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LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: DO NOT TAUNT Elaine Chao and Much, Much More.

AXIOS POLL: 72% of Americans think the news media often “report news they know to be fake, false or purposely misleading.”

Honestly, I think Axios’ headline, which focuses just on the Republican number, is an example of that.

ALL THEY HAVE TO DO IS NOT BE CRAZY, AND THEY CAN’T EVEN DO THAT: Florida Man Arrested, Accused of Threatening to Kill Children of GOP Rep Over Immigration Policies.

A STACK OF BLUE ANGELS: A fabulous aerial stunt.

BATTLE BREWING FOR A YEMENI SEAPORT: It appears the Saudi-led coalition has already dealt Iran a defeat.

REVERSED AND REMANDED: Congratulations to my colleague Lucy Jewel and her Appellate Litigation Clinic students for another big win in the Sixth Circuit.

SKYNET SMILES: A team of AI algorithms just crushed humans in a complex computer game. “Algorithms capable of collaboration and teamwork can outmaneuver human teams.”

This is an important and novel direction for AI, since algorithms typically operate independently. Approaches that help algorithms cooperate with each other could prove important for commercial uses of the technology. AI algorithms could, for instance, team up to outmaneuver opponents in online trading or ad bidding. Collaborative algorithms might also cooperate with humans.

OpenAI previously demonstrated an algorithm capable of competing against top humans at single-player Dota 2. The latest work builds on this using similar algorithms modified to value both individual and team success. The algorithms do not communicate directly except through game play.

“What we’ve seen implies that coordination and collaboration can emerge very naturally out of the incentives,” says Greg Brockman, one of the founders of OpenAI, which aims to develop artificial intelligence openly and in a way that benefits humanity. He adds that the team has tried substituting a human player for one of the algorithms and found this to work very well. “He described himself as feeling very well supported,” Brockman says.

So the AI is willing to work alongside human partners — for now.

POLL: Muslims ‘insufficiently American.’

In the survey “Muslims in America,” data from the Views of the Electoral Research Voter Survey from the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group found:

Americans view many Muslims in the United States as insufficiently “American.”

Perceptions of Muslim Americans are strongly related to partisanship and cultural conservatism.

There is significant support, especially among Republicans, for policies that would temporarily ban Muslims from entering the country and, for Muslims within this country, subject them to additional surveillance. In fact, almost 20 percent of Americans would deny Muslims who are American citizens the right to vote.

Negative perceptions of Muslim Americans do not match how Muslim Americans describe themselves. Ninety-two percent of Muslim Americans agreed that they were “proud to be an American.”

The massive survey of 5,000, found that Americans put Muslims at the bottom of a list of other groups, with a 48 percent approval.

The survey analysis also showed support for Trump policies.

48% isn’t really all that low, though. I mean, compare that with the ratings for Congress. Or the media.

WE COULDN’T FIND A THING! Eric Holder’s Law Firm Launches Investigation into Facebook’s Anti-Conservative Bias.

S.G. CHEAH: Donald Trump is not Hitler. But the media is doing Hitler’s work.

REPEAT AFTER ME: “BEWARE THE PIOUS.” This one is particularly upsetting/repulsive, given the serious nature of the cause this guy purported to serve. NBC’s NY local station reports that “A New York man who helps run a group to raise awareness about sex abuse of children was himself arrested Tuesday on child sex abuse charges.”

A deeper dive of his organization’s website states that the group was hosted at one point by “UN Special Envoy” Angelina Jolie. If that’s indeed true, just one more reason to ignore actors when they start lecturing us, no matter how noble-sounding the cause is.

COMPETITION: Russia’s Proton rocket, which predates Apollo, will finally stop flying.

The decision will bring down the curtain on one of the longest-used and most versatile rockets in world history. As the United States developed the space shuttle in the 1970s and began flying it in the 1980s, the Russian space agency saw the opportunity to commercialize the Proton rocket, and by the end of the 1990s, the booster became a major moneymaker for the Russian space industry. With a capacity of 22.8 tons to low-Earth orbit, it became a dominant player in the commercial market for heavier satellites.

It remained so during much of the 2000s, but as Ars has previously reported, the lack of technical oversight began manifesting itself in an increasing rate of failures. At the end of 2010, one Proton plunged into the ocean because too much propellant had been mistakenly loaded into its upper stage. In 2013, another vehicle performed a fiery dance seconds after liftoff because flight control sensors were hammered into the rocket’s compartment upside down.

More failures have followed in recent years. These problems, combined with the rapid rise of low-cost alternatives such as SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, have caused the number of Proton launches in a given year to dwindle from eight or so to just one or two.

The Russians historically are good at this stuff, but the Angara isn’t scheduled to exit the develop stage before next year — at which point the BFR, SpaceX’s follow-on vehicle for the Falcon 9, is expected to begin full testing.

OUCH:

BREAKING: New RNC ad slams democrats for unleashing pattern of violence across the United States pic.twitter.com/K5f2teGuT6

— Wired Sources (@WiredSources) June 27, 2018

I’M NOT WORRIED ABOUT WHITE EXTINCTION BECAUSE ASIANS ARE WHITE NOW: We Are in the Midst of the Third Bogus ‘White Extinction’ Panic in Just as Many Centuries. Also, the main people I hear talking about this stuff are actually lefties like Charles Blow.

DAVID HARSANYI: Dear Judd and Kumail: You Have No Idea What A Nazi Really Was. “Please find another historical event to exploit. Because you sound like a bunch of hysterical know-nothings.”

In September 1941, the Germans took Kiev. On Hitler’s orders, the new military governor orders the round-up of all Jews in the vicinity and marched them north of the city to a place called Babi Yar. There, Jews were stripped naked and taken into a ravine in groups of ten. Once at the bottom their fate was clear. Among the cries of children (many already separated from their parents), Jews were made to lie down atop others who had already been murdered. German soldiers then walked across the bodies in the large pit and meticulously shot every man, woman, child and baby in the head or neck. Then the next group would be brought down and it would happen all over again and again over a period of two days — until almost 34,000 people were no more.

Babi Yar was only the third largest massacre of Jews during the war. But the killing of children — Jewish and otherwise — started in 1939, when German medical professionals were reporting any child with disability to the authorities, and parents started handing them over to special “schools” where thousands were eliminated using drugs and starvation. All of this before the wholesale industrialized killing of humans was in full swing.

Now, if you really believed Donald Trump or Kirstjen Nielsen or Sarah Huckabee Sanders are keen on engaging in this sort of behavior one day, or anything close to it, you’re a depraved coward for not taking up arms and stopping them. And the only other possible reasons for you to constantly compare them to Nazis are that you’re tragically illiterate on basic history or a hopelessly unimaginative and dishonest partisan — or maybe both.

Read the whole thing.

EUGENE VOLOKH: The Travel Ban Decision In One Non-Snarky Sentence: “The federal government may pick and choose which foreigners to let into the country (at least setting aside foreigners who have are already been granted residence), even based on factors — political beliefs, religion, and likely race and sex — that would normally be unconstitutional.”

UNEXPECTED HEADLINES: Saudi Moves Forward With Plan to Turn Qatar Into Island.

Five international companies that specialize in digging canals have been invited to vie for the project, with bids closing on Monday and the winner to be chosen within 90 days, Makkah newspaper reported, citing unidentified people familiar with the matter. The canal should be completed within one year of work starting, it said. The report was also carried by Saudi-owned news channel Al Arabiya and shared on Twitter by Saudi royal court adviser Saud Al Qahtani.

The Saudi government’s Center for International Communication didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. The government has never confirmed the plan, first reported in April.

The project, if it is carried out, would geographically extend Qatar’s isolation from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt after they cut trade and diplomatic ties with the emirate last year.

I suppose you can’t fault the Saudis for lack of ambition.

JOEL KOTKIN: CALIFORNIA, GREENHOUSE GAS REGULATION, AND CLIMATE CHANGE.

California has adopted the most extensive climate change policies, laws and regulations in the United States, and the state’s climate leaders are routinely heralded for taking bold and generally unilateral action to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions within California’s borders to combat climate change. Although California can also claim to be the fifth largest economy in the world if it were a separate nation, the state’s actual GHG emissions account for less than 1% of the world’s anthropogenic GHG emissions. Given the state’s minuscule share of global GHG emissions, Governor Brown has often proclaimed that California’s GHG reductions will be “meaningless” unless other states and countries can be persuaded to follow California’s example.

This paper examines California’s GHG reductions between 2007 (when the landmark Global Warming Solutions Act (AB 32) took effect), to 2017, when the California Air Resources Board adopted the most recent “Scoping Plan” prescribing existing and proposed new GHG reduction mandates (Scoping Plan) that CARB deems required to achieve the state’s legislated mandate of reducing GHG 40% below the state’s 1990 GHG emission inventory by 2030, and the unlegislated Executive Orders issued by the current and prior governor directing the state to achieve an 80% reduction in GHG by 2050.

This paper also examines the performance of California’s economy as experienced by California residents, which presents a substantially different story than the aggregated statewide data used by CARB to conclude the state is enjoying a successful boom. In fact, California has the nation’s highest poverty rate, and by far the largest number of Americans living in poverty: about 8 million Californians, and more than 2 million children, live below the federal poverty level. California also has the nation’s highest homeless rate, and again by far the largest number of homeless Americans, including more than a quarter of a million families, children, and adults. California’s largest city, Los Angeles, counted more than 50,000 homeless individuals in 2017. California has a low unemployment rate, but extraordinarily high costs for basic necessities, including housing, electricity and transportation. For decades, California has also declined to authorize new housing construction, and experts as well as political candidates now concede that California now has a shortfall of about 3 million homes.

Leftism is amazingly destructive.

“SOCIALISM, WHETHER DEMOCRATIC OR NOT, IS ON THE RISE:” Tyler O’Neil is living blogging tonight’s primaries.