ANTISOCIAL MEDIA: China Spreads Propaganda to U.S. on Facebook, a Platform It Bans at Home.

CNN POLL: Approval Ratings for Democratic Party and Republican Party Collapse.

Well, one party hates half of America and the other party would rather be liked by the party that hates half of America than deliver on its promises.

Or as Glenn was just saying…

PUTTIN’ ON THE FOIL: Wi-Fi problems? You can boost signals with this $35 tinfoil 3D-printed reflector.

“With a simple investment of about $35 and specifying coverage requirements, a wireless reflector can be custom-built to outperform antennae that cost thousands of dollars,” said Xia Zhou, an assistant professor of computer science at Dartmouth.

The work builds on past experiments that have used a soda can behind a router’s antenna to act as a reflector that boosts bandwidth by targeting a Wi-Fi signal in one direction.

This system allows users to design their own ‘soda can’ reflector that’s optimized for the layout of a house. The design is 3D-printed and then wrapped in foil. Their wave-shaped example for a single access point focused Wi-Fi signals on two rooms and minimized signals to two other rooms.

The researchers’ tests showed that a reflector for a single access point can boost throughput by 22 percent to the desired rooms and reduce throughput by 36 percent to non-targeted rooms.

Sounds like an inexpensive solution for homes or workspaces too small to bother with expensive mesh systems, or knocking holes in walls to pull ethernet cable through.

UGH: Woman who reported rape on TripAdvisor says company lied about apology for deleting post.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Fusion GPS Strikes Deal, Texas Update and Much, Much More.

FASTER, PLEASE: Administration Has ‘No News to Share’ on Promise to Move U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem.

HEY NOW: Jeffrey Tambor Being Investigated by Amazon Following Sexual Harassment Allegation.

CHANGE? Jerry Jones threatens to sue NFL if Roger Goodell’s contract extension is approved.

DC MCALLISTER: Tuesday’s Elections Reveal That Many Americans Are Suffering From a Mental Disorder.

Churchill put it somewhat more gently.

WHAT COULD GO WRONG? To prevent revenge porn, Facebook will look at user-submitted nude photos.

MOLLIE HEMINGWAY: 5 Takeaways On Virginia’s Election Sweep For Democrats.

Here’s one:

Democrats are finally focusing on statehouse races, and this should terrify Republicans. Democrats lost some 958 state legislative seats during the Obama administration. Those years saw a strong federal executive, but very little attention paid to Democrats at the state and local level.

The Washington Post had a story last week that suggested the huge win for Democrats in Virginia was no accident, but the result of a carefully crafted campaign being tested for nationwide rollout:

For a new crop of Democratic groups, Virginia is the opening salvo and a testing ground ahead of what they hope is a wave election in 2018.
Virginia is the first state to hold a competitive contest for governor after Trump moved into the White House, and both parties want to win it — the Democrats as a rebuke of Trump, and the Republicans to show they are not blemished by an unpopular president.

It’s also a purple state where Democrats have been winning statewide since 2009, but Republicans hold 66 of the 100 seats in the House of Delegates. Democrats are running in 54 GOP-held districts this year, and scores of groups — some well-financed, some loosely organized, are looking to leave their mark on those contests.

There’s a Democratic super PAC planning to spend $1 million — with an eye to a bigger goal of raising $100 million to take control of state houses across the country.

An organization founded by wealthy Virginia donors and bankrolled by a Silicon Valley entrepreneur is beta-testing technology to help low-budget campaigns run more efficiently.

Given the success this high-dollar, high-technology strategy yielded, expect to see many more resources applied in a state near you to achieve the same effect.

The Democrats seem to be learning the lessons of 2016. Will the GOP learn the lessons of Virginia 2017?

EU AND WHAT ARMY? EU to Sign Joint Defense Pact in Show of Post-brexit Unity.

UPDATE: Link was broken. Fixed now — sorry!

UH-OH: Colombia in a Race Against Time to Protect Coffee Crops from Rust Disease.

CHRISTIAN TOTO: Why ‘The Misogynists’ Is a Minor Hollywood Miracle. “How could a film about a Trump-loving jerk be balanced? This indie drama just might surprise you.”

JUDICIAL WATCH: Justice Department Argues Comey’s Leak of ‘Flynn’ Memo to New York Times was Unauthorized, Compares Comey to Wikileaks.

SPENGLER: Curb your liberalism. “Liberal Jews aren’t funny, not, at least, to Jews who know the jokes in their original form.”

Read the whole thing.

DYING TO BE PRESIDENT: How Brazile’s book exposes liberal media’s Hillary health coverup.

Her coughing fits, especially a long one on Labor Day, and a history of falling were pointed out by the popular Drudge Report, some Republicans and smaller, conservative-leaning sites to suggest she was not being honest about her health.

But her campaign always denied anything was wrong — allergies, the candidate and her flacks insisted, caused the persistent coughs, and major news organizations mostly nodded their heads and stayed mum, accepting the official denials without skepticism.

The dam cracked a bit on Labor Day, when an NBC reporter filed a 91-word, four-paragraph story that said Clinton had been unable to finish her speech in Ohio because of a coughing fit.

The truth was dangerous, so the Praetorian Guard sprang to Clinton’s defense. The NBC reporter, Andrew Rafferty, was mocked and insulted, first by the campaign, and then by journalists, including some MSNBC commentators who turned on their colleague as if he had violated a secret oath.

CNN joined the Clinton amen chorus, and at the Washington Post, political writer Chris Cillizza denounced the topic of Clinton’s health as “a totally ridiculous issue” and declared it a “sure-fire loser” for Trump.

“It’s hard to plausibly insist, based on the available data, that Clinton is ill,” insisted Cillizza, who is now at CNN.

They haven’t been calling it Clinton News Network for 25 years for nothin’.

THE VANGUARD OF THE REVOLUTION: Yes, this $375 ‘antifa’ jacket from Barneys is actually real.

THE DAM HAS BURST: LAPD confirms they are investigating Hollywood pedophile ring after Corey Feldman files formal report.

J. CHRISTIAN ADAMS: Gillespie Ran a JEB! Campaign in a Trump World.

SKYNET SMILES: Russia Presses Ahead With Combat Robots.

BOTTOM STORY OF THE DAY: Tim Kaine Is Wrong about America and Slavery.

Kaine lays the blame at the feet of the Constitution: “a nation that put a Constitution in place that enshrined the institution of slavery and said that a slave is equal to three-fifths of a person.” But the compromises struck at Philadelphia in 1787 (or before that, during the Revolution) did not create slavery; slavery had existed in the Thirteen Colonies for a century, and the problem faced by the Founding Fathers was what to do with a society where it already existed.

By and large, the generation of the Founding Fathers saw slavery as an evil; they were acutely aware of the charge of hypocrisy laid against the broad principles of universal human rights they declared. At the same time, in an age when indentured servitude was still common, the moral argument that slavery was a fundamentally distinct evil was not as far advanced as it would later become.
…
Kaine, echoing today’s left-wing writers, would damn the Founding Fathers for their optimistic faith in the American promise. But the revolutionaries of France tried to tackle all of society’s ills simultaneously, and ended up on a Reign of Terror. We should not be so quick, from the distance of history, to condemn the Founders for making a world that was better than the one they knew just because the job was unfinished.

Indeed.

Good stuff — read the whole thing.

CLAUDIA ROSETT: Trump’s Spectacular Speech From Seoul.

This goes right back to what Roger L. Simon was wondering about earlier today.

THAT’S WHAT PURGES ARE FOR: How Erdogan’s Purge Is Making Turkish Journalists Think Twice.

A Turkish journalist who spoke on condition of anonymity said that Kavala’s arrest is intended to “sustain the fear.”

“The arrests fall into several categories,” he explains: “Those who were arrested right after the coup attempt, on the basis of information that directly tied them to the coup; those who were arrested in the second wave so as to eliminate Gulen’s influence in the government, the courts, the police and the army; and those who are being arrested now, in order to snuff out any desire to criticize the regime.”

He points to the coverage of the recent arrests by journalists who are considered supporters of the opposition, noting the tepid language that is being used.

“Everything is written carefully and cautiously, for fear that tomorrow the writer will be arrested or summoned for questioning. Suddenly, you see cultural events being given more prominence than political events. Opinion pieces have become highly generalized and refrain from naming specific people as being responsible for anything, and the images are also no longer news-related,” the journalist observed.

Democracy dies in bland conformity.

SO IT’S COME TO THIS: Emotional white girl blames RACISM for not being able to order French fries at Taco Bell… despite them not being on the menu.