EXPLOSION ROCKS CHINESE CITY OF TIANJIN — VIDEO: “Handheld footage captures a series of explosions in the Chinese city of Tianjin on Wednesday night. Allegedly the explosions happened in an industrial part of the city but reports are still coming in as to what might have caused them. The number of casualties are not yet known.”

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Trump-Sanders 2016, that’s the ticket!

I WAS EXPECTING AN EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOM: The Ground-Shaking Power of the M777A2 Howitzer. “The M777 Lightweight Towed Howitzer is the most recent 155 mm howitzer, debuting in 2005. The model used here, the A2, has additional software upgrades that allow it to use Excalibur GPS-guided rounds, making the M77A2 incredibly accurate from up to 25 miles away. (For comparison, the gun it replaced, the M198 howitzer, had an effective range of 14 miles, or just under 20 miles if using rocket-assisted artillery rounds.)”

HMM: Testing Trust in Autonomous Vehicles by Fooling Human Passengers.

KLINTONERDÄMMERUNG: This is a great parody of Hillary’s email scandal. But isn’t there buried lede here that there’s more than one scene from Downfall that can be recaptioned?

SIXTH PLANNED PARENTHOOD VIDEO: ORGANS HARVESTED WITHOUT PATIENT’S CONSENT.

KA-BOOM: Hillary Tweets: Republicans like Gov. Walker are making it harder to afford college & pay off debt. Hillary says that’s wrong.

Scott Walker replies:

I do believe that the GOP field is getting feistier.

HEY, REMEMBER WHEN THEY WERE TELLING US WE WERE AT “PEAK OIL?” Everybody point and laugh.

NARRATIVE CONTROL: Why Did the Media, All at Once, Proclaim the Evils of Air Conditioning?

IN FERGUSON, AN OATH-KEEPER DENOUNCES ABUSIVE POLICING: “Enough of this. Enough of this violence.”

WHO DOESN’T KNOW THIS? Why you should ALWAYS slice meat against the grain: Video reveals the science behind keeping steaks tender.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Trump-Sanders 2016, that’s the ticket!

SANDERS +7 OVER CLINTON IN IN N.H.: The latest Boston Herald poll conducted Aug. 7-10 has Bernie Sanders beating Hillary Clinton by 7 points in New Hampshire among likely voters in the Democrats’ primary. The poll revealingly showed that a majority of Democrats–51%–described Clinton’s candidacy as “you could support her, but you’re not enthusiastic about her candidacy.” 46 percent of those polled thought Joe Biden “should” challenge Clinton for the nomination, with 42% saying he “should not,” and 12% “unsure.”

Clinton’s support should dip even further now that it’s been confirmed that she did, in fact, receive/send top secret classified State Department emails using her unsecured home email server.

RELATED: The Washington Post, “Bernie Sanders’ big challenge explained in 2 charts.” Apparently, it’s blacks. They don’t really like him.

DO YOU WANT ME TO TAKE YOUR TOYS TO GOODWILL OR ARE YOU GOING TO CLEAN THE [BLEEP] PLAYROOM?!?! Steve Green contemplates the pros and cons of going full Samuel L. Jackson on his kids.

My dad would on very rare occasion channel his WWII drill instructor with me (sort of a PG version of Lee Ermey) — but as with Steve going full SLJ on his brood, it took a lot for him to reach that point.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 825.

SMART DIPLOMACY’S ENDGAME: Administration Abandons Failed Syria Program:

The Obama Administration may quietly be dropping its commitment to the failed, U.S.-run fighter scheme in Syria, which was the cause of much derision recently when 23 of the only 60 men the program trained were captured. . . .

Seeing officials finally move to distance themselves from the training program, even if only in an off-the-record manner, is heartening. The first step to solving a problem, as the saying goes, is to admit you have one, and America’s policy with regard to Syrian forces has had a serious problem lately. As a “senior defense advisor” told The Daily Beast, “I don’t understand why we are still training, other than to inoculate criticism. … [The administration] cannot admit it is a complete disaster.”
But a pivot to the YPG would be far more complicated than it is presented here as being, largely because of our new alliance with the Turks. They have no intention (to put it mildly) of allowing the anti-ISIS fight to create a new Kurdish power in the region. In fact, as Dov Friedman has argued in our pages, Ankara seems to see the campaign against ISIS as an opportunity to crush Kurdish regional aspirations. So the Administration’s trial balloon in this case proposes something completely at odds with its recent move to cooperate with Turkey in Syria.

Among the groups that can field real fighters in Syria, Kurdish forces are in many ways the most aligned with America’s interests.

It’s no wonder that the administration has treated them so shabbily.

JERRY POURNELLE ON THE IRAN DEAL: “Everyone must understand that the American Era is over. . . . For some this was an objective to achieve. For others it is a disaster. For all it is a coming fact. The nuclear weapon, like the .45 Colt, is an equalizer, and it is now inevitable that Iran will acquire nuclear weapons whenever they decide to do so, given that the deal essentially gives up on inspections, and Iran has announced that under no circumstance will there be any inspection of their military installations even if there is inspection – after 24 day’s notice – of their peaceful installations. Intelligence experts say Iran is about a year from their decision to have them. My guess is that there will be a demonstration in Summer, 2017. Meanwhile the other nations of the Middle East will rush to acquire their own; they can read the newspapers as well as I can.”

Everyone sees this coming, yet the Obama Administration forges ahead. Why?

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TWEET OF THE DAY: “The earnestly naive Bernie Sanders is who the Democratic party wants to be. The corrupt and venal Hillary Clinton is who they are.”

FROM THE FOLKS AT F.I.R.E.: 10 Things ‘The New Yorker’ Gets Wrong About Free Speech (Part 1).

HE’S ON SOLID GROUND HERE: Jeb Bush faults Hillary Clinton for ‘premature’ Iraq withdrawal.

On Tuesday night, Jeb Bush, who is seeking the Republican presidential nomination, attacked President Obama and former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton for their “premature” decision to withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq — a move he describes as a “fatal error.”

“It was a case of blind haste to get out, and to call the tragic consequences somebody else’s problem,” he said. “Rushing away from danger can be every bit as unwise as rushing into danger, and the costs have been grievous.”

That’s absolutely right. In fact, I think I’ll repeat this post again:

BOB WOODWARD: Bush Didn’t Lie About WMD, And Obama Sure Screwed Up Iraq In 2011.

[Y]ou certainly can make a persuasive argument it was a mistake. But there is a time that line going along that Bush and the other people lied about this. I spent 18 months looking at how Bush decided to invade Iraq. And lots of mistakes, but it was Bush telling George Tenet, the CIA director, don’t let anyone stretch the case on WMD. And he was the one who was skeptical. And if you try to summarize why we went into Iraq, it was momentum. The war plan kept getting better and easier, and finally at the end, people were saying, hey, look, it will only take a week or two. And early on it looked like it was going to take a year or 18 months. And so Bush pulled the trigger. A mistake certainly can be argued, and there is an abundance of evidence. But there was no lying in this that I could find.

Plus:

Woodward was also asked if it was a mistake to withdraw in 2011. Wallace points out that Obama has said that he tried to negotiate a status of forces agreement but did not succeed, but “A lot of people think he really didn’t want to keep any troops there.” Woodward agrees that Obama didn’t want to keep troops there and elaborates:

Look, Obama does not like war. But as you look back on this, the argument from the military was, let’s keep 10,000, 15,000 troops there as an insurance policy. And we all know insurance policies make sense. We have 30,000 troops or more in South Korea still 65 years or so after the war. When you are a superpower, you have to buy these insurance policies. And he didn’t in this case. I don’t think you can say everything is because of that decision, but clearly a factor.

We had some woeful laughs about the insurance policies metaphor. Everyone knows they make sense, but it’s still hard to get people to buy them. They want to think things might just work out, so why pay for the insurance? It’s the old “young invincibles” problem that underlies Obamcare.

Obama blew it in Iraq, which is in chaos, and in Syria, which is in chaos, and in Libya, which is in chaos. A little history:

As late as 2010, things were going so well in Iraq that Obama and Biden were bragging. Now, after Obama’s politically-motivated pullout and disengagement, the whole thing’s fallen apart. This is near-criminal neglect and incompetence, and an awful lot of people will pay a steep price for the Obama Administration’s fecklessness.

Related: National Journal: The World Will Blame Obama If Iraq Falls.

Related: What Kind Of Iraq Did Obama Inherit?

Plus, I’m just going to keep running this video of what the Democrats, including Harry Reid and Hillary Clinton, were saying on Iraq before the invasion:

Because I expect a lot of revisionist history over the next few months.

Plus: 2008 Flashback: Obama Says Preventing Genocide Not A Reason To Stay In Iraq. He was warned. He didn’t care.

And who can forget this?

FACT: President Obama kept his promise to end the war in Iraq. Romney called the decision to bring our troops home “tragic.”

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) October 22, 2012

Yes, I keep repeating this stuff. Because it bears repeating. In Iraq, Obama took a war that we had won at a considerable expense in lives and treasure, and threw it away for the callowest of political reasons. In Syria and Libya, he involved us in wars of choice without Congressional authorization, and proceeded to hand victories to the Islamists. Obama’s policy here has been a debacle of the first order, and the press wants to talk about Bush as a way of protecting him. Whenever you see anyone in the media bringing up 2003, you will know that they are serving as palace guard, not as press.

Related: Obama’s Betrayal Of The Iraqis.

UPDATE: A reader emails: “Thanks for revisiting everything we were saying about Iraq/Obama/Dems in 2008/10/11 in today’s posts. Bonus Bush never lied. Can’t be said enough. They wanted a Vietnam and when Bush refused to give it to them, they grabbed it and made it one.”

ANIMAL RIGHTS: A DANGEROUS ASPECT OF OUR NEW SECULAR RELIGION: I wonder if Nietzsche knew that having killed God, man would simply begin to substitute one religion with another?

ASHE SCHOW: How ’emotional reasoning’ informs current campus sexual assault hysteria:

The notion that one’s negative feelings reflect reality is permeating our college campuses when it comes to free speech and sexual assault.

In an informative article for the Atlantic, Foundation for Individual Rights in Education president Greg Lukianoff and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt tackle “The Coddling of the American Mind” — specifically how “microagressions” and “trigger warnings” are leading to mental health problems on college campuses.

While discussing the reality distortions identified by cognitive behavioral therapy, Lukianoff and Haidt invoke the concept of “emotional reasoning,” defined by adjunct psychiatric professor David D. Burns as assuming “that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are: ‘I feel it, therefore it must be true.’ ” The distortion is also defined by other cognitive therapy experts as letting “your feelings guide your interpretation of reality.”

Internet commenters might recognize this as “the feelz.” Although Lukianoff and Haidt restrict their explanation of “emotional reasoning” to college speech codes, it also applies to the way campus sexual assault is now treated.

As Lukianoff and Haidt point out, “subjective feelings are not always trustworthy guides; unrestrained, they can cause people to lash out at others who have done nothing wrong.” This is the case for some sexual assault accusations, where feelings of regret in the weeks, months or even years after an encounter suddenly feel like evidence that another person committed a heinous crime.

We saw this in the case of John Doe at Washington & Lee University. John’s accuser attended a presentation by the school’s Title IX officer Lauren Kozak, who asserted that “regret equals rape.” This truly dangerous idea is an emerging concept being supported by various individuals, including herself.

The idea that feelings, developed over time and after the intervention of college administrators or therapists, have been shaping attitudes toward sexual assault with devastating consequences. Even one of the top advisers to colleges on the issue, Brett Sokolow, acknowledged that sometimes accusers “genuinely believe they have been assaulted, despite overwhelming proof that it did not happen.”

It’s always like that in a witch hunt.