YES. Is it possible to be too ‘nice’ for your own good?

ANNALS OF FAKE NEWS: Former CNN host: Some there were “determined” to elect Hillary.

“They weren’t even pretending,” Morgan says about the media in general, “to be anything but in the tank for Hillary Clinton.”

As for what happens now, Morgan says that both sides need to calm down and reflect. “I think there is fault on both sides here” for the current “dangerous and toxic” relationship between the Trump administration and the media. “I think that the media have got to start showing President Trump a bit more respect, and he in turn and his White House operation have got to show the media more respect — and they’ve all got to move on.”

Morgan makes an excellent point about the root of the problem in American media. In the UK, Morgan notes, media outlets make very little pretense of having no point of view, so readers and viewers can put their reporting in context. “It’s pretty balanced down the middle,” Morgan explains, with “as many left-wing papers in Britain as there are right-wing. In America, what I don’t like is this pretense from papers like the New York Times that somehow they are completely beyond any reproach when it comes to their coverage, that they are completely neutral. They’re not neutral,” Morgan declares, and then goes on to point out examples of editorial bias.

By the way, Morgan points out, the temper tantrums in the US over Trump’s win are also taking place in the UK over the Brexit vote. In both cases, the media seems to be cheerleading them to some extent, too. “It’s one of the great hissy fits of modern political times.”

Indeed it is.

YOUNG PIONEERS: Socialist Student Group Teaches How to Beat Up Trump’s ‘Fascists’

A wise man once said something about punching back twice as hard.

JONATHAN RAUCH:

For this article, I set out to develop a list of telltales that the president is endangering the Constitution and threatening democracy. I failed. In fact, I concluded that there can be no such list, because many of the worrisome things that an antidemocratic president might do look just like things that other presidents have done. Use presidential power to bully corporations? Truman and Kennedy did that. Distort or exaggerate facts to initiate or escalate a war? Johnson and George W. Bush did that. Lie point-blank to the public? Eisenhower did that. Defy orders from the Supreme Court? Lincoln did that. Suspend habeas corpus? Lincoln did that, too. Spy on American activists? Kennedy and Johnson did that. Start wars at will, without congressional approval? Truman did that. Censor “disloyal” speech and fire “disloyal” civil servants? Wilson did that. Incarcerate U.S. citizens of foreign extraction? Franklin D. Roosevelt did that. Use shady schemes to circumvent congressional strictures? Reagan did that. Preempt Justice Department prosecutors? Obama did that. Assert sweeping powers to lock people up without trial or judicial review? George W. Bush did that. Declare an open-ended national emergency? Bush did that, and Obama continued it. Use regulatory authority aggressively and, according to the courts, sometimes illegally? Obama did that. Kill a U.S. citizen abroad? Obama did that, too. Grant favors to political friends, and make mischief for political enemies? All presidents do that.

But Rauch’s overall piece — about how “civil society” should rally to control Trump — is just more evidence in favor of my theory that if you want a President constrained by “civil society,” you need to elect a white, male Republican.

I HAD BEEN ASSURED IT WAS A TERRIBLE FIGHTER: F-35 Scores Impressive 15:1 Kill Ratio at Red Flag War Games.

Running from January 23 to February 10, this year’s Red Flag involves more threats to pilots than ever before, including surface-to-air missiles (SAMs), radar jamming equipment, and an increased number of red air, or mock enemy aircraft. Against the ramped-up threats, the F-35A only lost one aircraft for every 15 aggressors killed, according to Aviation Week.

The F-35 Lightning II’s advanced avionics software was the star of the show, as multiple F-35s successfully compiled data into a detailed layout of the battlefield with each individual threat pinpointed. The stealthy aircraft could then slip into weak spots in the defensive layout and take out SAM targets, opening up the space for follow-on forces of legacy fighters. Even when the F-35s ran out of munitions, F-22 and fourth-generation fighter pilots wanted the aircraft to remain in the combat zone, soaking up data and porting target info to the older fighters.

And the next batch of Air Force F-35As should come in at under $100 million per copy, thanks to Lockheed’s continuing production and volume efficiency improvements. That price is down 60% since the initial low-rate production run, and each new batch has come in at a lower flyaway cost than the preceding one.

The wisdom of forcing nearly-identical airframes into VTOL service (Marine F-35B) and aircraft carrier service (Navy F-35C) can and should still be debated. But the F-35A seems, at long last, to be performing to Air Force spec.

There’s some icing on this cake, too. We’ll build a couple thousand of our second fifth-generation jet, while the Russians and Chinese struggle to put up just one or two stealth fighter squadrons of dubious quality.

IS THERE ANYTHING DONALD TRUMP CAN’T DO? Lena Dunham: ‘Soul-crushing pain’ of Trump’s election made me lose weight.

BUT TELL ME, DO YOU KIPPLE? Kipling’s Poetic Hits (And Misses).

SOME CULTURES ARE MORE EVIL THAN OTHERS: Islamic State recruiting child refugees as they head to Europe. 

AN OPPORTUNITY THAT MAY NOT COME AGAIN IS EXACTLY HOW I SEE IT: Education at a Crossroads.

THEY PUT THEIR MONEY IN, THEY PUSHED THE RIGHT LEVER, BUT THE MACHINE DIDN’T DELIVER THEIR TREAT: Now they’re raging in panic, afraid their machine no longer works and they’re going to starve.  Good.  The Longest Nooooo!

NEWS FROM THE “TOLERANT” LEFT: This Yarn Store Owner Received Rape Threats For Opposing The Women’s March, But She Won’t Back Down.  I hope she knows she’s NOT alone.

HILLARY IS SEXIST AND ANDROPHOBIC: ‘The Future Is Female’: Watch Hillary Clinton’s First Public Remarks Since Donald Trump’s Inauguration.

A NOT UNCOMMON STORY: How the ctrl-Left drove me away from American liberalism.

WHY DEFAME THE WHITE MEN WHO WORKED AT NASA? The all-American appeal of ‘Hidden Figures’.

DEMONSTRATING HOW MUCH THE NEW UBER HATERS LIVE IN A BUBBLE: Trump’s travel ban was the wrong reason to boycott Uber.

THE AUCTION CATALOG IS ALREADY A BEST SELLER: Sotheby’s erotic art auction.

THE TRAIL OF (CROCODILE) TEARS FROM THIS WILL BE ENDLESS: Elizabeth Warren Cut Off From Speaking Against Jeff Sessions Because She Violated Senate Rules.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: UC Berkeley Staffer Under Investigation for Participating in anti-Milo Riot.

SCIENCE, UNSETTLED: Federal scientist cooked climate change books ahead of Obama presentation, whistle blower charges.

ESPN WENT FULL SJW. NEVER GO FULL SJW. Disney Q1 Revenue Weighed Down By ESPN Struggles.

STRATEGY TO DESTROY NORTH KOREAN MISSILES: The U.S. and South Korea are conducting military exercises “to detect, defend, disrupt and destroy North Korea missiles…” Purveyors of Pentagonese have already dubbed it called 4D.

If UPI fact checkers did an internet search they’d discover that a “simultaneous strategic bombing strike” to destroy nuclear weapons isn’t a new concept. (Scroll through the essay to find the paragraph describing one.)

AT AMAZON, up to 60 percent off in Outdoor Recreation.

Plus, Warehouse Deals in Home Improvement.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: If you’re reading this, you should probably have more children. It’s a little late for us. We’d have had more if we could have.

AS LIMBAUGH WAS SAYING THE OTHER DAY, IF TRUMP DOESN’T DELIVER ON THIS PROMISE THE BASE WILL CONSIDER HIM A FAILURE REGARDLESS OF WHAT ELSE HE DOES: Republicans begin to grumble: Why haven’t we repealed Obamacare yet?

REAFFIRMING QUANTUM WEIRDNESS: Cool article, from Quanta. Spooky action at a distance, man.

Dig:

“Technically, this experiment is truly impressive,” said Nicolas Gisin, a quantum physicist at the University of Geneva who has studied this loophole around entanglement.

More:

The universe might be like a restaurant with 10 menu items, Friedman said. “You think you can order any of the 10, but then they tell you, ‘We’re out of chicken,’ and it turns out only five of the things are really on the menu. You still have the freedom to choose from the remaining five, but you were overcounting your degrees of freedom.” Similarly, he said, “there might be unknowns, constraints, boundary conditions, conservation laws that could end up limiting your choices in a very subtle way” when setting up an experiment, leading to seeming violations of local realism.

Wow:

In the first of a planned series of “cosmic Bell test” experiments, the team sent pairs of photons from the roof of Zeilinger’s lab in Vienna through the open windows of two other buildings and into optical modulators, tallying coincident detections as usual. But this time, they attempted to lower the chance that the modulator settings might somehow become correlated with the states of the photons in the moments before each measurement. They pointed a telescope out of each window, trained each telescope on a bright and conveniently located (but otherwise random) star, and, before each measurement, used the color of an incoming photon from each star to set the angle of the associated modulator. The colors of these photons were decided hundreds of years ago, when they left their stars, increasing the chance that they (and therefore the measurement settings) were independent of the states of the photons being measured.

And yet, the scientists found that the measurement outcomes still violated Bell’s upper limit, boosting their confidence that the polarized photons in the experiment exhibit spooky action at a distance after all.

So. Unentangle and read it.