Archive for 2024
August 30, 2024
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: NASA’s Next Rocket Launcher Project Is Going Off the Rails.
NASA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) issued a scathing report on the space agency’s second mobile launcher (ML-2) for its Moon rocket, which could cost $2.2 billion more than originally estimated.
The report, issued this week, revealed the results of an audit of the ongoing development of the mobile launcher, which will be used to assemble, transport, and launch NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket. OIG found significant cost overruns and schedule delays, with the mobile launcher potentially costing six times more than its initial value.
In 2019, NASA awarded a $383 million contract to Bechtel to design and build a second mobile launcher that will be used to transport the SLS rocket to its launchpad for the upcoming Artemis 4 mission, scheduled for launch in September 2028. At the time, Bechtel was supposed to deliver the launcher by March 2023. By 2022, the contract value had increased to more than $1 billion and its delivery date had been delayed to May 2026.
Despite the initial cost projections, the OIG report estimates that the mobile launcher could end up costing $2.7 billion and that it would not be ready to support the SLS launch until September 2029.
$2.7 billion and years late for a launch tower? Heads should roll — but won’t.
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: ‘What Do YOU Think My Policies Might Be?’ Kamala Harris Asks CNN’s Dana Bash During Interview.
Given the very close coordination between the media and Vice President Harris’ campaign, this conversation likely happened — just not when the cameras were rolling.
FINALLY, THE LONG-AWAITED MIAMI VICE MEETS DR. STRANGELOVE CROSSOVER CAN BE SEEN: Photographer Visits Underground House Built by Eccentric Millionaire for Nuclear Fallout. “You need to have a penchant for over-the-top kitsch, insane colour combinations and James Bond-villain-lair aesthetics. Which I do…You could party down here for weeks and not even realise there was a nuclear war going on upstairs.”
FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY [VIP]: The Absolute Fastest Way to Stop a Speeding Car. “It’s time for your much-needed break from the serious news, and this week Florida Man learns there’s an even faster way than the PIT maneuver to stop a speeding car, a lovely experiment in happiness, and the watermelons that were green on the outside and meth on the inside.”
TRAPPED IN 2020: Meet the Americans STILL isolating 4 years into Covid pandemic… including NJ woman who’s been in lockdown for 1,620 days.
Surprisingly, CTL-F “Taylor Lorenz” brings back zero results.
LIMITED TIME DEAL: Ninja Air Fryer Pro 4-in-1 with 5 QT Capacity. #CommissionEarned
WOEING: NASA cuts 2 from next SpaceX flight to make room for astronauts stuck at space station. “NASA’s Nick Hague and Russian Aleksandr Gorbunov will launch in September aboard a SpaceX rocket for the orbiting laboratory. The duo will return with Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore in February. NASA decided it’s too risky for Williams and Wilmore to fly home in their Boeing Starliner capsule, marred by thruster troubles and helium leaks. Bumped from the SpaceX flight: NASA astronauts Zena Cardman and Stephanie Wilson. NASA said they could fly on future missions.”
MOLLIE HEMINGWAY: If Donald Trump’s Sex Life Is Fair Game For The Election, So Is Kamala Harris.’
To be clear, this is not about defending Trump’s private life, which is in many ways indefensible. This is about being honest about the state of American politics. If you want to understand why someone as allegedly immoral as Donald Trump wasn’t immediately kicked off the political stage because of his supposedly outrageous character flaws, you merely have to recognize that the American public rightly understands that the Democrat Party is itself fully in the thrall of figures whose personal dealings and sex lives are in many ways worse than Trump’s peccadilloes.
Eight years later, people are still in total denial about this, and maybe you shouldn’t feign outrage over a talk radio guy being cruder about the truth than your sensitive ears can handle. Especially when you’re silent about Kamala Harris’ past, the Clintons’ continued influence, and your friends and allies cashing checks from Reid Hoffman. But other than that, I’m sure [the Bullwork’s Sarah] Longwell is a swell gal.
Read the whole thing.
VDH: New rules for radicals — How to reinvent Kamala Harris.
6. Do not mention Biden at all. Harris is not to be seen with him in photos or at events. Create a vaguely joyful but completely imaginary, “Harris record.” Separate it from the miserable Biden-Harris administration. Leak that she was unhappy with Biden.
7. Call Trump a mobster, criminal, insurrectionist, and dictator nonstop. Never provide any evidence to support such charges. When challenged, double down and let loose with worse invective.
8. Talk about abortion nonstop. But never dare mention the word. Relabel abortion “reproductive rights.” Falsely reinvent Trump as a radical anti-abortionist who wants a federal ban.
9. Follow the 2020 successful Biden “basement” strategy: keep out of the public eye, silent on the issues, reliant on 70 percent of the ballots not being cast on Election Day, and outsourcing the campaign to the fusion media and billionaire class.
10. Harangue about race and gender nonstop. Define the election as a stark binary between a “young” oppressed but dynamic black woman and an old oppressor racist white guy.
11. Reinvent the “journey” and life “story” of Harris — the child of two PhDs — into a hardscrabble, lifelong struggle against poverty, systemic racism, and greedy “billionaires” like Trump. She is always to be from Oakland — never Berkeley.
12. Talk about transparency nonstop. Feign a willingness to have three or four debates. But agree to hold only one — and only on a left-wing network. Promise interviews and town halls endlessly. Enter into discussions about them. But always delay, stonewall, and evade for the next 10 weeks.
13. Meet privately and endlessly with the megarich donor class that helped to remove Biden. Assure Wall Street, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley grandees that banter about wealth taxes, taxes on unearned income, and higher corporate taxes are mere campaign posturing. Then outraise Trump again 3-1.
14. Privately assure leftist activists and Democrat politicos that any backslidings from supporting lifelong left-wing advocacies are temporary and necessary 70-day pretexts. Instead look at what Harris actually does after November 5, not anything she must say before then.
Saul Alinsky published Rules for Radicals in 1971 after the domestic battles of the previous decade, where American politics largely consisted of radical new leftists versus older, establishment New Deal Democrats. (Conservatives were largely on the sidelines. Goldwater’s stillborn campaign failed in 1964 and Nixon was a moderate Rockefeller Republican.) But reading between the lines of VDH’s latest column, it’s obvious that the radicals have been running the show for the Democratic Party (and by extension, much of the country) for quite some time.
THERE’S ONLY SO MUCH WATER THE INFOTAINMENT COMPLEX CAN CARRY: Why Isn’t Kamala Harris Farther Ahead?
“Kitchen sink” indictments usually produce at least one conviction, just because the jury figures something should stick. That’s why they’re used.
WHAT’S DOJ HIDING ABOUT ITS SPYING ON HILL STAFF? Great question and one to which Empower Oversight (EO) has been trying for more than a year to get some answers. After filing five Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests without getting anything from DOJ but a proforma acknowledgement of receipt, EO is asking a federal judge to order the government to cough up the documents. I think it’s all about that quaint notion known as “accountability.”
THIS WILL END WELL: Germany Vows ‘Knife Control’ After ISIS Refugee Slashes Throats at Diversity Festival.
- After laying a white rose at the site of the Diversity Festival slashing that left three dead and eight wounded, Chancellor Olaf Scholz promised rapid action would be taken against knives.
- Right now, people in Germany can carry knives up to 4.7 inches long. The law will be modified so that they can only carry knives up to 2.4 inches long. No one appears to have considered the possibility that Muslim terrorists on the way to killing as many infidels as possible might violate the law and carry a concealed knife of 4 inches or longer. Such thoughts are unthinkable.*
- There were 13,844 “knife crime” incidents in Germany in 2023, which the authorities are blaming on the existence of knives and not the perpetrators, who are reportedly mostly young Muslim men.
- But locating the source of the problem is probably “not a very helpful insight,” In the UK, people sharing such insights are being locked up even as Islamic terrorists are being freed.
“Knife control” headlines were rampant in the UK circa 2018. The policy worked about as well you’d expect: Britain’s Knife Control Is A Bad, Real-Life Parody Of Gun Control.
* A tacit reminder that integration of Muslim immigrants in German society may not be going very well:
THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONTINUES APACE: Kamala Harris’s New Arab Outreach Director Said ‘Zionists’ Are ‘Controlling’ American Politics.
Kamala Harris’s newly appointed head of Arab-American outreach once accused Zionists of “controlling” American politics, echoing an anti-Semitic trope that suggests Jews nefariously manipulate global affairs.
“The Zionists have a strong voice in American politics,” Brenda Abdelall, an Egyptian-American lawyer and former Department of Homeland Security official, said in a 2002 interview with the New York Sun while attending the American Muslim Council’s annual convention. “I would say they’re controlling a lot of it.”
Abdelall, whom Harris tapped earlier this week to help galvanize Arab voters, made the remarks after a speaker at the event, anti-Israel professor Jamil Fayez, said that “Zionists are destroying America.” Responding to his remarks, Abdelall said that while “‘destroying’ is a harsh word,” supporters of the Jewish state do control American politics.
The American Muslim Council’s 2002 confab also provided attendees with a chance to meet anti-Semitic former congresswoman Cynthia McKinney (D., Ga.), who famously blamed Jews for the 9/11 terror attack and attended a 2009 Holocaust-denial gathering in London. Her father similarly blamed Jews when she lost her congressional seat shortly after the 2002 conference. “Jews have bought everybody. Jews. J-E-W-S,” he said.
No wonder Josh Shapiro wanted nothing to do with this ticket. Or as America’s Newspaper of Record reported at the start of the month:
MIGRAINE NEWS: Migraine drug Ubrelvy may stop headaches at first sign.
STEVE SAILOR: Democrats are finally noticing Karl Rove wasn’t right about the Hispanic Vote.
For the first two decades of this century, the conventional wisdom of paid political strategists for both parties was George W. Bush’s svengali Karl Rove’s grand strategy that opening wide the borders was what Hispanic voters cared about most, that whichever party pandered hardest to Latinos on immigration would rule the Hispanic-dominated future. Sure, the Republicans would lose out on each additional Latino let in, but they’d make up for it in volume. Or something.
I was a rare voice of dissent. It seemed to me that the Hispanics who cared most about Open Borders were exactly the the handful of Latinos whom strategists and journalists talked to the most, such as Hispanic politicians and NGO ethnic activists. Of course, they benefit from swamping the country with more warm Latin American bodies whom they could claim to be the leaders of.
My emphasis over the last 24 years has been instead that Americans of Latin-American descent who vote aren’t monolithic Open Borders fanatics like their white-subsidized elites want them to be. Instead, Hispanic voters tend to favor traditional Democratic Harry Hopkins-style policies of tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect for basic class reasons.
The Democrats appear to have finally figured out that Rove was wrong and I was right.
Read the whole thing — also, Rove turned out to be wrong about a number of issues.
HARDLY SEEMS POSSIBLE: Tim Walz Made Kamala’s First Interview Worse, Not Better.
MATTHEW CONTINETTI: Kamala Comes Out of Hiding.
It was, Dana Bash said on CNN at 9 p.m. Thursday, “a watershed moment.” Not just a watershed—”a defining moment.” Why the fuss? Kamala Harris was giving an interview.
Think about that. Somehow, in the whirlwind of campaign 2024, we have reached the point where it’s news that the Democratic nominee for president of the United States of America will answer questions from the press. Until now, if you’ve been interested in Harris’s views, you’ve had to rely, with one or two exceptions, on the Harris whisperers—the unnamed aides quoted in mainstream media disavowing the vice president’s previous positions on health care, energy, the environment, immigration, and crime. The interview mattered because it was the first time we heard the nominee unfiltered, without her teleprompter, no notes.
But bolstered by her sidekick:
After watching the CNN interview of Vice President Kamala Harris and Governor Tim Walz it is clear that Walz is the first “emotional support candidate” in history. Just as some people need an emotional support pet it is clear Harris is sufficiently insecure she needs an…
— Newt Gingrich (@newtgingrich) August 30, 2024
MORE: This is CNN.
The contrast between her gentle, loving, and indefensibly incurious treatment of her pals Kamala and Tim with this hostile and badgering debate against someone she clearly loathes could not be more dramatic. https://t.co/geMAWkZE0Y
— Mollie (@MZHemingway) August 30, 2024
WHEN THEY TALK ABOUT “OUR DEMOCRACY,” THIS IS THE KIND OF THING THEY MEAN:
In September 2019, Senator Kamala Harris called on Twitter to censor the sitting President Donald Trump.
This was after the Democrat Party's Russiagate hoax was exposed as a multi-year disinformation campaign run against the American people.
She's a vindictive authoritarian who… https://t.co/09tgwuShZ4
— KanekoaTheGreat (@KanekoaTheGreat) August 30, 2024
ABOUT ‘THE AFTER PARTY CURRICULUM:’ Unless you travel in evangelical circles, you may not have heard of the “The After Party Curriculum” (TAP) authored by Curtiss Chang and Nancy French, based on a project by Russell Moore, David French and Chang.
But you should know about it if you aren’t familiar with conservative Christian doings because, according to evangelical blogger/author/podcaster Natasha Crain, TAP is being “heavily promoted this election year to individuals, churches, and Christian institutions (such as colleges) to counter the ‘dangerous trend’ of evangelicals having their political identity formed by ‘partisan forces, not by true Biblical faith.’” One suspects, particularly in the case of David French, that voting for Kamala Harris for president would be a result of “true Biblical faith.”
Readers familiar with Moore and David French will not be surprised to discover this fact about TAP, but Crain’s lengthy and devastating analysis points to much, much more evidence — including TAP’s funding coming from Far-Left foundations — that TAP is another illustration of the growing inroads being made by the secular, anti-Christian Left into evangelical Christianity.
I rate Crain’s TAP analysis as a must-read, especially for anybody who claims to be a follower of Jesus Christ and an independent or conservative in your politics.
TRUMP-VANCE CAMPAIGN ROLLS OUT BRUTAL NEW AD USING THIS LINE FROM HARRIS’ CNN INTERVIEW:
COMRADE KAMALA: "MY VALUES HAVE NOT CHANGED." pic.twitter.com/ZjYR02wFBe
— Trump on 𝕏 (@trump_repost) August 30, 2024
As Ed Morrissey notes, “Harris doesn’t fight. It’s not in her. Harris retreats when challenged and avoids confrontation when possible. She lacks a fighting instinct, and her entire campaign thus far demonstrates it.”
Harris expects to be elected on the basis of her identity and her “joy.” And that’s all she’s prepared to engage on. What does that say about what kind of president she will make — especially on foreign policy? If she won’t fight for herself and her “values,” why would anyone expect her to fight for America and its interests?
And that’s it. That’s the election in a nutshell. We have one candidate who won’t fight, and another candidate whose first instincts are to run to a fight. It makes me wonder whether Harris and her campaign really plan to show up for the debate on September 10. If they do, they’d better find a fighting spirit, or it may turn out worse for Harris than the previous debate turned out for Joe Biden.
Maybe there really is strength through “Joy,” if this is the best Harris can do, but is counting on the sheer force of the DNC-MSM to drag her across the finish line, past a candidate they’ve spent nearly a decade portraying as the anti-Christ.