MAKE HATS GREAT AGAIN: Here’s What Happened When I Decided to Wear my MAGA Hat in Public.

HMM: Two October surprises could boost oil prices above $50.

The first potential shock Croft and her team at RBC are monitoring is a debt default by Venezuelan oil giant Petroleos de Venezuela SA. Oil production from the state-owned PDVSA has steadily slipped as the country grapples with a financial crisis after the collapse in crude prices in 2014 and years of economic mismanagement.

“They have $3.5 billion in national oil company debt coming due in October-November. If they default, that could be significant for Venezuela’s production outlook,” Croft told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” on Tuesday.

Lower crude production from Venezuela would tend to support the oil market, which has been oversupplied for years.

The second surprise would come if the United States abandons an international deal that lifted sanctions on Iran. President Donald Trump could refuse to certify that Iran is complying with an accord that puts limits on its nuclear program. That could lead to the renewal of sanctions, which could impact Iran’s oil production.

A spike would provide relief to American frackers, who have trouble turning a profit at today’s prices. And taking Iran or Venezuelan oil off the market would give American frackers more opportunity to take market share.

Both of which would tend to drive prices back down.

DON’T ASK ME WHY: Billy Joel dons Jewish star against Neo-Nazis.

JIM GERAGHTY: Parasitic Progressivism at ESPN, Marvel, and the University of Missouri.

Notice that the progressive-minded revolutionaries in these three cases did not seek to found their own university in Missouri, their own cable sports network, or their own line of comic books. That would require a great deal of patience and effort and risk of failure. They moved into preexisting, relatively apolitical institutions and steered the ship in a new direction, aligned with their political and social goals.

And then they hit the rocks.

EVERGREEN:

DEAR PRESIDENT TRUMP: It’s Time for Some Conventional Political Finesse.

THE PLAME GAME: Ex-CIA Officer Trying to Buy Enough of Twitter to Ban Trump.

Kal Penn tried to get the president banned from Twitter by invoking the social network’s Terms of Service. Valerie Plame Wilson is going a step further. The former CIA officer has launched an effort to raise enough money to buy a controlling stake in the company and then shut down President Trump’s account, reports USA Today, which notes Twitter is currently worth just shy of $12 billion. The GoFundMe page has a long way to go on its $1 billion goal, a lofty amount that Wilson describes as “a small price to pay to take away Trump’s most powerful megaphone and prevent a horrific nuclear war.”

That seems sane.

UNEXPECTEDLY? Migrant crisis: Italy lurches to the right as tolerance wears thin.

As cowering locals filmed Catania’s first ever interracial street fighting on their phones, Mr Salice, 54, climbed into his white van and drove it towards the Senegalese, then reversed before careering into a stall, scattering those who had avoided being run over.

His subsequent claim that he was trying to get his van to safety did not convince Tidiane Diamanka, a Senegalese hawker. “He was trying to hit people — this was an act of terrorism,” he said.

The battle on July 19, which police are investigating, was a turning point for Catania. Italian traders in this port of 300,000 people in the shadow of Mount Etna used to help African hawkers to dodge the police. Now, after the arrival of more than 600,000 migrants in Italy in the past four years, locals are increasingly saying basta — enough. And not just in Catania.

The summer has been peppered with reports of violence and hostility to migrants as Italians adjust to the likelihood that many tens of thousands of the newcomers will be staying permanently. The country’s tolerance is waning, its politics being reshaped. The anti-establishment and increasingly migrant-hostile Five Star Movement is well placed to win next year’s parliamentary elections.

Interesting report, and with serious longterm implications for Europe.

INGLORIOUS END: U.S. 7th Fleet Head Vice Adm. Joseph Aucoin to be Removed from Command Early Following McCain Collision.

THE SCORPION STINGS THE FROG, EVERY TIME: SPLC Shamelessly Fundraising Off Hate that it Does Nothing About.

THIS IS CNN: CNN host reveals that journalists don’t like Trump.

It’s not clear why Mr. [Brian] Stelter wanted to raise the question of whether he and his colleagues are being honest. But there is certainly a question of just how uncomfortable CNN has been about raising issues related to President Trump’s health and character. “My impression is that since President Trump’s inauguration, there’s been a lot of tiptoeing going on,” added Mr. Stelter.

Perhaps he was referring to the program he hosted a month into the Trump presidency. Mr. Stelter called Mr. Trump’s words “a verbal form of poison” and said the President instills “fear in many people.” Then, appearing above a CNN headline saying, “TRUMP’S NIXON-ESQUE PRESS BASHING,” Mr. Stelter invited Carl Bernstein to tiptoe into the story. The former Washington Post reporter pronounced that Mr. Trump’s attacks on the press “are more treacherous than Richard Nixon’s ” and proceeded to reference Stalin and Hitler.

Stelter has certainly been making a name for himself lately.

SAFE HARBOR, YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG:

It’s different when they do it — and the “because shut up” was delivered via suspension notice.

TIME’S-A-WASTING: Ways and Means Chairman: GOP ‘Fully Committed’ to Tax Reform This Year.

21ST CENTURY CRIME: Metro Crackdown On Gum Chewing, ‘Manspreading’ Threatens Riders With Fines.

Riders who are found doing any of the following are subject to a fine of $75 per offense and could be escorted off the train or bus:

• Eating, drinking, smoking, vaping;
• Playing loud music;
• Disturbing others;
• Disorderly, lewd conduct;
• Placing chewing gum on seats;
• Loitering;
• Fare evasion;
• Occupying more than one seat or blocking a door; or
• Riding a bicycle or skateboard in a station.

Riders who commit third, fourth and fifth offenses could face being banned for 30 to 90 days, officials said.

Easier and more fun just to drive.

NICE RIDE: Mercedes’ $2.8 Million Hypercar Gets Huge Power from a Tiny Engine.

The Project One gets most of its oomph from a turbocharged 1.6-liter V6 engine. That may seem minuscule for this sort of use case, but consider that this machine is a close cousin to the one that powered the car Lewis Hamilton drove to an F1 championship in 2015. Of course, some accommodations had to be made.

Many of these changes have to do with how, and how high, the engine revs. The engine in an “ordinary” Mercedes sports car, say the $158,000 AMG GTR, is sized and tuned to make max power around 6,500 rpm. This limits heat and wear, allows for slightly greater tolerances in internal equipment, heightens longevity, and limits vibration.

A Formula One racecar will more than double that number, reaching about 13,500 rpm, and the Project One’s engine is a lot closer to that primal scream than to the roar of the GTR. The small, free-spinning motor will redline at an outrageous 11,000 rpm.

700 horses out of 1.6 liters? We may have found the replacement for displacement: Money.

CHRISTIAN TOTO: ‘Bushwick’ Trashes Texas, Right-Leaning Americans.

How did a B-movie bust like “Bushwick” get into the Sundance Film Festival?

The prestigious event allegedly accepts the best of the best from the indie world. Filmmakers’ careers can be made by getting their work screened in Park City, Utah.

Yet “Bushwick” debuted via Sundance all the same.

Did the film’s progressive premise punch its entry card?

Do you even need to ask?

MODERN MARRIAGE: Forget About Divorce. Don’t Marry a Hillary Supporter in the First Place.

PRIVACY: AccuWeather caught sending user location data, even when location sharing is off.

We independently verified the findings, and were able to geolocate an AccuWeather-running iPhone in our New York office within just a few meters, using nothing more than the Wi-Fi router’s MAC address and public data.

When the location is enabled, it sends the down-to-the-meter precise coordinates of the user, including speed and altitude, back to the data firm.

That’s where Reveal Mobile comes in. The data firm isn’t an advertiser per se but helps provide data for advertisers. Reveal says it “turns the location data coming out of those apps into meaningful audience data,” and “we listen for [latitude and longitude] data and when a device “bumps” into a Bluetooth beacon,” according to a brochure on its website.

For its part, Reveal Mobile executives said on a call last week with ZDNet that though company does collect Wi-Fi data and MAC address information, it “does not use it” for location data.

Tech blogger John Gruber adds:

In other words, if you deny AccuWeather permission to use the Location Services APIs on you iPhone, they’ll go around your back and send your Wi-Fi router name and the router’s MAC address to these shitbirds at Reveal Mobile, and they maintain a database that maps Wi-Fi routers to locations.

To me this is a one strike and you’re out situation. Apple should remove this version of the AccuWeather app from the App Store, and any of you reading this who have it installed should delete it from your devices and never re-install it. How can you trust them?

You can’t.

RECYCLING: You Can Actually Do Something Good With Those Eclipse Glasses.

Astronomers Without Borders has offered to take them off your hands so that children will be able to use them in future eclipses. The organization says it will soon announce a program dedicated to redistributing glasses to schools in Asia and South America, where there will be solar eclipses in 2019.

“This is an opportunity for schools to have a first-hand science experience that they might not otherwise have” Astronomers Without Borders President Mike Simmons told Gizmodo. “Many schools in developing countries don’t have resources for science education and this is a rare opportunity that inspires students and teachers and shows them that science is something they can do. It can be a ray of hope for young people who don’t otherwise see a path to a career like this.”

The organization’s mission is to provide astronomy-related education and equipment for developing countries. It raises money to buy new glasses for children, but it is hoping to use this opportunity to build a stockpile.

Nice.

Here’s the link.

THUGS IS THUGS: Antifa Stabs Man for Having ‘Neo-Nazi Haircut.’

THAT’S A RELIEF — MAYBE: Navy says cyber sabotage played ‘no role’ in USS John S. McCain incident.

Adm. John Richardson ordered an operational pause in all the fleets around the world while the Navy works to determine the factors behind the collision. Richardson tweeted that the Navy will conduct a wide investigation, including a review into the possibility of “cyber intrusion or sabotage,” — though a Navy official told Fox News on Tuesday any possible cyber sabotage played “no role” in the USS John S. McCain incident.

Richardson made clear that there is no evidence of a hacking at this point, but some cyber experts have raised to possiblity given the location of the warships.

Jeff Stutzman, an ex-information warfare specialist in the Navy who works at a cyber threat intelligence company, told McClatchy that “there’s something more than just human error going on.”

It seems likely that either the Navy is getting hacked or our sailors aren’t up to snuff, and neither option is very heartening.

HMM: The Latest Red Flag For U.S. Shale.

U.S. shale was thought to be the most competitive source of oil out there, and indeed the industry appears to be ramping up production at today’s prices. Shale had adapted to a $50 per barrel market, producers had streamlined operations to make them almost resemble an assembly line, and in a volatile and unpredictable market, the short-cycle nature of shale drilling made it one of the least risky options for drillers.

But in just a few weeks’ time, investors are starting to ask major questions about the viability of shale drilling at such a large scale.

A couple of notable things have occurred in the past month or so. Pioneer Natural Resources, a top Permian producer, raised concerns when it told investors that its Permian shale wells were coming up with a higher natural gas-to-oil ratio than expected, a potentially worrying sign. The company also reported that it had trouble with some of its wells, forcing it to delay some completions.

Separately, Goldman Sachs reported that top investors are souring on U.S. shale E&Ps, with poor performances leading investors to search for ways to “reallocate capital” elsewhere in the energy space. That is big red flag for the shale industry, which is still struggling to consistently post profits despite the highly-touted cost reductions over the past few years.

For consumers, the big benefit to shale is that under current conditions it effectively caps oil at a price which feels great at the pump and feels terrible in Riyadh and Moscow.

For producers, however, things are a little more complicated.

HONESTY IS SUCH A LONELY WORD: Finally, someone on the Left just came out and said it. Being a Republican is apparently no different than being a white supremacist.

In a recent column for The Guardian, former Democratic senator for Wisconsin Russ Feingold clarified what all this controversy about white supremacists and Confederate statues is really all about: Republicans are Nazis.

“The lesson from Charlottesville is not how dangerous the neo-Nazis are,” he writes. “It is the unmasking of the Republican party leadership. In the wake of last weekend’s horror and tragedy, let us finally, finally rip off the veneer that Trump’s affinity for white supremacy is distinct from the Republican agenda of voter suppression, renewed mass incarceration and the expulsion of immigrants.”

Finally, finally, someone on the Left just came out and said it. Being a Republican is apparently no different than being a white supremacist. Supporting a lower marginal tax rate puts you in the same company as the Ku Klux Klan. Therefore, punching a Nazi is the same as punching someone wearing a MAGA hat.

There are certain MAGA-hat wearers I wouldn’t advise you to punch.

WHERE HAVE ALL THE NAZIS GONE? They were on the left in Phoenix yesterday. That and more in Liz Sheld’s morning brief.

DON’T BE EVIL: One Statistics Professor Was Just Banned By Google.

On Friday afternoon East Coast Time by surprise, I was completely shut down in all my Google accounts (all of my gmail accounts, blog, all of my university pages that were on google sites, etc.) for no reason and no warning. A number of us were stunned and unsure, but clearly we know at this point it wasn’t an accident. Here are some examples commented from best-selling author Nassim Taleb, and they have been retweeted by government officials, and the NYT and WSJ journalists.

My ads-free blog itself is a probability theory site, with 27 million reads and has somewhere near 150k overall followers. It’s been read by Warren Buffett, Elon Musk, Nobel Laureates, multiple governments, celebrity athletes around the world, deans of many universities (on the syllabi of same), and a number of TV news anchors. So it’s been a great boon for Google to be noticed so kindly by essentially a charitable site promoting math education. What great people from all corners of the world and at all levels who can enjoy Google, until it suddenly died Friday afternoon.

My background is clean, and without a political or social agenda. I am not promoting any specific viewpoint. I teach probability math and that’s it. Have worked with both the Obama administration and advised on polling statistics for the Trump campaign, am an adjunct professor at three top universities, an editor of the peer-reviewed journal of the American Statistical Association, and wrote a best-selling statistics book (all the proceeds of which I gave to charity!)

Read the whole thing.

Google reinstated his accounts, but not before embarrassing itself and further jeopardizing its “safe harbor” protections.

BRO, DO YOU EVEN SCIENCE? NYT: We Should Trust Climate Scientists Because The Eclipse.

Somebody needs a reminder that weather isn’t climate orbital mechanics.