ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE: No Antenna Could Survive Europa’s Brutal, Radioactive Environment—Until Now.

HARRISON BERGERON WAS JUST A CAUTIONARY TALE, RIGHT? RIGHT??? BLM Group Demands Parents Pledge to Hold Back Their Kids’ Education. “Parents in Dallas just got a wake-up call. The local Black Lives Matter group Dallas Justice Now launched a new campaign, urging white parents in wealthy Highland Park to sign a pledge to keep their children back from America’s top colleges — in the name of ‘equity.’ The organization’s letter to parents lays on the guilt thick.”

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Drones could help save soldiers’ lives by delivering blood on demand.

JIM TREACHER: Being Rude to Tucker Carlson Will Not Fix What’s Broken in You.

This kind of stuff is why I use a pseudonym and don’t go on TV. Being famous seems like hell on earth to me. The first time I ever met Tucker in 2009, he flew to Indianapolis on a day’s notice to interview me to work for the Daily Caller, I met him at the Starbucks in the airport, and he hired me on the spot. (It’s still bizarre to me that it happened, but it happened.) And as we were sitting there chatting, a middle-aged woman walked up to our table, unprompted, and launched into a monologue about how she didn’t like Tucker and he should be more liberal and Keith Olbermann was better.2 No “Hello,” no “I watch your show,” nothing like that. She just marched up and went right into her speech, because she saw somebody she recognized from TV and somehow assumed they knew each other.

Tucker was very polite and cordial to her, and I got the impression that it happened to him all the time. He just brushed it off, but I was mortified. My momma raised me better than that. In our family, if you have a problem with somebody, you don’t make a big spectacle of yourself in public. You do the civilized thing and type up a snotty blog post about it.

This Montana incident also shows a big difference between Fox News and CNN. At CNN, the roles are reversed. It’s the employees who out of their way to call out the regular Americans who are just minding their own business.

But Tucker doesn’t need to resort to that sort of behavior because he isn’t desperate for ratings.

Read the whole thing.

TEXAS FLEEBAGGERS UPDATE: What to Know About How Those ‘Fugitive’ Texas Democrats Will Pay for Stay in DC.

As of Friday, the midpoint of the special session, taxpayers in Texas were spending at least $476,630 on a session that isn’t happening because of House Democrats’ exodus, according to an ongoing tally by GOP state Rep. Jared Patterson.

Texas is still losing money from a special session that isn’t happening because Democrats flew to Washington, Patterson explained.

“A session costs $43,000 per day and that equals a teacher’s salary,” the GOP lawmaker told The Daily Signal in a phone interview. “This is a conservative estimate that just looks at a couple of components.”

Those two components are the daily per diem of $221 for every day that a legislator is in session. The other is the increased budget to operate legislative offices during a special session.

“I don’t know anyone who thinks it’s better to choose fundraising in D.C. and lobbying Congress over their constituents in Texas,” Patterson said. “Texans believe you should show up for work.”

A small number of lawmakers reportedly said they would pay back their per diem to the state treasury.

“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Patterson said of Democrats’ forgoing their pay. “They haven’t yet, and have to fill out the paperwork to do so.”

KHOU-TV News reported that all the Texas legislators are continuing to receive their per diems.

The Texas House Democratic Caucus did not respond to inquiries from The Daily Signal for this article.

Still though, give what you can:

Earlier: Texas Democrats unravel — “I’m just pissed off” that Biden won’t meet with them.

FASTER, PLEASE: Investigational magnetic device shrinks glioblastoma in first-in-world human test.

PROFESSOR CARRINGTON, CALL YOUR OFFICE: New Method Can Detect ‘Stealth’ Solar Storms Before They Strike Earth .

WHATEVER HELPS GET MORE PEOPLE VACCINATED: Sarah Huckabee Sanders urges people to get the ‘Trump vaccine.’

To be fair though, I’m not sure how this sort of rhetoric will play with those red state rubes in Los Angeles: Masks Are Back In L.A. County Because Libs Are Really Anti-Vaxxers, Too: “Unless millions of toothless Republican rubes from the icky flyover hinterlands moved to Los Angeles in the last month, it would appear that a whole bunch of libs aren’t getting their vaccines either.”

Related: For the vaccinated, risks of delta variant are small.

MATT MARGOLIS: Will Biden DOJ Allow Us to See the Durham Report? I’m Skeptical.

WHY ARE LEFTIST MONOPOLY ORGANIZATIONS SUCH CESSPITS OF RACISM? Harvard downplays role in no-whites-allowed music seminar sponsored by Nike.

TOMORROW’S POSTMORTEMS TODAY! Politico helps Democrats spin possible 2022 ‘ballot carnage’ (naturally it WON’T be the Dems’ fault).

Don’t get cocky.

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: The Telos of Leftist Racial Ideology.

When I first saw the letter reproduced here from something called “Dallas Justice Now,” calling on wealthy whites living in the affluent Highland Park neighborhood of Dallas not to have their kids apply to elite colleges so that there would be more room for minority applicants, I assumed that it was a satire or a hoax.

But it turns out to be authentic. And there’s actually much to recommend this if you think about it for a moment: what Dallas Justice Now is doing is calling out the smug virtue-signaling of liberal “white allies” and demanding that they put their money (and their children’s futures) where their mouth is.

Good luck, Highland Park. I want you to know we’re all counting on you:

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): To reduce inequality, abolish the Ivy League.

OLD AND BUSTED: All the President’s Men.

The New Hotness? WaPo reporter sues paper for not assigning her to cover Kavanaugh matter.

Earlier: Journalists Are “Centering” Their “Trauma” Because It Enables Them To Acquire Power.

GET WOKE…: USA Men’s Basketball Team May Be Woke, But They Can’t Beat France at Olympics.

REMY: White Lightning. New video from Reason TV:

JOEL KOTKIN: The End of Merit.

Over time, our educational deficit with other countries, notably China, particularly in the acquisition of practical skills in mathematics, engineering medical technology, and management, has grown, threatening our economic and political pre-eminence. Our competitors, whatever their shortcomings, are focused on economic competition and technological supremacy. In math, the OECD’s 2018 Program for International Student Assessment found the United States was outperformed by 36 countries, not only by China, but also Russia, Italy, France, Finland, Poland, and Canada.

Critical Race Theory and its growing chorus of implementers—from the highest reaches of academia down to the grade school level—have little use for such practical skills acquisition and brook little dissent from teachers and researchers who raise objections to the new curriculum of racial grievance. Woke educators, like San Francisco’s School board member Alison Collins, claim that “merit, meritocracy and especially meritocracy based on standardized testing” are essentially “racist systems.” Some among the new racial cadres even denounce habits such as punctuality, rationality, and hard work as reflective of “racism” and “white privilege”.

In a world where brainpower pushes the economy, the denigration of habits of mind can only further weaken our economic future and undermine republican institutions. Even though the vast majority of corporate executives perceive a growing skills gap, they have failed to stop educators from abandoning skills in favor of ever greater emphasis on ephemera of race and gender.

It might as well be a foreign plot to weaken America.

YOU DON’T SAY: Stagflation is ‘a legitimate risk’ that would be painful for U.S. markets. “‘Imagine how scary it would be for the market if we had stocks and bonds selling off together,’ she said. Stagflation could pose a ‘major problem because central banks can’t really come to the rescue and cut interest rates.'”

I WASN’T SHOCKED: A Shocking Number of College Grads Wish They Had Been Taught More Life Skills.

WHEN YOU’VE LOST NPR … : Even NPR is concerned about rising crime now. Of course, the folks there see it as a public relations issue for the Democratic Party rather than a problem to be solved, but whatever.

Three years ago the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights issued a report on “Police Use of Force.” I used the opportunity to write a bit about the country’s history of treating black-on-black crime as if it doesn’t matter. It provides useful background now that things have gotten worse.

WOW: SpaceX to launch the Europa Clipper mission for a bargain price.

Slated to launch in October 2024, the $4.25 billion mission will spend much of the remainder of this decade flying to the Jovian system before entering an elongated orbit around Jupiter. The spacecraft will then make as many as 44 flybys of Europa, the intriguing, ice-encrusted Jovian moon that scientists believe harbors a vast ocean beneath the surface. It is possible that aquatic life exists there.

The total contract award amount for launch services is approximately $178 million, NASA said in a news release. This is a significant moment for SpaceX, as the company will be entrusted with one of NASA’s highest-priority exploration missions. The deal also saves NASA about $2 billion.

That’s about a 90% savings going SpaceX instead of SLS.

COLLUSION: University website scrubs reference to China origin for COVID after bias complaint. “The University of Minnesota system’s Bias Response and Referral Network asked students to report suspected bias ‘related to the COVID-19 outbreak.’ As a result, it appears that the School of Public Health removed a reference to COVID-19’s origin in China.”

To be fair, the truth has an anti-CCP bias, which is why the Chinese government and its satraps — who include many in the American higher education industry — work so assiduously to remove it.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Let’s Cheer the Olympians Who Aren’t Pathetic, Woke Morons. “The Olympics are all about national pride and the celebration of the dedication of the athletes. They aren’t all anti-American pieces of uselessness like Megan Rapinoe. It’s sad that the modern media climate tends to spotlight the bad seeds. Today we will celebrate the good.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: ‘The time has come for ‘gaytheism’:’ library promotes radical, anti-Christian books.

AT HELEN’S PAGE: Old Post Road Oils who sells this shaving soap gets good news from a customer.

IN THE ATLANTIC*: “Airplanes release around 500 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year, representing a significant contribution to global warming. Electric flight replaces petrochemical consumption with cleaner, battery-powered electricity.”

Missing from this: Any discussion of where the electricity comes from.

* It’s “sponsored content,” — that is, a paid ad that looks like an article — not a regular Atlantic article. But it’s what the people who are paying think Atlantic readers will find persuasive, which reflects poorly on Atlantic readers.