HMM: China’s Charm Offensive in the South China Sea.

Since the 2016 Permanent Court of Arbitration ruling in favour of the Philippines, China has actively engaged in a campaign to restore its image among ASEAN countries by affecting a more cooperative stance on the issue. In April 2017, China reopened the Scarborough Shoal to Philippine fishing vessels, which had been barred from the area following a tense two-month standoff in 2012. Economic initiatives for Southeast Asia were liberally poured out through the Belt and Road Initiative.

China also agreed to restart negotiations for the code of conduct, which had been stalled since the signing of the Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea in 2002. Earlier this month, the table-top phase of the inaugural ASEAN–China maritime exercise was held in Singapore. These olive branches from Beijing were generally well received in the various ASEAN capitals, and China is keen to maintain the goodwill it has generated over the past year.

At the same time, many ASEAN countries have begun to question the U.S. commitment to the region.

Years of Obama’s empty “pivot to Asia” promises will have that effect.

HEALTH: Explosive case of poop-packed “megacolon” prompts warning from doctors.

Silly headline, frighteningly serious condition.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: A Safe Full of Trump Secrets and Much, Much More.

BILL GERTZ: China Set for North Korea Invasion.

According to the report, China fears North Korea’s provocative nuclear and missile tests will set off a regional conflict. Beijing wants stability, a denuclearized peninsula and no U.S. forces near its borders.

“China’s priority is maintaining stability on the Korean peninsula, which includes preventing a [North Korean] collapse and preventing a military conflict on the peninsula,” the report said.

China’s government has issued strident statements regarding North Korea, including suggestions the PLA will be used to respond to a Korean crisis.

The response could include options ranging from “securing the China-North Korea border to prevent the flow of refugees, to a military intervention into North Korea.”

I’ve been arguing for years at VodkaPundit that the best politically viable solution to North Korea — if still highly unlikely — would be for Chinese paratroopers to show up in Pyongyang and decapitate the Kim Regime.

Maybe now it’s slightly more likely.

PRIVACY: Google data collection research.

A dormant, stationary Android phone (with the Chrome browser active in the background) communicated location information to Google 340 times during a 24-hour period, or at an average of 14 data communications per hour. In fact, location information constituted 35 percent of all the data samples sent to Google.

For comparison’s sake, a similar experiment found that on an iOS device with Safari but not Chrome, Google could not collect any appreciable data unless a user was interacting with the device. Moreover, an idle Android phone running the Chrome browser sends back to Google nearly fifty times as many data requests per hour as an idle iOS phone running Safari.

An idle Android device communicates with Google nearly 10 times more frequently as an Apple device communicates with Apple servers. These results highlighted the fact that Android and Chrome platforms are critical vehicles for Google’s data collection. Again, these experiments were done on stationary phones with no user interactions. If you actually use your phone the information collection increases with Google.

Google has the ability to associate anonymous data collected through passive means with the personal information of the user. Google makes this association largely through advertising technologies, many of which Google controls. Advertising identifiers—which are purportedly “user anonymous” and collect activity data on apps and third-party webpage visits—can get associated with a user’s real Google identity through passing of device-level identification information to Google servers by an Android device.

More at the link.

ANTISOCIAL MEDIA: Facebook apparently identifying posts with conservative content as spam.

More from Tyler O’Neil:

Ellis published an article in The Washington Examiner explaining why “Democrats are overreacting to the Michael Cohen guilty plea.” She argued that plea bargains are a legal fiction, are not confessions, and are not evidence of crimes or verdicts of guilt. Therefore, the Cohen plea did not implicate Trump in financial crimes.

Ellis shared the article on Facebook, and a friend took a picture of Facebook removing the post. Again came the same message: “We removed this post because it looks like spam and doesn’t follow our Community Standards.”

Clarice Feldman recommends not jumping to conclusions, writing to American Thinker, “I also have no idea what is going on – whether (a) it is deliberate on FB’s part, (b) a glitch, (c) a concerted attack by leftists reporting anything to the right as against community standards or spam.”

Maybe people wouldn’t jump to conclusions, if Facebook operated transparently and without so much apparent bias against one side.

OUR ALLIES THE TURKS: The Pastor is Not the Only U.S. Hostage in Turkey.

While Golge and Kul, no less than Brunson, are victims of the Turkish government’s bizarre paranoia, the scientific community’s advocacy for these scholars has been dwarfed by religious organizations’ lobbying on behalf of Brunson. The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, a federal government body, has held several congressional briefings on the case of Brunson, and the pastor’s plight has made it into pending legislation, in addition to the Trump administration’s punitive measures. In contrast, Kul is absent from and Golge is rarely mentioned in congressional press statements — or in presidential tweets. The only official letter on Golge’s behalf came from the U.S. Helsinki Commission nearly a year ago. Notably, however, Philip S. Kosnett, then the chargé d’affaires at the U.S. embassy in Ankara, visited Golge in prison in June.

Golge’s wife lamented in an NBC interview last month, “When I read the newspapers, I feel frustrated sometimes like they’re only trying to save Brunson but not us.” Similarly, Kul has wondered whether the disproportionate attention on Brunson has to do with the pastor’s faith, asking, “should I change my religion?”

Given that Golge has become an afterthought (and Kul not even that), it is not surprising that the three imprisoned Turkish employees of the U.S. mission in Turkey have not become a cause célèbre, either.

Well, here’s some publicity. Let’s hope they can do something with it.

MY UNDERSTANDING IS THAT THE CONSTITUTION FORBIDS ANY RELIGIOUS TEST FOR PUBLIC OFFICE: If Trump and GOP don’t understand climate change, they don’t deserve public office.

SPENGLER: War of Attrition Against President Trump.

Precisely how does Bill Clinton’s main legal fixer turn up as Michael Cohen’s attorney in a plea bargain with a special prosecutor?

If you put that kind of plot line in a political thriller, the public would laugh you off the newsstand book racks. Nonetheless, we now have Lanny Davis, special counsel to the president for Bill Clinton during 1996-1998, declaring to CNN: “It’s my observation that Mr. Cohen has knowledge that would be of interest to the special counsel about the issue of whether Donald Trump, ahead of time, knew about the hacking of emails, which is a computer crime.” On Tuesday Davis told MSNBC that Cohen knew about “the possibility of a conspiracy to collude and corrupt the American democracy system in the 2016 election.”

There you have it, boys and girls: None of this has anything to do with paying off floozies who claimed to have done the dirty with a presidential candidate. No one cares about that. It’s about using the legal system to extract “confessions” from Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen that will keep the Black Legend alive of a Russian hack of the 2016 elections.

Needless to say, read the whole thing.

TONI AIRAKSINEN: Northeastern Prof Warns: Male Military Veterans ‘Reinforce Hegemonic Masculinity,’ Sexism.

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Is Mitch McConnell “the Michael Jordan of owning the libs”?

SONNY BUNCH: The CIA funded a culture war against communism. It should do so again.

Those interested in the CIA’s covert cultural war should check out “Who Paid the Piper?” by Frances Stonor Saunders. Granted, it’s an unrelentingly negative portrayal of the efforts by Michael Josselson, Nicolas Nabokov and others to funnel money from the CIA into the hands of artists and intellectual journals that highlighted the Western world’s commitment to individual freedom. But if you can set aside the author’s biases, you’ll discover a fascinatingly byzantine effort to turn the world to the American way of thinking via pen and paint rather than munitions and murder.

The CIA at its founding was largely run by Ivy Leaguers, would-be highbrows and intellectuals. It makes sense that they’d have been attracted to the ideas of men like Melvin Lasky, the consummate Cold Warrior who pushed for the founding of a magazine designed to bridge the gap between the West and the rest. According to a postwar memo by Lasky submitted to the U.S. Army, journals like Der Monat would serve “as a demonstration that behind the official representatives of American democracy lies a great and progressive culture, with a richness of achievements in the arts, in literature, in philosophy, in all the aspects of culture which unite the free traditions of Europe and America.”

Yeah, but that was back when the Ivy League was still largely devoted to protecting and promoting Western Civilization. I’m not sure today’s Ivies, or today’s CIA for that matter, still have it in them.

OVER AT THE PJM LIVE BLOG I have a question for my brother and sister photo bugs about going mirrorless.

PAULA BOLYARD: Beto O’Rourke just handed Ted Cruz a huge gift.

SCRAPPLEFACE: Trump’s #HushMeansHush Helps NDA-Breach Victims. “The White House said the #HushMeansHush campaign demonstrates President Trump’s compassion toward those hardest hit when a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) gets violated, and thus becomes much more tragic than if such an agreement had never been signed.”

Heh™.

LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: The exodus from Venezuela threatens to descend into chaos.

Threatens?

EVER since Nicolás Maduro became president of Venezuela, the plight of the country’s citizens has gone from bad to worse. On August 19th 1,000 Venezuelan migrants fled from the Brazilian border town of Pacaraima after locals attacked them with sticks and stones. Around 60 Brazilian soldiers are expected to arrive in the town today to ensure safe passage for Venezuelans entering the country. Elsewhere, however, the situation is deteriorating. On August 18th Ecuador unexpectedly began requiring Venezuelans crossing into their country from Colombia to present passports rather than identity cards. Peru will do the same from August 25th.

The exodus has surged under Mr Maduro’s rule, characterised by political repression and grotesque economic mismanagement. Inflation has spiralled as high as 80,000%, making cash all but useless and food and medicine scarce. On August 20th the government will knock five zeros off its currency and anchor it to the oil price via a government-run virtual currency. In a poll conducted at the end of 2017, half of 18- to 29-year-olds and 55% of the middle class said they wanted to leave the country. Of those who hoped to flee, two-thirds gave the state of the economy as their reason.

We’ve seen this narrative before. Notice how Maduro is being set up as the bad guy here, the Stalin to Chavez’s Lenin — the brute who betrayed the noble ideals of the revolution.

Never mind the fact that everything that Stalin …er, Maduro… did was set in motion by Chavez. And that only untimely deaths prevented Lenin or Chavez from fulfilling their own vile plans themselves.

ROD KACKLEY: Election Cybersecurity Looms Large in Toss-Up Georgia Governor’s Race.

If only there were some kind of hack-proof ballot.

MELANIN-DEFICIENCY DENIAL IS AN UGLY THING: ‘I hereby resign from my race. F— these people,’ white professor writes online, sparking furor.

A white professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey violated the school’s policy when he complained about other white people in a post on Facebook, according to reports.

The university says it prohibits discrimination and harassment, and judged that history professor James Livingston, who is white, crossed a line with his comments.

In the post, Livingston slammed other white people, describing them as entitled and saying they impeded “access to my dinner.”

“… this place (burger restaurant) is overrun with little Caucasian a–holes who know their parents will approve of anything they do,” Livingston wrote.

Livingston argues that his remarks were “satirical,” and he was commenting on the gentrification of the Harlem neighborhood of New York City, where he lives, NorthJersey.com reported

So it’s really more blue-vs-blue than white-vs-white.

PREPAREDNESS: Scramble for food and water as Hurricane Lane approaches Hawaii.

Governor David Ige urged residents to prepare for the worst by setting aside a 14-day supply of water, food and medicines.

“I urge our residents and visitors to take this threat seriously and prepare for a significant impact,” the governor said at a news conference in the state capital, Honolulu.

The shelves of a downtown Honolulu Walmart were stripped of items ranging from canned tuna to dog food. Shoppers jostled with one another to get the last boxes of ramen noodles.

“There’s nothing in there,” said one shopper leaving the store.

It’s much more convenient and generally cheaper to get prepared way ahead of time than it is right before disaster hits.

JOHN HAWKINS: The Media’s Latest Scam: Trump’s Going to Be Impeached Because of the Michael Cohen Plea. “Do you think Trump’s in trouble?”

ELIZABETH NOLAN BROWN: The Senate Accused Them of Selling Kids for Sex. The FBI Raided Their Homes. Backpage.com’s Founders Speak for the First Time. “An inside look at how indie media veterans James Larkin and Michael Lacey became the targets of a federal witchhunt.”

Both men argue that the case against them is politically motivated and that current stalling on the state’s part is designed to force a plea. But “they’re going to have to win this in court,” says Lacey, “and we don’t think they can. And our lawyers don’t think they can.”

Officially, Larkin, Lacey, and several of their former colleagues were accused of money laundering, conspiracy, and violating the Travel Act, which says local crimes become federal business when they cross state lines. But in the court of public opinion, you’ll hear that they were complicit in facilitating underage prostitution as the founders and former owners of the now-shuttered classified ad website Backpage.

After its 2004 launch, Backpage became inextricably linked in the popular imagination with sex trafficking, thanks to a relentless campaign by well-funded activists, government lawyers, and some of the nation’s most prominent politicians. Officials heralded the April 2018 FBI seizure of the website and the arrests of Lacey and Larkin as a major victory against the exploitation of women and children.

Yet even the charges both men face hint at the weakness of that story. Neither Lacey nor Larkin is accused of directly participating in any sexual exchange or of having knowledge about any particular crimes advanced through the platform. In fact, law enforcement sources have over the years consistently applauded Backpage for its help making cases against predators and locating runaway teens.

The story of their arrest, then, is better understood as one of near-religious fervor, government greed, and political retribution, in which an escalating panic over commercial sex coincided with a booming online publishing platform.

Bombshell stuff. Read the whole thing.

JIM BROWN: ‘I Find Myself Really Pulling for the President.’

HMM: Germany accused of betraying pledge to combat anti-Semitism by ignoring Iran sanctions.

The German government is under fire for betraying its pledge to combat anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial, in light of Berlin’s efforts to circumvent U.S. sanctions on Iran.

The criticism comes after Heiko Maas, the German foreign minister, argued for a new world order without the U.S. as the leader.

In a hard-charging attack on the Trump administration, Maas said Germany “will not allow [the U.S.] to go over our heads, and at our expense.”

“It is therefore essential that we strengthen European autonomy by establishing payment channels independent of the US, a European monetary fund and an independent SWIFT [payments] system,” he wrote in German business daily Handelsblatt. “The devil is in thousands of details. But every day that the Iran [nuclear] agreement lasts, is better than the potentially explosive crisis that threatens the Middle East otherwise.”

His comments drew ire from Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of U.S. human rights organization of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

“Circumventing sanctions on an Iranian regime that is committed in word and deed to destroy Israel for financial gain for German companies makes a mockery of that [Berlin’s] commitment” to implement the lessons of the Holocaust, he told FoxNews.com.

German businesses had been at least appearing to come along with Trump’s renewed sanctions regime, but maybe some things about Berlin never change.

TYLER O’NEIL: Judge Foils ‘Deep State Bureaucrats’ in Obamacare Case, Demands IRS Return $839M to 6 States. “Busting a bureaucrat ‘money laundering scheme’.”

NO. NEXT QUESTION? Poverty-Stricken Millionaires: Will Devaluing The Bolívar Pay Off For Venezuela?