JUST DON’T MAKE IT SO EXPENSIVE THAT WE ONLY BUY FOUR OF THEM AND CAN’T LET THEM LEAVE THE GROUND: The F-22 Raptor’s Replacement Is Starting to Take Shape.

Citing the existence of advanced Russian weapons such as the S-400 air defense missile system and the Su-57 (formerly PAK-FA) fighter, Air Combat Command commander General Mike Holmes told Aviation Week & Space Technology that while the F-22 and F-35 will continue to be improved, “Eventually you will run into a limit in your ability to improve those platforms, and so we need to have something else ready.”

The U.S. hasn’t designed a clean-sheet fighter in twenty years, and Penetrating Counter Air (PCA) will differ from the F-22 and F-35 in some ways to deal with new strategic realities. For one thing, PCA will emphasize range, particularly in order to fly escort missions for B-2 and B-21 bombers over Russia and against China in the Asia-Pacific. These sort of missions were unthinkable just five years ago.

“Unthinkable?” By whom?

LIKE LOU GEHRIG SAID, WITH MY NAME IT WAS ONLY A MATTER OF TIME: Dodge Charger and Challenger Hellcats Recalled for Risk of Hellfire.

AT AMAZON, save in Health and Personal Care.

Plus, deals in Kitchen and Housewares.

REPORT: FBI Raid on Paul Manafort’s Home Was ‘Heavy-Handed and Designed to Intimidate.’

WHEN THE ULTIMATE TROLL GETS TROLLED. Mary Katharine Ham: Do You Think PETA’s Mad Everyone’s A Troll Now?

This week, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals offered a custom anti-hunting frame for Facebook profile photos. “Shoot Selfies, Not Animals,” it read, with a majestic buck silhouette and a PETA logo. A friend of mine immediately used it to frame a profile photo of her holding two giant ducks she’d shot.

She was not the only one to delight in trolling the animal rights organization, as hunter after hunter added snapshots of their conquests framed by an anti-hunting message. Because in America, you don’t have to choose between shooting selfies and animals.

But watching this widespread publicity campaign go awry, it occurred to me I was watching one of the original trolls get trolled…by the general public. My, what a role reversal.

As MKH writes, “Did PETA make us more troll-y or did PETA’s game work so well because we were always trolls? What I do know is we’ve come a long way on the PETA outrage gauge, and that is not a good thing for society. This is probably a chicken-and-egg situation we’ll never fully resolve. And that expression is probably animal cruelty, right, PETA?”

Heh.™

BUT HOW LONG BEFORE ELON MUSK GETS NUKES? Spacex could have more launches than Russia in 2017.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. PC Corporate Culture Is a Plague That Government Helps Spread.

The problem is that the scientific evidence doesn’t support the liberal view. Sex differences in interests emerge within several hours after children are born, with girls showing more interest in people and boys in systems/things. One-day-old girls look longer at faces than one-day-old boys, who spend more time looking at mechanical objects. Our primate cousins, rhesus monkeys, show exactly the same sex differences in interest as young children. Male monkeys prefer to play with trucks, female monkeys with dolls. Two- to three-week-old female macaques look more than males at other macaques’ faces, and four to five weeks after birth they exhibit more “affiliative behaviors.” Returning to humans, the greatest sex disparities in career choice are found in the richest and most egalitarian countries, where individuals have more freedom to pursue their interests. In Sweden, 79 percent of computer systems designers, analysts, and programmers and 97 percent of heavy truck and lorry drivers are men. Meanwhile, 89 percent of child-care workers and 74 percent of people working in research and development in education are women. In contrast, in relatively conservative and less wealthy India, more than 30 percent of computer programmers are women. Only 9 percent of engineers in the U.K. are women, while almost 30 percent of engineers in relatively poor EU countries like Bulgaria and Cyprus are women. Interest in people versus things is tied to prenatal testosterone levels even within sexes: Girls who had higher levels of testosterone in the womb end up with more stereotypically masculine cognitive styles and interests, and conversely for boys.

It is of course theoretically possible that one day we will discover that girls and boys are socialized to have different interests a few hours after they are born (or perhaps in the womb?), or that people are socialized differently depending on their prenatal testosterone levels. But since so far no one has come up with a non-ridiculous theory of how this socialization might work, it seems reasonable to assume that sex differences have (at least in part) a biological basis. The claim that the evidence supports an environmental explanation of all sex differences in interests can only be motivated by ignorance or dishonesty. To protect the men-and-women-are-exactly-the-same theory, the liberal establishment cannot appeal to scientific evidence, so it must resort to silencing dissenters: firing them, making ad hominem attacks, and calling them names.

“Celebrate diversity” morphed into “Conform, proles” so slowly I hardly even noticed.

HALF PAYCHECK: Amazon moving swiftly to cut prices at Whole Foods.

IMPOSSIBLE. SHE’S A CELEBRITY! Watchdog group accuses Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop of ‘deceptive’ marketing.

CNN TODAY: Was Cuban sonic attack a weapon, or an accident?

US STATE DEPARTMENT TODAY: 16 U.S. Embassy Personnel in Cuba Injured by Sonic Device Attack.

CNN has a history of kowtowing to dictators in order to maintain “access.”

RIDE THE ‘PROGRESSIVE’ MOBIUS LOOP! The Left Turns on Christopher Columbus, Repeating KKK ‘Black Legend’ Myths.

OUCH:

If the leaked samples are any indicator, Clinton’s new book will be a Nixonian “modified limited hangout” explaining her loss, drowning in an ocean of unreadable prose.

WHERE IS IT COMING FROM? 10 new cases of TB found at Texas high school after second round of testing.

AUSTIN BAY ON TRUMP’S NEW AFGHANISTAN STRATEGY: With Afghanistan, Third President Is A Charm.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Egyptian-themed fraternity party runs afoul of the campus crybullies:

The Delta Sigma Phi fraternity chapter at the University of Michigan had what it thought was a delightful theme—antiquity on the Nile—for a party kicking off the school year. They invited guests to come as a “mummy, Cleopatra, or King Tut, it doesn’t matter to us. Get your best ancient Egyptian robe and headdress and be ready to party in the desert.”

If you’ve been paying any attention to college life of late, you know where this is headed.

A poobah with the university’s Egyptian Student Association objected, writing a long Facebook post decrying the event and accusing the fraternity of cultural appropriation. The “party is extremely offensive and disrespectful,” wrote Yasmeen Afifi. “I take pride in the grandeur of my people’s legacy and will not allow my culture to be appropriated for your entertainment.”

Geez, wait ‘til she discovers Steve Martin.

THIS HAS GOTTEN SURPRISINGLY LITTLE ATTENTION: Hurricane Harvey: Texas braces for ‘catastrophic flooding’ as storm starts lashing coast.

Flashback: “Be the Help:” Lessons From The Cajun Navy.

YES. Could Trump’s Transgender Military Ban Actually Become Policy?

It was policy right up until the last six months or so of Obama’s second term.

SAVE BIG! Amazon’s big price cuts at Whole Foods just the beginning. Of course, the Whole Foods crowd will be unhappy if the petit-bourgeoisie start showing up.

THANKS, OBAMA: Waiting Longer for an Ambulance When Seconds Count? Blame Obamacare. “Study finds that expanded coverage from ACA put strain on emergency services not equipped to deal with the demand.”

I’m so old, I can remember when Obama promised that his law would relieve the stresses on emergency medical services.

Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparked Dissent Among Its Engineers.

The pressure was high to get testing done and develop the product. In a 2015 email, Mr. Rose urged engineers to get started on validating the technology, or to proving it works in tests, “RTFN”—right the f— now.

Some engineers and suppliers pushed back. Issues they debated included the amount of time a driver would be given to retake the wheel if a car’s autonomous driving features stopped working; mechanisms to keep drivers engaged; and whether the technology should be allowed on all roads.

Weeks before the October 2015 release of Autopilot, an engineer who had worked on safety features warned Tesla that the product wasn’t ready, according to a resignation letter circulated to other employees and reviewed by the Journal.

Autopilot’s development was based on “reckless decision making that has potentially put customer lives at risk,” the engineer, Evan Nakano, wrote.

There’s an old geopolitical jokes which goes: “Brazil is the next superpower — and always will be.” Some days you get the same feeling about fully automated cars.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: The Fire and Fury of Presidents.

“We could, obviously, destroy North Korea with our arsenals.” —Barack Obama, April 2016

The media recently went ballistic over President Trump’s impromptu promises of “fire and fury” in reply to the latest North Korean threats—and even more so when he later doubled down under criticism and claimed he had not been tough enough. But American leaders have always resorted to such blunt talk in exacerbating circumstances such as the current one.

Recall Bill Clinton’s now widely quoted remark that it would be “pointless” for North Korea to develop nuclear weapons because using them would mean “the end of their country.” Likewise, President Harry Truman once promised Japan a “rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth” after dropping the bomb on Hiroshima. Japan apparently got the message that there was no way out but unconditional surrender. President John F. Kennedy referred publicly to an “abyss of destruction” during the Cuban crisis.

And President Ronald Reagan was the master of the apocalyptic allusion. Remember his hot mic quip: “My fellow Americans, I’m pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes”? Or his “evil empire” reference to the Soviet Union, delivered to a group of Florida evangelicals? George W. Bush was channeling Reagan when he dubbed Iran, Iraq, and North Korea an “axis of evil”—“axis” was a World War II allusion that left no ambiguity, especially when married to the Reaganesque use of “evil.”

The media seems to have also forgotten the (now prescient) 2006 Washington Post joint op-ed by former Defense Secretary William Perry and future Defense Secretary Ash Carter. The two former Clinton administration officials called for a preemptory U.S. strike on a North Korea missile site. They mostly discounted the threat that North Korea would hit Seoul in response: “Should the United States allow a country openly hostile to it and armed with nuclear weapons to perfect an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of delivering nuclear weapons to U.S. soil? We believe not. . . .But diplomacy has failed, and we cannot sit by and let this deadly threat mature.”

Later, Perry and Carter backtracked somewhat from such calls for nuclear brinksmanship. But in retrospect, given North Korea’s new nuclear capabilities, their idea of limited preemption might have been right. Regardless, publishing their preemptive call for war did not enrage North Korea to the point of no return.

That’s different because shut up. Actually I think that it’s just that the press — which is enraged beyond all reason every time Trump opens his mouth — finds it hard to imagine that that reaction isn’t universal.

WHAT IS IT WITH THE LEFT AND FECES? San Francisco dog owners lay minefield of poo for rightwing rally.

THE GREAT WHITE NORTH: Justin Trudeau tones down warm welcome for migrants as Canada struggles to cope with influx.