A TALE OF TWO TONYS: The late Anthony Bourdain kicked off his current season of CNN shows by visiting West Virginia and writing:

I’ve gotta tell you, I was absolutely rocked back on my heels by, first of all, how beautiful it is, and how kind people were to me, and generous. I mean, in the same way that my preconceptions are upended so often around the world, I felt the same thing happening in West Virginia. In the stereotypical coal mining town in West Virginia — which is pretty much where we went, into the poorest area of West Virginia coal country — I was utterly moved and enchanted by the people and the place. And I like to think I came back from it with a more nuanced picture of what it means to be a coal miner, and why people voted for a sketchy businessman from New York who’s never changed a tire in his life.

You know, I went right at those things — guns, God, and Trump — and I was very moved by what I found there. I hope that people who watch the show will feel the same kind of empathy and respect, and will be able to walk in somebody else’s shoes, or imagine walking in somebody else’s shoes, for a few minutes in the same way that hopefully they do with one of my other shows.

In contrast, fellow leftwing New Yorker Robert DeNiro made his in-kind contribution to the Trump 2020 re-election campaign last night, shouting “F*** Trump” on the air during the Tonys. As Rod Dreher writes, “I can’t imagine that many Trump voters were watching the Tony Awards last night, so they wouldn’t have seen that virtue-signaling display. But it will enjoy a long life on social media, where it will do Donald Trump a lot of good with the masses, because it will solidify their entirely accurate belief that the cultural elites hate them. De Niro and the standing-ovation-giving audience are so vain that they don’t recognize this.”

Read the whole thing.

WELL, YEAH: The Real Winner From The Trump-Kim Summit Could Be… South Korea.

NEWS YOU CAN USE. Race, Gender and Trump: Everything You Think You Know is Wrong.

THIS COULD BE FUN: Trump, Kim to First Meet with Only Translators in the Room.

SALLY PIPES: Health Care Premiums Will Soar Again In 2019 — Thanks, Obama.

WATER, WATER EVERYWHERE, AND NOT ANY DROP TO DO THE DISHES: Yes, California Has Effectively Banned Showering And Doing Laundry On The Same Day.

Additionally, “The problem also threatens the state’s enormous and important agricultural industry, which is where most of the state’s water goes:”

Droughts are nothing new in California, especially in the desert south, but the increasing inability to deal with them is.

California wastes enormous sums of money on a bullet train to nowhere and other excessive spending priorities, but it has neglected to strengthen its water management infrastructure, leaving it susceptible to shortages and rationing.

As Joel Kotkin, fellow in urban studies at Chapman University, explained in a 2015 interview with Reason, the problem goes beyond water.

“The water situation in California is pretty bad,” he said. “You have to understand that we haven’t built any new infrastructure for the last 20 years. This, by the way, is not unique to water. It’s roads, it’s schools, it’s an unwillingness to invest in the future because we spend all our money in government paying the pensions of employees.”

And through this crisis, California has spent enormous resources to protect the delta smelt, a 3-inch fish that appears to be going extinct despite enormously wasteful environmental projects.

“To protect smelt from water pumps, government regulators have flushed 1.4 trillion gallons of water into the San Francisco Bay since 2008,” according to a 2015 report in The Wall Street Journal. “That would have been enough to sustain 6.4 million Californians for six years. Yet a survey of young adult smelt in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta last fall yielded just eight fish, the lowest level since 1967.”

P.J. O’Rourke once wrote that “You can’t get good Chinese takeout in China and Cuban cigars are rationed in Cuba. That’s all you need to know about communism.” And in socialist California, you can’t get sufficient water in a state that butts up against an entire ocean of the stuff.

DON’T GET COCKY:  In the midterms, even those who dislike Trump may not like the Democrats’ focus on impeachment and “resistance,” says John Fund.

MARKET SHARE: Crude oil futures mixed on rising US rig count, lower OPEC supply.

According to data released by Baker Hughes on Friday, US oil rig counts inched up by one to 862 for the week ended June 8.

“WTI declined as investors digested the sustained climb in oil rigs for the third consecutive week into June 8,” OCBC Commodity economist Barnabas Gan said.

The Permian oil rig count rose by three for the week ended June 8 to 479. The basin, sited in West Texas and southeastern New Mexico, is the US’ most active oil and gas drilling area.

Last week’s Permian oil rig count has risen 13 of the last 18 weeks and is at its highest level since mid-2015.

The data comes at a time while US crude production is at record high of 10.8 million b/d as of June 1, latest figures from the US Energy Information Administration showed.

Meanwhile, some support came from lower OPEC crude production, which slid for the fourth straight month in May to its lowest in over a year, latest S&P Global Platts survey showed.

A strong economy, summer demand, and Venezuela’s woes are likely to keep prices high at the pump for a while.

YUGE: 5 Reasons Trump Will Win 40 States in 2020.

Here’s one:

He Will Garner Record African American Support.

Driven largely on great home-ownership numbers, George W. Bush garnered the modern era’s greatest numbers of African American voters. It was all of 11%.

The lock-hold that the American left has handcuffed the African American vote with is both cultural and economic. And while President Trump will — like all GOP Presidents in the era — not likely gain the majority of African American votes, even an increase of 15-20% of their overall votes would trigger a seismic landslide. Consider that Bush was able to improve the lives of many by increased home-ownership. Consider that President Obama oversaw a rapid decline in the lives of African Americans. Then consider that no group has benefitted more from Trump reforms, deregulation, and job creation initiatives than the nation’s African Americans. But also consider the cultural impact President Trump is making on the issue of prison reform, cracking down on dangerous gang activity (of which minorities are the overwhelming majority of victims,) and pardoning African Americans wrongfully imprisoned, and their is a cultural shift occurring that no one is yet reporting. That he is even reaching out to the very sports figures who have opposed him and embracing cultural figures and giving them audience to hear their hearts and minds in order to achieve justice on some social level—is a picture that African American communities are unaccustomed to seeing. President Obama’s went to black churches, put in affected speech patterns, and bemoaned conditions. By contrast President Trump invites them to the White House, listens to their legitimate complaints and plots solutions. I would not be surprised if he were to break 30% of African American support in 2020.

Don’t get cocky.

NO FUN EVER: Student athletes suspended from postseason for smoking cigars after graduation.

Sure, it’s against the league’s rules, but this was a single celebration, not ongoing use (as far as we know).

GIANT INTERNET COMPANY SWEARS OFF CENSORSHIP, TAKES HITS FROM MEDIA: In a thoughtful blog post, the dominant Steam gaming marketplace announces that it is getting out of the censorship business, saying, “If you’re a player, we shouldn’t be choosing for you what content you can or can’t buy.” Great news for freedom lovers, but some game journalists and developers don’t like it. A Kotaku writer called the decision “irresponsible” and quotes, among others, a “developer of queer sex games” whose problems with getting racy games on Steam will now be over, but who opposes the decision because it means the platform is “picking bad moral norms.” This, despite the fact that it was the imposition of others’ moral norms that caused his problems in the first place.

MAN’S CRISIS OF IDENTITY IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE 21ST CENTURY: John Hawkins on The Increasing Meaningless of Modern American Life.

(Classical allusion in headline.)

NO THANKS: Man Who Destroyed The Democratic Party Gives Advice To Democratic Presidential Hopefuls

If you’d like to learn how Obama decimated his own party, I, coincidentally, have an article for that.

ANTISOCIAL MEDIA: Twitter Revokes Louis Farrakhan’s Blue Check Over Anti-Semitic Tirade. “His most recent anti-Semitic rant was apparently one too many.”

UNEXPECTEDLY: Yet another study finds that women’s choices lead to lower pay. Generous parental leave options lead women to spend more time at home, which in turn takes them out of the workforce for an extended period of time, causing the gender wage gap to expand.

“Lengthy parental leave unintentionally pushes [sic] women to lose momentum in developing human capital and workplace seniority and to put more energy into domestic life.”

In other words, with broader choice, women choose to spend more time with kids. https://t.co/1fLNojFAZV

— Ed Whelan (@EdWhelanEPPC) June 11, 2018

How many more times do we need to prove that the gender wage gap cannot conclusively be linked to discrimination?

CHRISTOPHER BUSKIRK: If There’s a Red Wave Election in 2018, This Will Be Why.

WINNING: The US again has the world’s most powerful supercomputer. “The US just grabbed back the crown from China with the AI-focused Summit.”

The Department of Energy pulled back the curtain on the world’s most powerful supercomputer Friday. When Summit is operating at max capacity, it can run at 200 petaflops — that’s 200 quadrillion calculations per second. That smokes the previous record holder, China’s Sunway TaihuLight (which has a 93 petaflop capacity). Summit is also about seven times faster than Titan, the previous US record holder which is housed at the same Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee. For perspective, in one hour, Summit can solve a problem that it would take a desktop computer 30 years to crack.

Summit’s 4,608 servers, which take up the size of two tennis courts, house more than 9,000 22-core IBM Power9 processors and more than 27,000 NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs. Cooling the system takes 4,000 gallons of water a minute and Summit uses enough power to run 8,100 homes.

DOE will use it in part to study your carbon footprint.

NOW THAT’S REAL SOCIALISM: Polio Returns to Venezuela as Economic Crisis Cripples Healthcare System.

This is Newsweek, so of course:

Which is odd when you remember how fond they were of the s-word just a few short years ago:

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LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Kim Summit, Trudeau Scuffle, a DOJ Deadline, and Much, Much More. “On Friday, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, gave the Justice Department a deadline to provide documents concerning the FBI’s alleged informant looking into Russian ties to Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign. The documents must be handed over by Tuesday.”

Or…?

Tyler O’Neil is filling in for Liz while she’s on vacation.

LIGHTNING CHAINED: An F-35B Lightning II ascends on an aircraft elevator aboard the USS Essex. Photo snapped June 2 during an exercise in the Pacific Ocean.

DEMOGRAPHICS IS DESTINY: Darn. I may outlive Social Security.

This week we learned Social Security will spend more than it collects this year for the first time since 1983. Unless trends change, the new go-bust date for the retirement program is 2034.

That’s just 16 years from now. I’ll be 79, and hope I’ll have a few years left, though I doubt I’ll be in shape to go job hunting.

Even worse news is that Medicare, the retiree health care program, will be spent out by 2026 — I may not even be retired yet.

As maddening as that prospect is for someone who has been paying into both systems for a half-century, I feel for the generations behind me. I’ve still got a shot at getting some of my money back. There seems no chance they’ll ever collect anything.

Given the vast number of Baby Boomers heading into retirement, you’d think these doomsday reports would trigger a panic response from Washington.

No way.

Anything which can’t go on forever will stop.

SAD: Things don’t look good for Dodge and Chrysler.

The fact is that Fiat Chrysler (FCAU) has as a lot of brands, some of which generate way more customer excitement than others.

For instance, there is Jeep, one of the most valuable automotive brands in the world. Then there’s Ram, the pickup truck that was brand split off from Dodge in 2009. It sells trucks that haul in loads of profits. Then, on the Italian side, there are Alfa Romeo and Maserati, which sell exciting, snarling Italian luxury and performance cars.

Chrysler and Dodge play support roles, and only have a significant presence in North America. Simply put, Fiat Chrysler has better places to invest its money.

The Chrysler name doesn’t resonate much with consumers even in the United States. The fact that it shares a name with its parent company that just a decade ago narrowly avoided bankruptcy doesn’t help, said David Zatz, a blogger who follows Chrysler closely.

“The case against Chrysler being here in 2030 is pretty convincing,” he said. “The brand does not have a particularly good reputation in the US, its only major market.”

Fiat has compounded Chrysler’s woes by starving the brand of product. Chrysler’s entire lineup consists of just two vehicles: A full-size sedan in a market going crazy for CUVs, and whose platform debuted in 2004; and a minivan, which is a segment whose sales peaked in 2000.

DOUBLING DOWN ON STUPID: Yes, Democrats Should Run On Impeachment.