DEMOCRACY DIES IN DARKNESS (SILENCE, TOO): CNN Silent After Host ‘Incited Rage’ at Antifa Rally in Berkeley.

THAT’S A NICE WAY OF SAYING “DISPOSABLE”: Skunk Works Sees Big Opportunity For ‘Attritable’ UAVs.

The company has been working over the past decade to mature autonomous flight control systems that enable cooperative teaming between unmanned combat air vehicle (UCAV) and manned warplanes. The company recently demonstrated this know-how through a series of “Have Raider” technology demonstrations supported by AFRL, using a surrogate F-16.

The Skunk Works Low-Cost Attritable Aircraft team, led by program manager Joe Pokora, has also been designing optionally reusable airframes that would incorporate that Have Raider technology. The firm’s designs would leverage advanced manufacturing techniques and different materials to keep cost low. The Air Force set a target of under $3 million per unit.

Pokora says in a written statement that the company is specifically focused on moderate to high subsonic designs powered by efficient turbofan engines. The mission range of these aircraft exceeds 2,500 mi., he adds.

The company’s aircraft concepts are broadly described as “attritable aircraft.” They are built to fly multiple times, but cheap enough to launch on one-way suicide missions, if required. Military operators wouldn’t be too concerned if one or two were shot down conducting a critical surveillance or strike mission inside hostile enemy airspace.

We need more combat planes but can’t retain enough pilots — problem solved?

BRINK LINDSEY: THE END OF THE WORKING CLASS.

Increased income inequality; wage stagnation; skill-biased technological change; productivity growth slowdown; rising college wage premium; labor-market polarization; declining prime-age labor force participation; low intergenerational relative mobility; declining absolute mobility—all of these are concepts developed by economists to describe the dimming prospects for ordinary American workers. Taken together, they inform the consensus view that something is wrong with the American economy that isn’t going away anytime soon.

But if we follow the experts in looking at our problems solely from an economic perspective, we will fail to appreciate the true gravity of our situation. Yes, the relevant data on “real” or inflation-adjusted incomes have been disappointing and worrisome for decades. In particular, the sharp rise in income inequality, created mostly by a rollicking rise in the top 1 percent of incomes, has meant that incomes for typical American households have not kept pace with the overall growth of the economy. Nevertheless, a careful and dispassionate review of the data shows that incomes continued to inch upwards since the 1970s. . . .

If we pull back from a narrow focus on incomes and purchasing power, however, we see something much more troubling than economic stagnation. Outside a well-educated and comfortable elite comprising 20-25 percent of Americans, we see unmistakable signs of social collapse. We see, more precisely, social disintegration—the progressive unraveling of the human connections that give life structure and meaning: declining attachment to work; declining participation in community life; declining rates of marriage and two-parent childrearing.

Wait, aren’t we supposed to be glad we’ve overcome bourgeois values?

HMM: Southern Poverty Law Center Transfers Millions in Cash to Offshore Entities.

ROBERT TRACINSKI: Bullying A Leftist Think Tank Pierces Google’s Carefully Cultivated ‘Don’t Be Evil’ Image.

It is entirely natural for a company to not want to give money to people calling for its destruction, and I totally support that. Yet Google and many other big tech firms have also tried to present themselves as beacons of “progressive ideals.” That’s why they funded the New America Foundation, which this article refers to as a center of “market-friendly Silicon Valley progressivism.” What’s progressive about it if it’s “market-friendly”? Well, the big tech companies and the people who work for them tend to back Democratic Party candidates. They pay lip service to “progressive” policies like the basic income. And they do things like firing employees for opinions the Left deems offensive, or targeting right-leaning YouTube channels for “demonetization.”

That’s what “Silicon Valley progressivism” means: be the Left’s enforcers against heretics and infidels in the culture wars, in exchange for (temporary) dispensation for your sins against the Left in the realm of economics.

By targeting Google for prosecution under the antitrust laws—the brainchild of the original Progressives, by the way—the Open Markets team breached this unspoken bargain, and that’s why they had to go. Even if Google or Schmidt didn’t directly order the firing, the big tech companies are the new centers of overflowing corporate abundance, without which think tanks like the New America Foundation can’t thrive, so they didn’t need anyone to give anyone instructions.

In another time at another place, that sort of willing behavior was called “Working towards the Fuehrer.” Not that Google is some sort of corporate Nazi party, of course. But a company with that much money, power, and willingness to throw its weight around, is going to attract the kind of people eager to further the company’s perceived desires.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, PENN LAW SCHOOL EDITION: “Nearly half the professors at the University of Pennsylvania law school have published an open letter condemning their colleague Amy Wax for her by now (in)famous op-ed on bourgeois values. The result? The quality of reasoned debate at the University of Pennsylvania has dramatically worsened, even below the already abysmal standards set by the graduate student and alumni screeds which preceded this latest open letter.”

Plus: “Do the authors rebut these arguments? Do they offer counterevidence? No. Apparently the thesis of Wax’s op-ed is so patently beyond the pale that it is enough for the signatories to assert: ‘We categorically reject Wax’s claims.’ In the absence of any attempt at refutation, that is simply a case of virtue signaling.”

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NORTH KOREAN OPTIONS UPDATE: My latest Observer essay. Trump says all options are on the table.

NOT SEEING A LOT OF VOTER BACKLASH OVER THIS: Trump to cut pay raises for government workers. “A pay increase of this magnitude is not warranted, and Federal agency budgets could not accommodate such an increase while still maintaining support for key Federal priorities such as those that advance the safety and security of the American people.”

THE NEW REPUBLIC: How Trump Is Creating a Propaganda State.

Flashback: The Aspiring Novelist Who Became Obama’s Foreign-Policy Guru.

The job he was hired to do, namely to help the president of the United States communicate with the public, was changing in equally significant ways, thanks to the impact of digital technologies that people in Washington were just beginning to wrap their minds around. It is hard for many to absorb the true magnitude of the change in the news business — 40 percent of newspaper-industry professionals have lost their jobs over the past decade — in part because readers can absorb all the news they want from social-media platforms like Facebook, which are valued in the tens and hundreds of billions of dollars and pay nothing for the “content” they provide to their readers. You have to have skin in the game — to be in the news business, or depend in a life-or-death way on its products — to understand the radical and qualitative ways in which words that appear in familiar typefaces have changed. Rhodes singled out a key example to me one day, laced with the brutal contempt that is a hallmark of his private utterances. “All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” he said. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”

Sarah Jones, author of The New Republic piece quoted at the top, appears to be right around 27 years old.

SPIKED: We Need More Texas Attitude And Less PC:

The official response to Harvey appears to be very competent. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was on the ground two days before Harvey reached land. Texas governor Greg Abbott deployed the entire Texas National Guard. Houston mayor Sylvester Turner quickly activated police and firefighters, and provided calm, clear instructions to residents. This was much better than the response to Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana in 2005 – indeed, it seemed to show that the authorities had learned the lessons of the botched response to Katrina. . . .

As capable as the local, state and federal disaster response has been, what has been even more impressive is the great effort made by thousands of ordinary people, volunteering to help their fellow citizens. Seeing massive flooding and destruction, many would think: ‘How do I get out of here?’ But in Houston we saw lines of cars towing boats, people driving into the worst of the flooding. Like the cavalry, on came the hundreds of the ‘Texas Navy’ (joined by the ‘Cajun Navy’ of Louisiana) in fishing boats, jet skis and kayaks.

They went about their business with modest determination. CNN found two men loading up their boat, heading into the storm. ‘What are you going to do?’, the CNN reporter asked. ‘Go try to save some lives’, one of the men said, in a matter-of-fact way. Those without a boat helped, too. Five volunteer rescuers from Lufkin, Texas stopped at a gas station, and a guy handed them three $100 bills, according to a New York Times report. ‘Texas people just stick together’, said one.

While Hurricane Harvey brought out the best in many, it also brought out the worst. Across social media, certain liberals were feeling less than sympathetic to Texans, seen as Trump voters and Republican Party backers. ‘I don’t believe in instant karma, but this feels like it for Texas’, tweeted a University of Tampa professor: ‘Hopefully this will help them realise the GOP doesn’t care about them.’ (This professor was later fired for this tweet, which he shouldn’t have been.)

The heroism shown by ordinary Texans has been a great antidote to the prejudices expressed by well-off liberals towards ‘deplorable’ Americans. The politically correct view is that white folks are irredeemably racist, and the country is inescapably divided by race, yet the images from Houston told a different story: a black deputy sheriff wading through floodwaters with a white child in each arm; a white SWAT officer carrying a Vietnamese-American woman and her baby through floodwaters; three Asian and Hispanic constables moving an elderly woman in a wheelchair.

As it happens, this was not exceptional: as anyone who has travelled through Texas and the South will know, social interactions between people of different backgrounds are casually pleasant. Unlike PC liberals, most people don’t see life through a prism of racial categories. In response to Harvey, we didn’t see the ‘diversity’ of essentially different people – we saw citizens helping citizens, Texans helping Texans.

Yes, but that offers insufficient opportunities for graft and political manipulation.

IS THERE ANYTHING IT CAN’T DO? Shale oil boom softens the energy blow from Harvey.

WHAT ARE THEY HIDING? Byron York: FBI fights public release of Trump dossier info.

Senate investigators have had problems getting the FBI to reveal information about the Trump dossier. They’re not the only ones. Outside groups filing Freedom of Information Act requests are running up against a stone wall when it comes to the dossier.

On March 8, Judicial Watch filed a FOIA request for documents regarding the bureau’s contacts with Christopher Steele, the former British spy who dug for dirt in Russia on candidate Donald Trump in the months before the 2016 presidential election. Steele’s effort was commissioned by the oppo research firm Fusion GPS, which at the time was being paid by still-unidentified Democrats who supported Hillary Clinton. Just weeks before the election, the FBI reportedly agreed to support Steele’s oppo project — an extraordinary action in the midst of a campaign which Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley said raised “questions about the FBI’s independence from politics.”

Raises them? Or answers them?

FORGET IT, JAKE — IT’S SALON: Salon Slams National Anthem as ‘Neo-Confederate Symbol’.

Who’s going to be the one to tell them the War of 1812 predates the Civil War?

BEING EVIL: Abuse of Power: Yes, Google Uses Its Power to Quash Ideas It Doesn’t Like—I Know Because It Happened to Me.

PENTAGON SENDS MORE TROOPS TO AFGHANISTAN: We’re paying for Obama’s feckless Afghanistan policy.

MASSIVE NET FAILURE IN WASHINGTON STATE: But not in cyberspace. A huge net at a net-pen salmon farm near Seattle malfunctioned and thousands (precise number unknown) of farmed Atlantic salmon escaped into the wild.

COMPETITION FOR THE TITLE OF DUMBEST MEMBER OF CONGRESS IS LIKE A 100-WAY TIE, BUT. . . Sheila Jackson Lee Repeatedly Confuses Sandy Hook With Superstorm Sandy on CNN.

INDEED: If the media doesn’t tell the truth, what use is it?

It’s Charlie Martin asking the question, but it ought to be the media asking it of itself.

THE HILL: Right accuses left of hypocrisy on antifa.

Conservatives are decrying what they see as a muted response to the rise of the left-wing antifa movement amid a series of violent protests and clashes that have broken out at events across the country.

Some on the right have accused liberals and the media of being loath to condemn violence on the left from militant groups that resist neo-Nazis and white supremacists, while racing to denounce such behavior by right-wing groups.

“After Charlottesville, the media rightly demanded that President Trump and all Republicans condemn the neo-Nazis and the KKK,” Marc Thiessen, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush and a fellow at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute, wrote Wednesday in an op-ed for The Washington Post.

“So where are the calls for Democrats to condemn antifa — and the brutal public condemnation for those who fail to do so?”

The conservative Independent Journal Review took aim at Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat, writing that he had failed to specifically call out antifa after the chaos in Charlottesville. Democrats, IJR’s Benny Johnson wrote, “have not yet denounced antifa and its violent tactics by name.”

Antifa, a contraction of the word “anti-fascist,” refers to the loose movement of radical activists — communists, socialists and anarchists among them — who in recent months have scrapped with right-wing demonstrators, racist groups and, at times, run-of-the-mill supporters of President Trump.

Separate from the peaceful protesters who joined the bevy of nationwide marches and demonstrations in the wake of Trump’s inauguration, many antifa activists have adopted a willingness to use violence to confront those they deem fascists.

Which, basically, is anyone they don’t like at the moment. And I’m pretty sure the only reason they’re getting any pushback now is that their violence and craziness — now the stuff of Onion parodies — is hurting Democrats.

MATT LABASH: A Beating in Berkeley.

Impossible to excerpt, so please do yourself a favor and treat yourself to the whole thing.

ENOUGH FOOT-DRAGGING: Judge Orders FBI To Make Details Of Clinton Email Probe Public.

U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg ordered the FBI to produce uncensored court documents describing the grand jury subpoenas issued to force Clinton’s internet service providers to turn over information related to her private server use, according to a statement released by Cause of Action Institute.

The ruling was made in response to a motion filed in June as part of a suit brought by Cause of Action Institute and Judicial Watch. The organizations claim the Department of State violated the Federal Records Act by failing to maintain records related to Clinton’s handling of classified information.

Boasberg justified his ruling on the basis that the set of documents in question “rehashes information already made public, thus obviating any need for secrecy.”

A reminder that “something stinks” at the Bureau: A former FBI agent battling Deputy Director McCabe said there is a ‘cancer’ inside the FBI.

AND WITH GOOD REASON: Google is losing allies across the political spectrum: Antitrust sentiment grows, so does skepticism about Google on both the left and the right. “Given Silicon Valley’s liberal views on social issues and Schmidt’s love for Democratic politicians, it was probably inevitable that conservatives would sour on the search giant. But the larger problem for the search giant is that the company has been losing support among Democrats as well. A growing number of liberal thinkers believes that the concentration of corporate power was a major problem in the American economy. And few companies exemplify that concentration more than Google.”

Big opportunity for Trump to come out as a Teddy Roosevelt style trustbuster.