This is very disappointing, from Popular Mechanics. A real “explainer” would explain why SLS is not in fact going to get astronauts to Mars, and why “power” is not the most important figure of merit for a rocket. Instead, they just regurgitate BS from NASA.
Jihad Everywhere
It’s not just terror bombings:
In the aftermath of 9/11, Americans were treated to a parade of “experts” who assured a worried public that jihadists were perverting the meaning of the term, that the term really and truly only referred to a peaceful, internal struggle — the quest for goodness and holiness. We’ve learned to laugh at this nonsense, but in so doing I fear that we’ve wrongly narrowed the term. To us, jihad is a bomb. It’s a beheading.
No, jihad is an eternal, all-encompassing unholy war against the unbeliever. It is waged in the mind of the believer, to fortify his or her own courage and faith. It is waged online and in the pages of books and magazines, to simultaneously cultivate the hatred and contempt of the committed for the kafir — the unbeliever — while also currying favor, appeasement, and advantage from the gullible West. Jihad is the teaching in the mosque. It is the prayer in the morning, the social-media post in the afternoon, and the donation to an Islamic “charity” in the evening.
There is jihad in predatory, coordinated sexual assault, there is jihad when Western camera crews are chased from Muslim neighborhoods, and there is jihad when Muslim apologists invariably crawl from the sewers of Western intelligentsia, blaming Europeans for the imperfections in their life-saving hospitality. So don’t make the mistake of believing that Europe or America only “periodically” or “rarely” deal with jihad. We confront it every day, just as the world has confronted it — to greater or lesser degrees — ever since Muslim armies first emerged from the Arabian peninsula. While not all Muslims are jihadists, jihad is so deeply imprinted in the DNA of Islam that the world will confront it as long as Islam lives.
While millions, most Muslims are peaceful, Islam itself is an infection that has haunted the world for over a millennium. There have been long periods of dormancy, but it occasionally flares up when given an opportunity. I don’t know how this will end, but I’ve been saying for years that the end will not be pretty.
Related: A Muslim explains how he discovered that the Quran encourages violence.
Andy McCarthy analyzes the timing of the latest attacks, and Theodore Dalrymple wonders what to do with the terrorist camps in the heart of Europe.
The Sixth Circuit
A lot of us did that years ago, but it’s nice to see this. But I expect the stonewalling to continue, because that’s what corrupted bureaucrats do, and will continue to do as long as there is no real accountability or consequences.
Heading To DC
I’m in the air somewhere over Wyoming on the way to ORD to switch planes for a flight to DCA this afternoon. Attending a workshop on space safety tomorrow. I’ve got Internet, obviously, but what I don’t have is room to type comfortably, given the seat pitch and guy ahead of me reclining. So probably light posting.
Trump Was Created By The Likes Of David Brooks
They denigrated the Tea Party, and now they have to deal with raucus working-class Trumpsters. They deserve whatever they get.
Powers And Duties
Does the president have a “duty” to put forth a nominee? Does the Senate have a “duty” to consider him or her? No.
I’ve been meaning to write about this but, as noted there, “shall” does not necessary mean that it is a mandatory act, and there is no time limit on it. The president has the power to nominate, and the Senate has the power to advise and consent, but it is not incumbent upon either to do so. The Framers intent was not to insure that appointees were appointed, but that it not be done unilaterally by a single branch. In their desire to limit government powers, they made appointments, as with much else, difficult, and I doubt they’d be displeased by either the “Biden rule” or the current Republican stance.
The only real duties that either branch has are to “establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence [sic], promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” It is ultimately up to the people to decide if they are doing so, and to rectify the situation if not.
If the president chooses not to nominate, he will be judged in the next election. If the Senate advises and consents by advising the president that they will not consent, they too will be judged in the next election, or at least a third of them will be (as it happens, the Republicans have 24 seats at risk in the fall). But the Senate is doing nothing unconstitutional in deciding to let the people decide.
[Update a while later]
Welp, Kasich said today that he might nominate Garland. So we have that going for us. #RINO
David Brooks
A shorter @Instapundit: “Eff you“:
The Tea Party movement — which you also failed to understand, and thus mostly despised — was a bourgeois, well-mannered effort (remember how Tea Party protests left the Mall cleaner than before they arrived?) to fix America. It was treated with contempt, smeared as racist, and blocked by a bipartisan coalition of business-as-usual elites. So now you have Trump, who’s not so well-mannered, and his followers, who are not so well-mannered, and you don’t like it.
They brought this on themselves.
[Saturday update]
Greenfail
So much for the 10kW-hr Tesla Powerwall.
Hillary Doesn’t Just Have An Email Problem
She has an NSA problem:
Now, over two months later, I can confirm that the contents of Sid Blumenthal’s June 8, 2011, email to Hillary Clinton, sent to her personal, unclassified account, were indeed based on highly sensitive NSA information. The agency investigated this compromise and determined that Mr. Blumenthal’s highly detailed account of Sudanese goings-on, including the retelling of high-level conversations in that country, was indeed derived from NSA intelligence.
Specifically, this information was illegally lifted from four different NSA reports, all of them classified “Top Secret / Special Intelligence.” Worse, at least one of those reports was issued under the GAMMA compartment, which is an NSA handling caveat that is applied to extraordinarily sensitive information (for instance, decrypted conversations between top foreign leadership, as this was). GAMMA is properly viewed as a SIGINT Special Access Program, or SAP, several of which from the CIA Ms. Clinton compromised in another series of her “unclassified” emails.
Currently serving NSA officials have told me they have no doubt that Mr. Blumenthal’s information came from their reports. “It’s word-for-word, verbatim copying,” one of them explained. “In one case, an entire paragraph was lifted from an NSA report” that was classified Top Secret / Special Intelligence.
How Mr. Blumenthal got his hands on this information is the key question, and there’s no firm answer yet. The fact that he was able to take four separate highly classified NSA reports—none of which he was supposed to have any access to—and pass the details of them to Hillary Clinton via email only hours after NSA released them in Top Secret / Special Intelligence channels indicates something highly unusual, as well as illegal, was going on.
You don’t say.
The SEDS Act
Dana has been talking about this for a year, but he’s finally introduced it:
To require the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to investigate and promote the exploration and development of space leading to human settlements beyond Earth, and for other purposes.
Development and settlement demand low cost of access to space, while NASA is forced by Congress to pursue a giant rocket that has exactly the opposite effect. I wish they’d left the E word out, because that’s implicit, and it allows people to maintain the status quo: “Well, the first thing we have to do is exploration, before we can think about development and settlement. And we can’t do exploration without SLS!”
I have a query in to Tony DeTora as to how this differs from the 1989 bill, because I still see no teeth in it regarding what to do if the administrator ignores it and doesn’t submit reports.
[Update a while later]
Related: A new book of essays and stories on the spiritual aspects of space