JOE PAPPALARDO: Missile CSI: How We Know Iran Violated an Arms Embargo.

COMING OUT FROM NASSIM TALEB: Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life. Sounds very interesting, and very much up my alley.

BLOODY NOSE? The U.S. is to deploy new attack drones in South Korea that could be used to kill North Korean leaders and launch pinpoint strikes on its missile launch pads.

The Gray Eagle is an improved version of the MQ-1 Predator, the leading U.S. medium-altitude unmanned aerial vehicle, and has both strike and reconnaissance capabilities.

With a 17 m wingspan, it is 8 m long and can fly at a maximum speed of 280 km/h for up to 30 hours. It is capable of non-stop surveillance missions and intelligence gathering in an area of a 400 km radius from an altitude of 7.6 km, which means it can target most parts of North Korea.

It could hit a vehicle carrying North Korean leaders, a missile launch site, or mobile missile launchers with four Hellfire anti-tank missiles or four Viper Strike small guided precision bombs. Each GPS-guided Viper Strike bomb weighs 20 kg and is accurate to within 1 meter so it can destroy even a fast-moving vehicle.

Last year, Beijing objected to the deployment plan, with Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying saying all sides concerned should “step on the brakes” if they want peace and stability in the region.

Deploying a drone armed with just a few, small conventional weapons doesn’t seem like a big escalation in response to a nuclear threat.

30 MACHINES that changed the world.

JEFF SESSIONS: FBI’s Use of Anti-Trump Dossier to Obtain FISA Warrant ‘Will Be Investigated.’

You would certainly hope so.

IT’S ALMOST AS IF THE JUDICIARY IS ENGAGED IN SOME SORT OF CLASS WAR OR SOMETHING: Dissenting from denial of cert, Justice Thomas complains Second Amendment has become “constitutional orphan.”

“JUST AN ASS-BACKWARD TECH COMPANY”: How Twitter Lost the Internet War.

Del Harvey, Twitter’s resident troll hunter, has a fitting, if unusual, backstory for somebody in charge of policing one of the Internet’s most ungovernable platforms. As a teenager, she spent a summer as a lifeguard at a state mental institution; at 21, she began volunteering for Perverted Justice, a vigilante group that lures pedophiles into online chat rooms and exposes their identities. When the group partnered with NBC in 2004 to launch To Catch a Predator, Harvey posed as a child to help put pedophiles in jail. In 2008, she joined Twitter, then a small status-updating service whose 140-character quirk was based on the amount of alphanumerics that could be contained on a flip-phone screen. She was employee No. 25, and her job was to combat spam accounts.

Harvey’s bildungsroman is legend inside Twitter, where she now serves as vice president of trust and safety, effectively commanding a massive, never-ending war between the company’s censors and a legion of Russian bots, sexual harassers, neo-Nazis, and Turkish hackers who have, at times, seemed to overwhelm the platform. For the past decade, she has been at the forefront of that battle, winning the loyalty of Twitter employees who respect her deep institutional knowledge. But as Twitter has grown from a small messaging platform with no revenue to a $25 billion public company, many company insiders have come to a frustrating conclusion: it’s a war that Harvey is losing.

You’ll notice that, at least based on the list presented here, Harvey is doing nothing to battle progressive trolls — of which there are plenty.

Related:

Enough of these anti-Second Amendment bots have sprouted up just since Friday that it’s easy to spot the template, but it remains to be seen what — if anything — Harvey will do about them.

FREE SPEECH: Let’s Talk About It.

BIRDS OF A FEATHER? Venezuela cryptocurrency to draw Turkish investments.

“On Tuesday, there will be quite a few announcements about the start of the process,” Venezuelan Cryptocurrency Superintendent Carlos Vargas said on the sidelines of a political meeting in Caracas.

“And there will surely be a lot of investors from Qatar, Turkey, and other parts of the Middle East, though Europeans and Americans will also participate.”

He did not elaborate.

That sounds less like Turkish investment plans and more like wishful thinking in Caracas.

PITY THE KURDS: Turkey’s president says Turkish troops involved in an offensive to drive out Syrian Kurdish militiamen from a Syrian enclave will soon begin a siege of the city of Afrin.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan told his ruling party’s legislators on Tuesday that the month-long offensive into the northwester enclave of Afrin has so far been progressing slowly.

He says Turkey is not there “to burn and destroy” the enclave but to ensure it becomes a “safe and livable place.”

Erdogan said that, however, “in the coming days, the siege of Afrin city center will commence at a more rapid pace.”

Turkey launched its offensive to clear Afrin of the Syrian Kurdish militia it considers a “terrorist” organization and an extension to its own outlawed Kurdish rebels fighting within Turkey.

Turkish troops have so far seized border regions encircling Afrin, including strategic hills.

The fate of Syria’s Kurds is the Levant’s next humanitarian crisis — on top of all the others.

TYLER O’NEIL: The Worst Presidents Everyone Forgets About.

JILL ABRAMSON REBOOTS HER ‘HIGH-TECH LYNCHING’ OF CLARENCE THOMAS: “Feel free to question Abramson’s timing and her subjectivity. Indeed, Abramson admits she is targeting Thomas again solely because the timing is proper, and the target high-value.”

CHANGE? Democrats Hoping for a Shocker in Trump Country. “Conor Lamb is running as a pro-gun, pro-union, pro-drilling Democrat in a region where voters have defected from the party en masse. Republicans hope that tying him to Nancy Pelosi is all that’s needed to hold onto this seat—and perhaps the House majority.”

Josh Kraushaar:

This slice of western Pennsylvania is filled with politically homeless voters, once-reliable Democrats who have grown alienated by their party’s drift leftward. Many of these up-for-grabs constituents don’t fit any neat political typologies: They’re gun-owning seniors who want to make sure their entitlement programs are protected. They champion the fracking boom that has revitalized the region’s economy, but also care about clean air and water. They’re compassionate towards immigrants, but want them to learn English and assimilate into American society. A majority voted for Walter Mondale in 1984, but became Donald Trump supporters in 2016.

These are the type of voters that Democrats need to win back if they hope to hold governing majorities into the future. And these Pennsylvanians will soon be rendering a critical verdict that will be heard around the country in a closely watched congressional election on March 13: Can the party win back some of these blue-collar voters that have been drifting unmistakably towards Republicans?

Running “moderates” all across the nation helped the Democrats win the House in 2006 — moderates who went on, by and large, to vote in favor of ObamaCare, Dodd-Frank, etc.

PROF. JAMES FOX: School shootings are not the new normal, despite statistics that stretch the truth: If you think that our schools are under siege like never before, take a statistical trip back in time.

Since 1990, there have been 22 shootings at elementary and secondary schools in which two or more people were killed, not counting those perpetrators who committed suicide.

But enough of your facts, Prof. Fox. What of people’s feelings?

STEPHEN L. CARTER: ‘The Black Panther’ Is No Call for Revolution: The superhero seeks to inspire, not force the world to change.

I’m somewhat troubled that we ascribe such great social importance — and this is just the latest example of many — to movies about comic book characters.

HMM: With Nowhere Else to Turn, Syrian Kurds Will Have to Embrace Assad’s Army.

With the understanding that they don’t really have anyone to rely on in their struggle against the Turkish forces that invaded northern Syria’s Afrin district in January, the Syrian Kurds will have to do a back flip and embrace the Syrian military. The army forces and those Syrian militias that have been helping President Bashar Assad’s regime are prepared to go into the Afrin district and even into the city itself to restore the regime’s control over the area, erect a defensive wall against the Turkish forces and perhaps later even expand Assad’s control over the other Kurdish districts in northern Syria.

The leadership of the Afrin district, one of the three autonomous Kurdish districts, denies it has reached any agreement with the regime, but judging by the movements of the regime’s army and the vague responses of the Kurds, this will be the next move. If indeed the Syrian military takes control of the district and positions military outposts along the Turkish border, it would be an important achievement for Assad that could have crucial consequences for the diplomatic process aiming to resolve the Syrian crisis.

Related: Turkey has warned the Syrian government not to help Kurds fighting against Turkish forces in northern Syria.

And: Moscow calls on US not to play with fire in Syria.

So we have US friends teaming up with a regime the US wants gone to stop a US ally from killing US friends while the Russians accuse the US of messing things up in the Middle East.

Sounds about par.

FUTURE HISTORY: Looking back a few years after hypothetical new restrictions on semiautomatic weapons in private hands, we see a country grown more divided, but no less armed.

CHANGE: China’s J-20 stealth fighter jet has officially entered service.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Minnesota legislation takes on ‘intellectual bullying’ on campus. “A Republican state senator in Minnesota is proposing legislation to ensure that public colleges and universities adhere to their constitutional obligation to allow freedom of speech on campus. The bill would specifically forbid administrators from imposing restrictions on speech, ‘including ideas and opinions they find offensive,’ and would also outlaw so-called ‘free speech zones.'”

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LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Gun Control Talk Continues, Mueller Eyes Jared, and Much, Much More. “The media continues to overlook the failure of the FBI to act upon a specific tip warning the agency that the Florida shooter was violent, armed and ready to shoot up his school, in favor of their own progressive political agenda.”

Never let a crisis go to waste, as the man said.

IN FREQUENCY OF MASS PUBLIC SHOOTINGS, the U.S. falls between France and Canada.

TET OFFENSIVE, VIETNAM 1968: Rocket attack on Da Nang.

CREDENTIALED BUT NOT EDUCATED, SMUG BUT NOT MORAL: The Atlantic: Witnessing the Collapse of the Global Elite. “What has happened here is the same phenomenon that explains so many of the ills of the last couple of decades: the algae-like bloom of elites and their simultaneous loss of substance.”