I had lunch with Doug Jones in Mojave last week (he’s one of the “contract” employees remaining). It’s a sad end to a once-promising company.
[Thursday-morning update]
Here’s the story from Jeff Foust. I hadn’t realized that Michael Blum had moved to XCOR after Firefly went under.
[Update late afternoon]
Here’s the take from the local Midland paper.
NPR tweeted the Declaration of Independence, and you’ll never guess what happened next!
Well, for the Union cause, anyway. Gettysburg had been won the day before, and most recognized that the fall of Vicksburg was the turning point in the war. Union victory was almost inevitable at that point, though it would take almost two more bloody years.
Kurt Schlichter says to stop caring about them:
I didn’t vote for Donald Trump to be a role model or a moral paragon. I voted for him to not be Hillary Clinton, and to incrementally move towards actual conservatism. Like everyone else who voted for him, I knew he wasn’t a doctrinaire conservative. But he believed in some conservative things, and that was better than someone who believed in no conservative things, and who wanted to stamp her sensible shoe into our faces forever.
Was he my first choice? No. Was he my second? No. But was there any other choice when it came down to him or Felonia von Pantsuit?
No. Which is something a lot of the cogs in the machine that is Conservative, Inc., still don’t choose to acknowledge.
That’s pretty much my take, too.
This is a great speech, given on the 150th anniversary, by “silent” Calvin Coolidge. He may be the most underrated president.
I’ve been working on a document for a client, and it’s laid out in book format. Each chapter has its own page style (to maintain chapter title in headers) and there are several other styles as well. I’ve been printing it double sided, two pages per side. Today, when I tried to print it, instead of US Letter (which is what I set up all of the styles to be in) it insists on printing in a #8 Monarch Envelope format, which totally screws things up. But there’s no way to change it; the format is greyed out. The default for the printer is US Letter, the page styles are US Letter, but for some reason Office has decided that it’s only going to allow me to print it as an envelope, in this file, and this file only. I can’t find anything in either the Help for the software or by Googling anyone else who has had a problem like this. Is there a Libre Office doctor in the house?
The House Armed Services Committee has voted to create it. Amidst all the other important news like what Trump tweeted about Mika Brzezinski, this will be lost in the noise, but it’s a pretty big deal in space policy, I suspect that USAF opposition played a role in passage. They’re lucky that Rogers didn’t go straight to a space force.
Glenn Reynolds has a roundup of links and thoughts:
Yes, I keep repeating this stuff. Because it bears repeating. In Iraq, Obama took a war that we had won at a considerable expense in lives and treasure, and threw it away for the callowest of political reasons. In Syria and Libya, he involved us in wars of choice without Congressional authorization, and proceeded to hand victories to the Islamists. Obama’s policy here has been a debacle of the first order, and the press wants to talk about Bush as a way of protecting him. Whenever you see anyone in the media bringing up 2003, you will know that they are serving as palace guard, not as press.
Worth noting that the Nobel Committee embarrassed itself beyond redemption as well.
[Update a while later]
More of Obama’s foreign-policy mess: Venezuela, the Syria next door. Because he never met a dictator he didn’t like.
Why he’s a more honest journalist than most of the MSM:
O’Keefe has revealed them to be fools, remarkably unsophisticated in their response to his revelations. (Jeff Zucker, et al., looked like dimwits walking into the most obvious trap by dismissing Bonifield as a mere “medical” producer with the famous Van Jones already queued up for humiliation.) At this point, only the most naive believe what the MSM says. CNN is already a joke, but the NYT, WaPo, etc. are not far behind. We are all reading Pravda now.
We always were, it’s just become so much more obvious.
[Update a while later]
…starting now, we’re instituting new policies for handling Russia stories. Stop groaning! This important! From now on, we’re going to need your Russia stories to all have an element of truth.”
The room erupted into chaos.
“What the hell?” screeched Wolf Blitzer. “Preposterous!”
“Wolf, your name is sort of like my puppy Woofy’s!” said Chris Cuomo. “Sort of.”
“Never!” snorted Christiane Amanpour, who had been annoying Jake Tapper because her enormous pink gyno hat was blocking his view.
“Look at it spin!” piped up Chris Cuomo between delighted giggles.
Jim Acosta stood up and adjusted his tie. “I want to register my outrage and disapproval of this hateful attack on the free press in the strongest possible terms!”
“Oh, knock it off, Jimmy. There’s no camera here,” Zucker said. “From now on, your anonymous sources have to actually exist. That’s final. I’m sorry people – calm down! – but you can’t quote sources who don’t exist.”
From the back, Don Lemon finished his drink and howled, “The voices tell me MANY THINGS!”
“Look,” said Jim Sciutto. “Like my friend Don, I deeply believe that invisible voices in our heads can be legitimate news sources. Especially if a different voice in our head confirms what the first voice told us.”
“But don’t you understand,” stuttered an indignant Brian Stelter. “Don’t you know that democracy will die in darkness if you impose arbitrary rules on us that limit our ability to report things that never happened?”
Kurt is a cruel man, but fair.
People will die!