ADDRESSING THE ROOT CAUSE: Baltimore Mayor Tries to Address City’s Violence by Telling Businesses When to Close.

ELIMINATIONIST RHETORIC: Gore on Trump Presidency: ‘Some Experiments are Terminated Early for Ethical Reasons.’

BUT THE SCIENCE WAS SETTLED, DAMMIT! Climate change is ‘not as bad as we thought’ say scientists.

HMM: Russia Widens EW War, ‘Disabling’ EC-130s In Syria.

The Compass Call is supposed to be one of America’s foremost electronic warfare weapons, but the EC-130s flying near Syria are being attacked and disabled “in the most aggressive EW environment on the planet,” the head of Special Operations Command said here today.

“Right now in Syria we are operating in the most aggressive EW environment on the planet from our adversaries. They are testing us everyday, knocking our communications down, disabling our EC-130s, etcetera,” Gen. Raymond Thomas told an audience of some 2,000 intelligence professionals.

While, for obvious reasons, we don’t know many details about the nature of the attacks on the EC-130s, we do know the Russians have done what one EW expert called a “good job” in several recent conflicts using EW. And the Russians are in force in Syria and provide most of the gear used by the Syrian military.

Historically, the Russians have been very good at this kind of thing. Hopefully, we’re learning more lessons about their gear than they’re learning about ours.

KYLE KASHOV: School Security Officers Used ‘Very Harsh Intimidation Tactics.’

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Prof Charged For Spraying Fake Blood On NRA Lobbyist’s House.

OH: Top Liberal Think Tank and Clinton Adviser Accused of Sheltering Sexual Harassers and Retaliating Against Victims.

BLUE STATE BLUES: Chicago Is Trying to Pay Down Its Debt By Impounding Innocent People’s Cars. “How a uniquely punitive city impound program combined with the drug war and asset forfeiture to deprive people of their vehicles for years at a time.”

More from Reason:

Byrd had run afoul of Chicago’s aggressive vehicle impound program, which seizes cars and fines owners thousands of dollars for dozens of different offenses. The program impounds cars when the owner beats a criminal case or isn’t charged with a crime in the first place. It impounds cars even when the owner isn’t even driving, like when a child is borrowing a parent’s car.

In total, Chicago fined motorists more than $17 million between March 2017 and March of this year for 31 different types of offenses, ranging from DUI to having illegal fireworks in a car to playing music too loud, according to data from the Chicago Administrative Hearings Department. About $10 million of those fines were for driving on a suspended license, and more than $3 million were for drug offenses like the one that resulted in the impoundment of Byrd’s car.

The city says it is simply enforcing nuisance laws and cracking down on scofflaws. But community activists and civil liberties groups say the laws are predatory, burying guilty and innocent owners alike in debt, regardless of their ability to pay or the effect losing a vehicle will have on their lives.

“There’s plenty of reason to be concerned that there’s injustice being done to people who are mostly poor, people who aren’t in a position to fight back,” says Ben Ruddell, a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Illinois. “The city has been perpetuating an exploitative system, charging exorbitant fees in a way that it knows is likely to make it so folks never get their cars out of impoundment.”

Officially licensed criminal exploitation of the poor is one of the more ubiquitous hallmarks of a failing state.

SABER RATTLING: Are Putin’s “new” nuclear weapons aimed at the West — or China?

“MY GOD, IT’S FULL OF STARS”: European satellite “Gaia” reveals motions of more than 1 billion stars and shape of the Milky Way.

One might think that the galaxy is completely mapped. But large parts of it are obscured by gas and dust, and it is hard to discern structure from the vantage of the solar system. Gaia is not only expected to clarify the spiral structures of the galaxy today, but because the satellite traces how stars move, astronomers can wind the clock backward and see how the galaxy evolved over the past 13 billion years—a field known as galactic archaeology. With Gaia’s color and brightness information, astronomers can classify the stars by composition and identify the stellar nurseries where different types were born, to understand how chemical elements were forged and distributed.

Gaia isn’t only about the Milky Way. For solar system scientists, the new data set will contain data on 14,000 asteroids. That’s a small fraction of the roughly 750,000 known minor bodies, but Gaia provides orbit information 100 times more accurate than before.

All that data on asteroid orbits might come in handy for planetary defense.

UNITED STATES SPACE FORCE: U.S. Air Force to Ramp Up Commitments to Space Amid Chinese Threat.

Speaking before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Air Force secretary Heather Wilson and chief of staff General David Goldfein both identified China’s space innovation and “rapid growth” in military capabilities among their top concerns facing the service in the coming years.

“Some of the work they’re doing in space, it’s very aggressive,” Goldfein said. “We built our space architecture in an era when space was a rather benign domain, so … we’re very focused on taking some bold moves in this budget to increase our ability to defend what we have in space.”

Faster, please.

BIG BUSINESS LOVES BIG GOVERNMENT: Google and Facebook Likely to Benefit From Europe’s Privacy Crackdown. “Big tech companies gain while smaller online ad firms are squeezed under the European Union’s GDPR, which takes effect in May.”

When the European Union’s justice commissioner traveled to California to meet with Google and Facebook last fall, she was expecting to get an earful from executives worried about the Continent’s sweeping new privacy law.

Instead, she realized they already had the situation under control. “They were more relaxed, and I became more nervous,” said the EU official, Věra Jourová. “They have the money, an army of lawyers, an army of technicians and so on.”

Brussels wants its new General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, to stop tech giants and their partners from pressuring consumers to relinquish control of their data in exchange for services. The EU would like to set an example for legislation around the world. But some of the restrictions are having an unintended consequence: reinforcing the duopoly of Facebook Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google.

On May 25, the EU will begin enforcing the new rules, which in many cases require companies to obtain affirmative consent to use European residents’ personal information. The change has sent shudders through the digital-advertising sector, from online publishers to the analytics firms, data brokers and buying platforms that use personal data to aim ads at individuals in real time.

Google and Facebook, however, are leveraging their vast scale and sophistication as they seek consent from the hundreds of millions of European users who visit their services each day. They are applying a relatively strict interpretation of the new law, competitors say—setting an industry standard that is hard for smaller firms to meet.

You don’t say.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: AZ Special Election, Jackson Smeared and Much, Much More. “Republican Debbie Lesko has won the special election to replace Trent Franks, who resigned from office late last year. The ‘story’ on this race–and the story always changes about what a GOP victory or loss means in the era of the resistance– is that anything less than a double digit win by the Republican candidate is some kind of mandate on Trump’s presidential victory. As of right now, the spread is about 6 points, very convenient.”

LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: Venezuela malaria cases jump by 69 percent.

HEADS I WIN, TAILS YOU LOSE: Why the win for Republicans in Arizona 8 is still good for Democrats.

This is CNN, after all.

LABORATORIES OF WELFARE STATISM: Finland’s basic income trial falls flat.

GOOD LORD: Why some ‘incels’ are celebrating Toronto’s alleged van attacker.

A post on Minassian’s Facebook said the “incel rebellion has already begun” and referred to “Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger.” Rodger was the 22-year-old California man responsible for a deadly rampage in Isla Vista, Calif., that left six people dead.

Facebook has confirmed the post was real and was posted publicly on Minassian’s profile before Facebook shut it down.

More, from an interview in the report with New York journalist Aditi Natasha Kini:

Can you tell us, first of all, what is an incel?

It stands for involuntary celibate. So an incel is a cisgendered heterosexual man who hasn’t had sex, not out of choice.

Why has it developed into an online phenomenon?

There is a growing faction of men who have found outlets for their anger against women and dating culture in general online, and that’s been codified into a sort of indoctrination.

Boys who were never taught how to grow up to be men, combined with grievance culture and antisocial media — that’s a deathly combination.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Seems like an argument for legalized prostitution.

CHEATING: How merchants use Facebook to flood Amazon with fake reviews.

Many of these fraudulent reviews originate on Facebook, where sellers seek shoppers on dozens of networks, including Amazon Review Club and Amazon Reviewers Group, to give glowing feedback in exchange for money or other compensation. The practice artificially inflates the ranking of thousands of products, experts say, misleading consumers.

But the ban, sellers and experts say, merely pushed an activity that used to take place openly into dispersed and harder-to-track online communities.

There, an economy of paid reviews has flourished. Merchants pledge to drop reimbursements into a reviewer’s PayPal account within minutes of posting comments for items such as kitchen knives, rain ponchos or shower caddies, often sweetening the deal with a $5 commission or a $10 Amazon gift card. Facebook this month deleted more than a dozen of the groups where sellers and buyers matched after being contacted by The Post. Amazon kicked a five-star seller off its site after an inquiry from The Post.

The kicker? The Post in question is Jeff Bezos’ own Washington Post.

MAKE THE U.S. NAVY GREAT AGAIN: It is imperative that America’s fleet reach 355 ships within the next ten years. There is, in fact, a path to achieve this goal that is both achievable and affordable.

A longer article, but this part stands out:

From a naval perspective, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) is pursuing a mix of high-end and low-end ships and submarines. This strategy would allow the PLAN to spread out across the vast Pacific Ocean in sufficient numbers to locate and interdict U.S. ships. At the high end, China is investing in aircraft carriers, nuclear-powered fast-attack submarines and large surface combatants equipped with advanced radars, surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) and surface-to-surface missiles. While China’s high-end ships are designed to go toe to toe with their American counterparts in battle, Beijing is unlikely to close the United States’ technological head start. Therefore, China is aiming to close the capability gap by fielding mass quantities of low-end ships.

While the United States will not start buying frigates until the 2020s, China is building a new frigate every six weeks. Vast numbers of these low-end ships will increasingly patrol China’s expanding front lines in the western Pacific and Indian Ocean regions. Backed by a growing arsenal of longer-range and more sophisticated air and missile weapons, the Chinese navy will have a highly capable and numerically larger maritime force by the middle of the next decade. If this situation comes to fruition, it could make the projection of U.S. naval power cost prohibitive in the western Pacific, undermining the credibility of our alliance commitments. Indeed, China currently calculates that western Pacific nations — South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines and perhaps even Australia — may ultimately align with the Middle Kingdom.

Wealthy maritime trading nations maintain powerful navies, or they don’t remain wealthy maritime trading nations.

NEITHER VICTOR NOR VICTORIA COULD BE REACHED FOR COMMENT: ‘Drag Kings’ Hope to Detoxify Masculinity by Dressing Up as Men (Who Act Like Women). “Peacock’s idea is that, because actual men have all been socially conditioned to be ‘toxic,’ we need actual women to pretend to be men to show us what men could be like if they weren’t all so darn toxic.”

Hating men for being men is a perfect example of toxic anti-femininity.

NOT EVEN BEACH VOLLEYBALL? I Don’t Enjoy Watching Women’s Sports. That Doesn’t Make Me a Misogynist.

CONVENIENT OR CREEPY? Amazon Starts Delivering Goods to the Trunk of Your GM or Volvo.

CHANGE: 43% of music revenues came from streaming last year.

MICHAEL WALSH: Kanye West may just be trolling us all, but he sure has the Left in a total swivet.

That’s good enough for me.

YOU GET A JOB AND YOU GET A JOB AND YOU GET A JOB: Sanders to announce proposal promising jobs to all Americans.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is set to announce a federal jobs proposal that would guarantee a job with at least a $15-per-hour wage and health benefits to every adult American “who wants or needs one,” The Washington Post reports.

The senator is still in the early stages of crafting the plan, according to the Post, which would provide a job or required training for any American.

Sanders’s office has yet to release the details of the plan’s funding, but previous large-scale projects proposed by the Vermont progressive have involved ending tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans and large corporations.

Flashback: The US Tax System Just Keeps On Getting More And More Progressive.

American business is getting better and better at creating jobs, thanks in no small part to last year’s tax cut. They’d do better still if politicians like Bernie Sanders would follow the wise man’s advice to “Get the hell out of my way!”