Sonia Sotomayor has seen better days

Sotomayor has gained a lot of weight since her nomination in 2009 (right). She fell in her home in April (hmmm) and is scheduled for shoulder surgery tomorrow.

Blue Origin launched and returned successfully today in its eighth test flight

The rocket's capsule reached nearly 66 miles up and safely parachuted to a soft landing in the west Texas desert.

The rocket also safely returned to a landing pad. The rocket is not a heavy launch vehicle like Elon Musk's, but it returns to earth in similar fashion to be reused. Space tourism is just around the corner.

Excellent video of the whole thing, here.

The Weekly Standard's girly man way of calling Pat Buchanan a fascist without really calling him one

Here's the html:

https://www.weeklystandard.com/charles-j-sykes/patrick-buchanans-strange-new-respect-for-the-ayatollah

Here's the actual headline:

Patrick Buchanan’s Strange New Respect for the Ayatollah

Here's the index of articles the way the girly men only wish they could title it, but don't have the balls to:

Was the last North Korean nuclear weapon detonation yield at Mantapsan underestimated by over 100%?

According to a Wikipedia entry here, the following formula is used to calculate the radius of the crater created by an underground nuclear blast:

r = 55 * ${\displaystyle \sqrt[3]{y}}$

If y was 100 kilotons as widely reported, for example here, the radius r of the crater should have been in the neighborhood of 255ft. with the entire underground void thus having a diameter of something like 510ft.

Yet the researchers referenced in this article state that the diameter of the void left under Mantapsan was 656ft.

That presupposes an r-value of 328 and thus a y-value of 212 kilotons, not 100, meaning the North Koreans detonated a weapon with a yield 112% higher than widely reported.

Senator Jon Tester of Montana looks increasingly well fed in his government job

What economic boom? 1Q2018 real GDP at 2.3% disappoints again

Let's see: Kim Jong Fat Boy made his first foreign visit, a secret one, to China at the end of March, and one month later suddenly he's offering denuclearization to South Korea

Xi Jinping Pong read His Rotundity the riot act, that's all.

There's a contingent of fellow travelers in South Korea who want peace at any price, just as there are in the West. Xi instructed Kim to play them for the fools that they are, just as Xi is playing Trump and the US.

Do you hear the sound of that fiddle?

The communists of China and North Korea are in it for the long haul, a long, slow game toward victory in their shared mutual fight to achieve socialist ideals.

Just as Xi Jinping lied about not militarizing the reefs China has illegally occupied, they're lying about this too.

The real objective is to get the US out of South Korea, and ultimately out of the region, and Kim is the instrument for accomplishing part of this broader aim.

Actually, Obama should just give his to Trump

N. Korean Mantapsan collapsed after 5th underground nuke test turned the mountain into fragile fragments

From the story here:

The test turned the mountain into fragile fragments, the researchers found. ... The mountain’s surface had shown no visible damage after four underground nuclear tests before 2017. But the 100-kilotonne bomb that went off on September 3 vaporised surrounding rocks with unprecedented heat and opened a space that was up to 200 metres (656 feet) in diameter, according to a statement posted on the Wen team’s website on Monday. 

New study in Journal of Climate says future warming to be 30-45% lower than projected by IPCC models

Uh huh.

Reported here.

Mark Steyn wins in court in the matter of CRTV vs. Steyn

CRTV has to pay Steyn over $4 million, according to the court, a stunning rebuke.

Mark Levin's network's days look numbered.

Steyn's account of it all is here, and here:

They picked a fight with me - and two judges have now ruled that they lost, comprehensively.

The story of the dirty rotten DNC, the dirty rotten Hillary and the dirty rotten Federal Election Commission

Here.

Don't miss it.

IPCC puts global warming at +1.53 degrees F 1880-2012, over 3.8 times what it was in Grand Rapids, Michigan

The average temperature trend in Grand Rapids, Michigan shows warming of about only 0.4 degrees F over the 120-year record from 1898 through 2017, according to NOAA online weather data for the station. The relatively small increase combined with the recency of the highs for the data series, however, makes one wonder about possible interference from developing heat island effects at the station, which is located near the increasingly busy Ford International Airport.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change figure of 1.53 degrees F is referenced here.

The data for Grand Rapids is shown below.

Gasoline prices are up about 30% since the Trump election

The SPLC Laugh of the Day

Liberalism is still trying to convince itself that Trump voters' economic anxieties were secondary

Here in "People Voted for Trump Because They Were Anxious, Not Poor" at The Atlantic.

The failure of jobs to recover under Obama to their trajectory before Obama means nothing to these people.

Mark Levin arrives at the truth: The US Senate has no purpose

He's saying so right now in the monologue, that since the 17th Amendment was passed the Senate has stopped functioning for the purpose for which the constitution had designed it.

It is indeed useless.

 

Popular election of senators made the US Senate a "Super House", which was a kind of a power grab away from the US House where popular power was distributed among many. 

 

Now popular power is concentrated among few.

 

The Senate still acts as a barrier to the House's energy, but it no longer reflects the direct will of the state legislatures which once appointed them.

R. Lee Ermey packs it in a little earlier than he had planned, I'm sure

Dang.

Find out how noisy is your address in the United States

The interactive map is here. Simply type in your complete street and city address and the tool will take you straight to your location. Government doing something useful for a change.

New York City's 311 gets 50,000 calls a day, the number one complaint being noise

From the story here in the Janesville WI GazetteXtra:

In a city whose cacophony can reach 95 decibels in midtown Manhattan — way above the federal government’s recommended average of no more than 70 decibels — the commotion over all that racket involves irate residents, anti-noise advocates, bars, helicopter sightseeing companies, landscapers and construction companies, as well as City Hall. The city’s 311 non-emergency call service gets 50,000 calls a day, and the No. 1 complaint is noise.