DISRUPTION: Self-Driving Cars May End the Fines That Fill City Coffers. Obviously, the solution is to raise taxes!

REVOLVING DOOR UPDATE: Former Obamacare chief to lead top insurance lobby. “The former chief of Medicare and Medicaid, who was responsible for overseeing the implementation of President Obama’s healthcare law, will lead the insurance industry’s top lobbying group. Marilyn Tavenner, who in February stepped down from her role as chief administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, will become the new head of America’s Health Insurance Plans, which represents dozens of U.S. insurers.”

With that track record, you know she’s being hired for her connections and not for her skills. Yet another argument for my revolving-door surtax.

BRIAN WANG: Boeing’s fusion-fission hybrid propulsion patent is weak compared to the detailed NASA NIAC Pulsed Fission-Fusion design.

THE UNABOMBER’S CHILDREN: “My favourite Deep Green Resistance member is the woman who wants a return to conditions during ‘the first four million years’ of human existence, when everybody “participated,’” Tim Blair writes. She’s wearing adult braces, which weren’t exactly a common feature of the pre-civilisation era.”

“The extreme green movement is nudging ever closer to a form of fascism,” Blair adds. “There is not much difference between words once deployed in the service of preserving a master race and words now deployed in the service of preserving a master planet”

Not exactly occurring unexpectedly.

COMING NEXT MONTH: Rejuvenation Biotechnology Conference 2015. Faster, please.

NOTE TO PEOPLE UNHAPPY WITH HOW WELL TRUMP’S POLLING: People like a fighter. If you don’t like Trump, then be, or back, a better fighter.

NO SECRETS: Mobile Robots and RFID Tags Internet-of-Things-ify the Outdoors.

SCARCITY: In Drought, Puerto Rico Rations Water, Setting Off a Collection Frenzy.

IN LIGHT OF MY EARLIER POST ON THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST’S EARTHQUAKE RISK, I NOTE THAT THIS DOESN’T GET ENOUGH ATTENTION: Study: New Madrid fault zone alive and active. The last time it let go, the tremor was felt all the way here in Knoxville.

VIDEO: THE POLITICALLY CORRECT DUKES OF HAZZARD: Jeff Foxworthy and Larry the Cable Guy predicted TV Land’s PC cave to the SJWs back in 2009.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 797.

AUSTIN BAY ON THE IRANIAN ARMS DEAL: “It begins with a broken promise. Once upon a time, President Barack Obama vowed to halt Iran’s nuclear weapons quest. Promise made, promise broken.”

NONSENSE. SHE CAN BLAME SEXISM AND RACISM AND PLENTY OF PEOPLE WILL BACK HER JUST BECAUSE. Reddit’s Ellen Pao Can Only Blame Herself.

I’d like to focus on something that hasn’t been as well explored: the poor job Ellen Pao did running Reddit.

I don’t say that lightly. I’m usually the first one to throw shade when writers who have never managed any project larger than getting themselves to back-to-back press conferences in different parts of town start proclaiming that they know exactly what a CEO should have done. My general feeling is that these people should go spend three months as the manager of a marginally profitable Chik-fil-A franchise, and report back on how easy it is to run a business.

Also — perhaps because of my extensive experience as a woman writing about business and politics — I am convinced that women have a handicap when they’re doing a traditionally “male” job. They are resented by both men and women for stating firm opinions and refusing to back down. Their competence is more quickly questioned. They seem to attract wildly disproportionate anger compared with men who say and do the same things . And indeed, during her time at Reddit, Ellen Pao seems to have endured the same sort of abuse that us ladies on the Internet are used to getting when we make people mad. So I am inclined toward sympathy.

Yet, it is also true that under her brief leadership, Reddit seems to have careened from disaster to disaster, and not just because Ellen Pao’s a woman and people watch female CEOs more closely.

If you’ve got a troubled company, you might want to think twice about hiring a female or minority CEO, since if they perform poorly it will be harder, and more costly, to fire them. These are the incentives that the “social justice” crowd has created.

ANGER IS MAKING US STUPID, Andrew Klavan writes, with assists from Jonah Goldberg and Yoda:

When a man like Trump seems to spit in the eye of the people we fear, we rally behind him thinking we’re fighting back. We’re not. We’re following our fear right down the rabbit hole.

You want to win back your country? Here’s how. Fear nothing. Hate no one. Stick to principles. Unchecked borders are dangerous not because Mexicans are evil but because evil thrives when good men don’t stand guard. Poverty programs are misguided, not because the poor are undeserving criminals, but because dependency on government breeds dysfunction and more poverty. Guns save lives and protect liberty. Property rights guarantee liberty. Religious rights are essential to liberty. Without liberty we are equal only in misery.

These things are true. They’re true for white people and black people, male people and female people, straight people and gay people. We should support the smartest, most proven, most statesmanlike candidate who best represents those principles. And we should do it out of — dare I say the word? — love. Love for our neighbors, our fellow citizens, white and black, male and female, straight and gay.

Read the whole thing.

WELL, THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU PUT A POLITICAL HACK IN CHARGE OF AN IMPORTANT AGENCY: How Much Damage Can the OPM Hackers Do With a Million Fingerprints? “The pilfering of 1.1 million fingerprints is ‘probably the biggest counterintelligence threat in my lifetime,’ one former NSA official said.” It’s also why “biometric security” isn’t secure. If someone steals your password you can change it. If someone steals your fingerprints, DNA, or retinal pattern, they’ve got it for life.

DISEASE: Haiti’s Unstoppable Cholera Outbreak. “A cholera victim can lose several liters of fluid within hours. Cholera can invade the body of a healthy person at daybreak and kill them by sundown.” Note that it was a gift from UN troops. “The cholera was Vibrio cholerae 01, serotype Ogawa, biotype El Tor, a strain never seen in Haiti, and confined until then to Asia and parts of Africa. This same strain of cholera had broken out in Kathmandu on September 23, 2010, shortly before the peacekeepers left for Haiti.”

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PAC, SCHMAC — THEY’D BE BETTER OFF PUTTING THEIR MONEY INTO MEDIA AIMED AT LOW-INFO VOTERS: Top GOP Donors Form New Mystery PAC Focused on 2016: Paul Singer and Ken Griffin are among the early investors.

Hey, guys: Read this piece. For a fraction of the money, you’ll have much more impact.

HOW THE CLEANEST & GREENEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY — NUCLEAR — BECAME VIEWED AS BAD FOR ENVIRONMENT: “While California & others embraced nuclear, faction in Sierra Club saw cheap power as opening door to more people & more development.”

Even the Sierra Club, try as they might, couldn’t prevent California’s growth. The 1970s was a period when California had about half its current population, as Victor Davis Hanson wrote earlier this year. While the Sierra Club and others were busy stopping nuclear development, Jerry Brown and other Democrats in the 1970s also opposed “the completion of state and federal water projects, along with their more recent allowance of massive water diversions for fish and river enhancement, left no margin for error in a state now home to 40 million people,” VDH writes, leading to he dubbed as California’s current “Engineered Drought.”

Brown’s reactionary efforts also set the tone for a state whose attitude has gone from NIMBY — “Not In My Back Yard” to BANANAs — “Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything.”

To be fair though, some then had other motives for not speaking up to move technology forward. As Pete Townshend confessed back in 1980, “I’m for nuclear power, but I haven’t told anyone because I am still hoping to f*** Jane Fonda, like everybody dreams of doing who’s involved in the No Nuke movement.”

(Via Power Line.)

VIDEO: WATCH NBC’S ANDREA MITCHELL ROLL HER EYES AT NETANYAHU, as she bats her pretty little eyelashes at the Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif on Tuesday.

DID WHATABURGER REALLY BAN GUNS? “There’s just one problem with this statement: it might be a lie.”

IT’S LIKE BLACK FRIDAY IN JULY, at Amazon’s Prime Day Sale. But only if you have Prime.

NEXT: A push for polygamous marriages?

EVERYTHING THEY DO IS UNDERHANDED, CORRUPT, AND POLITICIZED: The 2020 census is going to be a mess.

There’s something scary in Census Director John Thompson trying to secretly find someone to run the $13 billion 2020 decennial census — by using his personal e-mail because he wanted to hide the process.

There is something even more frightening in the blatant politics that were going on behind the scenes.

Sunlight, please. We need some disinfecting.