ROGER SIMON: Google and China — Made for Each Other.

TONI AIRAKSINEN: Lawsuit Claims Military Draft ‘Discriminates Against Men.’ “Calling men heroes if they sacrifice their life is a bribe.”

End it don’t mend it.

ARRIVAL AT JOINT BASE PEARL HARBOR-HICKAM: A B-2 returns from a routine training mission.

SALON: Norm Macdonald has a show. But when hasn’t he? That’s the problem.

Macdonald hasn’t been in our faces, per se. Sure, he’s enjoyed a recent stint as one of the rotating Colonel Sanders on those KFC commercials, worked as a golf commentator, and we can occasionally catch his “Weekend Update” segments when they pop up on repeats of classic “Saturday Night Live” episodes. He’s also the voice of Pigeon on “Mike Tyson Mysteries.” He’s managed to stick around, but not in an overt way.

But what I’m saying is, the world has always been ruled by some version of Norm Macdonald. That’s why so many people love him.

Ladies, you know what I’m talking about. Chances are some jovial galumph that resembles Macdonald has been a part of your life at some point. You may have met him at college. He could be a work colleague. He’s that guy who holds the door open for you and buys you lunch sometimes and apologizes for his good pal Bill when Bill drunkenly pinches your boob at after-work gatherings.

Because he knows Bill, see? He can vouch for Bill, who didn’t mean anything by it. Bill’s just joking around, old school. It’s not worth making a scene by pressing assault charges against Bill. Don’t get so worked up!

Maybe your Macdonald has been known to drop a joke that diminishes people in a punchline — he’s one-sixteenth Irish, he can do that! — but is otherwise OK to be around and anyway, he’s from the Great White North where nobody means to be offensive.

This fictionalized Macdonald sounds like a well-meaning, imperfect guy with a good sense of humor — and we can’t have that.

No worries, however. It won’t be long before the last laugh has been wrung out of comedy.

WHY ARE DEM-DOMINATED INDUSTRIES SUCH CESSPITS OF RACISM? Asian advocacy group blasts UC Berkeley’s plan for Hispanic ‘racial quotas.’

“DESPITE”: California’s poverty rate is still the highest in the nation, despite state efforts.

ANTISOCIAL MEDIA: Facebook to Start Fact-Checking Photos, Videos. “The social-media company will use technology and human reviewers to help flag false content.”

The company said Thursday it will use technology and human reviewers to try to staunch what it called in a statement “misinformation in these new visual formats.” Previously, the company’s efforts had been focused on rooting out false articles and links.

“The same false claim can appear as an article headline, as text over a photo or as audio in the background of a video,” Facebook product manager Tessa Lyons said in the statement. “In order to fight misinformation, we have to be able to fact-check it across all of these different content types.”

Facebook is one of the outlets Bill Whittle uses for the Right Angle video commentary segments we tape each week. I suspect our traffic there is about to take a big hit — provided they don’t dump us completely.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: “None of the speakers for the center’s launch have a background in conservative thought or activism. Although the center’s stated objective is to go ‘beyond partisanship,’ the lineup of speakers at the building’s opening ceremony favors the left.”

AT AMAZON, Today’s Kindle Deals.

Plus, Hot New Releases, Updated Every Hour.

And, save Big on Clearances, Overstocks, and Markdowns at the Amazon Outlet Store.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Florence Approaches, Creepy Porn Lawyer and Much, Much More. “Hurricane Florence has started to make landfall and ABC News reports it is about 200 miles wide. As of last night, 180,000 homes have no power and it’s expected to get worse. Water levels are rising and also expected to get worse. I told you all to get out but some have chosen to stick around. Now those holdouts need to be rescued.”

Part of being prepared is being prepared to bug out.

FLASHBACK: When disaster strikes, FEMA turns to Waffle House.

The 24-hour restaurant chain prides itself on serving its customers at all hours of the day, seven days a week. And FEMA caught on to this. They discovered that if a Waffle House was closed after a storm, then that meant things were really bad.

“It just doesn’t happen where Waffle House is normally shut down,” said Philip Strouse, FEMA’s private sector liaison for the Southeast.

Strouse said Waffle Houses are able to bounce back relatively quickly after a natural disaster, and have a good sense of what their statuses are in a community.

“They’re the canary in the coalmine, if you will,” Strouse said.

Here’s to hoping Florence doesn’t force any Waffle Houses to close.

LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: Venezuela’s hyperinflation fuels misery for poor but enriches elite through currency exchanges.

Skyrocketing prices have ruined Venezuela’s economy with many people unable to afford even basic necessities — unless you are part of tight circle of politically connected elites with access to a government-controlled currency exchange that one financial expert in Miami summed up as a “perpetual money machine for insider criminals.”

The exchange offers bolivar-for-dollar rates insulated from the country’s hyperinflation, a currency system that the socialist government of the late President Hugo Chávez first set up to stabilize the economy and lower the prices of essential goods like food and medicine for the poor.

In the 15 years since, financial experts and U.S. prosecutors say the government exchange has also turned into a tool to empower Venezuelan leaders and enrich already wealthy business insiders. They’ve siphoned billions out of national coffers by exploiting exchange rates rigged to make astronomical profits in currency transactions that are inaccessible to a population struggling with widespread food shortages and runaway prices.

Why, it’s almost as though socialism were nothing more than a scam to trick the people into thinking they could get something for nothing, when actually it enriches the politically well-connected elite at their expense.

WHY PEOPLE THINK THE PRESS IS FULL OF LIES, PART 4,327,215. Headline: Nikki Haley’s View of New York Is Priceless. Her Curtains? $52,701.

Scroll down — keep scrolling — and you eventually get to this: “A spokesman for Ms. Haley said plans to buy the curtains were made in 2016, during the Obama administration. Ms. Haley had no say in the purchase, he said.”

WELL, GOOD: Poland says it will block any EU sanctions against Hungary.

“Every country has its sovereign right to make internal reforms it deems appropriate,” Poland’s foreign ministry said in a statement late on Wednesday.

“Actions aimed against member states serve only deepening divides in the EU, increasing citizens’ current lack of confidence to European institutions.”

The European Parliament voted on Wednesday to sanction Hungary for neglecting norms on democracy, civil rights and corruption in a first bid to launch the punitive process of the EU treaty’s Article 7.

This Reuters reports hews to the EU party line, so for a better backgrounder, check out Spengler’s latest — Chutzpah in Strasbourg — if you missed it yesterday.

I DOUBT TRUMP IS LOSING ANY SLEEP OVER HIS EFFORTS: Barack Obama’s return just reminds us how he fueled the distrust that led to Donald Trump.

PROCUREMENT BLUES: Navy’s Revamped Stealth Destroyer Looks Less Stealthy As It Leaves San Diego For Trials.

It’s even worse than the headline promises:

After much fanfare among the mainstream press, the truth about the [Zumwalt’s] watered-down design, tiny fleet size, useless deck guns, and the implications of these factors, among others, became much more clear. As we reported two years ago, in yet another cost-cutting move, the Navy decided to forego the ship’s very stealth concept—which is the major reason the ships look the way they do, cost as much as they do, and have certain design tradeoffs for doing so—and bolt on communications systems and some sensors in a very unstealthy manner. These corner-cutting measures even included the addition of a rickety looking mast above the ship’s deckhouse. Now we are getting our first glimpses of this disappointing configuration.

There are EHF and UHF satellite communications systems (ball like structures) tacked onto either side of the ship’s deckhouse. Atop it, towards the forward edge of the deckhouse are two Tactical Common Data Link communications systems. Between them is the new mast, and no it isn’t a temporary structure. To the rear of the ship, above the hangar, we see the cupolas for the 30mm Bushmaster cannons. These were also downgraded from the far more capable 57mm guns as another late-in-the-game cost-saving move.

So it’s less stealthy and less well-armed than promised, years late, and costs more than anything afloat short of a Nimitz– or Ford-class aircraft carrier.

What a mess.

A DISH BEST SERVED COLD: Former Clinton Aide on Coons: We Would Have Been ‘Better off if the Witch Had Won.’

A former aide to Hillary Clinton expressed his disagreement with Sen. Chris Coons (D., Del.) on Thursday by saying it would have been better if “the witch had won,” a reference to the senator’s 2010 special election opponent.

Coons drew Brian Fallon’s ire after he expressed his desire on the “Hugh Hewitt Show” to bring back the filibuster for federal judicial nominees. . . .

Fallon’s tweet was a reference to the contentious 2010 special election in Delaware, which was called to fill the Senate seat vacated by Vice President Joe Biden. His Republican opponent at the time, Christine O’Donnell, became well-known for her insistence that she was “not a witch” after previously making comments about witchcraft, something she says she “dabbled” in.

Coons beat O’Donnell in the race 57 percent to 40 percent.

The communications director for Coons, Sean Coit, responded to Fallon’s comment by asking, “Is this a parody account?”

Who can tell, these days?

POLITICO: McConnell screws Dems ahead of election with October session. “The majority leader wants to deprive Democrats up for reelection the chance to campaign.”

If the parties were reversed, do you even have to ask if this is how Politico would frame the story?

FLASHBACK: Democrats Need Anti-Semites to Win. You can tell that by the candidates they’re recruiting.

RICK MORAN: Ex-Obama Aide Says US Should ‘Get Behind’ Plan for ‘Peaceful Ethnic Cleansing’ in Balkans. “A proposed land swap between Serbia and Kosovo would raise the specter of ethnic violence.”

This is a depressing observation rather than an enthusiastic endorsement, but one of humanity’s dirty little secrets is that ethnic resettling tends to work.

HAS ANYBODY ASKED TOM FRIEDMAN ABOUT THIS? Chinese official says China is educating, not mistreating, Muslims.

China is not mistreating Muslims in Xinjiang province but is putting some people through training courses to avoid extremism spreading, unlike Europe, which had failed to deal with the problem, a Chinese official told reporters on Thursday. . . .

“It is not mistreatment,” said Li Xiaojun, director for publicity at the Bureau of Human Rights Affairs of the State Council Information Office. “What China is doing is to establish professional training centers, educational centers.”

“If you do not say it’s the best way, maybe it’s the necessary way to deal with Islamic or religious extremism, because the West has failed in doing so, in dealing with religious Islamic extremism,” Li told reporters on the sidelines of the U.N. Human Rights Council session in Geneva.

“Look at Belgium, look at Paris, look at some other European countries. You have failed.”

Well, that part’s certainly true.

Related: 48 Ways to Get Sent to a Chinese Concentration Camp: Something terrible is happening in Xinjiang.

In response to growing tensions between Han Chinese and the Uighur population of Xinjiang itself, the recruitment of Uighurs to fight in the Syrian civil war, and several terrorist attacks orchestrated by Uighur separatists, the party launched what it called the Strike Hard Campaign Against Violent Terrorism. Despite its name, the campaign’s targets are not limited to terrorists. No Uighur living in Xinjiang can escape the shadow of the party nor can members of other ethnic minorities, especially Kazakhs.

Some of the methods used to surveil and coerce the population of Xinjiang are straight from the dystopian imagination: The party has collected the DNA, iris scans, and voice samples of the province’s Uighur population, regularly scans the contents of their digital devices, uses digitally coded ID cards to track their movements, and trains CCTV cameras on their homes, streets, and marketplaces.

To students of Chinese history, other elements of the system are depressingly familiar. Cultural Revolution-style struggle sessions have been resurrected: Uighurs now gather in public meetings to denounce their relatives and publicly admit their personal political sins. Most worrisome of all is the vast network of political education camps that have been created to hold and “re-educate” Uighurs who are too attached to their mother culture. Somewhere between 600,000 and 1.2 million Uighurs—that is, approximately one out of 12—are being held in these camps.

Maybe I missed it, but has Tom weighed in here?

Though I have to say, part of this sounds like the Social Justice Warrior game plan:

A central element of this campaign is uncertainty. It is difficult to judge which of these items are official policy and which are simply the result of ad hoc decisions made by local officials. This is likely by design. One Uighur interviewee told HRW how he simply stopped using his smartphone because he could not tell which websites were allowed and which might incriminate him; another described how she stopped talking to neighbors and strangers altogether because she did not want to unintentionally say something that might bring the police to her door. Vagueness breeds fear. Fear makes the people subject to the Communist Party’s campaigns easier to control.

And the SJW types are showing new enthusiasm for gulags.

ONLY IF UNWARRANTED SELF-REGARD AND ARRANT STUPIDITY WERE CRIMES:  ‘Oath’ Has Trump-like Gov’t Arresting Liberal Celebs.

WHEN THE EURO BUREAUCRATS STOP MEASURING BANANAS AND START LOOKING AT THINGS THAT MATTER, EVERYTHING COULD GO WRONG:  File under: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?