SPACE NEWS GALORE at the 529th Carnival of Space. Yes, there are still blog carnivals.

INTERESTING CHANGE OF STRATEGERY FOR DEMOCRATS:

● Kerry in 2004: “Can I get me a huntin’ license here?”

● Obama in 2008:

“I just want to be absolutely clear, alright. So I don’t want any misunderstanding. When ya’ll go home and you’re talking to your buddies, and they say, “Ah, he wants to take my gun away,” you’ve heard it here — I’m on television so everybody knows it —  I believe in the Second Amendment. I believe in people’s lawful right to bear arms. I will not take your shotgun away. I will not take your rifle away. I won’t take your handgun away. … So, there are some common-sense gun safety laws that I believe in. But I am not going to take your guns away. So if you want to find an excuse not to vote for me, don’t use that one. Cause that just ain’t true.”

Narrator voice: it was true.

Fast-forward to this week, post Vegas:

● Nancy Pelosi in 2017: “They’re going to say ‘you give them a bump stock, it’s going to be a slippery slope.’ I certainly hope so.”

● New York Times fauxcon Bret Stephens: “Repeal the Second Amendment. I have never understood the conservative fetish for the Second Amendment.”

●  Democrat operative with a lavalier, NBC’s Katy Tur agrees with Stephens, suggests repealing 2nd amendment should be Democrats’ end goal.

● Original NYT RINO David Brooks:

“Too often, the people who have been the spokesperson for gun control have been Michael Bloomberg and, frankly, Jimmy Kimmel,” he said “And I like Michael Bloomberg. I like Jimmy Kimmel’s show. But they shouldn’t be the face because everybody’s cultural awarenesses get up when it’s a New York mayor or a Hollywood star. And it has to come from people who own guns in this country.”

Well gee, if you don’t like Bloomberg and Kimmel, how ‘bout Nancy Pelosi? This is an interesting turn for the Democrats going forward. Who will believe them if and when they utter the we’re just everyday folks, we’re not coming for your guns lies that Kerry and Obama uttered during their campaigns?

21ST CENTURY HEADLINES: Scientists Are Proposing to Protect Earth From Solar Flares With a Gigantic Shield.

KIM JONG UN CLAIMS THE U.S. TRIED TO ASSASSINATE HIM:

From The New York Daily News:

“In May this year, a group of heinous terrorists who infiltrated into our country on the orders of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the U.S. and South Korean puppet Intelligence Service with the purpose of carrying out a state-sponsored terrorism against our supreme headquarters using biological and chemical substance were caught and exposed,” the article reads.

North Korea is supposed to conduct a test of some type during the next four or five days, but Rocket Man is rattled, and it shows.

OKAY, THIS IS MORE LIKE THE 21ST CENTURY I WAS PROMISED: TastyFloats: A Levitating Food Delivery System.

JOHN HINDERAKER ON EDINA, MINNESOTA: How Leftism Can Ruin a Once-Proud School District. “Edina is one of the Twin Cities’ wealthiest suburbs. For decades, its public schools have been viewed as among the nation’s finest. But no longer: a leftist political agenda now dominates the Edina school system, and quality of instruction has slipped badly. Edina is not alone. What has happened there is going on in public schools across the country. Edina’s experience should be a warning to all of us.”

ALSO, SKIP THE TIES, WHICH DON’T GET WASHED REGULARLY: Shorter sleeves on doctor’s coats may reduce risk of spreading superbugs.

HE DOESN’T LOOK LIKE A COCKNEY IN THE PHOTO: Eleven injured as taxi driver ‘deliberately mows down pedestrians’ after mounting the pavement outside London’s Natural History Museum before being pinned to the ground and arrested in front of stunned tourists. “Scotland Yard said they were keeping an open mind as to whether the incident is terror-related.”

JORDAN PETERSON AND CAMILLE PAGLIA DISCUSS ART, LANGUAGE, ACADEMIA, AND HOW THEY’VE BEEN WARPED BY POSTMODERNISM.

It’s a great video, but there’s a lot going on there. Given the rapid-fire velocity at which Paglia throws out references and topics, I wish it had a decent transcript rather than the unwieldy automatic YouTube transcript app.

HARVEY WEINSTEIN’S BROTHER MAY HAVE BEEN MASTERMIND BEHIND SEX ALLEGATION EXPOSÉ:

Bob Weinstein, the disgruntled co-founder of The Weinstein Company, may have been the mastermind behind an exposé of lurid sex allegations that led to his brother’s humiliating downfall, the sources said.

“Bob’s wanted Harvey out for years,” said a former staffer, who added that the two brothers are becoming increasingly suspicious of each other.

Insiders believe that Bob may have helped concoct the explosive New York Times story that exposed the harassment allegations from Ashley Judd, Rose McGowan and other former employees.

No way this story is remotely true. If there’s one thing I know, a person with deep financial ties to the Clintons and receiving legal representation from Bill Clinton’s former special counsel would never, ever lie when he claims he’s being attacked by a (presumably vast) right-wing conspiracy.

SPRINGTIME FOR STALIN, or the Pinch in the High Castle:

The Times has been running a series on Communism called “The Red Century.” It’s really, really weird. At times, it feels like the greatest high-brow trolling effort in recorded history. Some of the headlines read like they were plucked from the reject pile at The Onion. I particularly enjoyed “Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism.” One wonders what all the women who had to service their prison guards for a crust of bread would think about that. With the exception of one essay by Harvey Klehr, the upshot seems to be an effort to rehabilitate Communism for a certain kind of New York Times liberal who desperately needs to cling to the belief that he was on the right side of an argument he lost.

The tone is less “Communism was awesome” and more “Well, we sophisticated people understand it was a mixed bag, so let’s focus on the bright spots.” E.g., Mao’s collectivization liberated women from domestic service and put them to work in factories (that is the millions of women who weren’t killed in the process).

To understand how morally repugnant this series is, just imagine the 2017 in a Philip K. Dick-style multiverse where the Times ran a series on the misunderstood historic joys of national socialism, rather than international socialism. If “Why Women Had Better Sex Under National Socialism” would earn an author an instant rejection slip* and lifetime banning, it’s just bizarre that the Gray Lady would green-light this series.

* Accompanied by a note suggesting he go write for Vox…

MEGAN MCARDLE: Debt Alone Won’t Crush Puerto Rico. Depopulation Is the Curse.

“They owe a lot of money to your friends on Wall Street,” Donald Trump told Geraldo Rivera. “We’re going to have to wipe that out. That’s going to have to be — you know, you can say goodbye to that. I don’t know if it’s Goldman Sachs but whoever it is, you can wave goodbye to that.”

Bond markets didn’t appreciate the verbal wave. The territory’s bonds, already weak from the pounding of Hurricane Maria, fell another 31 percent. White House budget director Mick Mulvaney hastened to say the president didn’t mean what he said. “I wouldn’t take it word for word with that,” he said demurely. Nor should you; as debt expert Cate Long told CNN Money, “Trump does not have the ability to wave a magic wand and wipe out the debt.”

Yet the fact remains that Puerto Rico is not going to be able to pay all of its debts. Prior to the hurricane, the territory had $73 billion in outstanding debt, and a population of 3.4 million people. That’s approximately $21,500 for every man, woman and child on the island – just about enough to buy each of them a brand new Mini Cooper, provided that they don’t insist on the sport package or the heated seats. . . .

And why was the government borrowing so much? For one thing, because the government doesn’t work very well. The operations of the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, for example, defy belief: It essentially gave unlimited free power to municipalities and government-owned entities, which used it to do things like operate skating rinks in the tropics. Everywhere you look, you see signs of a government struggling to perform basic tasks: collect taxes, maintain the infrastructure, improve the health system. In the jargon of development economists, the island lacks “state capacity”: It is simply unable to exert the amount of power over its operations that we on the mainland mostly take for granted.

But you can’t entirely blame the Puerto Rican government for the state of the underlying economy, which is what had plunged the island into a bankruptcy crisis even before the hurricane. For that you have to look to the federal government, which eliminated a tax break that had given companies incentives to locate in Puerto Rico, and then oversaw a financial crisis that sent them into an even deeper spiral. We also made sure that a relatively poor island was forced to adopt the federal minimum wage, which was too high for the local labor market. That has contributed to the 11.5 percent unemployment rate. And Puerto Rico uses the U.S. dollar, leaving it unable to adjust monetary policy to overcome economic stagnation.

None of those things will change just because we wipe out the bondholders. And the bondholders are not Puerto Rico’s only creditors; it has an unfunded pension liability of roughly $50 billion. Covering the current liability will consume more 20 percent of the budget.

That figure will only grow, because the biggest problem of all is Puerto Rico’s rapid demographic decline. There has long been a steady migration from Puerto Rico to the mainland. By 2008, there were more Puerto Ricans in the rest of the U.S. than there were in Puerto Rico. But the economic crisis has accelerated that flow to staggering levels.

So I’m guessing that if Steve Bannon were still around, he’d be encouraging Trump to do things that would make Puerto Rico so attractive that not only would people want to stay there, but expat Puerto Ricans would want to return, since most of them vote Democrat, and Puerto Rico doesn’t have any electoral votes. Which would be good for Puerto Rico, and also for Trump. In Bannon’s absence, I’m not sure there’s anyone in the White House who thinks that way.

LARRY O’CONNOR: Weinstein Proves In Hollywood, Being Liberal Means Never Having To Say You’re Sorry.

Ashley Judd, the most famous victim of Weinstein’s predatory behavior, is an ardent pro-choice feminist activist who led the rally of the “resistance” pink hat march on Washington in January by proclaiming she was a “Naaaaaaaaaasty woman” and went on to speculate about the president’s nocturnal emissions while fantasizing about his own daughter.  It was some sick stuff that left many wondering to themselves “Wow, what happened to Ashley Judd?”

Now we know what happened to her.  Harvey Weinstein happened to her. And at the time, according to the Times report, as she was being preyed upon by a bathrobe-clad Weinstein begging for a massage or for her to watch him shower (talk about Sophie’s Choice) Judd’s over-riding concern was not “alienating Harvey Weinstein” while escaping his Cosby-esque advances.

Has she channeled that anger and humiliation and fear at the industry that allowed it? Or at the man and his multi-million dollar corporation that enabled it? No. Her real enemies are Republicans. Don’t you get it?

So the not-so-hidden message  in Weinstein’s non-apology statement was “Hey, remember, I supported Hillary and Obama and I raise millions for Democrats and I’ll help destroy the NRA and Trump. I may treat you like shit, but my heart is in the right place. Now get your knee pads on.”

In Hollywood, being liberal means never having to say you’re sorry.

Will anyone ask Matthew Weiner if his 1960s-era anti-GOP Mad Men series was inspired by what goes on in 21st century Democrat-controlled Hollywood, especially when his upcoming series for Amazon is being produced by — wait for it — The Weinstein Company? “I am truly excited to have this opportunity to work with risk takers like [Amazon] and Harvey and The Weinstein Company who have a proven, longstanding commitment to creative voices and innovation.”

Keep that quote in mind when you come across a Mad Men rerun on cable. (Though to be fair, don’t knock the show’s later seasons — they’re excellent remedies for even the worst insomniacs.)

K.C. JOHNSON: Stanford’s Many Dubious Sexual Assault Claims.

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THOMAS CHATTERTON WILLIAMS IN THE NEW YORK TIMES: How Ta-Nehisi Coates Gives Whiteness Power.

I have spent the past six months poring over the literature of European and American white nationalism, in the process interviewing noxious identitarians like the alt-right founder Richard Spencer. The most shocking aspect of Mr. Coates’s wording here is the extent to which it mirrors ideas of race — specifically the specialness of whiteness — that white supremacist thinkers cherish.

This, more than anything, is what is so unsettling about Mr. Coates’s recent writing and the tenor of the leftist “woke” discourse he epitomizes. Though it is not at all morally equivalent, it is nonetheless in sync with the toxic premises of white supremacism. Both sides eagerly reduce people to abstract color categories, all the while feeding off of and legitimizing each other, while those of us searching for gray areas and common ground get devoured twice. Both sides mystify racial identity, interpreting it as something fixed, determinative and almost supernatural. For Mr. Coates, whiteness is a “talisman,” an “amulet” of “eldritch energies” that explains all injustice; for the abysmal early-20th-century Italian fascist and racist icon Julius Evola, it was a “meta-biological force,” a collective mind-spirit that justifies all inequality. In either case, whites are preordained to walk that special path. It is a dangerous vision of life we should refuse no matter who is doing the conjuring.

This summer, I spent an hour on the phone with Richard Spencer. It was an exchange that left me feeling physically sickened. Toward the end of the interview, he said one thing that I still think about often. He referred to the all-encompassing sense of white power so many liberals now also attribute to whiteness as a profound opportunity. “This is the photographic negative of a white supremacist,” he told me gleefully. “This is why I’m actually very confident, because maybe those leftists will be the easiest ones to flip.”

If you divide America along racial/ethnic lines, eventually the largest racial/ethnic group will start to think of itself as a racial/ethnic group and act accordingly. But in the meantime, it’s a good living for Coates, and I guess an okay one for Spencer.

And if you want more Trump, well, Coates will help you get more Trump, and a lot more effectively than Spencer ever has. Right after the election, John Podhoretz tweeted, “Liberals spent 40 years disaggregating [the] U.S., until finally the largest cohort in the country chose to vote as though it were an ethnic group.” That’s where “whiteness”-as-original-sin gets you. But hey, like I said, it’s a good living for some people.

WELL, GOOD: ‘They’re coming out with their hands up – full scale surrender’: US General says ISIS fighters in Iraq are giving up after not being fed or paid. Weird how once Mattis announced that we were going to kill them all, we started winning. As Curtis LeMay said, if you kill enough of them, the rest stop fighting.

TRICKLE-UP ECONOMICS: Football’s decline has some high schools disbanding teams.

As Daniel J. Flynn told me when I interviewed him in 2013 on his book, The War on Football, “football as a participation sport is really hurting. Last year, youth football lost six percent of its player population…If youth football loses six percent of its player population next season and the season after, there’s not going to be any youth football left in America.” And eventually, that attrition in young players will begin having an impact on recruiting for both the college and the pro game.

Curiously, after Flynn’s book was published, the war on football became pro football’s war on its fans, potentially hastening the NFL’s demise as America’s premiere sport, just as first boxing and then baseball lost their cache as America’s leading pastime.

BUT OF COURSE: FBI terrorism unit says ‘black identity extremists’ pose a violent threat: Leaked report, citing concerns of retaliation over ‘perceptions of police brutality against African Americans’, prompts fears of crackdown on activists.

PEGGY NOONAN: Why do Americans own so many guns? Because they don’t trust the protected elites to protect them.

The establishments and elites that create our political and entertainment culture have no idea how fragile it all is—how fragile it seems to people living normal, less privileged lives. That is because nothing is fragile for them. They’re barricaded behind the things the influential have, from good neighborhoods to security alarms, doormen and gates. They’re not dark in their imagining of the future because history has never been dark for them; it’s been sunshine, which they expect to continue. They sail on, oblivious to the legitimate anxieties of their countrymen who live near the edge.

Those who create our culture feel free to lecture normal Americans—on news shows, on late night comedy shows. Why do they have such a propensity for violence? What is their love for guns? Why do they join the National Rifle Association? The influential grind away with their disdain for their fellow Americans, whom they seem less to want to help than to dominate: Give up your gun, bake my cake, free speech isn’t free if what you’re saying triggers us.

Would it help if we tried less censure and more cultural affiliation? Might it help if we started working on problems that are real? Sure. But why lower the temperature when there’s such easy pleasure to be had in ridiculing your mindless and benighted countrymen?

We have the worst political class in our history, but the most toxic thing about it is its open and proud disdain for ordinary Americans. That is, I believe, a destructive legacy of the civil rights era, when elites first felt the addictive pleasure of feeling morally superior to the populace at large.

NEW REPORT: GOP BASEBALL SUSPECT COMMITTED ‘ACT OF TERRORISM’ ‘FUELED BY RAGE AGAINST REPUBLICAN LEGISLATORS.’ “The report also indicates that Hodgkinson planned out the mass assassination attempt months in advance.”

Flashback: James T. Hodgkinson, Attempted Assassin Of Steve Scalise, Already Being Erased From History.

CONOR FRIEDERSDORF: The ACLU Should Keep Representing Deplorables: An uncompromising, universalist commitment to protecting civil rights is the best way to safeguard the rights of the most vulnerable to abuse and injustice. It is, but that’s out of fashion on the left.

WHY IS TINDER ENDORSING SEXUAL VIOLENCE? Tinder Launches Anti-Harassment Feature Allowing Women To Throw Martinis in Men’s Faces.

THANKS TO NFL AND ANTIFA! WaPo: Trump Is On Track To Win Reelection. “It would be as big a mistake to assume that Trump cannot win reelection in 2020 as it was for those of us who never thought that he could become president in the first place.”