AMERICA’S LONGEST WAR: Taliban Control of Afghan Districts Remains Unchanged Despite Increased U.S. Military Pressure.

Bill Roggio:

According to the SIGAR report, the Afghan government controls or influences 229 of Afghanistan’s 407 districts (56.3%). The Taliban controls or influences 59 districts (14.5%). The remaining 119 districts (29.2%) are contested.

There is little change between this quarter and last, when a US military spokesman noted that “approximately 56% of the country’s 407 districts are under Afghan government control or influence, 30% remain contested, and approximately 14% are now under insurgent control or influence.”

We’re never going to build a nation where there was never a nation.

WINNING: Goodbye, OPEC: America Is on the Way to Energy Dominance.

Last week Reuters argued that the American shale boom should be called “Donald Trump’s Revenge.” The story reported that U.S. oil “now floods Europe at the expense of OPEC and Russia.” Couldn’t have happened to a couple of nicer guys. America is now selling more than a half-million barrels a day, thanks in no small part to the end of the oil and gas export ban in 2016.

What all of this means is that we are getting very close to the day when America returns to becoming a net exporter of oil. This would reduce our trade deficit by more than $200 billion a year. Saudi Arabia is still a major player in the market that can move the world price by turning on and off their spigots. The recent spike in gas prices to more than $3 a gallon is due to Russia and Saudi Arabia’s production cuts. But the OPEC nations can no longer hold the world hostage, as they did in the 1970s when we had gasoline lines and price controls and had to bow to the Saudi oil sheiks.

What a difference a president makes. Trump has been all in on encouraging fossil fuel production. He’s freeing up federal lands in places such as Alaska for drilling, allowing permits for new pipelines and relaxing some of the anti-fracking regulations that were enacted in the Obama years. As Harold Hamm, the CEO of Continental Energy, which owns much of the Bakken shale in North Dakota, recently told me: “It makes a big difference when you have a president who actually likes your industry.”

In other words, “Get the hell out of my way!” as the wise man once said.

TRUE CONFESSIONS: After 14 years, I’ve had it. I’m leaving Seattle.

The toxic politics are bad enough, but the city also has become unaffordable for the middle class. Partly, that is due to high demand (which is a good problem for a city to have), but it’s also due to self-inflicted wounds, such as a restrictive housing policy that artificially caps supply. Seattle is well on its way to becoming the next Vancouver, British Columbia, with the median housing price having spiked to an eye-watering $820,000, far outside the reach of the middle class. Unless they are able to save for about 14 years to afford a down payment, millennials can forget about homeownership entirely.

The $15 minimum wage has added gasoline to the fire. Though it hasn’t even been fully implemented yet, the most recent study last summer revealed that when the minimum moved from $11 to $13 an hour, low-wage workers lost about $125 per month. That means that the law raises costs for businesses and customers while actually harming employees it was meant to help.

But stubborn facts and a hurting middle class don’t seem to faze the City Council, which seems far more concerned about issues over which it has zero control — such as climate change and foreign policy — than it does about issues over which it has at least a modicum of control, such as the cost of living, homelessness, crime, traffic and potholes. For our City Council, virtue signaling is more important than governing.

The Left is forever inventing new ways to wage war against the bourgeoisie and bourgeoisie values, and Bad City Government is just the latest.

YES, PLEASE: F-35 Brains in an F-22 Body: Thinking Through Japan’s Next-Generation Fighter Options. “Getting there won’t be easy, but an updated F-22 is, in theory, a formidable concept.”

Maybe we should be thinking about this, too.

UH-HUH: Obama’s National Security Council Spokesman Accuses Trump, Israelis of ‘Cooking Up’ Intel.

YOUR DAILY TREACHER: Why Is Thanos from ‘Infinity War’ Considered the Bad Guy? “The movie is a sequel to ‘An Inconvenient Truth.’ Thanos is basically Al Gore with a better workout routine.”

THIS TIME YOU CAN TRUST THEM FOR SURE: Zuckerberg Announces Facebook Dating Feature at Developer Conference.

MISS LIBERTY: Victims of Communism Day — Ten Films to Honor the Dead.

JUSTICE: Microsoft Persuades Court to Imprison Man for ‘Counterfeiting’ Software They Give Away for Free. “The electronics recycling innovator faces 15 months in prison and a $50,000 fine.”

21ST CENTURY HEADLINES: Could Pentagon’s Direct Energy Ray Gun Put an End to High Speed Police Chases?

PRIVACY: Twitter sold data to Cambridge Analytica; data sales account for 13% of revenue.

WHITESPLAINING: Late-Night Comics Shred Kanye West for Pro-Trump Tweets.

Plus: Rapper Issues ‘Crip Alert For Kanye’, Warns West To ‘Stay In Calabasas’ After Supporting Trump.

MOLLIE HEMINGWAY: The New York Times’ Hatchet Job On Devin Nunes Is Riddled With Errors.

This is a longer piece — it had to be — and is worth your time.

OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY: Venezuela stops paying $1bn debt to Canadian gold miner.

Gold Reserve sued Venezuela under the World Bank’s dispute settlement system more than eight years ago over the expropriation of its gold mining operations. The company finally agreed to a $1.03bn settlement in September 2016, mostly to be paid in monthly instalments that began last July.

But fourth-quarter financial statements published by Gold Reserve at the end of last week show that the payments ended in November.

It follows an apparent cessation of payments to holders of Venezuela’s sovereign bonds in September last year.

Venezuela’s dispute with Gold Reserve is one of several involving foreign mining companies that invested in the country as the government sought to exploit what are thought to be some of the world’s largest deposits of gold and other metals.

But gold mining has become chaotic as foreign companies have been forced out and illegal miners have taken over, often overseen by the army.

“Overseen” as in “protection” or as in “forced labor camp?”

YES. NEXT QUESTION? Can Trump Legally Withdraw from the Iran Deal?

THAT’S NOT FUNNY: 4 Journalists Who Praised Michelle Wolf and Her Correspondents’ Dinner Speech.

YOUR SCIENTISTS WERE SO PREOCCUPIED WITH WHETHER OR NOT THEY COULD, THEY DIDN’T STOP TO THINK IF THEY SHOULD: Artificial womb could grow mammoth-elephant hybrid, researchers say.

OH: Turkey denies report on Syria meeting with Russia, Iran.

A Euronews report on April 28 claimed that Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, along with his Russian and Iranian counterparts, condemned the joint military operation carried out by the United States, the United Kingdom, and France in response to a chemical weapons attack in the Syrian town of Douma earlier this month.

The report also cited that Çavuşoğlu said a foreign intervention could inhibit the peace process in Syria.

Turkish Foreign Ministry spokesman Hami Aksoy said in a statement released Monday that the report “is not true and constitutes a mere attempt of manipulation.”

Are we to take it then that Ankara is opposed to operations to prevent the further use of chemical weapons on civilians?

BROWN’S BILLION-DOLLAR BOONDOGGLE: Slow Death of the Train to Nowhere.

John Fund:

In 2011, the new GOP governors of Florida, Ohio, and Wisconsin turned down federal money for trains. Wisconsin’s Scott Walker told me: “Washington may help pay for building it, but we’d be stuck paying the operating costs of a boondoggle.”

But California’s transportation planners, who never encountered a boondoggle they couldn’t embrace, pressed on despite mounting costs and construction delays. In 2015, desperate to beat a deadline that would have meant the end of federal funding, they began construction on a 119-mile segment of track in the state’s sparsely settled Central Valley. Fewer than 3 percent of the train’s potential riders live along that portion of the route, but backers believed that if they built the Central Valley segment, the sunken costs would convince state legislators to find money for the remaining segments.

That is increasingly unlikely. In January, the California High Speed Rail Authority released its new business plan. Assemblyman Jim Patterson, a train critic who represents Fresno, promptly labeled it a “going-out-of-business plan.”

According to the Authority’s own numbers, the train’s costs have soared to a likely $77 billion — more than double the original cost estimate of $32 billion. If anything goes wrong, the tab for the project could hit $98 billion, or 50 times the current annual appropriation for the nationwide Amtrak system. As for delays, the Authority conceded that rail service on the portion of the route from Bakersfield to San Jose probably won’t begin until 2029, a full nine years after the entire system was supposed to be complete.

As for the “high speed” aspect of the train, the Authority now admits that the two-hour-and-40-minute travel time that helped sell the initial bonding of the train in 2008 will now slip to, at best, three hours and 30 minutes. Travel time on some runs will be up to five hours.

The question Californians need to ask is: Where did the money go?

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Mueller’s ‘Leak,’ Iran Busted and Much, Much More. “Professor Alan Dershowitz spoke to CNN’s Anderson Cooper about what Mueller’s list reveals about the witch hunt strategy. ‘They’re really designed to let him ramble and talk,’ he explained, ‘and I suspect that’s the strategy of the special counsel because they know that may be President Trump’s weakness’.”

LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: Venezuela boosts minimum wage 155 percent to fight inflation.

Not that it will do much good: “President Nicolas Maduro’s announcement of the 155 percent rise – or 13 percent fall, in dollar terms – came three weeks before a presidential election. It accompanies a monthly food ticket now worth just over 1.5 million bolivars.”

At the official exchange rate, 1.5 million bolivars is worth about $22. On the black market, where food might actually be available, it is worth substantially less.

AND ANOTHER ONE GONE: WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum quits Facebook due to privacy intrusions.

“It is time for me to move on . . . I’m taking some time off to do things I enjoy outside of technology, such as collecting rare air-cooled Porsches, working on my cars and playing ultimate frisbee,” WhatsApp co-founder, CEO and Facebook board member Jan Koum wrote today. The announcement followed shortly after The Washington Post reported that Koum would leave due to disagreements with Facebook management about WhatsApp user data privacy and weakened encryption. Koum obscured that motive in his note that says, “I’ll still be cheering WhatsApp on – just from the outside.”

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg quickly commented on Koum’s Facebook post about his departure, writing “Jan: I will miss working so closely with you. I’m grateful for everything you’ve done to help connect the world, and for everything you’ve taught me, including about encryption and its ability to take power from centralized systems and put it back in people’s hands. Those values will always be at the heart of WhatsApp.” That comment further tries to downplay the idea that Facebook pushed Koum away by trying to erode encryption.

Slightly off topic, but posting a photo to Facebook the other day made me wonder if giving Facebook permission to access my family photo library also gives Facebook permission to upload, analyze, and cross-reference my family photo library.

GORDON CHANG: Kim Makes Stunning Nuclear Concessions to ‘Crazy Guy’ Trump. “To force a good deal from Kim Jong Un, Trump will have to be Trump—but also Reagan and Obama.”

After yesterday’s revelation about Iran’s ongoing nuclear weapons program, I’m not sure anybody should be praising Obama’s negotiating skills.

Hell, not even before that.

CHANGE: In 15 years, the Corps might not have any manned aircraft.

BULLIES: Comcast won’t give new speed boost to Internet users who don’t buy TV service.

Last week, Comcast announced speed increases for customers in Houston and the Oregon/SW Washington areas. The announcement headlines were “Comcast increases Internet speeds for some video customers.”

Customers with 60Mbps Internet download speeds are being upped to 150Mbps; 150Mbps subscribers are going to 250Mbps; and 250Mbps subscribers are getting a raise to 400Mbps or 1Gbps.

Comcast says speed increases will kick in automatically without raising the customers’ monthly bills—but only if they subscribe to certain bundles that include both Internet and TV service.

“Cord cutters are not invited to the [speed increase] party,” the Houston Chronicle wrote. “Only those who bundle Internet with cable television and other services… will see their speeds go up at no extra charge.”

I’ve long had philosophical and practical issues with antitrust law. But moves like this one have me coming around to the idea that out of three categories — internet service, content distribution, and content production — perhaps corporations should be required to choose one and divest the rest.