JOHN HAWKINS: 5 Reasons Kids Become School Shooters.

Broken homes, broken homes, broken homes, broken homes, broken homes.

YOUR DAILY TREACHER: Hillary Still Ain’t Over It. “I’m trying to remember a failed presidential candidate before now who made a second career out of whining about losing an election.”

Would she be whining any less had she won?

21ST CENTURY HEADLINES: Transgender Files $50K Complaint After Muslim Woman Refuses to Wax Genitals.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Five facts you need to know about cannabis beer.

BRUCE BAWER: A Russian’s Devastating Verdict on Norway.

PRIVACY: I Tried to Watch a Video of a Puppy and Accidentally Sent Every Photo I’ve Ever Taken to Google.

I recently went to a concert, had a few beers, and woke up with a hangover and a notification that my phone had successfully uploaded 15,000 images and videos to Google Photos. Here’s what happened.

When Google Photos was announced in 2015, I downloaded it. I had no intention of giving every photo I’ve ever taken to Google — which categorizes them, runs them through image recognition and facial recognition algorithms, makes weird algorithmic slideshows out of them, and adds them to its massive photo database —but I wanted to try it out in any case. I quickly realized it was not for me, but I did not delete the app.

Instead, I just told iOS not to give Google Photos access to my photos, which means the app sat dormant on my phone for years. I could have and should have deleted the app. Most people probably would have.

ANYWAYS, a few weeks ago, I was at a concert and, between sets, suddenly remembered that my friend had just adopted a puppy.

I texted him asking to see a picture. He responded with a video that he uploaded to Google Photos. Because I had Google Photos installed on my phone, it tried to open in the app. You cannot use Google Photos on iOS — even to view photos that have been shared with you — without granting the app access to all the photos on your phone. Because I was drunk, and because I wanted to see the puppy, I changed my app permissions.

Plus:

I was careless and kind of dumb, but it’s not always easy to remember every specific setting I’ve ever selected for every app I’ve downloaded. And I think that’s one of the concerning things about “opt-in” privacy protection. They’re not really opt-in if you’re not sure what you’re opting into.

It’s clear that the author first had to give permission to Google Photos, but it’s also clear that Google uses its “free” apps to worm its way into its users’ lives in every imaginable way.

MILLENNIAL BLUES: Financial Crisis May Have Hit ’80s Generation the Hardest.

Americans who entered the world in the 1980s “are at substantial risk of accumulating less wealth over their life spans than the members of previous generations,” the report’s authors say. “Not only is their wealth shortfall in 2016 very large in percentage terms, but the typical 1980s family actually lost ground in relative terms between 2010 and 2016, a period of rapidly rising asset values that buoyed the wealth of all older cohorts.”

The St. Louis Fed research finds that as of 2016, those born in the 1980s had wealth levels 34% below where they would be absent the financial crisis and its aftermath. In comparison, people born in the 1970s had wealth levels that were 18% under where they should have been, while folks from the 1960s were down 11%.

This is going to have serious fiscal consequences in Washington down the road, as swathes of Millennial voters begin to retire and have nothing in the bank.

BLUE WAVE? Americans thank Trump for economy.

THE ELEPHANT IN SACRAMENTO: The bullet train is California’s biggest infrastructure project — but it’s seldom discussed in governor’s race.

The leading candidates for governor have said little publicly about how they would fix dire problems in the $77-billion mega-project that has already overrun its initial cost estimate by $44 billion.

The next governor, as well as the state Senate and Assembly, will inherit a financial storm and face the tasks of finding money to bore tunnels under three mountain ranges, develop complex passages through the state’s biggest urban regions and avoid further political compromises that would slow travel along the route.

Yet the California political system is largely shying away from addressing the problems at the very moment when the project’s chief proponent, Gov. Jerry Brown, prepares to leave office.

For a fraction of the cost, California could have done something about its hideous roads, and invested in desalination plants to fix its dire water situation.

CHRISTIAN TOTO: Seven Funny, Fawning Reviews of HBO’s The Final Year. “No one associated with the 2017 documentary The Final Year meant for audiences to laugh at its content.”

SENATOR CHRIS MURPHY: GOP Knows ‘Everything Is Different’ and Gun Rights ‘Might’ Cost Party Election. “Republicans ‘have this sort of genetic attachment to this lobby and to this industry that they simply cannot break until they are forced to,’ says Dem senator.”

Power-seeking pols trying to force — that’s Murphy’s word — people into surrendering their constitutional rights is all the justification anyone needs for a broad interpretation of the Second Amendment.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Parents angry after students at elite NYC school have moment of silence for fallen Hamas terrorists.

SPACE: NASA’s planet-hunting satellite sends back its first image — and it’s amazing.

Keep in mind, this image was produced using only one of TESS’s four cameras. Once the mission becomes fully operational, NASA expects future images to cover more than 400 times as much sky. A “first light” image suitable for detailed scientific analysis will be released in June. Meanwhile, here’s everything you need to know about the mission.

The four cameras will scan 26 entire sectors of the sky, covering both hemispheres during its two-year mission. The observations will focus on possible “transits” of exoplanets, where a far-away planet passes in front of its star causing a measurable drop in brightness. (And there’s quite a few way-off worlds; from the Dracula planet to Earth’s bigger, older cousin, here are the 10 best exoplanets discovered so far.)

“We learned from Kepler that there are more planets than stars in our sky, and now TESS will open our eyes to the variety of planets around some of the closest stars,” said Paul Hertz of NASA. “TESS will cast a wider net than ever before for enigmatic worlds whose properties can be probed by NASA’s upcoming James Webb Space Telescope and other missions.”

TESS is on its way to an unusual but highly stable elliptical orbit that takes it around the Earth every 13.7 days. After getting a gravity assist by passing within 5,000 miles of the moon, a final thruster burn on May 30 will finalize its orbit. The satellite will begin its detailed observation mission utilizing all four cameras in mid-June.

I can’t wait.

HOUSTON POLICE CHIEF: We need people to start using the ballot box to take action on gun control.

People have been doing just that, ever since turning Congress over to the GOP following Bill Clinton’s “assault” weapons ban.

BUT OF COURSE: Europe Plotting to Undermine New U.S. Sanctions on Iran.

Ahead of a landmark foreign policy speech on Iran Monday morning by newly installed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, his first since taking the office, European nations have been locked in meetings to develop contingencies to continue doing business with Iran after new U.S. sanctions go into effect in the coming months.

European Union members are seeking to reimpliment an old law known as the blocking statute, which orders European companies to ignore U.S. sanctions on Iran.

The move sets up a showdown between the United States and Europe over the future of business dealings with Iran in the wake of President Donald Trump’s decision to walk away from the landmark nuclear deal and reimpose wide-ranging and severe sanctions on the Islamic Republic.

Iran opponents on Capitol Hill are already moving to respond, according to multiple sources who shared with the Free Beacon a newly developed policy memo that maps a plan for the United States to potentially sanction the European Investment Bank, or EIB, and cut its access to the U.S. financial system. The policy paper was written by Richard Goldberg, a senior adviser at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

“There is no statute that can save a European company from losing its access to the U.S. financial system,” the policy memo states. “European companies will not be willing to violate U.S. sanctions even with the revival of the blocking statute.”

Pulling the Europeans along into a renewed sanctions regime was never going to be easy, which is one of the ways President Obama sought to lock future administrations into sticking with his lousy deal.

MARK PENN: Stopping Robert Mueller to protect us all.

Flush with 16 prosecutors, including a former lawyer for the Clinton Foundation, and an undisclosed budget, the Mueller investigation has been a scorched-earth effort to investigate the entirety of the Trump campaign, Trump business dealings, the entire administration and now, if it was not Russia, maybe it’s some other country.

The president’s earlier legal team was naive in believing that, when Mueller found nothing, he would just end it. Instead, the less investigators found, the more determined and expansive they became. This president and his team now are on a better road to put appropriate limits on all this.

This process must now be stopped, preferably long before a vote in the Senate. Rather than a fair, limited and impartial investigation, the Mueller investigation became a partisan, open-ended inquisition that, by its precedent, is a threat to all those who ever want to participate in a national campaign or an administration again.

Penn, in case you’d forgotten, served as Bill Clinton’s pollster during his impeachment.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Declassify All the Documents and Much, Much More. “Trump is getting bad advice. He should not have asked the DOJ, a subject of the investigation, to investigate itself. With all the DOJ stonewalling and slow-walking of documents to comply with Congressional oversight, there’s no doubt a mountain of bad behavior is being covered up. What Trump should have done, and can still do, is DECLASSIFY ALL THE DOCUMENTS in question.”

“NOW”: Okay, Now I Actually Do Want To Take Your Guns.

Listen, I know the moments after a gunman opens fire in a school are hectic for you. You have to get your talking points together, you have to mentally prepare to debate a traumatized yet sensible child, you have to look at yourself in the mirror and practice saying that more guns would have made the situation less deadly. It’s a busy time! And since we are always either in the moments after or the moments before a mass shooting, you’re pretty much always busy, I have noticed!

Anyway, I just wanted to drop you a line and let you know that I now actually do want to take your guns.

All of your guns.

Right now.

It was always “now.”

Always.

Dave Holmes can’t even confess without subterfuge.

CLARICE FELDMAN: H.A.L.P.E.R. Spells Game Up for Obama’s Spies.

Last week I reported that Internet sleuths had winkled out the name of the spy/agent provocateur that Obama’s intelligence officers had used on the Trump campaign. The New York Times and Washington Post, the Democrats’ semi-official newspapers this week megaphoned the instigators, offering up their justifications without naming his name.

Again, the name is Stefan Halper, who, as I wrote here last week, was paid a substantial sum by the Department of Defense’s Office of Net Assessment.

If it was for this work – and it suspiciously looks like it because the payments were made in July and September of 2016 when he was weaseling his way into the campaign – then we know we have the DNI, CIA, DOJ, FBI, Dept. of State and the Defense Department working for Hillary’s election and to smear and create a basis for further spying on Trump and his campaign.

The NYT and Washington Post stories were clearly dictated by the perpetrators of this unprecedented effort to interfere with our elections. A careful reading shows that they leaked just enough about Halper to positively identify him while the press refuses to name him because the selective leakers warned, “that exposing him could endanger him or his contacts.” If you buy that nonsense, please send me your name and contact information because I have a great investment deal for you.

Lots of dots to connect — read the whole thing.

WELL, GOOD: New Army Basic Training Promises More Ammo, Range Time for Trainees.

Most months I regret how little time I get to spend at the range, and soldiers, generally speaking, have a greater chance of getting shot at than bloggers do.

MISS LIBERTY: Cambodian Day of Remembrance: Five Films to Honor the Dead.

Pol Pot was taught the wonders of agrarian socialism while attending college in France, and returned home with a determination to build that utopia — whatever the cost. Per Wikipedia, “[The Khmer Rouge] planned to create a form of agrarian socialism founded on the ideals of Stalinism and Maoism. The subsequent policies caused forced relocation of the population from urban centers, torture, mass executions, use of forced labor, malnutrition, and disease.”

It’s weird how you never see this kind of thing happen in capitalist republics, where the workers and farmers are all exploited.

JONATHAN TOBIN: Democrats Reach a Tipping Point on Israel.

It is one thing for most Democrats to treat the opening of the new embassy in Jerusalem as if it were a Trump rally and therefore to be avoided — the only Democrat in attendance was former senator Joseph Lieberman — rather than a celebration of the alliance. But the deaths of dozens of Palestinians in the course of a “march of return” in which thousands sought to rush Israel’s border provided an opportunity to take the temperature of the party on the relationship, and the results were far from good.

While the Trump administration backed Israel’s right to defend its border with as much force as necessary, most Democrats didn’t agree. Many responded as the Obama administration would have been expected to, denouncing the supposedly “disproportionate” tactics of the Israel Defense Forces but also noting the role of the Hamas terrorist group, which rules Gaza, in fomenting the violence.

Representative Joseph Kennedy III, a rising star in the party who gave the official Democratic response to Trump’s State of the Union address earlier this year, provided a good example of this two-faced approach when he managed to cram criticism of Israel’s “excessive use of force,” a denunciation of Hamas, support for moving the embassy, and a claim that the embassy’s “hasty relocation” by Trump was the ultimate cause for all the violence into one two-paragraph statement.

But a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo from 13 Senate Democrats suggests the party may be at a tipping point.

The letter was organized by once and perhaps future presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders (Vt.) and was joined by Senator Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), another likely White House hopeful. Over the course of two pages laying out concern for the Palestinians and a desire to resume funding for a U.N. refugee agency fatally compromised by Hamas, the senators showed little interest in the terror group’s responsibility for the violence or the dismal situation in Gaza.

Democrats’ commitment to the politics of grievance has put them in the uncomfortable position of having to take sides with a gay-murdering, female-oppressing terror organization — over Israel, where women’s and minority rights are fully protected. Most Americans can probably see the ridiculousness of that, but to date the only Republican who has figured out how to take political advanced of it is Donald Trump.

A FIRST-PASS ANSWER? ONE STEP TOO FAR. How Far Left Will the Democrats Go in November?

SPENGLER: The Freud Fraud Underlies Political Correctness.

CLAUDIA ROSETT: A Vital Warning About China and the Looming “Decade of Concern.”

Read the whole thing.