CENSORSHIP: Turkey cuts off Wikipedia amid dissent crackdown.

DAVE MAJUMDAR: “It’s Like Fighting Mr. Invisible”: How I Went to War Against Stealth F-22 Raptors and F-35s (And Lost Badly).

“Even if you were in an Eagle or J-20… You felt the same thing,” a senior Air Force official with an air superiority background told me after my flight—referring to the feeling of utter helplessness of being attacked by an invisible enemy. “Because of the security cloak, it’s just impossible to explain. If everyone really knew and we asked to ‘choose their weapon’—there would be no doubt.”

Flying back to Langley, the experience was an eye-opener. I have been covering the Raptor and the F-35 since beginning of both programs. It is one thing to intellectually grasp the power of stealth, but seeing it in action makes one a believer—our flight had no idea, no warning from the AWACS or GCI that we were about to be hit until it was all over. It’s nearly impossible to fight an enemy you can’t see.

While the Raptor would be the most formidable fighter in the world due to its raw performance even without stealth, it’s now clear to me that even the F-35 with its mediocre kinematic performance will be an extremely dangerous foe in the air due to its low radar cross-section and sensors.

What’s most interesting is how well the Royal Air Force Typhoons play with U.S. stealth fighters. It makes the case for maintaining our own “high/low mix” of expensive stealth jets and less-expensive traditional jets.

A “BLACK NATIONALIST” WITH A PCP PROBLEM: Five Things To Know About Derick Brown, Dallas’ Alleged Paramedic Shooter. “Brown was a member of the New Black Panthers, a group he served as chairman of in the early 2000s. In 2004, he popped up on the Anti-Defamation League’s radar when he proclaimed that his group was ‘ready to die in self-defense’ during a protest at Dallas Police Department headquarters. The New Black Panthers, according the ADL, are an anti-semitic, racist hate group.”

SEPARATE BUT EQUAL? President-Free Correspondents’ Dinner May be ‘Healthiest Thing,’ Says CNN Reporter Don Lemon. ‘He wants to talk to his crowd. Good for him. Go for it.’

CHANGE: Fox ousts old guard as right mulls competition.

Competition is good. Stacy McCain has been warning about the “Fox trap” for years and he’s right. Don’t put all your eggs in one (effectively monopoly) media basket.

FASTER, PLEASE: End the discrimination against nuclear power.

Gov. John Kasich has long championed cost-effective action for clean air and the environment and last year vetoed legislation that would have repealed the state’s solar and wind mandates.

Unfortunately, those mandates exclude nuclear power, which provides 90 percent of Ohio’s clear energy. As a result, Ohio’s nuclear plants are at risk of closing — and killing over 1,300 high-paying, high-skill jobs.

Cheap natural gas has played a role in nuclear’s troubles, but why then have solar and wind been booming during a time of low natural gas prices? The answer is obvious: They benefit from over 23 years of federal subsidies and state mandates like the one Kasich supports for wind and solar — and which excludes nuclear.

Like most environmentalists, I used to be opposed to nuclear power. I thought solar and wind would be enough. But the more I learned about solar and wind, I realized they could never power a high-energy industrial civilization.

Anyone serious about reducing carbon emissions has to be serious about nuclear power, unless their real goal is a serious reduction in the number of living human beings.

STILL NOT TIRED OF WINNING: American Oil and Gas Surge to New Highs.

Shale companies are using hydraulic fracturing to harness a flood of new supplies of hydrocarbons. On the oil side of things, American production has surged from 8.5 million barrels per day (bpd) in October to nearly 9.3 million bpd today—a nearly 10 percent jump in just six months. As the EIA reports, much of that growth is being fueled by west Texas’s Permian Basin. . . .

The last U.S. Geological Survey estimate pegged the Permian Basin’s riches at potentially more than 20 billion barrels of oil and 16 trillion cubic feet (tcf) of natural gas—a veritable bounty. That shale formation is the undisputed engine of this newest shale renaissance.

This oil rebound has come about as a result of OPEC & co.’s decision to cut output to help push prices back up—a move that has helped shale producers as much (if not more) than it has assisted those petrostates.

But natural gas output is surging as well, perhaps a more remarkable feat considering that American production of that hydrocarbon hasn’t suffered as much (though it has declined slightly) as a result of falling global prices. Even in the midst of this natural gas surge, new EIA data shows that natural gas production in the continental U.S. had its biggest monthly increase in February in almost three years. . . .

U.S. shale still produces only a fraction of global oil and gas output, but that fraction is large enough—and has come on the scene quickly enough—to push supply past demand and help keep energy prices relatively low. At the same time, it’s given America more foreign policy options by bolstering our domestic energy security, and changing the tenor of the U.S. energy debate from one focused on scarcity to today’s paradigm of abundance.

Have you hugged a fracker today? A few years ago I had dinner with a former student and her husband, a big investor into fracking. “You’re saving Western Civilization,” I told him. I wasn’t wrong.

“PROMOTED?”: Briton who promoted Islamic State with special cufflinks jailed for eight years.

From the Reuters headline, you might be under the mistaken impression that a man was sent to prison for wearing pro-ISIS cufflinks — but no:

A British man who stored material about missile systems on data sticks disguised as cufflinks and created an extensive online manual for members of Islamic State was sentenced to eight years’ jail on Tuesday.

Samata Ullah, 34, an unemployed man from Cardiff in Wales, had admitted five terrorism charges including membership of Islamic State (IS).

Police recovered 30 pairs of USB sticks disguised as cufflinks, which contained a guide to missile systems and instructions on how to avoid detection online.

That sounds a bit more serious than mere “promotion.”

WELL, UNC HAS ALWAYS FELT COMPETITIVE WITH UVA: Is UNC Campus Rape Heroine Actually a Campus Rape Hoaxer?

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Trump Will Test Democrats’ Tax Patriotism: President’s plan would make high-tax blue states pay their fair share.

WORLD WAR TWO AIRCRAFT SHAKE AND BAKE: This is a classic photo — American phosphorus bombs striking Japanese aircraft lined up at Rabaul’s Lakunai Field. (From StrategyPage’s WW2 aircraft photo series.)

TOURING MOAB: No, not Utah. The target site in Afghanistan visited by a U.S. Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB) bomb.

With lush sprawling green meadows and grazing cattle surrounded by snow-capped mountains, the scene could be any idyllic spring countryside. But look a little closer and the scorched trees signal something far from idyllic, the results of detonating the largest non-nuclear bomb the U.S has ever used in combat.

Photos obtained by Fox News in Afghanistan taken less than two weeks after the strategically targeted explosion of the Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB) bomb to destroy ISIS fighters and their underground tunnels in Eastern Afghanistan’s Achin district of Nanganhar province show just how devastating the munition is.

MORE:

“There were tunnels that were entirely destroyed, decimated guns of ISIS, about 20 dead bodies and trees ripped from the earth,” Amini recalled, after having gone into areas of Achin without escort. “Scores of houses were also destroyed, and even parts of the mountain were, too.”

Someone send the link to Kim Jong Un, Pyongyang, North Korea.

CHARLIE MARTIN: Remember the VICTIMS of Communism on May Day.

There are around 100,000,000 of them.

WORLD WAR ONE POWDER KEG UPDATE: A short but indicative survey of troubles in the Balkans.

SAMPLE:

Many European and North American observers fret that the Balkans are spinning out of the EU’s liberal orbit of influence and sliding into the authoritarian orbits of Russia and Turkey. What impact, then, might the recent Turkish referendum have in this region?
Not a lot, argues Dimitar Bechev in his very clear comment piece for Balkan Insight.

Turkey’s influence in the region has in any case been waning. More importantly, the real model for Balkan leaders is Hungary’s Viktor Orban – like him, they want to be inside the EU, reaping the rewards of membership, without conforming to European norms of good governance and democracy.

CONRAD BLACK: Make-or-Break Moment At Hand for America Over Economic Growth.

GDP growth declined from 4.5% annually in the last six Reagan years, to 3.9% in the last six Clinton years (as the current-account deficit and the housing bubble ballooned), to 2% in the George W. Bush years, to 1% in the Obama years. If per capita GDP had increased in the first 15 years of this new century as it had in the years between 1945 and 2000, families and individuals in the United States would be 20 percent wealthier than they are. In the Reagan years, the federal debt increased to 50% of GDP from 40%. That debt declined a little in the Clinton years, but, in this century, even as a percentage of GDP, it has more than doubled.

These are extremely dangerous trends. The average American is aware of a 15-year flat-lined income in terms of buying power, and the absence of job security despite an official level of unemployment of a very acceptable 4.7%. Most would know, from their own experiences or acquaintances, that the labor force has shrunk, in fact by 15 million people.

There are now over 20 million Americans of prime employment age (25 to 54) who have dropped out and are sustained by the benefit system, especially Medicaid-supplied painkillers, food stamps, and activities that generally escape official compilation. Many of these are among the 750,000 people released each year by the bloated and corrupt prison system, which does all it can to demotivate, stigmatize, and render unemployable those released — and make more likely the return to its embrace. The system in any case always imprisons at least as many new convicts each year.

If the Trump administration does not get a tax bill through that rekindles economic expansion, the entire American project is going to face its greatest crisis since Roosevelt came in to grapple with the Great Depression.

Read the whole thing.

ROGER KIMBALL: Trump Critics Exude Desperate Political Nihilism. Desperate, indeed. And worse yet, as Ann Althouse noted the other day, they’ve become boring.

DAN HANNAN: Conservatives International launches next month in Miami. Join us!

When I was growing up in Lima in the 1970s, Western visitors were astonished by the shantytowns, the barriadas, as they were known, that ringed that grimy city. Why, they asked, did people leave the countryside to live in these squalid slums? Why swap the pure air of the Andes for traffic fumes and sewage?

It was a very First World question. No Peruvian ever asked why people were quitting villages that lacked electricity and clean water. The barriadas may have been ugly, but they were humming with enterprise. They offered work, access to schools and clinics, a power supply. They were, for most of their denizens, transitional, a staging post between mountain squalor and something better. . . .

Employees of foreign-owned companies in Vietnam earn 210 percent of the average wage. The readiness of that country to open itself to trade and investment has brought huge benefits to the Vietnamese, including those on the lowest incomes. Over 19 years, the West struggled to defeat totalitarian socialism in Vietnam, and failed. Three decades of trade have achieved what 60,000 American lives and over a trillion dollars in today’s prices in military spending failed to achieve: the end of Communism.

Developing countries which open their markets eliminate poverty more quickly than those which don’t. Compare Vietnam to Myanmar, or Colombia to Venezuela, or Bangladesh to Pakistan. A study of developing states since 1980 showed that those which had joined the global trading system enjoyed annual growth at an average of 5 percent, as against 1.5 percent for those which hadn’t. . . .

Liberalization works every time. Look at India since 1991, or China since 1979 — or, before that, at Singapore, South Korea, Chile. So why don’t others follow?

Much of the answer has to do with politics. Right-of-center parties in many less developed countries are both oligarchic and autocratic. They are aware of the inequalities of wealth in their nations, and believe that the only way to appeal to a poor and often badly-educated electorate is through bribery in the form of public works, or else through nationalism.

They are wrong. You don’t have to be rich or educated to grasp that fewer government officials and less form-filling will make a country less corrupt. The handful of politicians brave enough to offer that formula — Colombia’s Alvaro Uribe, for example — were richly rewarded at the polls.

The world is in a strange place when it takes an international movement of conservatives to promote liberalization.

PAUL RYAN’S ONGOING QUESTION: Rush on the terrible spending bill: “Why is anybody voting Republican, if this is what happens when we win?”

SHOW ME THE MONEY: Paul Ryan’s crucial cash surge.

First in Axios: Paul Ryan had another monster fundraising month for House Republicans, with his political entities sending $2.75 million to the National Republican Congressional Committee in April. That’s more than half a million more than the Speaker sent the committee in April 2016 — an election year.

Why this matters: Republicans need a ton of cash and fast to deal with an increasingly unstable political landscape. It’s only a few months past Election Day but the off-year special elections are tougher than many expected, with Democrats seeing each race as an opportunity to channel the entire progressive movement against Trump.

And House Republicans are already sweating 2018. Members are going home every weekend and facing angry progressive protesters. They’re already visualizing the inevitably brutal Democratic attack ads on everything from budget cuts to the unpopular Obamacare replacement bill.

Context: Ryan’s political operation tells us he’s sent nearly $20 million to the NRCC since the start of 2017. Over the same period in 2016 Ryan sent about $13 million to the NRCC. Ryan has also directly helped raise cash for the special election candidates, signing fundraising emails for candidates in Kansas, Georgia and Montana.

Ryan is almost certainly safe as Speaker while he brings in that kind of money.

RIGGED: DNC argues in court: We don’t owe anyone a fair primary process.

The Democratic National Committee is currently defending itself in court against a lawsuit brought by Bernie Sanders supporters over the Democratic presidential primary process. And the proceedings, including an April 25 hearing in which the party argued the case should be dismissed, are already becoming quite amusing.

As Michael Sainato puts it in the Observer, “lawyers representing the DNC and Debbie Wasserman Schultz double[d] down on arguments confirming the disdain the Democratic establishment has toward Bernie Sanders supporters and any entity challenging the party’s status quo.”

Hillary 2020! Slogan: This time, it really IS her turn!

KEEP PORTLAND VIOLENT AND OPPRESSED: Portland’s May Day March Quickly Spins Out of Control.

RYAN COOPER: The New York Times‘ staggering own goal on climate change.

It isn’t what you think:

Over the weekend, The New York Times found itself in a lot of hot water over the climate change views of its new columnist, Bret Stephens. The former Wall Street Journal editor has long espoused a sort of breezy science denial-lite, so liberal Times readers (i.e. most of them) reacted with stunned disbelief that the paper would waste the most valuable op-ed space in America on not only a third boring conservative white man, but one who downplays climate change, the most important problem in the world.

Stephens reacted by making his very first effort a defensive, smarmy column, full of gaping logical holes and disastrous scientific errors, about how the left was being mean to him over climate change. Many liberals were enraged enough to cancel their subscriptions over it. It’s both an excellent illustration of warped thinking about climate change, and how upper-class liberals’ need for civil discourse can lead to staggering own goals.

Got that? Gentry liberals attempted to shout down Stephens’ call for dialog and cast him out as a heretic on climate change because of their need for civil discourse.