USA TODAY: U.S. missile defense plans for zapping North Korean missiles.

“Missile defense buys you time and opens windows,” said Todd Harrison, director of the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Security and International Studies. “The way you protect yourself from a missile attack is through deterrence. You show your adversary that you can hold them off and strike back at them.”

Demonstrating anti-missile capabilities is one component of Trump’s Option 4. Strike back is Option 6.

HERE WE GO AGAIN? New U.S. Subprime Boom, Same Old Sins: Auto Defaults Are Soaring.

Subprime car loans have been around for ages, and no one is suggesting they’ll unleash the next crisis. But since the Great Recession, business has exploded. In 2009, $2.5 billion of new subprime auto bonds were sold. In 2016, $26 billion were, topping average pre-crisis levels, according to Wells Fargo & Co.

Few things capture this phenomenon like the partnership between Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV and Banco Santander SA. Since 2013, as U.S. car sales soared, the two have built one of the industry’s most powerful subprime machines.

Details of that relationship, pieced together from court documents, regulatory filings and interviews with industry insiders, lay bare some of the excesses of today’s subprime auto boom. Wall Street has rewarded lax lending standards that let people get loans without anyone verifying incomes or job histories. For instance, Santander recently vetted incomes on fewer than one out of every 10 loans packaged into $1 billion of bonds, according to Moody’s Investors Service. The largest portion were for Chrysler vehicles.

Some of their dealers, meantime, gamed the loan application process so low-income borrowers could drive off in new cars, state prosecutors said in court documents.

Through it all, Wall Street’s appetite for high-yield investments has kept the loans — and the bonds — coming. Santander says it has cut ties with hundreds of dealerships that were pushing unsound loans, some of which defaulted as soon as the first payment.

This never ends well for the borrowers or for the lenders, although a glut of barely-used cars would be a boon for anyone looking for a great deal.

MILO YIANNOPOULOS’S DANGEROUS IS NOW #4 on the New York Times’ hardcover bestseller list.

And Mark Levin’s Rediscovering Americanism is #1.

WHEN DID USURY STOP BEING A SIN and become respectable?

KEEP CLIMBING: Delta offers Ann Coulter $30 refund after she slams airline for giving her seat to another passenger.

ALLIES: Turkey Begins Bombing US-Backed YPG Positions In Syria.

Tensions between Turkish forces and the YPG have been mounting in the Afrin region in recent weeks: Turkey’s military, which launched an incursion last August into part of northern Syria which lies between Afrin and a larger Kurdish-controlled area further east, has said that it has returned fire against members of YPG militia near Afrin several times in the last few weeks.

Furthermore, last month the Turkish defence ministry slammed the Pentagon decision to arm theYPF, and mocking Washington’s assurances that it would retrieve weapons provided to the YPG after Islamic State fighters were defeated: “There has never been an incident where a group in the Middle East has been armed, and they returned the weapons,” Kurtulmus said. The United States “have formed more than a terrorist organisation there, they formed a small-scale army.”

Then overnight, Ilnur Cevik, a senior adviser to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, spoke to Bloomberg and said that while Turkey has no immediate plans for an operation in the Syrian Kurdish-run region of Afrin, its army is preparing for action and the military buildup on the border is “serious.”

Independent Kurdistan should have been the price for Ankara’s intransigence in 2003. That certainly would have been messy, but not nearly as messy as the current situation.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Free Robot Lawyer Helps People Tackle Over 1,500 Legal Issues.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: ABA Meets To Consider Elimination Of 49% Adjunct Professor Cap And Use Of GRE In Law School Admissions. Easier admissions, cheaper faculty — problem solved!

SARAH HOYT: Teach Your Children Well Part 3: Teach Your Children Quietly.

IT ISN’T AN AUTOPILOT; STOP CALLING IT THAT: Tesla’s autopilot feature blamed for crash.

RAND PAUL: Retaining instead of repealing Obamacare will be Republicans’ undoing.

If we are to subsidize health insurance, why not food? Or water? Or housing? You may respond, yes, but we already do that. You are right we have subsidized, for the poor, food and housing, but we didn’t, until now, attempt to subsidize a market item for all.

With this bill, Senate Republicans declare they have overcome Hayek’s protestations about the pretense of knowledge — the idea that no central planner can know enough to engineer an economy successfully.

With this bill, Senate Republicans declare they have the knowledge to determine and correct prices for millions of Americans who purchase health insurance. Pretense? You bet it is.

Markets are incredibly complex interactions between millions of people in a nearly simultaneous bazaar of trading. No one man or woman possesses that knowledge, so anyone who sets or attempts to set prices for health insurance is doomed to fail.

And mark my words, this Senate Healthcare bill will fail just as its twin Obamacare has, for they suffer from the same pretense of knowledge. No one is smart enough to plan even the simplest of marketplace prices — no matter how much data is available.

Entitlements are just as addicting for politicians of either party as they are for their beneficiaries — a fact Democrats have been counting on for generations.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: An overdose, a young companion, drug-fueled parties: The secret life of then-USC med school dean.

She said it seemed odd that someone with Puliafito’s responsibilities could devote so much time to her. She said he would spend the night with her in apartments or hotel rooms he paid for, leave early in the morning to go to his home and then return to her with breakfast.

“He was always with me,” she said. “It was as if he had nothing else to do.”

Ouch.

THE ONE SENTENCE THAT EXPLAINS WASHINGTON DYSFUNCTION.

Spoiler alert: “The political class never expected Donald Trump to become president,” Matthew Continetti writes at the Washington Free Beacon, proving that William Goldman’s maxim about Hollywood that “Nobody knows anything…… Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess and, if you’re lucky, an educated one,” is true about America’s other town full of preening theatrical performers as well.

WILL COLLIER: Jacob Rees-Mogg Is Finally Having His Moment.. “For years, the Tory backbencher was mocked for his old-fashioned mannerisms and stuffy pedigree. Now, with Brexit triumphant and Theresa May struggling, his future looks bright.”

The time was January of 1991, the place the ramshackle debate chamber of the Oxford Union Society. The Union was debating an updated version of the infamous 1933 King and Country motion — “this House will in no circumstances fight for its Queen and Country” — on the eve of the first Gulf War.

My seatmate in the hall was referring to Jacob Rees-Mogg, then a gangly 22-year-old from Trinity College, who rose to speak against the resolution amid considerable cheers — and jeers — from the standing-room-only House. “You won’t believe this kid,” my new friend had told me before the debate. “He looks like Ichabod Crane, but he speaks like Churchill crossed with James Earl Jones.”

The details of the long debate that followed are now, sadly, lost to my memory, but the impression left by Rees-Mogg’s turn in the well is as sharp as it was on that cold and tense evening. While his delivery was every bit as stentorian as promised, the quality of Rees-Mogg’s rhetoric and sly humor far outstripped that of the others on his own side as well as his opponents.

I was struck at the time by the familiar themes at the core of his arguments. Several speakers on the Oppose side rose with arguments based on everything from the moral duty to oppose Saddam Hussein’s brutality (somewhat effective) to exhortations that supporting the war was a patriotic obligation (much less so).

Rees-Mogg, meanwhile, attacked the issue with arguments that could have come from a Reagan or Buckley, citing the need to defend the West’s national interests and giving short shrift to the vapid “no blood for oil” bleating that ignored the realities of trade, economics, and statecraft alike.

To an American conservative in a high bastion of Western left-wing academia, listening to his statement and his sharp responses to would-be gotcha questions from the floor was a delight. As we filed out on the Oppose side (which lost, Oxford being Oxford, despite Rees-Mogg’s best efforts), I told my fellow academic expatriate, “25 years from now, that guy is going to be prime minister.”

Missed it by that much? Maybe, we’ll see.

In the meantime, read the whole thing.

THE WEEK: The Resistance That Cried Wolf. “If we are going to chastise Trump for norm violations, shouldn’t we first establish how normal or abnormal his actions in a given area really are? If we are going to say he is guilty of doing the unprecedented, shouldn’t we look to see if there are in fact any precedents? . . . The tendency to treat everything Trump does as an emergency, without distinction, will make true emergencies more difficult to recognize. And if the press gets it wrong, hyping something that isn’t especially unusual, it makes it easier for Trump to dismiss future criticisms or unflattering reports as ‘fake news.'”

SO MY COLLEAGUE BEN BARTON IS QUOTED IN THIS PIECE ON THE AVVO RULING.

His new book, coauthored with Penn lawprof Stephanos Bibas, whom Trump just nominated for the Third Circuit, comes out next week: Rebooting Justice: More Technology, Fewer Lawyers, and the Future of Law.

NO WONDER THE LEFT IS SO ANGRY AT BETSY DEVOS: DoE Civil Rights Office To Once Again Be “Neutral.” “In what appears to be yet another move to roll back the Obama era precedent of cabinet level “guidance memos” having the force of law, the Department of Education Civil Rights division will be transitioning back to being a “neutral” office rather than an activist force in the social justice movement. . . . One might imagine that the idea of ensuring that a government oversight agency remained a ‘neutral, impartial investigative’ entity wouldn’t be a controversial idea, but one would be wrong. It’s obviously plenty controversial in the eyes of many Democrats who had grown used to having their way on such matters under the presidency of Barack Obama. DeVos gave an apt description of many of the agency’s tactics when she described them as regulations issued via administrative fiat.”

INDEED: Dem Pitches Manufacturing as a ‘Cool’ Career Path. “We have to stop telling every young person that they’re going to go to college.”

NO WONDER HE AND TRUMP GOT ALONG SO FAMOUSLY: Macron Denounces Anti-Semitism.

HARVARD LAW STUDENTS COMPLAIN THAT HARVARD LAW FACULTY HAVE TOO MUCH INFLUENCE ON HARVARD LAW SCHOOL. As one of my lawprofs at Yale said, students aren’t the consumers of legal education, they’re its product — and nobody asks a Buick on the assembly line whether it wants to have AC installed.

A GREENPEACE CANVASSER KNOCKS ON JEFF JACOBY’S DOOR, AND YOU WON’T BELIEVE WHAT HAPPENS NEXT…

JOHN BOLTON: Trump must withdraw from Iran nuclear deal — now.

President Trump has repeatedly made clear his view that the Iran deal was a diplomatic debacle. It is not renegotiable, as some argue, because there is no chance that Iran, designated by Ronald Reagan as a state sponsor of terrorism in January 1984, will agree to any serious changes. Why should it? President Obama gave them unimaginably favorable terms, and there is no reason to think China and Russia will do us any favors revising them.

Accordingly, withdrawing from the JCPOA as soon as possible should be the highest priority. The administration should stop reviewing and start deciding. Even assuming, contrary to fact, that Iran is complying with the JCPOA, it remains palpably harmful to American national interests. It should not have taken six months to reach this conclusion. Well before Jan. 20, we saw 18 months of Iranian noncompliance and other hostile behavior as evidence. The Trump transition team should have identified abrogating the deal as one of the incoming administration’s highest policy priorities.

Within the Trump administration, JCPOA supporters contend that rejecting the deal would harm the United States by calling into question our commitment to international agreements generally. There is ominous talk of America “not living up to its word.”

How convenient that only one side in the Iran deal is expected to do so.

DEMOCRATIC PARTY OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES: How The Press Ignored Bill Clinton’s Foreign-Donation Scandal. “I’m glad the news media is pursuing the Trump–Russia scandal, but let’s not forget the differences between how they are covering Russia compared with how they reported a similar story — this one involving Communist China — that developed during Bill Clinton’s 1996 reelection campaign. . . . Many people still believe that a major cover-up of that scandal worked — in part because the media expressed skepticism and devoted only a fraction of resources they are spending on the Trump–Russia story. Network reporters expressed outright skepticism of the story, with many openly criticizing the late senator Fred Thompson, the chair of the Senate investigating committee, for wasting time and money.”

They were in the tank for Bill Clinton nearly as much as they were in the tank for Obama and Hillary.