A-ELECTRIC WARFARE: Israel approves Palestinian move to pressure Hamas with electricity cuts.

NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Scientists Perform Site-Specific Surgery on Nanoparticles. “A team of chemists led by Carnegie Mellon University’s Rongchao Jin has for the first time conducted site-specific surgery on a nanoparticle. The procedure, which allows for the precise tailoring of nanoparticles, stands to advance the field of nanochemistry. The surgical technique developed by Qi Li, the study’s lead author and a 3rd year graduate student in the Jin group, will allow researchers to enhance nanoparticles’ functional properties, such as catalytic activity and photoluminescence, increasing their usefulness in a wide variety of fields including health care, electronics and manufacturing.”

INTERESTING: Brain Architecture: Scientists Discover 11 Dimensional Structures That Could Help Us Understand How the Brain Works. “Scientists studying the brain have discovered that the organ operates on up to 11 different dimensions, creating multiverse-like structures that are ‘a world we had never imagined.’ By using an advanced mathematical system, researchers were able to uncover architectural structures that appears when the brain has to process information, before they disintegrate into nothing.”

DIGITAL UNDERGROUND: Bitcoin Is Helping the Pot Business Get Over Its Banking Problem.

THIS EXPLAINS WHY I’M SO MILD-MANNERED AND ACCEPTING: Eating a low carb breakfast may make you a more tolerant person.

BRIDGET JOHNSON: Paul Ryan Advice to Trump: ‘Let Robert Mueller Do His Job’

NOBODY TELL ANN ALTHOUSE: Dockers Men’s Classic-Fit Perfect-Short – New British Khaki (Cotton), $19.99 – $29.99.

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Is America Encouraging the Wrong Kind of Entrepreneurship?

In a 1990 paper, “Entrepreneurship: Productive, Unproductive, and Destructive,” Baumol argued that the level of entrepreneurial ambition in a country is essentially fixed over time, and that what determines a nation’s entrepreneurial output is the incentive structure that governs and directs entrepreneurial efforts between “productive” and “unproductive” endeavors.

Most people think of entrepreneurship as being the “productive” kind, as Baumol referred to it, where the companies that founders launch commercialize something new or better, benefiting society and themselves in the process. A sizable body of research establishes that these “Schumpeterian” entrepreneurs, those that are “creatively destroying” the old in favor of the new, are critical for breakthrough innovations and rapid advances in productivity and standards of living.

Baumol was worried, however, by a very different sort of entrepreneur: the “unproductive” ones, who exploit special relationships with the government to construct regulatory moats, secure public spending for their own benefit, or bend specific rules to their will, in the process stifling competition to create advantage for their firms. Economists call this rent-seeking behavior.
…
In Baumol’s theoretical framework, depressed rates of entrepreneurship aren’t the culprit for periods of slow economic growth; rather, a change in the mix of entrepreneurial effort between the two kinds of entrepreneurship is to blame — specifically, a decline in productive entrepreneurship and a coincident rise in unproductive entrepreneurship. But is this what’s actually happening in the U.S.?

Well, for starters, we and others have documented a pervasive decline in the rate of new firm formation during the last three decades and an acceleration in that decline since 2000. In fact, we found that by 2009 the rate of business closures exceeded the rate of business births for the first time in the three-decades-plus history of our data.

Washington is diverting ever more of the country’s creative energies away from innovation and towards “pull peddling.”

Atlas Shrugged was not supposed to be a how-to manual.

ARE VIRUSES ALIVE? It’s complicated.

BUYING FRIENDS: Panama’s Decision to Cut Ties With Taiwan.

China’s Foreign Ministry, in a statement, said the country highly appreciate(s) and warmly welcome(s)” the move. The reaction from Taipei was angry. The Foreign Ministry said Panama “caved in to Beijing … for economic gain,” calling the move “highly disrespectful.”

Panama is the latest country to switch from its recognition of Taiwan as the official representative of China. The move follows a similar one last December by Sao Tome and Principe, the African island nation, which aligned itself with Beijing.

And:

Panama’s reversal may be linked to China’s massive investment in the country; Beijing has spent billions of dollars in the area around the Panama Canal.

Flashback: John Kerry declares the Monroe Doctrine dead.

IT’S NICE THAT WOMEN AREN’T AS SUPERFICIAL AS MEN: 64 Girls Confess The First Thing They Check Out On A Guy. “The 3 B’s: butts bulges and biceps.”

Plus: “Nobody said height? Or that’s so obvious that it doesn’t need to be mentioned?”

STEALTH SANCTUARY CITY: Welcome to Denver. Sorry about the smell.

CHRISTIAN TOTO: ‘Wonder Woman’ and the War on Female Empowerment.

Diana Prince never needed a safe space.

UM… Hot New Rumor: Dennis Rodman Is A Secret Ambassador For Trump.

SHIRKERS: Mattis Blasts Congress Over Defense Budget.

In his toughest language to date, Mattis — along with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joe Dunford and Pentagon Comptroller David Norquist — called on Congress to pass a budget for fiscal year 2018, on time.

“I need bipartisan support for this budget,” Mattis said of President Trump’s $639 billion funding request for the Defense Department. That includes $574 billion for the Pentagon “base budget” and nearly $65 billion for overseas operations.

Mattis repeated what other defense officials during President Obama’s years have said over and over, the military’s combat readiness is eroding, weapon modernization plans are at risk, and still, the inaction continues. And he delivered a sharp rebuke: “Congress as a whole has met the present challenge with lassitude, not leadership.

He then continued to pile on, observing that Congress has “sidelined itself from its active constitutional oversight role.”

And not just on defense spending, either.

TYLER O’NEIL: 5 Things to Know About the Virginia Governor Primary.

JUST THINK OF THEM AS DEMOCRAT OPERATIVES WITH PUNCHLINES, AND IT ALL MAKES SENSE: Whither Humor After Kathy Griffin?

BLUE VS BLUE: Black Lives Matter Halts Toronto Gay Pride Parade.

OIL WARS: Saudi Arabia Cuts U.S. Oil Exports to Work Down Global Supply Glut.

The state-owned Saudi Arabian Oil Co. expects its sales to the U.S. will drop below one million barrels a day in June, then slide to about 850,000 barrels a day in July, according to people familiar with the matter. The July figure would be the its lowest export total to the U.S. for that month since 1988, based on figures from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Saudi Aramco expects its August exports to decline by another 100,000 barrels a day, these people said, which would be the lowest export amount for that month since 2009.

Many oil traders have questioned whether production cuts by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Companies have done much to reduce a persistent global supply imbalance, in part because U.S. companies have rushed to fill any void left by OPEC.

The Saudis can have market share or they can have ~$50 oil, but barring some crisis they can no longer have both.

Which leaves the question: Have you hugged a fracker today?

I’M SO OLD I REMEMBER WHEN DEMOCRATS LECTURED US ABOUT THE IMPORTANCE OF RESPECTING ELECTION RESULTS: Rich Lowry: American politics is now all about one thing: impeachment. “What would Democrats impeach Trump for? This is a question of mere details. They’ll surely find a case somewhere amidst the feverish allegations of obstruction of justice, abuse of power and violations of the emoluments clause.”

Democrats since November are like a dog chasing a truck. They won’t like what happens if they catch it, but they can’t help themselves.

YES, THESE ARE THE STAKES:

But our childish and entitled political class continues to play with fire. Because it’s childish and entitled.

Related: Peter Berkowitz: The People vs. The Political Professionals. “A satisfactory argument for transferring more power to today’s elites would require addressing the people’s legitimate anxieties about the professional class. These include policy incompetence ranging from mismanagement of the economy and immigration to botching diplomacy and the conduct of war; politicization of the administrative state as illustrated by IRS targeting of conservatives during Obama’s first term; and the elite media’s use of double standards in reporting and opining about left and right. Underlying it all is the corruption of liberal education, which has become boot camp for progressivism, and of graduate and professional schools, which provide advance training in the progressive exercise of power. To play the vital role contemplated for them by our constitutional system, intellectual and political elites have a long way to go in regaining the people’s trust.”

Indeed they do. Remember, Hitler didn’t happen because of Hitler. Hitler happened because of Weimar, which was the failure of the people in charge of the liberal political order to maintain a liberal political order because they were weak, entitled, corrupt, and incompetent.

UPDATE: The Guardian, of all places, has something useful on this:

Even as their world came apart, the bankers clung to denial. By August 2007, the flagship hedge fund of Wall Street’s most prestigious firm was tanking fast – and what explanation came from the man at Goldman Sachs? “We were seeing things that were 25-standard deviation moves, several days in a row.” The bank was getting hit by events that were only meant to happen once every 100,000 years – and they were happening every day of the week. Given a choice between blaming their models or reality, Goldman’s bosses held the world at fault.

You know the rest because, a decade later, you and I are still paying for it. How the banks died, the world economy collapsed and most of us got poorer. How the financiers, mainstream economists and regulators were so detached from reality that they swore blind that such a catastrophe was impossible – even while it was under way.

Their reputation has never recovered. And as an economics journalist, I look across at politics and see the same process at work. Brexit, Donald Trump, Jeremy Corbyn: time after time, the political class has completely failed to understand the world they were governing, policing and analysing. Allow me to be blunt: our political crisis is also a crisis for our political class. And it is one from which I doubt they can recover.

At each major fork in the road, they have sped off down the wrong turning, while decrying the other as unimaginable. Each time, they have crashed.

We need to take a serious look at how we select these people. Our current method is not working.

HMM: Trump to Cut $4.5 Million from Radio Free Asia.

The Trump administration plans to cut $4.5 million from Radio Free Asia in a move that critics say would sharply reduce Chinese language broadcasts into China by the pro-democracy radio.

The budget cuts were announced at RFA’s Washington headquarters recently and drew opposition from the staff and the radio’s supporters in Congress, according to administration officials.

The Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), the government entity that is RFA’s parent organization, defended the funding cuts to Mandarin-language radio as part of a shift to the use of social media—outlets in China that are tightly controlled by the government and explicitly ban RFA content.

“RFA will continue to focus on Mandarin through social media which is the platform the agency has determined to be most cost-effective,” the board said in a statement to the Washington Free Beacon.

But given how many resources Beijing devotes to tracking social media, is the move more effective-effective?

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