TYRANTS GOTTA TYRANNIZE: Venezuela’s rulers accused by UN of death squads and policy of fear.

UM, “NOW?”: Democrats Can’t Be Afraid to Gerrymander Now.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Burning the Flag with Hope of a ‘World Without America.’

Flag burner Gregory “Joey” Johnson along with the communist party burned two flags outside the White House on the Fourth of July, calling for a “a world without America.”

I wish one of our Pulitzer-winning type “journalists” asked the communists which Democrat candidate they endorse for president. Alas.

Heh.

MODERN COMMUNISM: China Is Forcing Tourists to Install Text-Stealing Malware at its Border.

Foreigners crossing certain Chinese borders into the Xinjiang region, where authorities are conducting a massive campaign of surveillance and oppression against the local Muslim population, are being forced to install a piece of malware on their phones that gives all of their text messages as well as other pieces of data to the authorities, a collaboration by Motherboard, Süddeutsche Zeitung, the Guardian, the New York Times, and the German public broadcaster NDR has found.

The Android malware, which is installed by a border guard when they physically seize the phone, also scans the tourist or traveller’s device for a specific set of files, according to multiple expert analyses of the software. The files authorities are looking for include Islamic extremist content, but also innocuous Islamic material, academic books on Islam by leading researchers, and even music from a Japanese metal band.

No state-sanctioned malware for iOS?

WOW: HIV patients could undergo genetic editing within year to snip away virus.

LIVING HISTORY: Naval warships, faced with steep maintenance costs, fight to survive.

The Battleship Texas has been docked on the Houston Ship Channel for more than 70 years, offering anyone who hops onboard a glimpse of its glory.

“It was at every major American amphibious landing in World War 2. It was at North Africa, D-Day, Omaha Beach, Okinawa, and Iwo Jima,” said Tony Gregory, chairman of the board of trustees for the Battleship Texas Foundation.

But, faced with high maintenance costs and a low number of visitors, the last remaining World War I dreadnought will be moving to a new location where it can generate more traffic and, thus, more revenue.

The memorial is one of several naval ships turned tourist attractions that are struggling to stay financially afloat.

If you’ve never visited any of the retired battleships, aircraft carriers, or submarines on display around the nation, you really ought to.

KRUISER: Ten Independence Day Tweets Showcasing Leftist Media Hatred for Patriotism.

THEY BELONG ON THE MALL: US Armed Forces Are Defenders of Liberty, Not Tools of Oppression.

MATT MARGOLIS: 2020 Democrats Pushing ‘Open Borders’ Plans That are ‘Unworkable’, says Obama DHS Secretary.

FACT CHECK: Trump Treating Illegals As Well Or Better Than Obama. “The numbers are roughly equal at about 1 death per month, even though Trump is handling more immigrants.”

FASTER, PLEASE: Researchers eliminated HIV from the DNA of infected mice. It’s the first step toward a cure for humans, they say.

COLD WAR II: Engineer faces 219 years in prison for smuggling US military chips to China.

On Tuesday, the US Department of Justice (DoJ) said that Yi-Chi Shih, a part-time Los Angeles resident, attempted to secure semiconductor chips used in US military applications in order to transfer them to Chinese associates.

The 64-year-old was subject to a six-week trial in a Los Angeles, California federal court.

Prosecutors alleged that Shih, alongside co-defendant Kiet Ahn Mai of Pasadena, California, conspired to gain access to a sensitive system belonging to an unnamed US firm which manufactured semiconductor chips and Monolithic Microwave Integrated Circuits (MMICs).

The victim company’s PC systems were accessed fraudulently after Mai posed as a potential customer, giving Shih the opportunity to obtain custom processors. While the firm in question believed the chips would only be used in the United States, Shih transferred the products to the Chengdu GaStone Technology Company (CGTC), a Chinese firm building an MMIC manufacturing plant.

Evidence suggested that Shih managed to “defraud the US company out of its proprietary, export-controlled items, including its design services for MMICs.”

China’s been stealing our seed corn for a long time now.

SHAMELESS: The left-wing media’s disgraceful smear of a gay Trump staffer.

YOU’RE NO FUN ANYMORE: Built Ford-Wuss: Ford Forces Dealership to End ‘American Flag, Bible Shotgun’ Promotion.

THAT WAS DIFFERENT BECAUSE SHUT UP:

It’s weird how many things became offensive only after Obama left office.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Julian Castro praises Nike, compares Betsy Ross flag to Confederate flag. Someone should ask Barack Obama if he plans to apologize for this racist display.

COMEBACK? Tesla breaks quarterly record with 95,200 delivered cars.

This is a significant increase from the company’s own milestone of delivering 90,700 cars in a single quarter, which Tesla had achieved in the fourth quarter of 2018.

The news is doubly important as it comes after a bad first quarter for Tesla, in which the company’s deliveries faltered and the company incurred massive losses.

Tesla says it produced a total of 87,048 cars and delivered 95,200 cars in Q2. There was also an additional 7,400 vehicles in transit at the end of the quarter, and these deliveries will spill into the third quarter.

But: “It should be noted that June 30 was the last day to get a $3,750 federal tax credit towards a Tesla purchase in the U.S., which surely contributed to the results above. Starting July 1, the credit is cut by half, to $1,875, and in 2020 it will disappear completely.”

JUNIOR DEMAGOGUES-IN-TRAINING GOTTA DEMAGOGUE: Hispanic pastors tour border facilities, expose AOC as a fraud: ‘Shocked by misinformation.’

According to a group of pastors who toured the same facilities last Friday, what they saw looked nothing like the macabre picture painted by AOC.

“We found no soiled diapers, no deplorable conditions and no lack of basic necessities,” pastor Rev. Samuel Rodriguez revealed during a press conference Monday, adding that when he asked officials whether they’d staged the facilities to look nice, they said no.

“I asked whether or not this was all being staged — did they just pivot based upon the reporting, did they shift things, did they make modifications in order to accommodate or to respond to the reporting?” he said. “They unequivocally denied it. What they stated was that every condition we were witnessing was the identical condition in the center when the attorneys arrived.”

Related: AOC Weeps Over Empty Parking Lot.

OH: The Struggle Continues: Judge Reduces Award to Gibson’s Bakery; Oberlin College Refuses to Apologize.

GOING… GOING… First One Out? John Hickenlooper Bleeding Staff, Losing Money, Pressured to Drop Out.

It’s telling that the Democrat who came out most forcefully against socialism might be the first one out.

WELL: ‘It Pains Me To Say This’: CNN’s Fareed Zakaria Says Trump Is Right About Asylum Crisis.

STRANGE BEDFELLOWS: George Soros and Charles Koch Have Teamed Up to Form a Think Tank.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Democrats MIA Pre-2017 on Humanitarian Crisis. “Now that the Democrats admit there is a crisis at the border, they have shifted to blaming the Trump administration for the crisis. Where were all these humanitarians when the same things were happening under the Obama administration? I don’t believe for one second any of these people really, really care about the children or the migrants in detention because the ‘crisis’ only really, really mattered to them when it could be used for partisan advantage. That’s right, the headline-seeking groups, lawyers, politicians and advocates aren’t outraged about the children or the women or the migrants, they care about getting political gain from their exhibitions.”

Well, yeah.

DIGITAL LIFE: Ebooks Purchased From Microsoft Will Be Deleted This Month Because You Don’t Really Own Anything Anymore.

Microsoft announced in April that it would stop selling ebooks and that any books the company already sold would stop working in early July because the DRM servers were being shut off. Yes, you read that correctly. Those books that you “bought” are going to disappear. Even the “free” books that you downloaded through Microsoft will be deleted.

Microsoft started selling ebooks back in 2017 but tech limitations made them unpopular with users. As my colleague Alex Cranz explained back in April, anyone who bought Microsoft’s ebooks had to use Microsoft’s Edge browser and the company never made a dedicated ebook reader application. The books also came with restrictive DRM, the digital locks on media that prohibit people from sharing the files with others. Unfortunately, the existence of those same locks are the precise reason that Microsoft can pull the plug on your books remotely.

Users will automatically get refunded to whatever account they have on file, but if your credit card has expired or you don’t have a payment method stored with the company, Microsoft will give you a credit that can be used online in the Microsoft Store.

The service was such a flop I doubt Microsoft will have to issue that much in refunds, so this is really just a reminder that anything important you should have in hardcopy.

UPDATE: Link was missing before. Fixed now — sorry!

UGH: Facebook, YouTube Overrun With Bogus Cancer-Treatment Claims.

A Journal investigation found misinformation about cancer treatment widely available on social-media sites. The Journal spoke to dozens of oncologists, patients, lawyers, privacy experts and company representatives, and quantified the reach of several social-media accounts that promoted scientifically unvalidated cancer therapies.

As of Monday, YouTube videos viewed millions of times were among the postings advocating the use of a cell-killing, or necrotizing, ointment called black salve to treat skin cancer. Use of the ointment can inadvertently burn or kill healthy skin, and doesn’t remove cancerous growths beneath the skin, as is claimed in some videos, said David Gorski, a professor of surgery at Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit who edits the blog Science-Based Medicine. The wounds could also lead to infection.

According to Dr. Gorski, misinformation about cancer on the internet is as much of a public-health issue as antivaccine misinformation. “It’s hard to argue which one is the worst,” he said.

Often the videos and social-media postings are connected with online businesses seeking to generate sales of books, supplements and unproven products.

A Facebook page with more than 60,000 likes promotes baking-soda injections and juicing regimens to treat cancer sold by a supplement salesman named Robert O. Young. Mr. Young was convicted in a San Diego County court in 2016 for practicing medicine without a license.

Caveat emptor.

FLASHBACK: Lincoln Said It Best: The Founding Fathers Opposed Slavery.

In Lincoln’s famous 1860 Cooper Union speech, he noted that of the 39 framers of the Constitution, 22 had voted on the question of banning slavery in the new territories. Twenty of the 22 voted to ban it, while another one of the Constitution’s framers–George Washington–signed into law legislation enforcing the Northwest Ordinance that banned slavery in the Northwest Territories. At Cooper Union, Lincoln also quoted Thomas Jefferson, who had argued in favor of Virginia emancipation: “It is still in our power to direct the process of emancipation, and deportation, peaceably, and in such slow degrees, as that the evil will wear off insensibly….”

To be sure, the Founding Fathers weren’t abolitionists. But they were overwhelmingly antislavery.

Lots of good history at the link, most of which is no longer taught.