MCCONNELL TO SENATE: Don’t Book Nonrefundable Travel for August Recess.

CHANGE: Trump Moves to Ease the Firing of Federal Workers.

President Trump on Friday signed a series of executive orders making it easier to fire federal government workers and to curb the workplace role of unions that represent them.

Andrew Bremberg, the head of the White House Domestic Policy Council, said the president was “fulfilling his promise to promote more efficient government by reforming our Civil Service rules.”

But the push also reflects conservatives’ long-running suspicion of the federal bureaucracy, one reflected in pronouncements by the president’s advisers. Shortly after Mr. Trump took office, Stephen K. Bannon, then his chief strategist, called for “the deconstruction of the administrative state.”

Unions representing government workers were quick to denounce the actions, calling them an “assault on democracy,” in the words of the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal employee union, which represents 700,000 workers.

Making federal workers subject to elected officials isn’t an assault on Democracy, as even FDR knew.

And, once again, Trump is the most conservative, and most libertarian, president of my lifetime.

HORSE, MEET BARN DOOR: FBI issues formal warning on massive malware network linked to Russia. We’ve ignored cyber defense against Russia — and more significantly China — for a decade, and the result is a debacle.

I DUNNO, IT’S ALREADY KINDA OVERPRICED AND TOXIC: Should Higher Education Be More Like Chipotle?

WELL, IT DOESN’T ALLOW FOR APPROVED RACIAL POSITIONING: Ayaan Hirsi Ali: The anti-woman violence feminists are afraid to confront.

JOHN MCWHORTER: Atonement As Activism: Today’s consciousness-raising on race is less about helping black people than it is about white people seeking grace.

Coates is a symptom of a larger mood. Over the past several years, for instance, whites across the country have been taught that it isn’t enough to understand that racism exists. Rather, the good white person views themselves as the bearer of an unearned “privilege” because of their color. Not long ago, I attended an event where a black man spoke of him and his black colleagues dressing in suits at work even on Casual Fridays, out of a sense that whites would look down on black men dressed down. The mostly white audience laughed and applauded warmly—at a story accusing people precisely like them of being racists.

This brand of self-flagellation has become the new form of enlightenment on race issues. It qualifies as a kind of worship; the parallels with Christianity are almost uncannily rich. White privilege is the secular white person’s Original Sin, present at birth and ultimately ineradicable. One does one’s penance by endlessly attesting to this privilege in hope of some kind of forgiveness. After the black man I mentioned above spoke, the next speaker was a middle-aged white man who spoke of having a coach come to his office each week to talk to him about his white privilege. The audience, of course, applauded warmly at this man’s description of having what an anthropologist observer would recognize not as a “coach” but as a pastor.

I have seen whites owning up to their white privilege using the hand-in-the-air-palm-out gesture typically associated with testifying in church. After the event I have been describing, all concerned deemed it “wonderful” even though nothing new had been learned. The purpose of the event was to remind the parishioners of the prevalence of the racist sin and its reflection in themselves, and to offer a kind of forgiveness, this latter being essentially the function of the black people on the panel and in the audience. Amen.

Some might see all of this as a healthy sign of moral advance. And I suppose if I had to choose between this performativity and the utter contempt most whites had for any discussion of discrimination 50 years ago and before, I’d choose our current moment. But goodness, it piles high and deep, this—well, I’ll call it fakeness. . . .

The self-affirming part is the rub. This new cult of atonement is less about black people than white people. Fifty years ago, a white person learning about the race problem came away asking “How can I help?” Today the same person too often comes away asking, “How can I show that I’m a moral person?”

They want religion. But they don’t actually want to be told to do anything they don’t already want to do.

AND OF COURSE THEY DO:  Harvard Extension School Now Offers ‘Social Justice Certificate’ Program.

IOW, DO THEY USE ‘SHUT UP, THEY EXPLAINED?’:  Five Ways to Know if You Can Talk to Someone about Climate.

UH OH:  BREAKING: Explosion at Indian Restaurant Outside Toronto Appears to Be a Bombing.

AS ALWAYS:  Trump Says He and North Koreans are Talking Again; Leftists Hardest Hit.

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO SEXUALLY ASSAULT:  Cable customer forced oral sex on repairman: cops.

THAT ISN’T FAT, IT’S A PROACTIVE BARRIER:  Obese people twice as likely to survive infectious diseases.

WHATEVER YOU DO, DON’T GO THROUGH THE TSA CHECK!  FBI tells women how to protect themselves from sexual assaults on flights.

PEAK JAPAN? HOLD MY SAKE AND WATCH THIS!  Hello Kitty bullet train is peak Japan.

ALIENS, IT’S GOTTA BE ALIENS!  Mystery lasers spotted shooting out from nebula.

N.B. – THIS BLOG IS NOT DIGITAL HEROIN, IT’S MORE LIKE DIGITAL REEFER [VODKA? SINGLE MALT? FINE WINE?]:   Our digital addictions are killing our kids.

READER BOOK PLUG: From reader Clayton Barnett, The Fourth Law. I get a cameo, of sorts.

WELL, IT IS OKLAHOMA CITY, AFTER ALL: Turns out the OKC shooter wasn’t stopped by a good guy with a gun — he was stopped by TWO good guys with guns. Twice as nice. Sort of like my Sonny’s BBQ story. “I’m happy to have you carrying — if somebody tries to rob me, it’s two against one.”

OPEN THREAD: Please reserve your DogMan discussions for the earlier post.

WITH TROPICAL STORM ALBERTO BEARING DOWN, I’M REMINDED THAT I EXPERIENCED FIRST HAND THE FIERCE DEVASTATION that accompanied the 2006 Alberto. And not only survived, but prevailed.

THE DIRE WOLVES ARE COMING BACK: Mysterious wolf-like creature shot in northcentral Montana near Denton.

IT IS: The insane crackdown on pain medication.

ROGER KIMBALL: For your eyes only: A short history of Democrat-spy collusion: How highly placed members of one administration mobilised the intelligence services to undermine their successors.

DAMN NEAR KILLED HIM: Man ‘hid SIX phones inside his bottom before deliberately getting arrested scaling the security fence surrounding Jerusalem so he could hand them to prison inmates.’

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: What Happened When I Let A Womanizer Take Over My Tinder Profile.