SPACE: HALO space habitat module passes preliminary design review.

If NASA’s ambitions to set up a permanent human presence of the Moon and to send an expedition to Mars are to be fulfilled, astronauts will need someplace to hang their space helmets. The HALO module is critical to this vision, acting as a place to house crew and a docking hub between low-Earth orbit and the cislunar region and beyond.

Because the first HALO unit is scheduled to launch in November 2023 along with the Power Propulsion Element module, primary contractor Northrop Grumman is pursuing a fast-track approach by basing the design on its already flown Cygnus robotic cargo ship, which has been used to transport supplies to the International Space Station. The design of the hull is basically the same, though it will have radial docking ports, body-mounted radiators, batteries and antenna installed on the outside.

Inside the HALO will be command and control systems as well as a life support system that can support four astronauts for up to 30 days, with the aid of the Orion spacecraft. All of this will allow the module to act as both a crew habitat and a docking hub for other vehicles, such as a lunar lander.

Faster, please.

WELL, THAT’S ACADEMIA’S ROLE IN THE CLERISY: Dozens of professors echo socialist-backed calls to defund police.

BEING A DICK AT THANKSGIVING SEEMS TO BE A STANDARD LEFTY DESIRE: UVA student newspaper opinion writer: ‘Stand up’ to ‘racist family’ at Thanksgiving.

I recommend standing up to your bratty, know-it-all kids. A friend’s daughter was giving him hell for voting Trump, so he told her she couldn’t live with him if she was going to treat him disrespectfully. Two hours at her mom’s and she was apologizing and begging him to take her back.

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KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: GOP Can’t Let Trump-Hating Squishes Take Over the Party Now. “The radical Never Trump people have been making noise for several weeks about wanting to return the party to the way it used to be, whatever that means. They are operating under the delusion that a lot of Republicans are waiting around to welcome them back with open arms.”

NOW THAT THE ELECTION IS OVER (OR AT LEAST THE VOTING PART), The New York Times can tell us what a huge success Operation Warp Speed was.

FIVE REASONS WHY BIDEN IS THE MOST AMAZING POLITICO EVER: Among other things, Biden, who spent most of the campaign in his basement, got more votes than Barack Obama in 2008 despite losing the 20 “bell-wether counties” that no winning president ever previously lost. The Federalist’ J.B. Shurk has more. Please note my tongue was firmly lodged in my cheek as I composed the headline to this post.

TRUMP SAVES ANOTHER INDUSTRY: Fall 2021 Law School Admissions At The Quarter-Pole: Applicants Are Up 32%, With Biggest Increases Among The Highest LSAT Bands And Applicants Of Color.

And thank goodness. Can you imagine a world without lawyers?

PEOPLE DON’T TRUST THEM, AND WON’T COOPERATE: RealClearInvestigations: Help! Pollsters Have Fallen and They Can’t Get Up!. “If you can’t predict something as simple as an election race, do you think these same polls are giving people the right answers on how people feel about Covid?”

BERT PETERSON: To Restore Election Integrity, End Mail-In Vote Fraud.

Suffice it to say, the opportunity for fraud with mail-in votes is clearly there. If that opportunity has been taken, can we, through a recount, prove it? The answer is no. Once the mail-in ballots are accepted, they are thrown in with the in-person ballots. Even if officials find out later that a dead person sent in a ballot, we don’t know how that dead person voted.

So if we find evidence that something in the recent election suggests that there was mail-in voter fraud (and there is such evidence), there’s nothing we can do to prove that. Ever.

Although we cannot have a recount that would discover and erase fraudulent mail-in votes, and potentially throw the state electors to Trump, there’s one thing that we can do. We can have a re-vote — one that includes early voting and (restricted) absentee voting, protocols to protect against COVID-19, but not mail-in voting. This would not award anything to anyone; it simply would provide a far more trustworthy vote.

Had it not been for the Wuhan Flu shutdowns, Trump would have coasted to victory, and ditto for the panic- and opportunistic-driven move to mail-in voting.

MICHAEL BARONE: Californians, and Americans, reject racial quotas and preferences.

Among the most surprising of the multiple surprising results in this election was California’s rejection of Proposition 16. The ballot measure was supported by the Democratic supermajorities in the state legislature, by long-established corporations, and by Silicon Valley tech firms, by leaders of mainline churches and nonprofit organizations.

Some $20 million was spent on its behalf and only $1 million in opposition. Yet, it lost by a solid 14-point margin in a state that voted 64% for Joe Biden.

Why? Because Californians, like most other Americans, don’t like racial discrimination. Proposition 16 was put on the ballot to repeal Proposition 209, which passed in 1996, which banned state government from discriminating “on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin.” Most Californians thought then and think now that that’s a good idea.

Disagreeing emphatically are the people who run the state’s giant state colleges and universities. Like their counterparts across the nation, they want to admit more black and Latino students than would qualify on non-race-based criteria such as test scores. The result, as documented by Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor in their 2012 book Mismatch, is that more black and Latino students are admitted, but because instruction is pitched to the median student, many opt out of rigorous STEM majors or drop out altogether. Enforcement of Proposition 209 meant fewer black and Hispanic students at flagship campuses (Berkeley, UCLA) but more (and more graduates) at UC and Cal State campuses elsewhere.

Racial quotas and preferences these days discriminate less against whites than against Asians, who are denied places despite high test scores and rigorous preparation, much as Jews were in the Ivy League from the 1920s to the 1950s. Anti-Asian bias is made plain in lawsuits pending in federal courts against Yale and Harvard, whose admissions personnel suspiciously rate Asians low on “positive personality.”

Affirmative action — and its weasel-worded replacement term, “diversity” — has always been highly popular among elites, and highly unpopular among everyone else. And if you concluded from this that that’s because it is good for elites, and bad for everyone else, you would be spot-on.

#RESISTANCE: Californians Defy Gov. Newsom Curfew Order, Flood Streets in 16 Cities.

IT LOOKS FINE TO ME:

She was hunting wild hogs from a helicopter.

A TALE OF TWO CAMPAIGNS: As all good Instapundit readers know by now, Proposition 16 has been soundly rejected by California voters. This happened despite its supporters having spent $27 million to the NO side’s $1.72 million.

I thought you might be interested in a list the top donors to the YES campaign. They were:

Quinn Delaney ($7,900,000)

ACLU, Inc. ($2,450,538.70)

Open Society Policy Center ($2,000,000)

Kaiser Foundation Health Plan, Inc. ($1,500,000)

ACLU of Northern California Issues Committee ($1,253,599.14)

Patricia Quillin ($1,000,000)

California Teachers Association/Issue PAC ($574,229.70)

Neighbors for a Better San Francisco ($536,000)

Anne E. Delaney ($500,000)

Blue Shield of California ($500,000)

American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, AFL-CIO (MPO) ($500,000)

Connie E. Ballmer ($500,000)

Steven A. Ballmer ($500,000)

Our Voice, Our Vote-Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez Ballot Measure Committee   Yes on Prop 16 ($389,365.50)

Salesforce.com ($375,000)

SF Workforce Housing Alliance PAC 2020, Sponsored by Neighbors for a Better San Francisco ($300,000)

California Nurses Association Initiative Political Action Committee ($300,000) California Democratic Party ($290,346.50)

Pacific Gas & Electric ($250,000)

American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, Local 3299 ($235,540.00)

Cisco ($200,000)

Cabrera Capital Market, LLC (Martin Cabrera, Jr.) ($200,000)

SEIU Local 1021 ($200,000)

Facebook, Inc. ($200,000)

Gwendolyn Marion Mathilde Sontheim ($200,000)

The San Francisco Foundation ($200,000)

Genentech USA ($200,000).

The No campaign did not receive a single donation that large. Its largest donation came from Students for Fair Admissions for $50,000. The second largest donation was from … uh … me. We won anyway, because Californians aren’t buying identity politics.

A list of the 34 largest donors to NO side (contributing $5000 or more) is available here.  If you donated (as many Instapundit readers did), thank you!

DON’T BE A SCIENCE DENIER, KEEP THE SCHOOLS OPEN: CDC Director Says School ‘One of Safest Places’ for Children, Data Supports In-Person Learning.

GOING TO THE GROCERY STORE CAN KILL YOU: That’s the point of a recent “news” story cited by American Institute for Economic Research’s (AIER) Jeffrey Tucker to illustrate what he calls “the blizzard of bogus journalism on Covid.”

ALL THE SERIOUS PEOPLE TODAY: IT’S IRRESPONSIBLE AND HIGHLY DESTRUCTIVE TO ENTERTAIN UNPROVEN CLAIMS OF ELECTION FRAUD.

Three Weeks Ago:

Related:

Democrats overwhelmingly say fake news spread by Russia was at least somewhat likely to have affected the results of the presidential election – just under half (46%) say that it was very likely. Republicans disagree – except for those Republicans who think that Russian-sponsored spreading of fake news actually took place. A majority in this group believe it was in fact likely that the effort did affect the election outcome.

Two out of three Democrats also claim Russia tampered with vote tallies on Election Day to help the President – something for which there has been no credible evidence.

Plus:

In response to the oncoming deluge of fraud claims, many of which will be clearly dubious, you’ll see the usual suspect crowd of journalist/activist types dropping giant heaps of gleeful scorn. They’ll laugh at the absurdity of supposed “conspiracy theories” being proffered about the vote counts in Arizona or wherever else. They’ll mock those who can’t accept reality. And they’ll be right in certain instances that the claims will be preposterous. But what will be even more preposterous is the profoundly misplaced sense of smug superiority they won’t be able to help themselves from exuding, given everything they just put us through over the past 4+ years.

I know we’re all tired of the polling-industrial complex and rightly so, but let’s please remember that a December 2016 YouGov poll found half of all Clinton voters that year didn’t just believe that Russia “interfered” in the election to the advantage of Trump, but that they tampered with the ballot tallies and effectively hacked the voting machines. By 2018, a supermajority of Democratic voters expressed this belief. And the belief didn’t become widely-adopted as a result of standard looney-tunes off-the-reservation conspiracy-theorizing, which is typically understood to emanate from the fringes of society. Instead these crazy, evidence-free beliefs were deliberately engineered by the most Serious precincts of mainstream respectable opinion, particularly those allied with the Democratic Party and its think tank / media affiliates.

The phrase “hacked the election” entered wide circulation by December 2016, with the New York Times among others spouting it without compunction. If you’re not a particularly sophisticated news consumer, and you have a pro-Democratic predisposition, what exactly do you think you’d have tended to infer from the phrase “hacked the election”? Trump winning the election was unfathomable to many, and people were understandably searching for answers. They were provided with self-deluding fantasies by sources they’d come to regard as authoritative. The people who used the phrase over and over again, like chronic liar Adam Schiff, aren’t stupid. They knew it would engender doubt as to the legitimacy of the election; that was the entire purpose.

One particularly egregious example from November 2016 was when Gabriel Sherman, then of New York Magazine, totally mischaracterized the views of a group of “prominent computer scientists” by attributing to them the belief that they had “found persuasive evidence that results in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania may have been manipulated or hacked.” The group had then supposedly advised the Hillary campaign to request recounts on that basis. Sherman’s article caused a huge firestorm and clearly contributed to the patently false belief that Russia had tampered with the vote count. But it was bunk; the computer scientist in question renounced Sherman’s article. By then it was too late though, and the legitimacy of the 2016 election would never be accepted by huge swaths of the population — all thanks to the ineptitude/depravity/deceptions of the media class.

I’m going with depravity, for the most part. And note that Hillary eventually did concede — but then proceeded to spend the next four years calling Trump illegitimate as she and her allies spread unfounded claims of “Russian collusion” and produced an absurdly baseless impeachment vote.

Trump, on the other hand, is challenging things via litigation and entirely within the system. And yet he’s somehow the threat to our norms and institutions.

Related: Robert F. Kennedy claims 2004 election was stolen. “It’s a scandal and people should be prosecuted for it, there should be hearings, people should go to jail.” And for extra laughs,he says that exit polls are “an exact science” that could be used to overturn the election.

CONGRATULATIONS TO THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION ON THIS MAGNIFICENT ACHIEVEMENT: First Americans Could Get COVID-19 Vaccine by December 11, Top Health Official Says.

Flashback: Fact check: Coronavirus vaccine could come this year, Trump says. Experts say he needs a ‘miracle’ to be right. Miraculously, he was.

HE’S ENTITLED TO TROLL HIS CRITICS, AS HE’S BEEN THE MOST SUCCESSFUL SECRETARY OF STATE IN DECADES: Pompeo Trolls Critics in Long Goodbye as He Looks to His Future. The organization of Asian allies against China, and the Middle East peace agreements are enough to support that all by themselves, though a Biden/Harris administration will probably — deliberately — throw both away at the earliest opportunity.

MARQUETTE IS A TROUBLED PLACE, WITH PROBLEMS IN BOTH FACULTY AND ADMINISTRATION: Marquette Faculty Stage Sickout Over Proposed Budget Cuts, Cancel Numerous Classes.

Related: Marquette May Cut Up To 20% Of Faculty And Staff Due To Budget Shortfall.

THAT’S DIFFERENT BECAUSE SHUT UP: Left Attacks Scott Atlas For Saying Same Things About COVID As The New York Times, Six Months Earlier. “Atlas is just a prominent face for this view that the power-hungry elites need to crush to avoid responsibility for their horrifically bad leadership during the COVID outbreak, as well as to get Trump. So they seek to destroy him because he and the scientific coalition he represents makes it clear that these public health emperors may have plenty of masks, but no clothes.”

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:

● Shot:

We dove right in by asking Gov. Brown what her opinion is on the phrase “defund the police.”

“I am absolutely committed to taking actions that ensure the safety of all of our communities,” she said.

There were two things that she pointed to, first, working with the People of Color Caucus and seeing what proposals they bring to the legislative special session. Second, she wants to “re-examine” training policies and accountability measures that are in place.

“Here’s also what I do know, actions need to be taken. Good intentions, words are not enough. We have to tackle the racial injustice in this state, in this country. I am absolutely committed to taking that action and making that happen,” Brown said.

* * * * * * * * *

“I think we need to re-envision how our law enforcement operates in this country,” Brown said.

From there, the interview with Governor Brown pivoted to the coronavirus pandemic. We asked if she is anxious that protests will cause a spike in COVID-19 cases and slow down the reopening of Oregon.

She said that whether the protest was of people rallying at the Capitol to oppose Oregon’s stay-home order or the thousands that have gathered nightly to protest police brutality, she is worried about the spread of COVID-19. She encouraged everyone to practice their First Amendment rights but do so safely, wear a face covering, maintain social distancing and use hand sanitizer.

—“Oregon Gov. Kate Brown on redefining public safety, use of tear gas and spikes of COVID-19,” Portland’s NBC affiliate, KGW8, June 10^th.

● Chaser: Oregon Gov. Kate Brown urges residents to call cops on shutdown violators.

—The Washington Times, yesterday.

THE SCIENCE WAS SETTLED, BUT THE PANDEMIC WAS NOT: Cornell professor explains why coronavirus cases are much lower than he originally predicted. From the comments: “Predictably, Professor Frazier now claims that the wonderful job he and his bosses have done accounts for numbers that are a small fraction of his prediction.”