The first launch on the way to the surface of the moon. 
It’s also the 71st anniversary of the first nuclear explosion at Trinity test site.
[Update a couple minutes later]
The anniversary of the landing is Wednesday. Bill Simon and I will be on The Space Show at 7 PM PDT to talk about the ceremony we came up with to commemorate it.
Did he save it? And if so, why? An interesting bit of history of which I’d been unaware. Mondale wanted to kill it, and did manage to reduce the fleet size from seven to five (including Enterprise, which never flew). Which was economically stupid, because it saved very little money. If we’d had six vehicles, we’d have still had four after the losses of Challenger and Columbia (assuming that we hadn’t built Endeavour from spares after Challenger, and those two events would have occurred in that alternate universe). A four- or five-ship fleet would have made for a slightly different calculus after the loss of the latter, because part of the reason the program was ended was that three was too small a fleet to continue to operate for long.
Some Europeans say that’s the only place that Apollo visited.
@Lee_Ars It's hard for people to appreciate the degree to which Apollo copulated things up, in terms of space.
— Apostle To Morons (@Rand_Simberg) July 14, 2016
What is Barack Obama?
Embrace the power of “and.”
[Update a while later]
Barack Obama: History’s worst president?
A case could be made, but it depends on your criteria.
He’s lost more cases than any modern president.
Obviously, SCOTUS is racist.
This is a decent primer for many young voters who weren’t even born when some of these events occurred. I could say that perhaps it’s too long for the attention spans of some, but it’s hard to shorten it much without leaving out significant examples of her corruption going back to the early 90s.
Thoughts from Leon Wolf about the cause:
…people’s willingness to act rationally and within the confines of the law and the political system is generally speaking directly proportional to their belief that the law and political system will ever punish wrongdoing. And right now, that belief is largely broken, especially in many minority communities.
And it’s the blind, uncritical belief that the police never (or only in freak circumstances) do anything wrong that is a major contributing factor to that.
We should also consider it in the broader context of an administration, and future president, who think themselves above the law. When people decide the system is rigged against them, the social compact breaks down, and it doesn’t end well.
[Update a few minutes later]
Earlier thoughts from Radley Balko last year. Note the irony of this happening in one of the most enlightened police departments in the country.
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Is it 1968 again? I don’t think the music is as good.
And Apollo 8 wasn’t the only good thing about the year. It was a World Series for the ages, that helped Detroit heal from the riots the summer before.
[Update a few minutes later]
Yes, part of the solution is to end police unions (along with all public-employee unions) and sovereign immunity.
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More thoughts from Richard Fernandez:
Was terrorism involved? Were the ideas of Ferguson taken to their final, frightening conclusion? While the individual culprits of the shooting have yet to be identified, the factors which have turned the summer of 2016 into a witches’ brew were clear for all to see. It is the culmination of decades of identity politics, the fruit of open borders, the outcome of an unwarranted disdain for Islamic extremism, the destruction of everything once held in common. Most of all it is the product of a collapse in legitimacy that has soured the public on nearly every institution: the political parties, the Supreme Court, the presidency, the police and the FBI. Now at the very moment when the public needs to trust someone the question is: whom can you trust?
It’s depressing.
This has already started to be discussed in comments at yesterday’s post, but I want to start a new one: The fourteen worst things for Hillary to come out of it. He basically said she was guilty of pretty much everything, except he wasn’t going to indict her because she was a Clinton.
The Clintons have gotten away with so many felonies over so many decades, Comey didn't want to be the guy to spoil their record.
— Apostle To Morons (@Rand_Simberg) July 5, 2016
[Update a few minutes later]
Comey’s remarks were devastating to Hillary. And no “reasonable” Attorney General meets with the spouse of someone under FBI investigation.
[Update a few minutes later]
Comey sells out the rule of law. And “today’s the day that rule of law died.” And did Comey “destroy Hillary by ‘exonerating” her“?
Pro tip: He didn’t exonerate her any more than Bob Ray did in Whitewater. “Insufficient evidence to indict” is no an exoneration.
[Update a few minutes later]
This is amusing. The State Department refuses to say whether or not Clinton and her aides have retained their clearances.
No one else in this situation would. They’re refusing to say because if they say she and they haven’t, they know the damage it would do to the campaign, as Obama flies her around on AF1, and lets her speak with the presidential seal in front of her lectern.
[Update a while later]
A ” target=”_blank”>mashup from ReasonTV of Comey’s presser and Hillary’s lies. Expect to see a lot of SuperPACs showing this.
The day the Left loves to hate.
Well, to be fair, it’s also the anniversary of the loss at Gettysburg and the simultaneous fall of Vicksburg, so I can see why Democrats would still be mad about that.
On the hundredth anniversary, thoughts on the Somme, from Charles JohnsonCooke.
On display in one cabinet are a couple of pristine machine guns — one a British “Vickers,” the other its German equivalent. My stomach turns inside out at the sight of them. These are the water-cooled monstrosities that were instrumental in producing the great stasis and all of its horrors. Capable of pushing out 500 rounds per minute (eight per second), it convinced both sides that defense was the safest course.
The machine gun, the British journalist Philip Gibbs observed, afforded its bearers the capacity to construct “not a line but a fortress position.” “No chance,” he noted, “for cavalry!” And yet, though the world’s generals knew from experience in Manchuria, from Thrace, and from the killing fields of the American Civil War just how obsolete established military tactics had been rendered by technological change, for much of the First World War the cavalry was given plenty of chances. Mounted or not, advancing forces at the Somme hewed largely to the techniques of old — failing tragically to overcome the conviction that charging with sufficient gusto would, eventually, lead to a glorious breakthrough. It was thus that the poet Rupert Brooke’s romantic conceptions of some “corner of a foreign field that is forever England” gave way to unlovely reality, and those optimistic volunteers who had followed the Ruritanian glory of all that his sonnets promised were met instead with the full might of the Industrial Revolution. There were few fair fights in the Great War — little chivalry or skill or heroism. There was just boredom, and then attrition. Just factory-style death. Just Siegfried Sassoon’s embittered “continuous roar,” and the apocalyptic collision of impregnable defense with naïve attack. In the days of muskets and cannon, one could reasonably expect to push forward to glory. Now, the lions were fed into the meat grinder with everybody else. When soldiers were brave enough to leave their hiding places, the novelist Sebastian Faulks recorded in Birdsong, “the air turned to lead.”
As I noted on Twitter, I hadn’t realized that the battle started exactly fifty-three years after Gettysburg (this weekend is the 153rd anniversary). As Charles notes, the Civil War, particularly the latter stage, with battles like Cold Harbor, provided hints of the horrors to come.
[Afternoon update]