SO MUCH HATE: L’Oreal’s SACKS its first transgender model after she blasted ‘ALL white people are racist’ in shocking Facebook rant.

THAT MEANS IT’S WORKING: Administration Official Is Unsure If Individuals Will Sign Up For Obamacare.

WINNING: Trump Rolls Back Onerous Diversity Regs.

OF COURSE HE DOES: Turkey’s Erdogan slams US indictments as ‘scandal.’

Erdogan’s comment follows the indictments in the United States of 19 people accused of attacking peaceful demonstrators gathered outside the Turkish ambassador’s Washington home during a visit by Erdogan on May 16.

Erdogan said Friday that the security officials were protecting him from members of an outlawed Kurdish militant group after U.S. police failed to do so. One of those indicted is the head of Erdogan’s security operation.

Yesterday’s writeup of the incident included a somewhat different take on what happened:

Nine people were hospitalised and two members of the Turkish leader’s security detail initially arrested in the brutal altercation with Kurds, Yazidis and Armenians protesting Mr Erdogan’s human rights record and Syria policy.

In footage from the incident Turkish bodyguards can be seen suddenly rushing at the protesters.

An elderly man holding a megaphone is kicked in the face, and several women are also hit. Police officers can be seen attempting to hold some of the aggressors back, dragging them to the other side of the street.

Throw the book at them.

JOHN R. MOORE: Antifa Came to Phoenix.

DEMOCRACY DIES IN DARKNESS (SILENCE, TOO): CNN Silent After Host ‘Incited Rage’ at Antifa Rally in Berkeley.

THAT’S A NICE WAY OF SAYING “DISPOSABLE”: Skunk Works Sees Big Opportunity For ‘Attritable’ UAVs.

The company has been working over the past decade to mature autonomous flight control systems that enable cooperative teaming between unmanned combat air vehicle (UCAV) and manned warplanes. The company recently demonstrated this know-how through a series of “Have Raider” technology demonstrations supported by AFRL, using a surrogate F-16.

The Skunk Works Low-Cost Attritable Aircraft team, led by program manager Joe Pokora, has also been designing optionally reusable airframes that would incorporate that Have Raider technology. The firm’s designs would leverage advanced manufacturing techniques and different materials to keep cost low. The Air Force set a target of under $3 million per unit.

Pokora says in a written statement that the company is specifically focused on moderate to high subsonic designs powered by efficient turbofan engines. The mission range of these aircraft exceeds 2,500 mi., he adds.

The company’s aircraft concepts are broadly described as “attritable aircraft.” They are built to fly multiple times, but cheap enough to launch on one-way suicide missions, if required. Military operators wouldn’t be too concerned if one or two were shot down conducting a critical surveillance or strike mission inside hostile enemy airspace.

We need more combat planes but can’t retain enough pilots — problem solved?

HMM: Southern Poverty Law Center Transfers Millions in Cash to Offshore Entities.

ROBERT TRACINSKI: Bullying A Leftist Think Tank Pierces Google’s Carefully Cultivated ‘Don’t Be Evil’ Image.

It is entirely natural for a company to not want to give money to people calling for its destruction, and I totally support that. Yet Google and many other big tech firms have also tried to present themselves as beacons of “progressive ideals.” That’s why they funded the New America Foundation, which this article refers to as a center of “market-friendly Silicon Valley progressivism.” What’s progressive about it if it’s “market-friendly”? Well, the big tech companies and the people who work for them tend to back Democratic Party candidates. They pay lip service to “progressive” policies like the basic income. And they do things like firing employees for opinions the Left deems offensive, or targeting right-leaning YouTube channels for “demonetization.”

That’s what “Silicon Valley progressivism” means: be the Left’s enforcers against heretics and infidels in the culture wars, in exchange for (temporary) dispensation for your sins against the Left in the realm of economics.

By targeting Google for prosecution under the antitrust laws—the brainchild of the original Progressives, by the way—the Open Markets team breached this unspoken bargain, and that’s why they had to go. Even if Google or Schmidt didn’t directly order the firing, the big tech companies are the new centers of overflowing corporate abundance, without which think tanks like the New America Foundation can’t thrive, so they didn’t need anyone to give anyone instructions.

In another time at another place, that sort of willing behavior was called “Working towards the Fuehrer.” Not that Google is some sort of corporate Nazi party, of course. But a company with that much money, power, and willingness to throw its weight around, is going to attract the kind of people eager to further the company’s perceived desires.

THE NEW REPUBLIC: How Trump Is Creating a Propaganda State.

Flashback: The Aspiring Novelist Who Became Obama’s Foreign-Policy Guru.

The job he was hired to do, namely to help the president of the United States communicate with the public, was changing in equally significant ways, thanks to the impact of digital technologies that people in Washington were just beginning to wrap their minds around. It is hard for many to absorb the true magnitude of the change in the news business — 40 percent of newspaper-industry professionals have lost their jobs over the past decade — in part because readers can absorb all the news they want from social-media platforms like Facebook, which are valued in the tens and hundreds of billions of dollars and pay nothing for the “content” they provide to their readers. You have to have skin in the game — to be in the news business, or depend in a life-or-death way on its products — to understand the radical and qualitative ways in which words that appear in familiar typefaces have changed. Rhodes singled out a key example to me one day, laced with the brutal contempt that is a hallmark of his private utterances. “All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” he said. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”

Sarah Jones, author of The New Republic piece quoted at the top, appears to be right around 27 years old.

IS THERE ANYTHING IT CAN’T DO? Shale oil boom softens the energy blow from Harvey.

FORGET IT, JAKE — IT’S SALON: Salon Slams National Anthem as ‘Neo-Confederate Symbol’.

Who’s going to be the one to tell them the War of 1812 predates the Civil War?

INDEED: If the media doesn’t tell the truth, what use is it?

It’s Charlie Martin asking the question, but it ought to be the media asking it of itself.

MATT LABASH: A Beating in Berkeley.

Impossible to excerpt, so please do yourself a favor and treat yourself to the whole thing.

ENOUGH FOOT-DRAGGING: Judge Orders FBI To Make Details Of Clinton Email Probe Public.

U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg ordered the FBI to produce uncensored court documents describing the grand jury subpoenas issued to force Clinton’s internet service providers to turn over information related to her private server use, according to a statement released by Cause of Action Institute.

The ruling was made in response to a motion filed in June as part of a suit brought by Cause of Action Institute and Judicial Watch. The organizations claim the Department of State violated the Federal Records Act by failing to maintain records related to Clinton’s handling of classified information.

Boasberg justified his ruling on the basis that the set of documents in question “rehashes information already made public, thus obviating any need for secrecy.”

A reminder that “something stinks” at the Bureau: A former FBI agent battling Deputy Director McCabe said there is a ‘cancer’ inside the FBI.

DA TECH GUY: A Simple Proof of the Insanity of Global Warming Hysteria.

When it comes to Hurricanes we have exact data that can be gleamed in real time of every aspect of a storm as it happens to add to the various computer models. Additionally we have live data dating back to the mid 19th century that has been studied by experts in the field for a century and a half to tell us how hurricanes have acted in the past including information made by first hand observation by the most advanced instruments available at the time.

Furthermore the computers now being used are leaps and bounds over machines of just a decade or two ago and unlike the mid 19th century we many venues all over the world that are a source of training in this information and an even larger pool of potential meteorologists available to allow those tasked with making these predictions to choose the very best.

Yet even with all of this, two weather services each with all the advantages listed, have 850 mile gap between where they think this storm will go over the next 72 hours.

Now as a person familiar with both mathematics and computer science, this variation is not odd, in fact it’s completely understandable. After all a computer model is based on the best possible guesses from the available data and hurricanes are “complex natural phenomena that involve multiple interacting processes” so there is nothing at all odd about there being a 850 mile variation as to where it will it. As we get closer to Sunday and we have true data to input the variation in the models will correspondingly decrease.

Now apply this to climate change models telling us we face disaster in 100 years.

Read the whole thing. A simpler explanation can be found in my old axiom: Hysteria is never whipped up for the benefit of the hysterical.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Latest on Harvey and Much, Much More.

CAUGHT: Kansas City’s Indian Creek Serial Murderer Nabbed After Killing 5th Victim.

IT’S COME TO THIS: University of Mississippi Ends Fraternity Retreat Early After Participant Threw Banana Peel Into a Tree. “Some students perceived it as a racist act.”

REMINDER: In Houston after Hurricane Harvey, price-gougers have the moral high-ground.

NO. The Ugliest Era of Menswear Is Back: Why You’ll Want to Relive It.

An otherwise pleasant stroll up Madison Avenue one recent Sunday turned into a 1970s flashback for Ralph Auriemma, the creative director of classic-suit purveyor Paul Stuart. Gazing into the windows at Prada’s New York store, Mr. Auriemma saw male mannequins clad in bell-bottom corduroys, fur belts and fuzzy angora sweaters, all hallmarks of that stylistically divisive decade. “The ’70s were probably the most horrific, ugliest era of menswear ever assembled,” said Mr. Auriemma, who was a teenager when Journey ruled the airwaves. “I remember polyester flared pants, platform cork shoes and bold, obnoxious patterns on shirts. And,” he added, proudly, “I didn’t wear any of it.” Nor is he about to start. Yet, at a time when much of men’s fashion is embracing, shall we say, challenging aesthetics (see “Off-Putting Is In” below), many of his peers disagree.

A quick scroll through the accompanying photos proves that Auriemma is on the right side of history.

HMM: Justice Department Forces Christian Pastor to Testify on Islam Views.

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR: High Times, Low Prices.

After decades of dodging law enforcement and fighting for legalization, U.S. marijuana growers face a new challenge: depressed prices. From Washington state to Colorado, wholesale cannabis prices have tumbled as dozens of states legalized the drug for recreational and medicinal uses, seeding a boom in marijuana production. The market is still tiny compared with the U.S. tobacco industry’s $119 billion in annual retail sales, but the nascent cannabis business has grown to more than $6 billion a year at retail. For marijuana smokers, the price drop is sweet news. But for growers —- ranging from high-tech warehouse operations to backcountry pot farmers gone legit -— the price drop has been painful.

Were there any black market producers who thought they’d be able to charge more after legalization?

SERVICE WITH A SMILE (AND A SIDE OF JET SKIS): Elderly Houston Couple Rescued After Ordering Lunch And A BOAT From Chick-Fil-A.

I had been assured that Chick-Fil-A seasoned their food with hate.

CATHY O’NEIL: Look Who’s Fighting Our Algorithmic Overlords.

Consider Themis, a new, open-source bias detection tool developed by computer scientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. It tests “black box” algorithms by feeding them inputs with slight differences and seeing what comes out — much as sociologists have tested companies’ hiring practices by sending them resumes with white-sounding and black-sounding names. This can be valuable in understanding whether an algorithm is fundamentally flawed.

The software, however, has a key limitation: It changes just one attribute at a time. To quantify the difference between white and black candidates, it must assume that they are identical in every other way. But in real life, whites and blacks, or men and women, tend to differ systematically in many ways — data points that algorithms can lock onto even with no information on race or gender. How many white engineers matriculated from Howard University? What are the chances that a woman attended high-school math camp?

Untangling cultural bias from actual differences in qualifications isn’t easy.

Not only am I certain that culture is an actual difference, I’d argue that it is the defining difference between individuals — and that the brains behind Themis are trying to pry open the black boxes in a spectacularly unhelpful way.