YES, AND MEDIA HYSTERIA IS LARGELY TO BLAME: Does Our Cultural Obsession With Safety Spell the Downfall of Democracy?

WELL, GOOD: Colombia notifies Unasur of its decision to withdraw over Venezuela crisis.

The President of Colombia announced Monday that his government has notified the Union of South American Nations (Unasur) of its decision to withdraw from the bloc as the South American organization failed to denounce Venezuela’s “brutal treatment” of its citizens.

“I want to inform the Colombians that today, with precise instructions, the Foreign Minister of the Republic sent Unasur the letter where we denounce the constituent treaty of that entity and in six months the withdrawal of Colombia from this organization will be effective”, President Ivan Duque told media.

30 years ago, Colombia was the basket case and Venezuela was one of the richest countries in South America. Now that their roles are reversed, the rest of South America should be looking to Bogota, not Caracas, for an example of good governance.

YOUR DAILY TREACHER: Louis C.K. Tries His Hand Again.

Nobody owes Louis C.K. anything. He had a successful career because a lot of people wanted to pay to see his work. If they don’t want to give him their money anymore, if they don’t want to be associated with him in any way, too bad for him. That’s their business.

But there’s another side to that coin: If some people still do want to give him their money, that’s their business too. If they don’t like what he did but still want to see his new material, or if they don’t care at all about what he did, or even if they think what he did was hilarious, that’s up to them. Their wallets, their choice.

You’re pro-choice, aren’t you?

Besides, America tends to forgive all of our famous perverts sooner or later. Hell, remember this scumbag? It took him about 20 years, but he almost got to move back into his old house!

Read the whole thing.

TRUMP’S JAWBONING FOR HUMAN RIGHTS MAKES A DIFFERENCE: South Africa withdraws white farmland redistribution bill six days after Trump warned he was closely studying the situation.

THE MASK COMES OFF: UN Appointed Climate Science Team Demands The End of Capitalism.

WHAT’S THIS NOW? CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin claimed Trump is racist because Antifa is “widely perceived as an African American organization.”

As Cameron Gray of NRA TV tweets in response, “Antifa is whiter than Pat Boone making a mayonnaise sandwich with Wonder bread in a Minnesota snowstorm,” which may be significantly understating the case.

At Hot Air, Allahpundit writes, “Needless to say to anyone who actually pays attention to Antifa, the group is emphatically not ‘widely perceived as an African-American organization.’ Really the opposite. The stereotype is that it’s overwhelmingly white, basically Berniebros gone rancid who are more likely to come from middle-class or upscale households than not. (They have their fair share of trust-fund babies in the ranks too, no doubt.)” adding that “the most high-profile arrest made in the past few years for Antifa-type activities involved Tim Kaine’s son. Doesn’t get any whiter than that!”

Related: Apparently, the memo went out at CNN this week to defend Antifa: CNN’s Don Lemon Explains Antifa: ‘No Organization Is Perfect.’

STEPHEN KRUISER: The MSM’s Revisionist Love Affair With McCain Is a Bit Much to Stomach.

FOR THE DNC-MSM, THE ONLY GOOD REPUBLICAN IS A DEAD REPUBLICAN: The Media Is Lavishing Praise On McCain After His Passing, But Look At What It Had To Say When He Ran Against Obama.

How saccharine has the coverage been this week? At Politico, even left-leaning veteran media critic Jack Shafer is asking, Are Journalists Allowed to Criticize John McCain?

NOT A SURPRISE: After professor bans laptops, grades improve; ‘results were significant.’

An economics professor at Ohio State banned laptops from his class last semester and the results were very positive, with students’ grades improving significantly, the scholar reports.

“Student performance improved, especially on the earliest midterms. Results were significant—average scores were about half a standard deviation higher than previous offerings. This is well above the long run average in both courses— this term was an outlier,” economics Professor Trevon Logan stated on Twitter in May.

“The students said the policy (1) encouraged them to focus, (2) helped them take better notes, (3) kept them engaged, and (4) increased their enjoyment of the course. I did not expect this at all,” he added.

Hmm.

THE DEEP STATE STRIKES BACK: Federal Court may alter NC congressional districts for 2018 election.

While the White House is thwarted on an almost hourly basis by federal district judges, the Tar Heel State languishes under the iron heel of the Fourth Circuit, a federal appellate court based in Richmond, Virginia. Once deeply conservative, the Fourth Circuit is now almost as liberal as the Ninth, and for a very simple reason: President Obama got to fill vacancies Senate Democrats kept from Bush in 2007 and 2008. (The judicial vacancy intrigue began long before Trump.)

The transformed Fourth Circuit quickly got to work striking down North Carolina’s laws on voter IDs, transgender bathroom accommodations, public prayer, and, of course, election districting, from races for lowly school boards to those for Congress. (I take no position on the wisdom of these policies, but don’t believe that federal courts should so lightly and frequently override an elected state legislature.)

And so the court strikes again.

Read the whole thing.

REPUBLICANS POUNCE: NY Times Accuses Conservatives Of ‘Pouncing’ On Vatican Sexual Abuse Scandal.

The most recent flare up in this controversy occurred earlier this week, when Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, a former top Vatican diplomat to the U.S., released a letter accusing Pope Francis of covering up Cardinal McCarrick’s abuses while also taking his counsel on appointing bishops. (RELATED: Former Vatican Diplomat Accuses Pope Francis Of Complicity in Covering Up McCarrick’s Abuses, Calls For His Resignation)

According to the article, conservatives are using the letter and the scandal to push for a stronger condemnation of homosexuality from the Catholic Church.

The article said, “An ideologically motivated opposition has weaponized the church’s sex abuse crisis to threaten not only Francis’ agenda but his entire papacy.”

Related: Pope Francis Concerned With Climate Change Over Sexual Predator Clergy.

Is there anyone the NYT won’t cover for if they’re pushing a “progressive” agenda?

SAUCE FOR THE GOOSE: The National Coalition for Men has filed a Title IX complaint with the Department of Education alleging that the University of Pennsylvania has 22 programs that illegally discriminate against men.

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LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: The Trump Bump and Much, Much More. “Rep. Darrel Issa told Fox news Ohr ‘has a poor memory. He seems to not remember a lot of details and, you know, poor memories are often claimed by people who want to stick to what they can say and not be caught in perjury,’ Issa told Fox News.”

WILL VENEZUELA EXPLODE BEFORE IT IMPLODES?

ACCUSED WOMAN-BEATER KEITH ELLISON ATTEMPTS TO SLIME HIS OPPONENT using claims by partisan propaganda outfit SPLC.

Ellison also faces credible allegations of abuse from multiple women. These allegations should be enough to disqualify him for the position, but there is more. Ellison, a convert to Islam, has a troubling history of associating himself with highly suspect groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which is tied to the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist political movement, and downright hateful groups like the Nation of Islam and its leader Louis Farrakhan, who is on record saying that Adolf Hitler was a “very great man,” and has blamed Jews for everything from the Holocaust to the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Ellison worked for Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam for 18 months, and says he abandoned the group once he realized Farrakhan’s extremist views. But when Ellison worked for Farrakhan he talked of “Jewish slave traders.” As a supposedly older and wiser man, Ellison also allegedly met with Farrakhan — and certainly met with other Nation of Islam leaders — multiple times since being elected to Congress. These ties have led prominent figures to credibly label Ellison as an anti-Semite.

Based on this brief review of Ellison’s resume, it’s fair to conclude he is a man of stunningly bad judgment. Take one recent example. Multiple local news outlets in Minnesota have recently reported on massive welfare fraud occurring in the state. Tens of millions have been stolen, possibly amounting to half of the state’s $200 million child-care subsidies.

Exact estimates are hard to come by, given that the extent of the problem is not even fully known by the bureaucrats who run the program. But we do know that some of this money left the country in suitcases full of cash and ended up in the hands of al-Shabaab, a terror group in direct combat with American soldiers in the Horn of Africa.

Ellison’s complaint? That his opponent worked for mainstream public interest law firm the Alliance Defending Freedom.

COMPETITION: Intel’s 9th Gen Chip Prices Leak.

Three stores leaked the pricing for the Core i9-9900K, Core i7-9700K, and Core i5-9600K, they are Alza.cz, PC21.FR, and Informaticazone. Even if we quote the most expensive price (after converting Euros to US dollars and subtracting the VAT) the Core i9-9900K is expected to cost just $534. Still expensive, but certainly not bank-breaking.

The Core i7-9700K is expected to cost $416. Remember, it’s a chip that also offers eight cores but is limited to eight threads and runs at 3.6GHz turbo boosting to 4.9GHz. Then we have the Core i5-9600K (six cores, six threads, 3.7GHz boosting to 4.6GHz), which is expected to cost $257.

We probably have AMD to thank for this level of pricing if it turns out to be correct. AMD’s recent resurgence by offering new processors with impressive performance have meant Intel doesn’t have the market pretty much to itself anymore. It’s a clear reminder of why healthy competition is so important for consumers and the market in general.

I built an Ubuntu machine a couple months ago for video encoding, based on a 12-core AMD Threadripper CPU. It’s by far the least-expensive x86 computer I’ve ever owned, and the performance is impressive… most impressive.

DEMOCRACY DIES IN DUMBNESS: Poll: Majority can’t name a single Supreme Court justice. “Nearly every voter in the nation believes that the U.S. Supreme Court impacts their everyday life, but a majority can’t name a single justice on the all-important bench, according to a new survey.” Actually, this suggests that they don’t care as much as they pretend to.

But I’ll bet a majority can name at least one Kardashian.

CHANGE? Rand Paul Endorses Gary Johnson for Senate. “The ‘libertarianish’ Republican becomes first major GOP figure to bypass his own party and back the Libertarian challenger to New Mexico’s Democratic incumbent.”

Paul’s endorsement is sure to add pressure on [Republican] Mick Rich to step aside and give Johnson, the two-term former governor of the state, a clear shot at challenging what until now has been considered a safe Democratic seat. In the only poll taken since Johnson officially entered the race two weeks ago, the Libertarian was up on the Republican 21 percent to 11 percent (versus Heidrich’s 39), and even held a slight edge among registered Republicans.

Both Johnson and his main political adviser, Ron Nielson, told me this month in interviews that a three-way race would be difficult to win in this heavily Democratic state. So it’s no surprise that today’s news has the candidate stoked.

I’m curious to see what, if anything, a republicanish Libertarian and a libertarianish Republican might accomplish in the Senate.

THE MAINSTREAM CHOICE: More Than Half the Country’s Attorneys General Have Endorsed Kavanaugh.

BREAK UP BIG TECH: God is in the machine: Carl Miller on the terrifying, hidden reality of Ridiculously Complicated Algorithms.

He’d been a talented researcher, an academic, until his friend started a small technology company. He had joined the company and helped it to grow. It eventually became so big that the company had been acquired by one of the tech giants. And so, then, was he.

He was now paid a fortune to help design the algorithms that were central to what the tech giant did. And he had signed solemn legal documents prohibiting him from speaking to me, or to anyone, about his work. But as the years passed, his concern – indeed his guilt – grew. “It’s power without responsibility.” He paused. “There’s so much power, and so little responsibility. This is not notional abstract power. This is real power about day-to-day lives. It’s both material and cultural and financial. The world has to know that this is how it works . . . There’s something rotten in the state of Denmark,” he said, quoting Hamlet a little melodramatically.”

Plus: “Truth is dead. There is only output.”

GET YOUR GLOBAL WARMING LAW ENFORCEMENT HERE! A new report compiled by the indefatigable Chris Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) exposes a previously secret $50 million fund used to pay for global warming litigation by Democratic state attorneys general and their staffs.

“This is political. We have a policymaking process. They tried it and failed. So their stance is, ‘It’s not working, so we’re going to use law enforcement,’” Horner says in the report, according to LifeZette’s Brendan Kirby.

Horner uncovered, among much else, an email from a staffer to California’s Governor Moonbeam pitching the fund to staffers of the governors of Washington state and New York. The Brown aide wrote “before you gasp, please note that foundations are currently spending over $1 billion a year on climate work.”

As Glenn says, just keeping scrolling.

MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE MEMORY HOLE: What Happened To The DNC Investigation Of Keith Ellison’s Alleged Domestic Abuse?

IN TENNESSEE, A DARING MOVE: Democrat Gubernatorial Candidate Karl Dean Calls for Higher Gas Taxes.