TEACH ROLLING STONE NOT TO PUBLISH AND TOUT FAKE RAPE STORIES THAT LIBEL INNOCENT VICTIMS WHO THE POLITICALLY CORRECT HATE: Hey you wonderful readers you, don’t you know the staff at Rolling Stone is perzackly like Katie Couric. Rolling Stone media elites were just trying to start a conversation, like Second Amendment Hater Cute Katie.

STOPPING THE Civilian-Military Drift.

THE BAD OLD DAYS MAKE A COMEBACK: StrategyPage’s Wars Update. This is Jim Dunnigan’s semi-annual assessment of armed conflict on the planet. Full disclosure: I’ve been a contributing editor at StrategyPage since 1999.

This is the lead, which may be difficult to believe but the stats back it up:

The post-Cold War trend towards less violence is resuming after a brief interruption. In 2014 over a decade of declining violence was temporarily reversed because terrorism deaths were up by about 20 percent that year and nearly as high in 2015. This was mainly because of ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant) in Syria and Iraq and Boko Haram in Nigeria.

Scroll down to read updates on major trouble spots, from Afghanistan to Yemen.

AS IN CHICAGO, HISPANICS ARE REPLACING BLACKS AS THE URBAN POWER: Candidates For Rangel Seat Push for Racial Reconciliation After Divisive Primary. If the GOP were smart (ha, ha, yeah, I know) there would be big opportunities here.

UM, WHAT? Officials believe blast that injured man in New York’s Central Park was an ‘experiment.’ “Officials believe an ‘explosive hobbyist’ may have left behind the device that detonated when an 18-year-old man’s foot landed on it in New York’s Central Park on Sunday morning, creating a blast that resulted in a severe leg injury for the man. . . . O’Connell and bomb squad commander Lt. Mark Torre said it was not unusual for individuals to create “homemade” fireworks as Independence Day celebrations approached. Officials were scouring the park for other, similar devices, but there was no evidence more than one existed.”

UPDATE: More here. The FBI is now reportedly investigating.

HEY, THEY DON’T CALL HIM PRESIDENT GOLDMAN SACHS FOR NOTHING: Income for top 1% in America rose twice as fast in 2015 as it did for the remaining 99%.

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SUZANNE VENKER: What The Feminization Of The West Has Wrought. “This phenomenon is not restricted to America — it’s a pan-Western problem.”

As I’ve noted before, Islam, particularly fundamentalist Salafist Islam, is a meme-complex designed (and successfully evolved) to appeal to emasculated, marginalized men in on overbearingly bureaucratic and feminized society. It might be smart to come up with a countervailing, competitive system of beliefs and behavior that offers many of the attractions with fewer antisocial elements.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Highly-Ranked Law Schools Like Minnesota, Washington & Lee Cut Enrollment, Costs To Survive.

ROSS DOUTHAT: The Myth Of Cosmopolitanism:

Indeed elite tribalism is actively encouraged by the technologies of globalization, the ease of travel and communication. Distance and separation force encounter and immersion, which is why the age of empire made cosmopolitans as well as chauvinists — sometimes out of the same people. (There is more genuine cosmopolitanism in Rudyard Kipling and T. E. Lawrence and Richard Francis Burton than in a hundred Davos sessions.) . . .

But it’s a problem that our tribe of self-styled cosmopolitans doesn’t see itself clearly as a tribe: because that means our leaders can’t see themselves the way the Brexiteers and Trumpistas and Marine Le Pen voters see them.

They can’t see that what feels diverse on the inside can still seem like an aristocracy to the excluded, who look at cities like London and see, as Peter Mandler wrote for Dissent after the Brexit vote, “a nearly hereditary professional caste of lawyers, journalists, publicists, and intellectuals, an increasingly hereditary caste of politicians, tight coteries of cultural movers-and-shakers richly sponsored by multinational corporations.”

They can’t see that paeans to multicultural openness can sound like self-serving cant coming from open-borders Londoners who love Afghan restaurants but would never live near an immigrant housing project, or American liberals who hail the end of whiteness while doing everything possible to keep their kids out of majority-minority schools.

They can’t see that their vision of history’s arc bending inexorably away from tribe and creed and nation-state looks to outsiders like something familiar from eras past: A powerful caste’s self-serving explanation for why it alone deserves to rule the world.

Critical self-awareness is not one of their strengths.

REVIEW: 2016 Chevrolet Malibu Hybrid.

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GANGSTER GOVERNMENT: Federal Lab Cooked the Books for Two Decades and No One is Being Punished.

Unexpectedly.

SPACE: Funding of Space Ventures Gets a Lift.

FASTER, PLEASE: This artificial pancreas could be available to diabetics as soon as 2018.

WIDE LANE FOR WIDE LOADS: The Christian Science Monitor has published an informative article on the Panama Canal’s now-completed expansion project and what the new “super big ship” capacity means for US natural gas exports to Asia.

The canal expansion opened on June 26 with a third lane that accommodates big ships such as liquified natural gas (LNG) ships, 90 percent of which may now travel across the canal, including those that hold as much as 3.9 billion cubic feet (Bcf) of fuel, according to a report from the US Energy Information Administration released June 30. Along with a new lane, the canal has enlarged its locks that are 180 feet wide and 60 feet deep, compared to the 110-foot wide and 42-foot deep 1914 canal. The project cost a total of $5.25 billion. The previous canal allowed just 6 percent of the current global fleet, or 30 of the smallest LNG tankers who could carry up to 0.7 Bcf of fuel, the report claims. The reduced travel time and transportation costs for LNG shipments could help United States natural gas exports to northern Asia. With the United States’ natural gas economy growing to the world’s third-largest LNG producer by 2020, the expansion could be a new favorite route.

The article says that the “updated Canal” should spur the expansion of American East Coast ports. In late January 1995 I got to open a Panama Canal lock. It was a bit of a thrill to tug one of the brass handles in the lock control room. I was serving a brief Army Reserve tour with SOUTHCOM, which at the time still had its headquarters in Quarry Heights, Panama.

FASTER, PLEASE: Searching for the Perfect Anti-Aging Drug.

DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS AND GUNS AND AMMO: Moe Lane tells DMs What to do When Your Players Try to Hatch a Gunpowder Plot.

ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK STAR DANIELLE BROOKS, FLYING FIRST CLASS, COMPLAINS ABOUT MICROAGGRESSION BY LOWLY GATE AGENT:

Brooks, the actress who plays Taystee in “Orange is the New Black,” took to Twitter to complain about her own first-world problems, a purported microaggression she experienced this morning at the airport.

Brooks tweeted – and then likely when called on her contemptuousness by Heat Street – deleted the following tweet:

I hate when gate agents look at me like I’ve never flown first class and say “You’re in first class, lucky you!”???? really tho

The nerve of that gate agent! Making $45K a year and not even having an expensive cadre of writers sculpting her dialogue and a director shaping her performance and a cameraman shooting take after take to get things just so! Incidentally, I wonder if the people who imagine all of these microagressions occurring ever wonder why they just keep happening over and over to them? But, really, as with Alec Baldwin accosting American Airlines stewardesses, what’s the sense of being a leftist one percenter who believes in tolerance and diversity if you can’t publicly attack people who actually work for a living?

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Little to no association between butter consumption and chronic disease or total mortality. I like grassfed butter. I get the Anchor New Zealand or the Kerrygold.

MISSING PERSON: Where is Noor Salman and the media that covered up her “disappearance”? It’s a local crime story.

DAN MARKEL NEWS: Update On Murder-For-Hire Investigation Into Dan Markel’s Death: Charlie Adelson Denies ‘Any Involvement.’ Well, okay then.

FLORIDA WOMAN: Caught on camera! Half naked woman tries to bribe her way out of a speeding ticket in Miami.

MICHAEL CIMINO DEAD AT AGE 77: “’The Deer Hunter’ is being talked about again after all these years. It is seen as a vehicle for understanding the political success of Donald Trump,” Paul Mirengoff writes at Power Line.

Cimino of course is also legendary for Heaven’s Gate, his follow-up to The Dear Hunter, which went so over budget and bombed so spectacularly at the box office it both effectively destroyed United Artists and permanently ended the notion of ‘70s film brats as autonomous auteurs. (Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories tanking that same year after Annie Hall and Manhattan had been big hits didn’t help UA, and its “I hate my fans” theme also impacted Woody at the box office for years to come.)

Because it nuked United Artists, Heaven’s Gate could have also killed the James Bond franchise dead in its tracks. This Digital Bits retrospective on the James Bond film For Your Eyes Only from last week explores how this otherwise so-so Bond outing may have saved the franchise from the fallout of the UA implosion.