Trump's impotence at the border is breeding not contempt exactly, but indifference

The lie of the day: "Mueller’s team continues to operate almost entirely leak-free"

Garrett M. Graff, "journalist", formerly of Politico, formerly of the Howard Dean presidential campaign, in Wired here.

What he really is is a Mueller toady:

"Mueller always knows more than we think".

"Mueller is building a bulletproof case".

"Mueller likely already knows how this story ends ... and it seems clear that Mueller might actually be relatively close to wrapping up the investigation".

Ilan Wurman calls for a return to interpretive departmentalism, siding with President Jackson and Justice Scalia

Here:

Thomas Jefferson, for example, pardoned individuals convicted under the Sedition Act because he believed that act to be unconstitutional notwithstanding contrary pronouncements by the courts, and Abraham Lincoln urged Congress to reenact the Missouri Compromise although it had been struck down as unconstitutional by the Court in Dred Scott. And Andrew Jackson vetoed the Second Bank of the United States, even though it had been approved by the Court.

“If the opinion of the Supreme Court covered the whole ground of this act,” Jackson wrote, “it ought not to control the coordinate authorities of this Government. The Congress, the Executive, and the Court must each for itself be guided by its own opinion of the Constitution. Each public officer who takes an oath to support the Constitution swears that he will support it as he understands it, and not as it is understood by others.”

Real Clear Politics is making sure Jon Tester is getting broad, expansive coverage

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.