If two New Hampshire men aren't a match for the Devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians. -Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)
US: World’s largest electric aircraft takes to the skies with over 1MW of power (Georgina Jedikovska, Aug 13, 2026, Interesting Engineering)
Forslund said that they designed the X1 to show that electric propulsion can work in an aircraft that is large enough for commercial airline operations. The plane is a demonstrator representative of Heart’s ES-30 production aircraft, that is currently being developed.
America Suspended the Jones Act. Americans Were the Winners.: In under five months, waiving the protectionist law opened up whole trade routes and sent fuel to areas that needed it. Why go back? (Veronique de Rugy | 8.13.2026, reason)
Since March, America has been running an accidental experiment and glimpsing what the country might look like without one of its dumbest statutes. The results are in, and they embarrass a century’s worth of U.S. lawmakers and defenders. […]The numbers speak for themselves. The Cato Institute’s Colin Grabow documented that in under five months, Puerto Rico took in more mainland fuel than in any full year since 2015. Shipments to the West Coast, Alaska, and Hawaii hit nearly 14 million barrels, about 170 percent of the recent annual average. Whole trade routes quickly appeared: Gulf Coast fuel to Hawaii, New Jersey jet fuel to California, propane to Puerto Rico.
America’s government-protected fleet seldom served these locales. Remove a prohibition and the market pours resources where they are needed. As Grabow noted, “That’s strong evidence for the longstanding critique that the Jones Act suppresses domestic commerce by preventing economically viable trade between Americans.”
Why MAGA Is So Obsessed With Fauci: In the aftermath of pandemics, people either try to forget them or find others to blame for them. (Peter Wehner, 8/12/26, The Atlantic)
[T]he scientific evidence favors a natural origin. This includes epidemiological evidence showing that the first COVID-19 cases clustered around one corner of Wuhan’s Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, where wild animals were being butchered. Environmental samples taken from that same area of the market contain, in the same swab, the SARS-CoV-2 sequence and DNA from potential intermediate hosts such as the raccoon dog.
The accusation that Fauci lied to Congress rests on his denial, in a 2021 exchange with Paul, that NIH had ever funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab. The point of such research is to learn what a virus would need to jump into humans before it does, so that vaccines and treatments can be ready.
The trouble is the term gain of function. In biology, it means research that gives an organism a new capability—engineering a bacterium to digest an oil spill is gain-of-function research. In politics, it has come to mean something narrower and more alarming: deliberately making a dangerous virus more dangerous. Federal rules use a third definition, narrower still. The federal framework adopted in 2017, after years of public debate, covers work to enhance a pathogen that is “likely highly transmissible and likely capable of wide and uncontrollable spread in human populations” and “likely highly virulent and likely to cause significant morbidity and/or mortality in humans.” It also excludes viruses, however dangerous, as they exist in nature. (The policy was revised in 2024.)
The gap between those definitions is the whole dispute, and it is why the perjury charge fails twice over.
Dispatching Humphrey’s Executor (Christopher James Wolfe, 8/12/26, Law & Liberty)
Thach fully recounts all of that in his book, but he would perhaps add three additional points to the chief justice’s account.
First, Thach would add to the discussion of the Articles of Confederation period. In chapter 3, he describes the Continental Congress’ attempts to execute the laws without an executive branch:
Having reached a decision, [the Continental Congress] entrusted its execution to whatever agency seemed at the moment most convenient, perhaps a committee of its own membership, perhaps a state council or convention, perhaps individuals without official status. Such agencies, having carried out the order in question, immediately lapsed. There was neither plan nor organization.
These committees for execution ate up Congress’ time, created turf wars, and were ineffective—leading to calls for a national executive branch of some sort. The plural executive model was failing both at the national and state levels, therefore. How to fix the national executive branch, making it both energetic and democratically accountable, was a question left open even in Madison’s Virginia Plan presented at the beginning of the convention.
Second, in chapter 4, Thach points out that the key model for the presidency cited during the convention was the New York governorship of George Clinton. That was the one state where a truly unitary model had been tried, and it had worked well, so well that Clinton rival Alexander Hamilton felt compelled to cite him as a paradigm in Federalist #70. It is true that the New York Constitution did not spell out appointment and removal powers for the executive branch, but “[Governor] Clinton’s control of nominations had given him control of the patronage, as was well known to all conversant with New York politics,” writes Thach. Here is another important point: after the convention, arguments made by various participants at the convention are repeated by the defenders of the Constitution, no matter who made them in the summer of 1787.
Third, Thach offers a highly nuanced account of the different sides in the Decision of 1789. He points out that eighteen Congressmen involved in the Decision of 1789 had been at the Constitutional Convention themselves—it was virtually the same “political environment.” During the debate, there were four camps, but one can tell by reading the debates that the presidential removal argument won the day—and got the final vote that mattered. Six of the House members present at the convention voted for the bill (Madison, Clymer, Baldwin, Carroll, Fitzsimons, and Gilman), while just two voted against (Sherman and Gerry, a “Grumbletonian”). The fact that several Congressmen were members of the convention is a significant point that Chief Justice Roberts leaves out; the Decision of 1789 gives us insight into the original meaning of Article II. It is not just one Congressional interpretation that could be erased by a later Congress, as it tried to during the Tenure of Office years after Reconstruction. As Chief Justice Taft said in Myers v. US, the Decision of 1789 is “contemporaneous legislative exposition” (272 US 175). And what is especially definitive about the Decision of 1789 is that the Senate renounced the power of removals. Thach writes: “The significance of the [Senate] vote is the greater when it is remembered that instances where a political body voluntarily deprives itself of power are very few in all the history of government.”