I THOUGHT THAT WAS WHAT HILLARY USED: Scientists have set a new record for data transmission using li-fi.

Oh, wait, that would be “Lie-Fi” for Hillary.

I WON’T EVEN HAVE TO FLY MY LEARJET TO NOVA SCOTIA THIS TIME: One Year From Now, America Will See Its First Total Solar Eclipse Since 1979. It looks as if it will go right over my house.

HECKOVAJOB, BARRY: Obama Sends Memo to La. Officials Warning Them Not to Discriminate With Disaster Assistance.

FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: Know English? For New York Cabdrivers, That’s No Longer Required.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1199.

TROLLED: In A Big Win For Donald Trump, President Obama Announces His Own Louisiana Visit.

THE GOVERNMENT CAN’T HELP YOU, but the Cajun Navy can.

JUSTICE: The Big Driver of Mass Incarceration That Nobody Talks About.

If you follow media coverage of America’s mass incarceration problem, you are likely to hear a lot about unscrupulous police officers, mandatory minimums, and drug laws. But you are unlikely to hear these two words that have probably played a larger role in producing the excesses of the American criminal justice system than anything else: plea coercion.

The number of criminal cases that actually go to trial in America is steadily dwindling. That’s because prosecutors have so much leverage during plea bargaining that most defendants take an offer—in particular, defendants who are held on bail, and who might need to wait in jail for months or even years before standing trial and facing an uncertain outcome.

We reported last week on a study from Columbia showing that all things being equal, defendants in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia who were made to pay bail are much more likely to plead guilty. Since then, a separate study from researchers at Harvard, Princeton and Stanford has come out that reaches a similar conclusion. . . .

Of course, bail remains a vital tool for judges, and some defendants are too dangerous to be let out before their trial, period. But there are ways we might be able to reform the pre-trial detention system so as to reduce the number of defendants who simply resign themselves to a guilty plea out of desperation since they can’t come up with the money to buy their temporary freedom. For example, the average amount of money bail assessed should be reduced (it has risen exponentially over the last several decades) and courts should experiment with ankle bracelets and home visits to monitor defendants rather than holding them in a jail cell before they have been convicted of a crime.

The focus on policing and minimum sentences and drug laws in the public discourse is all well and good. But if they are serious about making our justice system more fair and less arbitrary, criminal justice reformers should devote more of their efforts to reforming what happens in the period after arrest and before sentencing. That’s an area where big progress can be made with relatively straightforward, and politically palatable reforms.

See also my Ham Sandwich Nation piece.

THE HILL: A tale of two Louisiana disasters and media bias. “A very simple question, if George W. Bush was president right now and playing golf with celebrities in one of the richest zip codes in the country, would the headlines again be everywhere that portray him as insensitive, out-of-touch, even a racist president be the same now as they were 2005? Of course they would. Instead, President Obama continues his vacation that includes fundraising events for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and the relative silence is deafening.”

Related: Obama irks La. flood victims with memo warning them not to discriminate.

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DAVID HOROWITZ: Donald Trump’s Lincolnesque Moment: A landmark in the emergence of a new Republican Party.

NO WONDER THEIR LACKEYS IN THE MSM HAVE EARNED THE CONTEMPT OF BEN RHODES AND THE REST OF THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION: WashPost Buries Iran-Ransom Admission in Middle of Page A-10 — Despite Ransom Paid for Post Reporter!

Just think of the Post and the rest of the MSM as Democrat operatives — heck, Rhodes’ operatives — and you won’t go far wrong.

MALE PRIVILEGE: Breadwinning Men Are More Anxious and Less Healthy.

“When you’re a breadwinner, your family’s standard of living is very much dependent on your salary, much more so than your partner’s salary, and that’s a lot of pressure,” Munsch says. For the purposes of this paper, breadwinning is defined as earning a higher relative income than your partner. The anxiety — or lack thereof — associated with breadwinning was found to be indicative of gender expectations. For women, earning more money didn’t predict significant gains in health, but it did correlate with higher well-being.

“For men, they can be at status quo, but always lose it,” Munsch says. “For women who are breadwinners, they’re not at the status quo — they’re knocking it out of the park. In everyday interactions, people say, ‘Wow, you’re the breadwinner! You’re such a rock star.’ And if they lose it, they don’t become losers: They go back to the status quo.”

Is it any wonder so many men are going on strike?

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Hacked Soros Documents Reveal Some Big Dark Money Surprises.

The leak reveals Soros’ funding of a wide range of activities: the Black Lives Matter movement, influencing the European elections in 2014, swaying a Supreme Court decision, smearing political activists, and attacking the nation of Israel.

But you likely haven’t heard about these key “dark money” revelations. Soros has given $7 million to the pro-Clinton super PAC Priorities USA and has dedicated $25 million to support Democrats and their causes. His fundraising matters politically, and should be a big story.

But The New York Times, CNN, The Washington Post, CBS News, and other major media outlets did not even report on the leak, much less the stories revealed by it.

To rectify this coverage gap, PJ Media is presenting 5 of the biggest stories released so far. Enjoy!

There’s some big news here.

THE GOVERNMENT’S WAR ON FUN: EPA goes after Harley-Davidson.

Considering the enormous crossover among Harley owners and guitarists, sounds very much like the Obama regime’s earlier shakedown against Gibson.

(Found via Ace; classical reference in headline.)

AMY ALKON: Finally, It Becomes Clear: The Point Isn’t Whether Somebody’s Actually Racist.

Welcome to outrage culture.

I think a big part of this — but not the entire explanation — is people who feel a need to be “content” producers on social media and really don’t have much that’s original or interesting bouncing around in their heads.

Beyond that, I think it’s a way to say, “Hey, I’m one of you.”

The sad thing is, this is supposedly about improving our culture. What it’s actually doing is putting a chill on free speech — which is not something that results in making the world a better place; just a less free one and an uglier one.

Free speech tends to be a right that supports other rights.

Yeah, but most of the people screaming about racism don’t much care about supporting other rights. They scream about racism as a way of undermining a free society, not of protecting it.

SETH BARRETT TILLMAN: Trump, Academia, and Hyperbole.

WELL, WE KNOW THE ANSWER TO THAT ONE: What would media say about naked Hillary statues?

In a country once rocked for two weeks by the inadvertent appearance of Janet Jackson’s nipple at the Super Bowl, media condemnation of the objectively vulgar statue suddenly proved non-existent. The mood in the national press was rather jubilant and lauding.

The tone of the media wouldn’t concern if bias in its coverage of the presidential election and cultural affairs in America was not already so out of control.

Picture, if you will, a naked statue representation of Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, erected (erm…) by cover of night in Times Square and on the boardwalks of Los Angeles, the sculptor’s artistic license given free reign. Imagine the sagging breasts, the flabby tum tum, the far-less-than-pert buttocks, and for the coup de grace, creative depictions of the male genitalia. Would the sculptor go very short, or very long?

It is impossible to quantify the rage that our media would unleash on the nation and heap upon sexist and racist, so-called artists. See, there is at this point, no irony in, no shame from, and no end to, the parade of contradictions that mainstream media will foist on its viewers and readers.

When it comes to Trump, the same rules simply do not apply. He cannot speak for himself; the media will speak for him. He cannot be entitled to dignity; the media will strip it from him however they can. And it’s not because he’s Trump. It’s not because he angered the fans of Univision. It’s because he’s Republican. If it were Jeb Bush, the statue in Times Square would have been of Jeb Bush; the media criticism all the same.

Anyone who’s honest will admit that the media has long favored liberals, but the bias has been worse than ever in this election season. Bashing a political figure’s looks, private lives, and even personally attacking their family members is totally fair game — as long as that political figure is a conservative.

Just look at the coverage on Melania Trump’s white dress at the RNC. Elizabeth Wellington, a fashion writer at the Philadelphia Inquirer, suggested that Trump’s dress symbolized racism. “To many, that outfit could be another reminder that in the GOP, white is always right,” she wrote.

Vanessa Friedman of The New York Times wrote, “Ms. Trump’s choice of a white dress…sent all sorts of interesting subliminal signals.” Just a week later, Wellington gushed over Hillary Clinton’s all-white DNC outfit. “White is a hue that’s both soft and strong.

But it was appropriate: Her acceptance speech was a coming out of sorts. Clinton’s white pantsuit is telling us she has arrived. This is surreal. A dream come true….”

What would the reaction be if a mainstream journalist made even the slightest negative comment about Clinton’s or Michelle Obama’s attire at the DNC? What if they were called “too old looking,” “too fat,” “too weak”? We all know the answer to this question.

Think of them as Democratic operatives with bylines and you won’t go far wrong.

WHAT TO DO IF YOU’RE TRAPPED ON THE HIGHWAY LIKE SO MANY FOLKS IN LOUISIANA?

I keep a trouble bag in the back of my car, with food and water (lifeboat rations that nobody would ever eat unless they had to, plus a few snacks), a flashlight, emergency blankets, glow sticks, matches, a spare set of glasses, a change of socks and underwear, tampons (also good for gunshot wounds), and a Field Trauma Kit. I think I’m going to add a tourniquet.

Before anyone asks, I don’t keep a gun in the trouble bag. It’s too hard to access, and since I only check it occasionally to rotate out stuff that’s expired, I wouldn’t notice if someone stole it. But you should have a gun on hand if you can, though if you’re traveling interstate, benighted jurisdictions with criminally-strict gun laws may make that difficult, which is why we need national carry legislation.

AND HERE’S THE HEADLINE: Trump Tours Flood-Ravaged LA; Clinton, Obama Stay Away.

BORIS YELTSIN’S FINEST MOMENT: 25 Years Ago Today, When He Stopped A Military Coup That Would Have Restored The Old Soviet Union.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Why Large-Screen TVs Are Affordable And Health Care Is Not. “Take a look at this chart assembled by AEI. It reveals two important points. First, there is no such thing as an aggregate price level, or, rather what we call the price level is a statistical fiction. Second, it shows that competitive industries offer goods and services that are falling in price due to market pressure. In contrast monopolized industries can extract ever higher rents from people based on restriction.”

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DIVERSITY IS OUR STRENGTH: Europe hit by yet MORE sex attacks: Now 22 girls assaulted at Stockholm festival.