NEWS YOU CAN USE: Opt out of all the data sharing you wouldn’t opt in to.

BUT DON’T YOU DARE QUESTION HIS PATRIOTISM: The Young Turks’ Hasan Piker Says ‘America Deserved 9/11’, Mocks Dan Crenshaw’s War Injury: ‘Brave Soldier F***ed His Eye Hole.’

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Florida Man Busted with Trump-Shaped Ecstasy Pills and So Much More.

It’s Florida Man Friday.

TO BE FAIR, SOCIALISTS ARE NEVER HAPPY: Hasbro Has a New ‘Monopoly: Socialism’ Game and Socialists Are Not Happy.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. All The People Who Think They Are Better Than You Are Much, Much Worse.

Never before have so many snobs had so little to be snobbish about. It’s not like the ruling caste that turns up its collective snout at the people who actually make this country work has a CV full of achievements to back up its arrogance. Our elite is anything but. It’s a collection of pedestrian mediocrities who inherited our civilization from the people who actually created it and fought for it, and like every spoiled child who was handed free stuff by his doting mommy and daddy, our elite is resentful and obnoxious.

We’re ruled by a bunch of Veruca Salts.

Kurt Schlichter, so read the whole thing.

HEH: Journalist Attempts To Buy Guns At Walmart, Ends Up Collapsing The Left’s Anti-Gun Narrative Instead.

Short version: Non-gun owner shocked by the legal hurdles involved in buying a gun, because Obama told her it was so easy.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Granny Maojackets’ Emails Are Back!

The more we learn about the Comey-era FBI, the more it seems as if it functioned as a subsidiary of the Democratic National Committee. The conclusion of this article questions “whether there are two systems of justice inside the FBI — one for the Clintons, and one for the rest of the country.”

Clinton apologists are fond of reminding everyone that they have never been indicted for anything. I’ve written for years that that is because they are very good criminals.

Maybe they’ve had more inside help than we knew.

Pretty sure the “maybe” is rhetorical.

OUR PARTNER IN MIDDLE EAST PEACE: Abbas Doubles Down on ‘Pay-to-Slay’ Policy, Says Palestinians Will ‘March Into Jerusalem By the Millions.’

MEMRI has the full translation here.

IT’S COMPLICATED: Examining Claims About Induced Demand, Adding Road Capacity and Traffic Congestion. “The ‘iron law of roadway congestion’ isn’t.”

Here are some of the limitations with what Duranton and Turner did. First, their detailed analysis deals only with urban Interstates. Analytically, they treat parallel arterials and all other roadways in the metro area as a large blob. That leaves them unable to analyze (as opposed to only speculating about) the extent to which drivers shift trips from parallel arterials to the newly expanded urban Interstate (which would not represent new driving, but simply a re-allocation of existing driving).

Second, the authors’ premise that all such freeways have a “natural level of saturation” implies that all urban Interstates should fill up to the point of serious peak-period congestion. But in fact, actual congestion levels (in both extent and duration) vary considerably among the set of a metro area’s freeways. And the extent of congestion also varies enormously among large metro areas overall. In 2014, Randal O’Toole’s Antiplanner blog provided data on daily VMT per lane-mile on urban freeways around the country, finding a range from as low as 9,000 to a high of 22,000.

Third, since most metro areas in recent decades have added relatively little freeway capacity, the authors’ analytical results, even if correct, would tell us only that making marginal increases in freeway capacity produces little in the way of freeway congestion reduction.

We have a similar real-word experiment going on right where I live. The I-25 “gap” of two-lane highway between Monument (a Colorado Springs exurb) and Castle Rock (a Denver exurb) should have been widened 20 years ago, when traffic first became a noticeable problem. Instead, the decision wasn’t made until about two years ago, and only after two highway patrol officers were killed by oncoming traffic (the shoulders are quite narrow in most places) during routine ticket stops. And instead of two new lanes north and south, we’ll get just one new toll lane in each direction. In other words, the expanded interstate was obsolete at the planning stage, forget about 2022 when it’s finally completed.

Yet our “addiction to cars” or some such will get the blame for the unimproved traffic snarls, accidents, and deaths.

UPDATE: Link was missing. Fixed now — sorry!

BLUE ON BLUE: Hillary Clinton Gets Schooled By Pro-Clinton Author After She Denied Getting Election Help From Google.

PARTY LINE: China Sends Letter To More Than 30 Foreign News Outlets Urging More ‘Objective’ HK Reporting.

IT’S PART OF HIS PITCH TO SPEND FOUR YEARS FLYING ON THE WORLD’S MOST EXCLUSIVE PRIVATE JET: Bernie Sanders Unveils His Own $16 Trillion ‘Green New Deal’ Plan.

SECOND WORLD PROBLEMS: China Has A Great MMA Fighter. Problem: The Communist Government Hates Him.

TO WHAT END? SERIOUSLY, TO WHAT END? Radio host, former Illinois U.S. Rep. Joe Walsh says he’s weighing bid to challenge President Donald Trump for 2020 GOP nomination.

DON’T GET COCKY: GOP Smashes Another Fundraising Record in July.

FOR THE RECORD: ‘I AM NOT SUICIDAL,’ Says Man Who Exposed Hillary’s Ties to Google.

THIS HEADLINE CONTAINS ONE ADJECTIVE TOO MANY: Rising Warren faces uphill climb with black voters.

THEY’LL DO ONE ON MATT LAUER NEXT, RIGHT? RIGHT? Lionsgate Drops ‘Bombshell’ Trailer: Margot Robbie, Charlize Theron & Nicole Kidman Take On Roger Ailes.

GOOD: U.S. Clears Sale of F-16 Jets to Taiwan. “Export valued at $8 billion and is first major warplane deal since 1990s.”

These are top-of-the-line Block 70 models, the most-capable version of the F-16 currently available, and a huge step up from the aging F-16A/B Block 20 planes Taiwan currently flies.

SOUTH CHINA SEA: Has Beijing Given Up Fortifying Its Illegal Islands?

More than a century before France built the ill-fated Maginot Line, Napoleon Bonaparte supposedly was presented with a similar fortification plan, and his response (perhaps apocryphal) was, “What are you trying to defend me against, smugglers?” American General George S. Patton is on the record saying, “Fixed fortifications are monuments to man’s stupidity.” More broadly, from the SWAT team preparing to bring in a criminal holed up in a bank, to a bunker-buster bomb crippling the best-engineered underground fortress, if there’s one thing governments know how to do, it’s how to bring overwhelming force down on a known location.

That’s been my line of thinking while most everyone else has been fretting about China’s unprecedented fortification of the South China Sea (SCS) — and now it seems that even Beijing has caught on to their error.

Read the whole thing, if you don’t mind me saying so myself.

UM, REALLY? The Surprising Surge of Andrew Yang.

Andrew Yang was sitting here in a rented silver Suburban outside a black chamber of commerce surrounded by five members of his rapidly growing campaign staff when he saw a new Fox News poll in which he was tied for fifth in the sprawling Democratic presidential primary.

He stared at the screen of his phone and scrolled.

“Three percent!” Yang said, in his characteristically dry, droll way. “This team. Is the team. That’s going to go … all. The. Way. To the White House!”

Yang breezily walked into the chamber building and got onto a packed elevator. To the county party chair squeezed into a corner, Yang excitedly passed along the results of the poll, listing in order the only people who were ahead of him—a former vice president (Joe Biden) and three high-profile senators (Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris).

“And then me!” he exclaimed, flashing a goofy, exaggerated smile.

Perhaps you haven’t noticed, but Andrew Yang is … surging?

He’s trading at 10-to-1 or sometimes 11-to-1 on the PredictIt market.

CROWDSOURCING LIBERTY: How the Hong Kong Protestors’ Tactical Brilliance Backed Beijing into a Corner.

One of the reasons for the effectiveness of the protest movement is the decision to remain leaderless. In an op-ed article in 2017, Nicholas Berggruen, chairman of the Berggruen Institute, suggests that resistance movements need strong and charismatic leaders to succeed. Many resistance movements such as the Civil Rights Movement with Martin Luther King Jr., the resistance to apartheid with Nelson Mandela, and the India Independence Movement with Gandhi benefited greatly from such leadership.

But the outcome of Hong Kong’s 2014 pro-democracy movement suggests that the current protests would not be nearly as robust or effective if it did have such leaders. Joshua Wong, the strong and charismatic leader of the Umbrella movement in 2014, was jailed in 2017 for unlawful assembly. With strong leaders present, the authorities can arrest them, fatally weakening a movement. Given the deterioration of the rule of law in Hong Kong, the authorities could conceivably jail all of the movement’s linchpins with considerable ease. But with a leaderless movement, the authorities have no such power. So far, the Hong Kong Police Force has arrested hundreds of protesters while the movement has not lost any momentum because the contribution of no single individual is vital.

Didn’t somebody write a book about this, once upon a time?

NOBODY, NOT EVEN A HOLLYWOOD ACTOR, IS ACTUALLY THIS STUPID: Lori Loughlin reportedly thought college ‘bribe’ was like donating a library.

IT’S THE SAME OLD SONG: Biden Promises Unions Can Keep Their Health Insurance Plans if He’s Elected.

IF SOMETHING CANNOT GO ON FOREVER, IT WILL STOP: CBO Projects Trillion-Dollar Deficits for the Next Decade—And No One Seems to Care.

FLASHBACK: Trump Administration & Pelosi Negotiate $2 Trillion Budget Deal Over the Corpse of Fiscal Conservatism.