FASTER, PLEASE: ‘Hangover-free alcohol’ could replace all regular alcohol by 2050, says David Nutt.

On second thought, maybe hangovers are an necessary tool for helping us learn our limitations.

ROGER SIMON LAYS DOWN A MARKER. Why Trump Will Win: It’s the Likability, Stupid!

TRUMP TO DEBATE MODERATOR HOLT: We don’t want another Candy Crowley.

“Well, I think he has to be a moderator,” Trump told “Fox and Friends” of Holt during a phone interview Thursday morning. “I mean, you’re debating somebody and if she makes a mistake or I make a mistake, I’ll, you know, we’ll take each other on. But I certainly don’t think you want Candy Crowley again.”

Crowley, who moderated a 2012 debate at Hofstra University, where Trump and Clinton will square off Monday, attempted to fact check then-GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney, who said it took President Barack Obama 14 days to call the attack in Benghazi, Libya, an “act of terror.”

“And she turned out to be wrong. I really don’t think you want that,” Trump said. “That was a very pivotal moment in that debate. And it really threw the debate off and it was unfair. So I don’t think you want that. No, I think you have to have somebody that’s just — let them argue it out.”

What a welcome change — it’s been decades since I’ve been able to think about an upcoming presidential debate without flinching.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1233.

THE PRICE OF WAR, NEGLECT, DOWNSIZING, AND A BROKEN PROCUREMENT SYSTEM: House Panel says $1 Trillion Needed to Reboot Military.

The committee is spearheading the $18-billion annual increase for more equipment, training and troops. But it is facing a tough political fight with the Senate and Democrats, who oppose busting defense spending caps and raiding the Islamic State war fund to pay for the hike.

A $1 trillion increase would require obliterating spending limits passed by Congress and doling out an average of an additional $100 billion each year on the military through 2027.

Such an increase appears highly unlikely on Capitol Hill where budget gridlock and stop-gap legislative solutions have become normal. It foreshadows the hard political fight ahead for Republican defense hawks who want more money for a military that they say is depleted, inexperienced and unready for war with major world powers such as Russia and China.

That’s a lot of money. But as Robert Heinlein noted, “The most expensive thing in the world is a second-best military establishment, good but not good enough to win.“

RICHARD FERNANDEZ: “Charles Lister, writing at Foreign Policy, headlines his piece ‘Obama’s Syria Strategy Is the Definition of Insanity’…Lister doesn’t accuse Obama of being actually a crazy person, just of acting like a one. Yet the suggestive evidence goes much further than Syria.  Whether at social policy (which yielded riots), health policy (which resulted in Obamacare), or economic policy (which has created unemployment), the administration has shown a willingness to double down on failure.  In many and varied contexts, it acts like it’s insane.

Read the whole thing.

OREGON’S LOOMING PUBLIC PENSION CALAMITY: Oregon officials face truth behind state’s soaring public pension costs: ‘It’s a little bit like a Ponzi scheme,’ the chair of the Oregon Investment Council says.

Just how bad is Oregon’s public pension funding crisis?

Bad enough that Rukaiyah Adams, the normally polished investment professional who is vice chair of the Oregon Investment Council, broke down in tears last week as she spoke of passing a record $22 billion in unfunded promises to future taxpayers.

“My call to the Legislature and to the governor is for leadership on this, and I mean right now,” Adams said during last Wednesday’s joint meeting of the Oregon Public Employees Retirement System board and the citizen panel that oversees its investments. “This is becoming a moral issue. We can’t just talk about numbers anymore.”

The numbers are bleak. Oregon’s pension system owes billions of dollars more to retirees than it has, and the last major attempt to fix the problem was shot down in courts.

This month, cities, school districts and others will find out how much more they’ll pay to help prop up the system. Higher pension costs could come at the expense of funding for other needs, including social services, infrastructure investments and education programs.

Last week’s meeting was extraordinarily candid. And it provided a brief, reality-based peek behind the financial charade taking place not only in Oregon’s pension system, but also in systems across the country.

Experts openly acknowledged they’re understating the magnitude of Oregon’s problem. They’re relying on optimistic assumptions about investment returns. And they’re holding down required pension payments below what’s needed to keep pace with the debt, to avoid eviscerating school and government budgets across Oregon.

“We’re beyond crisis,” Katy Durant, chair of the Oregon Investment Council, said in an interview after last week’s meeting. “We should have been addressing this 20 years ago and it’s just been building. It’s a little bit like a Ponzi scheme. Sooner or later it’s going to catch up with you.”

Politicians just keep kicking the can down the road, hoping the bill will fall due after their time. That’s worked so far, but something that can’t go on forever, won’t.

AFTERMARKET AUTOPILOT: Comma.ai will ship a $999 autonomous driving add-on by the end of this year.

This isn’t a kit that makes your car into a fully self-driving vehicle, [famed iPhone and PlayStation hacker George] Hotz is quick to note, but it is a system that can provide powers equivalent to Tesla’s Autopilot, without requiring that you buy a whole new car. “It’s Mountain View to San Francisco without touching the wheel,” Hotz said. At launch, Comma One will support a small group of specific vehicles, but over time the startup hopes to add compatibility with more models.

Hotz contends that Comma’s key ingredient is “shippability,” a key ingredient he says other companies lack. Automakers and other startups are fond of announcing self-driving car projects (another was announced earlier today, in fact), but Hotz points out that many of these companies don’t even have hardware, let alone products they can sell to consumers.

“It is fully functional. It’s about on par with Tesla Autopilot,” Hotz said. It doesn’t have a lot of sensors as the Comma One relies on built-in car front radars and comes with a camera.

You go first.

AS A WISE COMMUNITY ORGANIZER ONCE SAID, PUNCH BACK TWICE AS HARD: 9/11 Families Protest Obama Veto Threat of Bill That Would Allow Saudi Suit.

NC CONGRESSMAN ROBERT PITTENGER: Charlotte Rioters ‘Hate White People’

That doesn’t seem like a helpful thing to say right now.

CUE WORLD’S SMALLEST VIOLIN: Falling Oil Prices Shock Saudi Middle Class.

Mohammed Idrees used to travel to London once or twice a year, but these days the Saudi civil servant is asking his wife and children to cut back on using the family car to save fuel and has installed a solar panel for the kitchen to reduce electricity costs.

For decades, Saudi nationals such as Mr. Idrees enjoyed a cozy lifestyle in the desert kingdom as its rulers spent hundreds of billions of dollars of its oil revenue to subsidize essentials such as fuel, water and electricity.

But a sharp drop in the price of oil, Saudi Arabia’s main revenue source, has forced the government to withdraw some benefits this year—raising the cost of living in the kingdom and hurting its middle class, a part of society long insulated from such problems.

They might have to find honest work.

SO NOW THE UNIVERSITY IS “INVESTIGATING” MY TWEET. I’m not sure what that means, since I’m not sure how you investigate a tweet.

More on that here.

UPDATE: Daniel Polsby emails:

I’m on your side.

A person reasonably in fear for his life has no legal duty to prefer the interest of the person who has wrongfully detained or assaulted him and made such a fear reasonable to his own, and is entitled to use necessary force on the wrongdoer to get himself out of harm’s way. That’s blackletter orthodoxy.

You can get “investigated” now – by the state, yet – for giving the “wrong” answer to a trolley problem? Really?

So it seems.

Related, from Judge Danny Boggs:

All of MY SIDE’s references and statements are to be taken in the coolest, hip-ironic, culturally aware, benign-metaphorical way possible (see Watts v. United States, and [granting my side the full benefit of the] the conflicting interpretive modes the various judges/justices on the Supreme Court and the Court[s] of Appeals [have approved]),

AND

All of YOUR SIDE’s references and statements are to be taken in the most mindlessly literal, threatening way possible.

That should work for almost all of our commentators, of whatever persuasion.

Also, any charge against MY SIDE requires exquisite legally admissible proof of its accuracy,

WHEREAS

Any charge against YOUR SIDE must be true if it was asserted by anyone, anywhere.

People on MY SIDE are responsible only for what they said personally, in full-quotation context.

BUT

People on YOUR SIDE are responsible for the inferred implications of anything said by anyone who ever held any idea vaguely similar to what your people think.

OK?

Well, it’s not okay, but it’s accurate.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: What It’s Like to Have Irritable Bowel Syndrome. “IBS is not a life-threatening disorder, but some people become incapacitated by it. They quit work, stop traveling, and withdraw completely. Some fall into a deep depression that exacerbates the brain-gut feedback loop and intensifies their symptoms. Like me, many people with IBS are too embarrassed to talk openly about it, or think that because it’s invisible or not serious that somehow their symptoms don’t matter.”

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MY CATO PAPER ON THE SUPREME COURT’S COMING TERM IS #7 on the SSRN Top Downloads list. Thanks to everyone who downloaded it!

THE CHARLOTTE RIOTS WILL ACCELERATE THIS IN NORTH CAROLINA, I SUSPECT: On a street in Ohio, defiant Democrats flock to Trump.

How long before some reporter asks Hillary if the riots are Russian-backed provokatskiya designed to swing the election?

MEET PALMER LUCKEY: The Facebook Near Billionaire Secretly Funding Trump’s Meme Machine.

Oculus founder Palmer Luckey financially backed a pro-Trump political organization called Nimble America, a self-described “social welfare 501(c)4 non-profit” in support of the Republican nominee.

Luckey sold his virtual reality company Oculus to Facebook for $2 billion in 2014, and Forbes estimates his current net worth to be $700 million. The 24-year-old told The Daily Beast that he had used the pseudonym “NimbleRichMan” on Reddit with a password given to him by the organization’s founders.

Nimble America says it’s dedicated to proving that “shitposting is powerful and meme magic is real,” according to the company’s introductory statement, and has taken credit for a billboard its founders say was posted outside of Pittsburgh with a cartoonishly large image of Clinton’s face alongside the words “Too Big to Jail.”

Payback’s a… well, you know.

THE HILL: Clinton’s eyes — a window into her health issues:

In 2014 Conan O’Brien did a spoof of Hillary Clinton‘s interview with Diane Sawyer about her lack of lingering health issues following her 2012 concussion. In an obviously photoshopped version Clinton’s eyes are made to oscillate crazily.

It was a very funny piece. Now, it may not seem so funny.

Hillary Clinton exhibited abnormal eye movements during her recent speech in Philadelphia and they were not photoshopped.

Her eyes did not always move in the same direction at the same time. It appears that she has a problem with her left sixth cranial nerve. That nerve serves only one function and that is to make the lateral rectus muscle contract. That muscle turns the eye in the direction away from the midline.

They’re not Photoshopped. This is an unretouched closeup of a photo off the AP wire of Hillary speaking with members of the media at Westchester County Airport in White Plains, NY on Monday. Note the disparity between where each eye is pointed.

IT’S A LIE IF YOU DON’T BELIEVE IT:

Obama warned that, if we didn't act to punish Assad in 2013, US troops would face chemical weapons. He was right. https://t.co/GBkcrhnkJi

— Noah Rothman (@NoahCRothman) September 22, 2016

CEASEFIRE UPDATE: New strikes in Aleppo as Syria announces offensive.

Syrian and Russian planes were pounding eastern Aleppo, according to activists. A rescue worker described what was happening as “annihilation”.

The government has urged people to avoid positions held by rebels. Russia has not confirmed its involvement.

US-Russian talks to revive a collapsed truce have broken up without progress.

Publicly, John Kerry sold the Syrian deal with Russia as a possible “turning point” in the five-year-old civil war. But privately, he “conceded to aides and friends that he believes it will not work,” even before it was implemented.

Our hands continue to be tied by overly restrictive rules of engagement, while Moscow and Damascus do whatever they please — with another self-humiliation of the U.S. Secretary of State as an added bonus.

MEDIAITE: Dear Media: Please Stop Calling Violent Rioters ‘Protesters.’ “There are thousands of protests in America every year, all of which manage to be nonviolent. I’ve been to quite a few of them, including entirely peaceful Black Lives Matter protests. None of them involved throwing people into a fire. Heck, none of them managed to set anything on fire.”

BOTTOM STORY OF THE DAY: Celebrities want you to vote … but not for Donald Trump.

WELL, I’M HOPING TO SEE THIS CIVIL RIGHT EXPAND: In America, Guns Are For Whites Only. It’s Eugene Robinson, so he’s got to get his licks in against the NRA, but actually the NRA called for an investigation in the Philando Castile case, though it could have moved faster in doing so.

That someone is carrying a weapon doesn’t make them a threat that police should respond to. Drawing a gun and pointing it is a different matter, obviously. Police need to be better trained on this.

On the other hand, Tennessee’s self-defense law is already benefiting minorities:

The man who shot and killed an armed robbery suspect at a Knoxville convenience store may avoid charges under Tennessee law — despite the fact he was a felon with a gun.

Issac Jamal Scruggs, 42, of Knoxville, was at a Breadbox convenience store early Monday on Asheville Highway when 18-year-old Tamon Stapleton held the clerk at gunpoint.

Scruggs, a friend of the clerk’s, shot and killed Stapleton. A previous felony conviction would ban Scruggs from carrying the gun he used, but Tennessee law says the fact he protected someone else means the gun charge doesn’t matter.

“It trumps any other firearms charges that might exist per statute. Now, the only thing that could come in play is it doesn’t preclude the federal government,” said Knoxville attorney Don Bosch, who is not directly connected to the case.

Scruggs is a felon, with past convictions for aggravated assault and possession of weapons more than 10 years ago. So far, no charges have been filed against him, and Knoxville Police say they consider the case closed.

As I said at the time, this seems entirely just.

UPDATE: The above reminded me of this story, reproduced in full below:

HOW WE ROLL IN KNOXVEGAS:

A crowd gathered as Knoxville Police Department Lt. Gordon Gwathney struggled with the screaming black woman in the public housing development.

Gwathney already had shot his stun gun at the 5-foot-2-inch tall woman, but her crack cocaine high made her impervious to the electric jolt designed to freeze the muscles of large men. She ripped the metal wires from her body and continued to fight.

As he tussled with the 110-pound woman, the crowd of onlookers in Walter P. Taylor Homes swelled. Gwathney’s radio was ripped from his uniform as he forced the woman to the ground, so calling for help as the crowd closed in around him was not an option.

As he fought to get handcuffs on the squirming woman, two people from the crowd jumped into the fray.

“I saw something I thought I’d never see — people come to the aid of an officer,” Dewey Roberts, former president of Knoxville NAACP, told a community group last week. “They were telling her to calm down and they got his radio that had been knocked loose.”

Roberts witnessed the event through a window at the Dr. Lee Williams Complex, a senior citizens center he oversees in Walter P. Taylor Homes. Roberts had seen the confrontation develop despite Gwathney “trying to de-escalate the situation” and worried as he saw the crowd of black onlookers encircle the lone officer.

“With my experiences with police over the years, I was just amazed,” said the 69-year-old Roberts who led Knoxville’s black community through the racial tinderbox in the late 1990s when several black men died during confrontations with Knoxville officers.

“And it wasn’t just a few people, it was the whole crowd. I was shaking my head in disbelief, but it was a good feeling.”

Well, good.

HUH: Turkey postpones trip by UN torture expert.

The U.N.’s special rapporteur on torture, Juan Mendez, was due to visit Turkey from Oct.10 to 14, but Ankara pushed the trip back to “November or December,” according to a statement from Mendez’s office.

“While I understand that the developments in Turkey during the last months demand the government’s fullest attention, I believe that postponing my visit at this late stage sends the wrong message,” he said in the statement.

“In light of the thousands of arrests made following the failed coup of July 15, and the allegations of severe overcrowding and poor conditions in many detention centres throughout the country, my visit is of utmost importance,” he added.

Mendez’s mandate ends on Oct. 31, but he urged Ankara to give his successor “unfettered access” to any areas where people were being detained.

U.N. rights office spokesman Jon Izagirre told AFP that Turkey said it was “too busy to dedicate time to the visit.”

Too busy with what, exactly?