PRIVACY: China Will Block All VPNs by February 2018.

The state has been attempting to clamp down on the use of VPNs by individuals for some time, but their use is still widespread. Last year Fang Binxing, known as the father of the Great Firewall, publicly used a VPN to bypass his own creation and in so doing caused embarrassment.

According to Bloomberg, China Mobile, China Unicom, and China Telecom, have been given a deadline of February 1, 2018 by which time all VPN connections must be blocked. In doing so, Twitter, Facebook, and Google services will be completely off limits, as will many more China disapproves of.

As well as the demands put on ISPs in the country, the Ministry of Industry and Information technology plans to clamp down on unauthorized VPNs operating within China. Businesses can continue to operate them, but only internally.

Whether the government is capable of achieving its goal of no VPN use is unclear, but one thing is for sure, using a VPN will become much more difficult in China next year. Anyone visiting should assume many services will be unavailable and plan for that.

You’re always taking your chances visiting a Communist nation.

JOURNALISM: How a High School Newspaper Scored an Interview With the Defense Secretary. “Interview topics included ISIS, foreign policy, the political climate in the US, the nature of American warfare in the years to come, and much more—including what Mattis thinks students should be studying (history) and what advice he would give to concerned high schoolers.”

NO. Can Democrats Make Nice with Deplorables?

In the course of describing the Democrats’ class dilemma, the liberal truth-tellers unwittingly show why a solution lies out of reach. They understate Democrats’ entanglement with the identity-politics Left, a group devoted to a narrative of American iniquity. Identity politics appeals to its core constituents through grievance and resentment, particularly toward white men. Consider some reactions to centrist Democrat John Osoff’s defeat in Georgia’s sixth district. “Maybe instead of trying to convince hateful white people, Dems should convince our base—ppl of color, women—to turn out,” feminist writer and Cosmopolitan political columnist Jill Filopovic tweeted afterward. “At some point we have to be willing to say that yes, lots of conservative voters are hateful and willing to embrace bigots.” Insightful as she is, even Williams assumes that all criticisms of the immigration status quo can be chalked up to “fear of brown people.”

No Democrat on the scene today possesses the Lincolnesque political skills to persuade liberal voters to give up their assumptions of white deplorability, endorse assimilation, or back traditional civics education. In the current environment, a Democratic civics curriculum would teach that American institutions are vehicles for the transmission of white supremacy and sexism, hardly a route to social cohesion. As for assimilation, Hispanic and bilingual-education advocacy organizations would threaten a revolt—and they’d only be the first to sound the alarm.

There’s also gentry liberal snobbery, which is the Blue States’ opioid crisis.

JAW, JAW IS BETTER THAN WAR, WAR: Army Training Tells Soldiers Not to Gossip About Transgender Troops.

ARE THERE LONG-TERM RISKS TO EGG DONORS? “When patients consider a medical procedure, they may be told ‘there are no known long-term effects.’ But unless such effects have been systematically studied, that does not mean there are no long-term effects.”

You know, it’s starting to seem like getting married at a reasonable age and having kids fairly soon is actually the best approach to reproduction.

BLUE ON BLUE: Bernie Sanders Faces Senate Challenger Amid Escalating FBI Investigation.

SURE, THAT WILL HELP RACE RELATIONS: BART Withholding Surveillance Videos Of Crime To Avoid ‘Stereotypes.’

In the last three months, there have been at least three robberies on BART involving groups of teenagers.

“I think people are genuinely concerned — they are fearful about the stories that have come out about the recent attacks, the assaults, the thefts,” said Debora Allen, who is a member of the BART Board of Directors.

April 22: Forty to sixty kids boarded a train at the Coliseum stop and robbed seven passengers, beating up two;

June 28: A group of four kids assaulted a passenger and made off with a cell phone at Dublin; and

June 30: A woman on a train with about a dozen teenagers had her phone snatched by one them before the group got off at the Coliseum stop. Thankfully, a good Samaritan was on hand to retrieve the phone.

So far, BART has refused to turn over surveillance video for any of these incidents.

Allen told us the agency issued an explanation for why it is being tight-lipped about the thefts.

“To release these videos would create a high level of racially insensitive commentary toward the district,” she was told. “And in addition it would create a racial bias in the riders against minorities on the trains.”

Instead, we have this action, which will do none of those things. . . .

HUH: Aerospace guru explains why SpaceX reuses rockets – and it’s not to save money.

Jim Cantrell is the CEO of Vector Space Systems. He’s worked for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab and was a founding member of both SpaceX and the Google Lunar X Prize-winning Moon Express. When it comes to the space industry, he’s the kind of guy who you should listen to, and in a recent response to a Quora question about exactly how much money SpaceX is saving by reusing its Falcon rocket, Cantrell revealed the real reason (he believes) the company has pursued reusable hardware so vigorously isn’t actually to save money, but to increase the number of launches the company is able to perform.

“Reusability allows a marked increase in flight rates,” Cantrell explained. “Reverse engineered financial models of SpaceX show that to reach a good strong positive cash flow, they need more than the traditional 10–12 launches per year that sized rocket has demonstrated. Reusability should easily double the amount of flights possible from a mere production and logistics standpoint.”

“Professionals study logistics” doesn’t just apply to military affairs.

USN ISSUES SPECS FOR A NEW GUIDED MISSILE FRIGATE: It will have the Vertical Launching System for air defense missiles and be capable of independent operations.

RELATED: The Navy’s frigate controversy.

AGING: 100-Year-Old Woman Says Plenty of Wine Is the Secret to Long Life.

The science is far from settled, but why take chances?

HEY, IT WORKED WITH THE SUGAR INDUSTRY AND HARVARD: Paying Professors: Inside Google’s Academic Influence Campaign: Company pays stipends of $5,000 to $400,000 for research supporting business practices that face regulatory scrutiny; a ‘wish list’ of topics. “Some researchers share their papers before publication and let Google give suggestions, according to thousands of pages of emails obtained by the Journal in public-records requests of more than a dozen university professors. The professors don’t always reveal Google’s backing in their research, and few disclosed the financial ties in subsequent articles on the same or similar topics, the Journal found.”

AT AMAZON, It’s Amazon Prime Day 2017 – 30 Hours of Deals. Like Christmas in July!

WHO WANTS TO PUT DEMOCRACY IN CHAINS? Everyone.

In her badly flawed book Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, historian Nancy MacLean gets many, many things wrong about the history and purposes of libertarianism. Jonathan Adler, David Bernstein (see also here), Phil Magness (also here), Russell Roberts, and Michael Munger, and others, have highlighted some of her most important fallacies and distortions.

On one issue, however, she is largely correct: it is indeed true that libertarians want to impose tight limits on the power of democratic majorities. Calling this agenda a “stealth plan” is, of course, ridiculous. It is much like saying that pro-lifers have a “stealth plan” to restrict abortion, or that Bernie Sanders has a secret agenda to expand government control over the economy. Skepticism about the power of democratic majorities has been a central – and completely open – feature of classical liberal and libertarian thought for centuries. Most of the Founding Fathers, John Stuart Mill, Alexis de Tocqueville, and many others held such views. It was Thomas Jefferson, writing in protest of the Alien and Sedition Acts, not James Buchanan and the Koch brothers (the central villains of MacLean’s story), who wrote that “[i]n questions of power,… let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.”

Regardless, MacLean tries to use libertarians’ suspicion of unconstrained democracy as a cudgel with which to deligitimize them and prove that they are outside the bounds of reasonable political discourse. Why would anyone want to put “chains” on democracy, if not to empower a narrow oligarchy of the wealthy, as she claims libertarians want to do?

Yet libertarians are far from the only ones who want to chain down democracy. Consider a group MacLean may have some sympathy with: mainstream modern left-liberals. Are they populist champions of the will of the people? Do they want to empower democratic majorities to rule as they see fit? Pretty obviously not. In some ways, the left wants to put even more chains on democracy than libertarians do.

That’s different because shut up.

DEEP STATE: US Post Office spent big OT bucks to cover workers while they campaigned for Hillary.

ANOTHER COFFEE UPDATE: Caffeinated or decaffeinated, it doesn’t matter. Coffee is associated with lower mortality rates. Two or three cups a day reduces your chance of death 18 percent.

BREAKING: Donald J. Trump Jr. has released the emails referred to in the New York Times’s article.

Yuge.

RELATED: Democrats happy to dance to Putin’s tune.

RETURNING NORTH KOREA’S SERVE: Trump’s anti-missile missile option.

RON RADOSH: Trump Shifts Gears After Warsaw Speech, Undercutting Any Good He Had Done.

HENRY PAYNE: Did Trump Just Save the U.S. Auto Industry?

In condemning the Trump Administration’s withdrawal from the Paris Accords, media darling and former Obama EPA official Marge Oge told the New York Times that “the rest of the world is moving forward with electric cars. If the Trump administration goes backward, the U.S. won’t be able to compete globally.”

In reality, the opposite is true. Thanks to less-stringent emissions rules and low gas prices, the U.S. is essential to most automakers’ profits, driving as it does the high-margin sales of popular pickup trucks and SUVs that can’t be sold elsewhere in the world. GM, for example, withdrew from the European market this year because its small cars are unprofitable there.

Ford joined the corporate chorus in condemning Trump’s Paris withdrawal saying that “we believe climate change is real, and remain deeply committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions in our vehicles and our facilities.” Yet the politically correct statement would seem a financial death wish. Some 80 percent of Ford’s profit reportedly comes from U.S. pickup sales. A France-like gas-engine ban to satisfy CO2 targets would destroy the company’s bottom line.

Selling vehicles people want at prices they can afford while earning a healthy profit? Outrageous.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The Moral Case For Renaming UC-Hastings Law School Due To ‘Indian Hunting’ By Serranus Hastings In The 1850s. The brand-destruction caused by this sort of renaming is enormously expensive. Right-wing conspiracists could never have done as much damage to higher education as it’s doing on its own at the behest of the Left.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The Wages of the Campus Revolts.

Colleges have been perceived as liberal bastions for decades, but the latest round of campus culture warring—beginning around 2014 and continuing through the present day—has had a sudden and dramatic impact on conservatives’ perceptions of the Ivory Tower. According to a new Pew survey, Republicans saw colleges and universities as having a “positive effect on the way things are going in the country” by about a 20 point margin until 2015. In the last two years, however, GOP esteem of America’s higher education institutions started to collapse. Today, Republican 58 percent of Republican voters say colleges have a negative effect on American society, compared to just 36 percent who say they have a positive effect.

Given what colleges have been saying about Republicans, and what college administrators have been allowing on campus, it’s amazing that it took this long, and that it isn’t worse.

AN ACTUALLY GOOD COLUMN FROM DAVID BROOKS ON HOW THE “NEW CLASS” IS RUINING AMERICA:

Over the past generation, members of the college-educated class have become amazingly good at making sure their children retain their privileged status. They have also become devastatingly good at making sure the children of other classes have limited chances to join their ranks. . . .

The educated class has built an ever more intricate net to cradle us in and ease everyone else out. It’s not really the prices that ensure 80 percent of your co-shoppers at Whole Foods are, comfortingly, also college grads; it’s the cultural codes.

Status rules are partly about collusion, about attracting educated people to your circle, tightening the bonds between you and erecting shields against everybody else. We in the educated class have created barriers to mobility that are more devastating for being invisible. The rest of America can’t name them, can’t understand them. They just know they’re there.

And that’s why you got Trump. Related: How David Brooks Created Donald Trump.

UPDATE: A lot of people are mocking Brooks for this, and understandably I suppose. But this is actually news to Brooks, and his readers. We should cheer when a bit of fresh air makes it into the bubble.

THERE’S A METHOD TO THIS MADNESS: San Francisco And California Take Additional Steps Toward Lawlessness.

Jazz Shaw:

Clearly San Francisco is upping their game when it comes to defying the law here. Some quasi-sanctuary cities have put less official policies in place which allow officers the option of not cooperating with ICE or asking suspects about their immigration status. But San Francisco has chosen to go with an all-out ban, forbidding their police from performing routine actions which would assist in upholding the law and protecting their own citizens from dangerous, criminal illegal aliens. It’s particularly ironic in light of the recent congressional action mentioned above, since their city was the home to Kathryn Steinle at the time of her brutal murder by an illegal alien who had already been deported multiple times.

Meanwhile, back in the state capital, California as a whole was moving in a similar direction. State senator Kevin de Leon has gotten his pet bill out of committee and it’s one which would, if enacted, turn the Golden State into one of the most hostile environments for immigration enforcement in the nation.

Jazz concludes: “Locking federal ICE agents out of law enforcement databases and physically blocking them from entering jails and courthouses is just about as far as one could imagine a state going in terms of lawlessness. That’s no longer just a policy difference… it’s aiding and abetting criminals while gutting the rule of law.”

Well, yes. But you can’t establish the New Feudalism without breaking a few eggs.

FEELGOOD STORY OF THE DAY: Florida beachgoers form an 80-person human chain to save family.