FASTER, PLEASE: NASA funds $18.8 million to create and test fuel for nuclear thermal propulsion.

FROM IOWAHAWK: Helpful tips from Google on how to gender-target your ad campaign.

Setting a bid for a specific demographic group.

You may get a higher return on investment (ROI) or increase your chances to show your ads to people who are more likely to buy your products by setting a specific bid for a demographic group. Follow these steps to set a bid for an audience that you’ve already added to your ad group.

Google is happy to help exploit gender differences among its products — you are its product, by the way — but stifles any internal dissent arguing that those differences might be real.

Because shut up. And also you’re fired.

HEH: Residents of an exclusive San Francisco street didn’t pay their taxes. So someone bought their street.

Tina Lam and Michael Cheng of San Jose said that in 2015 they were looking at parcels being auctioned online by San Francisco’s tax office when they saw a description of “this odd property in a great location.”

“Part of Pacific Heights, the right location, land in a good neighborhood. We took a chance,” Cheng told the San Jose Mercury News. He said they bought the land sight-unseen, beating out 73 other bidders and dropping $90,000 for the street and its common areas.

In an expensive city, the homes on Presidio Terrace are in a league of their own. One had an asking price of $16.9 million last year, which dropped by $2 million. It’s a steep price to be neighbors with the likes of Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D) and House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, who have called the street home.

Lam and Cheng are now the owners of the common space of Presidio Terrace, which includes its sidewalks, garden islands, leafy palm trees and other lush greenery beautifying the homes of 35 mega-mansions after the association that manages the common areas failed to pay property taxes going back decades, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

Wealthy lefty strongholds sure can be sloppy about paying their fair share.

OTISBURG? Cannabis Company Buys Entire Calif. Town Hoping to Turn it into a Pot Mecca.

YOU DON’T SAY: Europe’s Taxes Aren’t as Progressive as Its Leaders Like to Think.

Europeans believe their tax codes are highly progressive, giving lower earners a break while levying significant proportions of the income of higher earners and corporations to fund generous social benefits. But that progressivity holds true only for direct taxes on personal and corporate income.

Indirect taxes, such as the value-added tax on consumption and social-security taxes (disguised as “contributions”), are a different matter. The VAT disproportionately affects lower earners, who spend a higher proportion of their incomes. And social taxes tend to kick in at lower income levels than income taxes, and extract a higher and more uniform proportion of income.

The result in Germany is a progressive system that isn’t.

You mean to say that Europe’s wealthy progressives have devised a tax scheme which makes it appear as though they’re paying their “fair share,” while in fact socking it to the little guy? Maybe Sarah Hoyt will let me borrow her shocked face.

OH GOODIE: The 2020 Democratic Purity Olympics Are Already Under Way.

Wouldn’t you know it, on the very delicious-to-watch week that Republicans start jumping off the leaky Trump frigate, some Democrats began testing attacks on one of their own, possible 2020 presidential contender Kamala Harris. The charge, leveled by a few folks on the left, including one member of the Democratic Party Unity Commission (!), is the usual one: that Harris is a corporate stooge in the mold of you-know-who and if the Democrats are even thinking about nominating her, the dis-unity commission will get to work sabotaging her.

I hold no particular brief for Harris, who’s been a senator for all of seven months. Frankly, to me, this presidential talk seems awfully premature. Yes, Barack Obama had served briefly; he was elected to the Senate in 2006 and started running for president the next year, whereas Harris would have three years under her belt. But Obama had electrified the political world with that convention speech back in 2004, and that night he showed obvious presidential potential. Harris asked some good questions in two Senate hearings, but I’m a little mystified as to why that gets her on presidential lists. She was shortlisted by some people before she was even elected.

She’s telegenic, a female of color, and sufficiently progressive — or is sufficient not sufficient enough for some Democrats?

As David Dayen pointed out in the New Republic in early 2016 as her Senate run was getting off the ground, she has a history of being overly cautious (uh, just like you-know-who), especially with regard to her decision not to prosecute Steve Mnuchin’s bank for foreclosure violations. The California attorney general’s office had found ample evidence of possible wrongdoing, but Harris declined to pursue the matter and hasn’t said why.

So she should say why, if she runs for president, and people can judge whether her response is adequate. That’s part of the scrutiny.

But these attacks have the feel of something else. They have the feel of a group of people, most or all of them Bernie Sanders supporters, itching to refight 2016 and demand a level of purity that lo and behold only one candidate can possibly attain.

Corn, popped.

WHOSE LIFE IS IT, ANYWAY? Medical Ethicist: ‘Right to Try’ Bill Will Not Improve Experimental Treatment Access. “This is a politically motivated, Libertarian-ideology attempt to rein in the power of the FDA in the guise of trying to help patients.”

As we were reminded in recent weeks by the sad case of Charlie Gard, your life is the State’s, comrade.

LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: Venezuela inches closer to default.

Inches?

The country, which is engulfed in crisis, owes $251 million to bondholders on Monday.

The payment comes after a weekend in which the attorney general was kicked out of office, a controversial legislature took power, and the military thwarted an alleged attack by a small paramilitary group.

Experts anticipate that Venezuela will make the payment to bondholders. But it has other payments coming due in the near future and could fall short on those if the economy continues to tailspin and the United States hits it with heavy sanctions.

“This model is broken, and default is inevitable,” says Siobhan Morden, an expert in Latin American bonds at Nomura Holdings. Oil “sanctions will probably arrive sooner and force default sooner.”

Meanwhile, “Chávez loyalists hold firm amid chaos.”

It’s an easy prediction to make, that the Left will portray Maduro as they eventually portrayed Stalin — the brute who betrayed the revolution of his noble predecessor.

THIS LAND IS THEIR LAND: The case for Kurdistan.

To be sure, the establishment of a ‘greater Kurdistan’ that includes all areas where the Kurds comprise a majority remains impossible. If internal Kurdish politics were not enough to prevent such an outcome, geostrategic constraints certainly would be.

Kurdish independence is particularly implausible in Turkey. The Kurds’ main representative in that country, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK)—which champions a distinctly secular, Marxist brand of nationalism—has been fighting the Turkish government for decades. But, the government, led by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has not wavered in its commitment to preventing the establishment of a Kurdish state, to the point that even the PKK’s founder, Abdullah Öcalan, now favors a resolution that falls short of independence.

Erdoğan’s commitment to ending the PKK’s quest is so strong that he is also working to prevent Syria’s Kurds from leveraging sovereignty from their military gains against ISIS. He fears that Kurdish success in Syria would inspire Turkey’s Kurds to revive their own fight for statehood in the country’s southeast. This fear of nationalist spillover has driven Erdoğan’s campaign to create a buffer zone along the Turkish border that extends well into the territory now controlled by Syrian Kurds.

But the Kurdish community in Iraq, represented by the Kurdish Regional Government, has a real shot at statehood. The KRG is a quasi-sovereign entity overseeing an efficient military and an independent economy. Although it is plagued by corruption and cronyism, like every other political organisation in the region, the KRG represents the only truly functional government in Iraq, presiding over the country’s most peaceful and stable areas.

They’ve earned it.

FLASHBACK: Globalism And Why We Hate Each Other.

Ben Domenech:

A term that is particularly lacking in this arena is how we define “globalism” and “globalists”. We have been talking about them for years, and still we lack a real definition of what this term means. Globalism can certainly mean NAFTA, the WTO, and maintaining post-war order in Europe. It can mean Angela Merkel-like technocracy, the global system of property rights, a lenient attitude toward borders and a welcoming attitude toward Middle Eastern refugees. As a general rule, this mindset is well represented by Bret Stephens, whose book stressed the importance of being the world’s policeman, and whose latest column has a tongue in cheek call (I assume) for deporting Americans who don’t excel at the things he values. So globalism can also be an abiding belief that a nation is just where you happen to be walking about at a particular time.

Except that when you talk to people who are most bothered by creeping globalism, they don’t typically mention these issues – except the issue of refugees, but then they nearly always mention it in the context of fear of terrorism, which the globalists are not fans of, either. No one who has raised the issue of globalism with me has mentioned NAFTA, or trade deals, or even Angela Merkel. What is more commonly mentioned are the perceived beneficiaries of the globalist project: big businesses. And what often comes up is not the products they sell, but the ideology they push.

Indeed.

And an instant classic:

WHY ARE PROGRESSIVE INSTITUTIONS SUCH CESSPITS OF OFFICIAL INTOLERANCE? Conservative Students Fear Intense Backlash for Talking Politics, Study Finds.

HMM: Signs of trouble emerge in Trump’s base.

On Monday evening, a new CNN poll put his job approval rating at 38 percent. Just as worryingly from the White House’s perspective, the same survey showed his “strong approval” number among Republicans sliding to 59 percent, from 73 percent in February.

In a Quinnipiac University poll released last week, Trump registered an overall job approval rating of just 33 percent.

The president was even underwater among white people without a college education — the heart of his election-winning coalition last November — registering 43 percent approval and 50 percent disapproval with that group.

And the Quinnipiac poll, like the CNN survey, showed a decline in the share of Republicans approving of his performance. Among Republicans, his performance won the approval of 76 percent now in contrast to 84 percent in late June.

The assistant director of the Quinnipiac poll, Tim Malloy, said in the statement accompanying the poll’s release that, “It’s hard to pick what is the most alarming number in the troubling trail of new lows for President Donald Trump.”

I’m wary of polls this far out, but it would be a mistake for the White House to ignore them completely. That said, the Democrats appear to be in even worse shape, despite their successful holding action on ObamaCare and the ongoing Deep State shenanigans against the Administration.

DO YOU WANT MORE TRUMP? BECAUSE THIS IS HOW YOU GET MORE TRUMP:

I use DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine, and Bing as my fallback. Instead of Gmail, I spend a few bucks a month with a reliable web-hosting service and own my own domain with 1,000 email addresses and unmetered bandwidth. There are no Google apps on my phone to report my every movement and all my metadata back to the mothership.

These are easy steps almost anyone can take to rid themselves of this meddlesome priest.

NEWS YOU CAN USE, SAD TO SAY: How to ‘Rape-Proof’ Your College-Aged Son.

COLLATERAL DAMAGE IN THE FRACKING WARS: How The Dream Of America’s ‘Nuclear Renaissance’ Fizzled.

Building a nuclear reactor is expensive and time-consuming but once it’s up and running, it offers cheap and reliable electricity without generating the greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change.

With encouragement from the federal government, utilities around the country began applying for permission to build new reactors. At Vogtle in Georgia and V.C. Summer in South Carolina, power companies got to work.

“I thought it was going to be a very good thing for the Southern economy,” says Marilyn Brown, a public policy professor at Georgia Tech and board member of the Tennessee Valley Authority, which operates three older nuclear power plants in Alabama and Tennessee.

Then there were setbacks. First came the global financial crisis, which flattened the demand for electricity. Then fracking flooded the market with cheap natural gas. Renewable energy — especially wind power — also got more competitive.

How much cheaper did renewables really get, once you factor out subsidies?

LAWPROF WARNS: Congress must act on growing sexbot industry.

As the sale and use of lifelike sex robots that allow people to simulate rape continues to gain steam, one famed law professor is sounding the alarm.

John Banzhaf, a well-known activist professor of public interest law at George Washington University Law School, says experts disagree on the consequences of allowing people to engage in mock acts of rape with humanoid dolls, and lawmakers should vet this issue as soon as possible.

Saying there’s evidence rape sexbots may significantly increase the chance of rape to real women, the law should “no longer stand by and blindly ignore a major potential problem by doing nothing,” he said in an email to The College Fix.

Sexbots, especially those which can be programmed to act as if they are being raped, and those which act and appear to be young children, are already here and in use, Banzhaf said.

“The obvious first step would be to have hearings and do studies to determine just how serious the threat is, whether there are any real benefits to having sexbots programmed to simulate being raped, and then what if any new laws, regulations, etc. might be appropriate,” he said.

We should probably outlaw similar role-playing between consenting adults, too, just to be safe.

The Sexual Revolution morphed into the Junior Anti-Sex League so slowly, I hardly even noticed.

HARRY REID’S LEGACY: The Senate must end the tyranny of the minority and abolish the filibuster.

Congressman Trent Franks:

Mr. Trump is extremely astute to recognize the ‘senseless 60,’ Senate rule to be the primary culprit responsible for turning the U.S. Senate into the fundamentally dysfunctional institution it has become.

Perhaps the president was paying attention in the last election cycle when then Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said (when he was assuming Hillary Clinton would become president and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) would become majority leader): “The country can’t be run this way, where nothing gets done.” … “Unless after this election there is a dramatic change to go back to the way it used to be” (before the “no-debate stealth filibuster”) “the Senate will have to evolve as it has in the past” … “But it will evolve with a majority vote determining stuff. It is going to happen” (emphasis mine), meaning that the majority, not 60 votes, would rule.

After such unequivocal statements, to predicate America’s future on the hope that Democrats will suddenly be seized with an epiphany of fair play toward Republicans and not follow through with Mr. Reid’s plan when given the chance, is to risk the survival of this republic on a hope that has never manifest in the past.

Read the whole thing.

THE EPA VERSUS REALITY, SESSIONS VS EMANUEL, AND GOOGLE VS INTELLECTUAL DIVERSITY: All that and more in Liz Sheld’s morning brief.

RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA: The MSM Really Didn’t Want To Talk About That Clinton – Loretta Lynch Meeting.

Jazz Shaw:

According to the Daily Caller, there were some other folks who didn’t seem terribly interested in airing that sort of dirty laundry when it first came to light. They included reporters from the New York Times and the Washington Post. Emails obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request indicate that some of our stalwart defenders of the Freedom of the Press in the Fourth Estate may have been interested in getting that story off the front pages as quickly as possible.

A series of emails from reporters at The Washington Post and The New York Times published Friday reveal they weren’t eager to cover the 2016 tarmac meeting between former President Bill Clinton and then Attorney General Loretta Lynch.

The American Center for Law and Justice, a nonprofit organization, released a series of emails that show the reporters at the outlets didn’t seem to want to cover the secret meeting between the former president and Lynch, as the Department of Justice was investigating former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s email server.

Matt Zapotosky, a WaPo reporter, reached out to a Department of Justice spokesperson in the hopes of “putting the story to rest.”

Framing your request for details as an effort to “put the story to rest” doesn’t exactly speak to a dogged reporter digging for the truth. But Zapotosky wasn’t the only one to turn up in this investigation. Mark Landler, White House correspondent for the New York Times, described his assignment to cover the story as him being, “pressed into service.” Again, given the players involved and the timing, one might think that a dutiful reporter would be excited at the prospect of chasing down such a juicy lead. But apparently not.

EVERGREEN:

CHRISTIAN TOTO: 11 Brutal Responses to Chelsea Hander’s ‘Fascist’ Tweet.

THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME? Obama Steps Into Kenyan Election, Urges Fair and Peaceful Vote.

I kid, I kid.

SCIENCE: Woman Sends Unsolicited Vagina Pics to Men in Most Predictable Experiment Ever.

IF AT FIRST YOU DON’T SUCCEED… California eyes bigger rebates for electric cars.

Government is where bad ideas go to achieve immortality.

MEN EAT AT VEGAN RESTAURANTS? Vegan Cafe To Tax Men, Seat Women First.

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Can Rap Music Be Kosher?