AT AMAZON, Fresh Deals on Top Rated Products.

Plus, Shop Top Gift Ideas.

And, Shop Amazon – Best Selling Products – Updated Every Hour.

Also, browse the Kindle Deals of the Day.

AT SOME POINT, YOU’VE MADE ENOUGH MONEY. WE, ON THE OTHER HAND: The Obamas are ‘Becoming’ a billion-dollar brand.

SALENA ZITO: Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address was forgotten once, but never again.

BRET STEPHENS: How Plato Foresaw Facebook’s Folly.

Now we learn that the company also sought to cover up the extent of Russian meddling on its platform — while quietly seeding invidious stories against its business rivals and critics like George Soros. Facebook disputes some of the claims made by The Times, but it’s fair to say the company’s reputation currently stands somewhere between that of Philip Morris and Purdue Pharma in the public toxicity department.

To which one can only say: About time. . . .

To read The Times’s account of how Facebook dealt with its problems is to be struck by how desperately Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg sought to massage and finesse — with consultants, lobbyists and technological patches — what amounted to a daunting if simple crisis of trust. As with love and grammar, acquiring and maintaining trust is hard. There are no workarounds.

Related: Social Media As Social Disease.

A SMALL MEASURE OF ACCOUNTABILITY: Activist threw a fisherman’s catch back into the lake. Now, he has to pay. As a friend comments on Facebook, “Leftists and liberals need to be disabused of the notion that they can do whatever the hell they want just because they have a mistaken sense of ultimate moral authority.”

REMINDER: CA Gov. Jerry Brown Vetoed Bipartisan Wildfire Management Bill in 2016.

WHERE WOULD HE GET THAT IDEA? Trump Dubs Biden “Creepy Joe.”

Flashback: Biden Swims Naked, Upsetting Female Secret Service Agents:

“Agents say that, whether at the vice president’s residence or at his home in Delaware, Biden has a habit of swimming in his pool nude,” Kessler writes in the book – due for release Aug. 5.

“Female Secret Service agents find that offensive,” he writes.

“Biden likes to be revered as everyday Joe,” an unnamed agent told Kessler. “But the reality is no agents want to go on his detail because Biden makes agents’ lives so tough.”

Plus: Washington Post: What Are We Going To Do About Creepy Uncle Joe Biden?

And: ‘Creepy Veep’ Joe Biden ‘nuzzles’ wife of colleague and claims he is friends with lots of Somali cab drivers.

Also: Joe Biden’s Woman-Touching Habit.

Related: Talking Points Memo: Why Does Creepy Uncle Joe Biden Get A Pass From Liberals?

Plus:

MONOCULTURES ARE HIGHLY VULNERABLE TO NEW STRESSORS: A Glimpse Into The Ideological Monoculture Of Literary New York.

CHRISTIAN TOTO: Four Essential William Goldman Screenplays.

OPEN THREAD: Sorry it’s late — I thought I’d scheduled it but I guess I was wrong.

JOURNALISM: NYT, CNN wildly skew story on sexual harassment, Pence’s Press Secretary busts them.

She certainly did:

WATERY GRAVE: Missing Argentine submarine found almost a year to the day after it vanished in the Atlantic Ocean. “The wreckage of the ARA San Juan Submarine was located 2,850 feet deep, and about 700 miles east of the city of Puerto Madryn.”

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: There Are No ‘Good’ Public Schools.

ALL OUR TREES ARE CATCHING FIRE! HEY, MAYBE YOU SHOULD CUT SOME OF THEM DOWN. Facing Deadlier Fires, California Tries Something New: More Logging: Environmentalists and the timber industry, after long butting heads, increasingly agree that cutting trees to thin forests is vital to reducing fire danger. “Another dangerous factor, land-management experts say, is that forests have become overgrown with trees and underbrush due to a mix of human influences, including a past federal policy of putting out fires, rather than letting them burn. Washington has also sharply reduced logging under pressure from environmentalists.”

Weird, I remember a lot of people dunking on Trump after he said this the other day.

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Is the FDA Racist or Just Stupid?

AT AMAZON, Fall Savings in Patio, Lawn, and Garden.

Plus, save on bestselling Pet Supplies.

BREAKING: GILLUM FINALLY CONCEDES (AGAIN).

UPDATE: Of course, it’s worth noting that neither man will actually be the next governor of Florida…

THAT DEPENDS ON WHO YOU ASK: The New York Times asks, Are Jared and Ivanka Good for the Jews?

Arrgh. The Times adopts the narrative, popular on the left, that the only reason any Jews support Trump is that he is pro-Israel. Look, surveys show that 25-30% of American Jews are Republican or lean Republican. Orthodox Jews and older immigrants from the former Soviet Union are especially likely to be Republicans. Most American Jews don’t vote on “Jewish issues” as such, and Republican Jews, like other Republicans, will be inclined to support any Republican president unless they affirmatively strongly disagree with particular policies, though I assume a blatantly anti-Semitic president of either party would change voting patterns significantly. Ninety percent of Republicans in general approve of Trump, and if you are outside the liberal bubble that blames Trump for anti-Semitism, there is no reason to expect that figure to be significantly lower among Jewish Republicans unless you think that Jewish Republicans are especially likely to disapprove of Trump otherwise. And indeed, last I looked surveys show that 25-30% of American Jews approve of Trump.

In my experience, some of Trump’s most controversial policies, including the so-called Muslim ban, are reasonably popular with my Republican Jewish friends (real and Facebook) and family. Indeed, many of them are very concerned about the anti-Semitism immigrants from the Middle East bring with them, though it’s generally considered impolitic to talk about this in public. And not only are these Republican Jews not using Trump’s pro-Israel policies to excuse his contribution to anti-Semitism, as the Times suggests, but in fact they see those policies, along with appointments like Nikki Haley (who withdrew the U.S. from the anti-Semitic UN Human Rights Commission that Obama had rejoined) and Ken Marcus as policies of a very philo-Semitic presidency. Some of my Jewish Facebook friends routinely pronounce the Trump administration to be the most pro-Jewish in history. It’s far more accurate to conclude that Jews see Trump’s Jewish-related policies through the lens of their preexisting approval or disapproval of Trump than to suggest, as the Times does, that Trump’s Jewish-related policies are what drive Jewish voters one way or the other.

As usual, the New York Times reports on subcultures it doesn’t understand as if it is visiting Mars.

SO I FINISHED S.M. STIRLING’S LATEST (AND FINAL) CHANGE SERIES NOVEL, The Sky-Blue Wolves. As I got close to the end I wondered how he was going to wrap things up, but he managed. I know the series got a bit too crunchy for some InstaPundit readers, but I enjoyed it. Now I wish he’d do a sequal to Conquistador, or The Peshawar Lancers.

ANCIENT ALIENS ARE RACIST AND OTHER LEFTY INSANITY:

On the site Hyperallergic, author Sarah E. Bond tells readers that recent archeological discoveries are more proof against the “long-held but fringe theory that the blocks were so heavy and the distances they would have to travel so lengthy that aliens must have built the pyramids.” She then goes on to devote more than 2,000 words to the “fringe theory.”

She blames a 50-year-old book by a racist Swedish crackpot for popularizing what she calls pseudoarchaeology.

“While [these] ideas might be laughable to most,” she says in that progressive way that tells us “most” are irredeemable bigots, “the creation of doubt is a pernicious and rhetorical agent … Far from innocuous, these alien theories undermine the agency, archaeology, and intellect of non-European cultures in Africa and South America, as well as the Native peoples in North America by erasing their achievements.”

[Sigh] Okay, I’ll bite. Regardless of their provenance, why can’t these dumbass ideas just be a simple reaction to our dumbass bafflement? We see the Pyramids. We have an idea of the kind of technology and resources available when they were built (2589–2566 BCE, according to Bond — you’re really surprised she’s the kind of progressive who uses BCE and CE instead of BC and AD?), and we have no idea how they managed it. They being humans, not “non-Europeans.” Race doesn’t even enter into it.

When the Pyramids were built the Egyptians were about the only game in town. The Parthenon, the Great Wall and the Gibson Les Paul were thousands of years in the future. If Northern Europeans had managed the same thing at the same time, plenty of people would be wondering if aliens or angels or Sleestak had a hand in it. But the Gauls and the Germans didn’t do it. The Egyptians did, and their achievement blows our minds. Somebody smelled a sucker (or 65 million of them, buying his book over 50 years) and resuscitated some old notions about spacemen.

“It is notable that many (though not all) extraterrestrial theories focus on archaeological structures at sites within Egypt, Africa, South America, and North America — a fact that has led some academics to see beliefs in ancient alien engineers as a stalking horse for racism,” writes Bond.

I’m not saying it’s aliens, but it’s definitely aliens.

THE KIND OF MEN WHO CARRY POCKETKNIVES.

GALAXY BRAIN. ‘You played yourself’: Mexican woman becomes U.S. citizen to own the cons.

WHEN TRUMP DOES IT, IT’S A CRISIS: You may not agree with Glenn Greenwald often, and you may even believe that Julian Assange is/was a national security threat. Reasonable minds can differ. But Greenwald’s piece in The Intercept underscores what many conservatives, libertarians and free-thinkers have known for a while:

“Over the last two years, journalists and others have melodramatically claimed that press freedoms were being assaulted by the Trump administration due to trivial acts such as the President spouting adolescent insults on Twitter at Chuck Todd and Wolf Blitzer or banning Jim Acosta from White House press conferences due to his refusal to stop preening for a few minutes so as to allow other journalists to ask questions. Meanwhile, actual and real threats to press freedoms that began with the Obama DOJ and have escalated with the Trump DOJ – such as aggressive attempts to unearth and prosecute sources – have gone largely ignored if not applauded.”

Ask yourself this: If Acosta acted as he does in Saudi Arabia or China, do you think he’d ever see daylight again? “Trump was mean to me” just pales in comparison to the real “War on the Press.”