AS A FORMER MEMBER OF NASA’S PLANETARY PROTECTION SUBCOMMITTEE, I AGREE: Report recommends NASA revise its planetary protection policies.

The report, prepared by a committee of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine at the request of NASA and published July 2, found that existing policies developed for the Apollo lunar landings and the Viking missions to Mars decades ago don’t fit more advanced missions under development, including Mars sample return and exploration of “ocean worlds” in the outer solar system.

Those policies are intended in part to comply with Article 9 of the Outer Space Treaty, which requires countries to avoid “harmful contamination and also adverse changes in the environment of the Earth resulting from the introduction of extraterrestrial matter.” NASA developed policies to avoid contamination of potentially habitable worlds by its spacecraft, and to avoid contaminating the Earth’s environment with any materials those spacecraft return.

The committee concluded that while the central tenets of planetary protection policy, including its basis in the Outer Space Treaty and use of international cooperation, remain viable today, “the current planetary protection policy development process is inadequate to respond to progressively more complex solar system exploration missions, especially in an environment of significant programmatic constraints.”

Read the whole thing. We don’t want potentially-dangerous organisms traveling in either direction.

LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: Further Protests as Venezuela Begins Running Out of Water.

“Locals have been protesting since 3 am due to lack of water on the Charallave-Ocumare highway, and are now requesting the presence of the media,” wrote onlooker Rocely Romero in Twitter.

The last major water shortage in Venezuela was in February 2016, when authorities announced a weekend “maintenance” session designed to maintain sufficient water levels during a period of drought. An estimated three million in Caracas consequently went without water, where the average temperature at that time of year is 68F.

The lack of clean water is the latest in a string mass shortages experienced in Venezuela under the rule of socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro.

That the world’s most oil-rich nation has to import crude oil, and that a semi-tropical country can run out of water, should tell you everything you need to know about socialism.

DAVID HARSANYI: Hey, Democrats, The System Doesn’t Need To Be ’Fixed’ Every Time You Lose An Election. “Maybe it’s your agenda that’s broken.”

The real anxiety driving liberals is the reality of President Trump getting another Supreme Court justice, the kind of nominee any conservative president would likely have picked. This person will presumably help constrain progressive policies because many of those policies rely on coercion and unconstitutional intrusions into personal freedom. Maybe it’s not the system that’s broken, but rather rather the Left’s agenda.

The arrogance of the age — maybe every age — is that intellectuals believe, by default, that they’re smarter, more moral, and more evolved than those who came before them. We often hear the Left gripe about the antiquated nature of the Constitution. It was Klein, after all, who once claimed that the Constitution was confusing document because it is old.

We can disagree about the usefulness of Enlightenment ideas. But when Klein contends that the “chaotic, ugly realpolitik that followed Justice Antonin Scalia’s death” necessitates a “fix,” he is being transparently partisan. Nothing is more chaotic than altering the rules every time you experience a political defeat.

Cruel, but fair.

THE 21ST CENTURY ISN’T TURNNG OUT AS I’D HOPED: The Tragic Story of How Flesh-Eating Bacteria Forced an Emergency Plane Landing.

POT CONTROL: More evidence of the Fascist impulse from California.

BLUE CITY BLUES: SF’s appalling street life repels residents — now it’s driven away a convention.

“It’s the first time that we have had an out-and-out cancellation over the issue, and this is a group that has been coming here every three or four years since the 1980s,” said Joe D’Alessandro, president and CEO of S.F. Travel, the city’s convention bureau.

D’Alessandro declined to name the medical association, saying the bureau still hopes to bring the group back in the future.

As a rule, major conventions book their visits at least five years in advance. So when D’Alessandro and members of the hospitality industry hadn’t heard from the doctors about re-upping, they flew to the organization’s Chicago headquarters for a face-to-face meeting with its executive board.

And with good reason: The group’s annual five-day trade show draws 15,000 attendees and pumps about $40 million into the local economy.

“They said that they are committed to this year and to 2023, but nothing in between or nothing thereafter,” D’Alessandro said. “After that, they told us they are planning to go elsewhere — I believe it’s Los Angeles.”

Holding a medical convention in a city littered with needles and human excrement just doesn’t seem like a good idea.

THE MORE GYNOCENTRIC OUR SOCIETY BECOMES, THE MORE UNHAPPY WOMEN AND GIRLS SEEM TO BE: How Many Teenage Girls Deliberately Harm Themselves? Nearly 1 in 4, Survey Finds.

THE NEW RULES: Video shows a woman confronting EPA administrator Scott Pruitt in a Washington, DC restaurant.

They continue to behave as though their new rules will never apply to them, but that simply isn’t so.

BAD NEWS FOR DEMS’ DELAY SUPREME COURT VOTE TILL JANUARY STRATEGY: Turns out a clear majority of Americans want President Donald Trump to nominate Justice Anthony Kennedy’s replacement on the Supreme Court and the Senate to vote on confirmation before the November mid-term elections, according to a new poll from NBC.

IS THERE ANYTHING IT CAN’T DO? Coffee may boost chances for a longer life, study shows.

HMM: White House Says ‘Great Momentum’ on North Korea as Intel Reports Indicate Problems. “‘I made a deal with him. I shook hands with him. I really believe he means it,’ Trump said, adding it’s ‘possible’ things don’t work out.”

LOYALTY FOR SALE: Venezuela promotes 16,900 ‘loyal’ military personnel.

With inflation at 40,000% or so and foreign reserves rapidly shrinking, how long will they stay bought?

CHANGE: Trump Approval Jumps As Attacks From Critics Backfire; Trump Now More Popular Than FBI: IBD/TIPP Poll.

All they have to do is not be crazy, and they can’t even do that.

DISPATCHES FROM FLYOVER COUNTRY: Trump Country, it turns out, is more tolerant than the left.

Since President Trump’s election, journalists, political scientists and others from across the United States and around the world have visited our little southern Ohio town, population 6,600, to study the natives. Naturally, patronizing local eateries at breakfast or lunchtime is usually part of their itinerary.

Some have told me later that, during their interviews, they went out of their way to identify themselves as liberals who have little use for our president. To their credit, they wanted to be honest about who they were and what they were doing. They were sometimes treated with a degree of skepticism, but without fail, they say that people were polite and willing to talk to them — not to mention serve them breakfast or lunch.

We contrast this, of course, with the recent episodes involving Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, both of whom were essentially evicted from restaurants — Nielsen heckled away by customers, Sanders asked by the restaurant owner to leave — for the crime of Trump association, similar to a misdemeanor but quickly approaching felony status.

Nielsen was targeted by a liberal mob mentality that is no longer confined to college campus reactions to conservative speakers. The Sanders case is at least as disturbing, both for the precedent it sets as well as much of the media’s rather sympathetic portrayal of the restaurant owner who “stood by her principles.”

Read the whole thing, even though none of it comes as a surprise to anyone outside America’s parochial and mistrustful Blue enclaves.

TRUMP ADMINISTRATION TO RESCIND THE OBAMA-ERA GUIDELINES ON RACE IN COLLEGE ADMISSIONS?:  The Wall Street Journal is reporting that it will do so soon.  If so, it is good news.  Those guidelines encouraged, rather than discouraged, race discrimination.

Unlike the Supreme Court, which in Grutter v. Bollinger (2003) stated, “We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today,” the Obama Administration’s policy was apparently “racial preferences now, racial preferences tomorrow, and racial preferences forever.”

Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder was explicit about this.  In an interview at Columbia University, he said:  “I can’t actually imagine a time in which the need for more diversity would ever cease. … why should we shy away from the fact that we are going to have race as a factor to consider in what a student body is going to look like? … The question is not when does it end, but when does it begin. … When do people of color truly get the benefits to which they are entitled?”

(As always, I include here a link to an article explaining why race-preferential admissions are not in the interest of their supposed beneficiaries.)

OF COURSE THEY DO: Democratic Socialists of America Leaders Say ‘Communism Is Good.’

The “democratic” part of “democratic socialism” was never anything more than a ruse to fool the masses, to be disposed of once enough power was seized.

“I WAS DEVASTATED”: Tim Berners-Lee, the Man Who Created the World Wide Web, Has Some Regrets.

He is now embarking on a third act—determined to fight back through both his celebrity status and, notably, his skill as a coder. In particular, Berners-Lee has, for some time, been working on a new software, Solid, to reclaim the Web from corporations and return it to its democratic roots. On this winter day, he had come to Washington to attend the annual meeting of the World Wide Web Foundation, which he started in 2009 to protect human rights across the digital landscape. For Berners-Lee, this mission is critical to a fast-approaching future. Sometime this November, he estimates, half the world’s population—close to 4 billion people—will be connected online, sharing everything from résumés to political views to DNA information. As billions more come online, they will feed trillions of additional bits of information into the Web, making it more powerful, more valuable, and potentially more dangerous than ever.

The idea is simple: re-decentralize the Web. Working with a small team of developers, he spends most of his time now on Solid, a platform designed to give individuals, rather than corporations, control of their own data. “There are people working in the lab trying to imagine how the Web could be different. How society on the Web could look different. What could happen if we give people privacy and we give people control of their data,” Berners-Lee told me. “We are building a whole eco-system.”

For now, the Solid technology is still new and not ready for the masses. But the vision, if it works, could radically change the existing power dynamics of the Web.

Fascinating. I can’t wait for the big reveal.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Online program offers easy, cheap way to ‘earn college credit for what you already know.’

TURNAROUND? Tesla Sets New Model 3 Target of 6,000 a Week. “The new target suggests the car maker expects no slowdown in its production pace after reaching its long-delayed goal of making 5,000 Model 3s per week.”

Impressive numbers:

The Silicon Valley auto maker on Monday also reaffirmed that it expects to have positive cash flow and post a profit in the third and fourth quarters. Keeping up the 5,000-a-week production pace—which was a long-delayed accomplishment—is key to Tesla meeting its cash-flow forecast.

Tesla on Monday reported how many cars it made in the final week of the second quarter: 5,031 Model 3 sedans, as well as 1,913 Model S sedans and Model X sport-utility vehicles.

The electric-vehicle maker has spent the past year struggling to meet production goals for the Model 3, twice missing the 5,000-a-week target for what is considered Tesla’s first mass-market offering. The most recent end-of-quarter goal put the company under intense scrutiny and raised questions about whether Chief Executive Elon Musk, while inspiring fans and exciting investors, could actually execute on the company’s plans.

Workers had already been celebrating their accomplishment Sunday, and Mr. Musk sent them a memo confirming the production goal had been reached.

“I think we just became a real car company,” Mr. Musk wrote in his celebratory memo.

Tesla has been in a race with the traditional automakers (and more than a few impatient Model 3 depositors) to transition from a boutique maker of luxury cars into a mass-production powerhouse — all before the old firms caught up on batteries or before the money ran out.

This week is a huge milestone.

YOU SPELLED FASCIST WRONG: Socialist students seek to shut down Jordan Peterson event.

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LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: SCOTUS, Immigration and Much, Much More.

SALENA ZITO: “If you engage in politics on Twitter it is sometimes hard to reconcile the vicious vitriol you see, feel, and experience with what you see in your world outside of the social media platform.”