WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Australia to launch beach-protecting, AI-powered shark drones.

Non-lethal, of course.

FEMINISM: Yes, You Still Have Thin Privilege If You ‘Worked For’ Your Body – Here’s Why. “Thin privilege” is worth working for, and the sour grapes here prove it.

TYLER O’NEIL: Raindrops on roses and … burqas on statues?

These are Heinlein’s Crazy Years — we just live in them.

A VIEW FROM PARIS: Americans are lucky to have Trump as President.

21ST CENTURY HEADLINES: California Mulls Taxing Robots.

OH, GROW UP: Some smartphone-carrying millennials and Gen Zers are so used to texting upon arrival that the sound of a ringing doorbell freaks them out; ‘it’s terrifying.’

“Doorbells are just so sudden. It’s terrifying,” says Tiffany Zhong, 20, the founder of Zebra Intelligence, which helps companies conduct custom research and gather insights on people born in the past two decades.

There’s no published research about doorbell phobia, but it’s a real thing. In a poll by a Twitter user earlier this month that got more than 11,000 votes, 54% of respondents said “doorbells are scary weird.”

Some millennials and Gen Zers say they won’t even consider answering a ring at the door until they’ve checked the security camera.

The doorbell freak-out reflects the ascendance of mediated communication, which means people interacting through technological devices rather than directly. It’s not so much about screen time versus face time as it is a merger of the two.

What do these adult-sized children do when faced with simple household chores like a clogged toilet or a lamp in need of new wiring?

MAYBE I SHOULD DYE MAY HAIR WHITE SO I’LL GET MORE CREDIT FOR MY PHYSIQUE. This Man’s White Hair and Chiseled Physique Has Everyone Baffled By His Age.

THE THREAT WITHIN: ‘Even if You Close All the Borders,’ ISIS Attacks Wouldn’t Stop. “About 60 percent of ISIS-linked perpetrators were born in the U.S. while another 20 percent were naturalized citizens.”

SO I WAS GOING TO WAIT TO MAKE THIS PUBLIC, BUT IN LIGHT OF THE ARPAIO PARDON HERE’S MY LATEST PAPER: Congressional Control of Presidential Pardons. It’s quite short and readable. Download it early and often!

LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: “Hunger is gnawing at Venezuela, where a government that claims to rule for the poorest has left most of its 31 million people short of food.”

That thing about ruling for the poorest? That’s just a line for the suckers.

COURAGE: Let Us Now Praise Muslim Apostates.

Outrageously, Ibn Warraq and Hirsi Ali have found no sanctuary in America’s centers of higher learning, where they regularly find themselves denounced as “Islamophobes.” But they have shrugged off the calumnies and continued to think about the most serious threat facing the Western democracies since the end of the Cold War. Their two recent works, Ibn Warraq’s The Islam in Islamic Terrorism: The Importance of Beliefs, Ideas, and Ideology and Hirsi Ali’s The Challenge of Dawa: Political Islam as Ideology and Movement and How to Counter It, encourage readers to reflect on the striking parallels between the ideological challenges that America and its allies confronted during the long struggle against international Communism and the current battle against jihadist terrorism.

It might seem counterintuitive to see similarities between an avowedly atheistic revolutionary movement, promising salvation on earth, and the religion of Islam, which guarantees its adherents a sweet afterlife. In reality, Communism was a quasi-religion for its true believers, and Islam has doubled as a totalitarian political system. The West’s victory over Communism was achieved primarily not on battlefields but through a war of civilizational ideas. Millions of people in the free world were once seduced by the utopian allure of Marxism and its kindred ideologies. Communism’s progressive apologists finally had to face the truth in part because of the testimonies of courageous men and women who had witnessed totalitarian movements from the inside. Like today’s Muslim dissidents, Communism’s apostates were denounced by many Western liberals as “reactionaries” and “warmongers.”

Many Western “liberals” have long been at war with what used to be correctly called Western liberalism, and have long acted as though the enemy of their enemy is their friend.

And do read the whole thing.

I DO NOT TRUST THE INTERNET OF THINGS: Popular Robots are Dangerously Easy to Hack, Cybersecurity Firm Says.

Universal Robots’s devices are designed to work directly alongside humans without being confined to a cage for safety, as with many other industrial models. But IOActive was able to remotely hack the software that controls the robot and disable key safety features. This could result in them being programmed to injure the humans around them.

This is particularly worrying, IOActive said, because these machines are large enough and have enough power that “even running at low speeds, their force is more than sufficient to cause a skull fracture.”

With the robots intended for home use – SoftBank’s Pepper and NAO – IOActive found that cyberattackers could use them to record audio and video and secretly transmit this data to an external server.

Anything with a recording or capture device and an internet connection is a potential spy.

21st CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Chickens will become a beloved pet — just like the family dog.

The 21st century isn’t really working out the way I had hoped.™

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Trump—Compared to What?

BETTER LATE THAN NEVER: First F-35A Squadrons To Get Full Combat Capability In September.

TAXPROF: The IRS Scandal, Day 1572: Why Did It Go Away? Because the press didn’t want to cover anything that made Obama look bad, and the DC GOP was happy to see the Tea Party shut down.

CHANGE IT BACK: GOPs Want Trump, Congress to Roll Back Obama ‘Overreaching’ on National Monuments.

STAND DOWN: India And China Agree To “Disengage Troops” Along Disputed Border Area.

TO BE FAIR, THESE PEOPLE SHOULD HATE THEMSELVES. I JUST WISH THEY’D LEAVE THE REST OF US OUT OF IT: Behind the monument wars is a plague of self-hatred.

What fascinates me about this civilizational auto-immune disorder is how superficial it is. More than 95 percent of the people in Puerto Rico speak Spanish. The dominant religion is Catholicism.

As far as I can tell, Mark-Viverito, who is of mixed European ancestry (her mother, Elizabeth Viverito, was of Italian descent and a prominent Puerto Rican feminist; her father, Anthony Mark, was a prominent doctor), does not speak Taino, the native language of the Arawak tribes who inhabited Puerto Rico when Columbus arrived. Rather, she speaks the languages of her alleged oppressors — Spanish and, of course, English. She even attended Columbia University.

My point is not that the world ushered in by Christopher Columbus has been very good to Mark-Viverito, though it obviously has. It’s that toppling some statues or even incanting some nonsense about “cultural appropriation” cannot separate the iconoclasts from the culture they live in.

If only we could. . . .

SCENES FROM RAHM EMANUEL’S CHICAGO: 4 teens among 27 shot, 6 fatally, in Chicago weekend shootings.

SECRETARY OF STATE TILLERSON PLAYS GOOD COP: In the wake of North Korea’s latest missile tests, Tillerson said:

“We’re going to continue our peaceful pressure campaign as I have described it, working with allies, working with China as well to see if we can bring the regime in Pyongyang to the negotiating table.”

Somebody needs to write about Trump’s pressure strategy.

RETENTION: U.S. Fighter Pilots in Short Supply As War Demands Grow.

Including active duty, Air National Guard and reserve, the Air Force has a requirement for 20,352 pilots, including 5,292 fighter pilots. The force today has 18,808 pilots. But fighter pilots account for most of the overall deficit of 1,544. The Air Force today is 1,211 short of what it needs.

Wilson laid the blame on commercial airlines that have stepped up efforts to lure military pilots. Most companies require 1,500 hours of flight time for pilots to fly regional airlines, but military aviators can be hired with only 750 flight hours.

To tackle the problem in a systematic way, Wilson for the first time assigned a general to run an “air crew crisis task force.” Brig. Gen. Mike Koscheski, who formerly was chief of strategic planning and integration for the Air Force, will be responsible for pilot recruiting and retention.

More flight time. Less bureaucratic bullcrap.

GOOD QUESTION: Why Is Congress Not Investigating Obama’s Unprecedented Political Espionage?