EVERYTHING IS BROKEN: “A non-nuclear physicist was invited to present a paper at a nuclear physics conference. He submitted a gibberish response and was accepted to present!”

Christoph Bartneck, an associate professor at the Human Interface Technology laboratory at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, received an email inviting him to submit a paper to the International Conference on Atomic and Nuclear Physics in the US in November.

“Since I have practically no knowledge of nuclear physics I resorted to iOS autocomplete function to help me writing the paper,” he wrote in a blog post on Thursday. “I started a sentence with ‘atomic’ or ‘nuclear’ and then randomly hit the autocomplete suggestions.”

Idiocracy wasn’t meant to be a how-to guide for life in the 21^st century.

SECURITY: Massive Internet Outage Could Be a Sign of Things to Come. “The Dyn attack was clearly more than a test, and its severity certainly fits with Schneier’s hypothesis that someone, somewhere is trying to learn how to cause widespread disruption. The question of who is behind attacks like this, though, remains unanswered. Criminals are unlikely to be motivated by such attacks, as there’s little to gain from them other than widespread disruption. That lends some weight to Schneier’s suggestion that a large nation state, such as China or Russia, could be developing large-scale DDoS capabilities. Though it’s impossible to say for sure.”

THE 21ST CENTURY ISN’T TURNING OUT AS I’D HOPED: ‘He didn’t know the boy didn’t want to be raped’ Austrian court throws out Iraqi migrant child sex charge.

Take a bow, Angela.

BIG TALK FROM A GUY WHO COULDN’T BUILD A WEBSITE: President Obama Pokes Fun At Samsung’s Fire-Prone Phone.

THE EMPIRE BUILDS THE BIGGEST DEATH STAR YET: “AT&T-Time Warner deal would create the nation’s largest entertainment company and is already raising antitrust concerns… Just 15 months ago, AT&T became the nation’s largest pay-TV operator when it acquired DirecTV. Time Warner would give it HBO, CNN, TBS, TNT, Cartoon Network and Hollywood’s biggest television and film studio, Warner Bros.”

As Ed Morrissey writes, “Everything old is new again. Thirty-five years ago, the government forced AT&T into ending its telecom monopoly, breaking the company up into its component parts and touching off an era of rapid communications innovation and expansion. Rather than reassemble its former monopoly, AT&T has begun to verticalize itself within a telecom-entertainment delivery paradigm.”

It’s the media world’s equivalent of the Penn Central merger or Beatrice. And as with the Penn Central merger in 1968, “AT&T-Time Warner may signal start of new media industry consolidation,” Reuters notes. What could go wrong with such a giant conglomerate?

(Classical reference in headline.)

IBD/TIPP TRACKING POLL: Trump Up 2 Points Nationwide, While Clinton Campaigns As If The Race Is Already Won.

Well, most polls show Trump way behind, but IBD, Rasmussen, and LAT/Dornhiser show him tied or ahead.

THE NEW CRITERION: Here’s to 35 years of required reading.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1263.

SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE: Tom Hanks and Black Jeopardy.

HILLARY CLINTON: Architect Of Failure.

Let’s briefly review her qualifications to be commander in chief and focus on key international decisions considered to be, by her supporters, a strength. Clinton’s policy decisions have affected thousands: decisions that resulted in the loss of our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines; decisions that have cost this country trillions of dollars; decisions that have destabilized the Middle East and decisions that demonstrate her decision-making quality (a quality that is sadly lacking).

Unlike Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton was a sitting United States senator who voted for the war in Iraq. By that vote in 2003, she bears some responsibility for our involvement. Later, when the war was at a tipping point in 2007 and General David Petraeus advocated for a surge of U.S. forces to regain lost momentum, she voted against it.

As secretary of state she failed to negotiate a residual force that would have prevented Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki from creating sectarian strife. The ensuing strife led to the creation of an irregular war between Sunni and Shia with the Islamic State growing from that turmoil.

Each decision point was a critical event in U.S.-Iraq relations, and each a significant failure. Each have Clinton’s fingerprints on them. The latter two clearly demonstrate arrogance and a a disdain for military recommendations.

Clinton considers the 2011 overthrow of Moammar Gadhafi in Libya to be one of her finest hours as secretary of state. President Obama considers it one of his worst failures. As secretary of state, she pushed for U.S. and NATO involvement against Gaddafi. When he was overthrown, there was no plan for follow-up governance. The result was instability, a huge refugee flow into southern Europe and the Islamic State gaining a foothold in Libya.

Read the whole thing, and you’ll see why she’d rather run on women’s issues.

ROGER SIMON: If the Election Were about Trump’s Gettysburg Policies, He Would Win in a Landslide.

JONATHAN HAIDT: Why Universities Must Choose One Telos: Truth or Social Justice. It’s true that they are mutually incompatible.

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WHEREVER HE GOES, BILL CLINTON KEEPS RUNNING INTO PROTESTERS WHO CALL HIM A RAPIST. It’s not really the discussion we need to be having as a nation right now, but it’s still kind of gratifying to see that they’re unable to shut this stuff down the way they used to.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. It’s Time To Make The Supreme Court Boring Again.

Ideally, in the Glenn Thrush definition of the word.

THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS:

“You know that I’m going to first of all denounce the utilization of this intrusion by Wikipedia through the Russian intrusion,” Jackson Lee said in an interview with MSNBC on Friday. “This is what it’s about. Espionage just like what was said over these last couple of days. We need to be concerned about the intrusion of Russia and Putin in these elections.”

—Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) confuses Wikipedia with WikiLeaks (Video.)

FLASHBACK: In 2008, Obama said the party in power can manipulate elections.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: ABA Council Approves 75% Minimum Bar Pass Rate. “The council voted for the stricter standard over the opposition of diversity advocates who warned that schools with large numbers of minority students could lose their accreditation and that the stricter rule would prompt schools to admit fewer minority students. That, in turn, would exacerbate the legal profession’s longstanding diversity problem, they argued.”

I’M NOT HOLDING MY BREATH:

Shot: Penn Station, Reborn? A visionary plan to restore the transit hub to its former glory as part of West Side redevelopment.

—Catesby Leigh, City Journal, Summer 2016 issue.

Chaser: Penn Station: Back to the Future.

—Me, Tech Central Station, September 13, 2005.

(Via Maggie’s Farm.)

HUFFINGTON POST: Fox News Just Landed A Brutal, Clean Hit On Hillary Clinton’s Campaign: The campaign is having to answer for $12 million the Clinton Foundation received from the king of Morocco. “Campaign manager Robby Mook and longtime Clinton confidant John Podesta thought the deal ― in which Clinton had committed to speak at an event for the king on the condition of his $12 million donation ― would look bad. Clinton aide Huma Abedin tried to explain that it was simply too late to back out.”

That was then. This is now: “‘There’s nothing new here,’ Mook replied, deflecting to Donald Trump’s sagging poll numbers.”

I WOULD SAY THE ANGER STIRRED UP TRUMP RATHER THAN THE REVERSE, BUT YEAH. Joel Kotkin: Trump Will Go Away, but the Anger He’s Stirred Up Is Just Getting Started.

Exacerbating this cultural and class discussion is the growing division between the coastal and interior economies. Essentially, as I have argued elsewhere, the country is split fundamentally by how regions makes money. The heartland regions generally thrive by producing and transporting “stuff”—food, energy, manufactured goods —while the Democrats do best where the economy revolves around images, media, financial engineering and tourism.

Energy is the issue that most separates the heartland from the coasts. The increasingly radical calls for “decarbonization” by leading Democrats spell the loss of jobs throughout the heartland, either directly by attacking fossil fuels or by boosting energy costs. Since 2010, the energy boom has helped create hundreds of thousands of jobs throughout the heartland, many of them in manufacturing. At the same time, most big city Democratic strongholds continued to deindustrialize and shed factory employment. No surprise then that the increasingly anti-carbon Democrats control just one legislature, Illinois, outside the Northeast and the West Coast.

Trump’s romp through the primaries, like that of Bernie Sanders, rode on the perceived relative decline of the country’s middle and working classes. For all her well-calculated programmatic appeals, Hillary Clinton emerged as the willing candidate of the ruling economic oligarchy, something made more painfully obvious from the recent WikiLeaks tapes. Her likely approach to the economy, more of the same, is no doubt attractive to the Wall Street investment banks, Silicon Valley venture capitalists, renewable energy providers and inner city real estate speculators who have thrived under Obama.

Trump hasn’t lost yet, but yeah: Even if Hillary wins, a lot of the country is angry. Remember: The Tea Party was polite, and was insulted and destroyed. Trump voters aren’t polite, and they’re angry. If Trump loses, what comes next? Nothing you want to see.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE. NOW COUGH UP THE CASH. Thousands of California soldiers forced to repay enlistment bonuses a decade after going to war.

Short of troops to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan a decade ago, the California National Guard enticed thousands of soldiers with bonuses of $15,000 or more to reenlist and go to war.

Now the Pentagon is demanding the money back.

Nearly 10,000 soldiers, many of whom served multiple combat tours, have been ordered to repay large enlistment bonuses — and slapped with interest charges, wage garnishments and tax liens if they refuse — after audits revealed widespread overpayments by the California Guard at the height of the wars last decade.

Investigations have determined that lack of oversight allowed for widespread fraud and mismanagement by California Guard officials under pressure to meet enlistment targets.

But soldiers say the military is reneging on 10-year-old agreements and imposing severe financial hardship on veterans whose only mistake was to accept bonuses offered when the Pentagon needed to fill the ranks.

This is a disgrace. But these guys are little people, and little people are the only ones who have to worry about the rules nowadays.

HEH: Anti-Hillary ‘Walking Dead’ Posters Surface in Los Angeles. “The artwork from conservative artist Sabo consists of blood-spattered text reading, ‘Negan wants 50% of your shit. Hillary demands it all.’ The sentiments are based on Negan, a new villain on AMC’s hit show who expressed his desire for stuff that doesn’t belong to him.”

FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: America, land of opportunity? Not for young people, study says.