TO BOLDLY GO WHERE GENE RODDENBERRY HAS GONE BEFORE: Bernie Sanders wants to bring socialism to space.

The growth of an asteroid mining sector does have certain drawbacks. The sudden influx of what are now precious metals such as gold and platinum would diminish their unit value, causing economic disruption. Certain countries in Africa, dependent on the export of raw materials, would have to diversify their economies, much in the same way as the Persian Gulf states are moving from oil and gas to high tech.

But far from being a bad thing, as Sanders suggests, asteroid mining would usher in an age of abundance on Earth. Many of the raw materials mined in space would be used to create products in space-based manufacturing facilities. Since these manufacturing processes would take advantage of microgravity and other environmental factors unique to space, products that are impossible to create on Earth would become available to consumers. Space mining could lead to space manufacturing.

People such as Musk would become even more fabulously wealthy. Jobs would be created, and the world’s economy would rise faster than what otherwise would be the case. The argument for socialism, which Sanders favors, would be further diminished.

The senator will just have to grin and bear it.

Don’t worry — Roddenberry assures me this sort of profiteering will become passe by the time of the United Federation of Planets. (In-between making “his estimated $500 million fortune off of his creation and its many spin-offs.”)

HOW’S THAT RECRUITMENT CRISIS GOING? Beg Harder: Army Begging Soldiers Kicked Out Over Vax to Come Back.

I’VE SEEN THE LOCKDOWNS AND THE DAMAGE DONE: NYT Piece Calls Learning Loss “Startling” — But It’s Not. “It’s hard to describe how angry this “revelatory” piece of writing makes me. No, I don’t feel any sense of redemption. I just feel angry that it took them this long. And that the journalistic outlet fails to acknowledge their own complicity in these devastating results.”

JAMES PIERESON: Martyr of the Cold War.

These were the myths that grew up around Kennedy’s death and, curiously enough, remain widely believed. Many who doubted Oswald’s guilt traced the assassination to a “climate of hate” created by right-wing businessmen, religious leaders, and a few media figures. This became the prevailing interpretation of the assassination.

The facts pointed in a different direction: President Kennedy was a martyr (to the extent he was a martyr of any kind) in the Cold War struggle against Communism. Kennedy spoke often and clearly about the threat Communism posed to the United States and free nations everywhere. He emphasized foreign policy and the Cold War in his inaugural address in 1961. He was an articulate Cold Warrior before he became an outspoken civil rights advocate.

The assassin was a Communist and hardly a right-winger. He was also one of the biggest “creeps” ever to insert himself into history’s pages, a pathetic figure, even by the standards of assassins. He was haughty, arrogant, and insolent; he beat his wife; he could not keep a job; he was obsessed with politics and revolution. He gave a bad odor to Marxism, if that was possible. Like Richard III, he was “determined to prove a villain/and hate the idle pleasures of these days.” Everyone who knew him agreed afterward that he was entirely capable of carrying out such an attack.

Oswald defected from the U.S. to the Soviet Union in 1959, vowing that he could no longer live under a capitalist system. He pledged to turn over military secrets to Soviet authorities and may have done so. He returned to the United States with his Russian wife in 1962, disappointed with life under Soviet Communism but not disabused of his Marxist beliefs or his contempt for America. By 1963, Oswald had transferred his political allegiance to Castro’s Communist regime in Cuba.

In April 1963, Oswald tried to shoot Edwin Walker, a retired U.S. Army general, as Walker sat at a desk in his dining room. (The bullet struck a window frame, and Walker was unhurt.) Walker was the head of the Dallas chapter of the John Birch Society and a figure then in the news because of his opposition to school integration, his criticisms of President Kennedy, and his demand that the United States overthrow the Castro regime. The rifle Oswald used in his attack on Walker was the same one he used seven months later to shoot Kennedy. Oswald’s wife was well aware that he had taken a shot at Walker and had reason to think he might try to strike again. Dallas police did not identify Oswald as the assailant in the Walker case until after Kennedy’s assassination.

Read the whole thing.

KEEP UP THE PRESSURE: Mike Lee Isn’t Done With Liz Cheney Yet. He Had a Great Question for Her About Those FBI Agents and J6. “Jan. 6 Committee member Liz Cheney had a fit that the House Speaker Mike Johnson released all of the Jan. 6 video. Why? It didn’t help the narrative that she had been pushing, when it showed people being escorted through the building by the Capitol police — behaving peacefully — with protesters and police even shaking hands. . . . Calling someone a conspiracy theorist without presenting any facts to rebut what he presents is weak sauce. But she can’t dispute the truth of the newly released video. Meanwhile, it was the Committee who hired an ABC former president and ‘documentary storyteller’ to sell their production, while leaving out the newly released video.”

Related:

Think whatever you want about this video (which I regard as quite revealing).

That we only saw the Jan 6 excerpts that Liz Cheney and Adam Schiff wanted us to see, while they hid everything they didn't want us to see (like the below clip), corrupted everything from the start: https://t.co/78oT9JHpVQ

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) November 18, 2023

HMM: Israeli police say extreme sexual violence, rape by Hamas terrorists was systematic: The Civil Commission on October 7th Crimes by Hamas Against Women is working to compile a database of gender-based atrocities.

Related: Why Western Women Are Converting to Islam: Since October 7, young Americans have been professing their devotion to the Quran in ‘the ultimate rebellion against the West.’ Quite a few Western women ran off to join ISIS, too, under similar circumstances.

UPDATE: A friend writes that we haven’t heard anything from the feminists who were going on about “rape culture” a few years ago — or much of any feminists at all — with regard to the rape and sexual mutilation that went on on October 7.

ACTUAL GENOCIDE, OR AT LEAST ETHNIC CLEANSING: A Chart: What Happened to the Jewish Population of the Middle East (There Did Used to Be One).

HOW IT STARTED:

President Joe Biden tied the wars in Ukraine and Israel together during a primetime Oval Office address Thursday, making an impassioned appeal to the American people to support two fellow democracies that he says are facing existential threats.

The president has often cast this moment in history as an “inflection point” – a battle between the world’s democracies and autocracies.

—“Biden makes the case for wartime aid to Israel and Ukraine in primetime address,” CNN.com, October 19th.

How it’s going:

Democracies do not ban opposition parties. The fact that so many such parties ever existed says something about the level of opposition faced by the Ukrainian nationalist government that came to power after the 2014 revolution. Then in May of 2022, the Ukrainian parliament passed a law formally banning all these parties. President Volodymyr Zelensky signed the law. The list included the Opposition Platform for Life, which had held fully 10 percent of the seats in parliament. Among the 11 banned parties are the Socialist Party of Ukraine, the Progressive Socialist Party of the Ukraine, the Union of Left Forces, and the Communist Party of Ukraine.

Democracies do not ban elections, but Ukraine has put the democratic process itself on hold since declaring martial law in 2022. This hiatus was supposed to be temporary, but it has been repeatedly extended, most recently in July 2023. As a result of that vote in the Ukrainian parliament, where all opposition parties have been removed, the parliamentary elections scheduled for last month were canceled. Presidential elections were scheduled for March 2024, but under current rules they too will not be held, and Zelensky has stated that “now is not the time for elections.”

—“Ukraine Sure Doesn’t Look Like a Democracy Anymore,” Newsweek, Friday.

CHANGE: ABA Proposes To Allow Accreditation Of Fully Online Law Schools Like Purdue.

CAR GUYS DON’T DIG EVS: Remember the GTO? How about the Plymouth 383 Road Runner? Don’t forget Chevy’s SS396, the Olds 442, Ford 390 or Dodge Super Bee, either. Car guys (like me and a lot of other Instapunditeers) of a certain age absolutely love’em. But, as The Epoch Times reports, they don’t love Electric Vehicles (EVs). I mean they really, really don’t. No points and plugs to change. No timing to set. No fun.

JOSH BLACKMAN: A Reversal in Rahimi Will Be Tougher to Write Than Critics Admit: Courts are “not insensitive to domestic violence” but are “sensitive to the constitutional rights of the accused.”

The rights of the accused are overwhelmingly important, except when they’re inconvenient to the narrative.

MILE MARKERS ON THE ROAD TO ’24: A Flood of Retirements in Congress Threatens to Upend the 2024 Election.

AT AMAZON, Early Black Friday Deals. #CommissionEarned

WELCOME TO THE CRAZY YEARS:

We have reached a point where the far-left hates J.K Rowling but loves Osama bin Laden

🤷‍♂️ pic.twitter.com/v99b696xcp

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) November 18, 2023

THE GODS OF THE COPYBOOK HEADINGS COULD NOT BE REACHED FOR COMMENT: Pro-Hamas ‘Liberals’ and Other Thoughts on the Binary Nature of Choices. “Excuse me, but if you lie down with dogs, you can’t complain about waking up with fleas, and when Democrats — in a mood of derangement and despair after Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton in 2016 — decided to embrace the violent Antifa mob, they made a choice that had consequences. It turns out the vicious anarchists have ideas about foreign policy that most Democrats consider to be (pardon the phrase) not kosher.”

DISPATCHES FROM AL SHARPTON’S NETWORK: ‘Glorified the massacres:’ An NBC journalist in Israel was arrested on suspicion of inciting terror.

A journalist employed by the NBC was arrested on Thursday on suspicion of inciting terrorism and identifying with a terrorist organization.

Marwat Al-Azza, a 45-year-old journalist, employed by NBC and living in east Jerusalem, was arrested on suspicion of inciting terrorism and identifying with a terrorist organization. This was after four posts on her personal Facebook in recent times concerning the terror attack by Hamas from the Gaza Strip.

The police claim that Al-Azza “arrived ready for arrest”, without a mobile phone, and even wrote phone numbers on her leg.

To be fair, she’s far from the first anti-Semite employed by Comcast: How Al Sharpton Inflamed The Crown Heights Riot And How The Media Lied.

THIS IS COOL:

Deepmind just dropped one of the most powerful AI music generation tool. The impact will be huge.

Their new model, Lyria, can convert simple humming into a full instrument suite.

It can also produce music and vocals from a single text prompt, making it available to all… pic.twitter.com/X3aMgAJ1y1

— Lior⚡ (@AlphaSignalAI) November 17, 2023

MAKE THE RUBBLE BOUNCE: Elon Musk Plans “Thermonuclear” Lawsuit Against Media Matters.

WHOSE SIDE IS BLINKEN ON? NEVER MIND, I KNOW:

MUST READ! THE DIABOLICAL BLINKEN PLAN EXPOSED!

It is crystal clear now that Blinken is exploiting the war against Israel to destroy the existing state of Israel by using pressure, threats, blackmail, leaks, the media, diplomatic backstabbing, the Arab states, the EU, and the…

— Mark R. Levin (@marklevinshow) November 18, 2023

OPEN THREAD: Yeah, it’s Saturday night, everybody’s havin’ fun. I’m in the blogosphere, tryin’ to get my bloggin’ done. Watchin’ the blogs go ’round, watchin’ the blogs go ’round. . .

THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW:

Starship liftoff in slow motion pic.twitter.com/PuWMVyU6Lc

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) November 18, 2023

WAIT, WHAT? OpenAI board in discussions with Sam Altman to return as CEO. There’s no way the board comes out of this looking good.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: Starship lunar lander missions to require nearly 20 launches, NASA says.

BAD NEWS FOR HAMAS: More Please: Bahrain’s Crown Prince Unequivocally Condemns Hamas.

MODERATION IN ALL THINGS: Vigorous Exercise May Have a Concerning Effect We Didn’t Know About. Human beings evolved leading active lives, but with a lot of down time too. That said, I don’t find this study very impressive, due to its size and its use of firefighters, who get exposed to all sorts of chemicals, as subjects.