QUICK, LET’S MOCK THEM FOR THIS: Italy Proposes Law To Make Mocking People Online Illegal.

NO. WAY. Bill Clinton’s Speaking Fee Overlaps With Foundation Business.

The timing of Bill Clinton’s speech income, from a perfume trade group in which a large member would later benefit from a Clinton Foundation project in Haiti, represents the kind of overlapping of private and charitable interests that has become a political liability for his wife as she runs for office. The Clinton Foundation has previously drawn attention for accepting donations from companies and foreign governments with business before the State Department when it was led by Mrs. Clinton.

Mr. Clinton, for his part, has given so many speeches to companies and groups in recent years, and the Clinton Foundation has collected donations from so many corporations and organizations, that this kind of overlap seems almost inevitable.

Convenient, too.

NOW OUT: Kurt Schlichter’s new novel, People’s Republic, which kind of takes up where my Coups paper left off. . . .

LONDON DAILY MAIL: “ANTHONY WEINER CARRIED ON A MONTHS-LONG ONLINE SEXUAL RELATIONSHIP WITH A TROUBLED 15-YEAR-OLD GIRL, telling her she made him ‘hard,’ asking her to dress up in ‘school-girl’ outfits and pressing her to engage in ‘rape fantasies.’”

And you thought the story the New York Post broke that led to Huma announcing her separation from him at the end of August was lurid.

Because Bill officiated at their wedding, and because Huma serves as Hillary’s Girl Friday, the American media (read: DNC-MSM) will go into overdrive to assure that this story never impacts Hillary between now and November.

As Jim Treacher once said, “Modern journalism is all about deciding which facts the public shouldn’t know because they might reflect badly on Democrats.” And as Iowahawk once tweeted, “Journalism is about covering important stories. With a pillow, until they stop moving.”

Both apply in spades here.

UPDATE: File under questions that no one in the DNC-MSM dare ask: “Why are Hillary’s circles so full of sexual predators?”

EVERYTHING IS HARD: Fitness trackers may actually make you gain weight: In two-year study, regular dieters did better than those with technology.

FIVE YEARS, WHAT A SURPRISE: Obama Administration Considers Arming Syrian Kurds Against ISIS.

Deciding whether to arm the Syrian Kurds is a difficult decision for Mr. Obama, who is caught in the middle trying to balance the territorial and political ambitions of Turkey and the Syrian Kurds, two warring American allies that Washington needs to combat the Islamic insurgency.

Directly providing weapons for the first time to the Syrian Kurds, whom American commanders view as their most effective ground partner against the Islamic State, would help build momentum for the assault on Raqqa. But arming them would also aggravate Mr. Obama’s already tense relations with Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The United States and Turkey sharply disagree over Syria’s Kurdish militias, which Turkey sees as its main enemy in Syria.

Independent Kurdistan should have been the price President Bush made Turkey pay for their intransigence in 2003. And Kurdistan would have been, as Ralph Peters noted, “the most pro-Western state between Bulgaria and Japan.”

It still could be.

THE IMPORTANT THING TO REMEMBER IS, WHETHER YOU’RE GETTING SEXUAL ATTENTION OR NOT, IT’S ALWAYS MEN’S FAULT: Longing For The Male Gaze.

JOHN TAMNY: ‘America’s Raise’ Wholly Ignores the Real Story of U.S. Income.

What left and right properly pointed out about the median income news is that income was even higher in 1999. So if we ignore for now just how easy it is to twist statistics, the simple truth is that Americans got a raise in 2015 to levels that would have distressed the 1999 worker. Even more interesting is the sad reality that the 1999 dollar was quite a bit more valuable than the one in 2016. Deep thinkers view the mere mention of gold as low rent, but the dollar bought roughly 1/279th of an ounce of gold in 1999 versus less than 1/1300th of an ounce in 2016. Gasoline back then retailed for about .98 cents a gallon.

The above figures hopefully remind us that modern income gains are somewhat illusory, but they’re most useful for explaining what has been sixteen years of wage stagnation. More than elite thinkers would ever like to admit, 21st century wage stagnation has sprung from a lack of investment. Unquestionably. Because when investment soars, so does worker productivity and wages. Companies very much want to give out raises. But when investment lags, so does productivity, and with it so do wages stagnate.

Investing is a sucker’s bet so long as the Fed keeps King Dollar dethroned and Washington picks the winners and losers.

I’M NOT SAYING THAT IT’S ALIENS. BUT IT’S ALIENS. The Cloud on Titan That Shouldn’t Exist: The mystery cloud is made of material that doesn’t exist anywhere else in Titan’s atmosphere. So where did it come from?

SURPRISE! Democratic lawmakers pushing ‘public option’ amid ♡bamaCare!!! woes.

It’s almost as though ObamaCare was just a stalking horse for single payer all along.

AT CLEMSON, LEFTISTS CALL FELLOW STUDENTS WHO DISAGREE “TRASH INDIVIDUALS.” I guess that’s sort of like Hillary’s Basket of Deplorables.

Meanwhile, I admire the Clemson students who are standing up for free speech.

THIS IS DEFINITELY A BUG, NOT A FEATURE: Apple and Google Browser Tweaks Could Boost Mobile Video.

Apple Inc. and Google made tweaks to their popular mobile web browsers recently to enable video content to play automatically in web pages, provided audio is muted.

The changes could result in a boost in mobile video consumption for online publishers if they allow their videos to play automatically, and it could unlock new revenue opportunities as a result.

For marketers, the tweaks will enable them to automatically play video content when potential customers visit their websites.

Will Google or Apple be paying for our increased data usage? And then there’s the annoyance of having autoplay videos taking up valuable real estate on tiny mobile screens.

“User hostile” is the correct description of this kind of thing.

MICHAEL WALSH REVIEWS ANDREW KLAVAN’S NEW BOOK, THE GREAT GOOD THING:

Who is a Jew? What is a Christian? Can one be both at the same time? And who, precisely, gets to decide? These and other thorny questions are addressed by (full disclosure) my friend, PJ Media colleague, and fellow author and screenwriter Andrew Klavan in a new book that is at once challenging, depressing, and, in the end, profoundly joyous. In short, something for everyone and something to offend everyone, as a great good book should be.

Read the whole thing.

YA THINK? Trump-Clinton debate expected to shatter records.

21ST CENTURY HEADLINES: Mind-Controlled Nanobots Used to Release Chemicals in Living Cockroaches.

This is wild: a team of Israeli scientists developed a contraption that uses a person’s brain waves to remotely control DNA-based nanorobots — while the nanobots were inside a living cockroach. When prompted by a human thought, the clam shell-like robots opened up, revealing a drug-like molecule that tweaked the physiology of the cockroach’s cells.

Though “merely a demonstration and proof of concept,” the technology represents a new era of brain-nanomachine interfaces that links a person’s mental state to bioactive payloads such as drugs. Future techniques that build upon this prototype could be helpful for schizophrenia, depression or other mental disorders, in that the drugs only activate when a patient’s brain waves show signs of abnormality.

I’m not sure whether to say “faster, please” or worry about what Skynet might do with an army of mind-controlled cockroaches.

TRUMP: HE’S EVERY BOOGIEMAN THE LEFT NEEDS!

Shot: Bloomberg “Reporter” To Hillary Clinton: Do You Fear the Russians Are Actually Behind this False-Flag Bombing to Try to Throw the Election to Trump?

—Ace of Spades, yesterday.

Chaser: “The World of Today,” a lengthy recent essay in Medium.com that uses the 1941 suicide of legendary Austrian author Stefan Zweig after fleeing the Nazis to bash both Brexit (in which England chose once again not to go over the cliff with a unified and socialist Europe) and Trump. Watch as the author lays down multiple (and fascinating) early paragraphs about Zweig’s history, and photos of Weimar and Nazi book burnings, on the way to ultimately not so subtly Godwinizing Trump.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1231.

UNEXPECTEDLY: Craft Breweries Abound in States with Fewer Regulations.

Here’s to freedom – as Amnesty International used to say, before their own style of fundamental transformation.

VENEZUELA IS FAILING, BUT IRONY IS STILL GOING STRONG: How Bad Off Is Oil-Rich Venezuela? It’s Buying U.S. Oil

One oil rig was idle for weeks because a single piece of equipment was missing. Another was attacked by armed gangs who made off with all they could carry. Many oil workers say they are paid so little that they barely eat and have to keep watch over one another in case they faint while high up on the rigs.

Venezuela’s petroleum industry, whose vast revenues once fueled the country’s Socialist-inspired revolution, underwriting everything from housing to education, is spiraling into disarray.

To add insult to injury, the Venezuelan government has been forced to turn to its nemesis, the United States, for help.

“You call them the empire,” said Luis Centeno, a union leader for the oil workers, referring to what government officials call the United States, “and yet you’re buying their oil.”

It seems doubtful that Venezuela’s socialists will hang us with the rope we sell them.

TO BE FAIR, IT’S ONLY ACTUALLY MEANT TO FIX HER PROBLEM WITH YOUNG VOTERS: George Leef: No, the Clinton Plan Won’t “Fix College.”

THIS IS THE WAY OF THINGS IN LATE SOCIALISM: Oil Workers Starve as Venezuela’s Crude Output Collapses.

Venezuelan oil workers are starving as the country’s production shrinks. Few things are breaking Caracas’ way these days, but its struggles to keep pumping oil, its most important resource, are undoubtedly at the very top of President Maduro’s list of concerns.

Actually, I’m pretty sure his top concern is to finish the last bit of looting and then figure out how to get safely out of the country.

Earlier this year Venezuela suffered its largest one-month drop in oil production in more than a decade, and things haven’t improved much since then. Output has dropped roughly one million barrels per day over the past 18 years, and analysts expect a further decline through the rest of 2016.

Two years ago it was reported that Venezuela needed oil prices to reach $120 per barrel in order to balance its budget. At ~$45 per barrel, oil prices a far cry from that so-called breakeven level, and bargain crude is sending the petrostate’s economy into a death spiral. Power shortages are forcing producers to cut output and oil services companies are refusing to cooperate with country’s state-owned oil company because they aren’t being paid for their work. Crises beget crises, and it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets any better.

By failing to ensure that the coup against Hugo Chavez succeeded, the United States left Venezuela to over a decade of horror, and it’s not over yet.

PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT? South Korea, US to simulate attack on nuclear facility.

TRUMP, THE SCARIEST CENTRIST THE LEFT HAS EVER ENCOUNTERED: If Trump’s Not Conservative, Why Do Democrats Fear and Loathe Him?

GOOD LORD: At Least 12 Charlotte Cops Injured During Riot After Fatal Police Shooting.

And the obligatory: