NEWS YOU CAN USE: 4 useful things you can do with stale beer.

I’m sure somebody can use this news, but around here beer never seems to last long enough to go stale.

THEY MOSTLY COME AT NIGHT. MOSTLY. The Roaming Outrage Mob Took Down Roseanne Barr and James Gunn, But You’re Probably Safe.

UNEXPECTEDLY: Israel Declares Itself To Be A Jewish State: Liberals Go Nuts.

BRIDGET JOHNSON: Most Liberal House Dem Barbara Lee Wants to Replace Crowley as Caucus Leader.

BITTER PILL: China vaccine scandal sparks fury, roils markets.

OH: North Korean coal smuggling reveals lax sanctions enforcement. “Shipments reportedly reach South Korea via Russia.”

Reports that North Korea illegally exported coal to South Korea via Russia — and Seoul’s initial lack of action — are raising new doubts about how effectively the international sanctions on the Kim Jong Un regime are being enforced.

The suspected smuggling formed part of the backdrop to U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s call for vigilant sanctions enforcement at the United Nations Security Council on Friday.

North Korea laundered the coal shipments, which began last summer, through the island of Sakhalin in Russia’s Far East, according to reports by a Security Council sanctions committee and other sources.

Ships carrying the coal left the port of Wonsan in the North and were unloaded at Kholmsk on Sakhalin. Non-North Korean ships then carried the coal to South Korean ports including Incheon, according to the reports. Coal has traditionally been one of North Korea’s most important income-producing exports.

If the South can’t get serious about it, the sanctions regime will never work.

THAT’S NOT FUNNY: Killing your career is easy; comedy is hard.

TOO LATE? James Comey warns Democrats against socialism: ‘Please, please don’t lose your minds.’

NOW THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY I’D BEEN HOPING FOR: Plans outlined for 2,000 supersonic jets to link hundreds of cities across the planet.

Blake Scholl, founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic, says his company will be able to make supersonic air travel financially viable and affordable to the public, with one-way fares from London to New York from £2,000, about the same as a business class ticket today.

Boom Supersonic is one of a handful of firms attempting to revive the commercial prospects of planes that can travel faster than the speed of sound, something not seen since the demise of the Concorde in 2003.

The Denver-based operation has developed prototypes of a 55-seater jet that will have a cruising speed of 1,451mph, 100mph faster than the Concorde, and hopes to begin passenger flights by 2025.

“We are focused on accelerating long transoceanic trips. We we want to get the economy of the plane down so that anybody who flies can fly fast,” Scholl, who used to work at Amazon, told the Independent at the Farnborough Airshow.

Faster? Please!

YOU MIGHT NOT BE INTERESTED IN THE GLEICHSCHALTUNG, BUT THE GLEICHSCHALTUNG IS INTERESTED IN YOU: Female Deputy in Washington State Fired for Wearing ‘Proud Boys’ Sweatshirt.

“Celebrate diversity” morphed into “Conform, Prole” so slowly that I hardly even noticed.

OH: Alleged Russian agent Maria Butina met with US officials during the Obama administration.

HEH: Carter Page was ‘more like Inspector Gadget than Jason Bourne,’ Gowdy says amid FISA release.

CHANGE: Peak Oil Demand Could Be Less Than 2 Decades Away. “A new forecast says oil demand will plateau in 2036, which is several years earlier than the view of many in the industry.”

You read more and more about peak oil demand these days, and less and less about peak oil.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Trump threatens Iran IN ALL CAPS, Redacted FISA Released, and Much, Much More.

BUT OF COURSE: German intelligence contradicts Merkel on Iran’s nuclear drive.

A German intelligence report from the city-state of Hamburg said Iran’s regime is continuing to seek weapons of mass destruction, delivering another intelligence agency blow to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s belief that the 2015 atomic deal with the Islamic Republic curbed Tehran’s nuclear weapons ambitions.

The Jerusalem Post reviewed the 211-page document that states “some of the crisis countries… are still making an effort to obtain products for the manufacture of atomic, biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction (proliferation) and the corresponding missile carrier technology (rocket technology).”

The Hamburg report on Thursday added that “the current main focus points of countries in the area of relevant proliferation activities are: Iran, Syrian, Pakistan and Syria.”

Given her history as Chancellor, don’t expect Merkel’s policies to change just because they’re contrary to reality.

SILK ROAD BLUES: China’s Global Building Spree Runs Into Trouble in Pakistan. “To fund a 70-nation infrastructure initiative, Beijing has been extending loans in opaque deals often contingent on using Chinese contractors.”

Financed and built by Chinese state-run companies, the soon-to-be-finished overhead railway through Lahore is among the first projects in China’s $62 billion plan for Pakistan. Beijing hoped the $2 billion air-conditioned metro, sweeping past crumbling relics of Mughal and British imperial rule, would help make Pakistan a showcase for its global infrastructure-building spree.

Instead, it has become emblematic of the troubles that are throwing China’s modern-day Silk Road initiative off course.

China’s global plan, called the “Belt and Road Initiative,” involves some 70 countries and has been likened to the U.S. Marshall Plan that helped rebuild Europe after World War II. By building a network of ports, railways, roads and pipelines, China aims to open new East-West trade routes, generate business for Chinese companies and expand its strategic influence.

While the Americans mainly used grants in Postwar Europe, China has mostly extended loans in opaque deals often contingent on using Chinese contractors. Pakistan is now one of several countries grappling with the financial and political fallout of taking on so much Chinese debt.

With a general election in Pakistan scheduled for July 25, an ascendant opposition is pledging to publish secret details about the financing of Chinese projects, including the Orange Line, and Pakistani industry is agitating for less-generous perks for Chinese companies.

Well, this is getting sticky.

DAN MCLAUGHLIN: Democratic Desperation on Kavanaugh Is Showing.

It’s just a dress rehearsal for Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s eventual replacement.

VULTURES OF A FEATHER: Venezuela exported $779 mln in gold to Turkey in 2018.

Venezuela’s Mining Minister Victor Cano on Wednesday said the central bank was exporting gold to Turkey rather than Switzerland due to concerns about sanctions, without specifying the amount that was being sent.

The latest data on Turkey’s Statistical Institute website show that between January and May, Venezuela exported 20.15 tonnes of gold to Turkey, compared with none in 2017. Turkey did not send an equivalent amount of gold back to Venezuela, the data showed.

Evading sanctions — or putting the deposit down on a cushy safe haven for Venezuela’s socialist elite when the regime collapses?

Meanwhile, for those without gold to export: In Venezuela, public buses give way to private ‘dog carts’.

JETS WITH FRICKIN’ LASER BEAMS: F-35 Engine Upgrade Would Enable Directed Energy Weapons.

Additional power and thermal management capability will enable the use of directed energy weapons and other advanced offensive and defensive systems and, if approved, would feature in an upgrade package called Growth Option 2.0 (GO2). Pratt & Whitney, which would roll PTMS into a suite of compressor and turbine enhancements originally proposed in the first upgrade package, G01, says the complete upgrade could be available within four years of getting the official go-ahead.

Growth Option 1.0, which was floated with the JPO in 2017, offered 5% fuel reductions and as much as 10% higher thrust. Offered as a cost-neutral upgrade, it was always meant to form part of a longer-term, two-stage improvement road map for the F-35 engine under plans first unveiled by the manufacturer in 2015. However, with the move to combine GO1 and 2 into a more complete enhancement package, Pratt is tailoring the revised proposal to closer match the F-35 upgrade road map recently outlined under the C2D2 continuous improvement strategy.

It seems we’ve barely scratched the surface of what can be done with the F-35 platform. But that shouldn’t come as a surprise, since a recent-vintage F-15 or -16 is a far more capable beast than the original ’70s models.

IT’S COLLUSION, I TELLS YA — COLLUSION! Pentagon Giving $200 Million to Ukraine to ‘Build Defensive Capacity.’ “In quest to ‘bolster Ukraine’s ability to defend its territorial integrity’ a ‘timeline for delivery and fielding of equipment will be determined at a later date’.”

JOHN ELLIS: 5 Modern Myths People Need to Stop Believing.

FOR BETTER AND FOR WORSE: The Dark Knight Changed Hollywood Movies Forever.

While Batman Begins had one foot firmly planted in the pulpier side of the character, The Dark Knight was filmed like a gritty, atmospheric crime movie, with Nolan taking visual cues from Michael Mann’s bank-robber epic Heat. Rather than heightening Gotham City to the point that a man dressed as a bat makes sense as its public defender, Nolan turns Batman (Christian Bale) and the Joker (Heath Ledger) into jarring archetypes who are incongruous to the world of gangsters and cops around them, and symptoms of an increasingly polarized society of heroes and villains.

Part of Batman’s quest in The Dark Knight is to push the attorney general Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) as Gotham’s hero of the future, an effort that implodes when the Joker attacks and scars Dent, turning him into the monstrous villain Two-Face. Most comic-book antagonists have specific motives of world domination or personal revenge. But Nolan presents the Joker more as an elemental agent of chaos—one who’s interested only in upsetting the natural order of things wherever he goes, and who’s fascinated with Batman because he represents the opposite extreme. It’s a vision of evil as something trollish, amoral, and anarchic. “Some men just want to watch the world burn,” says Batman’s reliable butler, Alfred (Michael Caine)—a line that became an online refrain in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election.

Nolan got to make The Dark Knight exactly as he wanted, focusing on smaller, more practical stunts (the film’s biggest set piece involves a truck flipping over). He didn’t have to worry about setting up future sequels, shooting in 3-D, or doubling down on CGI spectacle to make for a more epic trailer. The film’s colossal success with both critics and audiences meant that almost every future superhero movie had to be more than just a fringe project for its studio. Couple that with the franchise potential of Iron Man, and a film as single-minded as The Dark Knight just couldn’t be made again.

A shame, that.

ARCTIC JIHAD: Refugee Violence Now Strikes Remote Corners of Europe.

OOPS: Egypt’s ‘Hippocratic Oath’ Could Force Christian Doctors To Unintentionally Become Muslim.

CLONEBURGER: Lab-grown meat could be in restaurants in 3 years.

The big challenge is making meat that looks, feels and tastes like the real thing. Mosa Meat uses a small sample of cells taken from a live animal. Those cells are fed with nutrients so that they grow into strands of muscle tissue. The company claims it could make up to 80,000 quarter pounders from a single sample.

A Dutch company that presented the world’s first lab-grown beef burger five years ago said Tuesday it has received funding to pursue its plans to make and sell artificially grown meat to restaurants from 2021.

Maastricht-based Mosa Meat, which has in the past also received 1 million euros from Google co-founder Sergey Brin, said it hopes to sell its first products most likely ground beef for burgers in 2021. The aim is to achieve industrial-scale production 2-3 years later, with a typical hamburger patty costing about $1.

I can see this stuff making a passable hamburger, but it just doesn’t seem possible to make a convincing ribeye out of strands.