NOTORIOUS: Ruth Bader Ginsburg: I’ve got ‘at least five more years.’

Ginsburg was speaking in Manhattan following the performance of a play about the late Justice Antonin Scalia when she made the estimate.

“I’m now 85,” Ginsburg said, according to CNN. “My senior colleague, Justice John Paul Stevens, he stepped down when he was 90, so think I have about at least five more years.”

Ginsburg was appointed to the Supreme Court by President Bill Clinton in 1993.

Glenn’s state-based idea for dramatically increasing the size of the court would reduce the influence of judges who remained on the bench past their prime — if any.

RASMUSSEN: Democrats Like Socialism But Say ‘No’ to Becoming A Socialist Party. “Democrats are less likely to know what socialism is compared to other voters but have a much more favorable opinion of it.”

That last line really says it all, doesn’t it?

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Trump Fights with the Gray Lady and Much, Much More. “Follow this logic with me: Trump’s rhetoric against the media is contributing to rising threats against journalists therefore the media’s rhetoric, fake news, unhinged attacks on Trump are leading to rising threats against FILL IN THE BLANK. See how that goes both ways? The media started it and they are upset because for the first time in forever and unlike his weak, sissy Republican predecessors and elected officials, Trump fights back.”

HEH: Union Demands Ousted Former President Pull Ad Supporting Right to Work.

Retired St. Louis Police sergeant Gary Wiegert urged voters to support Proposition A, which would ban employers from mandating union membership dues or fees as a condition of employment. Wiegert, the former head of the St. Louis Police Officers Association, criticized “out of touch union officials” for “lying to you about Prop A.”

“I’m a retired union leader. If workers like their union they can keep it,” Wiegert says in the ad, which has garnered more than 3,000 views on the National Right to Work Committee’s Facebook page. “Prop A just gives them that choice … Prop A is good for our workers.”

The association, which publicly backs rejecting right to work, took issue with the ad because Wiegert appears in a union polo shirt. The union sent a cease-and-desist letter to take down the “misleading” ad, which has aired on local radio and television airwaves.

What is it with the Left and policing what shirts people can wear on TV?

LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: ‘The truth is we had to leave’: Fleeing Venezuela for Colombia.

“Colombia is a lifeline for western Venezuela,” said Rafael Velasquez Garcia, the International Rescue Committee’s (IRC) head of mission in Colombia. “Every day more than 35,000 Venezuelans cross the Simon Bolivar bridge alone to purchase food and receive vital medical assistance, among other services which are not available in Venezuela. Of that number around 4,000 do not return Venezuela – many of whom are without official documentation or status.”

This number does not include those who cross through the “trochas” or trails that are often controlled by Colombian armed groups and/or organised crime groups, which charge migrants and refugees fees and expose them to the risks of recruitment and robbery.

An assessment of Venezuelans in Cucuta and Villa del Rosario conducted by the International Rescue Committee in March 2018 showed that among respondents who spent the last month in Colombia, their self-reported highest priority need was to find a job (89 percent), followed by food (80 percent), and then shelter (58 percent).

Related: On Spain’s Smartest Streets, a Property Boom Made in Venezuela.

As millions of Venezuelans wage a daily fight for survival at home, others have found a safe haven for their money across the Atlantic: Madrid’s real estate market.

During a walk around Salamanca, an upmarket district of the Spanish capital, Luis Valls-Taberner, a real-estate investment adviser, pointed out on almost every street a building that he said a wealthy Venezuelan had recently acquired.

Mr. Valls-Taberner would not identify the buyers. Some properties, he said, were purchased through investment companies based in Miami or elsewhere — but the money always came from Venezuela.

On foot or by private jet, almost everybody seems to want to escape the worker’s paradise.

DE FACTO KURDISTAN: Kurds eye decentralised Syria region in talks with Assad government.

Relations between the Syrian government of President Bashar Al Assad and the Kurdish-led administration in the northeast, the two sides that hold the most territory in Syria, have been pivotal in the course of the seven-year-old civil war.

However, while they have mostly avoided direct conflict, they have articulated sharply opposing visions for the future, with the Kurds seeking autonomy in a decentralised state, and Damascus wanting to restore full central control.

The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Council (SDC) said it and the government had decided to “form committees on various levels” to develop negotiations, end the violence engulfing Syria and chart a roadmap to democracy and decentralisation. It said it met Syrian government officials in Damascus this week at Assad’s invitation after initial meetings in Tabqa on the Euphrates river that focused on restoring local services.

The talks pointed to moves by the Kurdish-led authorities to seek a deal with Assad to preserve their autonomy as he regained most rebel areas with Russian and Iranian help.

“Molan labe” can refer to hard-won autonomy, too, which will probably be the Kurds unofficial position no matter what Assad decides about how to reconstitute the country.

SQUEEZE: Iran’s rial hits record-low 100,000 to the dollar.

The rial has lost half its value against the dollar in just four months, having broken through the 50,000-mark for the first time in March.

The government attempted to fix the rate at 42,000 in April, and threatened to crackdown on black market traders.

But the trade continued with Iranians worried about a prolonged economic downturn turning to dollars as a safe way to store their savings, or as an investment in the hope the rial will continue to drop.

With banks often refusing to sell their dollars at the artificially low rate, the government was forced to soften its line in June, allowing more flexibility for certain groups of importers.

The handling of the crisis was one of the reasons behind last week’s decision by President Hassan Rouhani to replace central bank chief, Valiollah Seif.

The currency collapse was encouraged by the US announcement in May that it was pulling out of the 2015 nuclear deal, that lifted certain sanctions in exchange for curbs to Iran’s atomic programme.

Message to Tehran: Pray Trump doesn’t alter it any further.

NOT CRAZY. JUST STUPID. New Medicare-for-All Caucus Declares Single-Payer Healthcare Not ‘Some Crazy Idea.’

Voters in Colorado, the eighth healthiest state in the US, blanched at the cost of single payer when it was put on the ballot two years ago.

HUH: Cannabis Oil Helped 80 Percent of Autistic Children, Israeli Study Finds. “It improved both behavior and communications in the children enrolled in the study.”

A LONG, LONG TIME: After 25 years, military told to move from “expendable” to “reusable” rockets.

TYLER O’NEIL: Twitter Scandal and Facebook Stock Drop Are Just Symptoms ‘of a Larger Backlash Against Big Tech.’

Reminder: Instapundit items are still curated, written, and published by human beings.

WELL, A BUNCH OF THEM PROBABLY SHOULD BE: Amazon is under fire after the ACLU found that its facial recognition technology identified members of Congress as people who have been arrested.

I’M PRETTY SURE THIS IS SATIRE, AT LEAST FOR NOW. Judge: Medicaid Must Also Cover Race Reassignment.

THIRD WORLD UNMANNED: Iran-Backed Houthi Rebels Claim Strike on Abu Dhabi Airport by New Long-Range Drone. “Terror groups have been experimenting with drones in order to increase their fighting capacity, with ISIS stepping up their research and development.”

PLATFORM WARS: Facebook joins YouTube and scrubs videos from pages belonging to InfoWars conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.

UNION BLUES: New UAW Corruption Scandal Details Implicate Union at Highest Level.

As part of a plea agreement filed this week, ex-labor official Nancy Adams Johnson told investigators that Williams specifically directed union members to use funds from Detroit’s automakers, funneled through training centers, to pay for union travel, meals, entertainment, and more. If true, the accusation not only implicates the UAW of corruption at the highest level but also the potential involvement of staff from both Ford and General Motors — something the FBI is already looking into.

I believe the official industry term for something like this is a “shit show.”

Based on my experience with Teamsters in the steel industry, I wouldn’t be surprised if the official term for something like this is “union business as usual.”

AUSTRALIAN MEDIA CLAIM: Trump May Bomb Iran as Soon as Next Month.

ANDREW KLAVAN: Trump Negotiates, the Press Lies.

Donald Trump is a negotiator, as he has told us from the start. Not everything he says means what it means. Not every final decision he makes is final. And just because he says he loves you, that doesn’t mean he does. He’s in motion toward a goal, and the truth is in the motion. By now, most of us get this.

Except the press. They just hate him too much to take him as he is — to take him as he has always said he is. They don’t accept he’s in a moving negotiation. If he says it’s over and it’s not over, they call him a liar. If he says he loves Putin, they declare he loves Putin. By now, most of us understand that Trump doesn’t operate that way. Not the press.

To be fair, they don’t want to understand — but do read the whole thing.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: IBM Watson recommended ‘unsafe’ cancer treatments, according to internal documents.

According to the internal slide deck, the problem stems from this Watson product being trained on a small number of “synthetic,” hypothetical cancer patients, rather than real-world cases. The accuracy of any AI is dependent on being trained on a large dataset—the larger and more accurate the dataset, the better. Watson’s recommendations were based on expert advice from specialists on each cancer type but not masses of actual cancer treatment cases. The result has been recommendations that are not on part with national treatment guidelines, according to Stat News.

This sounds like a self-correcting problem, as Watson gets more and more real-world data to chew on.

FAKE ZOOS: Egyptian Zoo accused of painting donkeys to look like zebras.

THE SCIENCE IS SETTLED: Forcing staff to start work before 10 a.m. is tantamount to torture.

Also at the PJM Live Blog: Coca-Cola set to raise prices due to metal tariffs.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Facebook’s Stock Plunge Is a Problem of Mark Zuckerberg’s Own Making. “Too cagey, too clever, and too dismissive of users’ concerns.”

NEWS YOU CAN USE? This Website Lets You Track F-35 Stealth Fighters.

An Israeli F-35 was tracked by flight tracking site flightradar24, according to aviation Web site The Aviationist.

One might wonder why a stealth combat aircraft was operating with its transponder on. One possibility is that it was a deliberate move to let Israel’s enemies — notably Syria and Iran — that Israel’s F-35s are out there. Such actions are not unprecedented.

“Increasingly, RC-135s and other strategic ISR [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance] platforms, including Global Hawks, operate over highly sensitive regions, such as Ukraine or the Korean Peninsula, with the ADS-B and Mode-S turned on, so that even commercial off the shelf receivers (or public tracking websites) can monitor them,” notes the Aviationist.

However, Israel has made no secret that its first F-35I Adir squadron went operational last year, and that the aircraft has already made its combat debut with strikes on Syria earlier this year. So what would be gained by briefly making an aircraft visible on flight trackers?

Pilot error is the safe guess.

HMM: EPA Reverses Course, Will Now Enforce Obama-Era Regulations On Used Trucks.

Acting Administrator Andrew Wheeler decided current regulations limiting the sale of glider kits — refurbished truck engines placed into new bodies — did not warrant a delay in enforcement, according to a source familiar with the matter.

EPA has been working to repeal Obama administration-era glider regulations for months, but hurdles just seem to keep getting in the way. Agency officials have dragged their feet on finalizing the repeal and the White House made EPA do a cost-benefit analysis that slowed the process down.

All the while, emails suggest lobbyists with truck manufacturers opposed to repealing glider regulations colluded with career EPA officials to undermine the Trump administration’s agenda.

Rent-seekers gotta seek rents.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Cohen Squealing Like a Pig and Much, Much More. “The meeting in question lasted 20 minutes and Fusion GPS client Veselitskaya offered no ‘dirt’ to the campaign but instead spoke about the Magnitsky act. Now ‘suddenly’ Cohen remembers Trump was told about this meeting. Silly stuff.”