PATRICK POOLE: Court Docs Say Michigan Man Arrested on Gun Charges Supported the Islamic State.

PART II OF SARAH HOYT’S INTERVIEW OF AGILE AERO CEO JEFF GREASON: Why Get Off This Rock.

SOME OF US HAVE BEEN SHOUTING INTO THE WIND ABOUT THIS FOR A VERY LONG TIME: Procurement a ‘mess,’ U.S. losing edge in aviation, space.

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Marines to get Star Trek phaser-like device for nonlethal weapon option.

The Ocular Interrupter System is essentially a green light with a combined laser range finder that gauges shooter-to-target distance then adjusts the light to deter, but not blind, personnel, said Ryan Smith, team leader for force protection programs at Marine Corps Systems Command.

It can be mounted on a the M16/M4 rail system or used separately with a pistol grip, Smith said.

The Glare Recoil nonlethal Hail and Warning device was developed as a commercial off-the-shelf product by B.E. Meyers & Co., Inc., based in Redmond, Washington. It is a $49 million contract, according to the company’s website.

Marine requirements wanted a system to operate up to 500 meters. Company spokeswoman Grace Strong said in an email that the gear, “provides immediate and recognizable visual warning quite a bit farther than the stated 500 meters. It is, in actuality, effective to (more than) 25 kilometers.”

I’m looking forward to the Ocular Interrupter System II, which if high-powered enough will induce the full Scanners effect.

LIZ SHELD’S HALLOWEEN BRIEFING: First Blood, Who’s Next and Much, Much More.

MORGAN FREEMAN: ‘Jailing Hillary’ Best Way To ‘Restore Public Faith In Govt.’

“Hillary should be in jail for her unlawful deeds and President Trump should absolutely, absolutely make sure this happens to send the very strong message that no-one, and I mean no-one, is above the law in the United States of America,” Morgan Freeman said in New York while promoting National Geographic’s new docu-series The Story of Us.

Responding to a question about why he thinks President Trump has not yet fulfilled this particular campaign promise, Freeman laughed and said and looked up at the heavens before saying, “Goddamnit man, you were elected for this very reason, lock that bitch up!”

After being accused of political incorrectness, Freeman laughed again, saying “It’s all about being loving and caring these days, isn’t it?“

“The most loving and caring thing we as a society can do for Hillary Clinton is lock her up where she can get professional and institutional help and prevent her hurting herself or anyone else.”

Indeed.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): This story appears to be fake.

UPDATE (FROM STEVE): I haven’t been snookered this badly since the first time I came across Duffel Blog. Apologies!

FUNNYMAN JIMMY KIMMEL: “I go to bed worried, and I wake up worried, and I honestly don’t know if things are going to be okay.”

You’ve been showing up, anyway. Do you have a sense of what your life after the show might be?

Some days I think about it 100 times. If you have a great show, you feel like you could do it forever, and if you have a bad show, you feel like you want to go home and never come back. It’s really just as simple as that, you know? If those 140 people sitting in front of me in the audience are laughing and enjoying the show, it makes it easier to imagine doing it for a long time. With the celebrity guests, I’m not of that mentality where it’s like, Oh, I have no interest in this person. It’s not like I’m going on a cruise with them. Realistically, I’m talking to them for 11 minutes. I can talk to anyone for 11 minutes. That’s not the part of the job that gets me down. It’s the relentlessness. It’s a grind.

Johnny Carson wasn’t a happy (or even nice) man, but he didn’t allow that to dominate his stage persona.

WHITE HOUSE STATEMENT: Advisor Who Admitted Perjury Played ‘Extremely Limited’ Role in Campaign.. Trump attorney says president “not interfering with special counsel Mueller’s position; he’s not firing the special counsel.”

TAXING WAIT: House Panel’s Talk of Phased-in Tax Cut Counters Trump’s Wishes.

House tax writers are discussing a gradual phase-in for President Donald Trump and Republican leaders’ proposed corporate tax-rate cut — on a schedule that would put the rate at 20 percent in 2022, according to a member of the chamber’s tax-writing committee and a person familiar with the discussions.

The phase-in plan is under discussion, but isn’t yet final, said a member of the House Ways and Means Committee, who asked not to be named because the discussions are private. Other members said they planned to discuss the proposal during a private meeting Monday afternoon.

House Ways and Means Chairman Kevin Brady told reporters Monday that there hasn’t been a decision yet. When asked whether a phase in was being considered, he said only: “We want to get the growth up front.”

Faster, please.

IRREPLACEABLE: Silicon Valley historians saddened over loss of Hewlett Packard archive in fire.

More than 100 boxes containing letters and other documents from Hewlett-Packard founders William Hewlett and David Packard were incinerated when the Tubbs Fire tore through one building on the campus of Keysight Technologies headquarters in Santa Rosa.

Corporate historians say the loss goes far beyond the estimated $2 million value of the collection. That’s because it contained thousands of pages of history documenting the firsthand thoughts and strategies of the two tech pioneers who formed the electronics company in Palo Alto.

“It’s heartbreaking,” said Karen Lewis, a former HP archivist who pored through each of those boxes in the 1980s, cataloging each document to help preserve that rich record for future researchers and historians.

While it isn’t a perfect solution, and daunting project to start, make a digital archive of all your records, photos, etc. You’d be amazed at what you can fit on an inexpensive external hard drive of just a few terabytes, kept in a safe deposit box or at a family member’s house.

BUT OF COURSE: The Iconoclasts Come For George Washington.

By now we should all be familiar with the inexorable logic of the iconoclasts, which goes like this. Lee, having fought for the slave-owning Confederacy in the Civil War, is more offensive than Washington, who merely owned slaves. Abraham Lincoln didn’t own slaves but he did sentence a couple dozen Dakota Indians to death in 1862 for war crimes against defenseless men, women, and children on the Minnesota frontier. For that, student activists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have demanded the removal of Lincoln’s statue from their campus. Frank Rizzo, the mayor of Philadelphia in the 1970s, didn’t own slaves or sentence any Indians to death, but he was insufficiently supportive of the civil rights movement in his day, so his statue must come down, too.

Once it takes hold, iconoclasm knows no distinctions or subtleties. It sweeps everything away. When progressive activists began clamoring for the immediate removal of Confederate monuments across the country, I and others noted that since this wasn’t really about the historical legacy of slavery but the imperatives of identity politics, there was no limiting principle to ensure that once they had finished with the Confederates they would not move on to the Founding Fathers, or Lincoln, or even the hapless Rizzo.

Of course, they came for them all. It wasn’t hard to see it coming.

The irony is that the iconoclasts can’t see the backlash coming, even though it started almost exactly one year ago.

TYLER O’NEIL: Clinton Bundler Tony Podesta Steps Down, Dissolves the Podesta Group.

THE DAM HAS BURST: House of Cards to End With Season 6.

FINALLY: NBC News severs ties with Mark Halperin over sexual harassment accusations.

SARAH HOYT INTERVIEWS AGILE AERO’S JEFF GREASON: Why Get Off This Rock?

I WANT TO SAY ONE WORD TO YOU. JUST ONE WORD: Corals eat plastic because we’ve made it tasty, study suggests.

CHANGE: Australia’s 100-Year-Old Automobile Industry Just Closed Down.

HMM: Was the Trump Camp’s Meeting With Russian Lawyer All a Clinton Set-Up?

E-STASI: Big data meets Big Brother as China moves to rate its citizens. “The Chinese government plans to launch its Social Credit System in 2020. The aim? To judge the trustworthiness – or otherwise – of its 1.3 billion residents.”

More:

The Chinese government is pitching the system as a desirable way to measure and enhance “trust” nationwide and to build a culture of “sincerity”. As the policy states, “It will forge a public opinion environment where keeping trust is glorious. It will strengthen sincerity in government affairs, commercial sincerity, social sincerity and the construction of judicial credibility.”

Others are less sanguine about its wider purpose.

Ya think?

No matter what Beijing claims about “trust” or “sincerity,” by definition, a high-trust society can’t be built from the top down. However it is possible with modern tools to build a surveillance state where everyone is both Winston Smith and the telescreen.

WAIT… WHAT? The Economy Can’t Grow Without Birth Control.

QUESTION ASKED: Should Employers Back Rainy Day Funds For Cash-Strapped Americans?

OH: Bill Gates Tacitly Admits His Common Core Experiment Was A Failure.

“Based on everything we have learned in the past 17 years, we are evolving our education strategy,” Gates wrote on his blog as a preface to a speech he gave last week in Cleveland. He followed this by detailing how U.S. education has essentially made little improvement in the years since he and his foundation — working so closely with the Obama administration that federal officials regularly consulted foundation employees and waived ethics laws to hire several — began redirecting trillions of public dollars towards programs he now admits haven’t accomplished much.

“If there is one thing I have learned,” Gates says in concluding his speech, “it is that no matter how enthusiastic we might be about one approach or another, the decision to go from pilot to wide-scale usage is ultimately and always something that has to be decided by you and others the field.” If this statement encompasses his Common Core debacle, Gates could have at least the humility to recall that Common Core had no pilot before he took it national. There wasn’t even a draft available to the public before the Obama administration hooked states into contracts, many of which were ghostwritten with Gates funds, pledging they’d buy that pig in a poke.

But it looks like this is as close to an apology or admission of failure as we’re going to get, folks. Sorry about that $4 trillion and mangled years of education for American K-12 kids and teachers.

Read the whole thing.

GARY WOLFRAM: Private Health Care Would Be Less Expensive for All.

It is important to realize the current system is not particularly market-based. The Affordable Care Act imposes thousands of pages of regulation, and the federal government is the largest purchaser of health care. It spends over $1 trillion on Medicare and Medicaid alone. No wonder other countries have better health outcomes.

A quick look at how well veterans and Medicaid recipients fare under government health care might cause you to think twice about adopting Senator Sanders’s plan. Only about 70 percent of physicians will accept Medicaid patients.

What’s more, government insurance has led to inefficiencies in the use of resources in health care due to the incentives of the system. Since the patient will ask if Medicare or Medicaid pays for the service rather than how much the service costs, providers have a strong incentive to engage in activities that are very costly and only marginally advance patient health, but that will be paid for by the government.

A solution much more likely to aid the poor is for the government to move Medicaid and Medicare to a form of health savings account. It would provide complete coverage for catastrophic care, and fund an account for recipients that they could use on health care spending. This would cause people to ask “How much does that test cost here versus another clinic?” This in turn would incentivize places like Wal-Mart having to employ nurse practitioners at their pharmacy who can provide health care at reasonable prices. Additionally, it would also spur innovation in medical techniques and pharmaceuticals that make people healthier at lower costs.

Well, yes. But if Walmart gets people healthy, then how will politicians take the credit for spending even more of other people’s money on a pretense of solving a spending problem they created?

And don’t forget about the opportunities for graft, even if the DNC-Media Complex would rather you did.

THEN BY ALL MEANS LET’S GIVE IT TO THEM: Marines Want a Truck-Mounted Rocket-Launcher that Fits in an Osprey.

What’s really needed is a missile launcher that fits on the hood of a midsize SUV.

OUCH: On Behalf of The LGBT Community, Fuck Off, Kevin Spacey.

We don’t respect a man of his age and standing refusing to be open about who he is, but we respect his right to make that choice. But we vehemently reject the use of the standard celebrity coming-out announcement to distract from the fact that serious allegations have been made against him. Worse, the statement made it sound like feeling up 14-year-olds is just a thing that happens when gay men – pardon us, men who “choose to live as a gay man” – get drunk.

In case there’s any confusion on this matter, please allow these two longstanding gay men to clear it up for you:

Alcohol does not make gay men fondle teenage boys.

That one’s all on you, Kev.

Compare this Tom and Lorenzo column with the soft-hands treatment Spacey is getting from ABC and NBC.