WHAT DO WE WANT? NUCLEAR POWER. WHEN DO WE WANT IT? NOW: Google and Microsoft now each consume more power than some fairly big countries.

Tech giants Google and Microsoft each consumed 24 TWh each of electricity during 2023, surpassing the consumption of more than 100 countries, new research has claimed.

Analysis by Michael Thomas, shared on X, claims both Google and Microsoft consumed the same amount of energy as Azerbaijan, which has an estimated GDP of $78.7 billion. Google’s 2023 revenue stood at $307.4 billion, and Microsoft’s at $211.9 billion.

My takeaway from this is that whatever else you think of Google and Microsoft, they’re much more energy-efficient than most countries.

PUSHBACK: A friend sends this from MIT. It’s the Pierce Laboratory, by where the protests and encampment were. If you can’t make out the photo on your device, it’s Israeli and American flags, and the words “Jews are Indigenous to Israel.”

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THE ESTABLISHMENT HAS BEEN SCREWING WITH ELON, AND HE’S RETURNING THE FAVOR: Elon Musk Has Said He Is Committing Around $45 Million a Month to a New Pro-Trump Super PAC. “Formed in June, America PAC is focused on registering voters and persuading constituents to vote early and request mail-in ballots in swing states, according to one of the people. The coalition assessed that the Democrats have historically had very robust “get out the vote” campaigns and took note of the amounts of money that the Biden administration has dedicated to so-called on the ground efforts in swing states. America PAC will try to counter that.”

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: J.D. Vance Pick Continues Remarkable Campaign for Trump. “J.D. Vance has demonstrated quite a knack for rejecting nonsense from ambush media types. The Trump campaign can just wind him up and let him shut down all of the sabotage attempts. Trump can still have his moments, but mostly remain above the fray. It’s a great mix.”

WHAT DOES VANCE DO FOR TRUMP’S RE-ELECTION PROSPECTS? NOTHING OR WORSE: Sean Trende: Trump’s VP Pick Won’t Help Him Win Election. Trende is one of America’s most astute political observers. Perhaps his most pertinent point is that Vance was hardly an electoral juggernaut in Ohio:

His performance in the state has been underwhelming, to say the least. Consider his run in 2022 compared to the rest of the statewide Republican ticket. Mike DeWine won the governorship by 25 percentage points. Dave Yost won the attorney general race by 20 points. Keith Faber (auditor) won by 18. Frank LaRose (secretary of state) won by 21. Robert Sprague (treasurer) won by 18. The GOP Supreme Court justices won by between 12 and 18 points.

J.D. Vance won his Senate seat by six points. It’s unclear, then, how he might help Trump carry Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, or Michigan.

By contrast: “Kim Reynolds of Iowa might have helped to flip Minnesota or Wisconsin. Rubio probably would have put away Arizona and Nevada and potentially put New Mexico fully in play. Youngkin could have made Virginia fully into a swing state.”

WHAT WAS GLENN SAYING JUST YESTERDAY ABOUT BURYING THIS IMAGE LIKE THEY DID THE 9/11 FALLING MAN?

IT STILL PROMISES TO BE AN UNNECESSARILY TENSE COUPLE OF DAYS: Update on RNC Secret Service Protection. “Based on Cheatle’s statement, it appears the Secret Service decided some changes were in order.”

THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION OF THOMAS CROOKS:

Had Saturday’s assassination attempt been carried out against President Joe Biden, we have no doubt we would have read about how the right’s dangerous rhetoric was behind it. We are old enough to remember more than a decade back when former Alaska governor Sarah Palin’s use of crosshairs imagery to identify congressional districts—or, as the Atlantic’s James Fallows put it, “extreme, implicitly violent political rhetoric and imagery”—was fingered as an incitement for former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’s (D., Ariz.) shooter. (He was, in fact, a deranged individual with no discernible motivation, political or otherwise.)

We could go on: The media fatuously attributed a Georgia spa shooting in 2021 to right-wing, anti-Asian hatred while the motivations of the left-wing lunatic who almost took out Rep. Steve Scalise (R., La.) and other Republican lawmakers on a baseball field in 2017 went studiously unexamined.

Plenty of poisonous rhetoric has been flying around on the left for the past decade. Biden is waging a campaign whose only argument, expressed with intermittent coherency, is that democracy is on the ballot. “We’re done talking about the debate, it’s time to put Trump in a bull’s eye,” Biden told donors last week. Even in the 2022 midterms he was scaremongering in front of Washington, D.C.’s Union Station, telling voters that the race was about “democracy itself” and a Republican victory would “allow dark forces to thirst,” whatever that means. The New Republic and others compare former president Donald Trump to Hitler.

We don’t know whether those moronic and misguided talking points led Thomas Crooks to try to assassinate Trump, but there are a few things we do know.

More than a few.

WHILE I WAS BUSY WITH THE WEEKEND’S BIGGEST STORY, I FORGOT TO COVER A COUPLE OF BAD SPACE ITEMS: SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets grounded by FAA, putting Space Coast missions on indefinite hold.

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket fleet has been grounded by the Federal Aviation Administration after a Thursday launch from California produced an upper-stage failure that deployed a batch of Starlink satellites into an eccentric orbit.

The FAA grounding has immediate impact on the Space Coast’s launch schedule — which is off to a record-breaking pace this year. All told, 46 of the 50 missions thus far during 2024 have been Falcon 9 launches from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and adjacent NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.

In a Friday statement, the FAA said, “an investigation is designed to further enhance public safety, determine the root cause of the event, and identify corrective actions to avoid it from happening again.”

“A return to flight is based on the FAA determining that any system, process, or procedure related to the mishap does not affect public safety. In addition, SpaceX may need to request and receive approval from the FAA to modify its license that incorporates any corrective actions and meet all other licensing requirements,” the statement said.

The Starlink satellites could not be salvaged and have since burned up on reentry.

And this: NASA’s $5 billion Europa Clipper mission may not be able to handle Jupiter’s radiation.

This past May, the mission team was told that parts similar to Europa Clipper’s transistors “were failing at lower radiation doses than expected,” NASA officials wrote in the Thursday update. Transistor testing is now underway at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which leads the mission, as well as the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, both of which are in Maryland.

The results aren’t exactly promising.

“Testing data obtained so far indicates some transistors are likely to fail in the high-radiation environment near Jupiter and its moon Europa because the parts are not as radiation-resistant as expected,” NASA officials wrote.

It’s been a rough few days for space launch and exploration fans.

CAN THE LEFT END ITS VIOLENCE? Richard Pollock, who has been chronicling the roots of the Pro-Palestinian protests and violence in the teachings of Saul Alinsky, sees no end to the protests, demonstrations and attacks:

“For the hard Left, violence has been part of their political religion. I know, as I once was a hard Left activist as I was a roommate with Chicago 8 defendant Rennie Davis. I personally became friends with Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and hard-left lawyer Bill Kuntsler. I understand that political violence is part of the Left’s DNA. Over time, I moved toward a more conservative outlook.

“Of course, Left-wing political violence has been on display in America ever since Big Bill Haywood’s Industrial Workers of the World, known as the Wobblies, sparked strikes and riots throughout the United States early in the Twentieth Century.”

And there is much more in Pollock’s latest column on Substack, penned in the aftermath of the failed assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump. If you aren’t subscribing to Pollock, you are missing one of the most unique and insightful analysts on the Right.