WHAT COULD GO WRONG? Zuckerberg Wants Facebook to Build a Mind-Reading Machine.

JOHN HAWKINS: The 5 Big Problems with Andrew Yang’s $1000-a-Month Universal Basic Income Proposal.

BRUCE BAWER: So What if the Clinton Foundation Fleeced Norway? Bring on the Chardonnay! “Norway’s leaders gave $100 million of taxpayer cash to those charlatans.”

BUT OF COURSE: Tlaib Blames Islamophobia for Dem Reaction to Omar’s Anti-Semitism.

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Maryland lawmakers target state’s handgun permit board over rate of granting appeals, seek to abolish panel.

People free to exercise their rights (pending official review and approval, that is)? We can’t have that.

How about a swap: Abolish the panel in exchange for a must-issue law.

RICHARD FERNANDEZ: “Improbably, for a country awash in oil reserves, gasoline in Maracaibo may be about to run out due to refinery breakdowns and distribution problems. This would be catastrophic to a population dependent on generators and scavenging.”

We’re watching the last chapter of Atlas Shrugged play out in Venezuela in realtime.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: It’s just not worth it and much, much more. “Speaker of the House Pelosi told the Washington Post that impeaching President Trump was ‘just not worth it.’ Could you just hear the progressive heads explode when she said that? There’s some drama in the Democrat caucus now since the grandstanders can’t hold out impeachment as a carrot to their flock. I wonder how bad the internal polling is if Nancy is coming forward to wipe impeachment off the Democrat menu.”

Pelosi might be the best vote-counter and arm-twister on Capitol Hill since Lyndon Johnson ruled the Senate, but even she can’t wangle this new Democratic caucus. Dashing their impeachment dreams will make it even more difficult for her.

FINLAND: Government Collapses Over Universal Health Care Costs, #Bernie2020 Hardest Hit. “Similar problems are bedeviling Sweden and Denmark, two other countries frequently held up as models to follow on health care.”

You’d think this was an international story with a domestic political angle or two, given the Democrats’ embrace of socialized medicine… but the American press has largely ignored it.

Well, you know the drill.

I’VE WONDERED MORE ABOUT THIS AS THE PROBLEM HAS GOTTEN MORE AGGRAVATING: Username and Password Hell: Why the Internet Can’t Keep You Logged In.

Whenever you enter your username and password, the app or site opens a “session,” quickly compiling relevant data to your account and connecting you to the servers and tools you need. That creates a security risk: If your session is still open and another person on the same computer goes to the same site, he or she could have access to all your stuff. As a result, most developers set an end date for your session, automatically closing your connection to the site or app after a specified amount of time. This security risk is also why you have to confirm your identity when changing account settings or shipping purchases to new addresses.

When you only had one computer, entering passwords every few weeks didn’t feel so arduous. Now you have laptops and phones and tablets and maybe even smart TVs, all logged in to the same things, each demanding a bi-weekly re-up.

And it gets worse. Each device now has multiple browsers and apps—and nowhere is it more chaotic than on our beloved smartphones. If you check sports scores on an app, you have one login, if you do the same on the Safari or Chrome browser, that’s another. If you click a link on Twitter , or someone emails it to your Gmail account, those apps have their own browsers, and you have to log in through each one. It starts to feel like a constant nag.

I’ve found that Apple’s FaceID is an elegant solution for mobile devices, but for security reasons can’t be used on computers (like non-all-in-one desktop models) without an integrated camera. But even FaceID doesn’t solve the problem — or eliminate the extra steps — of websites which keep you logged on for mere hours instead of weeks.

FOXY BROWN, LEIA ORGANA, ELLEN RIPLY, KARA ZOR-EL, RED SONJA, SARAH CONNOR, NIKITA, TANK GIRL, SAMANTHA CAINE, TRINITY, SELENE, SILK SPECTRE, JYN ERSO, PRINCESS DIANA, AND MORE COULD NOT BE REACHED FOR COMMENT: How ‘Captain Marvel’s’ $455M Global Bow Shattered the Glass Ceiling.

HMM: Elon Musk’s late-night announcement to raise prices and reopen some stores. “Collapsing sales and more senior staff departures suggest a company in disarray.”

The reason for the volte-face was not spelled out, but it paints a potentially worrying picture of corporate governance at the electric car OEM. Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported that most of Tesla’s retail landlords had been given no notice as to the termination of leases, many of which had no cancellation clauses, thus exposing the company to a host of potential lawsuits.

What is clear is that Tesla sales in 2019 have been disastrous. InsideEVs, a publication close to Tesla, tracks US electric vehicle deliveries, and, according to its numbers, January and February deliveries were down by around 80 percent compared to the months leading up. Although Tesla said it would concentrate on making up volume in Europe and China, neither of those markets appear able to take up the US’ slack.

If Tesla has finally geared up Model 3 production only to see demand collapse, that’s not a sign of good corporate health.

FIVETHIRTYEIGHT: The CDC’s Gun Injury Data Is Becoming Even Less Reliable.

According to the CDC’s most recent figures, somewhere between 31,000 and 236,000 people were injured by guns in 2017. That range, which represents the confidence interval — the high and low ends of a range of estimates that probably contains the real number, whatever that number is — is almost four times wider than the one given in the agency’s 2001 estimate.

“When I looked at the 2017 numbers, I went, ‘Oh, my god,’” said David Hemenway, the director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center. “You just can’t use those numbers.”

Plus:

Last year, FiveThirtyEight and The Trace, a nonprofit news organization covering gun violence in America,1 reported that the rising trend in the number of nonfatal gunshot wounds in the CDC’s estimates was out of step with trends reported by other public health and criminal justice databases, which found flat or declining numbers of these injuries. The CDC’s most recent estimate — nearly 134,000 injuries — suggests that the upward trend in its data is accelerating, with injuries jumping over 57 percent between 2015 and 2017.

But that number is suspect, in part because the agency sources its data from a small number of hospitals: just 60 in 2017, according to data obtained in a public records request by The Trace and FiveThirtyEight. Drawing data from such a small pool means that a single hospital that treats a disproportionate number of gun injuries has the potential to drastically skew the entire estimate.

It’s difficult to trust anything concerning guns coming from the CDC since the agency got “woke” about them in the ’90s.

VIDEO: ‘Empire’ Star Jussie Smollett ‘Betrayed’ and ‘Took Advantage of’ His Black Attackers, Lawyer Says.

My understanding is that they were well-paid.

YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BLOG: Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update.

AN IDEA WHOSE TIME HAS COME (AGAIN): Make Congress Congress again.

The Constitution’s separation of powers is premised in part on each branch being “jealous” of its own powers. What the Founders failed to plan for was a Congress eager to ditch its load onto the Executive.

GOOGLE MANAGER: ‘Fake News and Hate Speech’ Are ‘How Trump won the Election.’

WELL, THAT’S A TAKE: Elderly Americans are dying without getting to read Mueller’s report—and they’re not happy about it.

Before you click: Newsweek warning.

BUT OF COURSE: YouTube Changes Search Algorithm to Suppress Criticism Of Brie Larson And Captain Marvel.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. There’s no manifestation of Real Socialism™ more genuine than eating your neighbor.

CHANGE: Turkey Enters First Recession Since The Financial Crisis.

For much of the past decade, capital poured into Turkey during an era of record monetary stimulus around the world driven by Erdogan’s push for growth at all costs and his pressure on the central bank to keep interest rates low. However this uninterrupted expansion that boosted the economy by an average of nearly 7% each quarter since late 2009 ended abruptly following a currency crash, policy missteps and an unprecedented diplomatic rift with the U.S, Bloomberg reported.

“This is an indictment of Erdonomics and a direct consequence of a monetary policy in 2018 conducted in the interests of short-term political expediency rather than economic pragmatism,” said Julian Rimmer, a trader at Investec Bank Plc in London.

The recession lays out the dilemma facing both Erdogan and his central bank: while the country desperately needs lower rates to preserve its impressive economic growth rate, inflation remains solidly in the double digits, and any interest rate cuts threaten to unanchor the lira, sending it tumbling once again and unleashing runaway inflation. Meanwhile, investors are worried that that Turkey will face a long slog to recovery as the torrent of foreign capital dries up while households and companies begin paying down debts. Indeed, private consumption tumbled at a whopping 8.9% last quarter, with Turkey’s GDP per capita falling to $9,632 from a little over $10,000 in 2017.

“At least we aren’t Venezuela” isn’t much of a campaign slogan.

POLITICO: ‘A major player’: Sanders gets props from the Democratic establishment.

Flashback: Bernie Sanders Fills Ranks With Antisemites Tied to Jew-Hating Scandal.

This is who they are now.

MALAIKA JABALI: Hillary Clinton Is Still Deeply Confused About What Happened in Wisconsin.

The attempt to analogize the Southern struggle for voting rights with her fate in Wisconsin subordinates some uncomfortable, and likely more relevant, truths — in the service of a narrative offered by an element of the Democratic Party that would prefer to see cheating and illegality, rather than politics and policy, as the causes of its collapse. That narrative glosses over a remarkable, decadeslong decline in black economic conditions and political disillusionment outside the Southern, black Democratic firewall.

Wisconsin embodies these trends perhaps more acutely than anywhere else in the country.

After having had three years to grapple with the realities of a vital Democratic base in the Midwest, it seems Clinton still hasn’t learned her lesson. If this is any indication of the party’s 2020 strategy, it may be handing Trump another victory.

They do seem determined to get more Trump.

AMERICA’S MOST VALUABLE AUTO EXPORTER? BMW, again.

MICHAEL WALSH: Border Emergency? What Border Emergency? “Both wings of the Permanent Bipartisan Fusion Party want the chaos to continue.”

YUGE: Covington Boy’s Lawyers to Hit CNN With $250+ Million Lawsuit This Week. “CNN was probably more vicious in its direct attacks on Nicholas than the Washington Post.”