TWICHY: Mary Katharine Ham to Dems on Carryn Owens: ‘this moment is bigger than Trump or you.’

You’ll want to read the whole thing.

WHY DOES NANCY PELOSI HATE WORKING AMERICANS? Pelosi Refuses to Clap When Trump Talks About American Job Creation.

QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED:

• Is February 28, 2017, ‘The Night the Democratic Party Died’?

—Roger L. Simon, last night.

But the moment of the night came when Trump singled out Carryn Owens, the recently widowed wife of Special Officer Ryan Owens, a Navy SEAL killed during a raid in Yemen. There are still questions to be answered about the operation itself, some of which Owens’ father is demanding and deserves, but as the gallery stood and applauded for Carryn Owens, she broke out in tears and gratitude, at times looking up and mouthing words. The ovation lasted over two minutes. During the ovation, several Democrats were caught on camera remaining in their seats, including Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Bernie Sanders, Ellison and Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

Perhaps they felt the scene was exploitative, as several news personalities pointed out on Twitter, which is fine, but this was the party that rolled out Gold Star family members Khizr Muazzam Khan and Ghazala Khan during the Democrat National Convention and paraded them around cable news for a week in response to Trump’s flippant comments. Maybe, just maybe, both families, Khan and Owens are deserving of ovations. If the reason Democrats can’t rise and applaud the widow of a fallen service member, or victims of violent crime, or American companies based in the heartland of the country is fear of a backlash from their base, maybe the base they are catering to is the problem.

—The New Democrats’ Coming-Out Party Bombs During Trump Speech, Stephen Miller, Heat Street, today.

I’M OLD ENOUGH TO REMEMBER WHEN OBAMA SAID WE COULDN’T DRILL OUR WAY OUT OF OUR OIL SHORTAGE: U.S. oil exports are blowing past expectations.

HOME NETWORKING: Upgrade Your Home Wireless Network to Orbi and See What You’ve Been Missing.

I tried a number of routers over the past several months, including an Asus RT series, an Apple Airport, and a few others, touted as offering broad coverage. I even tried some extenders, that were small devices that supposedly extended coverage throughout the home. I found some minor differences, but none that improved the performance on the second floor or reached the garage. And even on the first floor, the signal was mediocre because the WiFi needed to pass through a thick wooden floor. My conclusion was for this 2600 sq. ft. home, a single router was just not sufficient for good coverage where I needed it.

That’s when I decided to try one of the new generation of mesh router systems that seems to have proliferated over the past six months. Each consists of a basic unit placed near the modem and one or two additional satellite units that are placed throughout the home. The concept is that they communicate with each other to deliver the WiFi signal to the remote units, located closer to where you need the strong signal, with each remote broadcasting a WiFi signal as if it was the primary router.

Among the numerous makes are Google WiFi, Eero and Orbi. From my research and speaking with others who had tried all of them, I settled on Orbi, a new product from Netgear, one of the major router brands. It’s the product that’s received the top reviews from a majority of the technology sites.

I had similar troubles last year, and ended up creating my own “mesh” network out of a commerical-grade ethernet switch and three of Ubiquiti Networking’s Unifi wireless access points. Orbi’s gear does the same thing for about the same price, but is easier to set up. Either way, the result is the same: Strong WiFi throughout your house — and probably most of your property, too.

PRESIDENT ME HAS LEFT THE BUILDING: Trump references self 60 percent less than Obama in first joint session speech.

AT AMAZON, Deep Discounts on Open-box and Used Sports Equipment.

SKYNET SMILES: This Smart AI Can Now Steal Code to Write Its Own Programs.

21ST CENTURY EDUCATION: Code schools and boot camps that teach computer programming skills prove they can rapidly retrain American workers for the 21st century.

Code schools aren’t the place to go if you want to be a “rock star” at Google or Facebook. These are designed to turn out junior developers, or “apprentices” as they’re known at Software Guild, which currently has 16 instructors and 148 students split between in-person and online programs. Students learn just enough to be dropped into teams of more experienced coders and continue their education at a company, even as they draw a competitive full-time salary. They aren’t building the high-flying startups; most are simply translating business processes into code, transforming data or helping maintain and update legacy systems.

The number of code-school graduates is roughly doubling every year, says Liz Eggleston of Course Report, one of the few organizations that track these schools. In 2016, there were nearly 18,000 graduates of code schools, a healthy number when you compare it with the nearly 60,000 students who graduated with computer-science degrees from U.S. colleges and universities in 2015. There are currently 91 full-time coding “boot camps” in the U.S. spread across 71 cities, up from just a handful in 2012, when the phenomenon began in tech hotspots like San Francisco and New York.

It doesn’t seem possible for public education to keep up, much less compete. Or stay relevant.

SPY HARD: Kim Jong Nam murder suspect trades ‘LOL’ T-shirt for bulletproof vest as she makes court appearance.

The other suspect, Indonesian Siti Aisyah, nodded as her translator told her: “You are accused of murdering a North Korean man at the departure hall” of Kuala Lumpur International Airport. She was dressed in a red T-shirt and jeans.

The women did not enter pleas because the magistrate court where they appeared has no jurisdiction over a murder case. Lead prosecutor Iskander Ahmad told the court he will ask for the case to be transferred to a higher court and for both women to be tried together.

Each faces a mandatory death sentence if convicted. Both women were wearing bulletproof vests as they were escorted from the court to Kajang Prison.

Kim Jong Nam was attacked as he waited for his flight home to Macau on Feb. 13. He died shortly after two women went up behind him and wiped something onto his face.

Both women have reportedly said they thought they were part of a prank TV show playing harmless tricks on unsuspecting passengers. Aisyah told authorities she was paid the equivalent of $90.

This is the most unbelievable assassination story outside of a bad spy movie.

FLOPPING ACES: No, George W. Bush did not criticize Donald Trump. He agreed with Trump. “An independent press would publish what W said and let you decide what he meant. Instead, they publish snippets, at times editing the quotes, and then they tell you what they think he meant. But we don’t have an independent press. I think W and Trump are very much on the same page. Once again W outsmarts the media. And so I agree with W. We do need an independent press. It is indispensable. I look forward to the day.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: The BigLaw Massacre Approaches. “Bad news for the tens of thousands of newly minted lawyers who pass the bar every year and hope to get associate positions at big law firms sorting through documents for corporate clients: Robots are taking your jobs.” I was writing about this years ago in Small Is The New BigLaw.

Meanwhile, it’s not just lawyers: “For the past few years, most of the commentary about technological innovation has focused on the way it has eliminated working and middle-class jobs like manufacturing. But the next round of the information revolution may put pressure on ‘symbolic analyst’ jobs that are mostly coded as upper-middle or professional class.”

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU SHARE, AND WITH WHOM: Insurance Company Cancels Couple’s Policy After Seeing Pic of Their Dog on Facebook.

SCOTT ADAMS: “If Trump maintains a constructive engagement with the black community, and continues to talk about unity, while his critics call him ‘dark,’ who wins the persuasion? Trump’s critics might accidentally turn him into the third black president. (Counting Bill Clinton as first.) That’s obviously a big stretch, but you didn’t think he would get elected president either. Four years is a lot of time for a Master Persuader.”

HMM: America Needs a Space Corps: It’s time for the Pentagon to create an independent orbital military service.

ONE-THE-JOB TRAINING: Iran Sends Students, Cadets to Syria.

Just a year and a half ago, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif shamelessly denied that Iran had sent any troops to fight in Syria even as one of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ top generals was killed in fighting in Aleppo. Six months later, Tasnim, a news portal affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard acknowledged that more than 1,000 Iranians had already died fighting in Syria. (So much for the honesty of the official in whom John Kerry put so much trust).

As the Iranian regime—newly-resourced with billions of dollars as a result of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action—has doubled down on Syria, it has sought to supplement its presence. Initially, that meant student volunteers. Given the high rate of casualties, however, it appears the Iranian government has gone to new lengths to shore up its Syria presence.

It isn’t imperialism when they do it.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Law School Applicants From Top Colleges Increased 1% In 2016 (But Down 48% Since 2010).

MARINE LE PEN SMILES: Fillon refuses to quit French election despite charges.

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: The Coming Warbot Revolution.

Most militaries continue to look at warbots as support weapons that can conduct reconnaissance, selective strike, and logistical or other supporting tasks. Many military leaders are most comfortable with warbots in these limited rolesbecause it is easier to keep humans in the loop and therefore retain a greater feeling of control. There is comparatively little discussion of incorporating warbots in significant, and in certain scenarios, primary combat roles into future combat doctrine. To do so, and to take advantage of the full capabilities of warbots, would require acceptance of a greater degree of autonomy, akin to the Army concept of Mission Command, than the US military seems to be comfortable with at this point. The U.S. military continues to invest in manned combat systems, yet warbots offer tremendous potential advantages as primary combatants. They are simply more capable, cheaper, and offer less risk to humans than manned equivalents in many, if not most, combat situations.

Robotic systems are able to engage enemies and respond to threats at far higher speeds than humans.The AH-64D Apache attack helicopter’s Longbow fire control radar already “automatically searches, detects, locates, classifies, and prioritizes multiple moving and stationary targets on land, air, and water in all weather and battlefield conditions.”[iv] Adding the ability to engage within human “on the loop” specified parameters offers the advantage of getting the first, and likely lethal, shot off faster than a human “in the loop” configuration. While the Israeli Trophy Active Protection System (APS) is a defensive system, it further demonstrates how faster reaction times could be achieved in an offensive system. It is a “fully automated” active point defense for vehicles thatresponds without human intervention to rapidly detect and neutralize incoming rockets and missiles with both “shotgun like blast[s] of pellets” as well as jamming.[v] Inserting a human into this decision loop would degrade the system and put it at a disadvantage due the necessity of ultra fast reaction times to counter an incoming missile.

Skynet smiles.

IT’S COME TO THIS: ‘From Kunta Kente to Toby’ — Van Jones’ fellow leftists trash him over praise for Trump’s joint address.

A.P. FACT CHECK FAIL: Trump Claim on Terrorism and Immigration Correlates with Justice Dept. Data.

Silly, it isn’t the A.P.’s job to upset a perfectly established narrative.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Why heroin and classroom sex aren’t enough to get teachers fired anymore.

THEY CAN HAVE IT: Turkey seeks to ‘absorb’ northern Syria.

Ankara seeks “to absorb northern Syria into the greater Turkey,” because the Turkish authorities want to take possession of Syrian water and oil resources, says Richard Hayden Black, an Republican member of the Virginia state Senate.

Turkey uses terrorist groups like Daesh and al-Qaeda to carry out ethnic cleansing in northern Syria and pave the ground for Ankara’s dominance there, the senator told Press TV on Tuesday.

According to Hayden Black, “The group ISIS (Daesh) is sort of a tool of Turkey, of the United States, [and] of all of these groups (US allies). They don’t want [Syria] to eventually survive, because Erdogan sees himself as the head of a vast caliphate, [and] as [the head of] a resurgent Ottoman Empire that stretches from Europe onto China.”

Well, that’s a little over the top. It seems unlikely that however authoritarian Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ambitions are domestically, that he would want to take on the Arab world’s dysfunctions, too.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: A Campus Free Speech Case Study Emerges In Vermont.

Vermont’s elite Middlebury College is gearing up for a test of its commitment to open discourse and free speech this week, when political scientist Charles Murray visits the school on Thursday. . . .

As must be expected every time a speaker to the right of Noam Chomsky visits campuses these days, protests are being planned for the day of Murray’s visit and dozens of recent alumni have signed a petition condemning him. Fliers have been circulating on campus accusing Murray of denying the “humanity” of persons of color in a book he coauthored called “The Bell Curve”, which analyzed sophisticated but controversial data sets which purported to show that black Americans and poor Americans have lower average IQs than wealthier and whiter Americans.

Middlebury College will not be paying Murray to speak; a student chapter of the American Enterprise Institute is using its own funds to bring him to Vermont. Middlebury’s Political Science department, however, has agreed to promote and co-sponsor the event. Department chair Bertram Johnson says he asks two basic questions when considering whether to sponsor a lecture: “Is it related to political science and is there sufficient interest that it would generate student interest and attendance?” Meanwhile, Middlebury College President Laurie Patton plans to attend the lecture because, as her spokesman put it, “Our view is that if we stand for anything, it’s the free exchange of ideas.”

Good for Johnson and Patton. This is precisely the kind of statement that administrators should be making in favor of open political discourse. Others, meanwhile, can protest if they would like to, but we hope they will give Murray a chance to speak. As the prominent liberal commentator Van Jones eloquently put it earlier this week, administrators and faculty who restrict speech on campus and the students who demand such restrictions “are creating a kind of liberalism that the minute it crosses the street into the real world, that is not just useless, but obnoxious and dangerous.”

It also encourages ignorance, which is fitting given that the subject of Murray’s lecture is his 2012 book “Coming Apart”. In the book, Murray argues that upper middle class whites have no awareness of how most of the country lives, what it believes, or the challenges their fellow citizens face with drugs, family breakdown, economic headwinds, and declining social trust.

Students at elite institutions are demanding to remain ignorant. But why should anyone care what they think? They don’t know anything.