FRANCIS TURNER: Hell hath no fury like a woman whose beloved husband has been scorned. “In this case the woman is Her Imperial Majesty Bridget I, Empress of Yard Moose Mountain, Interdimensional Lady of Hate and wife of the author Larry Correia (and mother of four – this latter will become important later).”

Read the whole thing, but first…

Doesn’t everybody know not to mess with the Correias?

SPENGLER: Is a Russian-American rapprochement possible?

I certainly hope so.

BLUE WAVE?

As always: Don’t get cocky.

UH-OH: Russia Inducts Its Own ‘Carrier Killer’ Missile, and It’s More Dangerous than China’s. “How the Kh-47M2 can drastically alter the balance of power in the Pacific.”

CALEB HOWE: Erdogan’s Hissy Fit and Withdrawal of Turkish Ambassador from D.C. Show Embassy Move the Right One. “Same goes for the MSM meltdown.”

As I’ve been saying here since the move was announced: The usual suspects will make the usual noises, but you’ll be amazed at how quickly the real world adapts to the new normal.

HMM: Whistleblower reported daycare fraud and possible link to terrorism to DHS management.

Emails obtained by the Fox 9 Investigators show the Minnesota government agency was told millions of stolen tax dollars were going overseas and likely a portion of the money was being skimmed by terrorism organizations.

Scott Stillman spent eight years managing the state’s digital forensics lab, meaning he mined data from computers and smart phones.

“I have never seen anything like this level or scope in my 27-year career as an investigator,” he told Fox 9.

When the state started going after daycare centers suspected of fraud, Stillman was directly involved in the investigations.

Some of the businesses were gaming the system to steal millions in government subsidies meant to help low-income families with their childcare expenses.

According to Stillman, he alerted a number of people in DHS including the Commissioner’s Chief of Staff with the following message: “Significant amount of these defrauded dollars are being sent overseas to countries and organizations connected to entities known to fund terrorists and terrorism.”

According to public records and government sources, Somali immigrants own most of the daycare centers.

That certainly doesn’t play well with the immigration narrative.

THE INTERNET OF THINGS: Ring doorbell flaw lets others watch after password changes. “At one point, the camera was exposed for months.”

IoT lighting can be convenient and fun — and harmless. But it’s going to be a long time before anyone should feel truly comfortable giving internet access to your door locks, garage doors, or gas cooking appliances.

SPACE: Yes, Europa really is sending plumes of water into space.

The Hubble findings were tentative but intriguing, so a team of US astronomers went back and took a second look at data collected by the Galileo spacecraft during its eight-year stay in the Jovian system. During that time, the spacecraft made 11 flybys of Europa, including one in which it came to within a few hundred kilometers of the moon’s surface.

To their delight, the scientists found such a signal on December 16, 1997, during the spacecraft’s E12 orbit. This was also Galileo’s closest approach to Europa, when it came to within 206km and flew near the Pwyll Crater region. During this pass, the spacecraft’s magnetometer measured significant changes, as did Galileo’s plasma wave spectrometer. They believed these fluctuations might be due to perturbations from a water plume in the plasma surrounding the moon.

“The sudden, short-duration jump in the frequency of intense emissions can be interpreted as consistent with a highly localized source of plasma, thereby supporting the hypothesis that the magnetic perturbations arise from passage through a localized plume,” write the authors of a new paper describing the findings in Nature Astronomy.

Sounds like we should attempt no landings there.

AL QAEDA LEADER: Trump ‘Revealed the True Face of the Modern Crusade.’

BROOKS ON TRUMP: ‘There Are a Lot of Things I Like That He’s Done and the Economy Has Not Tanked.’

To say the least.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Social Assistance Reform Isn’t Cruel; It’s Necessary.

SULTANS GOTTA SULTANATE: Erdogan Plans to Tighten His Grip on Turkey’s Economy.

With the Turkish lira at a record low against the dollar and down this year against all 17 major currencies tracked by Bloomberg, Erdogan told Bloomberg TV in London on Monday that after the vote transforms Turkey into a full presidential system, he expects the central bank will have to heed his calls for lower interest rates. The central bank’s key rate is now 13.5 percent, compared with 10.9 percent consumer-price inflation.

“When the people fall into difficulties because of monetary policies, who are they going to hold accountable?” the 64-year-old president said in the interview. “They’ll hold the president accountable. Since they’ll ask the president about it, we have to give off the image of a president who’s influential on monetary policies.”

That “may make some uncomfortable,” he said. “But we have to do it. Because it’s those who rule the state who are accountable to the citizens.”

Previously: “Democracy is like a tram ride: when you reach your stop, you get off.”

CHANGE: North Korea has Begun Dismantlement of the Punggye-ri Nuclear Test Site.

Now that’s bringing something to the table.

COLLUSION: Mueller’s FBI has a History With Russian Oligarch Oleg Deripaska. “The bureau in 2009 asked the oligarch to spend millions of his own dollars to fund an FBI-supervised operation.”

BUT OF COURSE: Celebs Blame Palestinian Deaths in Gaza Strip on Trump.

I’ve seen the video, and Trump wasn’t even in Gaza yesterday.

BEND THE KNEE: Gap sorry for T-shirt’s ‘erroneous’ China map.

In a posting late Monday on China’s Weibo microblogging platform, the company said it discovered that some T-shirts sold overseas “had an erroneous design of China’s map.”

“We are truly sorry about this unintentional mistake,” Gap said, promising to carry out “more rigorous reviews” in the future.

Gap took action after photos began circulating on Chinese social media of a T-shirt with a map that didn’t include Taiwan, a self-ruled island that Beijing regards as Chinese territory. The map also appeared to leave out southern Tibet and the disputed South China Sea, the state-owned Global Times said, adding that it drew hundreds of complaints on Weibo.

“Look, it’s a badly drawn map on a lousy t-shirt,” doesn’t cut it with Chinese nationalists.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Hamas Attacks Israel as Embassy Opens in Capital and Much, Much More. “The American Hamas sympathizers in the media and Hollywood remove any agency from the malefactors suggesting that, of course the proper response to the US opening its embassy in Jerusalem is bringing children to a war zone while throwing explosives at border guards.”

PRIVACY: Inside the Brotherhood of the Ad Blockers.

Anyone who works in the $200 billion digital advertising industry should be scared of people like Mark Drobnak, because the ad blocker he uses is way more powerful than yours. The college freshman says it feels as though everyone at Rochester Institute of Technology, from his roommate to his professors, has installed some way to ward off online ads. Drobnak is one of the die-hards who goes further, working with a handful of comrades to build what they call “a black hole for advertisements.” His parents say the one he built them works great.

Pi-hole (as in “shut your …”) is a free, open source software package designed to run on a Raspberry Pi, a basic computer that’s popular with DIYers, fits in the palm of your hand, and retails for about $35. Most ad blockers have to be installed on individual devices and work only in web browsers, but Pi-hole blocks ads across an entire network, including in most apps.

Interesting. I get similar results taming the most obnoxious sites using a customizable JavaScript blocker, but it can be tedious to set up and the results aren’t always easy to predict. I’ve thought about picking up a cheap PC and setting it up as a Ubuntu-based web server with ad and tracking firewalls installed, but the effort-to-reward ratio still breaks on my lazy side.

But Pi-Hole installed on a $35 Raspberry Pi is awfully tempting.

POLITICO: GOP tax cut not why economy is booming.

Brian Faler:

Republicans facing a tough midterm election season are pointing to the strong economy as proof their new tax law is working its magic.

But as campaign ads tout swelling payrolls and lawmakers spotlight companies handing out employee bonuses, there’s little evidence the tax cuts are already having an impact across the economy, which was already humming even before the law was enacted.

Unemployment, which dropped to 3.9 percent in April, has been declining for years, falling to 4.1 percent before the tax cuts were approved.

The billions in bonuses being handed out are tiny compared to the trillions of dollars in overall wages that Americans workers earn – and with the tight labor market, they might have been handed out anyway.

Meanwhile, the Treasury Department hasn’t even finished writing the new rules spelling out how exactly the new law will work. And the pace of change in business investment and labor supply is typically very slow.

OK, fine — let’s stipulate all that.

But what did change for sure on January 20, 2017 was the business climate, with the end of the Obama Administration’s incessant cronyism and regulatory warfare against unfavored businesses.

And if tax reform’s effects have yet to kick in, we’ll be even more better off when they do.

Finally, despite Faler’s best effort here, I’m not sure “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet!” is exactly the rallying cry Democrats are looking for.

SONNY BUNCH: Donald Trump Is Killing Humor.

Honestly, try to sit through the recent [SNL] sketch in which Stormy Daniels, playing herself, warns Baldwin—legitimately the worst impressionist I have seen get regular airtime on a major broadcast show; it’s still galling they fired Darrell Hammond for Baldwin—that she’s coming for him. I dare you.

These cold opens are the equivalent of an Andy Borowitz column brought to life: a string of references that vaguely resemble humor but are done in such a ham-handed and incompetent way that you are not only unamused, you are vaguely horrified. It’s like the Uncanny Valley of humor. You know it’s a joke but you’re so repulsed by its inability to be truly joke-like that you run away screaming.

Heh™.

And read the whole thing™.

HEATHER WILHELM: Tough times for the resistance?

At first glance, one might think that resistance membership might be at least somewhat exciting and purposeful, not depressing. After all, every few days, some fevered news agency announces some variation of the following: “This is it! We have the smoking gun that will crack the Trump presidency, and it is completely different from the 1,326 purported smoking guns that we thought we had before!”

If you found that headline intriguing, I fear you’ve missed what generally happens next: The story drifts, the supposed smoking gun sputters, and everything slowly morphs into a cable-news cartoon soap opera, narrated by a voice not unlike that of Charlie Brown’s disembodied and unintelligible murmuring teacher.

Depending on the day, the tale in question will likely involve layers of campaign-finance law, the name-dropping of a Russian oligarch, 13 unintelligible memos (probably), Stormy Daniels and her lawyer (definitely), several acts of mind-boggling incompetence from both sides of the aisle, countless insufferable bureaucrats who are wildly overpaid with your hard-earned tax dollars and at least one narrative element that you can’t appropriately discuss with children under the age of 23.

As an aside, the previous sentence is a fairly good illustration of why I think everyone should lean libertarian — well, that, and an alarming recent Washington Post piece that suggested D.C. hipsters be called “govsters.” But that’s a whole other column.

“Well, whatever,” a resistance loyalist might say. “Didn’t you read ‘All the President’s Men’ ”? (Author’s note: I did.) “Drip, drip, drip,” said loyalist might continue. “The truth shall potentially out, and this is not like the late 1990s at all!”

That’s right. In the ’90s, the Democrat-Media Complex provided the Clintons with just enough political cover to keep them in office. Today, that same (though enlarged) DMC has been trying to remove Trump from office since Day One, but has yet to reveal a smoking gun. And yet they persist.

So while it’s true that there are a lot of drips, it would be needlessly rude to call them that.

THIS IS A PROBLEM MOST COUNTRIES WOULD, WELL, KILL TO HAVE: Training Kills More Troops Than War. Here’s What’s Being Done About It.

TONI AIRAKSINEN: Professor Gets Cut After 30 years for Singing Pharrell Williams Song.

YOUR DAILY TREACHER: Nobody’s Even Pretending Anymore That Alec Baldwin Can Impersonate Trump. “Comedy used to be about making people laugh. Now it’s about trolling people you don’t like.”

HANS A. VON SPAKOVSKY: It’s Now 1984 at the University of Michigan.

It’s weird how the dark night of fascism is always descending in Red America, yet lands only in America’s Blue enclaves.