WELL, LET’S GET STARTED: The US Would Need a Mega-Constellation to Counter China’s Hypersonic Weapons.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Republicans Need to Make the Case For Capitalism, Because Dems and Young People Reject It.

HOT OFF THE PRESS: THE MONOLITHIC MEDIA MAY BE BIASED!   Dr. Hal Pashler and I ran a psychology experiment showing that one’s ideological point of view will tend to color one’s judgment on what is newsworthy. If a news story seems to provide ammunition for one’s own viewpoint, it’s more likely to be viewed as newsworthy. The result may not come as a bolt from the blue for savvy Instapundit readers. But by golly, it’s science now. (Note that the article contains lots of groovy graphs. I’ll bet that you didn’t think I could make graphs like that.)

SCRAPPLEFACE: Charlottesville Rally Bust Made White Man Feel Blue.

DON SURBER: ANTIFA IS THE FUTURE OF THE DEMOCRATS.

Think not? People in the 1970s blew off the Weather Underground as radicals who had nothing to do with the party.

But whom did Democrats nominate in 2008? And who was his political mentor? And who was his religious mentor? And who was the communist he put in charge of the CIA?

This was no accident or coincidence. Democrats have plotted this for 50 years, going back to Teddy the Drunk Kennedy’s first immigration reform, which he reformed again 31 years later, which 32 years later, they want to reform as open borders — which was their goal all along.

Read the whole thing.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: 5 Critical Mistakes Made by Defensive Gun Owners. This leaves out the worst mistake: Not having a gun.

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Plus, Shop Amazon Outlet – Clearance, Markdowns and Overstock Deals.

EXERCISE WITH A CHILEAN SUBMARINE: A Chilean diesel-electric submarine conducts operations in the Pacific with the U.S. Navy’s Third Fleet. In typical DESI exercises (Diesel Electric Submarine Initiative), USN anti-submarine warfare (ASW) aircraft play “cat and mouse” with diesel-electric subs from friendly South American nations. The South Americans portray “potential adversaries” who deploy diesel-electric subs — like Iran, Russia and China.

D. C. MCALLISTER: America Is Plagued by Privilege, but It’s Not What You Think.

THE DEPLATFORMING CONTINUES: Vimeo Removes Infowars Content as CNN Continues Blacklist Crusade. “Vimeo’s decision comes exactly a week after a slew of major companies including Facebook, Google, Apple podcasts, Spotify, LinkedIn and Pinterest concurrently removed Jones’s content from their service following a blacklist campaign led by CNN Senior Media Reporter Oliver Darcy.”

So when a media competitor (CNN) gets a bunch of companies to take down its competitor, and they do, is that a conspiracy in restraint of trade? Asking for a friend.

SIMPLE JUSTICE: Prof. Avital Ronell And The Lie of The Feminist Academy.

When law and philosophy prof Brian Leiter revealed academic and feminist superstar Judith Butler’s disgraceful and flagrantly hypocritical letter defending her sister superstar, NYU prof Avital Ronell, I was ready to pull the trigger. I have a post, dated June 13, 2018, fully written, but never published. I knew something Leiter didn’t.

At the time the Butler letter was sent around for signatures, threatening NYU with the wrath of scholars if Ronell wasn’t exonerated, the university had already found Ronell responsible. The only remaining question was what to do about it, one of the university’s brightest academic lights had sexually harassed a gay male student under her care.

This wasn’t one of the faux Title IX cases of post-hoc regret, but the real deal. Ronell was grad student Nimrod Reitman’s doctoral adviser. He came to NYU because of her, to study under her. And from the start of his graduate studies, she turned him into her boy toy upon the implicit threat of destroying his career. And it continued throughout his graduate studies, as proven by Ronell’s emails.

Professor Avital Ronell used her academic power over Reitman to coerce him to be her sexual plaything for years, or else.* And the feminist academy, via Judith Butler and myriad other signatories to a letter, demand that NYU lay off Ronell, or else. And it’s incredible to believe that the finding of responsibility wasn’t the impetus for the threat letter. Yet, these scholars sought to coerce a university into silence and impotence to conceal Ronell’s conduct.

If the patriarchy had been as self-interested and shameless as the feminist Old Girls Network, feminism never would have been a thing.

Plus: “Diane Davis, chair of the department of rhetoric at the University of Texas-Austin, who also signed the letter to the university supporting Professor Ronell, said she and her colleagues were particularly disturbed that, as they saw it, Mr. Reitman was using Title IX, a feminist tool, to take down a feminist.” It’s never actually about equality.

YUGE: Maduro to curb fuel subsidies.

Venezuela’s president has said its subsidised fuel prices should rise, to stop smugglers cheating the country out of billions of dollars.

“Gasoline must be sold at an international price to stop smuggling to Colombia and the Caribbean,” Nicolás Maduro said in a televised address.

Like many oil producing nations, Venezuela offers its citizens heavily subsidised petrol.

A fuel price rise in 1989 caused deadly riots in the capital, Caracas.

Cheap gas is one of the popular bribes employed by Venezuelan autocrats to take, maintain, and increase their political power. Under the Bolivarian Socialists, cheap gas has also helped to destroy the country’s oil industry — so the irony here is schadenfreudelicious.

I AGREE: An Underappreciated Key to College Success: Sleep. I always figured I was better off bullshitting with a clear head than trying to cram overnight. But actually, if you go to class and do the reading all along, you don’t have to worry that much.

SAD NEWS: Aretha Franklin in hospice care, CNN reports.

LIZ PEEK: Obama’s economist grasps at straws trying to devalue Trump’s impact.

A recent Rasmussen poll showed that 50 percent of likely voters say Trump deserves plaudits for the improving economy, while only 40 percent credit President Obama.

Even in a Quinnipiac poll taken at the height of the controversy over Trump’s Helsinki summit, when the president came under extreme criticism, respondents by a 49-47 margin were positive on his handling of the economy.

Larry Summers not only disagrees that President Trump has anything to do with our improving economy, he is also reluctant to bury his gloomy “secular stagnation” theory that income and job growth will forever be severely restricted.

He is, of course, in the position of having to explain why the Obama administration, in which he served as director of the National Economic Council, failed to excite higher investment and spending and instead presided over the slowest post-recession growth in modern times.

I had been assured by all the smartest people, starting in 2009, that “business climate” was just a myth.

HMM: Weak grip may signal future health trouble for adults, children. “During the study period, those children with weak grips were over three times more likely to remain in poor health or to have declines in health than those with strong grips. Previous studies have shown that muscle weakness as measured by grip strength is a predictor of poor health in adults, but this is the first to do so in children, according to senior study author Paul Gordon.”

The question is whether exercise would help, or just mask the effect of an underlying problem.

SHE WENT KETO: Jenna Jameson Opens Up About The Tough ‘Mental Aspect’ Of Losing Weight. Mindset is key.

HE DIDN’T INHALE: British Labor Party Leader Corbyn Admits Attendance at Ceremony Honoring Munich Terrorists. “He ‘doesn’t think’ he was involved in laying a wreath at the graves of terrorists.”

GET YOUR Space Force T-Shirt Right Here.

BLUE WAVE? If Trump’s Voters Turn Out This Fall, They’ll Give Republicans A Big Senate Majority.

In Minnesota, where two Senate seats are in play, both Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith, who replaced Al Franken, would face close votes if Minnesota’s smaller-town voters continue as they voted in 2016. Similarly, Sherrod Brown in Ohio, Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin, and Claire McCaskill in Missouri would likely lose if those voters come back this year.

Joe Donnelly looks almost certain to lose in Indiana at this point. Bob Casey’s continued career in the Senate appears to depend on his winning back the blue-collar voters who deserted Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Not every election goes by the numbers: incumbency, a willingness to chase after every voter in every village, hamlet, and farm community, and likable personalities can often give a popular incumbent a significant edge in a statewide race. The Midwestern voter shift that was so dramatic in 2016 may prove to be sharply watered-down in the 2018 midterms. However, this is not an excuse for Democrats’ campaigns to relax or become complacent.

Focusing the 2018 statewide elections on Trump may not succeed for Democrats. It certainly killed Hillary’s momentum to devote so much time to her opponent’s weaknesses, because it left so little time to emphasize her own strengths.

Considering her actual “strengths,” what else could she have done?

HEH: Outside of All the Violence, Those Antifa Protests Sure Were Peaceful.

By all accounts Antifa is radical, anarchist, and avowedly pro-violence, to the extent that the Barack Obama FBI and Department of Homeland Security issued a warning calling them “anarchist extremists” and “domestic terrorists,” a warning that has since been vindicated by many, many, many, many, many, many violent protests. Why, two years later, are the national media still downplaying the criminal elements of so-called “anti-hate” protesters?

I think we all know the answer to that.

Related: The News Media Bet On Trump Emboldening White Supremacy And Lost.

Flashback: Last year, CNN published the headline “Unmasking the leftist Antifa movement: Activists seek peace through violence,” then “scrubbed the headline of its article and changed it to ‘Unmasking the leftist Antifa movement.’ Benny Johnson [then with] the Independent Journal Review took a screenshot of the two different headlines and claimed CNN altered the original title because antifa did not like it.”

IT WAS GENOCIDE, NOT ECOCIDE: New evidence suggests that Easter Island was still a cohesive society before the arrival of the Dutch explorers, contradicting the Jared Diamond-popularized view that the Easter Islanders committed ecological suicide, or “ecocide.” Of course, those of us who read Benny Peiser’s exhaustive critique over a decade ago already knew this.

SALENA ZITO: Trump’s not the reason the GOP sputtered in Ohio.

Both Ohio and Pennsylvania represent the new coalition of Trump voters — Rust Belt states that were expected to swing blue in 2016 but in fact went for the unorthodox billionaire who promised to “Make America Great Again.”

So why, two years later, is the GOP having so much trouble connecting with these people? Is it Trump? The party establishment?

Ohio Gov. John Kasich said Balderson’s weak showing was a referendum on the president. “Voters here sent a message to the Republicans to knock it off,” Kasich told CBS News last week. “Stop the chaos, the division, no more of this family separation that we see at the border or taking people’s health care away. I think [people] have . . . basically had enough and they’re sending a message to the Republicans, including the Republican in the White House . . . This district is so Republican, there should never even have been an election here. And it was so close and — in one of the counties that’s so solidly Republican — where a Republican would normally win by 70 percent, it broke basically 50-50.”

But Kasich, who hasn’t yet ruled out a run for president in 2020, has got the wrong end of the stick. The GOP’s problem isn’t its president. The problem is its message.

Trump is the sun around which the solar system of American politics operates. You can’t outshine him.

And his base is solid.

I’d missed this one over a weekend long on chores and entertaining, but it’s still germane and you’ll want to read the whole thing.