SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – AT 11:55 P.M. ET:

INNOVATION IN CHICAGO – FROM FOX:   On the south side of Chicago, in one of the city's most dangerous neighborhoods, brazen criminals occasionally hit the gangster’s jackpot: they loot freight containers carrying shiny, new guns.  The guns – boxes and boxes of them – are part of shipments that are destined for gun companies or gun shops across the country. But as gangsters have caught on to the practice, they are ransacking these trains and stealing weapons that eventually make their way to the city’s blood-soaked streets.  "Any time you have individuals who can go in and steal guns from a train, that makes the environment very toxic," said Pastor Cory Brooks, who leads a church around the corner from the freight yard.   Remember, it's Trump's fault.  Or maybe it's Bush. 

INCREDIBLE – FROM THE WASHINGTON TIMES:    Stung by recent election defeats, Democrats are leading the charge to lower the voting age to 17, with a little help from liberal billionaire George Soros.  In California, Democratic legislators introduced this week a landmark bill, ACA 10, that would give the Golden State the nation’s youngest statewide voting age by lowering the threshold from 18 to 17 in the name of reversing the slide in voter turnout.  “Young people are our future,” said Democratic Assembly member Evan Low, the measure’s sponsor. “Lowering the voting age will help give them a voice in the democratic process and instill a lifelong habit of voting.”  The proposal comes as the most ambitious of a host of efforts to chip away at the 18-year-old voting age as Democrats seek to bring into the fold younger voters, who traditionally support more liberal causes and candidates than do their elders.  Why not lower the voting age to five, which represents the intellectual level of the Democratic Party?

ARE WE ALONE?  OR NOT? – FROM SPACE.COM:  Bizarre flashes of cosmic light may actually be generated by advanced alien civilizations, as a way to accelerate interstellar spacecraft to tremendous speeds, a new study suggests.  Astronomers have catalogued just 20 or so of these brief, superbright flashes, which are known as fast radio bursts (FRBs), since the first one was detected in 2007. FRBs seem to be coming from galaxies billions of light-years away, but what's causing them remains a mystery.  "Fast radio bursts are exceedingly bright given their short duration and origin at great distances, and we haven't identified a possible natural source with any confidence," study co-author Avi Loeb, a theorist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said in a statement Thursday (March 9). "An artificial origin is worth contemplating and checking."  These advanced alien civilizations just don't know how to communicate.  They should join Facebook and friend us.

March 9, 2017