FASTER, PLEASE: Scientists Discover How Vagus Nerve Stimulation Treats Rheumatoid Arthritis. “By selectively stimulating nerve fibers running from the brain to the spleen with electricity, researchers have successfully treated a small group of patients with rheumatoid arthritis. Importantly, the team showed the exact mechanism by which the procedure works: Vagus nerve stimulation activates immune system cells to inhibit the production of key inflammatory proteins, called cytokines, implicated in the disease.”

FLASHBACK: WHEN THE 2012 DNC CONVENTION BOOED GOD AND ISRAEL.

PHILIPPINES REJECTS CHINA TALKS: The link goes to a Reuters report. Why reject bilateral talks? China demanded an unacceptable condition: the Philippines couldn’t mention the The Permanent Court of Arbitration’s decision that nixed most of China’s claims in the South China Sea. This morning StrategyPage’s Jim Dunnigan was a bit pithier: “…the Philippines does not consider the situation a dispute but rather a case of unwarranted Chinese aggression. Now the Philippines has international law on its side.”

DALLAS: Black Lives Matter Organizers Who Marched Before Police Were Shot Make Their Next Move.

CUE THE BEASTIE BOYS SONG: Sabotage in Cleveland: The Melania Trump Speech, claims Steve Schale, who served on Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns in Florida:

I’ve written a fair number of speeches in my career. Anyone worth their salt who has written understands the intentional nature of speechwriting — particularly a speech designed to be delivered to a major audience. Every word, every pause, and every transition is considered. You play it out in your head — you have the principal practice it. Nothing is unintentional. Nothing. Ever.

Whoever wrote Melania Trump’s speech knew what they were doing — they were sabotaging the moment. They wrote a speech that they knew cribbed not only from Michelle Obama, but also from Rick Astley — the latter of which is the dead giveaway. And honeslty [sic] if they didn’t do it as intentional sabotage, then the Trump campaign is a bigger goat show than we all thought.

“The ‘tell’ isn’t the plagiarized part; it’s the Rick Roll… It’s like they signed their work.” Mike Cosper of The Harbor Institute for Faith & Culture tweets:

https://youtu.be/9KtzdP7mR-4

Related: Lewandowski knifes Manafort: If he signed off on a plagiarized speech, he should resign.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Public College President Salaries, 2014-15.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Erdogan is using this failed coup to get rid of the last vestiges of secular Turkey.

“As Istanbul’s mayor, Mr. Erdoğan once said: ‘Democracy is like a streetcar. When you come to your stop, you get off.’ Perhaps desperate to find in Turkey proof that Islamism is compatible with democracy, the West has refused to believe what Turks know: Mr. Erdoğan arrived at his stop years ago,” Michael Rubin wrote on “The Roots of the Turkish Uprising” in the Wall Street Journal in 2013.

AND AGAIN: “A French woman and her three young daughters were severely injured  when they were stabbed at a holiday resort on Tuesday by a Moroccan-born man who reportedly shouted that they were too scantily dressed,” the London Telegraph reports today. “The attacker, named as Mohamed B, 37, ‘may have acted out of religious motives’, French television channel TF1 reported.”

“It’s a tragic coincidence that this keeps happening,” as Glenn wrote on Sunday when USA Today ran a letter to the editor with the sentence, “To our utter dismay, the truck driver involved in the attack bears the same name as the holy founder of Islam, Mohammed.”

From yesterday: “Horror as 19 people are hospitalised by 17-year-old Afghan refugee wielding an AXE and shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ in German train rampage before police shot him dead as he fled the scene.”

THE END OF THE KEMALIST REPUBLIC: Turkey suspends more than 15,000 education workers in widening purge.

It wasn’t a failed coup; it’s a successful purge.

SYMPATHY FOR THE DONALD: MSM uses 9-Year Old Human Shields to Bash Trump, Continues Instead to Unwittingly Create Sympathy for Him.

MELANIA TRUMP STRIKES A BLOW TO OUTDATED SEVENTIES FEMINISM, Roger Simon writes:

Seventies feminism — I know from, alas, firsthand experience — did not make for good and lasting marriages.  Whatever view you may have of its ideology,  it often turned what should have been a union of mates into a perpetual dialectical debate and (sometimes) sexual competition.  The Clintons are an example of a couple who had to deal with this and made compromises to survive that are more than slightly eerie — almost, to be cruel, a form of Macbeth Family Values.  Everything is held together by ambition — and then just barely.

This does not compare well with what we have seen of the Trump family, a close-knit group that could almost be the subject of a 1950s sitcom were they not billionaires.  What we saw from Melania on Monday night is something I have never seen from Hillary — that she really loves her husband.

Roger also addresses the plagiarism charges from last night. Read the whole thing.

PETER PAN REPUBLICANS AND CAPTAIN CROOK: Crooked Hillary in NeverTrumpLand.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1167.

TRAITS ARE NO SUBSTITUTES FOR ACCOMPLISHMENTS, Aaron Clarey of Enjoy the Decline fame writes at his Captain Capitalism blog:

And then there’s leftist religions.

Like a zealot or religious fanatic, leftist fanatics worship and use their made-up religions to fill the hole of nothingness that is otherwise known as their life.  This is why you NEVER see the captain of the football team with a 3.8GPA join the “anarchist/marxist/minarchist” trench-coat wearing, movie-theater-shooting, nerd crowd.  Or the studious Asian engineering major block the interstate near campus.  They have lives.  They have meaning.  They have purpose.  They have agency.  They have value to the rest of society.

But again, those things require work, effort, rigor, math, and intellectual honesty.

Ergo, why do all that hard stuff when you can just claim a religion?

You’re a feminist!
You’re going green!
You eat only organic/non-GMO/gluten-free/whateverthefrickthey’llcomeupwithnextweek!
You’re fighting racism!
You’re helping the poor!
You’re a pacifist!
You have a ADDHDHHDH Autism or Aspergers are bi-polar or whatever you want to tell yourself.

You can claim allegiance to any one of an increasing number of bogus leftist religions and simply wear that trait on your sleeve like a badge of honor.  And the best thing about it, so AWESOME in fact that leftists masturbate to it, is…

you didn’t have to expend one calorie of energy on work to get it.  You simply “declared” you had this trait or believed this religion.  And now, not only does your worthless life have faux-worth.  You are a more intelligent, superior person to those troglodytes who don’t understand “intersectionality.”

Read the whole thing.

The blogger Ace of Spades has written about “The MacGuffinization of American Politics.”  As Ace wrote, “For Obama’s fanbois, this is not politics. This isn’t even America, not really, not anymore. This is a movie. And Barack Obama is the Hero. And the Republicans are the Villains. And policy questions — and Obama’s myriad failures as an executive — are simply incidental. They are MacGuffins only, of no importance whatsoever, except to the extent they provide opportunities for Drama as the Hero fights in favor of them.”

The media never covered Obama as though he was a normal politician submitting bills to Congress and meeting with foreign leaders. Instead, they covered him as though he was Cary Grant or Jimmy Stewart in an epic film as directed by Alfred Hitchcock, hence Ace’s name – the MacGuffin was the otherwise meaningless object that all the characters in an adventure movie desperately want. The microfilm in North By Northwest. The Soviet decoding device in From Russia With Love. The Death Star plans in Star Wars. The Ark of the Covenant, etc.

But I think it’s safe to say that all young people, or the vast majority of them, want to feel their life is some form of an epic quest for adventure, hence the near-universal popularity of films like the original (1977) Star Wars, the Lord of the Rings movies, or Batman Begins, all of which start off with their protagonist depicted as a callow youth, who precedes to then overcome two hours worth of adversity, to emerge by the time the credits roll as The Hero. As Joseph Campbell wrote in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, this quest for adventure is hardwired into most people, all the way back to Homer. (The author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, not the nuclear power plant worker who lives in Springfield.) Up until recently, most teenagers felt a similar sense of accomplishment and pride through such traditional avenues as academic advancement, athletic success, or learning a musical instrument.

But today, as Clarey writes, none of that hard work is necessary to feel life is some sort of epic quest overcoming seemingly near-impossible odds to succeed. Indeed, why even bother cracking a book or breaking a sweat, when, to borrow a line from Jonah Goldberg, “We’re in a weird Nietzschian transition moment where victimhood is the way you assert your will to power.” As he wrote last year:

In 2015, our society is shot through with Nietzschean ressentiment. Today it is a great sin on college campuses — and elsewhere! — to make anyone other than the “privileged” feel uncomfortable, challenged, or otherwise psychologically threatened by the use of the wrong words or concepts.

The University of California recently issued a set of guidelines about the terrible danger of “microaggressions” — small, usually unintended slights that allegedly hurt the feelings of the newly anointed classes of victims. One must no longer say that America is a “melting pot,” for to do so is to suggest that minorities should “assimilate to the dominant culture,” according to the new moralists at the University of California.

And one mustn’t say anything that advances “the Myth of Meritocracy.” Saying “America is the land of opportunity” or “everyone can succeed in this society if they work hard enough” is now a form of bigotry.

Of course, the surest way to guarantee that America is not a meritocracy is to teach young people not only that it isn’t one, but that it’s evil to say it is, or should be, one.

Today, the will to power through victimhood isn’t limited to modern-day academia, but racial relations (hence the “Black Lives Matter” movement, which the DNC-MSM is eager to sustain to maintain the ranks of minority voters), sexual politics in general, and all the way to Hollywood, where millionaire actors and actresses cry victimhood all the way to an even bigger bank account.

In this era of nihilism, in which traits substitute for accomplishments, a former POW running for the White House in 2008 is mocked for being too old and infirm, and an ultra-successful businessman four years later is mocked for giving his employees cancer. Meanwhile, a failed community organizer is compared to God by magazine editors who should know better (and actually do, somewhere deep down in their hearts). And we wonder why ISIS appeals to far too many disaffected youth, as a macho religious alternative to becoming Nietzsche’s dread “Last Man,” as personified by a sniveling figure such as Footie Pajamas Obamacare Boy.

All of which means, as Walter Hudson writes at PJM, “We’ve Entered [An] Era Where ‘No Lives Matter.’”

Emmanuel Goldstein couldn’t have said it any better.

CASUAL RACISM AT THE HILL: Tim Scott is referred to as the GOP’s “lone black senatorial candidate,” but guess what — the Dems only have one, too. Does The Hill refer to Kamala Harris as the Dems’ lone black senatorial candidate, or to Cory Booker as the Dems’ lone black Senator?

CHANGE: It’s the Middle East’s Turn to Buy American Hydrocarbons.

Hydrocarbon trade between the Middle East and the United States has historically been something of a one-way street, as petrostates have made billions selling off their prodigious oil reserves and Qatar has solidified its position as the world’s largest exporter of liquified natural gas (LNG). But the American shale revolution is shaking up the status quo, and two recent shipments of LNG have recently punctuated that shift. . . .

A decade ago, the United States was busy building massive, costly LNG import facilities along its Gulf Coast. What a difference ten years and an energy revolution can make, as those import projects have been idled in favor of export terminals, where workers are chilling America’s substantial stores of shale gas into liquid form and sending them off to ports around the world. The first shipment went to Brazil, but since then cargoes have made their way to Europe and, now, the Middle East.

Like its oil counterpart, the global LNG market is well supplied at the moment, with Qatar and Australia already exporting larger and larger volumes while the United States looks to become a major player in the coming years as more export terminals come online. It’s a buyer’s market, too, as prices have steadily come down both as a result of contracts that have included linkages to oil prices (which are today less than half of what they were two years ago) as well as sluggish demand coupled with surging supplies.

Selling LNG to Kuwait and Dubai won’t suddenly make the Middle East beholden to U.S. suppliers, but it does signal an important and ongoing change in global energy dynamics. And, as more Middle Eastern countries look to derive less of their electricity from costly and relatively inefficient oil-fired power plants, LNG demand should rise in the region. If and when that happens, there will be plenty of producers here in the United States willing to step up and subvert the traditional energy flows between the Middle East and America.

I think it was Malcolm S. Forbes who said in the 1970s that we should leave our huge reserves in the ground, buy Arab oil until it ran dry, then sell them ours at a steep premium. We’re not there yet, but it’s no longer fanciful.

I’M ALL FOR PROSECUTORIAL ACCOUNTABILITY, BUT IT’S FUNNY THAT YOU HAVE TO PROSECUTE COPS TO GET THIS MUCH PUSHBACK: Prosecutors of officers accused in Freddie Gray death face pressure for disbarment.

JAYVEE IN TRAINING FOR KILLER OLYMPIC EVENT. ‘We are Expecting a Larger Audience’: ISIS Supporters in Brazil Talk Attacks as Olympics Near.

ROGER KIMBALL: Thoughts On The Republican Convention, #1. “I conclude, not without some reluctance, that the Wall Street Journal’s Bill McGurn is right: the best case for Donald Trump is this: the alternative is Hillary Clinton.”

“PURLOINED PIFFLE:” I don’t have anything to say about the Melania Trump kerfuffle that I haven’t already said about Joe Biden’s plagiarism scandal that took place back when he was, you know, actually a candidate.

WHAT DO YOU GET WHEN YOU COMBINE insider self-dealing, hypocrisy, rosy scenarios, empty promises and influence peddling? The Clinton Foundation. Check out today’s expose by the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Richard Pollock. Maybe that’s why, for example, the foundation spent $12.6 million celebrating a Bill Clinton birthday, then reported it as a “fund-raising” expense.

TRUE: Obama is not a scientist. JAMA shouldn’t pretend he is. “In a sense, it’s cool that President Obama cares enough about science to want to publish a paper in one of the world’s leading medical journals. But JAMA has set a bad precedent. The article, on healthcare reform in the United States, is problematic not only in its content but in the threat it poses to the integrity of scientific publishing.”

Pretty much everything Obama touches suffers a loss of integrity.

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: After Turkey, An American Coup?