AND STAY DOWN: U.S. Supreme Court Won’t Revive North Carolina Voter-ID Law.

Turning away the appeal pressed by state Republican leaders, the justices left intact a ruling that said the provisions were racially discriminatory in violation of federal voting-rights law. In addition to requiring people to show a photo ID, the North Carolina law reduced the number of early voting days and eliminated same-day registration and out-of-precinct voting.

The rebuff was a surprise because four conservative justices previously tried to revive the measure before the 2016 election. That effort failed because it was an emergency request that required five votes, but the court could have accepted the latest appeal with only four votes.

In a statement that accompanied the court’s order Monday, Chief Justice John Roberts pointed to uncertainty over who was authorized to file an appeal on behalf of the state. He said the court had received a “blizzard of filings” on that issue.

Roberts, however, also stressed that the justices weren’t deciding that the lower court was right to strike down the North Carolina requirements. The rejection of an appeal “imports no expression of opinion upon the merits of the case,” he wrote, quoting from a 1923 Supreme Court opinion.

I’d like to get Glenn to weigh in on this, but the story reads like the N.C. law might be kosher, but that the appeal was a mess.

PATRICK POOLE EXCLUSIVE: Former Egyptian Terrorism Official Exposes the Muslim Brotherhood’s Terror Networks.

Big story, and Poole promises more to follow.

YES, YES IT DOES: Raising Jihadist Kids Doesn’t ‘Kill Their Childhood and Destroy Their Innocence’

RIP: Powers Boothe, star of Tombstone, Guyana Tragedy, MacGruber, dies at 68.

He and the late J.T. Walsh conveyed intelligent menace better than any other actors I can remember.

JUDD GREGG: How the GOP can win on healthcare.

I’m not sure how solid Gregg’s plan is, but he’s correctly diagnosed the root of the problem:

The purpose of ObamaCare was to gather all these [groups of uninsured] people into some type of healthcare coverage and have that coverage be highly subsidized by the rest of the population.

This was to be accomplished either directly, through subsidies that depended on taxes; or indirectly, through increasing the premiums of those who had insurance.

The outcome would be that most of these 40 to 45 million would have new benefits that they themselves paid little for.

This effort was to be undertaken by creating exchanges, which were actuarially unsound; and by expanding by fifty percent the Medicaid enrollment, which was grossly underfunded.

The creators of ObamaCare knew of the structural failures of the proposed approach. It was their expectation that the financial stress on the insurance industry and the huge tax subsidies needed to pay for the migration from private insurance into exchanges would lead to some sort of reordering of the system.

They knew that states, and especially doctors, could not handle the underfunded addition of millions of patients.

They also understood political reality, in which it is extremely difficult to take back a subsidized benefit once it has been given. This is especially true when it involves millions of people.

Thus, as ObamaCare crumbled, a single-payer system would be the default position to which the country would turn.

ObamaCare is crumbling, all right. What remains to be seen is if the GOP has the courage of its oft-stated convictions.

“RIGHTS,” YOU KEEP USING THAT WORD: Vietnam police arrest dissident for ‘abusing democracy rights’

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Netflix is no longer available for your rooted Android phone.

Have you noticed that you suddenly can’t (officially) download the Netflix app to your rooted Android phone? You’re not alone. Netflix has confirmed that its app is no longer visible on Google Play to anyone with a device that is “not Google-certified or [has] been altered.” A spokesperson tells Android Police that it’s all about a shift in copy protection. Version 5.0 of the Netflix app now leans entirely on Google’s Widevine digital rights management to prevent piracy, so it has to treat those modified devices as incompatible. The crackdown isn’t completely shocking, but it does create some issues.

There’s certainly an incentive for the shift in strategy: now that you can download shows, piracy is more of a concern than ever. In theory, it’s a bit easier to strip the copy protection from the downloaded copy of a Netflix series than it is to rip the stream. And when you root a device to gain more control over the operating system, you potentially have a better chance of circumventing that DRM than you would otherwise.

This measure might not stop many people, however, and it could hurt otherwise well-meaning viewers. While Netflix says its app “will no longer work” with modified Android devices, Android Police has verified that it still runs properly if you manage to install the app (such as by sideloading the APK), at least for now.

This may be a losing fight for Netflix.

IT’S A MYSTERY: Somali Refugee Flow to Minnesota Slows Dramatically.

FLY THE OVERLY FRIENDLY SKIES: United Airlines’ Cockpit Door Access Info May Have Been Made Public.

United Airlines has learned that some cockpit door access information may have been made public, the airline said in a statement. However, the airline says it has a protocol in place that ensures the cockpits on its flights remain secure.

“The safety of our customers and crew is our top priority and United utilizes a number of measures to keep our flight decks secure beyond door access information,” United spokeswoman Maddie King said in an emailed statement.

“In the interim this protocol ensures our cockpits remain secure.”

A bulletin obtained by CNN sent to the airline’s pilots warns them that “flight deck access procedures may have been compromised.”

United has already had a bad year, and it’s only May.

YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK! $697,177 for a ‘Climate-Change Musical’: You Call That Science?

The [National Science Foundation], whose mission is to ensure U.S. leadership in areas of science and technology that are essential to economic growth and national security, frequently funds politically correct but low-value research projects. A few doozies include the veiling-fashion industry in Turkey, Viking textiles in Iceland, the “social impacts” of tourism in the northern tip of Norway, and whether hunger causes couples to fight (using the number of pins stuck in voodoo dolls as a measure of aggressive feelings). Research funding in the geosciences, including climate change, is certainly legitimate, but not when it goes to ludicrous boondoggles such as a climate-change musical that cost $697,177 to produce.

The primary culprit is the NSF’s Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences, known as SBE. Underlying its ability to dispense grants is the wrongheaded notion that social-science projects such as a study of animal depictions in National Geographic and a climate change musical are as important as research to identify early markers for Alzheimer’s disease or pancreatic cancer.

In January President Obama signed the American Innovation and Competitiveness Act, which accomplished little with respect to setting funding priorities other than endorsing the only two criteria NSF had previously used to evaluate grant applications—the “intellectual merit” of the proposal and its “broader impacts” on society. The bill’s lead proponent, House Science Committee Chairman Lamar Smith, had wanted to include a “national interest” criterion defined by several factors including improving economic competitiveness, health, national security, the STEM workforce and scientific literacy.

In the end the national interest standard was retained, but only to provide examples of how grant applicants can satisfy NSF’s “broader impacts” requirement. In other words, SBE will continue funding marginal research by social scientists—what a former NSF official characterized as “the inmates running the asylum.”

It’s an intellectually pretentious New Deal-type make-work program for progressives.

Zero out its budget and shut it down.

EDUCATION: Students Design Ways to Mine the Moon for Rocket Fuel.

Depending on where the best ice reserves are, we might need to build several small robotic moon bases. Each one would mine ice, manufacture liquid propellant and transfer it to passing spacecraft. Our team developed plans to accomplish those tasks with three different types of rovers. Our plans also require a few small robotic shuttles to meet up with nearby deep-space mission vehicles in lunar orbit.

One rover, which we call the Prospector, would explore the moon and find ice-bearing locations. A second rover, the Constructor, would follow along behind, building a launch pad and packing down roadways to ease movements for the third rover type, the Miners, which actually collect the ice and deliver it to nearby storage tanks and an electrolysis processing plant that splits water into hydrogen and oxygen.

The Constructor would also build a landing pad where the small near-moon transport spacecraft we call Lunar Resupply Shuttles would arrive to collect fuel for delivery as newly launched spacecraft pass by the moon. The shuttles would burn moon-made fuel and would have advanced guidance and navigation systems to travel between lunar bases and their target spacecraft.

When enough fuel is being produced, and the shuttle delivery system is tested and reliable, our plan calls for building a gas station in space.

Fill ‘er up.

ED MEESE: Trump’s Travel Ban ‘Clearly’ Legal, Should Be Upheld.

It’s a moratorium, not a ban.

TO BE FAIR, NORTH KOREA MAKES A LOT OF B.S. CLAIMS: North Korea Says New Missile Can Carry ‘Large’ Nuclear Warhead.

WHAT COULD GO WRONG? By year’s end, the Pentagon wants computers to be leading the hunt for Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria.

The Pentagon has raced to buy and deploy drones that carry high-resolution cameras over the past decade and a half of war in Afghanistan and Iraq. But on the back end, stateside analysts are overwhelmed. Pentagon leaders hope technology can ease the burden on the workforce while producing better results on the battlefield.

“How do we actually begin to automate that in a way that gives time back to analysts who otherwise spend 80 percent of their time doing…mundane, administrative tasks associated with staring at full-motion video,” Shanahan said.

If an analyst sees something now, he or she typically types the data manually into a spreadsheet. Pentagon leaders do not believe that’s a good use of these analysts’ time.

So last month, Work — perhaps the Pentagon’s lead champion for marrying people and technology — established a special cell called the Algorithmic Warfare Cross Functional Team. The group will look to integrate big data and machine learning across the military.

Joking headline aside, this project looks like the perfect way to streamline endless data into something overworked analysts can handle, and that the military can then make good use of.

Or maybe that’s just what Skynet wants you to believe…

Oil surges on output cut extension but analysts caution upside is capped.

Oil is going to range trade between $40 and $55 per barrel while the marginal cost of production in the U.S. remains in the middle of that spectrum at around $50 per barrel, according to James Butterfill, Head of Research and Investment Strategy at ETF Securities.

“Every time oil tests that level…you see clients trading around it,” Butterfill observed, speaking on CNBC’s Squawk Box on Monday.

“Every time it goes below that $50 a barrel level, it’s a buying opportunity and roughly when it hits about $50, we see a lot of selling at that point,” he added.

The past week has seen a pick-up in flows with Butterfill noting that clients had bought around $130 million of crude oil in the past week with his firm, as part of year-to-date inflows to the asset class for his firm of around $340 million.

Analyst consensus now sees a cap on prices at around $60 according to Dean Turner, economist at UBS Wealth Management, also speaking on CNBC’s Squawk Box on Monday.

The real cap is on how much money the OPEC cartel can squeeze out of the rest of the world, thanks to American frackers.

21ST CENTURY PARENTING: Turning Your 8-Year-Old Son Into a Drag Queen.

These are Heinlein’s Crazy Years — we just live in them.

OF COURSE NOT; HE’S TRYING TO GET INTO BED WITH ERDOGAN: Putin says Russia sees no need to arm Syrian Kurds.

“Unlike other countries we are not announcing any arms deliveries to Kurdish formations,” said Putin, who was speaking in Beijing. “We don’t believe we need to start such work.”

Putin said the fact that the Kurds were engaged in the fight against Islamic State militants meant it made sense to maintain working contacts with them however “even if it’s only to avoid (accidental) clashes.”

The Kurds are the most powerful anti-ISIS force on the ground, but Turkey considers them terrorists.

BEGUN, THE RANSOMWARE WAR HAS: Ransomware’s Aftershocks Feared as U.S. Warns of Complexity.

As a new workweek started Monday in Asia, there were concerns the malicious software could spread further and in different forms, with new types of ransomware afflicting computers around the globe.

There were initial reports of new cases found over the weekend in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.

President Trump has ordered his homeland security adviser, Thomas P. Bossert, who has a background in cyberissues, to coordinate the government’s response to the spread of the malware and help organize the search for who was responsible, an administration official said Sunday.

The attack is more complicated because “the experts tell us that this code was cobbled together from many places and sources,” according to an administration official who insisted on anonymity to discuss the government’s cybersecurity plans. The more potential sources of the malicious code, the harder it is for investigators to run down the trail of possible perpetrators.

The source of the attack is a delicate issue for the United States because the vulnerability on which the malicious software is based was published by a group called the Shadow Brokers, which last summer began publishing cybertools developed by the National Security Agency.

This is an agency of the same federal government which wants backdoors built into your smartphone and other secure devices.

GOOD MORNING: Shake off the Monday blues with Liz Sheld’s morning brief.

FINALLY: After 500 years, Leonardo da Vinci’s music machine is brought to life.. “His marvelous viola organista sounds like a chamber orchestra due to its design.”

Rather than tapping the strings, as a harpsichord would, this instrument, called the viola organista, lowers the strings onto spinning wheels which are wrapped in horse hair. This acts as a bow would on a violin. The resulting sound gives the impression of a group of string instruments. The project took Zubrzycki 3 years and 5,000 hours to complete.

You’ve never heard anything quite like it.

BEER — PERHAPS THERE ARE SOME THINGS IT SHOULD NOT DO: A new beer, the ‘Pisner’, was made with human urine collected from a music festival.

CHARLIE MARTIN: Every day I think, “The legacy media can’t possibly have a stupider Trump-the-devil story today.” Every day, I’m wrong.

You’re not not wrong, Charlie. You’re just a little crazy.

CHANGE: Turkey test-fires first domestically-manufactured ballistic missile.

OH NO YOU DI’N’T! Saudi Arabia Whines US Has Too Much Control Over World’s Oil.

This is what winning feels like, in case you’d forgotten.

HARD BARGAIN: Dozens of ISIS Fighters Let Go on Condition They Cleared IEDs from Critical Dam Near Raqqa.