DOUBLING DOWN: New drone ship under construction for SpaceX rocket landings.

The third drone ship in the company’s fleet of ocean-going rocket recovery vessels is under construction, Musk said. He wrote on Twitter that it will be named “A Shortfall Of Gravitas.”

The name of the new landing platform is a nod to “Experiencing A Significant Gravitas Shortfall,” a starship featured in the “Culture” science fiction novel series by the late Scottish author Iain M. Banks.

SpaceX’s two other drone ships are also named for sentient, planet-sized ships in Banks’ novels: “Just Read the Instructions” currently based at the Port of Los Angeles for launches out of Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, and “Of Course I Still Love You” positioned at Port Canaveral for SpaceX missions from Florida.

Musk wrote that “A Shortfall of Gravitas” will be stationed in Florida to support high flight rates of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, and allow for dual ocean landings of the two side boosters carried on the Falcon Heavy rocket.

Happy landings…

TAKE OFF AND NUKE THE SITE FROM ORBIT: In Wake Of Corruption Trials, Maryland Ponders Disbanding Baltimore Police Department.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Guy Spends Almost A Year Gluing 42,000 Matches To Make A Giant Sphere, Sets It On Fire.

There’s video at the link, and as the fire consumes more and more of the sphere, it begins to look more and more like the Eye of Sauron.

I HAD BEEN ASSURED THAT BORDER CONTROLS WERE RACIST: Colombia tightens borders as Venezuela crisis worsens.

SCOTT GREER: Lefty Journalists: Free Speech For Me But Not For Thee.

Just last week, many of the same leftists crusading against Norton and Weiss were defending Deadspin contributor Jesse Farrar over his offensive humor. In a tweet, Farrar joked he wanted to drown conservative students. When Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk remarked that the dark tweet was probably a joke, the leftist writer insisted, “I am not joking.”

That was all a part of his particular humor, but it’s understandable why a few did not think it was a joke. He did flat-out say “I’m not joking,” which demands everyone understand his unique sense of humor to know he’s not.

Conservative outlet IJR reached out to Deadspin for comment on the matter. Deadspin deputy editor Barry Petchesky replied that he couldn’t argue against drowning conservative students. “And while I would not personally advocate the method mentioned in Farrar’s obvious joke Tweet you seem to be using to try to snitch on him to his employers, I can’t argue that it wouldn’t make the world a better place,” Petchesky told IJR.

Man is that funny.

Farrar’s leftist defenders believe that everyone should understand his humor and it’s a serious outrage to report his jokes to his employers, forgetting that they do this all the time to their political opponents.

What fun is free speech when even un-credentialed proles can use it?

TYLER O’NEIL: Dem. Repeats Discredited SPLC ‘Hate Group’ Smears 5 Times to Defend Planned Parenthood.

PUT. THE TACO. DOWN: DACA, Taco Tuesday, and the lessons of “Glengarry, Glen Ross.”

It’s Michael Walsh, so read the whole thing.

BECAUSE GIVING PEOPLE WHAT THEY NEED DOESN’T BUY VOTES LIKE GIVING THEM WHAT THEY WANT: Why does replacing food stamps with food so anger liberals?

NICE: Cisco to Repatriate $67 Billion Under New Tax Law.

I seem to recall being told seven or eight years ago by some very smart people that “business climate” was a myth and didn’t matter.

MICHAEL VAN DER GALIEN: Trump’s Spending Cuts ‘Are Totally Imaginary.’ “Overnight, they’ve become the biggest spenders in American history. And they’re proud of it.”

“CRUMBS”: Democratic Group Warns Party on Midterm Messaging.

The prominent super PAC Priorities USA released a polling memo Tuesday showing that as attention has been centered on White House scandals and immigration the past few weeks, Democrats have been losing ground on taxes and the economy.

The findings deliver welcome news for Republicans, who have been working on improving public perception of their originally unpopular tax bill and also banking on an improved economy in 2018. The Priorities’ survey shows upticks in President Trump’s job approval rating, along with increased approval on key GOP policy items including health care, taxes and the economy.

“There’s no question that Trump benefits when a critique of his tax and health care policies is not front and center – especially when voters are hearing Trump’s side of the story on the economy,” the memo reads. “In the last few weeks, Democrats turned their attention to other issues while Trump has continued to promote his economic policies, and Trump’s numbers have incrementally improved as a result.”

They can’t help but rise to the culture war bait, which is how they get more Trump.

WINNING? Taliban Wants US To Enter Dialogue, End Afghanistan War.

In a letter addressed to the “American people, officials of independent non-governmental organizations and the peace loving Congressmen,” the Taliban said it wanted to end the 17-year conflict through peace talks with President Donald Trump. The letter also warned that the pacifist tack shouldn’t be perceived as a sign of weakness and its fight against the U.S. troops in Afghanistan will persist until they leave the premises.

Former President George W. Bush deployed troops in Afghanistan in 2001 and last year, Trump redoubled his efforts to attack the region when U.S. unleashed the Mother Of All Bombs (MOAB) against an ISIS affiliate in Afghanistan’s eastern Nangarhar Province, along the border with Pakistan.

The strikes ordered by the president pushed the Taliban back from several district centers and two provincial capitals, Reuters reported.

The letter said, “Despite continuing this bloody war for seventeen years and accepting huge casualties and financial losses, your current president Donald Trump — to continue the illegal 17-year-old war in Afghanistan — acknowledged increased insecurity and emergence of multiple groups instead of the single unified Islamic Emirate (Taliban).”

That last paragraph is some unconvincing tough talk from a group who just got bloodied by American airpower.

JUST AS GLENN FORETOLD: The Michael Flynn guilty plea stinks to high-heaven.

Now it’s Larry O’Connor saying it:

Who sent the FBI to investigate this dubious charge of Flynn violating the arcane and never-enforced Logan Act? None other than Acting Attorney General Sally Yates. Yates famously joined the resistance to President Trump weeks after the inauguration by refusing to enforce the president’s Executive Order on extreme vetting for foreign nationals coming from certain countries known to engage in terror activities.

Yates was also a participant in a January 5 meeting between President Obama, Vice President Biden, Comey and National Security Adviser Susan Rice that was just revealed in an email Rice sent to herself claiming Obama wanted the ongoing surveillance and investigation into the Trump campaign to be conducted “by the book.”

Meanwhile, former Asst. US Attorney Andrew McCarthy writes at National Review about the curious events surrounding the guilty plea and the possibility that Mueller’s team did not reveal all exculpatory discovery to Flynn when they accepted reached their plea deal

Anyone working in the Executive branch who joins the “resistance” against their own boss ought to lose their job, period.

VIDEO: Sharyl Attkisson Explains the Origins of the 2016 ‘Fake News’ Narrative in TedX Talk. “The whole thing smacked of the roll-out of a propaganda campaign.”

CHANGE: Russia and China will have ‘operational’ anti-satellite weapons in a few years.

“We assess that, if a future conflict were to occur involving Russia or China, either country would justify attacks against U.S. and allied satellites as necessary to offset any perceived U.S. military advantage derived from military, civil or commercial space systems,” warns the 2018 Worldwide Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community, released this week by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

The United States has benefitted from a tidal wave of innovation in the space industry, but so have many other nations. “Foreign countries — particularly China and Russia — will continue to expand their space-based reconnaissance, communications, and navigation systems in terms of the numbers of satellites, the breadth of their capability, and the applications for use,” said the report.

Related: The Air Force Turned Off GPS To Rehearse a War Without It.

DAMNING: More Evidence the Obama White House Deliberately Deceived on the Iran Deal. “Ben Rhodes formally joins the Ploughshares Fund.”

There was an interesting announcement on Wednesday for Ben Rhodes, formerly the Obama White House deputy national security adviser. Rhodes, you may recall, caught some flack at the end of Obama’s presidency for admitting to the New York Times that he was manipulating the media in his efforts to sell the Iran Deal: “We created an echo chamber,” [Rhodes] admitted, when I asked him to explain the onslaught of freshly minted experts cheerleading for the deal. “They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.”

On Wednesday it was announced that Rhodes is joining the board of directors of the Ploughshares Fund.

If you know anything about the Ploughshares Fund, and their role in selling the Iran Deal, having Rhodes on their board is a good fit.

Read the whole thing.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Florida School Shooting, RUSSIA Investigation Update and Much, Much More. “What do we do with people who show signs of mental illness and/or violence before they commit a crime?”

The FBI needs to spend some serious time working on an answer to that question.

SHIPS WITH FRICKIN LASER BEAMS: The U.S. Navy Is Funding Lasers and Killing the Railgun.

The so-called Navy Laser Family of Systems is meant to get laser weapons to sea in the near term, giving the U.S. Navy the ability to deal with what might be called “pesky” threats: unmanned aerial vehicles, unmanned ships, and armed speed boats, also known as fast inshore attack craft (FIAC). Such threats cannot sink America’s large warships directly, but they can surveil, harass, and even damage a ship as large as a destroyer. The “family” also includes larger 150-kilowatt weapons that could be useful against missiles and aircraft.

But what about the U.S. Navy’s vaunted railgun, also known as Project 3370? The 2019 budget provides zero funding for the railgun. In its place, the Navy is funding the Gun Launched Guided Projectile, also known as the Hyper Velocity Projectile Block 0, which will “double the range of the current 5-inch conventional ammunition while meeting multi-mission operational requirements for Anti-Surface Warfare (ASuW), Anti-Air Warfare (AAW), and Naval Surface Fire Support (NSFS) missions.”

Both systems require huge amounts of electricity, but only the railgun has the reach to engage over-the-horizon threats. China is reportedly preparing to test-fire their own railgun.

I HAD BEEN ASSURED HIS WAS A REMARKABLY SCANDAL-FREE ADMINISTRATION: Federal abuses on Obama’s watch represent a growing blight on his legacy.

It’s increasingly apparent that these recently exposed abuses of power served two ostensible purposes: to secure Hillary Clinton’s candidacy by shielding her from prosecution stemming from the use of her unauthorized private server, and to derail the candidacy and presidency of Donald Trump.

But something else, something more profound, drove their efforts: their urgency to preserve what Obama once called “the fundamental transformation of the nation” — a grand project much bigger than Obama himself or any other single figure. He largely fulfilled the long-held progressive ambition of changing the nation’s course, only to see Trump threaten to change it once again: not to return it to where it was pre-Obama, but to smash the corrupt existing order that had made their progressive advances possible.

Obama and the leftist movement over which he has presided could not tolerate a reversal of their gains (by Trump, no less!), so they got to work.

On the offensive side, these Obama officials — who obviously loathe Trump, as demonstrated by the glaring antipathy in the Strzok–Page texts and others’ communications — set out to damage him. Trump, they thought, gave them much material with which to work, plus they enjoyed a compliant media that stood ready to amplify spoon-fed narratives, regardless of their veracity. The acquisition of multiple FISA warrants — now known to be largely based on an unverified dossier prepared by a foreign spy, using anonymous Russian and close Clinton associates and paid for by her campaign and the Democratic National Committee — to subvert and impair Trump and his associates, succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.

On the defensive side, Herculean efforts were made by the Obama DOJ and FBI to stonewall the Clinton investigation, not out of any real love for Hillary but because they needed to ensure a Democratic win and the continuance of their “transformative” agenda. Further, with Clinton at the helm, evidence of all of their previous abuses would never see the light of day.

Weird how this stuff is getting more attention only now that Obama is safely out of office and Clinton doesn’t wield presidential powers.

AMER TAHERI: Speaking Swedish, Acting North Korean.

[In 2013] the new administration of President Hassan Rouhani felt confident that, thanks to support from US President Barack Obama, the Khomeinist regime could talk like Sweden but act like North Korea.

However, it seems that the arrival on the scene of an unknown quantity named Donald J Trump has confused the mullahs, forcing them to ponder whether it is still possible to hoodwink the Americans and the rest of the world while pursuing repression in Iran and destabilizing policies abroad.

Strictly speaking Trump hasn’t yet done anything concrete against the mullahs apart from expressing sympathy with recent mass protests in Iran.

However, the fact that Trump has kept the mullahs guessing about his intentions has already impacted their behavior.

To start with Tehran has ended provocative naval acts in the Strait of Hormuz and its environs, winning praise from the Pentagon. Throughout the Obama presidency the Iranian navy operated “swarming sorties” against US naval units in the region with small speedboats approaching American battleships like so many gnats trying to sting an elephant.

Under Trump, however, the “gnats” are keeping away from the American elephant.

In another register, Tehran has also shelved its annual “End of America” and “A World Without Israel” shows.

I wonder why that is…

MAYBE NOT HA-HA FUNNY, BUT STILL FUNNY: U.S. spokeswoman says Erdoğan’s “Ottoman slap” threat funny.

The United States and Turkey are at odds over U.S. support for Kurdish forces in Syria. The U.S. military has backed the mainly Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) and together they have pushed Islamic State (ISIS) out of most of northern Syria to a remote area astride the border with Iraq.

Turkey sees the YPG as an arm of Kurdish rebels in Turkey and launched an operation against the group in the northwestern Syrian enclave of Afrin three weeks ago. Erdoğan has also threatened to pursue the offensive to into the area around the Syrian town of Manbij where U.S. troops are training the Kurdish forces.

U.S. Lieutenant General Paul Funk, the commander of the U.S.-led coalition against ISIS, said last week on a visit to Manbij that U.S. forces would defend themselves if attacked. “You hit us, we will respond aggressively. We will defend ourselves,” he said.

Erdoğan hit back on Tuesday. “Those who say ‘if they hit us we will respond harshly’ have clearly never received an Ottoman slap.”

I’m not sure the Ottomans successfully slapped the West after taking bits of Ukraine from Poland in 1676.

FIRST, WE COULDN’T DRILL OUR WAY OUT OF PROBLEMS. NOW, WE ARE DRILLING OUR WAY INTO PROBLEMS: Donald Trump’s Extract-Everything Energy Policy Dooms Us All.

Doomed if you drill, doomed if you don’t.

TONI AIRAKSINEN: Conservatives, Libertarians Are ‘on the Autistic Spectrum,’ Says Duke Professor.

Maybe she meant the awesome spectrum.

Either way, attending Duke in the fall semester of 2018 will set you or your parents back $39,284 — plus interest, if you don’t pay cash.

YOUR DAILY TREACHER: Dems Finally Fall Out of Love with Bill Clinton.

EVERYTHING IS PROBLEMATICAL: At Westminster, Even Dogs Are Subjected to Society’s Unrealistic Beauty Expectations.