August 14, 2026

MILE MARKERS ON THE ROAD TO 9/11:

Tweet concludes, “One student, Zacarias Moussaoui, keeps asking how to fly a plane, but insists that he doesn’t need to know how to take off and land. Moussaoui is arrested.”

As Mark Steyn wrote in 2005, “With hindsight, the defining encounter of the age was not between Mohammed Atta’s jet and the World Trade Center on 9/11, but that between Mohammed Atta and Johnelle Bryant a year earlier:”

Ms Bryant is an official with the US department of agriculture in Florida, and the late Mr Atta had gone to see her about getting a $650,000 government loan to convert a plane into the world’s largest crop-duster. A novel idea.

The meeting got off to a rocky start when Mr Atta refused to deal with Ms Bryant because she was “but a woman”. But, after this unpleasantness had been smoothed out, things went swimmingly.

When it was explained to him that, alas, he wouldn’t get the 650 grand in cash that day, Mr Atta threatened to cut Ms Bryant’s throat. He then pointed to a picture behind her desk showing an aerial view of downtown Washington – the White House, the Pentagon, etc – and asked, “How would America like it if another country destroyed that city and some of the monuments in it?”

Fortunately, Ms Bryant had been on the training course and knows an opportunity for multicultural outreach when she sees one. “I felt that he was trying to make the cultural leap from the country that he came from,” she recalled. “I was attempting, in every manner I could, to help him make his relocation into our country as easy for him as I could.”

“Better dead than rude,” to coin a phrase.

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

DEMOCRATS’ ‘WOKE 1’ HANGOVER:

As the “vibe shift” takes hold, Democrats who enthusiastically partook in the most extreme “Woke 1” rhetoric find themselves in a bind. Their old statements now seem unhinged. They can admit they were wrong, perhaps with a nod and a wink to how crazy we all went during lockdown. Or they can dig in their heels and stand by their old positions. Neither option is particularly attractive.

If you try to distance yourself from 2020-era statements, you come off as intellectually spineless and willing to go along with whatever’s popular, either because you have no ideas of your own, or because you’re too cowardly to break ranks. Your convenient conversion might also not be believed. As Ms. Hong found, no one buys that a 37-year-old ought not be judged by the beliefs she held as a 31-year-old. Refusing to capitulate feels good, but doesn’t solve the core problem that voters perceive you as an extremist crank.

So what is a plucky, progressive Democrat suffering from a nasty 2020 hangover to do? If it were me, I’d start by deleting my tweets.

Good luck with that — presumably, the craziest stuff from those running in the midterms and (especially) the Dems’ 2028 presidential candidates have all been screencapped by now by opposition researchers.

And for those on the left who reject the word “woke” to describe 2020 and/or their current worldview:

Posted at 6:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

WORTH ANOTHER LOOK:

NASA ECLIPSE AT TOTALITY

Posted at 4:27 pm by Charlie Martin

FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY [VIP]: He Wet the Cop, Not the Bed. “It’s time for your much-needed break from the serious news, and this week, we’ll learn a brand-new way to fail the field sobriety test, what’s on the other side of that pond, and how Wyoming Man pretty much arrested himself.”

Posted at 4:23 pm by Stephen Green

IT HELPS TO THINK OF THE MEDIA AS A NARRATIVE-ENFORCEMENT MECHANISM AND LITTLE ELSE:

Posted at 3:52 pm by Stephen Green

BECAUSE OF COURSE:

Posted at 3:36 pm by Stephen Green

REPORT: Jason Arday found dead.

UPDATE:

Posted at 3:32 pm by Ed Driscoll

IT’S TIME FOR VICTORIA TAFT’S West Coast, Messed Coast™: Is It the End of the Line for Gavin 2028? “Gavin Newsom and his political party have been the ruination of California. Of course, you’ve been reading this for years in your West Coast, Messed Coast™ update, but now Newsom is taking his act to a national audience, and it’s not going so well.”

Posted at 3:21 pm by Stephen Green

NIFTY: We’ve flown a radiation-blocking vest to the Moon and back, and it worked.

Spacecraft designers have spent decades weighing shielding options, from aluminum hulls to water-filled walls to superconducting magnets that would deflect charged particles before they reach the crew. All of them run into the same challenge. “The question was how to use mass in a very efficient way,” Milstein says. “Mass is really the bottleneck—every gram counts.”

A shielding garment an astronaut could wear is simultaneously sensible and ridiculous. The ridiculous part was that, for a long time, people thought that a protective garment would need to look like full-plate armor in order to offer meaningful protection. It would presumably need to be made of lead or other high-density materials that would add mass and make moving around nearly impossible.

StemRad engineers, though, figured dressing as a medieval knight doesn’t really get you all that much. The human body, Milstein explains, isn’t uniformly vulnerable to radiation. “Tissues like the bone marrow are a lot more sensitive to radiation compared to the brain,” he says. Following this idea, StemRad developed a belt for nuclear first responders, worn around the hips, which hold roughly half the body’s bone marrow, the tissue that makes blood cells. Protecting even a fraction of the bone marrow lets a person regrow it and survive a high-dose exposure.

So, StemRad, working with Lockheed Martin, expanded this idea into a female vest that, aside from the hips, also covered the breasts, stomach, colon, and reproductive organs. These are all less immediately life-threatening when irradiated, but carry a long-term cancer risk.

The details are intriguing.

Posted at 2:50 pm by Stephen Green