THOSE JOBS NUMBERS LOOK EVEN BETTER: The Washington Post grudgingly admits one amazing thing about today’s excellent jobs numbers – the black unemployment rate is now closer than it ever has been to the white unemployment rate. As the Post notes, in the past when the numbers got close it was because white unemployment was rising. That’s not the case today. Meanwhile, the New York Times says, “We Ran Out of Words to Describe How Good the Jobs Numbers Are.” It’s shocking what a supply-side cocktail of lower taxes, less regulation, and allowing businesses to get on with their jobs can do.

RENT-SEEKERS GOTTA SEEK RENTS: King Corn Suing EPA Over Ethanol Waivers.

President Trump has thus far refused to consider ending the Renewable Fuel Standard and its mandates for blending ethanol into the gasoline supply. This keeps the King Corn folks in Iowa happy, but pretty much nobody else in conservative circles. Some compromises have finally been reached, however, and the EPA has begun granting a few waivers to refineries which were the hardest hit by the mandates and associated penalties. It wasn’t much, but it’s at least a start.

So how did the corn contingent respond? They’re suing the EPA, saying that the waivers are violating their iron grip on the market or something.

“Entitlement” is a dirty word and an even worse attitude.

I CERTAINLY HOPE NOT: Do Tequila Drinkers Need to Worry about an Agave Shortage?

I’VE ALWAYS LIKED THESE, AS ABSURD AS IT WAS: Mercedes-Benz G550 4×4²: The O.G. G-wagen goes out on an extremely high note.

AT AMAZON, save in Automotive Tools and Equipment.

Plus, deals on Vitamins and Dietary Supplements.

WHAT DO YOU CALL A GOOD START? U.S. Demanding ‘Complete, Verifiable, Irreversible Denuclearization’ from North Korea, Says Official.

ROCKET REPORT: SpaceShipTwo soars, BFR engine advances, a self-eating booster.

Here’s more on the autophage rocket:

Engineers in Scotland and Ukraine are working on a small “autophage” rocket that consumes itself during ascent. The autophage engine consumes a propellant rod which has solid fuel on the outside and oxidizer on the inside, according to PhysOrg. The researchers say such a rocket could be good for launching CubeSats.

Launch lunch… This is actually kind of a brilliant concept to shed large quantities of mass on the way to orbit and deal with the problem of an empty fuel tank. Whether it’s practical, who knows. At present, the engineers are working with an engine prototype in the lab now and have no direct path to building a rocket around it.

If it works, we’ll at long last have the definitive answer to the question: “What’s the exact opposite of a reusable rocket?”

“PRETTY TERRIBLE:” The Actual Side Effects of Ambien.

MUTUALLY NONCONSENSUAL SEX:  Even the Atlantic is noticing the excesses of Title IX.

GRADUALLY, THEN SUDDENLY: How #TheResistance Lost Their Minds.

I think the last civil conversations we had occurred just days before November 8, 2016. You were supremely confident Hillary Clinton would win the presidential election; you voted for her with glee. As a lifelong Republican, I bit down hard and cast my vote for Donald Trump. Then the unimaginable happened. He won.

And you lost your freaking minds.

I knew you would take the loss hard—and personally—since all of you were super jacked-up to elect the first woman president. But I did not imagine you would become totally deranged, attacking anyone who voted for Trump or supported his presidency as a racist, sexist, misogynistic, homophobic Nazi-sympathizer.

Nah, the writing for that had been on the wall since Bush 43 — but do read the whole thing.

GOP DONORS REALLY NEED TO START FUNDING GLENN’S “WELCOME WAGON” IDEA:

● Shot: $55 million gets you this South Bay house.

—The San Jose Mercury, May 31, 2018.

● Chaser: People are fleeing Silicon Valley for Nevada, Texas and Idaho, report finds.

—The San Jose Mercury, May 31, 2018.

RAYMOND IBRAHIM: What Are Islam’s ‘Claims’ to Jerusalem?

Slim and none?

21ST CENTURY HEADLINES: Nanorobots help remove bacteria, toxins from blood.

DOWNLOAD IT WHILE ITS HOT: Prevailing Wage Legislation and the Continuing Significance of Race. My latest academic article:

Since the early twentieth century, labor unions have lobbied federal and state governments to enact and enforce laws requiring government contractors to pay “prevailing wages” to employees on public works projects. These laws, currently active at the federal level and in approximately thirty states, typically in practice require that contractors pay according to the local union wage scale. The laws also require employers to adhere to union work rules. The combination of these rules makes it extremely difficult for nonunion contractors to compete for public works contracts.

Meanwhile, construction unions have been among the most persistently exclusionary institutions in American society. Not surprisingly, in many cases, the history of prevailing wage legislation has been intertwined with the history of racial discrimination. Economists and others argue that prevailing wage legislation continues to have discriminatory effects on minorities today. Union advocates, not surprisingly, deny that prevailing wage laws have discriminatory effects. More surprisingly, they deny that the granddaddy of modern prevailing wage legislation, the federal Davis-Bacon Act of 1931, had discriminatory intent.

Part I of this Article discusses the discriminatory history of the most significant of all prevailing wage laws, the Davis-Bacon Act. As discussed below, Davis-Bacon was passed with the explicit intent of excluding African American workers from federal construction projects, and its discriminatory effects continued for decades.

Part II of this Article discusses the controversy over whether prevailing wage legislation continues to have discriminatory effects. The section begins with a discussion of the empirical literature on the effects of prevailing wage discrimination on minority employment. The section next presents evidence that construction unions continue to discriminate against members of minority groups, albeit much more subtly than in the past. The section concludes by recounting allegations that prevailing wage legislation serves to exclude minority contractors from obtaining government contracts.

PALEONTOLOGY: Scientists discover ‘Mother of All Lizards’ in the Alps.

Sometimes it’s hard to imagine what the Earth was like when massive beasts like the Tyrannosaurus rex freely roamed the land, but it can be even harder to go all the way to a time before dinosaurs were so fantastically dominant. There was planet Earth, ripe for habitation, with animal life still figuring out what evolutionary path it wanted to take. Now, researchers studying fossils from the Italian Alps have uncovered a true relic from that time, a tiny creature that is now the oldest known lizard to ever walk on this big blue marble.

This ‘Mother of All Lizards,” as it is being called, was a Megachirella. It was only about the size of a chameleon, but it was the precursor to the planet-spanning group of reptiles called squamates, which includes modern lizards and snakes.

The new discovery, which was detailed in a research paper published in Nature, was actually made using a 240-year-old fossil that had been discovered decades earlier. The tiny lizard was originally classified by scientists as an offshoot of the lizard family tree, but new scanning technology allowed the scientists to examine the fossil in an entirely new way.

So the science had not been settled.

FASTER? PLEASE! Arm aims to make your Android phone faster with next-gen mobile chips.

How will Arm’s in-house designs compete with Apple’s? “I expect we’ll do well against Apple,” said Mike Filippo, Arm’s lead processor architect.

But he was clear which company Arm considers its primary rival. “Our real competition is Intel,” he said.

“We’re building for sustained performance,” Filippo said. “The A76 is the biggest leap we’ve taken in our annual roadmap since we started in 2014.”

The 35 percent speed boost is a minimum, Filippo said. Some mathematical tasks will get a boost of 50 percent to 70 percent, and high-performance software that needs fast memory access should get a 60 percent to 95 percent boost for fetching that data, he added. Performance improvements vary depending on which speed test is used, he cautioned, adding that Arm used SPECint for its measurement of a 35 percent performance boost.

The Cortex-A76 has about the performance of today’s Intel Core i5-7300, Filippo said. Configured with more cache memory, it should compete with an i7 chip, he said.

Intel failed to recognize the importance of the mobile market until it was too late, and soon the mobile chipmakers are going to start moving in on Intel’s traditional turf.

ME TOO, AFTER THE WELLS FARGO THING: Millennials trust Amazon and PayPal over banks when it comes to personal data.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Educational decline: Homeschooling surges as parents seek safer option for children.

Who could have seen this coming?

CHANGE: Reddit Overtakes Facebook to Become Third Most Visited Website in the U.S. “Are all the scandals starting to catch up with the social media giant?”

NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: MSNBC stays silent as Joy Reid comes under more scrutiny.

CURIOUS: George Soros Pulls Out of San Diego’s District Attorney Race. “Soros cancels all media in support of far-left candidate Geneviéve Jones-Wright.”

The California Justice & Public Safety PAC, which was established by Soros to support Geneviéve Jones-Wright, a far-left public defender, recently pulled an advertisement depicting District Attorney Summer Stephan as having a backlog of rape kits that needed to be tested. The ad came under fire for being false and misleading.

Now, the PAC is leaving the race entirely. Soros’s PAC has cancelled all future advertisements in support of Jones-Wright, according to television station managers in the region.

Soros has spent hundreds of thousands on television advertisements, digital advertisements, and campaign literature and mailings in support of Jones-Wright after initially depositing $1.5 million into the California Justice & Public Safety PAC, the Washington Free Beacon previously reported.

Jones-Wright appeared at a secretive gathering held by the Democracy Alliance, a dark money donor network that was co-founded by Soros, last November to sit on a panel discussion on ramping up funding in district attorney races during the 2018 election cycle.

Jones-Wright, who told the Free Beacon in early May that she was “thrilled” to have the support of Soros, now has been dealt a major blow with the withdrawal of all upcoming media spots.

It’s probably just coincidence, but I’d feel remiss if I didn’t mention that Robespierre’s “Committee of Public Safety” governed Revolutionary France during the Reign of Terror.

IT’S NOT YOU JENNY, IT’S JUST THIS WAR, AND THAT LYING SON OF A BITCH JOHNSON: Samantha Bee whines about backlash from ‘one bad word’ after she calls Ivanka Trump a ‘feckless c***’ on national TV – as the president cites Roseanne ‘double standard’ and demands TBS fire her.

Bee tried to explain herself during Thursday night’s award ceremony. But in a non-public setting, she pointedly avoided repeating the apology she had tweeted hours earlier.

‘Stories about 1,500 missing unaccompanied migrant children flooded the news cycle over the weekend. So last night we aired a segment on the atrocious treatment of migrant children by this administration and past administrations,’ she said. ‘Sometimes even the ones who look best in swim trunks do bad jobs with things. Our piece attracted controversy of the worst kind.’

‘We spent the day wrestling with the repercussions of one bad word, when we all should have spent the day incensed that as a nation we are wrenching children from their parents and treating people legally seeking asylum as criminals. If we are OK with that then really, who are we?’

As Jim Treacher tweets, “Just as I suspected, [Bee’s] apology was bullshit. ‘I’m sorry I said it, but you made me say it’ is not an apology.”

SNAPSHOTS FROM THE FRONT: Dr. A. A. Nofi reviews Jon Cooksey’s The Vest Pocket Kodak and the First World War. As usual, the review is a history lesson unto itself.

VIRGINIA DEMOCRAT CAMPAIGN AD: After 9/11 The Greatest Threat To America Lived In A Cave. Now He Lives In The White House. “If the party roles were reversed here, this is a three-day firestorm. As it is, it’s more of a curio for the media. Which makes sense, since many of them doubtless agree with Dan Helmer’s point.”

You know what? I do think of them as Democratic operatives with bylines and it does all make sense.