RSVP: Member of Polish Parliament Invites Ocasio-Cortez to Visit Real Concentration Camps.

BLUE ON BLUE: Biden Touts Civility With Segregationists, Dems Slam Him for ‘Praising’ Racists Backed by the KKK.

Biden has been leaning on his “civility,” presumably as some kind of antidote to a voting public tired (they believe) of Trumpism. But civility didn’t work well for the Republicans in 2008 or 2012, and it clearly isn’t a good fit for the social media mobs who make up such a vocal segment of the Democratic base.

Just another reason to think of Biden as “The Evitable Nominee.”

WINNING: Democrats fear Trump, Republicans are making inroads with Hispanic voters in Florida.

The usual “Don’t get cocky™” disclaimer aside, Trump’s not-so-secret weapon is going after the other side’s base. Reagan was a master at that, too, but every GOP candidate since then has preemptively surrendered yuge blocks of voters.

Maybe that’s a bit unfair to George W. Bush, who did make some plays towards black and Hispanic voters, but not nearly to the degree Trump does — and much less aggressively, too.

DON’T BE EVIL: Millions of Business Listings on Google Maps Are Fake — and Google Profits.

Google’s ubiquitous internet platform shapes what’s real and what isn’t for more than 2 billion monthly users. Yet Google Maps, triggered by such Google queries as the one Ms. Carter made, is overrun with millions of false business addresses and fake names, according to advertisers, search experts and current and former Google employees.

The ruse lures the unsuspecting to what appear to be Google-suggested local businesses, a costly and dangerous deception.

A man arrived at Ms. Carter’s home in an unmarked van and said he was a company contractor. He wasn’t. After working on the garage door, he asked for $728, nearly twice the cost of previous repairs, Ms. Carter said. He demanded cash or a personal check, but she refused. “I’m at my house by myself with this guy,” she said. “He could have knocked me over dead.”

The repairman had hijacked the name of a legitimate business on Google Maps and listed his own phone number. He returned to Ms. Carter’s home again and again, hounding her for payment of a repair so shoddy it had to be redone.

Three years later, Google still can’t seem to stop the proliferation of fictional business listings and aggressive con artists on its search engine. The scams are profitable for nearly everyone involved, Google included.

I imagine Google hasn’t fixed the problem because their incentive is not to.

I DON’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT POETRY, BUT I KNOW WHAT I LIKE:

Well played.

DIGITAL DEFAMATION: How Secret Algorithms Are Crushing Conservative Media. “Where do I go to get my reputation back, even though nobody knows I lost it?”

MICHAEL TOMASKY: The Democratic Civil War Is Here. “If one of these two quarrels is going to metastasize into something ugly, it’ll be Sanders, who remains apart from the party whose nomination he’s running for.”

I dunno — the sniping at Biden is already getting ugly.

FLASHBACK: The Coming Democrat Civil War.

HMM: Introducing Guardian Firewall for iOS.

This is from the developer’s press release:

Starting over 2 years ago, we embarked on an ambitious mission: Build a tool that allows any electronic device owner in the world to take back control of their digital privacy. This tool needed to be incredibly easy to use, straightforward, and must allow a user to “set it and forget it” if they did not want to apply any customizations.

We could have cut plenty of corners and shipped an acceptable tool. Instead we took our time and did things right, putting together the most powerful tool and dataset we were capable of building. Why? Because we are working towards a broader set of goals: Make surveillance capitalism an untenable business model. [Emphasis added] Degrade the quality of shadow profiles maintained on every user of an internet connected device. Methodically expose every bad actor we can find. The electronic devices you bought and own should not be snitching on you at regular intervals. Something has gone very wrong, and the course must be corrected to prevent pervasive data collection from becoming an acceptable norm. It’s time for war. No stone will be left unturned.

Thousands of hours and a 5 month back-and-forth with Apple’s App Review team later, this mission has resulted in our creation of the first real firewall for iOS devices. Managed by a unique dataset that is the result of our continuous and exhaustive in-house research, Guardian Firewall updates instantaneously as we discover new threats to ensure that you don’t have to do any work at all. We will find threats before they can find you.

They promise continuing updates through the life of the company, presumably to block new snoops and the inevitable workarounds.

The company says their model allows for “easily portability” to other platforms, so I’d expect an Android version to follow sometime after the full iOS rollout next month.

At $9.99 a month ($99.99/year), Guardian Firewall isn’t cheap — about the top price even the best VPNs charge. But if their service does what they say, this is much more than just another VPN. I’ll test it out for a month after it goes public and report back.

HMM: Rush Limbaugh Has A Nasty Reality Check For Joe Biden.

“Imagine if you’re Joe Biden last night,” said Rush (transcript via RushLimbaugh.com). “You’re Joe Biden last night, and your advisers come in, and they say, ‘Joe, don’t sweat it, don’t sweat anything that happened last night. What happened last night doesn’t mean anything, Joe. The debates are the only thing that matter, Joe, and you’re gonna wipe the floor with this guy, Joe. You’re gonna wipe the floor about him in the debates, and you got the big money behind you, Joe. You got fundraisers, you’re setting records all over. Joe, don’t sweat this stuff last night.’”

But then came a tweet from Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel early Wednesday morning: “Donald Trump has raised a record-breaking $24.8 million in less than 24 hours for his reelection,” she announced. “The enthusiasm across the country for this president is unmatched, unlike anything we have ever seen.”

Don’t get cocky.

MAKE TEXAS GREAT AGAIN… ER, MORE GREAT: New Texas law will allow handgun owners to carry weapons in church.

BREAKING: Supremes Rule World War I Cross Memorial Doesn’t Violate Establishment Clause.

KRUISER: Federal Court Allows First-Ever Class Action Suit Against VA.

#METOO: Australia’s central bank chief has a message for those waiting to use Facebook Inc.’s proposed cryptocurrency: don’t hold your breath.

JUSTICE: Minnesota Supreme Court tosses conviction of teen who insulted classmate on Twitter.

AND SO IT BEGINS: Kamala Harris accuses Biden of cozying up to segregationists.

That’s pretty poisonous stuff.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Iran Shoots Down American Drone, Ready for War. “Gen. Hossein Salami, commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps announced: ‘Shooting down the American spy drone had a clear, decisive, firm and accurate message,’ he said, translated from Farsi. ‘The message is that the guardians of the borders of Islamic Iran will decisively respond to the violation of any stranger to this land. The only solution for the enemies is to respect the territorial integrity and national interests of Iran’.”

If the drone was flying over Iranian airspace, that’s just the risk we take for keeping an eye on things. If it really was flying in international airspace, that’s (yet another) act of war against us by Tehran.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Just remember, before fracking we had to be able to keep the Straits of Hormuz open. Now all we have to be able to do is keep them closed. And if Iran decides to close down oil shipments from the Gulf, it’s basically an oil embargo on China.

ANOTHER UPDATE: In response to the above, a reader emails:

As of a few weeks ago, Texas is exporting natural gas…to Saudi Arabia.

And on top of that, the United States is now recognized for having the most recoverable oil in the world, 100 billion barrels more than Russia and 20 billion more than Saudi Arabia.

And add to that, China is buying more and more natural gas, and Texas is producing more and more of it, and more efficiently than ever. Iran’s actions may drive China straight into our arms to buy up more good, clean American natural gas and oil.

Well, good. And thanks, frackers!

WOW: Trump campaign raises nearly $25 million in 24 hours.

PRAGER U: Who Cares About the National Debt?

The interest payment on our debt is currently $300 billion dollars per year, heading towards a projected $1 trillion dollars within a decade. At that point, a fifth of all federal taxes will go towards the interest on the debt, not education, infrastructure, and defense – you know, the stuff government is supposed to do. And that’s with historically low interest rates. Imagine if those rates normalized. Well, maybe you don’t want to imagine it because that picture is very dark.

In a better world, voters would be marching on Washington, demanding that our politicians dig us out of this hole before we’re buried in it.

In the real world… almost no one cares.

I’ve railed against big spending/big borrowing for more than 30 years, for all the good it hasn’t done.

There’s an instructive video podcast at the link, for anyone who might care at least that much.

LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: Venezuela Is Now Awash in U.S. Dollars.

We used to catch only rare glimpses of them in public. A waiter willing to risk jail time might be persuaded to accept them for the right price. Amateur tourists would flash them at the airport. Shady street hawkers made offers for them under their breath.

Now, U.S. greenbacks are everywhere. They’re stacked high in cashiers’ drawers at supermarkets and bodegas and even make their way into panhandlers’ cups. The wealthy tip parking valets with singles and pull out wads of twenties to pay for buckets of beer. Currency traders casually set up on busy street corners in slums and shout, “Compro dolares, compro dolares”—“I buy dollars.”

With the bolivar all but worthless, devalued into irrelevance by the autocrat Nicolas Maduro, the cash printed by the gringos he rails against has become king. It is beyond ironic that Washingtons and Benjamins—and not the domestic notes named for the South American independence hero—are keeping the consumer economy afloat.

Until recently, using foreign money was a crime the government enthusiastically threatened to prosecute. After the ruling socialists established currency controls back in 2003, they began patrolling for transactions that ran afoul of their Kafkaesque rules about money. Plain-clothed inspectors ran stings and raided businesses.

Weird how anti-American regimes so often wind up needing US dollars to to keep their regimes afloat.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: America’s First Third-World State.

If someone predicted half a century ago that a Los Angeles police station or indeed L.A. City Hall would be in danger of periodic, flea-borne infectious typhus outbreaks, he would have been considered unhinged. After all, the city that gave us the modern freeway system is not supposed to resemble Justinian’s sixth-century Constantinople. Yet typhus, along with outbreaks of infectious hepatitis A, are in the news on California streets. The sidewalks of the state’s major cities are homes to piles of used needles, feces, and refuse. Hygienists warn that permissive municipal governments are setting the stage — through spiking populations of history’s banes of fleas, lice, and rats — for possible dark-age outbreaks of plague or worse.

High tech does its part not to clean the streets but to create defecation apps that electronically warn tourists and hoi polloi how to avoid walking blindly into piles of sidewalk excrement. In Californian logic, public defecation butts up against progressive tolerance, so it is exempt from the law. Yet for a suburbanite to build a patio without a permit, for example, costs one dearly in fines. Indeed, a new patio without a permit can be deemed more dangerous to the public health than piles of excrement in the public workplace.

One out of three Californians who enters a hospital for any cause is now found to be suffering from either diabetes or pre-diabetes, an epidemic that hits the Hispanic community especially hard but for a variety of reasons has not led to effective public-health efforts and sufficient publicity. State-run dialysis clinics now dot the towns and communities of the Central Valley — a tragic symptom of dietary culture, massive illegal immigration, and poor public-health education.

Flashback: Ten Plagues of California Are Turning The Golden State into a Third-World Hell Hole.

DECOUPLING: Apple investigating move of up to 30% of production out of China. “A team of between 30 and 40 people at Apple is surveying the company’s major suppliers about the cost implications of moving production out of China. Nikkei reports that several major suppliers have confirmed that Apple has asked them to look into moving and restructuring production.”

COMFORTABLY DUMB: Ocasio-Cortez: ‘I’m Absolutely Comfortable’ Using Concentration Camp Term to Describe Border.

TOTALLY EXPECTED HEADLINES: Willie Nelson says he’s ‘chief tester’ at his marijuana company.

UNEXPECTED HEADLINES: Putin spy girl fears cloning extinct woolly mammoth will spread plague on world.

SHE’S COMPROMISED, ALL RIGHT: Democrat Establishment Now Sees Elizabeth Warren As ‘Compromise Nominee.’