HOUSTON, WE HAVE A PROBLEM? Implication of sabotage adds intrigue to SpaceX investigation.

The long-running feud between Elon Musk’s space company and its fierce competitor United Launch Alliance took a bizarre twist this month when a SpaceX employee visited its facilities at Cape Canaveral, Fla., and asked for access to the roof of one of ULA’s buildings.

About two weeks earlier, one of SpaceX’s rockets blew up on a launchpad while it was awaiting an engine test. As part of the investigation, SpaceX officials had come across something suspicious they wanted to check out, according to three industry officials with knowledge of the episode. SpaceX had still images from video that appeared to show an odd shadow, then a white spot on the roof of a nearby building belonging to ULA, a joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing.

The SpaceX representative explained to the ULA officials on site that it was trying to run down all possible leads in what was a cordial, not accusatory, encounter, according to the industry sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigation.

Bizarre.

YOU SPELLED DELIBERATE VANDALISM WRONG: “Hurt feelings from racial hostilities have spilled over onto the walls of Trump property in Downtown DC.”

PLEASING YOUR ENEMIES DOES NOT TURN THEM INTO FRIENDS: Chris Christie signs huge gas tax increase.

The DNC-MSM loves big gas taxes, and in December of 2008, Tom Brokaw begged President-Elect Obama to screw motorists (read: his viewers) by raising the gas tax. But Christie, collectively loathed by old media, shouldn’t expect any favors from them, despite this turn to the left.

(Headline a leitmotif at Small Dead Animals.)

TO ASK THE QUESTION IS TO ANSWER IT:

Why is Hillary Clinton so quiet about Obamacare? Speech after speech–not a word. https://t.co/cSX0kROE3W

— Byron York (@ByronYork) October 3, 2016

THE HILL: Trump blasts Clinton for comments about Bernie Sanders supporters.

Donald Trump sought to drive a wedge into the Democratic Party by capitalizing on newly released audio from a February Hillary Clinton fundraiser to paint her as dismissive to Bernie Sanders supporters.

The GOP nominee has long tried to woo disaffected Democrats over to his party and spent much of his speech linking his anti-free trade policies to Sanders’ primary campaign message.

So the latest attempt at Saturday night’s rally in small-town Pennsylvania casts Clinton as dismissive to those very Democrats with whom her campaign has worked to make a tenuous peace.

“Hillary Clinton thinks Bernie supporters are hopeless and ignorant basement dwellers. Then, of course, she thinks people who vote for and follow us are deplorable and irredeemable. I don’t think so,” he said at the Manheim, Pa., rally. . . .

The controversy over Clinton’s comments stems from February audio obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, where Clinton lamented Sanders supporters as unrealistically idealistic.

“There’s just a deep desire to believe that we can have free college, free healthcare, that what we’ve done hasn’t gone far enough, and that we just need to, you know, go as far as, you know, Scandinavia, whatever that means, and half the people don’t know what it means but it is something that they deeply feel,” she said of Sanders , according to the audio.

“Some are new to politics completely. They’re children of the Great Recession. And they are living in their parents’ basement,” she added, going on to say that many are dissatisfied with their job prospects and that politicians need to understand where they are coming from.

Clinton opponents have taken to Twitter to push their outrage over the comments–the hashtag “BasementDwellers” was one of the most popular hashtags in America by the time of the rally.

But the Democratic nominee’s allies and Sanders’ own aides have blasted that reading of her comments as a stretch, with her campaign releasing a statement arguing she is “fighting for exactly what the millennial generation cares about–a fairer, more equal, just world.”

Related: Trump moves to poach Sanders supporters with Clinton remarks.

Plus: Clinton camp on leaked audio: She’s fighting for millennials.

ALICIA MACHADO’S SHADY HISTORY FOILS CLINTON SEX SMEAR, Mercedes Schlapp of the Washington Times opines.

I think that’s nonsense. Low-information voters will never hear “the rest of the story,” as Paul Harvey used to say. As with Khizr Khan in August, Hillary used her newest mascot to successfully — and all too easily — throw Trump off his game. The New York Times publishing his tax return will further keep him off message. A more disciplined candidate (remember, “It’s the economy, stupid” in 1992?) wouldn’t take the bait so easily, but as John Podhoretz tweeted, “Hillary on Machado is Judge Doom tapping ‘shave and a haircut’ on the wall. Like Roger Rabbit, Trump had to burst out and shout ‘two bits’!”

RESET: Two U.S. Diplomats Drugged In St. Petersburg Last Year, Deepening Washington’s Concern.

Two U.S. officials traveling with diplomatic passports were drugged while attending a conference in Russia last year, and one of them was hospitalized, in what officials have concluded was part of a wider, escalating pattern of harassment of U.S. diplomats by Russia.

The incident at a hotel bar during a UN anticorruption conference in St. Petersburg in November 2015 caused concern in the U.S. State Department, which quietly protested to Moscow, according to a U.S. government official with direct knowledge of what occurred.

But it wasn’t until a dramatic event in June, when an accredited U.S. diplomat was tackled outside the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, that officials in Washington reexamined the November drugging and concluded they were part of a definite pattern.

It’s well past time to play a little tit for tat with Moscow until they return to civilized behavior.

DISPATCHES FROM THE MEDIA APOCALYPSE: BBC Appoints Former MSNBC Anchor Who Said Someone Should ‘Sh*t In Sarah Palin’s Mouth’ As New Religion Chief.

Flashback: A former insider describes the BBC’s “Powerfully Corrosive Internal Culture.”

WHY ARE DEMOCRAT-RUN CITIES SUCH CESSPITS OF INCOMPETENCE AND INFIGHTING? Baltimore Food Fight: “A war of words has broken out in Baltimore between Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby. Mosby wants to blame Rawlings-Blake for the rioting that followed Freddie Gray’s death. The mayor has ripped Mosby for rushing to judgment on the six police officers she unsuccessfully prosecuted. Both have good cases.”

ROGER KIMBALL: London Chronicle: Brexit and Free Speech.

I came to England a few days ago in order to participate in a conference in Winchester on the fate of free sphesteheech in the academy, U.S. as well as British editions. We’ll be publishing the papers for that conference in The New Criterion come January, but I can reveal now one thing that struck me about our deliberations. Two years before, we had held a conference on a similar topic (which you can read about here): “Free Speech Under Threat.” To some extent, what transpired in Winchester a few days ago comes under the rubric of what the philosopher Yogi Berra called “déjà-vu all over again.”

But there are differences. In the couple of years since we last considered the issue of free speech, blatant assaults on free speech have grown much more common to the point where they are less scandalous than simply business as usual. People are harassed, shunned, sacked, fined, even jailed in some Western countries for expressing an unpopular opinion.

It is difficult to maintain a perpetual sense of emergency, however, and it’s my sense that many incursions upon free speech are now met more with a weary shrug than the outrage they would have occasioned even a few years back. Novelty is the handmaiden of outrage, and there is, alas, nothing novel about the assaults against free speech on campus today.

One of the most conspicuous strategies to limit free speech on campuses in the United States these last few years has been via the weaponization of victimhood. This is where the demand for “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings” and the anxiety over “micro agressions” makes common cause with political correctness to curtail free speech and establish the reign of politically correct orthodoxy.

It’s my impression that this latest gift of American academia has yet to be fully transplanted to England. The toxic rhetoric of “safe spaces,” “trigger warnings,” and “micro aggressions” is beginning to catch on here and there but has not, so far as I can see, really taken root here.

I’m sure that will change before long. It’s just too potent a weapon to ignore.

What’s interesting about this efflorescence of infantilization is how sinuously it colludes with the imperatives of political correctness to stamp down on free speech and, beyond that, on the very processes of adult thought.

Well, they don’t want voters to be adults. Adults are harder to manage than children.

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: Taliban launches major assault on Afghan city of Kunduz.

An aid worker living in Kunduz described an eruption of gunfire early Monday morning.

“Heavy fighting is still going on,” Ehsanullah Sadiqi told CNN, speaking by phone from Kunduz.
He said traumatic memories are still fresh for much of the city’s population after the Taliban capture of Kunduz in late September 2015.

“A lot of people who fled Kunduz last year at this time when the Taliban had taken over the city returned to Kunduz. So the number of people trying to flee again today was huge,” Sadiqi said. He described city streets that are almost completely deserted.

Obama sold Afghanistan a bloody bill of goods.

FALSE IN ONE, FALSE IN ALL? When a state’s drug chemist lies for years, should all her cases be thrown out?.

21st CENTURY HEADLINES: Cop Issues Warning: ‘If You Run Around in a Clown Suit, You Should Probably Expect for Citizens to Beat You.’

JUSTICE IN EDROGAN’S TURKEY: Victims Of Turkey’s Post-Coup Purge Invited To Prove Their Innocence.

Prove their innocence?

More:

The sweeping purge has been in part made possible by a three-month state of emergency declared shortly after the failed coup. At the time, officials said it would be a one-time measure to give the government extraordinary powers not only to detain suspects but to enact measures by decree. Now, weeks before it’s due to expire, there’s a move to extend the state of emergency.

Turkey’s National Security Council, at a meeting chaired by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, recommended extending the state of emergency for another three months. After the meeting, Erdogan told an audience of local leaders that the state of emergency “is only for an effective counter-terrorism,” according to the state run Anatolia News Agency.

Ever since the massive purge began, Turks have been wondering how so many people could have been in on a coup that was so secret everyone missed it.

Indeed.

FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: Obama’s New Middle East.

EVERYONE’S DOING IT: Marc Andreessen’s Sudden Silence on Twitter Stumps Silicon Valley.

Venture capitalist and technology evangelist Marc Andreessen has been among the most prolific Twitter users, deluging his more than half-million followers at all hours with wide-ranging witticisms, postulates and statistics.

So since he suddenly stopped tweeting last Saturday, his silence on the social-media site has been deafening in Silicon Valley. Techies and tech journalists have taken to Twitter to speculate about the mystery of his virtual disappearance, including his decision to simultaneously delete all of his previous tweets.

Mr. Andreessen, co-founder of venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, offered little explanation with his late-night announcement, simply tweeting: “Taking a Twitter break!”

He has since suggested that tweeting was taking too much time. “I feel 50 pounds lighter” without it, Mr. Andreessen said in an onstage interview at a tech event on Thursday, adding that he had archived all of his old tweets. On his behalf, a spokeswoman for his firm declined to comment.

I have to say, I feel the same way. You don’t realize how much headspace Twitter takes up until you get off. I’ve found myself much more productive on various projects as the Twitter-induced ADHD fades.

HAVING SOLVED ALL OF CALIFORNIA’S OTHER PROBLEMS, Jerry Brown Signs Law Mandating Gender-Neutral Bathroom Signs.

In other news from the insanity that is Sacramento, a look at the current state of California’s high-speed train to nowhere: “Saving the Planet, very slowly and very expensively.”

VIDEO: THE MEDIA WANTS U.S. TO ‘DO SOMETHING’ ABOUT SYRIA, FORGETS OBAMA IS PRESIDENT.

FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: NYC’s homelessness may only get worse.

COLOMBIANS REJECT PEACE DEAL: Polls projected a narrow victory for the peace agreement. The result was a narrow defeat. Former president Alvaro Uribe was against it. He argued rebel leaders would be treated too leniently.