"Mr. Mueller is reaching the crossroads of his investigation and faces at least four critical decisions.

"One, Mr. Mueller can wind up his investigations now. He can write a report affirming that he has found no evidence while conducting his originally assigned inquiry: Donald Trump did not collude with the Russians to throw the election his way.

"Two, Mr. Mueller might pause and await Inspector General Michael Horowitz's report concerning possible Department of Justice and FBI abuses pertaining to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court. If Mr. Horowitz finds credible evidence of lawbreaking, then Mr. Mueller might seek indictments based on the IG's likely actionable evidence.

"Three, Mr. Mueller could continue to investigate anyone close to the Trump campaign for another year. If he did that, he would confirm that his inquiry has descended into a political cause. If Mr. Mueller calibrates the release of his findings to the fall midterm elections, he will be hailed by Trump opponents as a crusading prosecutor -- despite finding nothing related to collusion. A Democratic takeover of Congress would shut down congressional investigations of FBI and DOJ wrongdoing and further empower Mr. Mueller.

"Four, Mr. Mueller could more evenly apply his investigations of lying, obstruction of justice and collusion during the 2016 campaign. That way, he would reassure the country of equal treatment of all under the law."

"It is hard to say what is more comical in this grilling of Facebook hoodie-in-chief Mark Zuckerberg by members of Congress.

"First, you have The Big Dork hissing and blistering like a screaming weenie over a Boy Scout campfire.

"'Facebook is an idealistic and optimistic company,' he sniveled in his opening remarks.

"We are talking about a behemoth company that peddles personal information scraped from millions of 'users' around the planet and has the power to promote people into the presidency -- or make them vanish.

"Yeah, 'idealistic' and 'optimistic' are the exact words that come to mind -- in Newspeak maybe. ...

"Shut up. You are not. Stop lying."

Read entire article here.

"London has a problem. England's capital and largest city has seen a 40 percent increase in homicides in the last three years. There have been 53 murders already in 2018, and it is only April.

"Because it is near impossible to own a firearm legally in Britain, knives have been the go-to weapon in most of these murders. Authorities have noticed this, which is why the London Mayor Sadiq Khan announced this weekend that they would soon crackdown on anyone caught carrying a knife.

"'No excuses: there is never a reason to carry a knife. Anyone who does will be caught, and they will feel the full force of the law,' he tweeted. ...

"Go through the steps: They came for the firearms, so criminals moved on to other modes of violence, including knives. Authorities announced this weekend that they would treat knives as contraband. What do you suppose the criminal element will do now? They will move on to something equally fatal, and so on and so on until -- what, exactly? Scrutinizing blunt objects?"

"Once, the internet seemed to invite expanded access for an ever widening scope for content creators. Now, digitization appears to be hyper-concentrating media both geographically, on the coasts, and through pipelines controlled overwhelmingly by a firms like Facebook and Google. As the Guardian recently put it: 'If ExxonMobil attempted to insert itself into every element of our lives like this, there might be a concerted grassroots movement to curb its influence.'

"Ironically, the brouhaha over Russian efforts to influence the election may provide the oligarchs with the license to 'curate,' or more accurately censor, views they don't like. For the most part this censorship is being carried out under guidance developed largely by progressive groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center, which often labels anyone outside its ideological 'safe space' as racist bigots. What is considered hateful speech by the politically correct does not have to reflect neo-Nazi or Putin-inspired opinion; meanwhile there have been very few restraints on equally noxious voices on the left.

"Ultimately the tech moguls are following the approach described by the late radical social thinker C. Wright Mills: 'power elites' remain so by constraining debate in ways that do not threaten their core interests. The oligarchs' unprecedented wealth, married to new technologies, could help shape the nation's thinking in ways that represent a direct assault on pluralism and independent journalism. This needs to be recognized and opposed across the ideological spectrum by people committed to both pluralism and independent thought."

"A top White House aide said President Trump's threat to hit $150 billion worth of Chinese goods with tariffs is sending a message to China that Trump will stand up to China until it improves its exploitive trade practices that have cost America tens of thousands of jobs.

"'This is business, and this is the kind of business where we have to stand firm against China's unfair trade practices, unlike the previous presidents who the for last 16 years prior to this president basically surrendered over 70,000 factories to China and millions of manufacturing jobs,' said Peter Navarro, White House director of trade and industrial policy.

"Navarro said on Fox News that while Trump initially threatened tariffs on $50 billion worth of Chinese goods, but is now mulling $150 billion after China responded with proposed tariffs of its own against the U.S., including on key U.S. agriculture exports."

"We are not in a trade war with China, that war was lost many years ago by the foolish, or incompetent, people who represented the U.S. Now we have a Trade Deficit of $500 Billion a year, with Intellectual Property Theft of another $300 Billion. We cannot let this continue!"

"President Trump said Tuesday he wants to deploy U.S. troops to guard the southern border until his proposed wall is built, a move that could significantly escalate his efforts to crack down on illegal immigration.

"The president told reporters that he has been discussing the idea with Defense Secretary James Mattis, arguably his most trusted Cabinet adviser.

"'Until we can have a wall and proper security, we are going to be guarding our border with the military,' Trump said during a meeting with Baltic state leaders, with Mattis sitting at his side. 'That's a big step. We really haven't done that before, or certainly not very much before.' ...

"Sending troops to the border would be an unusual but not unprecedented step.

"Former President George W. Bush deployed 6,000 National Guard troops to the southern border in 2006 to assist the Border Patrol while more border agents were hired and trained. Former President Obama made a similar deployment in 2010, sending 1,200 guardsmen to the U.S.-Mexico frontier."

"President Donald Trump's administration is urging Congress to reshape the Sen. Elizabeth Warren-crafted consumer finance agency before it can be used as a tool for 'tyranny.'

"'The [Consumer Financial Protection] Bureau is far too powerful, with precious little oversight of its activities,' CFPB acting director Mick Mulvaney said in a statement Monday. 'The power wielded by the Director of the Bureau could all too easily be used to harm consumers, destroy businesses, or arbitrarily remake American financial markets.'

"Mulvaney released a semi-annual report to Congress Monday, detailing the CFPB's work between April and September 2017, when Obama appointee and current Ohio gubernatorial candidate Richard Cordray led the bureau.

"'The structure and powers of this agency are not something the Founders and Framers would recognize,' Mulvaney argued in his letter accompanying the report. The CFPB appears tyrannical in that it appears to accumulate 'legislative, executive, and judiciary, [powers] in the same hands,' Mulvaney suggested, quoting from James Madison's 'Federalist Number 47.' Such an accumulation of power 'may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny,' Madison wrote."

"As the tragedy at Parkland, Fla., inspires discussion (and some screeching) about how to keep our children safe, the politically correct answer heard over and above all others is 'gun control.' The widely held assumption is that America is suffering a major increase of gun violence.

"According to the FBI, the truth is very different: Gun violence is not just down over the last 25 years, it's way down, as is violent crime overall, down to levels not seen since the 1960s (for murder) and 1971 (for violent crime generally).

"So, if we can at least agree that we would all like to reduce violence in America, especially violence that victimizes children, then let's at least try to start with the facts. ...

"When a discussion is sparked by a tragedy like the mass shooting at Parkland, it's easy, and even understandable, that emotions can dominate the discussion. But if we want real, long-term results -- less violence and safer children -- then while we comfort those who are in pain from the recent tragedy, we must focus on what works.

"And that starts with the facts."

"Facebook has hit the headlines in recent weeks over its handling of your private data, and now the shocking extent of information held by Google has been revealed.

"In a series of tweets, one IT expert has laid out exactly what the search giant knows about him, dating back to 2008, which he describes as 'preposterous'.

"It ranges from every place he visited in the past year to every website he clicked on, and even contained files deleted from his Google Drive cloud storage account. ...

"Web developer Dylan Curran, based in Waterford, Ireland, decided to download both his Facebook and Google archives on Saturday.

"The data held by the world's most popular social media site was fairly large, at around 600mb, equivalent to roughly 400,000 Word documents.

"But this paled in comparison to Google's data file, which was 5.5gb, almost ten times larger. This is around the same size as three million Word documents."

Read entire article here.