AND THEY DON’T PRODUCE ANY GOODS OR SERVICES: Union Bosses Make More Money Than Private Sector CEOs.

CHRISTIAN TOTO: 10 Insufferable SNL Revelations from THR Interview.

READER BOOK PLUG: From James LaFond, The Jericho Bone.

DRIVERLESS: Three Studies Show How Robocars Will Make for Safer, More Efficient Roads.

AMERICA’S LONGEST WAR: Marines are back in Afghanistan’s most violent province, and their mission could expand.

IT’S THEIR WAY: MSNBC Host Learns North Korea Story Is Fake News — Keeps Pushing It Anyway.

Video at the link.

BLUE APRONLESS: Now Strippers Have Their Own Subscription Box Service. “Stage Gurl offers a variety of boxes, targeting different levels of dancers and a range of budgets. The top-of-the-line Feature Stripper Box ($110) includes one or two outfits and a variety of other items: leg warmers or garters, a bottle of body spray, a small purse in which a dancer can carry her cash, tampons, baby wipes, and lotion.”

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING? NBC Reporter: Official Says ISIS Intel Trump Discussed With Russians ‘Wasn’t Anything They Didn’t Already Know.’

Related: McMaster: Info Trump shared was “wholly appropriate … for common action.”

VIDEO: Angry Crowd Boos Former Hugo Chavez Minister and Forces Him to Leave Venezuelan Bakery in Miami.

HE SHOULD HAVE BEEN PROSECUTED FOR LYING TO CONGRESS: James Clapper’s Assault on Democracy. “You know what does seriously erode our system of checks and balances? It’s when high-ranking government officials lie under oath to members of Congress. That’s what James Clapper did on March 12, 2013, while testifying before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.”

NEWS YOU CAN USE: How Tech is Changing Your Beauty Routine.

I KEEP ASKING THE VERY SAME THING: How can we ‘Move On Together’ if Hillary Clinton won’t go away?

BIG LIFT: SpaceX Launches Super-Heavy Communications Satellite.

The 23-story-tall booster soared off its seaside launch pad, which once hosted NASA’s space shuttles and Apollo moon rockets, at 7:21 p.m. EDT (2321 GMT). It was the sixth of more than 20 missions SpaceX plans to fly this year.

Perched on top of the two-stage rocket was the 13,400-lb. (6,100 kilograms) Inmarsat-5 F4 communications satellite, the heaviest spacecraft yet to be delivered by a Falcon booster into a geostationary transfer orbit some 22,300 miles (35,800 km) above Earth. [Photos: SpaceX Launches Inmarsat-5 F4 Satellite]

The satellite separated from the Falcon 9’s second stage right on time, about 32 minutes after liftoff.

“It’s been a great afternoon and evening,” said SpaceX mission commentator John Insprucker. “All you can ask for today.”

Getting F4 into its intended orbit emptied the Falcon’s fuel tanks, leaving no propellant for the booster’s first stage to attempt a landing on either a drone barge or the ground.

Maybe the Falcon Heavy, due to launch later this year, will be able to put a similar payload into geosynchronous orbit and then return the first stage for recycling — but the SpaceX data sheet doesn’t say.

CHARLIE MARTIN: Analyzing the Trump/Russia Intelligence Story.

HEH: With Conservative Viewership Tanking, ESPN Gets MSNBC to Run Ads on SportsCenter.

No joke. During NBC’s late ’70 nadir, I remember them running promo spots for the ill-fated (and ill-conceived and ill-executed) Supertrain — on St. Louis’s tiny UHF station. You have to be desperate to imagine that you’ll find the audience for your new big budget show sandwiched in between mid-afternoon reruns of Sanford and Son and Rhoda.

So this is familiar TV territory, both the desperation and the nadir.

FROM LUDLUMESQUE CONSPIRACY THEORY TO ACTUAL NEWS: Bombshell: Seth Rich sent 44,053 DNC emails to WikiLeaks. “The federal investigator, who requested anonymity, said 44,053 emails and 17,761 attachments between Democratic National Committee leaders, spanning from January 2015 through late May 2016, were transferred from Rich to MacFadyen before May 21. On July 22, just 12 days after Rich was killed, WikiLeaks published internal DNC emails that appeared to show top party officials conspired to stop Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont from becoming the party’s presidential nominee.”

VIETNAM-ERA RECON DRONE: A Teledyne Ryan AQM-34L Firebee. Nice photo.

HILLARY 2020! RUN, HILLARY, RUN! Hillary Clinton’s PAC power play may underline Dems’ disarray .

Slogan: This time it’s really my turn, bitchez!

SERIOUS DIGITAL SABOTAGE: The head of Holland’s AIVD intelligence service issues yet another warning.

Bertholee highlighted how in 2012 the computers at Saudi Arabia’s largest oil company came under brief attack, or how three years later Ukrainian electricity companies were hacked causing a massive blackout lasting several hours.

The world’s infrastructure was heavily interconnected, which had huge benefits, but also “vulnerabilities”.

“Imagine what would happen if the entire banking system were sabotaged for a day, two days, for a week,” he asked.

“Or if there was a breakdown in our transportation network. Or if air traffic controllers faced cyberattacks while directing flights. The consequences could be catastrophic.”

Added Bertholee: “Sabotage on one of these sectors could have major public repercussions, causing unrest, chaos and disorder.”

In 1994 I heard a U.S. Navy captain who was a computer systems expert describe how someone might attack an electrical grid. So the threat isn’t new. But it has evolved.

THEY THINK IT’S A SURVIVAL PACT: The Media-Democratic Party Suicide Pact.

If Dwight Eisenhower were around today, he might be warning us against the Media-Government Complex.

JAMES MORROW: Not every scandal is a magic bullet, and the hysteria is helping Trump.

The pattern of the Trump-shared-secrets-with-the-Russkies story is predictable.

As is so often the case the Washington Post, which has made itself the unofficial house organ of America’s anti-Trump establishment with its new self-regarding slogan, “Democracy dies in darkness”, kicked things off.

They did this with an article citing “anonymous sources” who claimed that the president — whether in a fit of braggadocio, stupidity, or in partial payment for Moscow’s meddling with the election the Post leaves to the reader to decide — passed on exceedingly sensitive and restricted intelligence to the Russian ambassador and foreign minister in a meeting last week.

The information was so top secret, said the Post, that America hadn’t even shared the information with key allies.

All of this conjured images of Trump letting the Russians in on something really big, like exactly when all the generals take smoko at NORAD (“I tell you Vlad, they’re out there every morning at 9:30 like clockwork. And if they’re talking about what happened on Last Resort, they’re not back at their stations for, like, half an hour, easy.”)

And it immediately set commentators abuzz, with everyone who’d just settled down over the firing of FBI Director James Comey once again demanding Trump’s impeachment, this time for grievously damaging national security.

But as so often happens, the extent of what Trump actually told the Russians reality may be a bit more pedestrian.

The information in question is now said to have been about ISIS plots to sneak a bomb on to an airliner in a laptop, a plot device easily imagined by any Hollywood TV writer or paperback spy thriller author.

Indeed, if no other allies knew about the plot, then all credit to British officials who instituted a similar ban in the wake of the US’s move to ban laptops on flights from a number of Muslim-majority countries, as well as to Malcolm Turnbull, who is also said to be looking “very closely” at putting such a policy in place for flights to Australia.

And for what it’s worth, National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster has denied anything inappropriate was shared with the Russians, though whether the word of a three star general can hold a candle to unnamed sources is an open question.

This is not to defend Trump so much as it is to plead for some sense of reality on the part of his critics, who see in every scandal a magic bullet that might restore the world to the way they think it should be.

Well, I’m still not sure exactly what’s going on — see Stephen’s post below for more — but what is clear is that they hope that if they gin up enough controversy, baseless or not, maybe it’ll give cover to an impeachment or 25 Amendment removal, or something. I don’t think it will happen and if it does — barring something a lot bigger and more uncontrovertible than anything they’ve come up with so far — you will have literal riots in the streets if Trump’s removed, far beyond anything you’ve seen from Democrat constituency groups like Black Lives Matter. Trump supporters have had it with the establishment, and are unlikely to go along quietly with a system they regard as deeply corrupt and devoted to their destruction. To the extent it’s interested in impeachment, the anti-Trump establishment, which likes to present itself as responsible and sensible, is playing with fire here, in a room full of gasoline that the establishment itself has pumped.

Exit question: We know of one clear-cut crime here, the leak to WaPo. Which senior Republican White House official — because who else could it be? — was behind that leak? And will Trump follow Obama’s lead and use the Espionage Act to try to find out and punish the leaker? Because Trump’s practically a dictator, and that’s what a dictator would do, right? Oh, wait . . .

WELL, OUR RULING CLASS HAS BEEN DELIBERATELY PULLING OUT THREADS FOR 50 YEARS: The Social Fabric Frays. The Patches Aren’t Obvious.

“In Washington,” says Utah senator Mike Lee, “we measure GDP, we measure government outlays and revenues — all kind of things that are quantifiable and monitored like vital signs, blood pressure and heart rate. But we don’t always take the time to measure other things that are just as important to our life as a country.” One of those things is the state of America’s “associational life,” which is the topic of a new report from the senator’s staff on the Joint Economic Committee of Congress.

The report sets the scene by invoking the titles of some high-profile books by Robert Putnam, Charles Murray and Yuval Levin: “There is a sense that our social fabric has seen better days. Leading thinkers have issued warnings that we are increasingly ‘bowling alone,’ ‘coming apart,’ and inhabiting a ‘fractured republic.’ At the heart of those warnings is a view that what happens in the middle layers of our society is vital to sustaining a free, prosperous, democratic, and pluralistic country.”

What Lee is concerned about documenting is that this middle layer is thinning. Fewer Americans are getting married or living in families. We are going to religious services less often, and are less likely to consider ourselves members of a religious organization. We’re spending less time socializing with neighbors and co-workers, too. Voting rates have declined, and we’ve grown less likely to pay attention to news about government. We trust one another less: The percentage of Americans who thought most people could be trusted fell to 31 percent in 2016 from 46 percent in 1972, the report says, citing the General Social Survey.

When you make war on bourgeois sentiments and behavior for half a century — and that’s what’s been going on, both openly and otherwise — you shouldn’t be surprised to find less of both.

CLAIM: Trump’s trampling of political norms spurs strongman comparisons.

Has he threatened to use his “pen and phone” to circumvent Congress?

THE NOT-SO-GREAT WALL: China’s Economic Reforms Have Hit a Wall.

From the late 1970s until 2010 China averaged more than nine percent real growth, but growth has fallen considerably since, coming in at 6.7 percent for all of 2016. More troubling than the country’s dive in growth is its collapse in productivity. All of China’s growth now is achieved through mobilizing more money and labor, not improvements in human capital or technology. It now takes three times as much capital to generate a single unit of economic growth as it did in 2008. The result is an explosion of debt that now accounts for at least 280 percent of GDP, and could break through the 300 percent mark by year’s end.

China has three strategies to arrest this trend. The first is to shrink the size of the old economy by reducing capacity in heavy industrial sectors dominated by lethargic state-owned enterprises, including steel and aluminum. The second is to expand the new economy by supporting high value-added services and advanced technologies. And the third is to reform local government fiscal systems while tightening regulation of new financial instruments such as wealth management products. The headline figures do reflect economic restructuring; services now count for more than half of the economy, high-tech manufacturing is expanding rapidly, and the issuance of new credit is slowing. But despite these efforts, productivity is still flagging.

Two out of those three reforms directly attack the power structure of the Communist Party of China. The remaining one, expanding the high-tech “new economy,” requires the kind of openness and transparency which Communist rule makes impossible.