FLYOVER NATION: YOU CAN’T RUN A COUNTRY YOU’VE NEVER BEEN TO. Kurt Schlichter: Ignorant Liberals Need To Go Visit America.

(Classical reference in headline.)

UBER WHISTLEBLOWER: Autonomous Vehicles Need New Safety Metrics, Aren’t Really Any Safer.

In his study, he alleged that too many automakers and tech firms rely on misleading benchmarks, reframing setbacks, and focus too much on the amount of testing vs technological progress.

“The miles per disengagement metric is a bad metric for measuring progress and is not meaningful in terms of safety. Companies inflate their miles per disengagement to appear further along and use their own absurd definitions of what a disengagement is — effectively erasing thousands of safety-related disengages. Companies that report their disengages honestly appear much further behind. Furthermore, this metric incentivize safety drivers to not disengage in unsafe situations,” he said. “Relying on the wrong metrics or not looking at real data has unfortunately propelled us into the realm of safety theater — meaning creating the illusion of safety instead of actually delivering on safety.”

With Congress likely to move ahead with legislation regarding the safe deployment of self-driving vehicles as early as next month, we’re past due for a critical analysis of the technology. Unfortunately, most of the data given to legislators is coming from tech firms and auto giants with an interest in playing up the positive aspects. A common chorus is that AVs will save anywhere from 3,000 to 37,500 American lives per year. However, it rides on the presumption that they’ll be more effective than human drivers, something that has yet to be proven.

I don’t think autonomous driving falls under the old “[BLANK] of the future — and always will be” gag, but it sure isn’t coming as soon as some had indicated.

IT’S COME TO THIS: Brexit: The London Airlift?

As if Britons hadn’t heard it before, they spent the weekend being told the worst. “Operation Yellowhammer,” a supposedly confidential document prepared by Her Majesty’s civil service, imagines the chaos that would follow a no deal Brexit. It was leaked to the Sunday Times in advance of Prime Minister Johnson’s negotiations this week with President Macron and Chancellor Merkel.

Supposedly, the Civil Serves say, Britain will face a “three-month meltdown” as trucks back up at its ports. It will need to restore border checks between Northern Ireland and the Irish republic. Critical shortages of food, fuel, and medicine are predicted if it leaves the EU without a deal. The Johnson government has denounced the leaks as the latest effort by Remainers to strike fear in the public.

One answer to all this, it occurs to us, could come from America. For it turns out that a no-deal Brexit could coincide almost exactly with the 70th anniversary of the last time an ally like the United Kingdom was cut off from vital supplies sourced from other parts of Europe — only to be rescued by American and British grit. We speak of the Berlin Airlift that triumphed on September 30, 1949.

The nice thing is that Britain’s royalty and their supporters are currently in the process of eliminating the global warming argument about such flights: Elton John, Pink and Ellen DeGeneres defend Harry and Meghan’s destruction of the planet through binge private plane flying.

AMERICANS (SORT OF) PRETEND TO CARE: Elizabeth Warren (Sort Of) Apologizes for Her Native American Lie.

ON THIS DAY IN 1919, RODDIE EDMONDS WAS BORN NEAR KNOXVILLE, TENNESSEE:  Almost a century later, in 2015, he was posthumously recognized as “Righteous Among the Nations,” Israel’s highest honor for non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.

He never told his story to his friends or family. His son learned about it only after his father’s death.

Master Sergeant Roddie Edmonds’ unit was surrounded by the Nazis during the Battle of Bulge. While they held out as long as they could, they eventually surrendered on December 19, 1944. On January 27, 1945, Edmonds arrived at Stalag IX-A along with well over a thousand fellow POWs, all of them exhausted, dirty, half-starved, cold, and no doubt frightened. As the highest-ranking non-commissioned officer among them, he was in charge.

For reasons I cannot begin to understand, the camp commandant’s first priority was to separate the Jewish from the non-Jewish POWs. Germany’s defeat was all but certain by then; you’d think he’d have given it a rest. Nevertheless, as soon as Edmonds arrived with his men, the commandant ordered Edmonds to assemble all Jewish soldiers the next day so that they could be dealt with separately.

“We are not doing that. We are all falling out,” Edmonds’ men remember him saying to them. So instead, all of the American POWs assembled that morning. The irate commandant held a pistol to Edmond’s head and ordered him to identify the Jews: “They cannot all be Jews!”

“We are all Jews,” Edmonds replied.

Edmonds told him that if he wanted to kill the Jewish POWs, he was going to have to kill them all. He reminded him that there is such a thing as a war crime and that under the Geneva Conventions name, rank, and serial number are all you get, not religion.

Miraculously, the commandant relented.

The Jewish-American prisoners at the other camp—Stalag IX-B—were not as lucky. It’s not clear what the facts were there. By some accounts, Jewish prisoners were asked to identify themselves and the senior officers there urged cooperation. By other accounts, the Nazis picked out the prisoners who looked Jewish (along with prisoners who were identified as troublemakers). Both stories may be true. In any event, those selected were sent to a slave labor camp where the death rate was horrifically high, despite the fact that the war in Europe lasted only another 3 ½ months.

Jews were only about 2 or 3% of the American population at the time, but they were a higher percentage of the prisoners at Stalag IX-A.  Edmonds’ courage is thought to have saved about 200 lives that cold, winter morning. He was then, now, and forever an American hero.

DEEP STATE BLUES: Federal Judge Orders FBI to Search for More Christopher Steele Docs.

JON GABRIEL (WITH AN ASSIST FROM PRESIDENT TRUMP): Memoirs from the Meme War.

ASKING THE QUESTIONS NO ONE ELSE IS ASKING: Can Trump lie his way out of a recession? That actually might not work. “Of course Trump’s fans will back his silly, racist lies — but some might not appreciate him wrecking the economy.”

Forget it, Jake — it’s Salon.

GOOD: UVA to keep pro-Jefferson ‘Founder’s Day’ despite Charlottesville’s decision to nix presidential holiday.

HOW CAN WE MISS YOU IF YOU WON’T GO AWAY? It’s Time for Colin Kaepernick to Move On.

BOTTOM STORY OF THE DAY: Scaramucci says he’s putting together coalition to stop Trump in 2020.

CORRECTION: This is the bottom story of the day: The Obamas’ First Big Anti-Trump Statement of 2020.

THE ENEMY WITHIN: Amid US-China trade war, dozens of colleges still spew Chinese ‘propaganda.’ I’m so old, I remember when colluding with foreign governments was supposed to be bad.

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Tempest in a Tardigrade cup: Cute little ‘water bears on the moon’ don’t contaminate space.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Frauds Investigating the Frauds – Gov. Stacey Abrams Edition. “The same crowd that has just spent three years telling us that Boris and Natasha swayed an American election using Facebook is now incredulous that the infinitely more powerful — and blatantly liberal — Google could pull this off.”

That’s different because shut up.

LIGHTNING IN NORTHERN LIGHTNING: An F-35A participating in exercise Northern Lightning takes off from an airbase in Wisconsin.

EVERYTHING SEEMINGLY IS SPINNING OUT OF CONTROL. Harvard Climate Loon: Keto Dieters Are Killing the Planet Because Bacon and Butter or Something.

(Classical reference in headline.)

THE DEATH OF CITIES, ROUND TWO: The Cost of Bad Intentions. Progressive policies threaten a new era of urban dysfunction.

OUCH: When Will the Boeing 737 Max Fly Again? Not This Year.

Having the FAA approve the software fix isn’t the only headache for Boeing and the aircraft’s operators, the European Aviation Safety Agency also needs to approve the fix, as do other regulators, which means the path back into service is still not straightforward. And that is only step one. Do passengers even want to fly this plane again? Ryanair has already repainted and quasi-rebranded it’s Max aircraft to the 737-8200, removing the word Max.

Airlines were so proud to display the most fuel efficient model in their inflight magazines as they took delivery from 2018, however, will their now be a subtle re-entry into service, taking the opposite path where airlines don’t want passengers to actually know the 737 variant they are sat inside is indeed a Max?

Boeing squandered an awful lot of trust, and really, that’s what keeps a manufacturer’s planes in the air.

SALENA ZITO: The perils of trading social interaction for social media.

I often say that what happens on Twitter isn’t a reflection of American life in the real world.

The facts mostly back that up. Last month, a Pew survey showed only 22% of U.S. adults say they use Twitter. Twitter users skew younger, identified more as Democrats, are more educated, and have more money than the other 78% who don’t use it.

Experiences back that up as well. Halfway through a 16-state backroads trip across the country, I’ve had many people — both conservative and liberal — tell me that if they use Twitter, they don’t use the social media platform in the way we assume they do.

They mostly observe. And what they see often makes them not want to jump into the discussion.

They also worry about how Twitter is used as a blunt force weapon to punish those with unpopular views, diminishing a healthy discourse to debate differences. They are not wrong.

The Twitter experience gives people pause about expressing their views on anything, because anything these days, even a cat video, is just one keystroke from becoming a political hot potato.

This is not a small problem. We should be able to have a normal political debate.

You could write a book on this.

THEY ALL KNEW: Jeffrey Epstein’s girls left impression on charter captain, but disgraced millionaire was elusive. “In neighboring St. Thomas, the young girls Epstein brought to his island weren’t a secret. In fact, he flaunted them.”

KAMALA HARRIS: Too Ignorant To Be President.

JOHN ROSENBERG AT MINDING THE CAMPUS:  Intimidation produces silence at Stanford.