MY USA TODAY COLUMN: “I’d rather have a sister in a whorehouse than a brother in the FBI.”

NEWS YOU CAN USE: A Field Guide to Encountering a Social Justice Warrior.

DEATH OF AN AMERICAN HUCKSTER: The long con of the late Michael Cimino:

By the time Bach arrived in Kalispell [Montana] to try to get a leash on Cimino, the total cost of [Heaven’s Gate] (including debt service) was projected to be $50 million, which was half of the studio’s entire production budget for 1979. (Cimino continued to insist that he would finish the movie for $25 million.) At this point, [UA senior vice-president Steven Bach] realized that United Artists’ continued existence hinged on the movie being completed and becoming a smash-hit. Anything short of that would kill the company.

And it did, killing the ‘70s movie brats’ industry autonomy along the way. Read the whole thing.

FASTER, PLEASE: New regenerative tooth fillings heal your teeth from the inside.

BURIED LEDE: LIBERAL NEWSPAPER COMMITS ACT OF JOURNALISM: Boston Globe Accidentally Reports That Raising the Minimum Wage Kills Jobs.

PRICKS IN FLICKS OBSESS ON POLITICS, NIX THEIR OWN FLICKS: Why Do Hollywood A-Listers Keep Sabotaging Their Own Movies?

In the old days, Hollywood moguls wisely surrounded their stars with a phalanx of PR people to prevent them from sabotaging both their carefully-crafted images and their latest movies. One huge benefit of today’s social media is that we get to see today’s crop of nihilistic stars drop their masks and reveal what they truly think about their audiences. Or the lack there of, as Christian Toto writes in regards to several big budget films that bombed after their stars put their foot in their iPhones.

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MAYBE IT WOULD BE EASIER IF WE JUST STARTED KEEPING TRACK OF THE GREEN POWER PROJECTS THAT AREN’T MONEY-SINKS FOR THE CONNECTED: A Mississippi Power Plant Highlights All That’s Wrong with “Clean Coal.”

JOEL KOTKIN: Why the World Is Rebelling Against ‘Experts:’

This arrogance, in part, stems froms what one writer at the Atlantic has called the war on the stupid. In this formulation, those with elite degrees, including the hegemons on Wall Street and Silicon Valley, dismiss local control as rule by the Yahoos. The progressive ideal of government by experts—sometimes seen as “the technocracy”—may sounds good in Palo Alto or London, but often promise a dim future for the middle class. Expert regulation, often with green goals in mind, take hard-earned gains like car and home ownership and cheap air travel all but out of reach for the middle class, while keeping them around for the globe-trotting elites.

Read the whole thing. It’s a great column and Kotkin is a good guy, but note that it’s appearing in a Website whose editor views those who rebel against their betters in DC as “Wingnuts,” and which grew out of the collapse of a magazine owned by the Washington Post who in its death throes declared “We Are Socialists Now,” shortly before being offloaded to an elderly millionaire rube for $1.00. Experts, heal thy selves.

HEARTBREAK EXPRESS: Dolly Parton said she is not endorsing Hillary Clinton for president.

OBSOLESCENCE: Planes Need Something Better Than the Black Box. “In an era when we can track a cell phone anywhere in the world, shouldn’t we know the whereabouts and status of every commercial airliner in more or less real time? There are two big reasons the industry is dragging its feet: Cost, and the idea that things are basically good enough.”

EXPIRATION DATE, REACHED: Obama says Afghanistan troops levels won’t be cut as he once pledged.

REUTERS: Clinton leads Trump by 13.

Even assuming her lead is real — and that Reuters poll appears to be a outlier — voters might be damning Clinton with faint praise, judging by this little gem buried at the bottom of the report:

Among Clinton’s supporters, nearly half said they were backing her because “I don’t want Donald Trump to win.” A further 39 percent said they “agree with her positions,” and about 13 percent said they “like her personally.”

Hardly a ringing endorsement.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: “I’d rather have a sister in a whorehouse than a brother in the FBI.”

BEFORE YOU CALL HIM A FAILURE, YOU MUST KNOW WHAT HE WAS TRYING TO ACCOMPLISH: Richard Epstein: Barack Obama’s Failed Presidency. “The week after the Fourth of July is a good time to take stock of the presidency of Barack Obama. It is highly unlikely that he will change course in his six remaining months in office, so he will be judged by history on his current record. That record reveals an enormous gap between his grandiose promises and his pitiful performance over the past eight years. . . . The sad truth is that the United States today is weaker economically, more divided socially, and more disrespected across the globe than it was before Obama took office. With few exceptions, he made the wrong choices in all the areas in which he declared the dawn of a new era.”

IMBIBER-IN-CHIEF: Hillary Clinton Plans to Drink Heavily as President.

Upside: At least the 21st Amendment of the Constitution will be safe under Hillary.

Downside: We’re sure going to need it.

CASTING THE FIRST STONE: Hillary Clinton to trash Donald Trump’s business record in Atlantic City.

Clinton once turned $1,000 into $100,000 in only 10 months, just by reading the Wall Street Journal.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1154.

HIGHER EDUCATION IMPLOSION UPDATE: Colorado ‘Bias Response Team’ Threatened Prof To Change His Lessons.

The University of Northern Colorado administrator had no idea he was being recorded last fall as he sat down with an English professor, asking him to change his lessons after a student complained to the school’s controversial “Bias Response Team.”

Heat Street has exclusively obtained this recording, provided by the adjunct professor, who does not have tenure and asked to remain unnamed to avoid retaliation. The conversation’s tone was warm and informal—but its basic message, far less so: Avoid talking about transgender issues or face possible investigation or legal repercussions.

The professor’s transgression? He’d asked his class to discuss controversial social issues, including transgender rights. A student complained to the University’s Bias Response Team. “I would just like the professor to be educated about what trans is and how what he said is not okay because as someone who truly identifies as a transwomen I was very offended and hurt by this,” the student wrote.

Offended, hurt, and privileged is no way to go through life, son.

A TALE OF TWO CITIES: Britain has decided that London won’t be Brussels. Other responses to the failure of Western elites may not be so mannerly.

The pros and cons of Brexit are complicated; reasonable people could and did disagree. But what was most interesting was the reaction to a vote outcome unpredicted by the pollsters or, just as important these days, the betting parlors. In London, and throughout most of Britain’s upper-middle class world, the quality press, and the political establishment—the Great and the Good, in short—the result was not disappointment but curious combination of despair, hysteria, and quiet elation.

Much of the outcry against Brexit was not merely despondent, but, as my Twitter feed revealed, unqualified in its belief that the vote was a catastrophe. Equally unambiguous was the contempt expressed for those on the other side. The professors, business people, and journalists making remarks about the “lizard brain of the British people” had no visible inclination to do what some American conservatives appalled by the rise of Trump have realized they need to do, namely, figure out why a majority of their countrymen went for a choice they consider dangerously crazy.

What also appeared was a manifestation of a nasty class-based bigotry, as acid and ugly as anything an 18th-century aristocrat might have expressed for an uppity cobbler who presumed to have a political opinion. It was manifested most clearly, in London at any rate, by the gilded young who immediately began snarling at the old and the working class who voted for Brexit, and talking—emptily, most likely—about leaving London for elsewhere.

The larger phenomenon here, however, is a crisis not of ignorant masses, but of elites who have failed. All societies, except perhaps the Greek city-states of antiquity, are led by elites or, as the great sociologist Digby Baltzell described them, establishments. As long as they provide their societies with some consequential benefit (prosperity, success in war, or political leadership), can absorb talented non-elite members, and display virtues that the rest of society values (public service, self-sacrifice, or military courage) they deserve to hang on and do.

The elites of London, like those of this country and large parts of the Western world, appear in many ways to have failed those tests. The crash of 2008 crystallized a view of the financial class in particular as reckless, self-dealing manipulators. As Joel Kotkin among others has pointed out, by virtue of how our education systems have evolved, elite youth increasingly marry one another, and the prosperous can (and do) give their children every leg up—which poorer parents cannot hope to match. Meanwhile, the political and intellectual elites deserve, and receive, very little credit for patriotism or courage, because they do not exhibit much. As manifested on campuses in Great Britain as here, they increasingly show themselves intolerant of dissenting opinions, and inclined to bully because they have forgotten (or never learned) how to argue.

The failure of courage, Solzhenitsyn said at a particularly dark point in the Cold War, was in danger of becoming a distinguishing feature of the West. The young people who talked petulantly of abandoning their country because of a vote they did not like were bright graduates of the best universities in the English-speaking world—and severely deficient in pluck. They had no notion of that patriotism which says that when your country is in trouble, you are supposed to fight it out, not begin checking to see if Morgan Stanley is hiring in Madrid. They are not fit to be trusted with political power.

And in the very intemperateness of their reaction lies one of the best reasons to think that Brexit is, with all its hazards, a good thing.

Indeed.

WELL, WE KNOW HOW BILL AND HILLARY WOULD ANSWER THAT QUESTION. Roger Kimball: What Is a ‘Reasonable Prosecutor?’

WHERE THERE’S SMOKE, THERE’S SMOKE: Another Clinton ‘scandal’ goes poof.

Funny how that keeps happening.

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: Iraq: The World Capital of Terrorism.

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