The U.S. State Department said that recent remarks from Russian President Vladimir Putin suggesting he would supply North Korea with weapons are “incredibly concerning.”

Earlier this week, in a visit to North Korea, Mr. Putin suggested that weapons supplies to the isolated, communist country would be a similar response to the West arming Ukraine in the midst of the two-year-long war with Russia.

The Russian leader also warned South Korea against supplying arms to Ukraine.

In comments at a news briefing on Thursday, U.S. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller was asked about the Russian president’s comments about possible arms supplies to Pyongyang. “It’s incredibly concerning,” he said in response.

“It would destabilize the Korean Peninsula, of course, and potentially ... depending on the type of weapons they provide, might violate U.N. Security Council resolutions that Russia itself has supported,” he added.

The spokesman said the United States “will continue to work with our allies in the region” such as “South Korea, Japan, others ... to respond to the threat posed by North Korea.”

Technology is about to accelerate because Chevron deference is over and regulators can't just make up laws anymore. So, countless new startups just became feasible. This is often spoken about in the abstract, so let's do three examples and two visuals.

THREE EXAMPLES:

1) Genomics. Did Congress explicitly give FDA authority to regulate genetic tests in a bill like Kefauver-Harris (1962) or PDUFA (1992)? No, it did not.

But in the early 2010s, FDA attacked 23andMe and forced them to take personal genomic tests offline.

Implicitly, this was under Chevron.

2) Nuclear power. Did Congress explicitly give EPA and NRC the authority to implement ALARA? No, it did not.

But these agencies came up with this "as low as reasonably achievable" standard, forcing nuclear energy to become as expensive as other energy sources by spending all the cost-savings on "safety."

Implicitly, this was under Chevron, too.

3) Cryptocurrency. You guessed it. Did Congress explicitly give the SEC authority to regulate crypto? No, it did not.

Cryptocurrencies didn't exist when the 1933 and 1934 acts were written. However, the SEC says it has regulatory authority over crypto, even when Congress is deliberating on bills to the contrary.

Implicitly, that claim of SEC authority too was under Chevron.

In other words: if a regulator can't point to the law that gives them the power, they may not have the power. And you might be able to win in a court of law.

A very interesting study appeared last week by two researchers looking into the pandemic policy response around the world. They are Drs. Eran Bendavid and Chirag Patel of Stanford and Harvard, respectively.

Their ambition was quite straightforward. They wanted to examine the effects of government policy on the virus.

In this ambition, after all, researchers have access to an unprecedented amount of information. We have global data on strategies and stringencies. We have global data on infections and mortality.

We can look at it all according to the timeline. We have precise dating of stay-at-home orders, business closures, meeting bans, masking, and every other physical intervention you can imagine.

The researchers merely wanted to track what worked and what did not, as a way of informing future responses to viral outbreaks so that public health can learn lessons and do better next time.

They presumed from the outset they would discover that at least some mitigation tactics achieved the aim.

Normally, the self-important, gazillionaire libs of the All In Podcast can be tiresome. But their recent 49-minute Trump interview demands watching, as a window into Trump's agenda, particularly in the economic realm.

Trump's remarkable ability to magnetically pull disparate constituencies into his orbit is proceeding exponentially.

Consider Bitcoin. He has made it mandatory for participants in that sector to support him, otherwise the Janet Yellens and Elizabeth Warrens will outlaw its existence.

Or his tax-free tips proposal, attracting millions of service workers -- a proposal that drew laughter from 80 elite CEOs Trump recently met behind closed doors. Trump will laugh all the way to the November polls.

Trump has adopted politically astute positions for issues across the board. Democrats are trying equally hard to drive away as many constituencies as possible, an extraordinary political moment.

Trump practices unification; Democrats excel at division. When Trump warns what will happen if he is not elected, no one doubts him.

Contrast Trump’s continuous stream of nuance and substance below with fake “news” accounts of his meeting with CEOs: [They] “said that he was remarkably meandering, could not keep a straight thought, was all over the map.”

The reality is quite different.

California has become a test case of the suicide of the West. Never before has such a state, so rich in natural resources and endowed with such a bountiful human inheritance, self-destructed so rapidly.

How and why did California so utterly consume its unmatched natural and ancestral inheritance and end up as a warning to Western civilization of what might be in store for anyone who followed its nihilism?

The symptoms of the state’s suicide are indisputable.

Governor Gavin Newsom enjoyed a recent $98 billion budget surplus — gifted from multibillion-dollar federal COVID-19 subsidies, the highest income and gas taxes in the nation, and among the country’s steepest sales and property taxes.

Yet in a year, he turned it into a growing $45 billion budget deficit.

For as long as I can remember, the Left has been sneering at anyone who points out that the United States is a republic, not a democracy.

They find the notion almost as unsophisticated and fascistic as flying a revolutionary-era flag. Others dismiss the democracy/republic debate as pedantic or a semantic distraction. They shouldn't.

The other day, CNN's Donie O'Sullivan tried to make Trump fans who repeat this factual contention look like a bunch of dumb, lockstepping authoritarians.

To explain the problem, CNN even recruited "democracy" expert Anne Applebaum, who noted that, "America is a democracy. It was founded as a democracy ... the word 'democracy' and the word 'republic' have often been used interchangeably. There isn't a meaningful difference between them ..."

Sure there is.