ROBERT KAPLAN: America’s Darwinian Nationalism.

Ironically, the human-rights community understands a basic truth about the American historical and spiritual condition that too few others do—which is that while other states have survived and even prospered by a ruthless realpolitik of sorts, America, because it was born as a geographic bounty and also as an ideal, is nothing without both. Other nations may only represent themselves. But America must, to a certain reasonable extent, represent humanity—or at least aspire to. There have been periods where America has not done so, and there have been periods where it has tried too hard to do so. But what counts is the preservation of the tension between those two extremes. If the United States ever truly decided that its own good was no longer bound up anymore with the good of the world, then America’s reputation for power would begin to disintegrate in a way that it would not for another country. This is why the liberal world order that the United States has built in Europe and Asia since the Second World War signifies the culmination of the American experience. Though extending that world order much further might be beyond the capacity of the United States, simply retreating from it must lead to American decline. For while the interests of state, properly defined, lead to peace by respecting the interests of other states, alliances are much harder to maintain without declared values, and thus our values themselves are part of our strategic advantage.

That’s not a bad one-paragraph definition of American Exceptionalism — and there are other worthwhile bits in the rest of Kaplan’s (lengthy) piece.

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: New Centene CEO is another example Obamacare’s architects getting rich off Obamacare.

Sarah Kliff’s take is a ludicrously generous assessment. The reporter is referring to the recent decision by former healthcare.gov CEO, Kevin Counihan, to join a health insurance company, Centene. Unlike many other insurers who have withdrawn from the exchanges, Centene is finding success in Obama’s wonderland. Amusingly, Kliff suggests Counihan for moral rather than monetary reasons.

I think her assessment is a stretch.

As the former head of the federal health exchange, Counihan is well placed to guide Centene towards new profits. And it’s clear where those profits wait. As I’ve explained, Centene’s business model is utterly dependent on the Obama administration’s massive expansion of Medicaid. Indeed, with 3.5 million of Centene’s customers on Medicaid, the government trough is Centene’s heart, aorta, and lifeblood.

Counihan will be able to grease Centene’s wheels by engaging with his healthcare.gov contacts to help his new employer anticipate regulatory changes and subsidies. In return, Counihan is likely to collect a healthy paycheck.

Yet another argument for my revolving-door surtax.

THEY DON’T MAKE ‘EM LIKE THAT ANYMORE: A-10 Pilot Lands With No Canopy, Gear After Gun Explodes.

Two thousand feet up and flying over the forests of Alpena County, Capt. Brett DeVries was running through his mental checklist and most of the options were bad. With his wingman flying just feet away and an Air Force maintenance specialist patched in via a radio set up next to a speaker phone, DeVries made the decision to land his badly-damaged A-10 Thunderbolt II on the runway at the Alpena Combat Readiness Training Center.

Despite the fact that his landing gear wouldn’t come down. And the canopy had blown off the aircraft 25 minutes before. And his main radio stopped working. Along with the first back-up.

There’s an old saying in the Air Force: Any landing you can walk away from is a good landing.

In this case, DeVries expeditiously exited the aircraft – gulping deep breathes until he was certain there would be no explosion. But yes, it was a very good landing.

Impressive photo at the link.

During the first Gulf War, CNN talked to an A-10 pilot who had safely landed back in Saudi with, at a guess, maybe 60% total of both his aircraft’s wing remaining — and he didn’t seem to think it was a such a big deal. I’m not sure that particular A-10 ever flew again (although I wouldn’t be surprised if it had), but the pilot certainly did.

As the Air Force continues its hunt for a light attack plane to replace the A-10, let’s hope they’re keeping survivability from ground fire very much in mind.

I DO NOT TRUST THE INTERNET OF THINGS: Update gone wrong leaves 500 smart locks inoperable.

Hundreds of Internet-connected locks became inoperable last week after a faulty software update caused them to experience a fatal system error, manufacturer LockState said.

The incident is the latest reminder that the so-called Internet of Things—in which locks, thermostats, and other everyday appliances are embedded with small Internet-connected computers—often provide as many annoyances as they do conveniences. Over the past week, the Colorado-based company’s Twitter feed has been gorged with comments from customers who were suddenly unable to lock or unlock their doors normally. Complicating the matter: the affected LockState model—the RemoteLock 6i—is included in an Airbnb partnership called Host Assist. That left many hosts unable to remotely control their locks.

IoT is fine for fun things, like giving even middle class Americans mood lighting options previously only available to the rich. But giving web-enabled devices the power to control ingress to your home or business didn’t seem like such a good idea even before this incident.

NO DEMOCRAT WILL BE ASKED TO DENOUNCE THIS: Las Vegas Man Arrested for Heller Burglary, Threat.

A 62-year-old man was arrested Monday in relation to a threatening message for Nevada Sen. Dean Heller over his vote on the Republican health care bill.

Richard Holley was arrested and booked at the Clark County Detention Center on charges related to a July 16 burglary at the senator’s office, where police found a note threatening Heller’s life, the Las Vegas Review Journal reported.

The letter criticized Heller in relation to how he would vote on repealing and replacing the 2010 health care law.

Will they?

POTUS PRESSER GONE WILD: That and much more in Liz Sheld’s morning brief.

JOURNALISM: Ann Althouse: “I wish I felt more confidence that The Washington Post would tell it straight. Maybe this is straight, but how can I know? What trust has been shot to hell in the last few years of journalism!”

Plus: “I have to assume the police deliberately absented themselves. Was it because they knew or expected the counterprotesters to be the enforcers? And who started the punching and shoving? The WaPo report is a model of hiding the human agency: chaos, shoves, and punches seem to be acting on their own.” (Bumped).

CORN, POPPED: Democrats Fret as Clinton Book Rollout Looms. “The losing presidential candidate wants to talk about what went wrong. Her party wishes she wouldn’t.”

Can you blame them?

Clinton has promised to “let my guard down” in the book, “What Happened,” explaining her shocking loss to Trump in November. She has already offered up several explanations, blaming Russian interference, former FBI director James Comey, and misogyny, while also acknowledging tactical errors by her campaign.

Many Washington Democrats, though unwilling to criticize her in public, wish she’d “move on,” as Senator Al Franken has put it. They fear that her complaints help Trump make his case that the controversies surrounding him flow from the Democrats’ bitterness about their 2016 loss.

They prefer the approach taken by Al Gore after his equally controversial loss in 2000.

That’s not going to work, because Clinton scammed her way to riches before losing a presidential election.

THE HILL: Mattis praises sailors: ‘You’re not some p—- sitting on the sidelines.’

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis offered some salty words of encouragement to submarine sailors during remarks at Naval Base Kitsap in Washington state, according to the Pentagon’s official transcript of the speech.

Mattis thanked the sailors of the USS Kentucky Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine for their service during the August 9 speech.

“You will have some of the best days of your life and some of the worst days of your life in the U.S. Navy, you know what I mean? That says – that means you’re living. That means you’re living,” Mattis said at a troop event.

“That means you’re not some p—- sitting on the sidelines, you know what I mean, kind of sitting there saying, ‘Well, I should have done something with my life.’ Because of what you’re doing now, you’re not going to be laying on a shrink’s couch when you’re 45 years old, say ‘What the hell did I do with my life?’ Why? Because you served others; you served something bigger than you.”

The former Marine Corps general added that he wished he were “young enough to go back out to sea,” but joked, “there’s a world of difference between a submariner and a Marine, you know what I mean?”

“I spent seven days underwater once on a submarine so small it’d fit in half of this thing, and I was never so happy as when I got back to the surface,” he added.

Heh.

BURN THE WITCH: Dr. Judith Curry Explains The Reality Of Bad Climate Science And Bad Politics.

Regarding the role that human greenhouse gas emissions play in driving the earth’s climate Dr. Curry concludes that:

“On balance, I don’t see any particular dangers from greenhouse warming. {Humans do} influence climate to some extent, what we do with land-use changes and what we put into the atmosphere. But I don’t think it’s a large enough impact to dominate over natural climate variability.”

Regarding the politically contrived climate “consensus” arguments put forth by climate alarmists she concludes:

“The collapse of the consensus on cholesterol and heart disease – that one collapsed overnight. I can only hope that sanity will eventually prevail with the climate problem as well.”

There’s a lot less money to be grifted out of cholesterol than there is out of “saving the planet.”

AN IMPORTANT LESSON FROM MICHAEL WALSH: This is how the Compromised Media™ creates and propels its own Narrative.

WHY KNOXVILLE DOESN’T HAVE CONFEDERATE MONUMENTS: “The short answer is East Tennessee was a heavily pro-Union part of the South.”

And as I noted in a post over a decade ago, one thing our ancestors seem to have been better at than 21st Century Americans are was bringing the country together after the Civil War. But, of course, having a Civil War in their recent memory made them appreciate having “the hands that were once raised in strife now clasp a brother’s hand.” Note that this line appears in a monument erected by Union troops, a block from my office, commemorating the Battle of Fort Sanders. Our current political class, on the other hand, seems more reminiscent of America’s in the 1850s. Or maybe they just live by Rhett Butler’s saying, that there’s as much money to be made in tearing down a civilization as in building one up.

PRO-TIP, DON’T STAND IN THE RAIN: We’ve finally learned how to avoid getting struck by lightning.

END KITTEN TERRORISM!  GIVE THEM TUNA ALREADY: Kitten to blame for today’s awful morning commute.

WHEN YOU’VE BEEN THROUGH HELL, YOU RECOGNIZE THE SMELL OF BRIMSTONE: The Blessings of a Soviet Education.

NEWS YOU CAN USE:Get a massage, science says you need one.

LET’S NOT FORGET GOOGLE: The Curse of Monopoly.

THEY WISHED IT INTO BEING:The Faces Of Those Responsible For The Return Of Racism.

HIGH TIME AND PAST HIGH TIME: Conservatives Need To Stop Accepting Leftist Premises Of Public Moral Superiority.

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ORIN KERR: A closer look at DOJ’s warrant to collect website records.

The Hill is getting a lot of attention in privacy circles with a story headlined “Justice demands 1.3M IP addresses related to Trump resistance site.” . . .

First, it’s not obvious to me whether the warrant is problematic. Attachment B tells Dreamhost to turn over records to the government relating to “each account and identifier listed in Attachment A.” Notably, Attachment A doesn’t list any specific user accounts: It just lists the specific website. So the warrant seems to be telling Dreamhost to turn over pretty much everything it has on that website. I understand this to be Dreamhost’s objection. Dreamhost thinks the warrant should only require it to hand over specific records about specific users.

What makes this tricky, I think, is that Dreamhost is only involved in the initial search stage of a two-stage warrant. Computer warrants are ordinarily executed in two stages. First, the government gets access to all the electronic records. Next, the government searches through the records for the particularly described evidence. Courts have broadly allowed the government to follow this two-step procedure, in which they get all the stuff in the initial stage of electronic evidence warrants so that they can search it for the relevant evidence. Given that, Dreamhost’s objection is slightly off. As I read it, Dreamhost is essentially challenging the widely accepted two-stage warrant practice. Some federal magistrate judges in the “magistrate’s revolt” have made that argument, but they generally have been overruled at the district court level.

With that said, there’s an interesting and unresolved issue presented here: What’s the correct level of particularity for a website? Courts have allowed the government to get a suspect’s entire email account, which the government can then search through for evidence. But is the collective set of records concerning a website itself so extensive that it goes beyond what the Fourth Amendment allows?

Some decent privacy legislation would be helpful here, but don’t hold your breath.

PATHETIC. Fanny Hill is now too triggering for college students in London. “The book incensed the British clergy and censors upon its publication. However, heteronormative descriptions in Fanny Hill of ‘maypole[s] of so enormous a standard’ appear to be proving too much for university students.”

Phallophobia is real.

UPDATE: But apparently this story is not.

AND IT’S NO FUN: Sleep deprivation may impact brain like binge drinking, researchers say. Seriously, prioritize sleep.

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