I DUNNO, BUT IN THE U.S. AND EUROPE, THE WORMTONGUES SEEM FIRMLY IN CHARGE: Victor Davis Hanson: Are The Orcs Winning?

CAMPUSES ARE HOTBEDS OF RAPE AND RACISM. NO ONE SHOULD SEND THEIR KIDS THERE. The Varsity Rape Team.

AT AMAZON, Fall Deals on Men’s Shoes. Also, Women’s Shoes.

Plus, Generators and Portable Power for Storm Season. Winter is coming.

ED DRISCOLL: Breaking News From 2005: Washington Post Discovers That “TV is For Old People.” Well, when the WaPo’s media critics are only 9 years behind Ed Driscoll, that’s progress.

YEAH, PRETTY MUCH: Liberal Fascism laid bare in one @DonnaBrazile tweet.

I DUNNO, I’M NOT SURE I TRUST “PASSWORD MANAGERS.” Three Essential Steps to Make Yourself More Hack-Proof.

MORE ON THIS, WHICH IS A BIT DISTURBING: Mysterious Phony Cell Towers Could Be Intercepting Your Calls.

QUESTIONS ABOUT the FBI’s explanation of how they located Silk Road. “One of the big outstanding issues was how the FBI managed to uncover the real IP address of the server hosting the Silk Road. The indictment is intentionally vague on the details of how the server was discovered, and the issue is important since a large number of users (numbering in the millions) rely on the Tor software network to protect their identity.”

Prediction: We’ll eventually discover that Tor has had an NSA backdoor since day one.

SHOCKER: Foreign Powers Buy Influence at Think Tanks.

More than a dozen prominent Washington research groups have received tens of millions of dollars from foreign governments in recent years while pushing United States government officials to adopt policies that often reflect the donors’ priorities, an investigation by The New York Times has found.

The money is increasingly transforming the once-staid think-tank world into a muscular arm of foreign governments’ lobbying in Washington. And it has set off troubling questions about intellectual freedom: Some scholars say they have been pressured to reach conclusions friendly to the government financing the research.

Here’s another shocker: Foreign money affects research in academic institutions, too. Especially money from Saudia Arabia and the Gulf States. Maybe the NYT will do a story on that next.

UPDATE: Heh: “So says the Paper of Record that will soon be nearly 20 percent owned by a Mexican billionaire with vast holdings.”

DAN MITCHELL: What’s The Best Tax Haven For American Citizens?

WAGES OF BRITAIN’S GREEN-ENERGY POLICIES: Blackout alert: Offices and factories to undergo 1970s-style electricity rationing this winter to stop households being plunged into darkness. If we follow the same policies here, we’ll get the same result. If I ran things, reserve-capacity and hardening would be much higher priorities.

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Is Rachel @Maddow’s Haircut Waging War Against Heteronormative Patriarchy?

Me, I’ll just note that this piece on “heteronormativity” is by a guy named Stacy.

LONG-TERM TEST REPORT: Our Corvette blew an engine but we still love it. There actually seem to be a lot of reliability issues.

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P.J. O’ROURKE: A “Space Corvette” In Every Garage. That’s what I want.

BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU: FAA Scans the Internet For Drone Users; Sends Cease and Desist Letters.

TEN TOOLS YOU DIDN’T KNOW YOU NEEED.

READER BOOK PLUG: From reader Kevin Kneupper, They Who Fell.

SAM SMITH: Good Journalism Means Confronting Your Biases.

YES! The Most Desired iPhone 6 Improvement: Better Battery Life. I’d rather they made my iPhone 1/4″ thicker and gave me twice the battery life. Instead, I keep my slim phone in a fat Mophie Juicepack Plus for sufficient battery life.

GREEN CARS IN THE RED: “Is a down market the ‘new normal’ for US green-car vehicle sales? That’s what analysts and advanced-powertrain advocates may be asking after green-car sales turned in their third straight down month in August. Not even record sales of the Nissan Leaf battery-electric could save things, as Americans cut their purchases of hybrids, plug-ins and diesels by about 11 percent last month compared to 2013 figures.”

Huh. It’s not as if gas is all that cheap.

THE GLOBAL war on nudism.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 486.

ANOTHER TRIUMPH OF SOCIALISM: Venezuela Set To Import Oil.

Venezuela’s oil production, which accounts for 95 percent of the country’s export earnings, should be used in world classrooms as a textbook case of what happens when a populist government starts distributing a country’s wealth in cash subsidies, without investing in maintenance and innovation. Much like happened with Cuba’s once flourishing sugar industry, Venezuela’s Chávez-inspired populism has destroyed the goose that laid the golden eggs.

In 1999, when Chávez took office, PDVSA had 51,000 employees and produced 63 barrels of crude a day per employee. Fifteen years later, PDVSA had 140,000 employees, and produced 20 barrels of crude a day per employee, according to an Aug. 14 report by the France Press news agency.

Venezuela’s net oil exports have plummeted from 3.1 million barrels a day in 1997 to 1.7 million barrels a day in 2013, according to U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates.

Plus: “There was a popular riddle bandied about the Soviet Union back in communist days that went something like this: Question: if the Soviet Union conquered the Sahara, what would happen? Answer: nothing for 50 years, then a shortage of sand.” It didn’t take 50 years.