WARTHOG SURGE: An A-10 elephant walk — part of a surge exercise conducted May 22.

RELATED: From April 2017, the 18th Wing in Japan conducts an elephant walk with F-15 Eagles, HH-60 Pave Hawks, E-3 Sentries and KC-135 Stratotankers. Send this photo to Kim Jong Un.

BACK CHANNELS: Historian Doug Wead tells Fox News other presidential administrations have used them. Teddy Roosevelt. JFK. Why, Obama and the Iran deal!

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Burned at the stake.

Facts and Information about the method of torture and execution by being burned at the stake used during the Medieval period of the Middle Ages.

It’s a brief but horrifying history.

GREGG ALLMAN HAS DIED: Complications from liver cancer killed him. He will be buried in the same cemetery in Macon, Georgia, as his brother, Duane, and Allman Brothers Band bassist, Berry Oakley. Gregg Allman wrote Whipping Post, a song I admire.

I see Glenn posted on this previously, after I read his post about the mysterious Australian SOS and went elsewhere online. Here’s the wikipedia on Whipping Post. Here’s a link to the YouTube of Whipping Post performed at the Fillmore East in 1970.

HOW TO TELL A PERSON’S BRAIN AGE:

In recent years, scientists have plumbed the molecular depths of the body and surfaced with tell-tale biomarkers of aging, some of which extend to the brain. Now, researchers are harnessing another tool, neuroimaging, to measure the organ’s age, and using that to predict how long a person will live…

…Cole and his colleagues recently devised their own technique of predicting the biological age of people’s brains using a combination of machine learning and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans.

As for determining if someone is brain dead, voting for Hillary is definitely a tell-tale marker.

ALL AMERICAN WEEK BLAST: The 82nd Airborne Division’s annual celebration. This year is special — it’s the division’s 100th birthday. The division was formed in 1917 as an infantry division. In 1942 it became an airborne division.

TURKEY ISSUES ARREST WARRANT FOR BASKETBALL STAR: The Turkish government says Oklahoma City Thunder Enes Kanter is a terrorist. He belongs to the Gulen Movement.

Kanter was detained last week in Romania after the Turkish government revoked his passport. In a video about it, Kanter said Erdogan is the “Hitler of this century.”

Kanter returned to the United States, via London, on Monday using his green card. Kanter, who claims he routinely gets death threats, said in interviews following the incident he was woken up by his manager in the middle of the night in Indonesia a few nights before and told the Indonesian “secret service and army” were looking for him because he is a “dangerous man.”

Kanter told reporters he plans on becoming a United States citizen.

The Turkish government believes Gulenists were behind the 2016 coup.

THE FALL OF CONSTANTINOPLE: May 29, 1453. RealClearHistory links to a 1999 Economist article that reviews the historical event then relates it to more contemporary issues involving Europe and Turkey.

For example:

The fall of Constantinople brought to a head many trends already under way. One was the slide of the Byzantine empire’s power, as the loss of Anatolian lands left it short of revenue and recruits, and thus more dependent on fickle Italian allies; another the flight of Greek scholars (particularly brilliant in Byzantium’s final years) to Italy, where they helped to stimulate the Renaissance.

Yet another was the emergent contest in south-eastern Europe between the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires. The Turks were besieging Vienna in 1683 and repeatedly at war with Russia or Austria in the 130 years thereafter. They held southern Greece until 1832, today’s Bulgaria, Romania, Bosnia and nominally Serbia until 1878, the lands south of these down to liberated Greece until 1913. Hence the Muslim pockets—Albania, Bosnia—that for most Europeans today are the only reminder that the country they see as a source of cheap, resented, migrant labour was once a mighty power in Europe.

But a part of Europe? Allied with Germany in the first world war, and therefore stripped of their remaining Middle Eastern empire, the Turks by 1922 were strong enough again to drive Greece’s troops, and centuries of Greek society, from Anatolia. Old enmities were resharpened by the Turkish invasion of northern Cyprus in 1974. If the European Union still hesitates, despite Turkey’s decades inside NATO, about its wish for EU membership too, the real reasons lie centuries deep; not least in 1453.

Yes, an 18 year-old article that’s still rather current.

RELATED: UN calls off Cyprus talks. That’s a headline from today, May 26, 2017.

The negotiations that began in May 2015 have made significant progress on how to share power in an envisioned federation, but they have stumbled on pivotal issues of post-reunification security arrangements and how much territory each side would administer.

The current impasse concerns the 35,000 troops that Turkey keeps in the breakaway Turkish Cypriot north. Greek Cypriots want all Turkish troops gone as part of any deal and propose an international police force to oversee security. The minority Turkish Cypriots say the troops are their only security guarantee. Turkish officials have said there can be no peace deal without a Turkish troop presence.

ALSO RELATED: A column on Cyprus written 13 years ago — it’s dated but still useful background. “…in these embedded conflicts involving land, religion and culture, no one forgets, and only the wise few forgive.”

CONVOY DUTY, SUMMER OF ’41: A color photo of the battleship USS Texas (BB-35) participating in a North Atlantic convoy operation in the summer of 1941. A silhouette at sunset.

THE RENEWABLE JOBS LIE: It’s one of many peddled by leftists. This column in Forbes, by James Taylor, fisks an article written by Allan Hoffman, a former Dept. of Energy bureaucrat who makes the claim that the renewable energy sector creates more jobs than conventional energy.

Renewable energy advocates often claim renewable energy creates more jobs than conventional energy, but such claims are based on deception and false comparisons. In reality, renewable energy isn’t even in the same universe of job creation as conventional energy.

More:

Public policy officials, do not be duped. The next time somebody claims wind and solar power create more jobs than natural gas and other conventional energy sources, ask them for specific definitions and parameters of the job numbers cited. If they falsely claim the definitions and parameters are similar, call them on it. If they truthfully answer that the definitions and parameters do not match up, ask them why they are presenting deliberately misleading data.

Indeed, a first class fisking!

MEANWHILE, BACK ON THE CHINA-NORTH KOREA BORDER: The U.S. Acting Assistant Secretary of State Susan Thorton quoted Chinese officials as saying they have “tightened border inspections, beefed up policing on the border and stepped up customs inspections.”

However, Ms. Thorton added: “Their calculus about how much pressure to impose on North Korea is related to their tolerance for potential instability, which is low, I would say.”

Someone needs to remind Beijing that a nuclear war on the Korean peninsula will create actual instability.

STEALTH CLOTH: Multi-spectral camouflage netting has been in development a long time. Now Saab has taken multi-spectral camouflage netting a step further.

CHINA’S DEBT PROBLEM:

Credit rating agency Moody’s downgraded China this week, warning that the country’s financial health is suffering from rising debt and slowing economic growth. It’s the first time the agency has cut China’s rating in nearly three decades.

The article is short but makes several relevant points, including the fact that this situation didn’t develop overnight.

RELATED: Fixing this situation is very hard. Ask Portugal.

THE BATTLESHIP TEXAS OF 1898: This is a color photo, or what passed for a color photo in the late 19th century. The process was called photochrom.

Per the caption, the USS Texas was the sister ship of the ill-fated USS Maine. Of course you remember the Maine.

CURVEBALLS: The pitch hitters hate.

Terrifyingly beautiful, like summer thunderstorms and whitewater rapids, the curveball of Astros pitcher Lance McCullers can be found at the intersection of violence and wonder. It is a demon he unleashes on hitters, especially with two strikes, when he throws it 68% of the time.

More:

The legend of the first curveball starts like this: In the summer of 1863 a 14-year-old boy named William Arthur Cummings experienced a eureka moment one day while tossing clamshells along a Brooklyn beach with some buddies. “All of a sudden it came to me that it would be a good joke on the boys if I could make a baseball curve the same way,” Cummings later wrote.

Four years of practice later, Cummings, then pitching for an amateur Brooklyn team as a 5’ 9″, 120-pound righthander, broke out his new pitch in a game against Harvard University on Oct. 7, 1867. Harvard won 18–6, but Cummings rejoiced in the success of his curveball, later writing, “I could scarcely keep from dancing with pure joy.”

The article is entertaining and packed with interesting stats.

NORTH AMERICA’S OIL WEAPON: My latest Creators Syndicate column.

Sophisticated American and Canadian energy industries have given the Free World an economic boost and a powerful diplomatic weapon.

The North American “fracking” revolution — hydraulic fracturing to tap vast reservoirs of “tight” natural gas and oil — has altered the world’s strategic calculus.

Yes, hug a fracker.

SUPER ZEPPELIN: The Airlander 10 is 302 feet long and undergoing flight tests.

Though it looks like a massive blimp, the Airlander 10 combines technology from airplanes, helicopters, and airships. It is designed to stay aloft at altitudes of up to 20,000 feet (6,100 meters) for up to five days when manned…

According to the chief test pilot, it flies “superbly.”

OLD BUT RELIABLE, DEADLY AND UPGRADED: Why Special Operations Command sticks with the MH-6 helicopter.

BATTLE FOR MOSUL: The slow fight continues.

Iraqi military engineers installed a new floating bridge across the Tigris river on Wednesday, reconnecting the two halves of Mosul to facilitate troop deployments ahead of a final assault to dislodge Islamic State.

All five bridges connecting the two sides of the city bisected by the Tigris were struck by the U.S.-led coalition in order to hinder the militants’ movements in the early stages of the campaign to retake Mosul last year.

Seven months on, Iraqi forces have removed Islamic State from all but a pocket of territory in the western half of Mosul, including the Old City, where the militants are expected to make their last stand.

It is set to be the most complex battleground yet.

CONNECTICUT DEMOCRATS CONSIDER SPENDING CUTS: I’m so old I remember when cutting spending made you a terrorist.

Governor Malloy says negotiations over the state budget, which began this week, have a long way to go, but after wobbling on taxes he has accomplished something remarkable. He has pushed his party’s majority in the General Assembly, the Democrats, to agree that state government’s financial collapse must be fixed mainly by cutting spending, and has induced the Republican minority, which is just a few votes short of displacing the Democrats, to propose cutting spending even more and to get specific about some spending cuts.

It’s amazing what a Democratic governor can accomplish when, forswearing re-election, he no longer must play the tool of the special interests that run the party, the state employee and teacher unions, and can pursue the public interest instead.

Of course the unions, working through Democratic legislators, will try to induce the governor to go wobbly on taxes again. After all, government in Connecticut long has been less a mechanism of public service than of financing the Democratic Party, keeping the party’s most active members on the government payroll. This makes ironic the Republican opposition to the Citizens’ Election Program, which makes all election campaigns, not just campaigns supported by government employee unions, eligible for government funding.

FLIGHT OF THE VALKYRIE: North American XB-70A Valkyrie — a beautiful plane. The photo is tentatively dated 1964.

RECALIBRATING PRODUCTIVITY STATISTICS: Walter Russell Mead explores the implications of Daniel Yergin’s argument that energy markets are experiencing “cost recalibration.”

Information technology has contributed to the drop in energy prices, so much so that productivity statistics may need to be recalibrated.

But this points to two even bigger stories. One is that the same forces that are making oil and gas so much cheaper and easier to find and extract will also be affecting other commodities. We can expect mining to become more efficient as well, and in fact there’s already evidence of that happening.

And there’s more. One of the big mysteries of the information revolution is the question of productivity. We keep using all this tech that clearly lets us do more with less, but instead of galloping higher, productivity levels have stagnated. What’s going on?

It’s possible that the productivity increases are appearing as lower prices rather than as higher incomes. If the price of oil falls from $100 per barrel to $50 per barrel due to increasingly cheap and efficient methods of production, then everybody in the industry is more productive in terms of barrels of oil per hour of work, but since the oil price has gone down, that productivity increase won’t be captured by statistical methods that calculate productivity in terms of money.

OPEC’S CRISIS: Iraq needs money, so it produces an extra 80,000 barrels of oil a day. But non-compliance (cheating) by cartel members isn’t OPEC’s biggest strategic problem.

Brent crude tumbled below $50 a barrel this month as data showed U.S. shale producers were alive and kicking, confounding OPEC’s efforts to control the supply glut. While oil recovered losses after Saudi Arabia and Russia threw their weight behind extending the six-month output reductions, it’s still 7 percent off post-deal highs.

More:

Under the November deal, OPEC envisioned curbing 1.2 million barrels per day of output, with Iraq trimming 210,000 barrels a day to 4.351 million barrels a day. In the first quarter, Iraq met only 61 percent of its targeted cut, though compliance improved to 90 percent in April, according to OPEC data. It’s not the only straggler. The United Arab Emirates achieved just 57 percent of its cut in the first quarter, though the U.A.E. exceeded its target in April, and many non-OPEC producers including Russia also missed their goals.

WANNACRY RANSOMWARE UPDATE: An analysis of WannaCry that includes a short but handy glossary of basic hacker terms.

Example:

Social Engineering- Exploiting human nature to get malware onto a system. This is what fishing and spear fishing attacks depend on.

Nope, it isn’t left-wing social engineering of society, though that’s also a crooked racket.

NORTH KOREA’S UNIT 180: It’s Pyongyang’s key cyber warfare unit.

North Korea’s main spy agency has a special cell called Unit 180 that is likely to have launched some of its most daring and successful cyber attacks, according to defectors, officials and internet security experts…

…Cyber security researchers have also said they have found technical evidence that could link North Korea with the global WannaCry “ransomware” cyber attack that infected more than 300,000 computers in 150 countries this month. Pyongyang has called the allegation “ridiculous”.

The crux of the allegations against North Korea is its connection to a hacking group called Lazarus that is linked to last year’s $81 million cyber heist at the Bangladesh central bank and the 2014 attack on Sony’s Hollywood studio. The U.S. government has blamed North Korea for the Sony hack and some U.S. officials have said prosecutors are building a case against Pyongyang in the Bangladesh Bank theft.

The Pentagon makes a point:

The U.S. Department of Defense said in a report submitted to Congress last year that North Korea likely “views cyber as a cost-effective, asymmetric, deniable tool that it can employ with little risk from reprisal attacks, in part because its networks are largely separated from the Internet”.

Read the whole report.