BUT THE NARRATIVE! Green Energy Makes Ontario the Most Debt-Ridden Province on Earth.

I had been assured that making energy much more expensive would make us all much richer.

CHANGE? Colorado Gov Attends High-Powered Summit in Italy, as 2020 Speculation Mounts.

I can’t think of much that Governor Hickenlooper has accomplished for Colorado, besides driving Magpul Industries to Texas — and I live in Colorado. Hickenlooper also came out against Colorado’s single-payer proposal, which is quickly becoming enshrined Democratic doctrine — if it hasn’t already.

TO BE FAIR THEY’RE ALSO MAKING THINGS WORSE IN THEIR OWN COUNTRIES: Iranian Feminist on How Western Liberals Are Making Women’s Lives Worse in Her Country.

BEN SHAPIRO AT PRAGER U: What is Intersectionality? (Video)

OH: Bill Nelson Switches Support of Judge After Schumer Cash Infusion Into FL-Sen. “Nelson originally suggested Allen Winsor to the Trump White House for a judgeship. Did a multi-million cash infusion from Chuck Schumer’s super PAC change his mind?”

Inquiring minds want to know.

VITAMIN D UPDATE: Vitamin D may guard against colon cancer.

ROGER L. SIMON ON PETER STRZOK: His desire to testify is fishy and dangerous.

FROM THE NATIONAL SPACE COUNCIL MEETING JUST NOW: Trump announces he’s directing Pentagon to create ‘space force’ as new branch of Armed Services. He also signed a space debris directive.

JOY REID ATTACKED CLINTON ADMIN FOR NOT WANTING TO DEPORT IMMIGRANT CHILDREN: “In a satire spinoff of Dr. Seuss, Reid attacked former Attorney General Janet Reno for her not wanting to take Elian Gonzalez away from family in Florida and return him to Cuba.”

Related: In 2000, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times wrote, “Yup, I gotta confess, that now-famous picture of a U.S. marshal in Miami pointing an automatic weapon toward Donato Dalrymple and ordering him in the name of the U.S. government to turn over Elian Gonzalez warmed my heart. They should put that picture up in every visa line in every U.S. consulate around the world, with a caption that reads: ‘America is a country where the rule of law rules. This picture illustrates what happens to those who defy the rule of law and how far our government and people will go to preserve it. Come all ye who understand that.’”

WHY THE OIG REPORT SHOULD SCARE YOU: “The Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General is filled with people who fear the FBI.”

CIVIL RIGHTS, PRACTICAL APPLICATION UPDATE: Armed civilian took down shooter at Washington state Walmart.

An armed civilian took down a shooter after at least two people were shot Sunday night at a Washington state Walmart, police said.

Tumwater police said the civilian, described by officers as a good Samaritan, shot and killed the suspect at the scene.

The shooting happened just after 5:30 p.m. at the Walmart Supercenter in Tumwater, about 65 miles south of Seattle.

“I heard two bangs. It sounded like gunshots to me,” witness Robert Berwick said. “I looked down the aisle and saw a person running.”

That’s when Berwick ran, too. There was chaos in the parking lot, and he said the shooting suspect tried to carjack another man. That’s when the suspect was shot.

“I thanked him for saving my life,” Berwick said of the attempted carjacking victim who shot the suspect. “He didn’t look like he had any regrets. I hope he doesn’t have any.”

Management at that Walmart should pass around the hat for this hero.

A SMALL MEASURE OF ACCOUNTABILITY: SPLC Pays $3.3 Million Settlement to Counter-Extremism Group It Called ‘Anti-Muslim.’ The SPLC has been a lefty smear machine for years, but now it’s being used by tech giants to censor “hate.”

WEIRD, YOU’D NEVER KNOW THIS FROM FOLLOWING THE NEWS: Gallup: Satisfaction With U.S. Direction Reaches 12-Year High.

AGAINST ANTI-LIBERALISM: A long-standing fashion on the left is now a fashion on the right.

Susan Sontag established herself as a public intellectual through original and incisive essays in which she exalted avant-garde over high culture in the 1960s. Late in her career, in the 1990s, she began to have second thoughts. “It never occurred to me that all the stuff I had cherished, and all the people I had cared about in my university education, could be dethroned,” she explained to Joan Acocella of The New Yorker. She had assumed that “all that would happen is that you would set up an annex — you know, a playhouse — in which you could study these naughty new people, who challenged things.”

The “naughty new people” were mid-20th-century artists, particularly American and European writers and filmmakers, who defied existing conventions of the novel and of narrative in general. In your creation or experience of art, try for a moment to stop asking what it “means,” Sontag advised. Relish the “sensuous surface of art without mucking about in it.” The aesthetic she was celebrating — it amounted to an elevation of form over content — was supposed to be exemplified by the “nouveau roman,” in which plot, character development, and all the empty promises of linear thought were minimized or, better, absent. “What is important now is to recover our senses,” she wrote. “We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more.”

Alas, what had appealed to Sontag about that kind of formalism “was mostly just the idea of it,” Acocella observed. “I thought I liked William Burroughs and Nathalie Sarraute and Robbe-Grillet,” Sontag told her, “but I didn’t. I actually didn’t.” And now she had regrets. “Little did I know that the avant-garde transgressiveness of the sixties was to become absolutely institutionalized and that most of the gods of high culture would be dethroned and mocked.” In “Thirty Years Later” (1996), Sontag, reflecting on what she had failed to foresee when she wrote the cultural criticism collected in her book Against Interpretation (1966), recounted that she hadn’t yet grasped that

seriousness itself was in the early stages of losing credibility in the culture at large, and that some of the more transgressive art I was enjoying would reinforce frivolous, merely consumerist transgressions. Thirty years later, the undermining of standards of seriousness is almost complete, with the ascendancy of a culture whose most intelligible, persuasive values are drawn from the entertainment industries. Now the very idea of the serious (and the honorable) seems quaint, “unrealistic,” to most people.

During the late ‘60s and early ‘70s Pauline Kael was doing the same tearing down of old standards in the film industry as Sontag did in literature from her perch as the New Yorker’s most prominent film critic. As a 2008 profile of her in Canada’s National Post concluded, “Not long before she died, Pauline Kael remarked to a friend, ‘When we championed trash culture we had no idea it would become the only culture.’ Who did?”

Read the whole thing.

BOOK REVIEW: The Simple Joys of an Old, Happy Dog by Dave Barry.

ONE DEAD, 22 INJURED: The mass shooting nobody will march against.

BREAKING: Former Israeli minister arrested on suspicion of spying for Iran.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Why is Harvard discriminating against Asian Americans? ‘Diversity’ is no excuse for racial bias.

THE SOLUTION IS SO OBVIOUS: Make warm weather illegal.

ACHTUNG: The Revolt Comes to Germany.

The problem of keeping the room cool while leaving the door open is now consuming Angela Merekel’s European Union as the refugee problem grows in political size. Can the EU have no internal borders if it lacks an external one? If there’s no way of keeping benefits in, what is the meaning of out?

That in a nutshell is the problem posed by the 21st century European migrant crisis where millions, mostly “from Muslim-majority countries of regions south and east of Europe, including Western Asia, South Asia and Africa,” have streamed into the continent. They predominantly enter through nations bordering on the Mediterranean and Turkey yet disproportionately settle in the Northern European high-wage areas of the continent. The resulting disruptions have fueled a succession of local rebellions from countries disproportionately affected by the inrushing tide. Each straining member country is demanding at least a partial return of control over their internal border in order to cope.

That revolt has finally reached Germany. The New York Times writes that “the populist surge that has left Hungary, Austria and Italy threatening to close their borders to migrants has now spread to Germany, where it could even bring down Chancellor Angela Merkel and further unhinge Europe Union’s cohesion and stability.”

Read the whole thing.

AMERICA’S LONGEST WAR: Taliban resume fighting as Eid ceasefire ends.

The first day of the ceasefire on Friday started with Taliban, civilians and officials offering Eid prayers together in mosques across the country.

Pictures and videos emerged on social media later that day of Afghans celebrating Eid with men identified by them as Taliban fighters.

“It was a moment of extreme happiness for us that we got to celebrate Eid this way – without any fear,” Zahid Khan, a resident of Jalalabad told Al Jazeera.

The celebrations were cut short with a first attack claimed by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) on Saturday that killed at least 30 people and wounded more than 65 in Nangarhar province.

The second attack, a suicide bombing in Jalalabad on Sunday, close to the governor’s office in Nangarhar province, killed at least 18 people. No group immediately claimed responsibility.

“On the day of Eid when everyone came together, an attack by ISIL made many people cry for their lost ones,” Nikzad, a Kabul resident told Al Jazeera.

“Peace is not easy to achieve in this country.”

What country? Afghanistan is a place on the map where neighboring countries aren’t.

THE SOCIAL-JUSTICE “RAPE CULTURE” CROWD IS A SMALL MINORITY OF STUDENTS, INDULGED BECAUSE ADMINISTRATORS AGREE WITH THEM, NOT BECAUSE THEIR FELLOW STUDENTS DO: FIRE Survey: Students Want Due Process for Accused.

THE RUSSIAN THREAT TO UNDERSEA CABLES:

The Trump administration’s new sanctions on Russia are casting light on the threat posed to the undersea cables that carry the world’s electronic communications between continents.

The Treasury Department sanctioned five Russian firms and three Russian nationals this week for aiding the Kremlin’s domestic security service, the FSB. One of the companies is alleged to have provided support for Moscow’s “underwater capabilities” – including producing diving systems and a submersible craft for the FSB.

The Treasury Department alleged that Russia has been “active” in tracking underwater fiber optic cables that transmit communications across continents.

Hacking the old fashioned way:

“It is much more likely that sabotage would be something that could potentially damage or exploit these cables, than espionage,” said Robert Anderson, a former national security executive at the FBI and now a security expert with the Chertoff Group.

“It is a lot harder to have the ability to tap into these [cables] without anybody finding out about it and then gleaning off intelligence over time,” added Anderson. He said the threat lingers in areas where the cables are in shallower waters or make landfall.

RELATED HISTORICAL BACKGROUND: Hacking undersea cables in World War One.

DID TRUMP OR ARGENTINA DEFEAT SOUTH CAROLINA’S REP. MARK SANFORD? Sanford was the butt of countless jokes when his affair with a woman in Argentina became a national topic of discussion a few years ago. He kept to a solidly conservative line in Congress, so between his voting record and his personal history, Sanford was far from the most visible Republican member of the House of Representatives.

So how to account for Sanford’s primary loss last Tuesday? “I’d spoken out as I had with regard to the president, and it cost me,” Sanford told “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd Sunday. Sanford was referring to his harsh criticism of Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs, according to LifeZette’s Brendan Kirby. Actually, that’s only part of the story, Kirby reports.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Link was bad before. Fixed now.