Category: Update

The big news this weekend should have been SpaceX’s big accomplishment this past week. But talk of it has been oddly muted. Some have drawn political conclusions from the silence, such as Friday’s post by “DogeDesigner” on X (@cb_doge on Twitter): “SpaceX, an American company, just completed the first-​ever commercial spacewalk, the farthest from Earth in over 50 years. Yet, no recognition or appreciation from the President. For [the] Democratic party, politics always comes first, not America.”

Elon Musk replied with a “Sigh.”

But in the Democrats’ defense, they have a whole lot to lose by saying anything nice about Elon Musk’s two outfits in question, X and SpaceX. Further, just maybe the president of the United States (Biden?) has been waiting for the mission’s completion.

Wait no more!

“Tech billionaire Jared Isaacman and SpaceX engineer Sarah Gillis completed the first-​ever commercial spacewalk in SpaceX-​designed suits,” we read at Devdiscourse. “The Polaris Dawn mission tested new spacesuit technology in extreme conditions and conducted 36 experiments. This mission marks a significant milestone in commercial spaceflight and advances scientific knowledge for future space endeavors.”

The space walk occurred on Thursday, with all five crew members participating. The flight began on Tuesday. Splashdown of Polaris Dawn’s Dragon spacecraft occurred early Sunday.

Oh, and the new space suits look snazzy.

Paul Jacob has been following SpaceX for years here on Common Sense with Paul Jacob.

H.R. 8281, the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (SAVE Act), introduced by Rep. Chip Roy (R‑TX), would require voters to provide documentary proof of citizenship at the time of registration. It passed the House in July and is hovering in the Senate where …

Wait. Something happened. It’s been placed in the latest Continuing Resolution (CR) on the budget!

But before you get too excited, Thomas Massey, Republican Representative from Kentucky, calls this a “Bright Shiny Object” which will be voted for by Republicans and voted against by Democrats and, according to the rules of “political theater” will be removed before the CR goes to the president’s pen.

Besides, the SAVE Act can’t save the election we’re worried about, since the general election will be held just a few weeks from now and everybody’s been registered and …

Well, watch Massey on X.

Vice President Kamala Harris is a flip-flopper.

She changes her “policies” to fit … whatever the climate is.

It may be her most endearing trait.

Her latest? Plastic straws. She says they may remain legal.

Whoah.

But why?

Christian Britschgi explains at Reason​.com: “People’s frustration with paper alternatives to plastic straws eventually saw support for straw bans subside. By 2020, the policy had become synonymous with liberal overreach. Conservatives and freedom-​lovers rallied behind plastic straw use,” Mr. Britschgi wrote on Friday. “The Trump campaign even started selling Trump-​branded plastic straws and singled out Harris’ support for straw bans in attack ads.”

So it’s no mystery why “Harris’ campaign handlers are reversing her past support for plastic straw bans.”

But isn’t this “a lot less consequential than Harris’ other policy switcheroos”? Britschgi thinks NO. “Harris’ history with plastic straw bans is a useful window into her evolution as a candidate.”

Paul Jacob has written about this sort of issue:

• “The Last Straw” — January 29, 2018
• “Are We Graduating from Plastic?” — March 9, 2020
• “How Quickly Can California Be Destroyed?” — October 2, 2020

See also: 

“How to Know” — January 5, 2019

The political party that demands that every last street person, hobo, convict and illegal alien have it made easy to vote has also worked mightily, behind the scenes, to make sure that at least one candidate not appear on ballots. The maniest-​many should vote, but not more than two should be voted for! “For months, Democratic National Committee-​backed lawsuits were focused on preventing independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from appearing on ballots in multiple states,” begins Jeff Louderback’s Saturday article for The Epoch Times.

But the party’s tactics changed “on Aug. 23 when Kennedy announced he would suspend his campaign in battleground states and urge his supporters to vote for former President Donald Trump in those states.”

On August 26, in “RFKj+T,” Paul Jacob had explained why Kennedy had switched to backing Trump. Today Louderback explains the ramifications for the Democratic Party of that switch.

Kennedy’s idea of taking his name off the ballot in ten key, marginal states — voting populations that could go either way — has left the Democratic Party with a new stance: try to keep Kennedy on the ballots they had previously fought to keep him off of.

The new tactic has met with mixed success. “Wisconsin is currently the only state rejecting Kennedy’s withdrawal effort,” Louderback reports. “On Aug. 27, the Wisconsin Elections Commission voted 5 – 1 to keep Kennedy’s name on the state’s ballot. Kennedy filed a lawsuit challenging the ruling on Sept. 3.”

And so “democratic” politics goes on.

On Friday, Paul Jacob (“Deep State in a Corner”) alluded to Elon Musk’s verbal and legal battles with Brazilian censorship, suggesting “why Musk is pulling out Twitter personnel” out of the Portuguese-​speaking country. And as that commentary was “going to press,” as we used to say in the print biz, the story grew much larger.

“X began to go dark across Brazil on Saturday after the nation’s Supreme Court blocked the social network because its owner, Elon Musk, refused to comply with court orders to suspend certain accounts,” explain Jack Nicas and Kate Conger in The New York Times. “The moment posed one of the biggest tests yet of the billionaire’s efforts to transform the site into a digital town square where just about anything goes.”

Yes. It’s called “free speech.” It’s almost as if Nicas and Conger are trying to dysphemize it.

“Alexandre de Moraes, a Brazilian Supreme Court justice, ordered Brazil’s telecom agency to block access to X across the nation of 200 million because the company lacked a physical presence in Brazil.” But remember: X was pulling out so personnel wouldn’t get arrested for not complying with the maniac judge, Alexandre de Moraes.

Moraes’s antics have been covered extensively by Glenn Greenwald of System Update on Rumble. As noted on Friday, Rumble is also not operating in Brazil, nor allowed to be accessed over the Internet.

But there’s a lot more to the censorship story, and some of it expands upon the points in “Deep State in a Corner”: Mike Benz, whom you may have caught on Tucker Carlson’s show, says he was told by a Brazilian congressman that behind all this is a batch of NGOs funded by the United States: “the Brazilian think tanks who are part of the legislative development of these censorship edicts and who pressuring Brazil’s government not to create a carve‑X out for congressional parliamentarians because it would give a free pass for Brazilian members of Congress to spread misinformation online.” 

Political. Very political.

Ominous. Very ominous.

After the racial tensions over cops shooting black people became a big story with the Ferguson incidents, Paul Jacob worked on several citizen initiatives to require “body cams” on police officers in cities around the country. Resistance to the practice has come from several quarters, not infrequently the police themselves — despite the “cop cams’” utility being to protect cops as much as anyone.

But the strangest wrinkle to this ongoing story came recently. Consult Jacob Sullum at Reason, whose article “Albuquerque’s Police Chief Says Cops Have a 5th Amendment Right To Leave Their Body Cameras Off” tells the strange behavior of Police Chief Harold Medina, who got in a crash after driving by a homeless encampment on the way to a press conference, with his wife in the department-​issued pickup truck. And yes, he pled the Fifth.

“Medina is suggesting that cops have a constitutional right to refrain from recording their interactions with the public whenever that evidence could be used against them,” explains Sullum. “By turning on their cameras in those situations, he argues, police could be incriminating themselves. That is the whole point.”

But read the whole article. It’s quite a story.