SPACE: 3 Reasons Why 2018 Will Be the Make-Or-Break Year for SpaceX.

STACY MCCAIN: “We know who Cora Segal is and we know what Cora Segal believes because Cora Segal has told us these things. Cora Segal is an activist, and when an activist goes to a public event and disrupts it by shouting obscenities — ‘F–k you! . . . Keep your hate speech off this campus!’ — her public activism is newsworthy. Identifying her is not ‘doxing.'”

But, really, she seems like somebody a right-wing parody site would make up. But then, most social-justice-warriorism seems that way.

MUSLIM LABOUR LEADER FAVORED TO WIN LONDON MAYORAL RACE:

Sadiq Khan, the son of a London bus driver, has had a remarkable rise into the upper echelons of British politics. He grew up with seven siblings in a three-bedroom home in public housing and attended state schools before becoming a human-rights lawyer and then a senior government minister.

Now Khan, 45, a lawmaker and former transport minister for the opposition Labour Party, is the favorite in the battle to become the next mayor of London. He would succeed Boris Johnson, the extroverted Conservative who has held the post since 2008 and is a leading figure in the campaign for Britain’s departure from the European Union.

A victory Thursday would make Khan the first Muslim to lead the city, where 1 in 8 residents adheres to that faith, and when Britain is struggling to integrate minorities and combat radicalization.

Reuters adds that Kahn will be “the first Muslim to head a major Western capital.” He’s pledged to be “a Muslim Mayor that stands up for Jewish rights,” and I hope that works out well, but he’s got his job cut out for him; as Nick Cohen writes in the Guardian (of all places), “I saw the darkness of Labour’s antisemitism, but I never thought it would get this dark.”

Because of its small size when compared to America, England’s fundamental transformation occurred much more quickly than America’s. In the late 1990s, some were warning it was a preview of what was to come here, and for things to continue getting worse there.

EMINENCE FRONT — IT’S A PUT ON:  Really successful people who were caught lying on their CVs.

Curiously, one of the worst liars about his salad days (certainly at least, during his salad days) and his would-be successor aren’t even mentioned.

As Glenn likes to say, we have the worst political class in our history — but the rot extends far beyond the world of politics.

Perhaps that explains why elites hold the middle class in such contempt; as Ace of Spades noted in 2011, “Our elites are fixated on how disappointed they are with the tawdry public precisely because that allows them to avoid examining their own colossal failures.”

JERRY POURNELLE: Noonan on Trump; Trump and America First; Conservatism; On immigration; and other matters.

EVERYTHING YOU KNOW ABOUT TY COBB IS WRONG.

Which seems only fair, as everything you know about the 20th century is wrong.

OBAMA TO PRESS: YOU HAVE ‘RESPONSIBILITY’ ‘TO QUESTION,’ THANKS FOR WORKING ‘SIDE-BY-SIDE’ WITH ME.

Last night’s “Nerd Prom” marks the final days of, as former CBS executive Bernie Goldberg dubbed it in 2009, A Slobbering Love Affair between the media and Obama, which had begun in earnest the previous year:

Prom season means that graduation is soon to follow, and much like the bittersweet coda of American Graffiti, a very different relationship could be in store between the next president and, as Andrew Breitbart dubbed them “the Democrat-Media Complex,” which has chosen the form of its destructor. If so, a large swatch of the public won’t be very sympathetic to their plight; Andrew Klavan explores “The Media Corruption that Helped Spawn The Donald.”

FASTER, PLEASE: Sony files to patent new contact lenses that can record video, store it, play it back – and adjust zoom and focus automatically.

Well, this is the 21st century you know, to coin an Insta-phrase.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1088.

BOB MCMANUS: Cuomo has reason to worry as Bharara zeroes in on inner circle.

YEAH, PRETTY MUCH: McClatchy: Obama’s legacy: Politics of anger, fights, division.

Fist fights at campaign rallies. A major presidential candidate called a bigot and bully by members of his own party. Gridlock in Washington. And Americans downright pessimistic.

This is America’s politics today, seven years after Barack Obama was elected president with a promise to change it all.

The political change he predicted never appeared. Instead, partisanship and dysfunction have grown worse. His legacy on policies is more mixed. He did accomplish things, notably the Affordable Care Act. But his legacy on politics is another story.

Republicans and Democrats refuse to compromise, sometimes even talk. Congress has become more unproductive with lawmakers failing to pass budgets or even consider presidential appointments. And most Americans have little to no confidence in the federal government to tackle the problems facing the nation in 2016, according to a poll released in January.

Just Thursday, about 20 people were arrested after hundreds of protesters blocked an intersection and vandalized a police car outside a rally for Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump at the Orange County Fairgrounds in California. Several fights broke out.

“It’s fair to say that President Obama entered office as chief executive of a divided country, and he’s done nothing noticeable to heal those divisions in his seven years,” said William Galston, a former adviser to President Bill Clinton and now a senior fellow at the center-left Brookings Institution.

Well, yes, it’s fair to say that because it’s true. In fact, that’s actually putting it pretty mildly.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Health Advice From Walt Whitman.

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THIS IS CNN: After ‘Alleged Journalist’ White House Correspondents Dinner Joke, Don Lemon Gives Larry Wilmore the Finger.

To be fair, CNN has been giving its viewers the finger for at least two decades now. It’s only fair that they start flipping off their fellow Democrat operatives with lavaliers as well.

IDIOCRACY WASN’T MEANT TO BE A DOCUMENTARY: Larry Wilmore Reflects on Obama’s Legacy at White House Correspondents Dinner: ‘You Did It, My N*gga.’

ASHE SCHOW: Connecticut could become next state to adopt affirmative consent.

Connecticut could soon become the fourth state to adopt an affirmative consent or “yes means yes” policy for sexual conduct at its colleges and universities.

So far, California, Hawaii and New York have made affirmative consent the standard on college campuses. Affirmative consent requires each student involved in sexual activity to request ongoing consent for every action in the encounter. It essentially turns sex into a question-and-answer session dictated by the government, and if you deviate from that at all, then you’re a rapist.

Affirmative consent is unnatural in passionate moments such as sexual activity. While nonverbal communication is allowed under the policy, it is often more difficult to determine someone’s intent with just a moan or a head movement. In this way, affirmative consent leans more toward actually asking someone: “May I touch you here?” “May I kiss you here?” etc.

People don’t have sex that way, and they damn sure don’t want the government telling them how to have sex.

It’s all part of the ongoing war on college men. But the ultimate losers will be the colleges themselves, as they become finishing schools for girls.

TRUMP THUMPS THE RULING CLASS:

Last Christmas I ran into Newt Gingrich after Mass in Washington, D.C., and for the heck of it said to him, “So what job do you want in the Trump administration?” He looked at me with utter disbelief. Now I see him on TV bemoaning the slowness with which pundits grasped the Trump phenomenon. He was one of them.

Up in New York City I noticed that none of the anti-Trump outrage of the ruling class had trickled down to the peasants. They either didn’t care about Trump’s politically incorrect brashness or kind of liked it. While lavishly paid, “brilliantly perceptive” reporters and editors like David Remnick and James Fallows were saying that Trump had “zero chance” of winning the nomination, anybody who bothered to speak to ordinary folks walking the streets below the suites of The New Yorker could see that Trump had a huge opening. The George Wills, who spend more time tinkering with their cuff links than talking to people, also pronounced Trump an unelectable clown who would soon disappear back into the buffoonery from which he came.

Such inept punditry and incompetent reporting is the journalistic equivalent of a surgeon killing a patient on the operating table. Yet all these reporters and pundits keep working, often failing upwards to six-figure jobs, provided that they attend all the right parties and know all the right people.

The public’s exhaustion with, and at times hatred of, the corrupt ruling class, for which this naysaying anti-Trump media complex served as a constant advertisement, largely explains the rise of Trump. He fit the temper of the times and had the charisma to channel it toward a bust-up of the GOP establishment.

Choose the form of your destructor.

COMEDIAN D.L. HUGHLEY: Don’t Compare Civil Rights Movement to Transgenders’ Bowel Movements.

Hughley is so far to the left that in 2009 he told then-Republican National Party Chairman Michael Steele that Republicans ‘literally look like Nazi Germany.’ (An odd thing to say to a fellow African-American.) Pass the popcorn if he’s now forced into one of the left’s mandatory reeducation camps to maintain his career.

THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: ICE Director Admits ‘Sanctuary’ Policies Put Agents At Risk, But Refuses To Force Cities To Scrap Them.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: ‘Ban the Box’ Goes to College — When schools ask applicants about their criminal histories, a veneer of campus safety may come at the expense of educational opportunity.

What could go wrong?

NIKKI HALEY ON MOVING GITMO DETAINEES TO U.S.: ‘Do Not Bring Them to My Home.’

WHY TRUMP’S WINNING: It’s Still The Economy, Stupid.

DATA: How Foursquare knew before almost anyone how bad things were for Chipotle.

Chipotle announced its first loss as a public company Tuesday. But two weeks earlier, an unlikely source —the social media app Foursquare — had beat Chipotle to the punch, predicting in a blog post that the burrito maker’s sales would drop nearly 30 percent. Chipotle made it official Tuesday afternoon — reporting a drop of 29.7 percent.

The remarkably accurate prediction from a company consumers know for restaurant tips and the ability to check in at locations highlights the emerging power of the gobs of data our smartphones collect and the opportunity for savvy companies to convert that information into piles of cash.

“In biology the microscope changed the world. In physics and astronomy, the telescope,” said University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign professor Lav Varshney. “These data sets give a very detailed view of human behavior. It’s a really powerful instrument in all kinds of settings.”

Foursquare has spent seven years collecting data and has 85 million places in its database. It describes its data trove as the “biggest foot traffic panel in the world.” Clients that buy Foursquare’s data to glean insights include retailers, real estate developers, Wall Street traders and consumer package-goods companies.

They’re monetizing people’s egos.

FASTER, PLEASE: Blue Lives Matter: Cop Killing Could Become a Hate Crime.