WOEING: Extra Holes Drilled in 737 Max Pressure Bulkheads.

Boeing has found another significant manufacturing flaw in its 737 Max aircraft and it’s likely to throw a curveball at deliveries of its most popular aircraft.

The company says fuselages from its largest contractor, Spirit AeroSystems, have random extra holes drilled in the rear pressurization bulkhead. The Air Current broke the story on Wednesday and said the issue may be widespread.

Boeing inspectors reportedly found bulkheads with “hundreds” of misaligned and duplicated holes in the structure, some of which were filled with fasteners. They passed Spirit’s quality control inspections.

Absolutely none of that inspires any confidence.

MASSIVE RESISTANCE, UNMASKED: Conservative ASU whistleblower professor exposes DEI requirement in faculty evaluations.

GOTTA CHOOSE ONE OR THE OTHER: Science or faith, that is. Or must we? Not according to the latest installment on HillFaith of the Colson Center’s excellent “What Would You Say?” video series.

CHANGE: Anti-U.S. BRICS Admits 6 New Members, Including Iran.

HIGHER EDUCATION’S CULTURE OF HATE: Uncovered emails show U. Kentucky employees mocking conservative students: The University of Kentucky has apologized after a public records request produced documents showing university employees mocking a conservative student organization.

CUE THE ELECTION-YEAR COVID STRAIN HYPE IN FIVE… FOUR… THREE…: Ohio becomes the THIRD state to detect highly-mutated BA.2.86 COVID variant that ‘can infect vaccinated people better than other strains.’

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Can the Trump-Hating Psycho Prosecutors Be Stopped? “A once-great country is being subjected to the manifestation of the emotional imbalance that’s brought on by being progressive. I wrote in my classic book ‘Don’t Let the Hippies Shower‘ that progressivism is ‘the toddler mindset manifested in adulthood.'”

I’D WONDERED THIS MYSELF: After Prigozhin humiliated Putin, the question was how he survived so long.

“The very fact that Prigozhin existed after the coup completely upended our understanding of the Putin regime,” said Abbas Galyamov, a political consultant and former Putin speechwriter. “The rule was that you can’t go against Putin. For two months, everything was upside down. Prigozhin created a massive problem for Putin, he humiliated him.”

In the two months after the mutiny, Prigozhin appeared down but not out. He was filmed in Belarus telling his mercenaries that the conduct of the war in Ukraine was a “disgrace”. He was photographed on the sidelines of a Russia-Africa summit, and then appeared this week armed and in camouflage somewhere in Africa, saying he was “making Russia even greater on all continents”.

Perhaps more importantly, he was never served with criminal charges after the mutiny. His companies continued to win multimillion-dollar catering contracts, and he continued to travel between Africa, Belarus and Russia on his Embraer jet until it crashed on Wednesday.

“It gave the signal that it was permissible to go against Putin and everything will be OK,” Galyamov said.

Many had the sense that this would not last. The CIA director, William Burns, last month called Putin an “apostle of payback” and warned Prigozhin not to fire his food taster.

Somehow, Prigozhin spent his time in Belarus (which is basically a Russian vassal) and sometimes even safely traveling back to Russia… up until he didn’t.

SPOILER: THEY WON’T. A Lot Of Government Officials Should Be Going To Prison For The Hawaii Fires.

If we had a functioning news media, there’s a video that would be leading every newscast right now. It has nothing to do with a plane crash in Russia, a GOP primary debate, or even the indictment of every lawyer who’s ever given Donald Trump legal advice, as important as all those topics may be. This video is about Americans — including children — who died horribly this month. It’s about how their deaths could have been prevented if their government was even remotely competent.

The footage I’m talking about is an interview with a survivor of the fires in Maui. This interview was conducted not by CNN or NPR but by a real estate agent who moonlights as a citizen journalist. He spoke with a man who goes by “Fish” and survived the blaze in Lahaina. Here’s what that man saw. . . .

He says, “All the cars were lined up, but none of them were moving. . . . And I was wondering what was stopping the traffic. It was a policeman.”

Only those who disobeyed, survived.

EVERY INSTITUTION HAS BEEN CORRUPTED: IRS Backdating Of Documents Highlights Festering Cultural Rot: ‘If The IRS Doesn’t Play By The Rules, They’re The Mob.’

Totally, completely unrelated: “Are you worried that they’re going to try and kill you? Why wouldn’t they try and kill you? Honestly?”

PUNCH BACK TWICE AS HARD: Self-Professed Free Speech Warrior Elon Musk Says He’s Suing Over Censorship.

FLASHBACK: Our society’s ‘top brains’ have gone mad — and dysfunctional politics is the result.

GO, ALICE!  I GUESS HE’S NOT EIGHTEEN ANYMORE: “Alice Cooper Call Transgender Healthcare for Kids a ‘Fad’; Condemns the ‘Whole Woke Thing.'”  Who would have ever thought that Alice Cooper would become the voice of reason?

THE REAL SIN IS BEING GOOD AT WHAT THEY DO: Justice Department sues SpaceX for not hiring refugees.

DEAL OF THE DAY: DONAMA Cervical Pillow for Neck Pain . #CommissionEarned

WHEN CANCEL CULTURE MEETS THE STREISAND EFFECT: Cancel Culture Made Aldean’s ‘Small Town’ Even Bigger. “You’re not gonna love every joke a comedian tells… but what the Republican party needs to lean into is the First Amendment, free speech and the marketplace of ideas.”

PROFILE: Kim Reynolds Shows Her Work.

Reynolds was an accidental governor. Elected lieutenant governor in 2010 as an afterthought on a ticket with Terry Branstad, the longest-serving governor in the state’s history, she was elevated to the big job in 2017 when Branstad was named ambassador to China. Reynolds was mistrusted in some conservative quarters, perceived as a colorless moderate functionary. With a low-key demeanor, pixie-cut hairdo, and skirt suits, she looked the part of one. She did not speak as if her hair were on fire. But “colorless moderate functionary” proved to be a grave underestimation.

Reynolds surprised many observers by winning reelection by a 2.7-point margin in a bad Republican year in the Upper Midwest in 2018. It was the smallest margin of victory for a reelected governor in Iowa since the 1890s. Reynolds had trailed in four of the five post–Labor Day public polls, and she trailed 44 percent to 46 percent in the final Des Moines Register poll — by tradition the gold standard in the state. Yet she ended up clearing 50 percent of the vote, sweeping Iowa’s rural west.

The politics of Iowa were already shifting when Reynolds took office. An older generation of Iowans, who came of age with the New Deal and prairie populism, were staunch Democrats, but they were dying off. Michael Dukakis and Al Gore won Iowa; Bill Clinton and Barack Obama both won it twice. Democrats Tom Vilsack and Chet Culver won three straight elections to the governorship between 1998 and 2006. Democrats controlled the state senate for a decade from 2007 to 2016. Liberal icon Tom Harkin won five terms in the Senate, carrying 94 of the state’s 99 counties in his last election in 2008.

The state swung 16 points to the right between 2012 and 2016, when Donald Trump carried it by 9.4 points. Even so, Democrats as recently as 2018 won three of the state’s four House districts while Reynolds was winning her first statewide election. Like Ron DeSantis in Florida, Reynolds has presided over the consolidation of a purple state into a red juggernaut.

Read the whole thing.

THERE ISN’T MUCH THE HOUSE CAN DO BUT AT LEAST THEY’RE DOING SOMETHING: The House Judiciary Committee Has Fani Willis in Its Sights. “Turning first to the question of motivation, it is noteworthy that just four days before this indictment, you launched a new campaign fundraising website that highlighted your investigation into President Trump.”

LOL: Vivek’s Foreign Policy Experience Questioned As He’s Never Bombed A Brown Person Before.

CDR. SALAMANDER: Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad BRICs? Let’s dance. “Led by China and Russia, BRICS are morphing in to something aimed are creating a new international economic and rules based order by challenging the old. The present structure, led by the USA and its dollar simply is not what they want. If the BRICS want to dance, then let’s dance. There is a natural counter to BRICS that in economic, human, and cultural criteria is superior and clearly differentiated. Of course, I’m talking about the G7.”

FROM RACONTEUR PRESS ANTHOLOGIES:  Your Honor, I Can Explain.

#COMISSIONEARNED

Sometimes, things go wrong. Sometimes, they go very, very wrong. And then you’re explaining to the judge where the contraband came from, why the goat is covered in peanut butter, and why the courtroom suddenly smells like a freshly fertilized field.

Your Honor, I Can Explain is a collection of 10 stories about when things went wrong. Really, really wrong. With the added bonus of a specific character in each story. The authors were required to include Andrew Spurgle, in any capacity they cared to, and make him gloriously incompetent.

Some of the stories are funny, some of them are scary, all of them are worth enjoying.

THAT’S ALL? THEY MUSTN’T HAVE LOOKED VERY HARD: Scientists found over 1,000 AI bots on X stealing selfies to create fake accounts.

Now do facebook!  Oh, I see. It’s not owned by musk, and it’s completely controlled, so “scientists” aren’t interested.

HE’S GOT LOTS OF PRACTICE STICKING TO THE NARRATIVE:  Ex-NY Times CEO Mark Thompson leads field to run CNN after Chris Licht ouster: report.

THIS IS THE TWENTY FIRST CENTURY WE WERE PROMISED:  Breakthrough AI implants let paralyzed woman ‘talk’ for first time in years.

NO HOUSE-PASSED BILL IS GOING TO BE TAKEN UP IN THE SENATE, SO INVESTIGATION IS WHAT THEY CAN DO:  McCarthy Hints Congressional Investigation of Federal Maui Response.

Turn on the lights. Expose the swamp.