MORE ON DC’s WOKEST RESTAURANT: Ed Driscoll posted on the wokest restaurant in Washington earlier this afternoon. It’s called Busboys & Poets. As Ed wrote, among its many “woke” innovations is its practice of handing out “Race Cards” to patrons, with questions like “How often do you discuss race with your family and friends?”

What caught my eye about the Washington City Paper article was a statement by a “core organizer of Black Lives Matter DC,” who is decidedly unenthusiastic about the restaurant. It’s not woke enough for her. And here’s the reason why:

“The Core Organizers of Black Lives Matter DC will no longer accept speaking engagements, participate on panels, or otherwise patronize any Busboys & Poets or Mulebone restaurant based on our past experiences,” she wrote. “Andy Shallal has used Busboys & Poets to commoditize racial history by having panels with local radical activists while making money from food and drink sales of attendees but not paying them, profiting on the history of Black DC while contributing to ‘revitalization’ that is fueling displacement, and posturing as a radical while being a capitalist.”

To put it a bit more succinctly: You’re doing it wrong. You were supposed to pay us.

PRIVACY: Facebook Gave Device Makers Deep Access to Data on Users and Friends.

Facebook has reached data-sharing partnerships with at least 60 device makers — including Apple, Amazon, BlackBerry, Microsoft and Samsung — over the last decade, starting before Facebook apps were widely available on smartphones, company officials said. The deals allowed Facebook to expand its reach and let device makers offer customers popular features of the social network, such as messaging, “like” buttons and address books.

But the partnerships, whose scope has not previously been reported, raise concerns about the company’s privacy protections and compliance with a 2011 consent decree with the Federal Trade Commission. Facebook allowed the device companies access to the data of users’ friends without their explicit consent, even after declaring that it would no longer share such information with outsiders. Some device makers could retrieve personal information even from users’ friends who believed they had barred any sharing, The New York Times found.

Most of the partnerships remain in effect, though Facebook began winding them down in April. The company came under intensifying scrutiny by lawmakers and regulators after news reports in March that a political consulting firm, Cambridge Analytica, misused the private information of tens of millions of Facebook users.

Data collection and sharing should be made easy to understand for the user, and with easy-to-understand, granular controls.

More: Apple Requested ‘Zero’ Personal Data In Deals With Facebook, CEO Tim Cook Says.

Perhaps, but even iOS allows app developers to force users to choose between never allowing location tracking or always allowing location tracking. “Allow only when using app” should always be an option.

STARBUCKS PREZ HAS LATTE LUST FOR WHITE HOUSE: It appears Starbucks luminary Howard Schultz is leaving the omnipresent java proprietor after 36 years and hinting of a possible run for president, according to LifeZette’s Zachary Leeman. But maybe there’s another explanation, something having to do with distracting attention from the firm’s recent controversy over racial sensitivity training as a yet-unreported backlash gathers steam? Keep an eye on upcoming corporate quarterly reports. Just sayin.’

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Crash Tests 101: What to Know about the Wrecks behind the Ratings.

AT AMAZON, deals on bestselling Appliances.

Plus, save in Sports Nutrition.

BRUCE BAWER: Trashing Tommy Robinson.

So I ask: how far is “too far” when you’re sounding the alarm about a nationwide child-rape epidemic that authorities up and down the line have conspired to cover up, that is still going on, that is (although one is not allowed to say so) a byproduct of Islamic theology, and that the mainstream media, even after they’ve finally been forced to face up to the reality of it, prefer to treat as if it were a series of parking violations?

As for Robinson being “detained illegally”: I, for one, certainly wouldn’t say that his detention is illegal. No, it’s entirely legal. That’s precisely the problem.

British law itself — the whole process of deciding what’s legal and what’s illegal — is no longer what it used to be, and hence no longer worth respecting. It’s been twisted into a tool of those who wish to protect Muslim criminals and troublemakers (and their apologists and defenders) and to punish those who blow the whistle on Muslim crime and tell the truth about Islamic ideology.

Needless to say, read the whole thing.

YES. NEXT QUESTION? Did Bill Clinton really think he could dodge #MeToo?

HEALTH: Five More Deaths Linked to Intragastric Balloons for Obesity.

OUCH: Tesla has reportedly refunded nearly a quarter of US Model 3 pre-orders.

BEN SHAPIRO: Are Democrats Blowing It?

Instead of playing nice with Trump, while stoking the flames of anti-Trump ire with their base, Democrats promised a deus ex machina: Trump would flame out, retire, be impeached, be prosecuted by Robert Mueller for Russian collusion, and all the rest. Trump wasn’t merely a bad guy — he was the worst guy, a buffoonish Hitler clad in the armor of cruel conservatism.

But there’s a problem: Trump hasn’t flamed out. Mueller so far hasn’t come up with credible evidence of Russian collusion, and even the high hopes surrounding porn star Stormy Daniels have gone flaccid. Trump himself seems alternatively irked by his office and trollishly empowered by it, but never willing to walk away. That’s dispiriting to the Democratic base, which spends each morning fuming over the latest Trumpian twitterstorm, thrilling to the extremist musings of kooks such as Maxine Waters (D., Calif.).

Any plan which relies on the ineptitude of your opponent is hardly a plan at all.

More:

All of which means that Democrats have been forced to turn to the second prong of their 2018 attack: policy.

But on policy, the Democratic record looks even worse. Trump’s rhetoric continues to fuel feelings of unmoored chaos, but the markets continue to soar, the job market grows, and we’re not in the middle of any serious foreign-policy crisis. In 2016, CNN Money warned, “A Trump win would sink stocks.” Nope. Pelosi warned that Trump’s tax cuts were mere “crumbs” that would amount to nothing. Nope. Hollywood celebrities warned about the significant possibility of global thermonuclear war. Nope. Democrats promised a dystopian hellscape. Instead, they got an economy so good that the New York Times ran a piece headlined “We Ran Out of Words to Describe How Good the Jobs Numbers Are.”

Don’t get cocky.

LIFE IN THE 21ST CENTURY: Method devised for wirelessly powering, controlling devices inside body.

HMM: Manafort Accused of Witness Tampering Ahead of Trials. “Mueller team tells court they have ‘little confidence that restrictions short of detention will assure Manafort’s compliance’.”

HMMM. ‘Something’s Up:’ David Hogg’s reaction to SWAT-ting incident is raising a lot of eyebrows.

For a young man seemingly obsessed with gun safety, he does have an awfully blasé attitude about an incident that would leave most people terrified.

DEMOCRATS’ DELAY STRATEGY GETS MCCONNELL BLOWBACK: Senate Republicans kill the August recess. “The move would let senators confirm more of President Trump’s nominees and pass more of the GOP agenda through Congress. However, Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn, R-Texas, indicated the plan would be to spend most of the time confirming nominees.” It also means that Dems defending their seats in swing states won’t be able to spend as much time back home campaigning.

IT’S COMPLICATED: Saudi Arabian Arrest Wave Shows Crown Prince’s Bid to Control Change.

Dozens of high-profile Saudis are locked up in jail, many of them denounced as traitors. Hundreds, possibly more, are barred from leaving the kingdom. And others have quietly left their homeland with no plans to return, creating the rudiments of an overseas Saudi dissident community.

Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, has gone further than any of his predecessors to relax the kingdom’s strict social rules. But he is also overseeing one of the most ruthless crackdowns on perceived dissenters that Saudi Arabia has experienced in decades.

After high-profile autumn roundups of what the government said were dissident clerics and corrupt businessmen, the latest wave of arrests, in May, have focused in part on women and men who pushed for the right of women to drive, even though the Saudi government is set to begin recognizing that right on June 24.

The message behind the crackdown, which has come despite scant evidence of public dissent, is that the crown prince alone intends to dictate the pace and scope of change in Saudi Arabia, critics say.

“We were hoping for a more balanced society, more rights,” says a Saudi rights activist who has come under government pressure. “Instead what has happened is more repression, just with a different ideology.”

Government supporters see the development differently. “The country is going through tremendous disruptive change and it has a wide spectrum of political opinion—from religious conservatives to Western liberals,” said Ali Shihabi, who is close to the Saudi government and executive director of the Arabia Foundation, a Washington-based think tank.

“If you want to affect change, which is long overdue, there is no way you can bring all those constituencies together,” he added. “So you need an authoritarian approach—and that means you are going to limit freedoms for a while.”

Bringing the Kingdom into the 21st Century — or even the 19th — was never going to be pretty. But if bin Salman can pull it off, the results will be worth it.

JOE PAPPALARDO: Why the Pentagon Doesn’t Know How Much Anything Costs.

OUCH:

ANNALS OF LEFTWING AUTOPHAGY: Woke Restaurant Serves Discomfort Food.

Sometimes you can have the best of intentions and still miss the mark completely. Such is the case with Busboys and Poets‘ “Race Card” initiative, which aims to foster discussions about race and privilege among its diners by handing out literal “Race Cards”—cards featuring larger questions about the state of race relations in America—to patrons as they enter.

A recent Facebook post featuring one of the “Race Cards”—which reads “Did you perceive me as racist because I’m a white male?”—has garnered more than 150 shares and even more comments, with people criticizing Busboys and Poets for taking a somewhat tone-deaf approach in trying to foster a conversation about race. Other “Race Cards” that Busboys and Poets employees are handing out read: “What is your experience with race in America?,” “Have you ever been in a place where you were the racial minority?,” and “How often do you discuss race with your friends or family?”

Akosua Johnson, who posted the picture that went viral, says that a bartender at Busboys and Poets handed them the card when they sat down at the bar. Johnson, who identifies as nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns, wrote on Facebook that the bartender, who was white, “had no idea how to actually engage with this poorly constructed, forced ‘conversation’ and so just walked away immediately after dropping the cards in the middle of my meal.”

Read the whole thing. I don’t know what the calorie count for schadenfreude is, but there’s a huge serving to be had here.

21ST CENTURY HEADLINES: Israel uses ‘Mean Girls’ to troll Iran on Twitter.

SPACE: Asteroid on Course to Earth Was Spotted Just Hours Before It Hit The Atmosphere.

CONTAINMENT: China eyes its next prize – the Mekong.

There is another prize in Beijing’s sights, an artery that runs straight through mainland Southeast Asia. The mighty Mekong River, which starts in China (known there as Lancang), and connects Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia, is a crucial lifeline that nourishes some 60 million people along its banks.

Control of both