DEMOCRATS ARE GOING TO HAVE A GOOGLE PROBLEM:

All businesses lobby on behalf of their interests, and in recent years that lobbying has increasingly expanded to include more focus on things like think tanks and other aspects of the “deep” influence game.

Google has been especially an especially aggressive player at deep influence. The Wall Street journal reported in July, for example, that they’ve spent millions of dollars subsidizing academic research that backs Google policy positions, often mapping out the thesis to be proven and then shopping to find the scholar to do the work. Google’s money, not always disclosed, has backed donations to think tanks across the ideological spectrum as well as more prosaic forms of influence peddling like campaign contributions.

What makes Google somewhat unusual for such a big company is that it’s fairly closely aligned with the Democratic Party. Dozens of people moved from jobs at Google to jobs in the Obama administration, and vice versa, over its eight-year span. Schmidt was a major Hillary Clinton donor. More tellingly, Schmidt owns a company called Civis Analytics that does an enormous amount of behind-the-scenes data work for Democratic Party campaigns. This alignment grows out of both cultural affinity between Democrats and Google on social issues, and also years of regulatory struggle that often saw Google, Democrats, and consumer groups on one side pitted against telecommunications industry incumbents.

And for Democratic Party politicians and staffers, the idea of a big, rich, dynamic technology company that favored progressive views on social issues and wanted to put money behind pro-consumer regulatory efforts seemed almost too good to be true.

The specter raised by the European Union’s antitrust fine is that it is, in fact, too good to be true. And that Google, like any other giant company, is going to sometimes find itself in the regulatory crosshairs, throwing its weight around to try to get away with things that maybe shouldn’t be allowed. “Don’t be evil” was a nice idea while it lasted, but business is business and politics is politics — no exceptions.

There’s a huge opportunity for Trump to take a Teddy Roosevelt-like trust-busting stand. Especially since, as Joel Kotkin says:

The Silicon Valley and its Puget Sound annex dominated by Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft increasingly resemble the pre-gas crisis Detroit of the Big Three. Tech’s Big Five all enjoy overwhelming market shares—for example Google controls upwards of 80 percent of global search—and the capital to either acquire or crush any newcomers. They are bringing us a hardly gilded age of prosperity but depressed competition, economic stagnation, and, increasingly, a chilling desire to control the national conversation.

Creepy economic predators. When you think about it that way, it’s not surprising they’re allied with the Democratic Party.

UN CHIEF: Democracy ‘barely alive’ in Venezuela.

President Nicolas Maduro “was elected by the people,” Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein told reporters in Geneva, but added that the government’s recent actions “support the feeling that what is left of democratic life in Venezuela is being squeezed”.

Asked about French President Emmanuel Macron’s accusation yesterday that Mr Maduro was creating a “dictatorship”, Mr Zeid said there had been “an erosion of democratic life”.

“It must be barely alive, if still alive.”

It’s dead, Jim.

WELL, GOOD: Erdogan guards face three new indictments over Washington DC brawl.

Tuesday’s grand jury decision means that a total of 19 people – 15 identified as Turkish security officials – have now been charged over their roles in the violence on 17 May during Mr Erdogan’s state visit to the US.

Nine people were hospitalised and two members of the Turkish leader’s security detail initially arrested in the brutal altercation with Kurds, Yazidis and Armenians protesting Mr Erdogan’s human rights record and Syria policy.

In footage from the incident Turkish bodyguards can be seen suddenly rushing at the protesters.

An elderly man holding a megaphone is kicked in the face, and several women are also hit. Police officers can be seen attempting to hold some of the aggressors back, dragging them to the other side of the street.

Plus, “All 19 have been charged with conspiracy to commit a crime of violence, which is punishable by a statutory maximum of 15 years in prison, and several face additional charges of assault with a deadly weapon.”

DOJ should send a clear signal by prosecuting them to the fullest extent of the law.

ROGER SIMON: HARVEY WILL BE THE TURNING POINT OF THE TRUMP PRESIDENCY: “Trump is proving himself under fire in a situation immeasurably more important than Twitter sideshows. Nitpickers now seem more what they are — pickers of nits. And those accusing Trump of racismsexismhomophobiaIslamophobiayaddayaddayadda will appear to be exactly what they are as well — dim-witted bores who wouldn’t know a real racist when they saw one. (Most likely that would take a mirror.)”

HE’LL CHANGE HIS TUNE IF TRUMP GOES AFTER CARRIED INTEREST: Schumer warns against tax cuts for the rich ahead of Trump speech.

FORMER JUDGE: U.S. Has ‘Perverse Incentives’ for Parents to Smuggle Children Into Country Illegally.

FASTER, PLEASE: ‘Safer’ thorium reactor trials could salvage nuclear power.

If it’s so safe and reliable why hasn’t thorium been used all along? Because (unlike uranium) it’s much harder to weaponize. As a result, it’s historically been sidelined by nations in search of both energy and a potential source of weapons-grade plutonium. The downside is that thorium is only slightly radioactive, making it harder to prepare than uranium. That’s where NRG’s next-gen reactor comes in.

You see, molten salt reactors melt down salts for fuel and then use that molten liquid to initiate the reaction that creates power. As part of its Salt Irrigation Experimentation (SALIENT), the NRG team will melt a sample of thorium fuel and batter it with neutrons to convert it into fissionable uranium. Future trials will involve temperature-resistant metal alloys and other materials that can sustain the heat inside the reactor. Ultimately, the researchers will have to figure out how to dispose of the waste created by thorium — which is substantially less toxic than that produced by a nuclear reactor.

With the fear of nuclear disasters (and nuclear war) on the rise, a switch to safer nuclear power couldn’t come at a better time.

This is not news to Instapundit readers.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Why I’m Leaving The Political Science Association.

Looking forward to a lively annual conference of the American Political Science Association, due to start this week in San Francisco, I proposed a panel on “Viewpoint Diversity in Political Science.” After all, I thought, wasn’t the 2016 election a signal lesson in the continuing relevance of diverse viewpoints in the American body politic?

My submission featured four of the most prominent political scientists in the country who have written on the issue of political diversity in the field. They included Joshua Dunn, Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, whose co-authored 2016 book entitled Passing on the Right: Conservative Professors in the Progressive University has been a focus of the national discussion among academics interested in the issue; and April Kelly-Woessner, Professor of Political Science and Chair of the Department of Politics, Philosophy and Legal Studies at Elizabethtown College, whose co-authored 2011 book The Still Divided Academy: How Competing Visions of Power Politics and Diversity Complicate the Mission of Higher Education is the gold standard on how to promote respectful political dialogue on campus.

Now, granted, every major conference receives far more submissions than it can accept. Still, I was surprised when the panel was rejected. I assumed that it had been bested by superior panels submitted to the jointly-organized teaching and educations sections of the conference. But when the official program came out, I could see that it was not. Instead, it was crowded out by APSA’s serious lack of political diversity.

A total of 11 full panels or roundtables were accepted in the teaching and education sections. Of these, 7 are on mainstream teaching topics. Another 4 were set aside for, shall we say, more politicized topics. One, entitled “Let’s Talk about Sex (and Gender and Sexuality)”, is on how to restructure the classroom around ideas of being “genderfluid, transgender, or gender nonconforming.” Another, on “Tolerance, Diversity, and Assessment” will focus on how to use administrative coercion to enforce various group identity agendas.

The third, called “Taking Advantage of Diversity,” will help scholars to understand why their quaint notions of cutting edge knowledge are merely expressions of white identity. Another, “Teaching Trump”, is composed of left-wing feminist scholars. Final score for political science education at this year’s APSA conference: left-wing approaches to diversity and difference: 4; conservative or classical liberal approaches: 0.

They don’t see themselves as academics, ultimately, but as ideological soldiers. But now the taxpayers they soldier against are asking why they should foot the bill.

GOOD QUESTION: What stopped Japan from intercepting North Korean missile?

The projectile was apparently tracked by the three Aegis destroyers, each equipped with Standard Missile-3 interceptor missiles that are constantly deployed in the Sea of Japan. A second layer of close-in defense is provided by the Air Self-Defense Force’s ground-based Patriot Advanced Capability-3 missiles, with the ASDF’s PAC-3 unit in Hokkaido based at Chitose Air base.

“By the time this got over Japan, this thing was very high and moving extremely fast,” Lance Gatling, a defense analyst and president of Tokyo-based Nexial Research Inc., told DW.

“It was apparently at an altitude of 550 kilometers when it passed over Hokkaido, which is at the very limit of the intercept range for the SM-3, and any Aegis destroyer would have needed to be in just the right position to intercept,” Gatling said. “All in all, it was a pretty low percentage shot if they had gone ahead and ordered it.”

Boost-phase is when an ICBM is most vulnerable, but also the most difficult time to arrange an intercept.

AMERICA: Harvey has created untold heroes from ordinary people responding magnificently.

JOHN HINDERAKER: Shocking Sexism and Racism by Leftist Professors at University of Nebraska.

IS THERE ANYTHING HE CAN’T DO? Survey Confirms Significant ‘Trump Bump’ In Law School Applications.

THAT’S WHAT THEY ALWAYS SAY WHEN IT’S HELD BY REPUBLICANS: Labor Leader Sees A White House Of ‘Racists’ and ‘Wall Streeters.’

How is President Goldman-Sachs doing these days, anyway?

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, ACADEMIA-KEEPS-DIGGING EDITION: Scandal Erupts over the Promotion of ‘Bourgeois’ Behavior.

Were you planning to instruct your child about the value of hard work and civility? Not so fast! According to a current uproar at the University of Pennsylvania, advocacy of such bourgeois virtues is “hate speech.” The controversy, sparked by an op-ed written by two law professors, illustrates the rapidly shrinking boundaries of acceptable thought on college campuses and the use of racial victimology to police those boundaries.

On August 9, University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax and University of San Diego law professor Larry Alexander published an op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer calling for a revival of the bourgeois values that characterized mid-century American life, including child-rearing within marriage, hard work, self-discipline on and off the job, and respect for authority. The late 1960s took aim at the bourgeois ethic, they say, encouraging an “antiauthoritarian, adolescent, wish-fulfillment ideal [of] sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll that was unworthy of, and unworkable for, a mature, prosperous adult society.”

Today, the consequences of that cultural revolution are all around us: lagging education levels, the lowest male work-force participation rate since the Great Depression, opioid abuse, and high illegitimacy rates. Wax and Alexander catalogue the self-defeating behaviors that leave too many Americans idle, addicted, or in prison: “the single-parent, antisocial habits, prevalent among some working-class whites; the anti-‘acting white’ rap culture of inner-city blacks; the anti-assimilation ideas gaining ground among some Hispanic immigrants.”

Well, of course the squares of academia are shocked. Bourgeois is the new transgressive.

CAMELOT REALLY ALWAYS WAS A TRAILER PARK: ‘Untouchable’ Kennedys boast about bad behavior all over Hyannis Port.

YES, OF COURSE, BECAUSE THE GOAL IS TO REACH THE KIDS IN THE PERPETUAL NOW AND NOT TO ENDOW THEM WITH THE TIMELESS REACHES OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION: Teachers resort to emojis, GIFs and memes to reach Gen Z.  Teaching, you is doing it wrong.

AND HE’S RIGHT: #Harvey: Trump Says Texans Can Handle Anything

WHEN THAT’S THE ONLY OPTION LEFT: Prediction: Hard Brexit.

IF TRUE WE NEED A NEW NAME FOR THE CONDITION:Scientist claims he can ‘talk’ to brain-dead patients.

AT AMAZON, deals on Pet Supplies.

MATT DRUDGE’S TAKE:

THE SCIENCE IS SETTLED: 107-Year-Old Woman Credits Scotch, ‘Hearty Appetite’ For Long Life.

FEDERAL JUDGE JOINS THE RESISTANCE: Joe Arpaio saga isn’t over: Judge to decide if his conviction stands. I’m pretty sure the judge lacks jurisdiction as the pardon renders the matter moot. Am I wrong?

UPDATE: Ah, this explains what’s going on.

ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Why Stinky Socks May Bother Women More Than Men. “In research published in 2002 in the journal Nature Neuroscience, Pamela Dalton of the Monell Chemical Senses Center and her colleagues exposed men and women to smells in the laboratory. Not just once, but over and over again. Dr. Dalton and her team found that with repeated exposure, the women’s ability to detect the odors improved 100,000-fold: the women were able to detect the odor at a concentration 1/100,000th of the concentration they needed at the beginning of the study. But the male subjects, on average, showed no improvement at all in their ability to detect the odor.”