SPACE: NASA realizes SLS and Orion are too expensive, opens door to competitors.

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Soft Acoustic Sensors Could Monitor Hearts, Recognize Speech.

WHY TRUMP WON, PART 1,622,327: Mall Santa Sent to Counseling for Joking that Hillary was on Naughty List.

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SPACE: Luxembourg boldly invests in asteroid mining.

SCOTT ADAMS: “The only people who will think Trump is a racist going forward are people who haven’t read this article. If you find someone like that, send them the link. This piece is a brilliant service to the country. Breathtaking.”

Excerpt:

Back in October 2015, I wrote that the picture of Trump as “the white power candidate” and “the first openly white supremacist candidate to have a shot at the Presidency in the modern era” was overblown. I said that “the media narrative that Trump is doing some kind of special appeal-to-white-voters voodoo is unsupported by any polling data”, and predicted that:

If Trump were the Republican nominee, he could probably count on equal or greater support from minorities as Romney or McCain before him.

Now the votes are in, and Trump got greater support from minorities than Romney or McCain before him. You can read the Washington Post article, Trump Got More Votes From People Of Color Than Romney Did, or look at the raw data (source).

Trump made gains among blacks. He made gains among Latinos. He made gains among Asians. The only major racial group where he didn’t get a gain of greater than 5% was white people. I want to repeat that: the group where Trump’s message resonated least over what we would predict from a generic Republican was the white population. . . .

I stick to my thesis from October 2015. There is no evidence that Donald Trump is more racist than any past Republican candidate (or any other 70 year old white guy, for that matter). All this stuff about how he’s “the candidate of the KKK” and “the vanguard of a new white supremacist movement” is made up. It’s a catastrophic distraction from the dozens of other undeniable problems with Trump that could have convinced voters to abandon him. That it came to dominate the election cycle should be considered a horrifying indictment of our political discourse, in the same way that it would be a horrifying indictment of our political discourse if the entire Republican campaign had been based around the theory that Hillary Clinton was a secret Satanist. Yes, calling Romney a racist was crying wolf. But you are still crying wolf.

I avoided pushing this point any more since last October because I didn’t want to look like I was supporting Trump, or accidentally convince anyone else to support Trump. But since we’re past the point where that matters anymore, I want to present my case. . . .

First, I want to go over Donald Trump’s official, explicit campaign message. Yes, it’s possible for candidates’ secret feelings to differ from their explicit messages, but the things they say every single day and put on their website and include in their speeches are still worth going over to see what image they want to project.

Trump’s official message has been the same vague feel-good pro-diversity rhetoric as any other politician.

Read the whole thing.

PERSONALLY, I THINK THERE ARE BETTER PLACES TO PUT SPACE DOLLARS THAN NASA: Robert Bigelow calls on Trump to sharply increase NASA spending.

JONAH GOLDBERG ON THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF CLINTON:

I feel a little like a hungry Sid Blumenthal looking down at a box full of live, white mice: Where to begin?

Well schadenfreude is always a good way to get your day going. The stories about Hillary measuring the drapes are all over Washington. They literally popped champagne on the campaign plane on Election Day.

I like to imagine Bill Clinton going through binders full of women — and not the Romney kind — picking out the “deputies” he’d like to work with in the White House and Sid Blumenthal letting his fingers wander over an assortment of fine Italian leather riding crops pondering his return to power.

Someone recently told me that the Bill Clinton Presidential Library is built off-center on its campus in anticipation of the day that Hillary’s presidential library would go along side it. I can’t find any corroboration of this, save for the fact that if you look at these pictures, it certainly seems plausible.

Read the whole thing. By the way, I edited a rather prescient and forward-thinking Victor Davis Hanson article last year with a similar title; here’s the Edgar Allan Poe-inspired Photoshop I created to illustrate it, with Bill’s presidential library, and a Hillary “H” logo on it:

WHY? IF WE DID, THE TERRORISTS, ENGLAND, AND THE LEFT WILL HAVE WON: Post-Election, Why Don’t We All Just Skip Thanksgiving This Year?, Roger Simon proposes.

I dunno; for the first time in years, I suspect a lot of people are going to have plenty of fun on Thursday.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1290.

RICK MORAN: How Long Before Prominent Leftists Begin Calling Openly for Trump’s Assassination? Haven’t they already started?

SHOCKER: “Surprisingly, some Iraqis seem less offended by Mr. Trump’s comments linking terrorism to Islam than American liberals.” That’s the grudging observation in paragraph 5 of this NYT article, and look where it goes from there:

Iraqis have endured years of Islam being used to justify mass killing, and some see Mr. Trump as a truth-teller in calling out Islam — or a certain brand of it — as the problem.

Iraqi Shiites, in particular, say they believe Mr. Trump will take a harder line on Saudi Arabia, the regional Sunni power that many see as the incubator of the extreme form of Islam, known as Wahhabism, that forms a basis of the Islamic State’s ideology.

“The victory of Trump is the beginning of the end of extremist Islam and Wahhabism,” said Mouwafak al-Rubaie, an Iraqi lawmaker and the country’s former national security adviser.

In Mr. Trump’s vow to defeat terrorism many Iraqis say they have hope that decisive American power will be marshaled to eradicate the Islamic State, the extremist group also known as ISIS, which has occupied parts of Iraq and Syria for the past two years.

“We have no concerns about the policy of Trump because he is against extremism,” said Saad al-Hadithi, the spokesman for Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi.

That must have made some heads explode at the Times.

A FEW WEEKS AGO, THE HAMILTON CAST HELD A HILLARY FUNDRAISER. LAST NIGHT, WITHOUT REALIZING IT, THEY HELD A TRUMP FUNDRAISER. Note Trump’s deliberate use of SJW “safe-space” and “harassment” language. Not an accident, I’m sure. Choose the form of your Destructor, indeed.

UPDATE: Ouch. “Tonight, libs booed Pence at ‘Hamilton.’ Tonight, HRC sits alone, drinking, blaming men, and sobbing. We win.”

Plus: “Pence didn’t require a safe space or ask to pet puppies afterwards.”

Also: “For the record, Alexander Hamilton was an immigration hawk who endorsed the Alien and Sedition Acts and wanted to deport troublemakers.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: History: “The audience had just witnessed the reenacted shooting to death of the great American, Alexander Hamilton. The actor delivering the lecture was Brandon Victor Dixon, who plays Aaron Burr, the man who killed Hamilton. Years ago, in a theater, a President of the United States was shot by a politically overheated actor. I understand hustling Mike Pence out of that place.”

From the comments: “Being a dick to people who paid to see you is #HowYouGotTrump.”

Plus: “Other than that, how was the play, Mr. Pence?”

And: “It’s funny because the left right now is all ‘I don’t feel safe!’, but they are the once blocking the roads, turning theatre nights into verbal attacks, and rushing the speakers on college campuses.”

Also: “The cast are not scared of Pence. If they were, they wouldn’t insult him. It takes no bravery for you to mock someone that all your social peers think is terrible. It takes no bravery for you to claim the moral high ground over someone you and the media paint as a backwards reject from the 1950s or earlier. This was craven; people who think it took courage to speak out against someone the media wants us to hate need to readjust their definitions of courage.”

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS REPORTS STEEP DECLINE IN CIRCULATION.

You went full SJW, man. Never go full SJW.

MANY FANS AGREE: Kaley Cuoco: My plastic surgery was the ‘best thing I ever did.’

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NEWS UPDATE FROM NEVERLAND: Early critics doing 180s. I called them Peter Pan Republicans, living in NeverLand. That essay drew several memorable sneers. Fewer sneers now, I suspect.

AND THE PRESS WOULD HAVE LAUDED THIS APPROACH, IN THOSE CIRCUMSTANCES: Former Obama White House counsel would have advised blocking Scalia’s replacement if tables had been turned.

ACTUALLY, GEORGE, IT WAS DEMOCRATS WHO INTERNED YOUR FAMILY. SO GIVEN YOUR POLITICAL LOYALTIES, SHOULDN’T THAT BE “WE,” NOT “THEY?” George Takei: They interned my family. Don’t let them do it to Muslims.

POLITICS: The Age Of The Honey Badger Dawns. By explicitly — and proudly, in many cases — abandoning objectivity in an effort to beat Trump, the press left itself much, much weaker in terms of its ability to affect things once Trump was elected. They were warned about this, but chose not to listen.

Choose the form of your destructor.

J. CHRISTIAN ADAMS: Crying Wolf on Race: Top Sessions Critic Gerry Hebert Has History of Making it Up.

WELL, WITH ALL THE NEW FRACKING DISCOVERIES, WE CAN AFFORD TO LEAVE IT IN THE GROUND FOR A WHILE: Obama rescinds Arctic offshore drilling proposal.

KAROL MARKOWICZ: Trump’s female voters are people not props.

As America recovers from last week’s shock election results that ended with a President-elect Donald Trump, the finger pointing is in full swing. If there’s someone poised to pick up a large share of the blame, it’s the white women who voted 53% for Donald Trump.

Donald Trump got a larger share of Latino and black voters than Mitt Romney or John McCain. Yet the story isn’t Hillary Clinton not being able to secure as much of their vote as Barack Obama. The story of the election is that Trump got a majority of the white woman vote. The blame game is strong. “How could they?” people wonder.

It’s a fair question. Many things that Trump said about women were offensive. But it’s strange that people focus only on women being offended. Trump said many offensive things about many people, including men. We don’t wonder how shorter men could have voted for him when he called Marco Rubio little. Why should women be insulted on behalf of other women more than men are on behalf of other men?

There’s also the continuing idea that women should all line up a certain way on “women’s issues.” But the fact is that women are split on a lot of them.

It’s almost as if they can think for themselves, which I’ve been assured by feminists is impossible.