A MARK VI IN THE ARABIAN GULF LAUNCHES A PUMA: A U.S. Navy Mark VI patrol boat operating in the Arabian Gulf launches an RQ-20B PUMA Unmanned Aerial System. The photo illustrates how a small naval combatant can use its own drone “air force” for local surveillance. President Trump has told the Navy to sink Iranian vessels if they harass or threaten American ships. Mark VI patrol boats are fast and agile and are used to monitor Iranian “speedboat swarms.” Here’s a Surface Forces update from 2019 which discusses the Mark VI and the U.S. Navy’s “rediscovery” of coastal patrol boats. The update also discusses the Navy’s Cyclone class patrol ships, like the USS Thunderbolt, which engaged an Iranian vessel in 2017.

IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE PROPHECY:

In case you can’t make out the headline on the image on the right: Harvard Smart People Misspell ‘Arithmetic’ While Advocating ‘Ban’ On Homeschooling.

The timing of Harvard’s self-own is remarkable: A Bad Time To Hate Homeschool — Harvard Magazine recently profiled a sharp critique of homeschooling that is poorly reasoned and even more poorly timed.

ANOTHER BIDEN ACCOMPLISHEMENT! How Obama/Biden Wrecked the U.S. Medical Device Industry. “As lawmakers ponder ways to bring back U.S. manufacturing of pharmaceuticals, their raw materials, medical supplies, and devices, it must be remembered a major part of this problem which has come back to bite us was created by the Obama/Biden administration and the medical device tax that was included in ObamaCare that was supposed to defray the costs of this doomed-to-failure new entitlement program. . . . Apart from forcing companies to cancel expansion plans and/or move overseas, one immediate effect of the medical device tax was to destroy jobs in an industry belatedly considered as part of our national security in an age of China-spawned pandemics.”

WHAT DID SHE THINK WOULD HAPPEN? Biden accuser Tara Reade ‘lost total respect’ for CNN’s Anderson Cooper for not asking former VP about assault claim.

INSERT LORI LOUGHLIN JOKE HERE: USC says yes to nearly $20 million in COVID relief.

DENSITY KILLS. MASS TRANSIT KILLS. URBANIZATION KILLS. Coronavirus Lingers in Air of Crowded Spaces, New Study Finds.

I WAS KIND OF HOPING THIS WAS A TIME-TRAVEL STORY, BUT NO: How an F-16 Fighter Jet Accidentally Bombed Japan.

DAN MARKEL UPDATE: Lawyer For Hit Man In Dan Markel Murder Case: ‘Detectives Were Stationed Outside The Adelsons’ Homes, Ready To Make Arrests.’

DON’T GET COCKY, KIDS: Businesses adopted stricter health policies, even as dire predictions didn’t materialize.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Diversity officer slams Trump for ‘inflaming’ ‘mostly conservative white’ lockdown protesters.

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WE NEED A SHAKEUP FOR A WHOLE LOT OF REASONS: An intelligence community shakeup is returning assets to field, where they are welcomed.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: ‘Kim Jong-Un Dead’ Sounds Like a Dictator Vampire. “The geopolitical consequences of the demise of Kim Jong-un probably won’t be that great. It’s a closed dictatorship, and it will still remain the same if he does die, just with a different chubby commie in charge. That is, unless NoKo breaks with tradition and lets Kim’s sister take over. She’s not chubby and probably ten times worse than he is.”

Easy call: If she takes the job, the press will fawn over her and wonder why we haven’t had a female murderous dictator yet.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Our Virus is a Violent Teacher. “Panic ensued. Former madness was declared genius. More were needed in overalls, fewer in yoga pants. A Chevy van was preferable to a year’s pass on the metro. A first-class ticket to Milan was nothing but a trip to nowhere. Roomy yards were again correct, nice elevators not so much.”

CRITICISM OR FRIENDLY ADVICE? ‘Just Calm Down’: Nancy Pelosi Fires Back After Jake Tapper Suggests She Made ‘A Tactical Mistake.’

SALENA ZITO: Small-town America: ‘One bad season away from bankrupt.’

UGH: Young and middle-aged people, barely sick with covid-19, are dying of strokes. “Doctors sound alarm about patients in their 30s and 40s left debilitated or dead. Some didn’t even know they were infected.”

There was one report out of Wuhan, China, that showed that some hospitalized patients had experienced strokes, with many being seriously ill and elderly. But the linkage was considered more of “a clinical hunch by a lot of really smart people,” said Sherry H-Y Chou, a University of Pittsburgh Medical Center neurologist and critical care doctor.

Now for the first time, three large U.S. medical centers are preparing to publish data on the stroke phenomenon. There are only a few dozen cases per location, but they provide new insights into what the virus does to our bodies.

A stroke, which is a sudden interruption of the blood supply, is a complex problem with numerous causes and presentations. It can be caused by heart problems, clogged arteries due to cholesterol, even substance abuse. Mini-strokes often don’t cause permanent damage and can resolve on their own within 24 hours. But bigger ones can be catastrophic.

The numbers are small enough that I wouldn’t be surprised if they were linked to regular drug use.

ADVICE THAT WILL NOT BE TAKEN: Stop Letting Trump Live Rent-Free In Your Head: Ask your doctor if constant outrage is right for you. If it’s not, consider dialing it down.

COLORADO: Coffee shop workers laid off during COVID-19 start ‘Pandemic Donuts.’

After one last hurrah on St. Patrick’s Day, the coffee shop where Gabrielle Henning and Michael Milton worked closed down because of COVID-19.

A week and a half later, they opened their own business.

“Woke up the next day and started Pandemic Donuts on Instagram and hit the ground running from there,” Milton said.

Pandemic Donuts took off. The pair said they shifted from taking orders through Instagram messages to on a website in less than a week.

“The first day we were really surprised we got a couple dozen, like wow this is pretty cool, we could do this every day,” Milton said. “And by the second and third day we were selling out into the future.”

It’s impossible not to enjoy the increase in entrepreneurship we’ve seen.

KAROL MARKOWICZ: Wait, how long are we supposed to stay in lockdown?

In the beginning, we had a goal: to flatten the curve. We were warned that COVID-19 would overtake our hospitals and cause a health-system collapse. We were to stay home to give our medical heroes a fighting chance.

So we did, and thanks to the strength of our system, it worked. The Javits Center never filled up; the USS Comfort is sailing away. Three weeks ago, Gov. Andrew Cuomo was vowing to seize ventilators from upstate hospitals and send them to Gotham. Last week, we were dispatching our ventilators out to other states.

We did our part; we flattened the curve. So why is there no move to loosen regulations?

In February and March, expert and elite opinion seemed to understand that ­patience with lockdowns would at some point wear thin. But not anymore. . . .

It’s also becoming apparent that staying closed is some weird poke in the eye to President Trump. Hyper-polarization means that if the president wants to awaken the nation from its devastating economic coma, it must mean that he and his cornpone followers are wrong. Smart people — who tend to have lockdown-immune jobs in academe, government and media — must know better, and they have a license to mock and demean.

Yeah, they seem to have gotten steadily more invested. Plus:

It’s less that we need to know when this ends than we need to know how it ends. Are we waiting for deaths to fall below a certain daily number? What is that number? Are we waiting for hospitalizations to evaporate? For better treatment? For a vaccine? Antibody tests? Herd immunity? New Yorkers are tough, we can handle the truth.

But this uncertainty can’t last, or people will decide to leap into irresponsibility. We need a plan, and we need it now.

Related: Protests show ‘two Americas’ — those who lost their jobs and those still getting paid.

FAKE NEWS: Poison Control Calls Are Up After Trump’s Disinfectant Remark.

To be fair, if it weren’t for fake news they wouldn’t know what to report.

THIS IS NOT THE PANDEMIC OUTCOME I EXPECTED: Mayo Clinic to furlough or reduce pay of 30,000 employees.

JOEL KOTKIN: Angelenos like their single-family sprawl. The coronavirus proves them right.

For nearly a century, Los Angeles’ urban form has infuriated urbanists who prefer a more concentrated model built around a single central core.

Yet, in the COVID-19 pandemic, our much-maligned dispersed urban pattern has proven a major asset. Los Angeles and its surrounding suburbs have had a considerable number of cases, but overall this highly diverse, globally engaged region has managed to keep rates of infection well below that of dense, transit-dependent New York City.

As of April 24, Los Angeles County, with nearly 2 million more residents than the five boroughs, had 850 coronavirus-related deaths compared with 16,646 in New York City.

After this crisis, deeper research will explain why some regions of the country were able to fend off infection more effectively than others. But clearly, differ-ences in employment and housing patterns and transit modes appear to be very significant, if not decisive, factors.

L.A.’s sprawling, multi-polar urban form, by its nature, results in far less “exposure density” to the contagion than more densely packed urban areas, particularly those where large, crowded workplaces are common and workers are mass-transit-dependent.

Los Angeles’ urban form emerged early in the last century as civic leaders such as Dana Bartlett, a Protestant minister, envisioned Los Angeles as “a better city,” an alternative to the congestion and squalor so common in the big cities of the time. Developers and the public embraced this vision of single-family homes, as Los Angeles became among the fastest-growing big cities in the country.

In recent decades, this dispersed model has been increasingly disparaged by politicians, the media and people in academia who tend to favor the New York model of density and mass transit. Yet even before COVID-19 most Angelenos rejected their advice, preferring to live and work in dispersed patterns and traveling by car. This bit of passive civic resistance may have saved lives in this pandemic.

Lessons of the coronavirus: Urbanization kills. Mass transit kills. Bureaucracy kills.