#NICE IS FRANCE’S SEVENTH TERROR ATTACK IN 18 MONTHS, Bloomberg reports:

Or as David Burge, aka Iowahawk, dubs it, “9/11, on the installment plan.”

And note this, also from Dave’s Twitter feed: “France ‘Suppressed News of Gruesome Torture’ at Bataclan Massacre.” Louise Mensch reports at Heat Street, adding, “The news follows reports that German police sat on the huge number of sexual assaults committed by Islamist migrants in Cologne, which a secret report estimated at thousands, not hundreds.”

Shades of the American MSM censoring the images of Americans jumping from the WTC on September 11th.

REVIEW: 2016 Porsche Cayenne Turbo S.

I DISAGREE. I THINK ADDING HASHTAGS, THE RIGHT LOGO, AND JAMES TAYLOR SINGING “IMAGINE” WOULD BE A MUCH MORE DEVASTATING RESPONSE. Actual headline at the London Guardian: “Sympathy should be our only response to the Nice terror attack.”

Related: As Jon Gabriel tweets after seeing “street artist” “Banksy’s” artwork created in response to the murders at Nice, “The healing power of graphic design… from the same people who condemn ‘thoughts and prayers’ as trite nonsense.”

FRED HIATT: Justice Ginsburg’s Trump Derangement Syndrome is a bad sign.

Now that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has taken herself to the woodshed, it’s worth asking what her brief bout of Trump Derangement Syndrome says about our system’s ability to withstand four years of a Trump presidency.

Short answer: It is not a good omen.

As the idea of a President Trump has evolved from laughable to unlikely to oh-my-god-this-might-actually-happen, a debate has raged in Washington.

The debate is not over the man’s fitness for office — few people privately will make the case that Donald Trump is qualified or temperamentally suitable to be commander in chief — but over how much damage he might do.

Notorious RBG’s injudicious outburst was Trump’s fault? Hiatt might want to ask himself who else might be suffering from TDS.

ESPN: THE WORLDWIDE LEADER IN BULLSHIT.

That’s no small trick, considering just how fierce the competition for the title is these days.

YOU STAY CLASSY, BRIAN: “MSNBC’s breaking news anchor Brian Williams has had quite the few weeks with deplorable and head-scratching moments, but he again couldn’t help himself on Thursday night while covering the terrorist truck attack in Nice, France by apologizing to Hardball host Chris Matthews for having ‘just plowed over the normal hour of airtime’ for him.”

I think Ron Burgundy, Ted Baxter and even a semi-fictional anchorman like Dan Rather were capable of smarter metaphors than that.

GANGSTER GOVERNMENT: Hillary Managed Her Emails Like Criminals I’ve Known.

SPENGLER ON WHY THE TERRORISTS ARE WINNING THE INTELLIGENCE WAR:

Yet another criminal known to security services has perpetrated a mass killing, the Tunisian Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel. Why did the French police allow a foreign national with a criminal record of violence to reside in France? Apart from utter incompetence, the explanation is that he was a snitch for the French authorities. Blackmailing Muslim criminals to inform on prospective terrorists is the principal activity of European counter-terrorism agencies, as I noted in 2015. Every Muslim in Europe knows this.

The terrorists, though, have succeeded in turning the police agents sent to spy on them and forcing them to commit suicide attacks to expiate their sins. This has become depressingly familiar; as Ryan Gallagher reported recently, perpetrators already known to the authorities committed ten of the highest-profile attacks between 2013 and 2015.

The terrorists, in other words, are adding insult to injury. By deploying police snitches as suicide attackers, terrorists assert their moral superiority and power over western governments. The message may be lost on the western public, whose security agencies and media do their best to obscure it, but it is well understood among the core constituencies of the terrorist groups: the superiority of Islam turns around the depraved criminals whom the western police send to spy on us, and persuades them to become martyrs for the cause of Islam.

Read the whole thing.

SKYNET SMILES: Elon Musk Says DARPA A.I. Hacking Challenge Will Lead to Skynet.

MICHAEL WALSH: ENOUGH. “Western civilization has defended us for centuries. Isn’t it about time we defended it?”

First, we need leaders again who think that that Western Civilization is something worth saving.

WIRED: Clinton has a team of Silicon Valley Stars. Trump has Twitter.

Don’t be too certain which is the more powerful force.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1163.

HE CHOSE POORLY: “The owner of [the Lucky Teriyaki] restaurant in Sedro-Woolley [WA] has asked local law enforcement to no longer dine at the establishment, the Skagit County Sheriff’s office said Thursday:”

The Sedro-Woolley Police Department said it “support our local businesses but are disappointed by the news.” In a Facebook post, the department went on to say, “We want everyone to know SWPD will continue to respond and assist them in any way they request.”

But perhaps not as quickly as before. Just sayin’.

PEACE IN OUR TIME: Mike Lee predicts backlash after RNC smothers delegate rebellion.

“Instead of focusing on a message that could truly unite the party, you’ve got all these people in there who are shouting about, ‘Darn it, we’ve got to be united,’” Lee said, his voice rising. “And to be united we’ve got to shut you guys up. We’ve got to lock up the rules, so that anyone who disagrees with us will be silenced. That’s how we’re going to be unified.”

There’s been a lot of that this year from both sides, so there was going to be backlash no matter who won the rules fight.

RETIRED LT. GEN. MICHAEL T. FLYNN WAS PRESIDENT OBAMA’S DEFENSE INTEL CHIEF from 2012 to 2014, so he knows firsthand what the War on Terrorism is about and what is required to defeat the savages known as “ISIS.” Flynn’s assessment (given prior to the Nice terrorist horrors) is simple: “We are in a war … We are losing.”

Flynn and historian Michael Ledeen co-authored a book that hit the shelves earlier this week that is as timely as it could be, as seen in the title:“The Field of Flight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies.” The book quickly rose to the top ranks of the Amazon sales chart.

In a wide-ranging interview Thursday with Richard Pollock of the Daily Caller News Foundation, Flynn said what is needed is “’an entirely new strategy, and intelligence must drive this. Good intelligence has to start with properly and clearly defining this enemy.’ The new president has to use the term radical Islam within all military, intelligence and law enforcement agencies. ‘Within the government, within the Department of Justice, the Department of Defense, you have practically eliminated any training or any use of the term ‘radical Islam.’”

In a separate interview, Ledeen told Pollock that “It’s not just radical Islam. It’s radical Islam, plus their radical, secular allies North Korea, Russia, China, Cuba. So we’re fighting a global alliance which is coming after us. We should stand up for our own values and waging political war against them as we did against the communism and fascism in the last century.”

And in one of most needed but totally un-PC comments of 2016, Ledeen insisted that “Muslim civilization is a failure. There were more books translated into Spanish in the last year than into Arabic in the last thousand years. You’re dealing with a failed culture.”

TO BE FAIR, IT’S VOX WE’RE TALKING ABOUT HERE: Pokemon Go Reveals Everything Wrong With Conventional Wonk Thinking.

Because mainstream policy thinkers lack creative ideas for reinvigorating the American economy and helping the middle class, they issue familiar calls for more wealth redistribution and stimulus. We’re not necessarily opposed to a more progressive tax code or demand-boosting policies like infrastructure spending, but neither looks to us like a serious fix for deep structural problems.

A great deal of policy proposals today are rooted in a sense of resignation: capitalism naturally causes inequality, so the best we can do is have the government take more and more from the rich and give more and more to the poor.

That approach bespeaks a lack of imagination and historical awareness. Time and again, doomsayers have bewailed free market; time and again, their fears have proven to be greatly exaggerated. In the late nineteenth century, as the United States transitioned from agriculture to heavy industry, new technologies were making farm hands obsolete and rapid urbanization was creating social disorder and depleting rural communities. But no worried mother in 1890 could imagine that her young children would grow up to become mechanics or telephone operators. Those jobs didn’t exist because automobiles and sophisticated landline infrastructure didn’t exist. In any age, it’s difficult and often impossible to know what the jobs and industries of the future will be.

Instead of simply redistributing wealth and doubling down on short-term stimulus policies, we should be looking at ways to make it easier for people to start businesses and move jobs. Relaxing licensing requirements and confronting the gatekeepers who lobby for them so that more people can compete for jobs in traditionally-protected industries would be a good place to begin. So would faster implementation of portable pension plans. In addition to reforming housing policies in urban centers, we ought to think about how telework can allow more people who don’t live in San Francisco to make money off of the tech boom.

Rather than resigning ourselves to managing “late stage capitalism”, we should be creating a regulatory and commercial framework that can support an information economy. The jobs of the future may be unknowable, but that shouldn’t stop us from imagining and starting to build a country in which they are more likely to be created.

Then again, if all our creative energies are directed toward debating the merits of catching virtual Pikachus instead of toward building a new economic model, humanity may indeed be doomed.

The thing is, redistribution of wealth provides superb opportunities for graft. But it’s fair to assume that any author using the phrase “late stage capitalism” unironically has nothing useful to contribute.

UM… NO:

France must learn to "live with terrorism", French PM Manuel Valls says after #NiceAttack https://t.co/UVBb4u9oF3 pic.twitter.com/gVRUmzQEts

— BBC Breaking News (@BBCBreaking) July 15, 2016

IT’S THE TERRORISM, STUPID: Will Trump Win in a Blowout?, Roger Simon asks.

AFTER THE LATEST TERROR ATTACK IN FRANCE: We hear questions we’ve heard before: “…as more becomes known about the man responsible for last night’s attack, the French authorities will be under renewed pressure to explain why a key potential suspect like this was not subjected to proper monitoring, and also to explain what further measures can be taken to try to make sure than France is better protected from similar attacks in future.”

According to The Economist, Nice has a problem with Islamic radicals, the “most intractable problems of Islamic radicalization outside the Paris region.” I think the article is behind the magazine’s paywall. This quote catches the gist of it:

By the start of this year, at least 55 residents of Nice and other towns in the department of Alpes-Maritimes, which covers the Côte d’Azur, had left to fight in Syria or Iraq. That included 11 members of a single family. The department’s government recently closed down five underground prayer houses suspected of preaching violent Islamism. (In total there are roughly 40 mosques in and around Nice.)

The French government has extended the national state of emergency through October 26. It was supposed to expire this month.

KRAUTHAMMER: A First Step Toward Rebuilding NATO.

NATO will now deploy four battalions to front-line states. In Estonia, they will be led by Britain; in Lithuania, by Germany; in Latvia, by Canada; in Poland, by the United States. Not nearly enough, and not permanently based, but nonetheless significant.

In the unlikely event of a Russian invasion of any of those territories, these troops are to act as a tripwire, triggering a full-scale war with NATO. It’s the kind of coldblooded deterrent that kept the peace in Europe during the Cold War and keeps it now along the DMZ in Korea.

In the more likely event of a “little green men” takeover attempt in, say, Estonia (about 25% ethnically Russian), the sort of disguised slow-motion invasion that Vladimir Putin pulled off in Crimea, the NATO deployments might be enough to thwart the aggression and call in reinforcements.

The message to Putin is clear: Yes, you’ve taken parts of Georgia and Ukraine. But they’re not NATO. That territory is sacred — or so we say.

Putin may hold a weaker hand than Krauthammer thinks.

OUT: NUCLEAR BRINKSMANSHIP IN IRAN, KOREA. In: Nuclear Brinksmanship in New York.

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Hillary, The Democrats, And The Problem Of Trust.

THE HILL: Democrats ‘freaked out’ about polls in meeting with Clinton. Well, they should be. I keep reading stuff about her juggernaut of a professional campaign and Trump’s amateurish shambles, yet somehow she’s barely staying even with him.