FASTER, PLEASE: The Battery Boost We’ve Been Waiting for Is Only a Few Years Out.

The first commercial consumer devices to have higher-capacity lithium-silicon batteries will likely be announced in the next two years, says Mr. Lam, who expects a wearable to be first. Other companies claim a similar timetable for consumer rollout.

Enevate produces complete silicon-dominant anodes for car manufacturers. CEO Robert Rango says its technology increases the range of electric vehicles by 30% compared with conventional lithium-ion batteries.

BMW plans to incorporate Sila’s silicon anode technology in a plug-in electric vehicle by 2023, says a company spokesman. BMW expects an increase of 10% to 15% in battery-pack capacity in a single leap. While this is the same technology destined for mobile electronics, the higher volumes and higher safety demands of the auto industry mean slower implementation there. In 2017, BMW said it would invest €200 million ($246 million) in its own battery-research center.

Now looks like a great time to wait before buying an electric car.

BLUE WAVE? New Generic Congressional Ballot Poll Shows Dems Regaining Double-Digit Lead. But: “Will party infighting derail the Dems’ chances to take over the House?”

BIPARTISANSHIP: Public Troubled by ‘Deep State.’

A majority of the American public believe that the U.S. government engages in widespread monitoring of its own citizens and worry that the U.S. government could be invading their own privacy. The Monmouth University Poll also finds a large bipartisan majority who feel that national policy is being manipulated or directed by a “Deep State” of unelected government officials. Americans of color on the center and left and NRA members on the right are among those most worried about the reach of government prying into average citizens’ lives.

Just over half of the public is either very worried (23%) or somewhat worried (30%) about the U.S. government monitoring their activities and invading their privacy. There are no significant partisan differences – 57% of independents, 51% of Republicans, and 50% of Democrats are at least somewhat worried the federal government is monitoring their activities. Another 24% of the American public are not too worried and 22% are not at all worried.

Fully 8-in-10 believe that the U.S. government currently monitors or spies on the activities of American citizens, including a majority (53%) who say this activity is widespread and another 29% who say such monitoring happens but is not widespread. Just 14% say this monitoring does not happen at all. There are no substantial partisan differences in these results.

This breakdown in trust is what happens when power is held by people unworthy of it.

SOD OFF, SWAMPY: Experts Say We Should Tax Meat Eaters the Same Way We Tax Smokers.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. No one can pretend Facebook is just harmless fun any more.

Even if we want to avoid the site and keep our data protected, it’s not as easy as one might think. According to Roger McNamee, an early investor in Facebook, the company uses techniques found in propaganda and casino gambling to foster psychological addiction in its users – such as constant notifications and variable rewards. By keeping us hooked, Facebook is able to hold a huge amount of data on us. What is surprising, and worrying, is the derived data Facebook has – the profiles it can build of its users based on seemingly innocuous information. The author of the book Networks of Control, Wolfie Christl, noted that a patent published by Facebook works out people’s commute times by using location data from mobile apps. It then uses this and other data to segregate users into social classes.

Facebook’s massive data cache goes hand in hand with its acquisition of competitors. Nick Srnicek, author of Platform Capitalism, says, “Facebook is acting like a classic monopoly: it’s buying up competitors like Instagram, it’s blatantly copying rivals like Snapchat, and it even has its own app, Onavo, that acts to warn them of potential threats. All of this is combined with an unchecked sweeping up of our data that’s being used to build an impervious moat around its business.”

Anti-Facebook sentiment seems to have gone viral.

I DID NOT SEE THAT COMING: Walmart Applies for Patent to Develop Drone Bees.

MAGGIE HABERMAN: Newly Emboldened, Trump Says What He Really Feels.

For months, President Trump’s legal advisers implored him to avoid so much as mentioning the name of Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, in his tweets, and to do nothing to provoke him or suggest his investigation is not proper.

Ignoring that advice over the weekend was the decision of a president who ultimately trusts only his own instincts, and now believes he has settled into the job enough to rely on them rather than the people who advise him.

A dozen people close to Mr. Trump or the White House, including current and former aides and longtime friends, described him as newly emboldened to say what he really feels and to ignore the cautions of those around him.

That self-confidence has led to a series of surprising comments and actions that have pushed the Trump presidency in an ever more tumultuous direction.

Yes, up until now reticence has been Trump’s defining characteristic.

DON’T SAY THAT LIKE IT’S A BAD THING: Trump’s pick for secretary of state reportedly set up ‘kill teams’ of commandos at the CIA.

TELFORD: Police Failed to Act While Shahzad Khan Made £2,000 a Night Selling Victims at ‘The Rape House.’

The Pakistani migrant, who died in 2015 aged 61, had targeted girls in the town since 1981, picking up at least one of his victims from under the noses of the authorities outside a police station on a regular basis, the Mirror reports.

“He’d pick me up right outside the police station in Wellington and sometimes police cars would drive past us,” she said.

“They must have realised something was very badly wrong but they never said a word, nor asked me what I was doing with a much older man.”

The scandal — barely covered by national broadcasters, including the publicly-funded BBC, despite being the worst in Britain’s history — saw up to a thousand girls beaten, raped, and even killed in a city of just 170,000, with Khan standing out as one of the most prolific abusers among hundreds of potential rapists.

Diversity is our strength.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Another Austin Bomb, McCabe DOWN and Much, Much More. “If you ever doubted that there was a group of senior government bureaucrats working against the election of Trump and the Trump administration, doubt no more.”

NEO-OTTOMAN EMPIRE: Turkish Forces Seize Syrian City of Afrin.

Turkey’s offensive against Afrin began on January 20th, and the Associated Press reports it slowly pushed the Kurdish militia and civilians into the town center. The U.K.-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says nearly 200,000 people have fled the Afrin region in recent days, and cites witnesses who say intense clashes between Turkish-backed forces and YPG Syrian Kurdish fighters are ongoing. A Kurdish official told the AP YPG fighters have evacuated remaining civilians “because of massacres” by Turkish and allied forces.

The Turkish government says the Kurdish forces in Afrin are tied to an insurgent group that has fought for Kurdish autonomy in southeastern Turkey. The AP reports that Turkey “fears the establishment of a Kurdish self-ruled zone in Syria that could inspire its own Kurdish minority to press for greater autonomy.” While the Turkish government sees the YPG as a “terrorist army,” the militia has been an important ally to the U.S. in the fight against the Islamic State group.

According to the BBC’s Mark Lowen, “President Erdogan has achieved his twin objectives: to remove a key area under YPG control and to rally the vast majority of Turks behind their commander-in-chief. The jingoism here has been breathtaking. Targeting Turkey’s age-old enemy of the Kurdish militants is a rare uniting force in a polarised country.”

Plus: “The U.K.-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says nearly 200,000 people have fled the Afrin region in recent days.”

That’s mission accomplished for Erdogan.

PEOPLE POWER? Maduro challenger shakes up Venezuela’s presidential vote.

“Traitor!” cry socialist stalwarts, who cannot forgive the former state governor for breaking with their beloved late leader Hugo Chavez in 2010.

“Chavista lite!” say opposition radicals, always suspicious that Falcon came into their ranks as a Trojan horse.

Now that the 56-year-old former soldier is running for president in a May 20 vote, both groups are united in scoffing at his chances.

After all, Falcon is up against not just a powerful President Nicolas Maduro but also an election system widely considered unfair and an opposition boycott that will deprive him of votes.

And yet, a clutch of opinion polls show Falcon ahead, bolstering his campaign mantra that he is a natural transition candidate with appeal to a moderate majority fed up with political polarization and economic chaos.

Widely-followed pollster Datanalisis, for example, put him more than 10 percentage points ahead in voter intentions.

Stay tuned…

THE TWO MILLION DOLLAR DEM: More Dems offer to hire McCabe.

More Democratic lawmakers are coming forward with offers to hire former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe after he was fired Friday, just two days before he was eligible for his pension.

Democratic Reps. Seth Moulton (Mass.), Jamie Raskin (Md.) and Luis Gutiérrez (Ill.) have all made job offers on Twitter. The lawmakers are extending the offers in an attempt to help McCabe to qualify for his benefits.

Outrageous.

ANTISOCIAL MEDIA: Facebook may have broken FTC deal in Cambridge Analytica incident.

Facebook may face more legal trouble than you might think in the wake of Cambridge Analytica’s large-scale data harvesting. Former US officials David Vladeck and Jessica Rich have told the Washington Post that Facebook’s data sharing may violate the FTC consent decree requiring that it both ask for permission before sharing data and report any authorized access. The “Thisisyourdigitallife” app at the heart of the affair asked for permission from those who directly used it, but not the millions of Facebook friends whose data was taken in the process.

Facebook, for its part, said that it “reject[s] any suggestion” that it violated the consent decree. It maintained that it “respected” users’ privacy settings.

If the FTC did find violations, Facebook could be on the hook for some very hefty fines — albeit fines that aren’t likely to be as hefty as possible. The decree asks for fines as large as $40,000 per person, but that would amount to roughly $2 trillion. Regulators like the FTC historically push for fines they know companies can pay, which would suggest fines that are ‘just’ in the billion-dollar range. Given that there are already multiple American and European investigations underway, any financial penalty would be just one piece of a larger puzzle.

$40,000 per user might not be realistic, since it would force Facebook into liquidation and users would still never see that much restitution.

But just think of the message it would send to the surviving data-harvesting platforms.

WELL, GOOD: South Korea may buy more Apache helicopters to lead the fight across DMZ.

This news comes on the heels of last month’s decision to purchase 90 more German-made bunker-busting Taurus air-to-surface missiles.

President Moon Jae-in ran on a dovish foreign policy platform, but it Li’l Kim’s recklessness may have forced a change of mind.

KEVIN MCCULLOUGH: The Coming Collusion Bloodbath.

What the universe has truly ignored is the fact that the Inspector General’s investigation (which has been far less publicized than Special Council Robert Mueller’s), and in large measure has had much more devastating impact. Agents have been fired, reassigned, and otherwise dealt with just within the process of the investigation. The limited amount of what we’ve seen from the efforts thus far have painted a picture of corruption at the highest levels, and potentially “Watergate” comparable outcomes upon the report’s issuance.

McCabe’s firing was directly linked to the IG’s findings, and once revealed to the Justice Department’s disciplinary powers a concurrent recommendation was termination.

That Comey, McCabe, and others have practiced an obvious double standard in the email case of Hillary Clinton where ample evidence caused 106 of the case agents and attorneys working on the case to believe indictment would occur, and simultaneously going to such extraordinary measures through the assistance of essentially Hillary’s campaign operation to attempt to thwart the outcome of the election is more than enough reason to go after them on a criminal basis alone.

That McCabe reportedly lied to the low key Inspector General, while attempting to send General Michael Flynn to prison for lying to the same FBI is of highest hypocrisy.

But hypocrisy is what Comey, McCabe, Strzok, and others seem especially gifted at.

Well, to be fair, it takes a hypocrite to play the corruption game at this level.

SOCIAL JUSTICE: Student Assaulted for Pro-Second Amendment Views, Then Suspended for Defending Himself.

“Social justice” is whatever the mob feels like it can get away with at the moment — and the Administration at too many schools has joined in.

HOW TO LOSE A MAJORITY, EXHIBIT #1,000,006: The Next Big Republican Spending Bill Is Packed With Liberal Priorities.

HONOR ROLL: Clintons, Kissinger, Mattis Among Rich and Powerful Fooled by Silicon Valley Whiz Kid’s $700M Fraud.

HUH: I think Google has stopped in­dex­ing the old­er parts of the We­b. I think I can prove it. Google’s com­pe­ti­tion is do­ing bet­ter.

So switch to the competition — I did.

BRIDGET JOHNSON: Scalise Predicts Pelosi will be One of Dems’ ‘Biggest Impediments’ in Midterms.

AUSTIN BAY: ‘Maximum Pressure’ Strategy Got North Korea to the Table.

OH, SHUT UP: Arnold Schwarzenegger Calls For Warning Labels on ‘Every Product That Has Fossil Fuels.’

FAR LEFT WATCH: Communist militia leader arrested on weapons charges.

LET THE BOYS FIGHT: Why Anti-Bullying Policies Fail and Why Fighting May Be the Answer.