AT AMAZON, DIY in July: Save on Automotive Parts, Accessories, & More.

Plus, deals in Classroom & School Supplies.

I BELIEVE THIS IS CALLED “MANSPLAINING” NOWADAYS AND HENCE IS DISMISSABLE: “Since the penis and testicles were mine and no one else’s, then my opinion must surely have some meaning.”

“HARBINGERS OF FAILURE:” Some people seem to have a knack for buying losing products. Wonder how this analysis would apply to political candidates.

WHY AUTOMATED CARS need new traffic laws.

When Delphi took its prototype Audi robocar from San Francisco to New York in April, the car obeyed every traffic law, hewing to the speed limit even if that meant impeding the flow of traffic.

“You can imagine the reaction of the drivers around us,” Michael Pozsar, director of electronic controls at Delphi, said at a conference in Michigan last week, according to Automotive News. “Oh, boy. It’s a good thing engineers have thick skin. All kinds of indecent hand gestures were made to our drivers.”

And that indicates that a problem is brewing, argues Prof Alain Kornhauser, who directs the transportation program at Princeton University. “The shame of the driving laws is that they all sort of have a ‘wink’ associated with them,” he says. “It says 55 miles per hour, but everyone knows that you can do 9 over. If that’s the situation, why isn’t it written that way—with a speed limit at 64?”

People know when to disregard a law, but it isn’t easy to reduce such implicit knowledge to an algorithm. Even if you could, there are some laws that robots should never have to observe.

“A stop sign—rather than a ‘yield’ sign—is there to make sure people have the opportunity to look both ways and see nobody is coming,” Kornhauser says. “But with 360-degree camera coverage, lidars and radars, those automated cars know in a 20th of a second whether something is coming. Why should we require them to come to a complete stop?”

In fact, if all cars were autonomous and connected to each other wirelessly, they wouldn’t need stop signs even at the intersections of multilane highways, as shown in this video simulation by Kurt Dresner and Peter Stone of the University of Texas at Austin.

True.

THE POLLING ON THIS MUST BE TRULY AWFUL: White House Won’t Commit to Veto of Bill Defunding Planned Parenthood.

UPDATE: Hillary Throws Planned Parenthood Under The Bus. Like I said, the polling on this must be truly awful.

ASHE SCHOW: Fraternity brothers sue Rolling Stone as top editor resigns. Take ’em to the cleaners.

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Swiss bank’s donations to Clinton Foundation increased after Hillary intervention in IRS dispute.

FROM KEN AT POPEHAT, an analysis of the TRO blocking publication of some of the abortion video.

CHANGE: Michigan’s Union Boomerang. “This is great news for self-government, empowering an elected legislature over courts and an unelected bureaucracy. But it’s even better news for state employees, who will now be able to decide if they want to pay the fees that finance an organization whose purpose and practices they may not support. Union membership has plummeted in Wisconsin and Indiana since similar worker freedom was allowed. The largest state teachers union in Wisconsin has lost more than half of its 40,000 members in four years. Meanwhile, the UAW faces another watershed when its auto contracts expire later this year, meaning auto workers will be eligible for right-to-work protections for the first time.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Cuts in Adjuncts’ Pay and Raises for All Others. The reason so many academics think capitalism is about the weak being exploited by the strong? Because that’s how academia works. . . .

BROTHER BOOK PLUG: My brother Jonathan recommends this book by his former student Russell Zimmerman: Shadowrun: Shaken (No Job Too Small).

UH OH: New vulnerability can put Android phones into permanent vegetative state.

HERE’S MORE ON MY revolving-door surtax plan.

GEORGE WILL: Iran deal shows disdain for Congress.

The best reason for rejecting the agreement is to rebuke Obama’s long record of aggressive disdain for Congress — recess appointments when the Senate was not in recess, rewriting and circumventing statutes, etc. Obama’s intellectual pedigree runs to Woodrow Wilson, the first presidential disparager of the separation of powers. Like Wilson, Obama ignores the constitutional etiquette of respecting even rivalrous institutions.

The Iran agreement should be a treaty; it should not have been submitted first to the U.N. as a studied insult to Congress. Wilson said that rejecting the Versailles Treaty would “break the heart of the world.” The Senate, no member of which had been invited to accompany Wilson to the Paris Peace Conference, proceeded to break his heart. Obama deserves a lesson in the cost of Wilsonian arrogance. Knowing little history, Obama makes bad history.

Obama’s legacy is his palpable distaste for the other branches of government, particularly Congress. While Obama’s other actions disregarding Congress have been frustrating, annoying, and worrisome, his disregard of Congress–and hence, the American people–on the Iran nuclear deal is dangerously meglomaniacal.

RELATED: Nicholas Kristof summons the energy to defend the Iran deal in the New York Times. His only real point comes at the very end:

If the U.S. rejects this landmark deal, then we get the worst of both worlds: an erosion of sanctions and also an immediate revival of the Iran nuclear program.

We have a glimpse of what might happen. In 2003, Iran seemingly offered a comprehensive “grand bargain” to resolve relations with the United States, but George W. Bush’s administration dismissed it. Since then, Iran has gone from a tiny number of centrifuges to 19,000, getting within two months of “breakout” to a nuclear weapon. The point: Fulmination is not a substitute for policy, and a multilateral international agreement achieves far more protection than finger-wagging.

Diplomacy is rarely about optimal outcomes; it is about muddling along in the dark, dodging bullets, struggling to defer war and catastrophe for the time being, nurturing opportunities for a better tomorrow. By that standard, the Iran deal succeeds. Sure, it is flawed, and yes, it makes us safer.

Translation: If we back out of the Iran deal now–after Obama has already diplomatically agreed to it, without seeking congressional approval–the other nations will still lift sanctions, but Iran won’t honor its agreement, and will indeed ramp up its nuclear efforts. Why Kristof assumes the former (that there will be an “erosion of sanctions,” in his words) if the US backs out, he never explains. Likewise, Kristof never addresses the key question that is troubling most of America: How can Iran be trusted to hold up its end of this “bargain” anyway, when it has not agreed to “anytime, anywhere” inspections (and in fact, the U.S. never sought them) and there are at least two secret “side deals” with the IAEA?

Yet somehow, in a biblical leap of faith, Kristof concludes that the Iran deal will make us safer, because we are muddling along in the dark, dodging bullets and struggling to defer war and catastrophe. In other words, the very most Kristof can muster in support of the Iran deal is that it might keep us ignorant about Iran’s nuclear ambitions a little longer and allow the Obama Administration to kick this apocalyptic can down the road to a future (likely Republican) Administration. And of course that is darn-near perfect, isn’t it?

NEWS YOU CAN USE: You Can Buy This Ridiculous Flamethrower If You Are an Insane Person.

WELL, THAT’S NICE TO KNOW: “InstaPundit’s still got it.”

DONS CLOWN NOSE TO COVER BROWN NOSE: Jon Stewart opens up on ‘secret’ White House visits.

HONESTLY, I THINK THE MEDIA ARE OFTEN AS COMPLICIT AS MISLED: Ed Morrissey: How the Media and You Are Misled by False Data.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 812.

SO GUY CHARGED WITH MULTIPLE FINANCIAL FELONIES ALSO RAN BLACK CAUCUS’S CHARITY ORGANIZATION: Fattah Steps Aside at Congressional Black Caucus Foundation. “The Pennsylvania Democrat’s exit from the prominent spot with the education and policy nonprofit closely linked to the Congressional Black Caucus on Capitol Hill comes less than 24 hours after Fattah was charged in a 29-count indictment.” Might want to look into that entity, too. . . .

WELL, AT THIS POINT YOU’RE EVEN SEEING THIS IN THE WAPO, SO YEAH: Hillary Clinton Pours Salt in Planned Parenthood’s Open Wound.

Plus, Ron Fournier tweets: “Democrats who think this Planned Parenthood fiasco is just abt video tactics should examine abortion crosstabs: #millennials, esp Hispanic.”

THE TOP GEAR CREW WILL BE STREAMING A NEW SHOW FOR AMAZON PRIME. Quoth Jeremy Clarkson: “I feel like I’ve climbed out of a bi-plane and into a spaceship.”

You can get Amazon Prime right here.

MEGAN MCARDLE ON those bogus campus rape studies:

Back then, the assumption was that most campus rape was caused by a bad culture — that men were committing rape because they’d been raised to understand that women who placed themselves in certain situations were “asking for it.” In the years since then, however, that assumption has been shifting. Now the focus is on serial predators, men who may be enabled by a culture that shames victims of sexual violence, and fails to do enough to protect them, but are very different from the majority of men who realize that rape is not really all right if she showed up at your fraternity party in a short skirt.

One of the major foundations of this shift in focus is a 2002 study by David Lisak, which has been widely cited in support of the emerging model of campus rape as a crime committed by serial predators who will perpetuate a cycle of violence unless stopped. This has major consequences for how you address the problem. If the issue is that most boys don’t understand a woman’s right to say no right up until the end, then what you need is a lot of education, combined with punishment of those who don’t get the message. If the problem is a small number of repeat offenders, then what you need is not so much education as much as better methods to identify and neutralize them.

Unfortunately, a new article in Reason magazine suggests that this foundation is much shakier than most people working on this issue — myself included — may have assumed. . . .

In short, Lisak’s 2002 study is not a systematic survey of rape on campus; it is pooled data from surveys of people who happen to have been near a commuter campus on days when the surveys were being collected.

Before I go any further, let me note that I’m not saying that what these men did was not bad, or does not deserve to be punished. But if LeFauve is right, this study is basically worthless for shaping campus policies designed to stop rape.

Nope. But it provided an excuse for people who want to turn college campuses into man-hating sexual police states. And that was the goal.

NONSENSE: VOTER FRAUD IS JUST A REPUBLICAN MYTH. Dead and Registered: Clarke County, MS, Sued for Having More Voters Than Live Citizens.