THAT’S NOT GOING TO MAKE ENOUGH VITAMIN D: 10-trillionths of your suntan comes from galaxies beyond the Milky Way.

A TALE OF TWO HEADLINES: Juanita Broaddrick Wants To Be Believed.

—BuzzFeed News, yesterday.

On Rape, Clinton Campaign Deletes ‘You Have The Right to Be Believed’ From Website.

—Breitbart.com, today.

HEALTH WATCH: Hillary Clinton’s ‘Erratic’ Behavior Raises Eyebrows.

There are many things much more worrisome about Hillary Clinton than her health.

FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: Twitter Used to Help Organize New Social Movements. Now It’s Just a ‘Honeypot for Assholes.’

And note this: “The head of Trust & Safety at Twitter is a woman who doesn’t use her legal name. Just let that sink in….”

Related: Meet Del Harvey, Twitter’s Troll Patrol.

More: Report claims Twitter forced comedian to delete Ghostbusters joke because it triggered film’s director.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Chemtrails Aren’t Real, In Case You Were Wondering.

Yeah, and there’s no alien invasion on the way, either.

WAS IT GOOD FOR YOU?

Shot: “Sexual intercourse began in nineteen sixty-three (Which was rather late for me) between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP.”

― British poet Philip Larkin, “Annus Mirabilis,” 1974.

Chaser: “Goodbye to sex: a short and heartfelt eulogy:”

Born in 1963, died 2016 – alas poor Sex. We knew you well. Well, not WELL. We knew you. Slightly. That was a good summer.

But it was with great regret and some tears that last week we learned of your death. All of us will remember where we were when we heard, of course – we were not having you. We were sitting on sofas, TV on, loungewear on, jointly scrolling through our phones for more updates on what the millennials are thinking, eating Doritos.

* * * * * * * *

But why? Why have young people stopped having you? Why have they stopped building their lives around you, the peg their tents were tied to, the mistakes they yearned to make? Why have you died just when, some would argue, we needed you most?

—Eva Wiseman, the London Guardian, yesterday.

Hangover: The Unsexy Truth About Millennials: They’re Poor: If you’re wondering why millennials don’t have much sex, and don’t buy cars, forget social theorizing: the harsh truth lies in their near-empty wallets.

—The Daily Beast, August 5th.

(Guardian essay found via Kathy Shaidle.)

21ST CENTURY HEADLINE: How states use facial recognition to sniff out driver’s license fraud.

Deep learning makes it easy and cheap to scan millions of photos for duplicates and fraud, and since it doesn’t involve any extra data collection or access — you just need to find matching entries, not link them to an identity — privacy groups see it as one of the more benign forms of facial scanning. Forty-three of the 50 states have used some form of that technology, with seven of those states adopting the system for driver’s licenses in the last three years. (The holdouts are California, Missouri, Louisiana, Mississippi, Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont.) But while the scans are still limited, some worry those systems could be the first step toward something more troubling.

One of the driving forces behind the new DMV systems has been a new wave of federal requirements — and newly available federal money to meet those new standards. The RealID Act was passed in 2005 in response to the 9/11 Commission’s identification requirements — including the requirement that driver’s licenses be stored in digital form. States are still in charge of their own licenses, but if licenses don’t meet the new federal requirements, they’ll stop being valid for use in airports as early as 2018.

What about for voting?

FLASHBACK: How Eisenhower solved illegal border crossings from Mexico.

Now, Eisenhower was one of those “good Republicans” who are somehow all dead now. So if we do what he did, that’ll be good, right?

LET’S DO THE TIME WARP AGAIN! Changing History in an RPG via Time Travel 101.

SWEDEN: Summer Inferno of Sexual Assaults.

ANDREW McCARTHY ON CLINTON CORRUPTION AND US: “If someone as squalid as Hillary Clinton is a viable political candidate, that is not a failure of our legal system. It is a failure of our culture.”

Read the whole thing.

WHY CAPITALISM WORKS AND SOCIALISM DOESN’T: ARBITRAGE.

But of course, in a world of socialism — that is, where a government attempts to create perfect fairness and justice by means of coercive distribution — arbitrage poses a mortal threat.  Do you understand why?  If not, there are some good examples coming out of Venezuela, not to mention the ongoing saga of “affordable housing” here in New York.

At the Washington Post’s Wonkblog on Monday, a guy named Matt O’Brien reports on the ongoing disaster in Venezuela.  The title of the article is “Venezuela’s death spiral is getting worse.”   I will give serious credit to Mr. O’Brien for actually doing some investigation of what is causing Venezuela’s problems.  (Contrast that to the likes of idiots from such outlets as the New York Times, CNN and Time Magazine, cited in my posts from May here and here, who purport to give reasons for Venezuela’s economic disaster without ever mentioning socialism, price controls, nationalizations, or anything else of significance.)

Venezuela of course has made a run at creating perfect justice and fairness by the device of price controls.  Included among items with controlled prices are most consumer staples, as well as the currency itself.  As a result, the consumer staples with controlled prices have completely disappeared from stores.  As to the currency, you can’t buy anything with a bolivar, so you need to get dollars; but you can’t get dollars at the controlled price unless you are somehow connected.  On the other hand, if you are importing, say, butter, and you have the right connections, you can get the dollars.  Yet somehow butter still does not appear in the stores.  The government blames “hoarders” — but is someone really hoarding tons of butter somewhere?

As Glenn noted on Saturday in regards to Venezuela, “Leftism impoverishes and kills, again and again. But politicians like it because it offers them control, and opportunities for graft. Voters like it because, well, it’s a con game designed to take advantage of greed and envy. Remember, under free markets the rich become powerful. But under socialism, the powerful become rich. Entirely unrelated: Candidate Who Said There Were Too Many Kinds Of Deodorant Buys His Third House.”

And finally, an exit question: Why Couldn’t What Happened In Venezuela Happen Here?

(Via Maggie’s Farm.)

CHANGE: Congress is getting richer.

The median net worth of lawmakers was just over $1 million in 2013, or 18 times the wealth of the typical American household, according to new research released Monday by the Center for Responsive Politics.

And while Americans’ median wealth is down 43% since 2007, Congress members’ net worth has jumped 28%.

I’ve long thought that elected federal officials should be required to place their assets in a blind trust.

WALL STREET JOURNAL: “As for Mr. Trump, he needs to stop blaming everyone else and decide if he wants to behave like someone who wants to be President—or turn the nomination over to Mike Pence.”

MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE: Whole Foods CEO Drops the Mic on Why Socialism Will Never Work.

John Mackey, chief executive officer of Whole Foods Market, recently debated John Roemer, a Marxist economics professor at Yale, on the question of “Capitalism vs. Socialism: Free to Choose or Free to Lose?”

Roemer, a supporter of former Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, wrote a book called “Free to Lose,” challenging the theme of free-market economist Milton Friedman’s classic, “Free to Choose.” Roemer blames the 2008 financial crisis and growing inequality of wealth on “greedy” capitalists.

Yet during the debate, hosted at FreedomFest in Las Vegas, Mackey pointed out that countries with high economic freedom such as Hong Kong, Singapore and Chile have improved prosperity, while socialist countries such as Greece, Venezuela and North Korea are poor and getting poorer all the time. He also looked at Sweden as a case study, which he reported has lowered its corporate tax rate and reduced its top marginal tax rates and achieved improved economic growth. More broadly, Mackey contended people are better off financially as they enjoy freer markets.

If you think Whole Foods is expensive, wait’ll you try government ownership of the means of production.

ISLAMIC STATE ALTERS VICTORY CONDITIONS: As it loses territory, the Islamic State is returning to “dispersed organization” mode.

THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER: ‘Nightly Show’ Canceled; Larry Wilmore “Saddened” By “Unblackening” at Comedy Central:

Wilmore, who informed his staff of the network’s decision early Monday, didn’t hide his disappointment. “I’m really grateful to Comedy Central, Jon Stewart, and our fans to have had this opportunity,” he says in a statement to THR, leaning on his “Keeping it 100” mantra as he continued: “But I’m also saddened and surprised we won’t be covering this crazy election or ‘The Unblackening’ as we’ve coined it. And keeping it 100, I guess I hadn’t counted on ‘The Unblackening’ happening to my time slot as well.”

Three questions: On the one hand, if you run with Wilmore’s claim and it’s how it’s framed by the Hollywood Reporter in its headline to its logical conclusion, they’re accusing Comedy Central and its parent company Viacom of institutional racism for cancelling him. If so, why are Democrat-run media outlets such cesspits of racism?

On the other hand, what does Wilmore’s cancellation say about the viewing habits of Comedy Central’s core audience of leftwing coastal elites and those who virtue signal that they wish to be members of the corporatist caste?

And finally, on the gripping hand, didn’t Jon Stewart “jokingly” warn Wilmore in 2010 that his race card had been maxed out?

QUESTION ASKED: After Trump, can the Republican Party be rebuilt? From Ricochet’s Jon Gabriel, writing in the Arizona Republic:

Accomplishing these recommendations is far from easy. Not only will it require years of hard work, it also will require elites to place their fellow Americans’ welfare above their own vanity, power, and quarterly dividend statements. This cannot be a temporary pose to trick the “rubes,” but a change in heart, mind and direction. The new party bosses must admit that much of the work they do in Washington is either useless or downright counter-productive.

If the GOP isn’t willing to make these changes, a new party will have to rise from its ashes.

Read the whole thing.

Related: When it comes to rebuilding the GOP, “Evolutionary Change Isn’t Going To Cut It Any More,” one of Ace’s co-bloggers posits.

GERMAN INTELLIGENCE: We Have Evidence ISIS Hides ‘Hit Squads’ Among Syrian Refugees.

According to Politico, Manfred Hauser — the vice president of BayLfV, the Bavarian region’s intelligence gathering apparatus — told the BBC Thursday that officials must “accept we have hit squads and sleeper cells in Germany.”

“We have substantial reports that among the refugees there are hit squads,” he added. “There are hundreds of these reports, some from refugees themselves.”

Hauser stated that BayLfV is currently following up on the reports of ISIS operatives inside German borders, but maintained the investigation is far from complete.

Why must Germans “accept” this?

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1194.

KATIE PAVLICH: ‘THERE AREN’T AS MANY CONSERVATIVES IN THE COUNTRY AS WE THOUGHT.’ “When people like [conservative Sen.] Ben Sasse are the ‘enemy,’ we’re in a really bad spot,” she added.

FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: Anti-Semitism At The Olympics Is Completely Out Of Control.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. PAC Operative Confesses, “We Killed the Tea Party”

What began as an organic, policy-driven grass-roots movement was drained of its vitality and resources by national political action committees that dunned the movement’s true believers endlessly for money to support its candidates and causes. The PACs used that money first to enrich themselves and their vendors and then deployed most of the rest to search for more “prospects.” In Tea Party world, that meant mostly older, technologically unsavvy people willing to divulge personal information through “petitions”—which only made them prey to further attempts to lighten their wallets for what they believed was a good cause. While the solicitations continue, the audience has greatly diminished because of a lack of policy results and changing political winds.

A lot of well-intentioned people have been duped out of millions of dollars, with nothing to show for it but increasing electoral outrage.

SUBSIDIZING THE RICH AND CONNECTED: Poor Ohioans’ Tax Dollars Fund Rich People’s TV Shows.

If the existence of the show “Vanilla Ice Goes Amish” is not ridiculous enough, try the idea of giving it government funding. Believe it or not, Ohio taxpayers paid for this show’s production.

Under the recently revised Ohio Motion Picture Tax Credit, annual funding for film productions in the state will double to $40 million. This credit is refundable, meaning Ohio taxpayers actually have to cut checks to production companies that film timeless classics such as “Alpha Dogz Presents: Pups United.” (Buckeyes, you need to watch this trailer to see how your tax dollars are being used.) To be fair, since the state’s film tax credit program was first passed in 2009, blockbuster hits including “The Avengers” and “Captain America: Winter Soldier” have also been filmed in Ohio. But does subsidizing film actually pay off?

Well, it pays off for some people. . . .

I had a piece about this in the Wall Street Journal a while back. Also, repeal the Hollywood Tax Cuts!