UM… Tillerson says ‘talks,’ but no ‘negotiations’ with NKorea.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Trump to Meet with Rocket Man, RUSSIA Update and Much, Much More.

FLASHBACK: Yelling at “scumbags”—inside the White House’s last gaming violence summit.

“I think the first words he said to me were something like, ‘What are we going to do with these scumbags?'”

In the wake of a horrific school shooting, a senior member of the White House appeared ready to take the game industry to task for supposedly desensitizing an entire generation to the horrors of gun violence. But while President Trump has repeatedly called out video games and other violent media in recent weeks, he’s not the one who reportedly called game industry representatives “scumbags” in advance of a White House summit. The above quote is instead attributed to the last senior White House official to host a meeting with the video game industry: Vice President Joe Biden.

These things are pointless, beyond a veneer of “doing something.”

ALEX PAREENE: If You Truly Care About Speech, You Will Invite Me to Your Office to Personally Call You a Dipshit.

THAT’S WHAT I’M AFRAID OF: Kamala Harris Says “California Represents The Future.”

LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: Sick Venezuelans flee to Colombia in mounting refugee crisis.

An 18-year-old woman rubbed her swollen belly after fleeing with her infant daughter when the wounds from her C-section began to ooze pus. A young man whose femur had torn through his skin in a motorcycle crash needed antibiotics for an infection. An elderly retiree with a swollen foot arrived after taking a 20-hour bus ride from Caracas because doctors there told his family the only treatment they could offer was amputation — without anesthesia or antibiotics.

“If you want to sign, sign. But we are not responsible for the life of your father,” Teresa Tobar, 36, quoted the doctors in Venezuela as telling her when they handed over the papers to authorize her father’s surgery.

As Venezuela’s economic crisis worsens, rising numbers are fleeing in a burgeoning refugee crisis that is drawing alarm across Latin America. Independent groups estimate that as many as 3 million to 4 million Venezuelans have abandoned their homeland in recent years, with several hundred thousand departing in 2017 alone.

Socialism means caring for the poor and sick, I’m told.

HMM: Navy, Marine Corps leaders warn that China is ‘weaponizing capital.’

“When it comes to China, the bottom line there is the checkbook,” Navy Secretary Richard V. Spencer told lawmakers during a House Appropriations defense subcommittee hearing.

“Not only in the dollars and cents that they are writing to support their military expansion and their technological work, but what they’re doing around the globe … weaponizing capital.”

Spencer referred to Beijing’s current funding of a Sri Lankan port project, a move not done as aid but rather in order to secure it for themselves.

China has said the project is part of its $1.4 trillion “Belt and Road Initiative,” which is meant to bolster trade routes by extending roads outside the country and building up ports.

“Their open checkbook keeps me up at night,” Spencer said.

Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Robert Neller, who also spoke at the hearing, said the Chinese “are playing the long game.”

Meanwhile, the US Congress has seemingly given up its primary job of budgeting.

JACOB SULLUM: America’s War on Pain Pills Is Killing Addicts and Leaving Patients in Agony.

Contrary to the impression left by most press coverage of the issue, opioid-related deaths do not usually involve drug-naive patients who accidentally get hooked while being treated for pain. Instead, they usually involve people with histories of substance abuse and psychological problems who use multiple drugs, not just opioids.

Conflating those two groups results in policies like the pill count that left Craig without the pain medication he needed to get out of bed in the morning, go to work, and lead a normal life. The rationale is that cutting people like him off will stop them from ending up dead of an overdose in a Walmart parking lot next to a baggie of fentanyl-laced heroin.

But the truth is that patients who take opioids for pain rarely become addicted. A 2018 study found that just 1 percent of people who took prescription pain medication following surgery showed signs of “opioid misuse,” a broader category than addiction. Even when patients take opioids for chronic pain, only a small minority of them become addicted. The risk of fatal poisoning is even lower—on the order of two-hundredths of a percent annually, judging from a 2015 study.

Despite such reassuring numbers, the government is responding to the “opioid epidemic” as if opioid addiction were a disease caused by exposure to opioids, a simplistic view that ignores the personal, social, and economic factors that make these drugs attractive to some people. Treating pain medication as a disease vector, the government has restricted access to it by monitoring prescriptions, investigating doctors, and imposing new limits on how much can be prescribed, for how long, and under what circumstances. That approach hurts pain patients by depriving them of the analgesics they need to make their lives livable, and it hurts nonmedical users by driving them into a black market where the drugs are deadlier.

None of this should come as a surprise to anyone who has studied history’s various prohibitions.

COMMIES HATE WOMEN (AND OTHER LIVING THINGS): Campus Commies at the University of Texas Vandalize Fountain to Celebrate International Women’s Day.

YOUR DAILY TREACHER: Rachel Dolezal Is Back, and Still Black.

Well, yes and no…

AND WAS IMMEDIATELY SENTENCED TO 20 YEARS HARD LABOR AT MAR-A-LAGO: ‘Veep’ Creator Compares President Trump to Murderous Dictators.

BEING A TYRANT IS UNHEALTHY WORK: U.S., South Korean intelligence probe reports of Kim Jong Un health woes.

BUT THE NARRATIVE! Italy’s first black senator: my election shows far right is not anti-immigration.

DAVID SOLWAY: The Campus Rape Meme Just Keeps Chugging Along.

CHRISTIAN TOTO: The Real Reason We Need ‘Fahrenheit 451’ Now More Than Ever.

I’m generally against remakes and reboots, but ‘451’ updated with smart takes on modern political correctness and corrosive antisocial media could be a great film.

UGH: Syria enters ‘new phase of horror’ as Assad pushes on with eastern Ghouta offensive.

Claims from President Bashar al Assad that his forces are doing all it can to protect civilians in the two-week-old offensive on eastern Ghouta are “frankly ridiculous”, human rights chief Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein said on Wednesday.

The Russian-supported “indiscriminate, brutal attacks“ have killed at least 800 people and led most of the area’s estimated 400,000 population to seek shelter in basements from intense shelling and air strikes despite demands from the UN for a ceasefire on 24 February.

The fate of Eastern Ghouta reflects the ‘siege, starve and surrender’ Assad playbook in several other urban battles in Syria’s complex conflict.

There were reports that the Assad regime used chlorine gas on Ghouta, but those reports may be false.

AMAZING: ‘Mind-reading’ A.I. produces a description of what you’re thinking about.

Think that Google’s search algorithms are good at reading your mind? That’s nothing compared to a new artificial intelligence research project coming out of Japan, which can analyze a person’s brain scans and provide a written description of what they have been looking at.

To generate its captions, the artificial intelligence is given an fMRI brain scan image, taken while a person is looking at a picture. It then generates a written description of what they think the person was viewing. An illustration of the level of complexity it can offer is: “A dog is sitting on the floor in front of an open door” or “a group of people standing on the beach.” Both of those turn out to be absolutely accurate.

In the wrong hands this could be creepy as hell, but I’m thinking of its application for longterm coma victims.

LARRY O’CONNOR: CBS really wants Oprah to run against Trump.

The full court press is on over at CBS to try and convince Oprah Winfrey to run for president in 2020.

Winfrey recently told People Magazine that it would take a message from the Almighty to get her to run. “’God, if you think I’m supposed to run, you gotta tell me, and it has to be so clear that not even I can miss it.’ And I haven’t gotten that yet,” she said.

So it appears CBS is determined to inspire some sort of divine intervention to get Oprah to to throw in her hat.

Earlier this week Oprah appeared on CBS’ Late Show with Stephen Colbert and an animated “God” showed up, complete with Oprah for President swag.

More details about CBS’s desperation at the link, plus:

But here’s the really strange thing about this pressure from CBS to get Oprah to run: Winfrey is actually their employee. She is, in fact, a journalist for CBS News.

So, apparently, CBS News is completely comfortable dispensing with even the faintest hint of journalistic integrity for their high-priced, 60 Minutes Special Correspondent.

In all fairness, it’s been a long time since CBS News or 60 Minutes dropped any pretense of objectivity.

RANDY BARNETT: The New Challenge to Obamacare.

Readers may be familiar with a new constitutional challenge by 20 state attorneys general to the Affordable Care Act, which Ilya blogged about here. Their argument, in a nutshell, is that with the amount of the penalty for failing to have health insurance now set to zero, the individual insurance “requirement”–AKA the “individual mandate”–can no longer be justified as a tax. This is so because one of the essential characteristics of a tax is that it raises at least some revenue for the government. For this reason, the “saving construction” employed by Chief Justice Roberts no longer applies, as it is no longer even a “reasonably possible” reading of the insurance requirement, which now raises no revenue.

On this claim, the AG’s are on very strong ground. To the extent they are correct, the NFIB v. Sebelius was a bigger victory than we realized when it was decided, as it left the insurance mandate susceptible to being killed off in this way via reconciliation.

Because this constitutional claim makes sense, the attention will turn to the issue of standing and, perhaps, mainly to severability. If the insurance requirement is invalidated, does that bring down the rest of the Affordable Care Act?

Read the whole thing.

And it’s sad to have to say this, but Obama being gone — along with his implicit threat to go to war against SCOTUS over ObamaCare — might be a critical factor in Chief Justice John Roberts’ thinking.

CLAIM: Firm Hired by BuzzFeed to Verify Steele Dossier Has Checkered Past in Venezuela.

IGNORANCE IS BLISS AND/OR POLICY: If You’re Trying To Ban Guns, The Least You Can Do Is Learn The Basics. “In a debate imbued with emotion, gun-control advocates rely on ignorance.”

David Harsanyi:

When Barack Obama tells a crowd that a mass shooter used a “fully automatic weapon,” he’s not concerned with the finest taxonomic distinctions of a gun, he’s depending on the yawning obliviousness of a cheering crowd. When CNN featured an alleged gun expert explaining that the AR-15 he’s about to fire is “full semi-automatic,” he’s making the functionality of firearm sound scarier to those who are ignorant about guns.

“Jargon” are words and expressions that are difficult for a layman to understand or use. Rather than use jargon, Second Amendment advocates are usually mocking those who use jargon-y sounding words in efforts to fearmonger viewers and constituents. When you claim that the streets are rife with “high-capacity, rapid-fire magazines” or “jumbo clips” you’re trying to fool your audience with a veneer of expertise you don’t possess. When you claim that we need to ban “gas-assisted, receiver firearms” you’re trying to make a semi-automatic weapon sound like a machine gun for a reason.

And the reason is to limit, restrict, ban, or otherwise infringe on a constitutionally protected right.

CHANGE: China’s Military Revolution: Smarter, Better, Faster, Smaller.

The United States armed forces underwent a similar revolution in the ’70s and ’80s after the Draft was ended — and the end result was the deadliest military in history.

YOU WANT MORE MEN WITHOUT CHESTS? BECAUSE THIS IS HOW YOU GET MORE MEN WITHOUT CHESTS: Two Miramar SWAT officers suspended for heading to Parkland massacre.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Tariffs, going to war in California, and much, much more.

Tyler O’Neil is filling in for Liz this morning.

PRIVACY: Best Buy’s Geek Squad Techs Search Customer Computers For The FBI, Reports Claim.