UNDER OATH? The Russian Lawyer Who Met With Don Jr. Says She’s Ready to Testify for the U.S. Senate.

GOOD LORD: Low IQ costs Oregon parents their kids.

YES. NEXT QUESTION? Has the Republican Party Lost Its Backbone?

ALL IS PROGRESSING AS MARK STEYN HAS FORESEEN: As Europe’s migrant crisis enters a new phase, it’s clear that European leaders have neither the will nor desire to preserve their own civilization.

John Daniel Davidson:

Take women’s rights, for example. In Europe as in America, the equality of the sexes has for decades been held as an immutable fact. But Europe is even more militant about its feminism than America. For Europeans, the very idea of a housewife is backwards and oppressive; mothers are expected to work and send their children to state-subsidized child care, not opt out of the workforce to raise a family. This is the official policy of the EU, which has entire commissions dedicated to ensuring more women enter the workforce.

For Muslim immigrants to Europe, who come from societies in which women are generally subordinate to men, this comes as a shock. Yet for a long time Europe insisted that newcomers adopt western attitudes regarding women’s rights and sexual freedom. As Christopher Caldwell has noted, this was the only non-negotiable demand Europe made of its immigrants. The European ruling class might have been willing to look the other way on free speech and denounce as fascist anyone who worries about Islam and terrorism, but on feminism there was no room for negotiation: “It is the litmus test according to which assimilation—and even membership in the national community—is judged. It is the one area where Europeans retain both a deep suspicion of Muslim ways and a confidence in their own institutions that is free of self-doubt.”

At least, that’s how it used to be.

Read the whole thing.

Professional feminists have no interest in protecting the rights of Western women, because it’s different when they’re being oppressed by oppressed “migrants.”

ALLIES: Turkey Threatens to Reveal More Top-Secret Details About U.S. Special Forces in Syria.

SHUT UP, THEY EXPLAINED: UC Berkeley BLOCKS Shapiro Event At University On September 14.

On Wednesday, Young America’s Foundation and the Berkeley College Republicans were told by the University of California, Berkeley administration that Berkeley would not facilitate an event by Daily Wire editor-in-chief Ben Shapiro on September 14 on campus. Instead, administrators have informed YAF and BCR that they are “unable to identify an available campus venue.”

I think what they meant to say is that they are unable to identify a safe campus venue, because the Berkeley administration has taken a sort of wink-and-nod approach to violence against conservatives.

WALTER WILLIAMS: The Key Facts About Slavery That the Left Conveniently Ignores.

Slavery is by no means peculiar, odd, or unusual. It was common among ancient peoples such as the Egyptians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Hittites, Greeks, Persians, Armenians, and many others.

Large numbers of Christians were enslaved during the Ottoman wars in Europe. White slaves were common in Europe from the Dark Ages to the Middle Ages. It was only after A.D. 1600 that Europeans joined with Arabs and Africans and started the Atlantic slave trade.

As David P. Forsythe wrote in his book, “The Globalist,” “The fact remained that at the beginning of the 19th century an estimated three-quarters of all people alive were trapped in bondage against their will either in some form of slavery or serfdom.”

While slavery constitutes one of the grossest encroachments on human liberty, it is by no means unique or restricted to the Western world or United States, as many liberal academics would have us believe.

Much of their indoctrination of our young people, at all levels of education, paints our nation’s Founders as racist adherents to slavery, but the story is not so simple.

Read the whole thing.

“Everybody does it” is no excuse, but not everybody fights a horrible Civil War over it, then constitutionally elevates former slaves to full citizenship.

LEGALIZARLA: Uruguay Becomes First Nation to Oversee Pot Sales, From Seed to Smoke.

The new policy comes as much of Latin America, Canada and numerous U.S. states have legalized marijuana for limited use, even as several countries continue to have tough interdiction policies against the cocaine trade.

Some leaders in the region on the front lines of the U.S.-backed war on drugs have increasingly voiced fatigue with those hard-line policies. But so far, Uruguay has most decidedly broken with the prohibitionist approach, making this country’s experiment a test case that is being closely watched by governments and activists on both sides of the drug-legalization debate.

The move has also encouraged businesses, like Vancouver-based International Cannabis Corp., which has a license to harvest and export the marijuana it is producing in Uruguay.

“We are ready to start exporting to more than 12 countries, and we will do it with a seal of quality from the Uruguayan Health Ministry,” said Alejandro Antalich, chief executive of the company.

The report also claims that Uruguay’s program has “enthralled pro-pot activists and smokers abroad but has lukewarm support at home.” But the expected tax revenues certainly have big support in Montevideo.

TRUMP TURNS ON SESSIONS, A TRAGIC TRUMPCARE AUTOPSY, AND RUSSIA-RUSSIA-RUSSIA: Liz Sheld is on travel, but Tyler O’Neil has all that and more in today’s morning brief.

PROCUREMENT: DARPA, BAE Systems Developing Small Unmanned Underwater Vehicles to Hunt Enemy Submarines.

Well, good. Small and quiet, air-independent propulsion subs like China is building can be tough and dangerous to root out of coastal waters.

UNEXPECTEDLY: San Francisco Transit Shielded Criminals Over Fears of Racist Public, Now Rapes, Sexual Assaults on the Rise.

VIDEO: Bernie Sanders Claims He Never Said Republicans’ Health Plan Was Going to Kill People.

As Ken Layne said, “We can fact-check your ass.”

NETFLIX AND CHILL: Television’s 10 Best Anti-Heroes of All Time.

Alas, neither Julie Newmar’s nor Eartha Kitt’s Catwoman made the cut.

PROGRESS? Google unveils new ‘smart feed’ in Search with a ‘follow’ option.

At an unveiling in San Francisco on Tuesday, the Mountain View search giant gave a preview of the new “smart feed” scheduled to roll out for Apple iOS and Google Android mobile devices. It identifies areas of interest selected by a user, and their history of using Search, YouTube and other Google products, to produce a stream of news stories and other information intended to be unique to each user.

“None of us has quite the same mix of passions, interests and goals as the next person,” said Shashi Thakur, Google’s vice-president of engineering for Search. “It’s hard to find one place to stay in the know about exactly what matters to you.”

A “follow” button will appear next to certain search results including those concerning movies, sports, bands and celebrities. Hitting the button puts the topic into the feed.

The feed also relies on Google’s algorithms, which find out about a user’s interests by combing through their search history, the videos they watch on YouTube, music downloaded via Google Play, and their use of all other Google services. Location data is also used, according to Google.

Sounds helpful, but I’ll never be comfortable with that level of tracking.

DAVID STEINBERG: The Voter Purges Aren’t Coming, Just Another Silly Democratic Narrative.

I’VE LONG SUSPECTED THIS: That Drug Expiration Date May Be More Myth Than Fact.

ANTISOCIAL MEDIA: A massive botnet was tweeting you porn for months.

CHARLIE MARTIN: Where Does Global Warming Come From?

The essential measurement on which the climate change debate is based is the Global Average Surface Temperature (GAST). Conceptually, this is really pretty simple: you just put a thermometer on every point on the surface of the earth, take continuous readings for an entire year and then divide the sum of all those readings by the number of readings.

Practically, that presents problems: that’s a lot of thermometers and people use the surface of the Earth for doing other things than taking temperature readings. The reality is that the thermometers are anywhere from miles apart to thousands of miles, and they’re not at all uniform. So to estimate the GAST, the temperature measurements are fed into a model, which includes corrections. When I was writing about this in 2013, the difference between GAST and the predictions of GAST was becoming too big to ignore. Climate scientists then looked for reasons and added new corrections — but some of them were controversial.

Those who take the readings decide nothing. Those who model the readings decide everything.

MEET THE RESISTANCE: Antifa Site Includes Tips on Committing Sabotage.

GOOD LORD: North Korea firing squad carries out public executions in school yards, report says.

The report, released by The Transnational Justice Working Group in Seoul, gathered information from more than 300 North Korean refugees who witnessed the regime’s firing squad executing criminals in public areas to attract large crowds and instill fear in its citizens.

“In ordinary areas outside the prison system, our interviewees stated that public executions take place near river banks, in river beds, near bridges, in public sports stadiums, in the local marketplace, on school grounds in the fringes of the city, or on mountainsides,” the report stated.

The report said people were publicly executed for crimes such as stealing rice and livestock and distributing South Korean media.

Just another paradisiacal workers’ state.

STARRING FELICITY JONES? REALLY? The Ruth Bader Ginsburg Biopic Will Be A Superhero Movie Or Something.

AARON BLAKE: This poll is a warning sign for Democrats.

A new Washington Post-ABC News poll, as Mike DeBonis and Emily Guskin report, presents a pretty mixed bag for Democrats. It shows that registered voters say they want Democrats to control Congress to be a check on Trump by a 52-38 percent margin, but it also shows Democrats are — rather remarkably — less enthusiastic about voting than Republicans are. While 65 percent of Republicans and GOP-leaning adults say they are “almost certain to vote,” just 57 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning adults say the same.

The question from there is which is more predictive of what lies ahead. And the answer won’t necessarily make Democrats feel better.

Great, kid — don’t get cocky.

LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: Venezuela’s National Oil Company On Its Last Legs.

Venezuelan refineries are operating significantly below operational capacity, a product of a lack of investment and maintenance, as well as a lack of technical knowledge (a lot of the highly qualified personnel from PDVSA who rebelled against Hugo Chavez’s regime in 2002 were fired and now work in various other countries, such as; Colombia, Mexico, Canada and the USA). Falling output at refineries means that Venezuela needs to import gasoline, further squeezing the national budget. Refineries are currently working at less than 40 percent of average 2016 levels as state-run oil company PDVSA is importing between 100 and 150 thousand barrels per day of gasoline and between 80 and 90 thousand barrels per day of diesel.

Venezuela’s daily demand for gasoline and diesel are 225 and 170 thousand barrels respectively. Several tankers are waiting off the coast of Venezuela to discharge cargoes as the PDVSA has difficulties in paying their shipping bills, resulting in a penalty of $26 000 per tanker per day. An almost surreal paradox in a country that owns twenty refineries; five in Venezuela and fifteen worldwide.

In the last ten years, Venezuela crude oil production has lost more than 500 thousand barrels per day. Since the beginning of 2017, the country has lost 92 thousand barrels per day. Between May and June 2017, Venezuela’s oil crude production has decreased from 1,951 to 1,938 million barrels per day, representing 13 thousand barrels lost in one month, based on the secondary sources used by OPEC.

“Bad luck.”

ONLY MOSTLY DEAD? After Deciding to ‘Just Let Obamacare Fail,’ Trump Again Lobbying for Healthcare Bill.

BUT THE NARRATIVE! HHS analysis finds Cruz amendment lowers premiums, boosts enrollment.