MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Why we still don’t have flying cars: After regulation exploded in 1970, innovation hit a sustained speed bump.

SMALL ACTS OF COWARDICE ARE DESTROYING OUR CULTURE: “This is how culture wars are lost: through the slow accumulation of individually defensible but collectively unjustifiable decisions not to resist. It’s the decision that objecting during diversity training simply isn’t worth the hassle. It’s the decision not to say anything when you see a colleague or fellow student facing persecution because of their beliefs. It’s a life habit of always taking the path of least resistance, keeping your head down, and doing your best to preserve your own family and career. The small fights don’t matter anyway, right?”

WITH DNC IN MIND, CITY BANS CARRYING URINE, FECES: Russia used pee-swapping spies to get away with massive Olympics doping.

NAME ONE NIRVANA, AND THE OTHER ONE COBAIN: Astronomers discover two new giant lithium-rich stars in an old open cluster.

DON’T SAY YOU WEREN’T WARNED: “Voting for Obama anyway,” a flashback to Ben Smith, then of the Politico (now with BuzzFeed) in October of 2008.

TEST DRIVE: 2017 Kia Sportage SX Turbo 2.0L FWD.

COMEDY CENTRAL RATINGS PLUMMETING SINCE STEWART, COLBERT DEPARTURES.

I blame the inherent racism of their leftwing audience; as Moe Lane noted in January in regards to the Daily Show, “liberals don’t groove as much on the show because its new host Trevor Noah is a black dude.”

Beyond that, with the exception of South Park, Viacom’s Comedy Central essentially serves as the palace guard to the left, cooing sweet nothings to power. It’s too bad; as Stephen Kruiser writes, “Hillary Clinton is a comedy gold mine if you don’t treat her like a sacred cow. She’s a shrieking grandma who wears bright yellow Mao jackets and has a body count. There’s a lot of stuff there if someone would just go looking.” But they won’t, as they’re simply Democrat operatives with lavaliers and laugh tracks.

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SOMETHING THAT CAN’T GO ON FOREVER, WON’T — BUT KNOWING THERE’S A BUBBLE ISN’T THE SAME AS KNOWING WHEN IT WILL POP: How Long Will the Classic Sports-Car Bubble Last?

FASTER, PLEASE: A Malaria Vaccine Has Some Success In Testing.

GOZILLA VERSUS MECHAGODZILLA: I have Bill Whittle and Scott Ott to preview what promises to be the most negative presidential campaign in modern times.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Why we still don’t have flying cars: After regulation exploded in 1970, innovation hit a sustained speed bump. I love the illustration.

GO FORTH AND HAVE NO FEAR: VCDL floods Arlington Zoning Board meeting to successfully defeat an attempt to pull NOVA Armory’s occupancy permit on May11, 2016.  (Thank you.)

CAN WE BE VENEZUELA? ¡SI SE PUEDE! “Obama’s recent impromptu remarks to a Latin American audience provide a fleeting glimpse into how the American Left is preparing mainstream America for socialism.”

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1099.

ALL DR. PHIL IS SAYING IS GIVE SOME KIND OF PEACE A CHANCE: Dr. Phil: Trump, Paul Ryan Must Find ‘Some Kind of Peace.’

THE ART OF THE DEAL: Will Trump Play Nice for GOP Donors?

BILL AND HILLARY CLINTON GOT AT LEAST $100 MILLION FROM MIDDLE EAST SHEIKS: The Clintons have done something that has never before been done by any U.S. political figures – Using speaking fees, business partnerships, foundation grants and who knows what else made possible by public service to make themselves fabulously wealthy, without apparent regard for who suffered the consequences.

Richard Pollock of the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group pored over countless public documents and connected the dots to tell an incredible – and previously unreported – story that raises a multitude of disturbing new questions about a second Clinton presidency. Like how would the American people ever know with any certainty that a decision by President Hillary Clinton was made to advance the best interests of the U.S. or to make the Clintons even richer?

DIFFERENT, NOT WRONG: Stop drugging ADHD kids — and start teaching them to use their gifts.

WELL, TO BE HONEST, THEY’RE NOT VERY GOOD AT ESTABLISHMENTING. Why Trump Beat The Republican Establishment.

For some tens of millions of American voters, it matters less that Trump is clearly not well versed in policy nuances than that he has somehow identified and targeted the weakest points of establishment conservatism.

For what has the establishment GOP accomplished for its voters—excepting those in its well-nurtured class of consultants and lobbyists? In early 2015, the veteran pollster and Democratic consultant Pat Caddell analyzed a poll of Republican and independent voters, and was shocked by the widespread of animosity respondents expressed towards their own leaders. “The GOP leadership, the lawyers, the lobbyists, the consultant class of the Republican party don’t understand that these people are angry” Caddell said, continuing “I’ve never seen anything like this at the base of a party. And that is why the analogy to the Whigs is not so far-fetched.” This was six months before Trump walked down the escalator at Trump Tower.

He wasn’t talking about social-issue anger, which has been around for two generations and may be ebbing, but the emotions of people slowly losing their standing in their country. And what can the contemporary Republican Party point to? The war in Iraq, its relentless cheerleading for a war in Iran; lower taxes for the very rich; for its most establishment leaders, legalization of illegal immigrants. These all are proposed against a backdrop of accelerating economic inequality, and the shocking demographic decline—early death through hopelessness one might call it—of less-educated white people. The latter are probably not Trump voters, who more or less match the Republican average in income. But you can’t go to a Trump rally and sense that Trump voters are not so far removed from those people who have given up, and likely feel a sense of shared destiny with them more than does the typical Obama, Hillary or Romney voter. Trump, many conservative intellectuals claim, is not a conservative; but the natural retort to them is what precisely, with their agenda of foreign wars, middle- and working-class job loss, and high rates of immigration, are they trying to conserve?

In Trump’s case, the answer probably is something like an Eisenhower conservatism, with big government and secure employment.

I don’t think Trump can deliver that — Ike didn’t deliver it, it was just the fruit of winning a big war that left competitors playing catch-up for three decades — but you can see why people want it. Even Democrats act nostalgic for Eisenhower-era economics, even as they reject Eisenhower-era values.

Plus:

Trumpism is also, as some have noted but the mainstream press has ignored, an American variation of a pan-Western phenomenon. A closely contended referendum about Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union awaits; Marine Le Pen (after purging her father and moderating her party) is the leading politician in France (though the National Front is smaller than the combined center-left and establishment right), and even Germany—deeply and for good reason suspicious of any antiestablishment conservatism, has produced its own “nationalist” conservative party. Ditto Sweden, The Netherlands, Austria, anywhere you look. Due to geography more than any other factor, Europe’s immigration crisis is more severe than America’s, but its newly ascending conservative parties are interested in approximately the same thing—a desire to conserve the best elements about the society of their parents and own youth, including such attributes as a secure and self-confident working class and a considerable sense of common and shared culture. One can denounce such aspirations as bigotry and xenophobia all one wants, but their durability suggests that they are universal, natural and deeply rooted in the human personality.

In the United States, the question of the day is to what degree will the Republican Party go to accommodate and support these aspirations, of which Donald Trump has improbably become leading vector.

The ruling class in the West needs to get over its need to feel — and, worse, act — superior to its own working class voters.

SPENGLER: In Alien vs. Predator, I’m for Predator, Because He’s OUR Predator, David P. Goldman writes.

FREE SPEECH GOOD NEWS: University of Minnesota’s proposed free speech protections would be “the most comprehensive to date.”

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DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: “Professor Dennis Gouws is a tenured professor at Springfield College in Massachusetts who has run afoul of college authorities who in 2014 abruptly began to find fault with his teaching a long-established course, ‘Men in Literature.’ In 2016, they cancelled his course, culminating a long campaign of petty hostility against him because of his scholarly and professional interest in ‘biological maleness.’”