TO PROMISE THINGS IS TO LIE

TOP OF THE NEWS:

- To Promise Free Things Is to Lie (National Review) "President Trump represents the notion, ascendant in Republican circles, that the only way to win elections is to fib to the American people. Power is its own justification, and there is no better way to demonstrate power than by promulgating a big lie. That fits with Trump’s view of the world, in which success is its own virtue. ...anti-establishment conservatives concluded that it would take an uncivil, indecent person to defeat Democrats. And that, of course, was the ultimate purpose: defeating Democrats. Not truth, not enacting a conservative agenda, but defeating Democrats: the lesser of two evils. Trump’s victory rewarded that theory. But the theory is untenable. It’s untenable because conservatives don’t seek the same policy results that leftists do. That means that Trump’s promises are bound to come up empty. And that means that Trump and the Republicans have placed themselves back on the horns of an ancient dilemma: They can lie to the people by promising them free things, but those things won’t materialize."

BUSIENSS:

- Forget Bitcoin. The Blockchain Could Reveal What’s True Today and Tomorrow (Wired) "A prediction market is like the stock market, except that you’re not buying stock in companies. You’re buying stock in outcomes. In theory, the better your information, the bigger the bet you’ll make. Using a blockchain, a service like Augur aims to enhance this dynamic by pushing markets across borders and removing all betting limits, roping in more people and more cash."

- Platform Companies Are Becoming More Powerful — But What Exactly Do They Want? (NYT) "...a 'platform business,' one built around matchmaking between vendors and customers. If successful, a platform creates its own marketplace; if extremely successful, it ends up controlling something closer to an entire economy."

NEWS:

- Trump Associates Caught Repeatedly in Incidental Surveillance, Intel Chairman Says (Weekly Standard) "The communications were swept up under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act via incidental collection, he [Nunes] said. Incidental collection occurs when the intelligence community targets an approved foreign entity, and the foreign entity communicates with a U.S. person. Those communications are then collected and sometimes distributed within the intelligence community." and House Intelligence chair says Trump campaign officials were ensnared in surveillance operations (WaPo) "Outside of the White House on Wednesday, Nunes confirmed his opinion that Trump was not wiretapped in the sense the president meant with his March 4 tweet. But he did suggest Trump could have been caught up in incidental collection — or legal surveillance of the communications of foreign nationals who may be in contact with U.S. citizens."

- Shepard Smith, the Fox News anchorman who drives the Fox News faithful crazy (WaPo) "The hubbub around Smith, who also is Fox’s managing editor of breaking news, has drawn silence from Fox. Two rival network sources say Smith is a short-timer at Fox and thus is feeling free to speak his mind on air. But that may be more rumor than fact; Smith has been at Fox since the network began in 1996... The counter-theory is that Fox has purposely loosened its leash on Smith in order to carve out a modicum of independence from Trump."

- Trump’s Wall Meets Texas’s Biggest National Park (National Review) "'The biggest challenge to Trump’s timeline is going to be the fact that Texas, where there are currently 110 miles of wall on our 1,200-mile border, is almost entirely private property,' the Sierra Club’s Scott Nicol told the Statesman. 'Land-condemnation suits will take years, but Big Bend National Park and some remaining tracts of the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge down here are federally owned.'"

- Becoming Duterte: The Making of a Philippine Strongman (NYT) "He has alienated many with outrageous comments and irrational behavior, yet remains wildly popular. He is an antidrug crusader, yet has struggled with drug abuse himself. And he grew up a child of privilege, the son of a provincial governor, yet was subjected to regular beatings." and Duterte Aide Bristles at Times Article, Calling It a ‘Hack Job’ (NYT) "The Times made repeated requests to interview Mr. Duterte for the article, both through Mr. Abella and another official spokesman."

- Roused by Trump, First-Time Female Candidates Eye Local Seats (NYT) "The swell in interest certainly leans Democratic, and much of the protest and activism following the election of President Trump has come from those more aligned with liberal policies, but the surge is bipartisan in some states."

- A THAAD Story (Weekly Standard) "Beijing is furious that Korea has decided to, jointly with the United States, install the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile defense system on its territory. Seoul's reason for wanting a system that can shoot down short and medium term missiles is obvious, but China is having none of it. Beijing claims (spuriously) that THAAD's radar capabilities will be used to spy on China. The Chinese regime has deeper reasons for opposing THAAD as well, a senior-level South Korean diplomat in Seoul tells me: It indicates that South Korea is tilting towards the United States, and away from China. In an era of "strategic competition" between the world's two largest economies, Beijing has been trying to lure South Korea into its orbit and THAAD shows it has largely failed in this effort."

- A report card on Tillerson’s trip to Asia (WaPo) "Overall, Tillerson sent the message he needed in order to gain some traction on North Korea. The confusion that has emerged over his intentions has more to do with the Trump administration as a whole than with his own performance."

SCIENCE:

- A New Form of Stem-Cell Engineering Raises Ethical Questions (NYT) "In 1979, a federal advisory board recommended that the cutoff [to keep stem cells alive] should be 14 days. For decades, scientists did not break the 14-day rule — but only because they did not know how. Scientists could keep human embryos alive for just over a week... But last year, two teams of scientists determined how to grow human embryos for 13 days. Those advances hinted that it might be possible to allow scientists to tack on a few days more, by changing the 14-day rule to, say, a 20-day rule."

TECHNOLOGY:

- Intel’s Bold Plan to Reinvent Computer Memory (and Keep It a Secret) (Wired) "The company calls this new creation 3D XPoint—pronounced 'three-dee cross-point'—and this week, after touting the stuff for a year-and-a-half, Intel finally pushed it into the market. You can think of the new technology as a computer building block that can serve more than one purpose—a single thing that can replace several others. Where this could really change things is inside the massive data centers operated by the internet’s biggest companies. As their online empires continue to grow, these companies always need faster and cheaper ways of storing ever-larger amounts of data."

BOTTOM OF THE NEWS:

- You can buy Detroit's priciest dilapidated house for $5M (USA Today) "

SONG OF THE DAY:

- My Heart's Always Yours (Arkells)

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