CHANGE: JUST IN: Mexico’s President Lopez Obrador asks Trump to have U.S. officials meet with the Mexican foreign minister in Washington on Friday to seek a solution that benefits both nations.

GEORGE LOGAN, CALL YOUR OFFICE: Team Obama Tells Iran: Don’t Escalate, Don’t Take Trump’s Bait. “Former Obama officials have been working with Iran and friends on the Hill to isolate the Trump admin. Their most recent contacts were a couple weeks ago. They told @thedailybeast that them secretly talking to Iran is ‘normal’.”

JACK THE SIGNAL: Since 2015 Russia has been using eastern Ukraine and Syria to test new electronic Warfare equipment and operational techniques for hacking and jamming. Targets include American unmanned aerial vehicles (drones like Global Hawk) and satellite feeds. Read the whole thing.

30 YEARS LATER TIANANMEN SQUARE STILL HAUNTS CHINA’S COMMUNIST DICTATORSHIP: And well it should. On June 4, 1989, the PLA slaughtered over 2,000 peaceful protestors. Now Beijing forbids discussing the massacre and seeks to erase it from history.

The government has tried to erase photo evidence of the massacre, or at least prevent mainland China’s people from seeing images on the internet. Arguably the most iconic photo was snapped June 5, the day after the slaughter: In Tiananmen Square, a lone Chinese man stands before a PLA main battle tank. The man carries two shopping bags. There is video of the incident. After the tank stopped, the courageous fellow climbed aboard and spoke with the soldiers. He was eventually dragged into the crowd, and … then he disappeared. The government still claims it has never found the man and doesn’t know his name. Realists believe he is in a secret jail or an unmarked grave.

My latest Creators Syndicate column.

RELATED: Chapter 3, Cocktails from Hell.

UPDATE: Link fixed.

RAPTOR OVER ALASKA: An F-22 flies over Alaska during Exercise Northern Edge.

ABORT, RETRY, FAIL? Mueller Delivered a Message. Washington Couldn’t Agree on What It Was.

WARNING: Top sheriff warns: Trump’s ‘done’ if illegal immigration isn’t slashed.

NOW OUT: Much Ado About Lewrie: An Alan Lewrie Naval Adventure.

WORST. ANTISEMITE. EVER.

THAT’S NICE: Trump stays on after commencement speech, shakes hands with 1,000 cadets.

SHE’S ON THE OTHER SIDE: Merkel refuses to outlaw Hezbollah, snubbing German Jews after kippah row.

SHOCKINGLY, THIS IS NOT SATIRE: Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to Keynote FireEye Cyber Defense Summit.

IF YOU AREN’T SERIOUS ABOUT NUCLEAR, YOU AREN’T SERIOUS ABOUT CARBON REDUCTION: Nuke retirements could lead to 4 billion metric tons of extra CO2 emissions.

THEY’RE BOTH RIGHT: Ted Cruz agrees with Ocasio-Cortez: There should be a ban on lawmakers becoming lobbyists.

And we also need my revolving-door surtax.

NIALL FERGUSON: The outbreak of the second Cold War. “1648, not 1989, is our destination: a Cyber Westphalia, not the fall of the Great Firewall of China.”

Because the Internet and smartphones have enlarged, accelerated, and empowered social networks in the same way that the printing press did in the 16th and 17th centuries, today’s strategic rivalry is being played out in a near-borderless world, altogether different from the world of early John le Carré.

The 17th century had it all: climate change (the Little Ice Age that regularly froze the Thames), refugee crises (as Protestant zealots crossed the Atlantic), extreme views (as Catholics and Protestants sought to smear one another), and fake news (as witch-finders condemned hundreds of innocent women to death). But its most familiar feature to our eyes was the erosion of state sovereignty. The war of religion had no respect for borders: Jesuits infiltrated Protestant England just as Russian trolls now meddle in Western democracies.

The Thirty Years’ War was as much about power as it was about religion, however. Unlike the Cold War, which was waged by two superpowers, the Thirty Years’ War was a multiplayer game. The Holy Roman Emperor sought to reimpose Catholicism on Bohemia. Spain wanted to bring the rebellious Dutch back under Habsburg rule. Despite being Catholic, France sought to challenge the power of both Spain and Austria.

In the same way, today’s world is not bipolar. The United States may tell others to boycott Huawei, but not all Europeans will comply. China is the biggest economy in Asia, but it does not control India.

The Cold War created vast tank armies and nuclear arsenals, pointed at each other but never used. The Thirty Years’ War was quite different. It was a time of terrorism and gruesome violence, with no clear distinction between soldiers and civilians. (Think Syria.) Then, as now, the worst-affected areas suffered death and depopulation. There was no deterrence then, just as there is none now in cyberwarfare. Indeed, states tended to underestimate the costs of getting involved in the conflict. Both Britain and France did so — only to slide into civil war themselves.

The implications of this analogy are not cheering. The sole consolation I can offer is that, thanks to technology, most things nowadays happen roughly 10 times faster than they did 400 years ago. So we may be heading for a Three Years’ War rather than a Thirty Years’ War. Either way, we need to learn how to end such a war.

Fascinating piece. Read the whole thing.

HACKS GONNA HACK: Pelosi Attacks Facebook As ‘Willing Enabler’ of Russia, Still Owns Up to $1 Million In Company Stock; Pelosi family has owned Facebook stock since 2012, increased investment in 2018.

JUSTICE GORSUCH: Dangers of a World Where “Almost Anyone Can be Arrested for Something.”

Related: Ham Sandwich Nation: Due Process When Everything is a Crime.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Trump Has Become The Democrats’ Great White Whale.

One way of envisioning the Democratic obsessions with Donald Trump is as an addiction. We have seen the initial impeachment efforts; the attempt to get him under the emoluments clause, the Logan Act, and the 25th Amendment; the Russian collusion hoax; the Mueller investigation; the demand for his tax returns; and the psychodramas involving Michael Avenatti, Michael Cohen, and Stormy Daniels. Relentless progressives have needed a new Get Trump fix about every two months.

More practically, their fixation also substitutes for a collective poverty of ideas. The Democratic party has no plan to secure the borders other than to be against whatever Trump is for. They would not build a wall, deport illegal entrants, end sanctuary cities, fine employers, or do much of anything but allow almost anyone to enter the U.S.

The homeless crisis is reaching epidemic proportions in our cities, almost all of them run by progressive mayors and city councils. None have any workable plan to clean the sidewalks of needles and human excrement. None know what to do with the hundreds of thousands who have camped out in public spaces, endangering their own health and that of everyone around them due to drug addiction and inadequate sanitation and waste removal.

On abortion, the new Democratic position seems to be that the unborn can be aborted at any time the mother chooses, up to and including the moment of birth.

The Green New Deal has been endorsed by most of the current Democratic-primary candidates, even though they privately know its utopian fantasies would shut down the U.S. economy and destroy the present prosperity fueled by record energy production, deregulation, and tax reform and reduction. . . .

For now, no one has much of an idea what Democratic candidates would actually do, much less how they would do it. . . .

The Democratic establishment has become something like novelist Herman Melville’s phobic Captain Ahab, who became fatally absorbed with chasing his nemesis, the albino whale Moby Dick. The great white whale once ate part of Ahab’s leg, and he demands revenge — even if such a never-ending neurosis leads to the destruction of his ship and crew.

Democrats can never forgive Trump for unexpectedly defeating supposed sure winner Hillary Clinton in 2016 and then systematically — and loudly — undoing the eight-year agenda of Obama.

So far, Trump seems to have escaped all of their efforts to spear and remove him before the 2020 election. Trump, like Moby Dick, seems a weird force of nature whose wounds from constant attacks only seem to make him more indestructible and his attackers even more obsessed with their prey.

So true.

GOOD FOR HER: Meryl Streep says she doesn’t agree with the term ‘toxic masculinity.’

“Sometimes I think we’re hurt. We hurt our boys by calling something toxic masculinity. I do,” Streep said. “And I don’t find [that] putting those two words together … because women can be pretty f***ing toxic.”

Yes, but you’re not supposed to notice that.

HEADLINES FROM 1968-2016 INCLUSIVE: Democrats 2020: The Grievance Party.

PATRIK JONSSON: After delay on Harriet Tubman $20 bill, what makes a real American hero?

In announcing the Tubman bill’s postponement until 2026, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin cited security issues. Earlier this year, Rep. John Katko, a New York Republican, introduced the Harriet Tubman Tribute Act of 2019, which would force a 2020 reveal of the bill. Currently, Congress by law has only one override on currency: The Washington dollar bill cannot be changed without its consent.

So that means President Trump could order this one himself?

I MUST PUT HIM IN A BOOK:  Tiny Tyrannosaur Named the “Coyote King”.

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