PROCUREMENT BLUES: Air Force puts the kibosh on the $1,300 coffee cup.

The Air Force has used the hot cups — which have an internal heating element to warm up liquids such as water, coffee or soup and are specially manufactured to plug into aircraft systems — for decades, since the KC-10 Extender tanker was introduced in 1981.

But their problem lay in a faulty plastic handle that easily broke when dropped. And because replacement handles weren’t available, that meant Air Force units ordered entirely new hot cups. That was expensive enough in 2016, when they cost $693 apiece. But the price tag has now swelled to $1,280 apiece, drawing the ire of Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa.

The Phoenix Spark innovation program at Travis Air Force Base in California earlier this year began looking for a cheaper way to deal with broken handles, and figured out a way to 3-D print replacement parts for 50 cents apiece. Travis posted a release online July 2 about the 3-D printing solution and said it “could save thousands.”

Nice.

BUT OF COUSE: CNN Host Says ‘No One’s Blaming the President’ for Pipe Bombs Before Panelist Blames Trump.

Usually there’s at least a brief turnaround time before the double standard comes into effect.

JEFFREY HARDING: California’s Feminist Corporate Coup.

The law’s goal is gender parity, but it is couched in financial terms suggesting that companies with women on their boards do better than those that don’t. Several studies are cited to back this claim (UC Cal, Credit Suisse, and McKinsey). Catalyst, a nonprofit that promotes women in the workplace, did a widely quoted study that claimed:

• Return on Equity: On average, companies with the highest percentages of women board directors outperformed those with the least by 53%.
• Return on Sales: On average, companies with the highest percentages of women board directors outperformed those with the least by 42%.
• Return on Invested Capital: On average, companies with the highest percentages of women board directors outperformed those with the least by 66%.

This claim doesn’t meet the smell test and the overwhelming conclusion of scientific research in the field says that women directors have little or no effect on corporate performance. Much of the data supporting the feminist theory lacks empirical rigor and is coincidental (A happened and then B happened, thus A caused B).

“Party of Science.”

JOHN HAWKINS: So What if the Saudis Killed Jamal Khashoggi? “The Trump administration should be exactly as upset about this as it takes to best represent our interests.”

THE TECHIES AND NERDS ARE GOING TO SAVE US FROM THE SJWS: Tech Community Outraged after SQLite Founder Adopts Benedictine Code of Conduct.

THIS IS CNN:

Shameless.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: How much a pint of beer costs around the world.

CHRIS QUEEN: The 10 Most Bizarre Hits of the ‘70s.

I still have a small soft spot for Sweet’s “Love Is Like Oxygen,” which is either too awful or not quite awful enough to make the list.

BLUE WAVE? Republican Patrick Morrisey Takes Lead Over Sen. Manchin in West Virginia. “Morrisey, the state attorney general, leads Manchin 44 percent to 42 percent in new poll.”

CONRAD BLACK: About That ‘Blue Wave.’

Those repelled by Trump will not soften until he has retired as president, as with those who hated Franklin D. Roosevelt for spurious ideological or mythic reasons (such as that he gave Eastern Europe to Stalin); or those who disparaged Reagan as “an amiable dunce,” in the words of Clark Clifford, the ageless and elegant Washington fixer and an unsuccessful defense secretary. It would be at least premature, and perhaps wildly optimistic, to compare Trump to FDR and Reagan, the two greatest presidents since Lincoln, but as the voters proceed to the polls in two weeks, they will have to reflect on the indisputable fact of President Trump’s successes. He took a sluggish economy where GDP growth per capita had declined from 4.5 percent under President Reagan to 1 percent under President Obama, under whom federal debt increased by 233 percent in eight years. He has focused attention on the unutterable scandal of the steady influx of millions of illiterate peasants, including many violent criminals, across the southern border, and is the enemy of the permissiveness of “sanctuary” and the prohibition of constitutionally mandated census-takers to ask respondents’ citizenship. Trump has made himself the sole possible agent of enforcement of nuclear nonproliferation by his actions to prevent North Korea and Iran from becoming nuclear military powers, a status that his predecessors effectively conceded to them.

Obama said 2 percent economic growth is the “new normal,” as poverty, food-stamp use, and violence increased. Trump has created a full-employment economy and generated the first increases in purchasing power and job security in this millennium for the lower third of Roosevelt’s “forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.” I don’t believe that most pollsters have adjusted their techniques to allow for a higher voting turnout from what used to be the white working class, or to allow for the reluctance of many Trump voters to identify themselves.

As I was saying earlier, there’s a big gap between the polls and how it feels like this election ought to go.

OIL FROM A STONE: Conoco Is Collecting $2 Billion From Venezuela—One Barrel of Oil at a Time.

Conoco has received an initial payment of $345 million in the form of “cash and commodities” from Venezuela’s state-run oil company, the Houston-based company said on Thursday. The remittance helped allay fears the cash-strapped nation wouldn’t be able to pay off the award in a long-running dispute over asset seizures.

Conoco didn’t provide more details in its statement, but people with knowledge of the matter told Bloomberg News on Wednesday that the company loaded about 1.5 million barrels of Venezuelan crude from terminals in the Caribbean run by Petroleos de Venezuela SA. Conoco resold the cargoes to refineries in the U.S. and Asia, the people said.

It will be interesting to see which winds down first: Venezuela’s debt to Conoco, or Venezuela’s ability to barter it down.

SHOT: Trump tries nicer tone after bomb threats.

CHASER: Democratic Leaders Reject Trump’s Call For Unity After Bomb Scare.

Trump didn’t win by playing nice, and there probably is no playing nice (and winning) with today’s Democrats.

NUMBERS OR FEELINGS? Over at VodkaPundit, a few thoughts on how the contest for the House feels, versus what the polls say. “The numbers all say that the Dems take the House with a slender majority, and they’ve said that to varying degrees for months now. But it just doesn’t feel that way. A booming economy, wage growth, tax cuts… are American voters really willing to risk all that by giving the House to a party which promises to undo those things?”

JOHN LOTT: The Problem With the FBI’s ‘Active Shooter’ Data.

The FBI’s first report claimed that only once from 2000-2013 did a concealed handgun permit holder stop one of 160 reported “active shooter” attacks. These active shooter attacks include any time a gun is fired in a public place, even if no one is injured or killed. They exclude gang fights or attacks that arise out of other crimes such as robberies.

The report got massive news coverage on the front pages of such newspapers as the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, as well as all of the TV news networks. Gun control activists have frequently cited the report in court cases and in political debates to claim that civilians rarely use guns to stop public shootings.

Unfortunately, the problems with the reports have continued during the Trump administration. The latest FBI report, released in May, misses still more cases. The FBI claims that from 2014 to 2017 there were 90 active shooter cases and only seven where permit holders stopped these attacks.

In all, the FBI claims that concealed handgun permit holders have stopped 3.2 percent of active shooter incidents.

But the bureau misses at least 23 cases where permit holders saved the day. That means they stopped 11.5 percent of active shooter incidents from 2000 to 2017. We at the Crime Prevention Research Center are more confident that we have all of the cases from 2014 to 2017, when 16.5 percent of attacks were stopped.

I don’t trust much of anything coming out of the FBI these days.

BREAKING: Megyn Kelly out at NBC, will likely walk with $69 million.

I’d not work for NBC for half that much, if they’re looking for somebody.

COOL: Long lost, 1930’s novel that inspired ‘The Thing’ discovered and set for publication.

Before taking over editorial duties on the magazine and publishing seminal works by authors like Isaac Asimov, Jack Williamson, Robert A. Heinlein, A.E. van Vogt and others, Campbell himself was a writer, and the last major piece of fiction he published was “Who Goes There?”, in which a team of researchers stationed in the Antarctic battle the shape-shifting occupant of a crashed alien ship.

But now, according to The Verge, a longer version of that story may be coming to light decades after being locked away. While researching his new book, Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction, author Alec Nevala-Lee learned that Campbell had actually written a novel-length version of the story, which he cut down for publication in the magazine.

I hope there’s enough there-there to make a solid, longer story, but I’ll read it regardless.

BIPARTISANSHIP: Sens. Ted Cruz and Doug Jones have introduced a Civil Rights cold case bill that is both righteous and politically clever.

“[I]n many cases,” Sens. Jones and Cruz write, “witnesses were intimidated into silence and evidence was intentionally brushed under the rug by corrupt officials. Victims and their families were often afraid to pursue justice against their attackers. And despite the best efforts of law enforcement in many cases, they did not have access to modern forensic methods, and trails went cold.”

They add: “Records and evidence from many of these cases sit locked away in files and vaults, outside of the public eye. As memories fade and witnesses, victims and perpetrators of decades-old crimes pass away, our window to solve these cold cases shrinks.”

The proposed legislation would require that the cold case files be made available at the National Archives and Records Administration. The idea here is that NARA would then create a “collection of documents that would be publicly disclosed, although for certain reasons disclosure of some information may be postponed.” The bill is also careful to take steps to provide identity protections where requested and/or necessary.

As Jones and Cruz explain it, the bill aims mostly to make the information available to “private detectives, historians, victims and victims’ families,” with the ultimate goal being that some of these cases be solved finally.

That would be nice.

BREAKING: AP Source Says the Powder Inside The Envelope In The Package Sent To CNN Was Harmless.

RELIGION OF PEACE UPDATE: New ISIS Threat of Knife, Gun Attacks to ‘Terrorize the Crusader Nations.’ “Days ago, media group released a poster with shadowy imagery of the Pulse nightclub attack, along with images of a soldier and an explosive device.”

They might find America a harder target than disarmed Britain or France.

BOLD: Super PAC’s ‘Lynching’ Ad in Arkansas Congressional Race Claims #MeToo Is Dangerous to Black Men.

PROGRESS: SpaceX official says company about to launch a Falcon 9 for the third time.

SpaceX has since flown a handful of Block 5 rockets twice, but it has not taken the step of flying one of these rockets for the third time. However, that may happen quite soon, according to Lars Hoffman, senior director of government sales for the California-based rocket company.

“We’ve launched Falcon 9 over 60 times,” Hoffman said at the Wernher von Braun Memorial Symposium on Wednesday afternoon. “We’ve landed our first stage booster 30 times now. And relaunched 16 times. We’re about to relaunch a booster for the third time. So we’re turning this into routine access to space. High-reliability, higher-performance, lower-cost access to space; that opens it up to everybody.”

The company has not officially confirmed its plans, but at present SpaceX intends to reuse a Falcon 9 rocket for the third time to launch a rideshare mission of dozens of small satellites for Spaceflight. This Spaceflight SSO-A mission currently has a launch date of November 19, according to a calendar maintained by Spaceflight Now. An earlier report in The Space Review previously indicated this mission may involve the third flight of a booster.

What a ride.

MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE: FDA Approves ‘Novel’ Single-Dose Flu Drug — The First Of Its Kind In 20 Years.

HEATHER MAC DONALD: Identity Politics in Overdrive. “From the Kavanaugh hearings to a lawsuit alleging that Harvard discriminates against Asian-Americans, the Left sees “white supremacy” at the heart of everything.”

The core premise of academic victimology is that whites game the system to disable non-whites. The effort seems to have failed miserably. But rather than acknowledging the implications of Asian success for the narrative of systemic pro-white bias, the proponents of identity politics simply trot out the “white supremacy” mantra as if doing so routs any countervailing evidence. That some left-wing Asians adopt the same rhetoric is a testament to the status accorded to alleged victims of white privilege and to the lure of oppositional identity politics in elite circles.

The use of “white supremacy” to characterize the Harvard racial-preferences lawsuit is a model of lucidity, however, compared with its deployment in the final days of Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation process. Categories of privilege and oppression shifted, recombined, and split apart, highlighting internecine tensions within the intersectional Left.

Read the whole thing.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Bombs Away and Much, Much More. “Two things drive the news cycle: when the media can make itself the story (CHECK!) and when the media can use the news to beat up on President Trump (CHECK!). Yesterday was a jackpot.”

Indeed.

FLOTUS: Melania Invited Ellen Producer to Kindness Event After His Cynical Tweets.

After Andy Lassner, a producer for The Ellen DeGeneres Show, tweeted the other day that he’s “way more afraid of another Melania getting in to this country than” he is of the thousands of migrants in the caravan marching towards the U.S. border.

First Lady Melania Trump’s office tweeted him an invite to her gathering of children at the White House to talk about kindness and screen the movie Wonder.

You can guess how this man child responded.

The First Lady deserves far more positive press than she’ll ever receive.