OPEN THREAD: Finish out your weekend here.

TOMORROW: ‘Zero hour’ for Artemis 1: NASA’s most powerful rocket to launch risky moon mission test flight. “Liftoff of NASA’s Artemis 1 moon mission is set for Aug. 29 at 8:33 a.m. EDT.”

Good luck, guys.

WHAT COULD GO WRONG? Scientists Just Genetically Edited a Million Years of Evolution Into Mouse DNA.

SATAN CREATES HECK, A LIGHTER VERSION OF HELL: Here are the torments involved.

YOU WILL EAT BUGS AND WORMS AND YOU WILL LIKE IT, PEASANTS: A new seasoning smells like meat thanks to sugar — and mealworms.

OH, TO BE IN ENGLAND: Police remove lesbians from GAY PRIDE parade in Cardiff: Moment cop tells gender-critical women to leave LGBT march because ‘whatever you are, you’re causing confrontation’ with trans groups and their supporters.

Police told a group of lesbians to leave a gay pride march in Cardiff after an officer was filmed telling the gender-critical women to step aside due to ‘confrontation’ with a transgender marchers and their supporters.

The activist group ‘Get The L Out UK’, which ‘stands against transgenderism’, shared footage from yesterday’s Cardiff Pride event.

In the clip, two rival marchers can be seen shouting at each other on St Mary Street during the LGBT march.

Organisers of the event, Pride Cymru, have since claimed the lesbian group – seen displaying banners reading ‘transactivism erases lesbians’ and ‘lesbians don’t like penises’ – had ‘interrupted’ the march, and were not officially registered to attend.

The police officer can be heard saying to the women they are ‘causing confrontation between different groups of people’.

He said: ‘At the moment, your march, this group of people is causing confrontation between different groups of people.’

Women are then heard replying ‘we’re lesbians, it’s Cardiff pride’.

The police officer replies, saying ‘whatever you are… at the moment, is causing confrontation’.

More at the London Spectator: Why are lesbians no longer welcome at Pride? “Whilst Pride became populated with floats carrying drag queens resplendent in tassels, glitter and sequins, with rollerskating nuns following behind, lesbians sought to continue to remind the world that there were real issues to be fought, such as women losing their children to violent men because of anti-lesbian bigotry in the family courts; compulsory heterosexuality and the pressure to marry men and have babies, and a total lack of understanding that women have the right to control our own sexuality. Lesbians have had enough, as we saw from the Cardiff parade yesterday. If gay men wish to turn what used to be an honourable protest march into nothing more than a street party, and include kinksters and cross dressers in the rainbow flag, that’s up to them, but lesbians have a lot of work left to do. As Angela Wild, a founder member of GTLO told me, they protested the march to highlight the appalling treatment of lesbians by the queer-identified crowd, and the climate of sexual coercion that lesbian have to navigate daily. ‘The way we were treated, both by the LGBT crowd and the police who refused to let us march and failed to protect us is a clear reflection of the current anti-lesbian image brought by trans activists,’ says Wild.”

THIS SEEMS TO BE THE GREEN PATTERN: EV Battery Leases Could Be A Boon for Manufacturers, a Bust for Consumers.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: When To Choose Between IWB vs. OWB Holsters.

READER FAVORITE: Apple AirPods (2nd Generation) Wireless Earbuds. #CommissionEarned

BOEING IS HAVING A BAD DECADE: NASA, Boeing announce Starliner crewed test mission pushed to February. “While planning is going well, a CFT mission to the International Space Station planned to be the first flight with astronauts on Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner, originally scheduled for this fall, has been pushed back to February.”

I remember back in the ’90s, when the consensus was that Boeing was great in every way — which in retrospect, was about the time it started to go downhill.

UPDATE: A reader emails: “It pretty much started with the Rockwell aerospace and McDonnell Douglas
mergers in the mid 90s. It’s a long story, but somehow the MDAC people ended up running the company, and they started running it into the ground, including moving HQ from Seattle to Chicago, and putting the bean counters instead of the engineers in charge.”

Yeah, that’s the story as I understand it too.

ROGER SIMON: Say Goodbye to Experts (Mostly).

What in the Sam Hill is an expert, and why should we trust them?

Personally, I cringe when I see in a headline—in this paper and virtually everywhere else—the phrase “experts say.” My back immediately goes up and I do my best Yogi Berra imitation: “Sez who?”

This is especially true when the name of the expert is not specified. In some quarters (not here, as far as I can tell) it is deliberately omitted. The use of “experts say” then is often just a cover for what the journalist him or herself really thinks—a method of passing off opinion as news.

We see that almost every day at The New York Times and The Washington Post under such rubrics as “someone in a position to know.” Who, exactly? Well, that’s for me to know and for you to find out.

Some areas of expertise have long evinced skepticism. Five minutes watching a half-dozen economists on CNBC or Fox Business predict the direction of the stock market is a perfect example.

Even better might be the “foreign policy expert.” Who paying attention cannot recall decades of misguided nonsense emanating from Middle East experts after the Oslo Accords that never amounted to anything, or even exacerbated the violence?

Then along came the galumphing Donald Trump, expert in Fifth Avenue real estate, I suppose, who employed some common sense—you might say street smarts—allying the Gulf States with Israel against their common threat, Iran. And, voila—a huge step forward to peace.

The pandemic, needless to say, has thrown us all into the arms of warring medical and scientific experts. It has been quite a battle—much of it, I am pleased to say, engaged in with more clarity and usefulness than elsewhere on these digital pages.

One of the few positive things that has emerged from the COVID-19 awfulness is that our suspiciousness of experts has grown considerably, as it should. The intelligent person now knows to look past the label (institutes led, doctorates earned) on the supposed expert—who had a fancier vitae than Dr. Anthony Fauci?—to the true character, knowledge, and intentions of the human being beneath that label.

Related: The Suicide of Expertise.

WELL, WE WEREN’T READY FOR THE LAST ONE BECAUSE THE CDC, NIH, ETC. ARE FULL OF IDIOTS, LIARS AND CROOKS: The coming storm: America is not ready for a future pandemic.

And the problem isn’t that “funding for core public health functions remains ‘grossly insufficient.'” It’s that the relevant agencies are full of idiots, liars, and crooks.

Honestly, the decentralized health system of the day handled the 1918 flu better than the federal apparat of today handled Covid, which was objectively a much less serious thing, despite colossal budgets by comparison.

ATOMIC BETTY: ‘Miniature’ Life Lessons.

TAKE NOTE: Japan Will Restart Nuclear Reactors and Build New Nuclear.

Also: China’s 2 Megawatt Molten-salt Thorium Nuclear Reactor Has Start up Approval.

BRAVES MASCOT OBLITERATES LITTLE KIDS DURING HALFTIME OF THE FALCONS/JAGUARS GAME:

Atlanta Braves mascot Blooper taught a group of young kids a very valuable lesson during the Jaguars/Falcons game.

In the era of handouts and participation trophies, kids have started to learn that nothing comes hard in life. Well, Blooper did a little educating for the children during halftime Saturday when a youth team was scrimmaging.

He unleashed some stiff arms that absolutely demolished the tiny children attempting to tackle him. Feast your eyes on an automatic first ballot hall of fame video below.

Football is a tough sport. It’s not easy. It’s an absolute war in the trenches and in the open field. Blooper – a baseball mascot – understood that better than the kids on the field.

Click over for the video. I’m not expecting the Cowboys’ mascot Rowdy to demonstrate similar moves anytime soon, which explains much about the Jerry Jones era.

UNEXPECTEDLY! Ford Electric Mustang Price Going Up After Biden, Dems Handed Out EV Tax Credit.

ROGER KIMBALL: Biden’s Debt Transference and Enforcement Arm.

I am not sure the Biden Administration has admitted yet whether the economy is in recession, but it is. And it is certainly suffering from inflation—or “Bidenflation” as some wags denominate it—the worst, we’re told, in 40 years. Gas prices have moderated a bit from their highs in May and early June, but they are still more than twice what they were when Biden took office, i.e., when Donald Trump was president, and everyone thinks prices will climb again this winter.

So, prices are rising, your money is worth less, and, oh, by the way, you have less of it. On Friday, the Dow-Jones Industrial Average lost just over 1,000 points, wiping out billions in value. And if the “Prosperity Reduction Act” (the real name of the inflationary “Inflation Reduction Act”) weren’t enough of a blow—raising taxes and weaponizing the tax farmers of the IRS—Biden has delivered another sharp jab to the solar plexus of the American taxpayer with his hare-brained student loan “forgiveness” scheme.

True, from time immemorial, the promise of debt forgiveness has been a powerful political gesture. But as has often been pointed out since the student loan subsidy was announced, Biden’s program is not really debt forgiveness. Rather, it is debt transference. That is, the debt doesn’t go away. It is just dropped in someone else’s lap. And that someone, Dear Reader, is you.

Flying monkey* Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) dramatized what is happening back in 2020 when, having touted the idea of forgiving students loans herself, she responded to someone who asked her if that meant he would be getting back the money he saved so that his daughter didn’t have any student loans. “Of course not,” was the squaw’s response. The moral of the story: “So you’re going to pay for people who didn’t save any money and those of us who did the right thing get screwed.”

Crisply put, that. Work hard. Save your money. Pay your debts. Then get saddled with someone else’s debts because you didn’t have the foresight to be improvident at the opportune moment.

Feel like a chump yet?

Biden might: Yikes! Yellen and Jill Biden advised him not to cancel student loan debt, but Joe listened to someone else.

* That’s a pretty racist thing to say about someone who was “Harvard Law’s ‘first woman of color'” — until she wasn’t: Elizabeth Warren in Iowa: ‘I am not a person of color.’

Speaking of whom, America’s Newspaper of Record “reports:” Harvard To Pay Elizabeth Warren $400,000 To Teach Class On Why College Is So Expensive.

THAT MUSHROOM CLOUD YOU SEE IS ANOTHER TRUMP MEDIA NARRATIVE EXPLODING BEFORE YOUR EYES:

Heh, heh. If you think the Fourth Estate being used as the Fifth Column is hilarious, it gets even “funnier.” The Post outed its own sources in its later story about being totally wrong. It came in a follow-up whoopsie-daisy story about the release of the affidavit.

Behold:

“In addition, the FBI believed that the material contained what it calls “national defense information,” or some of the most guarded secrets. (The Washington Post has reported the government feared nuclear secrets were at Mar-a-Lago.)

So all the Post‘s sources — who it nebulously described as “‘people familiar with the investigation” and “experts in classified information” and “former senior intelligence officials” and “a person familiar with the investigation” who said there were nuclear secrets at Mar-a-Lago — were “the FBI” and the “government.”

Please laugh.

Then vote.

Read the whole thing.