT IN AT A COLLEGE DIVERSITY-AND-EQUITY OFFICE: “We would say stuff like, ‘The reporter’s out in the field.’ And he would look at us and say, ‘What are you saying, cotton fields? That’s racist.’”

WHY DO DEMOCRATS HATE GAY PEOPLE AND SEX? Gay activists fume over de Blasio’s role in rentboy.com raid. “The LGBT community hasn’t seen such harassment and intimidation since before Stonewall in 1969. This has become a City Hall war against gay consensual sex. Some wonder whether this is happening to rid the city of ‘gay sin’ prior to the arrival of de Blasio’s friend, the Pope.”

ABOUT TIME: Challenging Comfortable Fictions, Part II: The Question of Quality.