CERTAINLY NOT WITH INSTAPUNDIT READERS: Is Gwyneth Paltrow’s pseudoscience winning?

CHARLIE MARTIN: The End of Charlie Gard’s Story.

I’D RATHER NOT: Meet a Man Who WANTS Kids’ Lemonade Stands Shut Down.

ARMED AND FABULOUS: In Chicago, women worried about violence join gun club.

“My husband influenced me and we thought about it a long time. Maybe you need a gun these days, in your house at least,” said Crowder, who lives in a gated community with her retired banker husband.

A fellow retiree, Javondlynn Dunagan, came up with the idea of gun training classes geared toward women, and for the “Ladies of Steel” gun club — after successful training, the women gather twice a month to practice their skills.

Dunagan served as a parole officer for 25 years before finishing her career in January, but had rarely held a gun when dealing with convicts.

She said she started carrying one after divorcing her police officer husband.

“I was at home by myself with my daughter, and I was used to having a firearm in a home with my ex-husband,” she explained. “So, I wanted to make sure that we were safe.”

But Dunagan noticed something curious when she visited gun ranges around Chicago to practice.

“I noticed that I never saw two women at the range together or a group of ladies,” she recounted.

Welcome to the club.

SECURITY THEATER OF THE ABSURD: TSA Bans Comic Books in Checked Luggage for Comic-Con.

According to the report, United — surprise — seems to be the only airline actually enforcing the ban.

UPDATE: TSA denies.

MICHAEL LEDEEN: Who Gets Purged by Trump?

I don’t think the Trumps et al. have a solid grasp of Washington. I think that they believe the bureaucracy should salute whenever the president expresses a conviction, and immediately impose his will on the system. Maybe so (elections really do have consequences. Most always). Except Washington doesn’t work that way. The bureaucrats know they will outlast any president. He’ll be gone in four or eight years, but they will still be there. Moreover, it’s almost impossible to fire a civil servant; maybe you can move him down the hall, or even half way around the world, but he’ll still be active. Somewhere. And he may well have friends.

Not so with political appointees, who can be purged. You have no doubt seen the laments from the Trump loyalists about the Obama “holdovers” who continue to work and often participate in some very sensitive meetings. Many of them are now out, but there has been a surprising purge of Trump loyalists, especially in national security, including Mike Flynn, Adam Lovinger, and Robin Townley.

Read the whole thing.

JUST TEN MORE MINUTES, I SWEAR: Democrats snoozing through their wake-up call.

Gloria Johns:

Where do we start with all the Democrats have gotten wrong?

First, they did not anticipate the backlash from the party’s greatest achievement. The election of the first African-American president was the straw that broke the back of conservatives and middle-income white Americans who were quickly becoming the minority and not happy about it at all.

Democrats failed to notice their party’s freefall, as evidenced by the loss of about 900 legislative seats from 2008 to 2016. While it’s not untypical that a two-term presidency starts to lose a little luster during its waning years, these numbers definitely signal a shift in mood among the American people – a shift not quite away from civil rights, but definitely more focused on the right to prosper as an individual, the equivalent of the Republican’s siren song.

And not to diminish her exceptional public service over many decades, but Hillary Clinton was an entitlement candidate and an unimaginative one at that. If Trump represents a 1950s separatist, Clinton is a bit of a relic of the 1960s, when the Democrats’ whimsical party platform was, “… it is the creation of an enduring peace in which the universal values of human dignity, truth, and justice under law are finally secured for all men everywhere on earth.”

How do you turn all of that into action?

If this column is any indicator, even lefties who think they get it still haven’t gotten it.

UPDATE: Yes, even Chuck Schumer.

JOEL KOTKIN: Why the Greens Lost, and Trump Won.

The believers at times seem more concerned in demonstrating their faith than in passing laws, winning elections or demonstrating results. So with Republicans controlling the federal government, greens are cheering Democratic state attorney generals’ long-shot legal cases against oil companies. The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman has talked about dismissing the disorder of democracy as not suited to meeting the environmental challenges we face, and replacing it with rulers like the “reasonably enlightened group of people” who run the Chinese dictatorship.

After Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate accord, China was praised, bizarrely, as the great green hope. The Middle Kingdom, though, is the world’s biggest and fastest grower emitter, generating coal energy at record levels. It won’t, under Paris, need to cut its emissions till 2030. Largely ignored is the fact that America, due largely to natural gas replacing coal, has been leading the world in GHG reductions.

Among many greens, and their supports, performance seems to mean less than proper genuflecting; the Paris accords, so beloved by the green establishment, will make little impact on the actual climate, as both rational skeptics like Bjorn Lomborg and true believers like NASA’s James Hanson agree. In this context, support for Paris represents the ultimate in “virtue signaling.” Ave Maria, Gaia.

They get the virtue, we get the tab.

PEER REVIEW: Predatory Journals Hit By ‘Star Wars’ Sting.

JACK DUNPHY: Was Policeman Mohammed Noor Justified in Shooting Justine Damond?

AFTER ALL, HE IS THE BULLGOD: Let’s get this out of the way right now: Yes, Kid Rock can absolutely win if he runs for U.S. Senate in Michigan.

ASTRONOMY: The Next Step In The Search For Aliens Is A Huge Telescope And A Ton Of Math.

Astronomers hoping to find extraterrestrial life are looking largely for exoplanets (planets outside Earth’s solar system) in the so-called “Goldilocks zone” around each star: a distance range in which a planet is not too hot and not too cold, making it possible for liquid water to exist on the surface. But after studying our own world and many other planetary systems, scientists have come to believe that many factors other than distance are key to the development of life. These include the mix of gases in the atmosphere, the age of the planet and host star, whether the host star often puts out harmful radiation, and how fast the planet rotates — some planets rotate at a rate that leaves the same side always facing their star, so one hemisphere is stuck in perpetual night while the other is locked into scorching day. This makes it a complex problem that scientists can start to tackle with powerful computers, data and statistics. These tools — and new telescope technology — could make the discovery of life beyond Earth more likely.

Two teams of astronomers are proposing different methods of tackling these questions. One argues that we should try to identify trends in the data generated by surveys of thousands of planets, while the other favors focusing on a handful of individual planets to assess where they’d lie on a scale from uninhabitable to probably populated.

If there’s anybody out there, I’d rather we found them before they find us.

SINGLE PAYER, SINGLE DECIDER: Charlie Gard’s Parents Drop Legal Battle Over Experimental Treatment.

The parents of critically ill baby Charlie Gard dropped their legal bid Monday to send him to the United States for an experimental treatment after new medical tests showed that the window of opportunity to help him had closed.

Chris Gard and Connie Yates wept as they withdrew their appeal during a London High Court hearing, signaling the end of a legal saga that had stretched for months. The couple’s attorney, Grant Armstrong, said recent medical tests on 11-month-old Charlie showed the baby has irreversible muscular damage, and the new treatment wouldn’t help.

“It’s too late for Charlie,” Armstrong said. “The damage has been done.”

Medically, there may have been no hope for Charlie even at an earlier date. Politically, the process the Gards were subjected to was a crude power play of the state against the individual, and the state won.

Britons should have no doubt about their place in a single payer system.

NICHOLAS BALLASY: Democrats: Despite Trump Victory, Americans Still Want Action on Climate Change.

THE OIL WARS: OPEC/Saudi ‘Promises’ Fail To Ignite Momentum in WTI Crude Prices.

As Bloomberg reports, OPEC and partners meet in St. Petersburg where the Saudi energy minister says he expects deep cut in nation’s August exports.

OPEC/non-OPEC meeting:

•Saudi Arabia’s Al-Falih says inventory draw-down to accelerate, demand picking up; Saudis to cap exports at 6.6m b/d in August, y/y decline of 1m b/d

•Joint ministerial committee said to discuss monitoring oil exports along with production figures; Al-Falih says exports have become key metric for financial markets

•OPEC may need to discuss in November extending cuts: U.A.E.

•Nigeria to limit output to 1.8m b/d if it can reach that level: Oman

•Russia’s Novak sees ‘‘big potential’’ for oil markets in 3Q; not opposed to monitoring exports

And this is the result… a quick spike above $46… then fall back.

Have you hugged a fracker today?

SOCIAL JUSTICE: Man ordered to pay $65K in child support for kid who isn’t his.

In 2003, a child support court in Texas ruled that Gabriel Cornejo, 45, had to pay child support to his ex-girlfriend who had recently given birth because she vowed that there was no way he wasn’t the rightful dad.

Cornejo, who is currently raising three children of his own and two nephews, claimed that he was not made aware of this and only found out about the child support payments last year when a deputy served him court papers claiming that the state of Texas lists him as having another child. He soon met the minor for the first and only time – describing her as a “wonderful girl” – but after taking a DNA test, learned she was not his after all.

Only Cornejo’s ex-girlfriend and the state still want the $65,000 in back payments.

“I never thought in my whole life I would have to defend myself of something that I am innocent of,” he said.

Under current legal thinking, he’s male, so he must be guilty of something.

Plus this: “Texas’ family code, chapter 161, states that even if one is not the biological father, they still owe support payments that accrued before the paternity test proves otherwise.”

RON RADOSH: Brit Hume’s Strange and Heartless Prescription for Health Care.

KAROL MARKOWICZ: Now the speech police are going after small talk.

“What do you do?” is now considered impolite. The Huffington Post has called it a “conversation killer” and the Boston Globe’s Robin Abrahams called it “the lamest party question.”

Abrahams writes: “I’ve had people tell me straight up that they find the question rude. Many folks perceive it as a prestige contest — and when it’s preceded by, say, ‘I’m a spinal surgeon and run a private-equity fund in my spare time,’ it’s easy to feel that way.”

But why does everything have to be a competition? If you come across a spinal surgeon who runs a private-equity fund that should be the best conversation of your life. Why would anyone refuse to take the opportunity to learn something from someone so accomplished?

Also, if you’re hearing that answer, that means you’re the one who asked the question. If you don’t feel great about your professional life, small talk makes it easy to steer away from the topic or change the subject once it’s introduced. That’s the thing about small talk: It can go anywhere you’d like.

In the last few years, my go-to question — “Where are you from?” — has also become unacceptable. Apparently it’s racist or anti-immigrant or any number of problematics to ask someone where they grew up.

There’s nothing committed busybodies can’t ruin for everybody else.

OH: North Korea is Able to Launch a ‘Limited Missile Attack,’ Warns Top U.S. General.

At dinner last night I was speaking to someone deeply involved in our missile defense program, and half-jokingly suggested we place North Korea under a “missile quarantine” by stationing an Aegis-equipped destroyer or two in international waters — with instructions to shoot down anything that goes up.

His response was, “The crews would love that.”

UPDATE: Credit where it’s due, before I forget again.

PROGRESS? Female Athletes Are Closing The Gender Gap When It Comes To Concussions.

“We classically have always known the male response to brain injury,” says Mark Burns, at Georgetown University. But there have been remarkably few studies of females. The bias runs throughout the scientific literature, even in studies of mice.

“Male mice have been used historically in research and not really been compared to female mice,” he says.

That’s changing now. The National Institutes of Health recently began to require scientists to include female animals.

Burns’ lab has begun using both sexes in research on head injuries. And they’re finding some differences. This summer, Burns published a study in the journal Glia that looked at mice with severe brain injuries. He says the brains of male mice showed a massive immune response within a day, but the female response was much slower — up to seven days.

Given traditional roles, unlike men there was probably little evolutionary advantage for women to rapidly heal from concussions.

SCARAMUCCI’S SUNDAY TOUR, PELOSI’S REBRANDING, AND KUSHNER’S GOING BEHIND CLOSED DOORS: All that and more in Liz Sheld’s morning brief.

REPORT: De Blasio Ordered Police to Clear Homeless Out of Subways Before His Ride.

New York Mayor Bill De Blasio reportedly ordered the police to clear out homeless people from two subway stations ahead of his four-stop press event on Sunday so that the stations “looked nice.”

Law enforcement sources told the New York Post that the police had until 11 A.M. on Sunday to eject those who were “hanging out” at the Fourth Avenue/Ninth Street and Jay Street/MetroTech F train stations.

Another source put it this way: de Blasio’s office let the police know ahead of time about his schedule “with the expectation that the subway stations would be free and clear of homeless people.”

#Caring.

LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: Violinist symbolic of Venezuela protest bloodied.

A young violinist who became a symbol of anti-government protest in Venezuela has apparently been injured at a demonstration.

Images broadcast on local television show emergency response workers tending to Wuilly Arteaga as he bleeds from his nose. His shirt and baseball cap with the colors of the Venezuelan flag are also stained with blood.

Arteaga posted a brief video of himself Saturday on Twitter with a swollen lip and bandaged face, vowing to be back on the streets tomorrow.

It was not immediately clear what happened to him.

Arteaga has been a fixture at demonstrations against President Nicolas Maduro, playing the national anthem on his violin as authorities launch tear gas in his direction.

Maduro’s opposition is calling for a two-day general strike to protest his July 30 vote to “elect a new national assembly and rewrite the constitution” in order to bypass the existing, opposition-held assembly. Because socialism will work this time, if they just put the right people in charge.

IT’S COME TO THIS: Terror Group Uses CNN ‘Body-Slam’ Tweet to Declare Trump ‘Most Stupid President… Ever.’

CHRISTIAN TOTO: Five WWII Movies to See Before ‘Dunkirk.’

I’d add a shout-out to 1948’s Command Decision.