OPEN THREAD: Happy Friday Eve.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: China is working on a design for a reusable air-launched orbital rocket.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: China’s Mars Lander Detects Subsurface Geometrical Shapes in Scientific First.

WELL, YES: Bob McManus: Anti-Israel protests have a higher purpose — a complete teardown of the West. “Please don’t mistake Wednesday’s Rockefeller Center Christmas tree demonstration for just another unimaginative lashing-out by dyspeptic attention-mongering misfits. It was much more than that. . . . It was an enthusiastic endorsement of rape, torture, mutilation and kidnapping — a brutal forecast of what the Palestinian war cry ‘from the river to the sea’ really means: extermination in detail. The audacity is staggering. What happened in Midtown Wednesday night, and during the Macy’s parade Thanksgiving day and at transportation hubs, river crossings and public parks citywide for weeks now, are not protests per se. They are efforts to seduce New York into standing behind the man on the pillar — if not endorsing the October 7 slaughter explicitly, then by acquiescing in it.”

IT’S CALLED “PULLING A TORRICELLI.” Democrats have no Biden backup plan for 2024, despite age concerns. My prediction is that he’ll drop out late, and the nominee will be picked in a (formerly) smoke-filled room. This time the scent will be oat milk lattes, but otherwise it’s the same story. This is why they’re building up Newsom.

AT AMAZON, shop Holiday Deals.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: “My fifth-grade science project was to type everyone’s blood in my class. My oldest son’s fifth-grade science project, four decades later, was the equivalent of number-painting a comic book.”

LIFE IN THE BLUE ZONES: Massachusetts Hate Crimes Task Force Member Accuses Israel of Genocide, Says Jews Control The Media.

THEN THEY SAID “NO, IT’S THE CHILDREN WHO ARE WRONG.”

Protesters Shouting Down Children Singing Christmas Carols Briefly Wonder If They're The Bad Guys https://t.co/aWylO64hpd pic.twitter.com/XcE8JSdWiV

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) November 30, 2023

THE NEW SPACE RACE: With another record broken, the world’s spaceports are busier than ever: No turning back? We can expect even more launches worldwide next year.

HOLIDAY DEAL: Bose QuietComfort Earbuds II. #CommissionEarned

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Five Great .38 Special Revolvers.

I WILL FEAR NO EVIL: Transferring and Rejuvenating Brains As a Path to a Problematic Form of Physical Immortality.

WOW: Utah State QB Chooses to Forgo His Final Season to Become a Different Kind of Hero.

AN ENGINEERING TRIUMPH: The Mars helicopter Ingenuity is an amazing success. NASA’s already testing tech for the next generation (video).

WORDS MEAN THINGS: Don’t Call It Treason (VIP)

JOANNE JACOBS: ‘B-flation’ misleads parents: 89% say their child is at grade level. “Seventy-nine percent of parents say their child is receiving mostly B’s or better, and 89 percent believe their child is at or above grade level in reading and math, according to a new recent Gallup-Learning Heroes study, report Jennifer Dineen and Andrea Malek Ash. But standardized test scores show that’s not true for at least half of students. The gap between parents’ perceptions and test scores is very large for black and Hispanic students. ”

LIFESTYLE PLAYS A ROLE, BUT LONGEVITY IS MOSTLY ABOUT HEREDITY: Charlie Munger ate peanut brittle, drank Diet Coke, and refused to exercise — and still lived to 99. Did that make him a SuperAger?

LET IT GO: Even in Death, Henry Kissinger Discombobulates the Left.

HMM: Actively monitoring cervical lesions linked to heightened long-term risk of cervical cancer. Is it really surprising that substituting “monitoring” for actual treatment produces a worse result?

A BILLION HERE AND A BILLION THERE…: US Clean Energy Stocks Have Lost $30 Billion In Value In The Last 6 Months.

KRUISER: Confederate Is the New Nazi—NY Times Compares Trump to Jefferson Davis.

IN THE MAIL: Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy. #CommissionEarned

STEALTH DISCRIMINATION: Top Law Firm Collects Photographs of Potential Applicants, Raising Discrimination Concerns.

THANKS, FELLAS: How shooters lured historic Colorado wolves to their deaths in Wyoming.

On June 30, 2020, a Colorado Parks and Wildlife officer and two federal special agents visited all three wolf kill sites in Wyoming. They confirmed their positions, and the reported kill sites, by matching trees with trees they could see in the background of photos one of the wolf hunters posted on Facebook.

The investigation began on a Colorado biologist’s suspicion that one of the wolves reportedly killed in Wyoming had actually been killed south of the state line. When the biologist inquired with the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, the agency “refused to share” wolf harvest information.

Once the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service got involved, Wyoming did turn over wolf harvest records for four animals killed near the state line. Although there are few rules and licenses aren’t necessary, wolves killed in the predator zone must be reported within 10 days. The outfitter and his son both reported their kills within three days or less.

Game and Fish also obtained DNA samples from the animals, according to large carnivore supervisor Dan Thompson. The samples, however, were not analyzed in a way that provides any insight as to where the short-lived wolf pack in northwest Colorado and southwest Wyoming originated, he said.

The outfitter told WyoFile that a special agent told him the investigation wasn’t going anywhere early on in 2020.

“He called me like a week later and said, ‘You’ve been cleared of everything,’” the man told WyoFile. “He said, ‘Don’t worry about it.’”

Seriously —- thanks, fellas.

And here’s some background on Colorado’s plan to reintroduce wolves to the Rockies, which — surprise! — is popular in Denver and Boulder but not so much in the rural areas that got outvoted.