Mike Ryan is filling in for Jack Wheeler this week.

Control and use of information technology and the intellectual property behind it has been a significant factor in recent events. The so-called trade war with China and the tariffs on basic materials are really about the future of intellectual property rights.

President Trump is using solid commodities such as steel and aluminum to work towards more favorable intellectual property rights expectations and legalities.

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Google returned their self-driving cars to the road. They are perfecting information technology that has the potential to impact the 2020 election powerfully.

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Iranians appear to be on their way towards regime change, using information technology that the Mullahs are having difficulty controlling.

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At the same time, Facebook’s Zuckerburg proposes turning over access to messaging technology to the US Government in exchange for more favorable press.

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President Trump’s tweets turned around a horde of migrants, and Hillary still can’t accept that her AI driven election tools were fooled by President Trump. What do these all have in common? Artificially intelligent systems.

Read about all these in this week's HFR! ...

Who said this?

“The EPA is one of the most toxic places in the federal government to work. If you don’t get rid of the toxicity of the employees at the EPA, we are doing a great disservice to this country. I have serious questions about [the EPA administrator’s] ability to actually administrate.”

No, those remarks aren’t from one of EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt’s many critics on the Left.

They’re the words of former House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), who held several congressional hearings in 2016 to investigate egregious cases of misconduct and mismanagement under the leadership of Gina McCarthy, President Obama’s last EPA chief.

Since official Washington is consumed with Pruitt’s every move, perhaps it’s time to take a little trip down pre-Trump Memory Lane—when all was right in the world, according to incurious elite media—and jolt the faulty memories of these hyperventilating talking heads and editorial boards who insist Pruitt should be fired for spending 50 bucks a night to rent a D.C. condo.

Gina McCarthy should share a place of ignominy in the Obama Hall of Shame, right alongside IRS commissioner John Koskinen, FBI Director James Comey, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She is impossibly corrupt – and here are the examples.

The FBI, bluntly, is a mess. The level of incompetence mixed with bias is stunning. If the FBI were a private corporation, it would either be in Chapter 11 or fighting off stockholder rebellion or both.

Unfortunately, however, it's our most important law enforcement agency,

Its litany of incompetence is extraordinary -- completely missing the Boston Marathon and Pulse night club terror murderers when they were staring them in the face, grotesquely overlooking the Parkland schools mass killer when his violent psychosis should have been apparent to anyone with a 3-digit IQ,  are but three recent catastrophes on their watch.

As for the bias part, well, that is what is being uncovered.  The extent of it, it is easy to predict, will be great.  It already is.

We have already seen how dishonest the organization is, how desperately they are hiding facts from the public. Documents have to be pried out with a crowbar. The stonewalling is endless, the numbers of self-serving redactions myriad and seemingly rote.  It is anti-democratic in the extreme.

Follow the money.

It’s a strange political fact, but nearly every major anti-gun group has been a front group.  By contrast, the NRA is maligned 24/7 and yet it’s completely obvious whom it represents.

Despite the efforts to tie the NRA to everyone from firearms manufacturers to the Russians (if you can’t tie any random Republican thing to the Russians these days, you won’t be working at the Washington Post or CNN for very long), it represents its five million members.

Anti-gun groups tend to represent shadowy networks. The one consistent thing about anti-gun groups is that that they are usually the opposite of what their name says they are.

March for Our Lives is on every cable channel, but who runs it? The photogenic teen fronts are out front. But it’s obvious to everyone that a bunch of teen-agers in high school don’t have the resources and skills to coordinate a nationwide movement. Instead it’s the experienced activists who are actually running things.

Ever since Donald Trump rode down his escalator and announced he was running for president, a good swath of America, not to mention the overwhelming majority of its media, has been having the collective equivalent of a nervous breakdown.

It got worse when he actually became president and it hasn't stopped since.  The ramifications have been, to put it mildly, depressing  -- families divided, longtime friendships shattered, the society even more sundered than it was during Vietnam.

This has largely been the Left's doing, to be honest -- they tend to react more emotionally -- but some on the Right (“Never Trumpers”) are responsible too.

Enter Roseanne Barr.

The woman whose sitcom with John Goodman broke ground thirty years ago as a symbol of working class progressivism returned, after a three-decade hiatus, Tuesday night, but this time -- oh, apostasy! -- as a Trump supporter in Roseanne.