FORGET IT, HE’S TROLLING: Crowd at Indiana rally cheers when Trump suggests he deserves an ‘extension’ on his presidency beyond two terms.

SARAH PALIN SAYS MCCAIN’S REGRETS ABOUT HER ARE A ‘PERPETUAL GUT-PUNCH:’

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) said it’s a “perpetual gut punch” to hear reports that Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) now regrets picking her as his 2008 presidential running mate.

Palin, in an interview with The Daily Mail published Thursday, said McCain has never expressed any misgivings to her. The ailing senator reportedly makes the admission in his upcoming book and in an HBO documentary, The New York Times reported.

“That’s not what Sen. McCain has told me all these years, as he’s apologized to me repeatedly for the people who ran his campaign –- some who now staff MSNBC, the newsroom there, which tells you a lot,” Palin said. She attributed McCain’s statements to his ghostwriters.

To be fair, many of McCain’s statements over the years have been perpetual gut-punches to conservatives and libertarians.

DON’T CALL IT AN SUV: Rolls-Royce reveals Cullinan SUV at a price of $325,000.

Rolls would prefer that you referred to the Cullinan as an “all-terrain high-bodied car.” And whether you love the look or hate it, it is unmistakably Rolls-Royce.

THE SCIENCE IS SETTLED: The Study You Won’t Be Hearing About: No Impact On Groundwater From Fracking.

OOF: White House Aide on McCain’s Haspel Opposition: ‘It Doesn’t Matter, He’s Dying Anyway.’

BLUE ON BLUE: Facebook’s ‘so white and male’ leadership highlights bigger diversity issue. “Where’s the progress?”

Make them live up to their own rules.

AT AMAZON, Save on High-Speed HDMI Cables.

I’M AMAZED I GOT TO THIS STORY BEFORE STEPHEN GREEN DID: We Could Be Getting a Hangover ‘Pill’ Soon, After Hugely Positive Results in Mice. Then again, I think you have to stop drinking before you can get a hangover.

21ST CENTURY HEADLINES: F-22s & F-35s Will Launch Recoverable Gremlins Attack Drones.

FRONT-RUNNER: The Gambler Who Cracked the Horse-Racing Code. “Bill Benter did the impossible: He wrote an algorithm that couldn’t lose at the track. Close to a billion dollars later, he tells his story for the first time.”

VIRGINIA POSTREL: Trump And The Rules Of Celebrity Politics. “In dominating Twitter, the president joined the American tradition of embracing new media just as Eisenhower did with TV, says author David Haven Blake.”

STEPHEN KRUISER: Daily Barrage of Anonymous Sources Is Neither News nor Journalism. “It is lazy though.”

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Prof says ‘wealth redistribution’ key to ‘sexual fulfillment.’

It certainly worked wonders in the swinging socialist sexual paradise of the Soviet Union, or so I am told by the New York Times.

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS. Or, Question Asked and Answered:

● Shot: McCain May Be the ‘Conscience of the Senate.’ Is Anybody Listening?

—Headline, the New York Times, yesterday.

● Chaser: New York Times rejects McCain essay.

—Headline, CNN.com, July 11th, 2008.

CONE OF SILENCE (UNDERSEA EDITION): Device could make underwater objects appear invisible to sonar.

The device makes sound waves scatter around an object making it invisible to sonar detection.

In order to achieve this, the researchers used a “smart” material with special properties.

The researchers have outlined their work at a major scientific meeting in Minneapolis, US.

When a ship sends out a signal to detect objects in the ocean or to map the sea floor, the signal bounces back in a way that makes it appear as if the cloaked object isn’t there at all.

Amanda Hanford and her team at Pennsylvania State University in State College designed a 90cm (3ft) -tall pyramid out of perforated steel plates that could do just that.

The smart “metamaterial” they developed for use in the “cloak” forces sound waves to spread their energy around the object, making it undetectable to underwater sensors.

Interesting, although over the last few years real progress has been made in non-acoustic methods of detecting large underwater objects, such as nuclear missile submarines.

THIS IS CNN: ‘She’s mocking you, dummy!’ Woman holds up stuffed Pepe the Frog doll at Trump rally and Jim Acosta can’t even. 

Will Acosta dial 911 for the Time-Warner-CNN-HBO Dox Squad and force a confession, North Korean-style out of her next? Stay tuned.

FLASHBACK: Four years ago, Thomas Sowell castigated the policies of the Obama administration that would lead, more or less directly to the Parkland school shooting.

WHAT COULD GO WRONG? Service Meant to Monitor Inmates’ Calls Could Track You, Too:

Thousands of jails and prisons across the United States use a company called Securus Technologies to provide and monitor calls to inmates. But the former sheriff of Mississippi County, Mo., used a lesser-known Securus service to track people’s cellphones, including those of other officers, without court orders, according to charges filed against him in state and federal court.

The service can find the whereabouts of almost any cellphone in the country within seconds. It does this by going through a system typically used by marketers and other companies to get location data from major cellphone carriers, including AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon, documents show.

Between 2014 and 2017, the sheriff, Cory Hutcheson, used the service at least 11 times, prosecutors said. His alleged targets included a judge and members of the State Highway Patrol. Mr. Hutcheson, who was dismissed last year in an unrelated matter, has pleaded not guilty in the surveillance cases.

As location tracking has become more accurate, and as more people carry their phones at every waking moment, the ability of law enforcement officers and companies like Securus to get that data has become an ever greater privacy concern.

Via Joseph Cox of Motherboard, who tweets, “Holy shit; huge. Law enforcement have access to a system that can geolocate almost any phone in the US; the system doesn’t really check if the officer has legal authority to do so. One officer allegedly used to spy on judges, other law enforcement.”

DELAYED FROG CASUALTIES OF THE KOREAN WAR: Yeah, what a click bait headline.

The article, however, is worth the read. Apparently a fungus traced to Korea is killing over 200 amphibian species worldwide.

This ecological super-villain, the chytrid fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, has driven more than 200 amphibian species to extinction or near-extinction—radically rewiring ecosystems all over Earth.

“This is the worst pathogen in the history of the world, as far as we can tell, in terms of its impacts on biodiversity,” says Mat Fisher, an Imperial College London mycologist who studies the fungus.

Now, a global team of 58 researchers has uncovered the creature’s origin story. A groundbreaking study published in Science on Thursday reveals where and when the fungus most likely emerged: the Korean peninsula, sometime during the 1950s.

An assault on amphibians, which I suppose is at least rhetorically related to an amphibious assault.

STARBUCKS: Bathrooms for All!

HOT MIC: There are reports coming in of two school shootings in the LA area, but details are still sketchy.

More to come, I’m afraid.

CHUTZPAH: Disgraced Former A.G. Schneiderman Sued Pro-Lifers For ‘Unwanted Physical Contact.’

That’s hypocrisy big enough to choke on.

THE INTERNET OF THINGS: Researchers can now send secret audio instructions undetectable to the human ear to Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Assistant.

A group of students from University of California, Berkeley and Georgetown University showed in 2016 that they could hide commands in white noise played over loudspeakers and through YouTube videos to get smart devices to turn on airplane mode or open a website.

This month, some of those Berkeley researchers published a research paper that went further, saying they could embed commands directly into recordings of music or spoken text. So while a human listener hears someone talking or an orchestra playing, Amazon’s Echo speaker might hear an instruction to add something to your shopping list.

“We wanted to see if we could make it even more stealthy,” said Nicholas Carlini, a fifth-year Ph.D. student in computer security at U.C. Berkeley and one of the paper’s authors.

Mr. Carlini added that while there was no evidence that these techniques have left the lab, it may only be a matter of time before someone starts exploiting them.

May?

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Course critiques ‘superficiality’ of ‘dominant white culture.’