WHERE DID ALL THE STABBERS COME FROM? Britain’s knife crime epidemic spreads to the Home Counties: Stabbings are now more likely in Bedfordshire than in Merseyside as city drugs gangs extend their grip across the UK.

ALIVE WITH FLAVOR: Guess What Nanny-State Hero Chuck Schumer Wants To Ban Next.

BLUE WAVE? The ‘experts’ were wrong in 2016; they could be wrong in 2018 too.

Newt Gingrich:

Now, we are seeing the blue wave may be shrinking to a blue ripple. The generic congressional ballot has tightened, and the leads Democrats averaged in the December polls have been cut nearly in half. One national expert told me last week that if the election were held now, the GOP would keep control. His research indicated the GOP was leading the generic ballot in seven of the 12 Senate races.

As the benefits of the Republican tax cuts, deregulation, and growing business and consumer confidence have taken effect, approval of President Trump and support for Republicans has grown. When combined with the president’s successes in both foreign policy and trade, Americans have significantly increased their support for his presidency and agenda.

With African American unemployment at a historic low, Trump’s approval among black men jumped from 11 percent to 22 percent in the last week of April. While 22 percent is still a minority, it is a huge improvement over traditional Republican support in the black community. As the facts and the conversation continue, do not be shocked if President Trump’s reputation as the “jobs President” drives his support among African Americans significantly higher.

Nancy Pelosi’s recent appeal to the “Tax You Bastards Back to the Stone Age” wing of the Democratic Party can’t be helping matters, either.

WE’RE FROM THE GOVERNMENT, AND WE’RE HERE TO HELP: Programs to monitor opioid drug use may drive some to heroin: Study.

SHOCKING NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: Nature says it wants to publish replication attempts. So what happened when a group of authors submitted one to Nature Neuroscience?

GOOD READ: The Seven Steps to the Destruction of the Islamic State Caliphate.

If the Islamic State leadership were in fact queried about the reasons for the destruction of their caliphate, what would they say? With the probability of this occurring virtually nil, certain points can be brought to the surface by examining the trajectory of the operational and strategic decisions of the Islamic State from June 2014 to October 2017. In light of such analysis, it is posited that the following steps resulted in the destruction of the Islamic State caliphate:

1. Failure of the Islamic State to achieve a policy-strategy match
2. The Islamic State’s premature transition to the “strategic offensive”
3. Al-Baghdadi’s unilateral declaration of the caliphate
4. The Islamic State’s attempt to control territory
5. The Islamic State’s use of ultra-violence
6. Incorrect strategic assumptions by the Islamic State leadership
7. The Global Coalition to Defeat Daesh

Failure of the Islamic State to achieve a policy-strategy match: The Islamic State made a fundamental error in its quest for an enduring political victory in that its policy goals were never aligned with its strategy. This policy-strategy mismatch, in which the Islamic State’s policy goals outran its capabilities, contributed significantly to the destruction of the caliphate.

It also helps to have a POTUS and a SecDef who understand that the way to deal with terrorists is to kill them in great numbers.

NICK GILLESPIE: Of Course Trump Should Avoid Talking To Mueller Voluntarily and Take the Fifth If/When Subpoenaed. That Mueller is refusing to do written questions strongly suggests that he wants to lure Trump into inconsistent statements that can be used for a “process crime” charge. Which also suggests that he’s got nothing much otherwise.

THIS WON’T BACKFIRE: Walmart and Sam’s Club to Restrict Opioids to 7-Day Supply.

I’m not sure it’s such a good idea, forcing people with chronic pain conditions to make a 52 trips to the pharmacist each year instead of 12.

WHY DOES GOOGLE HATE “COMMUNITIES OF COLOR” AND WANT MINORITIES TO ROT IN JAIL?

PATRICK MORRISEY WINS GOP PRIMARY IN WEST VIRGINIA:  That means that Don Blankenship lost, which is good news for those who would like to see a viable GOP candidate go up against Joe Manchin in November.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: The Trump Land Mine.

After the 2016 election, the so-called deep state was confident that it had the power easily to either stop, remove, or delegitimize the outlier Donald Trump and his presidency.

Give it credit, the Washington apparat quite imaginatively pulled out all the stops: implanting Obama holdover appointees all over the Trump executive branch; filing lawsuits and judge shopping; organizing the Resistance; pursuing impeachment writs; warping the FISA courts; weaponizing the DOJ and FBI; attempting to disrupt the Electoral College; angling for enactment of the 25th Amendment or the emoluments clause; and unleashing Hollywood celebrities, Silicon Valley, and many in Wall Street to suffocate the Trump presidency in its infancy.

But now the administrative state’s multifaceted efforts are starting to unwind, and perhaps even boomerang, on the perpetrators. If a federal judge should end up throwing out most of the indictments of Paul Manafort on the rationale that they have nothing much to do with the original mandate of the special counsel’s office, or if Michael Flynn’s confession to giving false statements is withdrawn successfully because the FBI politicized its investigation and FISA courts were misled in approving the surveillance of Flynn, then the Mueller investigation will implode.

Indeed, the Mueller investigation would likely lose so much public support that the Department of Justice could probably dismiss it with impunity. So, in an ironic sense, Mueller’s overreach might well end once and for all the absurdities of the special counsel/prosecutor law that for nearly half a century has plagued the nation.

Until recently, deep-state apparatchiks such as John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, and Andrew McCabe seemed immune from accountability after lying either to Congress or to federal authorities. In a perverse sort of way, the more Robert Mueller plays the role of the obsessed but impotent Inspector Javert, the more he demonstrates that there is no Russian-Trump collusion. Meanwhile, he is establishing precedents that those whom he exempts from his own zeal will inevitably have to account for their own lawbreaking. One cannot justifiably hound Michael Flynn for supposedly misleading FBI agents, when agency investigators were told by Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills that they had known nothing about Hillary Clinton’s private server during her tenure as secretary of state — despite evidence that they themselves had communicated over it (as had the former president of the United States).

Let us hope.

VP PENCE’S OLDER BROTHER WINS A HOUSE PRIMARY:

Greg Pence, the oldest brother of Vice President Mike Pence, won the Republican primary on Tuesday for the Indiana House seat once held by his more famous sibling, successfully leveraging his family name into prodigious fund-raising and ample votes that make him a heavy favorite to win the seat in November.

If that sounds like dismissive and minimalizing New York Times rhetoric, well, it is. The NYT doesn’t write that way about Clintons and Kennedys, does it?

OPEN THREAD: I just want to say good luck: we’re all counting on you.

IF ONLY MAMA HILLARY WERE IN THE WHITE HOUSE, TO SOOTHE EVERYONE’S JANGLED NERVES: It’s not just you, we’re all living in the United States of Anxiety. It couldn’t be nonstop media hysteria setting people on edge.

But here’s a prescription:

BOB MCMANUS: Spitzer, Weiner, Schneiderman: a bunch of power-hungry perverts.

ROBERT MORRIS MAY WELL HAVE BEEN AS INDISPENSIBLE AS GEORGE WASHINGTON: The wealthy financier and merchant signed all three of the nation’s founding documents—the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution. Roger Sherman is the only other person who did so. But Morris’ real claim to fame is that he financed a major portion of the Revolution. Alas, business reversals in the 1790s landed him in debtors’ prison in 1798. He languished there over three years till Congress, in part out of sympathy for Morris in particular, passed its first bankruptcy statute in 1801. Morris never regained his health or wealth. He died on this day in history, 1806.

WELL I HOPE WE’RE NOT TOO MESSIANIC, or a trifle too Satanic. “Demons and witches against Trump? Not exactly a winning slogan, but I may underestimate the number of constituents.”

AT AMAZON, spring deals in Camera and Photo.

Plus, save on Vitamins and Dietary Supplements.

AS USUAL, EVERYBODY KNEW: Eric Schneiderman’s Inevitable Fall: The New York attorney general’s dark-side personal life was an open secret in Democratic Party circles.

AMY ALKON:

There’s this quote — and people always nod solemnly in (unthinking) agreement when somebody tosses it out: “No one on his deathbed ever said, ‘I wish I had spent more time on my business.'”

(There are various versions of this, yes, attributed to various people.)

Now, maybe this is the reality for some people, but it isn’t the reality for me — or for some of the driven professors and writers I know.

I try to spend as much time every day on digging up science and writing (and rewriting and rewriting and rewriting) as possible.

There’s long been this notion — probably since Social Security came to be — that people would cut out of the work force; retire.

Well, if I’m working on an oil rig, yeah, at some point, I age out of the profession. (Not that I’d ever be in that area of work, but just as a wild example.)

But writing? As long as I keep those Alzheimer’s cobwebs out of my brain — or as long as I don’t get some horrible, writing-stopping disease — why should I stop? Presumably, I’ll get wiser with age. At least, that’s what I’ve found so far. So, presumably, my writing and thinking will have more value, as long as I can stay current.

I agree.

WELL: Israel Will ‘Eliminate’ Assad if He Continues to Let Iran Operate From Syria, Minister Warns.

APPARENTLY, EMILY LITELLA IS NOW ON THE WASHINGTON POST’S EDITORIAL BOARD: “Clarification: In agreements with George Mason University, the Charles Koch Foundation could name members of a selection committee whose appointees could also serve on an advisory board that had the power to recommend dismissal from the school’s Mercatus Center, but had no power over faculty retention or promotion. This version has been updated.”

BARI WEISS: Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web: An alliance of heretics is making an end run around the mainstream conversation. Should we be listening?

Here are some things that you will hear when you sit down to dinner with the vanguard of the Intellectual Dark Web: There are fundamental biological differences between men and women. Free speech is under siege. Identity politics is a toxic ideology that is tearing American society apart. And we’re in a dangerous place if these ideas are considered “dark.”

I was meeting with Sam Harris, a neuroscientist; Eric Weinstein, a mathematician and managing director of Thiel Capital; the commentator and comedian Dave Rubin; and their spouses in a Los Angeles restaurant to talk about how they were turned into heretics. A decade ago, they argued, when Donald Trump was still hosting “The Apprentice,” none of these observations would have been considered taboo.

Today, people like them who dare venture into this “There Be Dragons” territory on the intellectual map have met with outrage and derision — even, or perhaps especially, from people who pride themselves on openness.

Well, the left is decadent to the core nowadays.

SALLY KOHN ON TRUMP SUPPORTERS: “No One Is Just Who They Voted For.” “CNN commentator Sally Kohn explained how her experience working at Fox News turned out to be the opposite of what she had expected and how it influenced her new book, The Opposite of Hate: A Field Guide to Repairing Our Humanity.”

Good for her.

ENGAGE: SpaceX Set to Debut Newest Falcon 9 Rocket.

The two-stage Block 5 Falcon 9 is designed to take reusability to new heights. SpaceX has landed and re-flown numerous Falcon 9 first stages over the past few years, but none of these individual boosters has launched more than twice. Block 5 first stages, however, are designed to fly 10 times with just inspections between landing and liftoff, and 100 times with some refurbishment involved, SpaceX representatives have said.

“Block 5 basically summarizes all that we learned on reusability,” Hans Koenigsmann, SpaceX vice president of build and flight reliability, said last month during a news conference before the launch of NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, which lifted off atop a Falcon 9 Block 4. “It’s a reliability upgrade that combines reliability and reusability.”

This is the 21st Century I’ve been hoping for.