Archive for 2020

WHEN IS IT A “DONATION,” AND WHEN IS IT AN “EXTRACTION?” Men should be allowed to donate sperm after death, study says. “The mechanics of donating, they say, are entirely feasible through either electroejaculation or surgical methods.” With prior consent, I guess it’s a donation. Without, it’s an extraction.

HERE’S THE FULL TEXT OF TULSI GABBARD’S COMPLAINT AGAINST HILLARY. It’s lit!

My take: She chose a bad venue — the Southern District is notoriously defendant-friendly — and while the complaint is super-amusing, I wouldn’t call it top-notch. My guess is that this is mostly a warning shot for the benefit of future political adversaries in future races. As a public figure, it’s hard for Tulsi to win a libel suit.

That said, we’re talking about Hillary here. She’s not a media defendant, which is who the SDNY is usually sympathetic to. And let’s be honest, where Hillary’s concerned, malice should basically be presumed. . . .

Also, as Charles Glasser was pointing out on Facebook, you can expect Hillary’s team to argue — as CNN did with “racist” in the Sandmann case — that “Russian asset” is just a statement of opinion, not a defamatory statement of fact. Trouble is, it’s a defamatory statement of fact, and was undoubtedly meant to be taken as such.

BOEING: Starliner’s thruster performance receiving close scrutiny from NASA.

The NASA release did not mention thruster performance, but an agency source told Ars that engineers are looking closely at the performance of the Starliner propulsion system. In addition to four large launch abort engines, the service module has 28 reaction control system thrusters, each with 85 pounds of thrust and 20 more-powerful orbital maneuvering thrusters, each with 1,500 pounds of thrust.

During the post-flight news conference Jim Chilton, Boeing’s senior vice president of the Space and Launch division, said the service module thrusters were stressed due to their unconventional use in raising Starliner’s orbit instead of performing one big burn. As a result, the company had to shut down one manifold, which effectively branches into several lines carrying propellant to four thrusters. “We even shut down one manifold as we saw pressure go low ’cause it had been used a lot,” he said.

The NASA source said eight or more thrusters on the service module failed at one point and that one thruster never fired at all.

And from the comments:

I will give Boeing a semi-pass on this one. The thrusters were used in a manner they would never be used during a mission, so it’s probably not surprising they had issues after that. However, it is concerning that one thruster never fired at all. That is certainly not acceptable, and unfortunately, may be yet another failure of Boeing’s quality assurance culture. In light of this additional finding, there is absolutely no way they should be allowed to do a manned flight without a successful unmanned demo. Considering Dragon had yet another great flight adds more fuel to that argument. If SpaceX can do it, why can’t Boeing?

Good question.

FORMER BILL CLINTON ADVISOR MARK PENN: Democrats Need to End This Partisan Impeachment.

History, it seems, does repeat itself. George Washington’s farewell address about the excesses of partisanship was never truer than today. As America’s only truly independent president, Washington predicted that the growth of factionalism would undermine the execution of our laws and that the “alternate domination” of one party over another would lead to efforts to “exact revenge” and “raise false alarms.”

Let us not forget that the Trump administration suffered through a two-year special counsel investigation based almost entirely on opposition research from the other party, and that this imbroglio stems from the other party believing it had now in turn found information that would turn the political tables. It is all exactly as George Washington foretold.

Read the whole thing.

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Rep. Tulsi Gabbard Sues Hillary Clinton for Defamation Over ‘Russian’ Claim.

More here: “Following Clinton’s initial comments, Gabbard responded on Twitter by calling the former secretary of state ‘the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long,’ and challenged her to join the primary.”

And at Twitchy: “Tulsi Gabbard is suing Hillary Clinton and the first page of the filing is WILD AF… ‘Tulsi Gabbard is running for President of the United States, a position Clinton has long coveted, but has not been able to attain.’”

Pass the popcorn.

FRANK J. says it better — and more pithily — than I did.