AMAZON, SERIOUSLY?  Amazon Shuts Man Out of Own Smart Home After Racism Allegations.

THEY’RE NOT POOR IN SPIRIT: A Poverty of Mind.

WE WHAT?  Blinken in China: America Does ‘Not Support Taiwan Independence’.

AND YET POINTING THAT OUT THREE YEARS AGO WAS CALLED “RACIST” BY ALL RIGHT-THINKING PEOPLE: It’s becoming undeniable: COVID came from a Chinese lab. Even though it was already obvious then.

GOOD LUCK: A search and rescue operation is underway for a submersible touring the wreckage of the Titanic.

RIP: John Romita Sr., Iconic Marvel And Spider-Man Comic Book Artist, Has Died, Age 93.

THIS WOULD EXPLAIN A LOT:

https://twitter.com/jslinville/status/1670919689965379586

Possibly related:

The "fact based community" is consequently casting about for a "world information order". Freedom of speech is now seen as the enemy of sanity. The words of reluctance are "we didn't want to censor the public but you made us do it."

What I want to know is who is "you" and "us".

— wretchardthecat (@wretchardthecat) June 18, 2023

OPEN THREAD: It’s all you.

MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: Jimmy Lai may yet outlast Hong Kong’s evil regime.

WELL, I WASN’T EXPECTING THIS: The Pro-Nuclear Power Oliver Stone.

“They always say, if there is an accident with nuclear, it’s gonna be the end of the world. That’s bulls***,” says Oliver Stone. The great, daunting topic of nuclear energy sits at the centre of Stone’s latest film, the documentary Nuclear Now. The multi-Oscar-winning director built his reputation on snap and excess: the violent crime odyssey Scarface (as screenwriter); the visceral Vietnam war drama Platoon; the insatiable Eighties satire Wall Street; the three-hour-long conspiracy-theory-laden thriller JFK. His latest project, though, is one of frill-less conviction.

I’m meeting with Stone, and Nuclear Now’s producer Fernando Sulichin, in the bar of a central London hotel. They are in the country for a pair of private screenings, and they begin by reflecting on the previous night’s event. Unusually, none of the talk really concerns how the film was enjoyed as a work of cinema, but rather, how receptive the audience were to the film’s argument. This makes sense: Nuclear Now is filmmaking as manifesto. The documentary has an ardent message, and it doesn’t waste much time entertaining alternative points of view. Nuclear energy, both men aver, is the only practical road to a green future, and the survival of our species.

“I was a young man in the Seventies and Eighties,” Stone explains. “I believed what Jane Fonda was saying, and Ralph Nader, and Bruce Springsteen. They were heroes – so I went along with it. But as the situation deepened and the years went by… It’s been over 20 years since the year 2000, and still, 84 per cent of the world’s energy comes from fossil fuels.” Stone is no longer a young man, of course – he’s 76, to be exact – and has an air of world-weariness about him. When he speaks, though, it is with a bearish intensity. “Obviously I’m not gonna be here in 2050,” he says. “But my children, and hopefully grandchildren, will be.”

Nuclear advocates emphasise the technology’s relative cheapness, scalability and reliability – unlike wind or solar, its output is not beholden to weather patterns or day-and-night cycles. “We’re not saying [these clean energies] are bad,” Sulichin assures me. “But in order to power the electric grid of England, with the wind you have here, you need to surround practically the whole island of Great Britain with turbines.”

I’ve always been pro-nuclear power. But if Oliver Stone is for it…

THE NEW SPACE RACE: Rocket Lab launches first suborbital version of Electron.

HEH: ‘The Most Flattering Hit Piece I Ever Read:’ Kayleigh McEnany Flips the Script on WaPo Article About Casey DeSantis.

“She’s unstoppable. She’s smart, she’s strong, she’s accomplished, and she’s conservative, so she will be attacked. I read every word of this hit piece last night — it was in The Washington Post — it was north of 5,000 words, and the animating themes were this: They love being around each other — Ron DeSantis and Casey DeSantis — they’re private, and when he was in Congress, he would leave at — if the vote was at noon —he’d be on his way to the airport at 12:06 because he wanted to see his family. Sounds like a great marriage to me!

“And then the other complaint about Ron DeSantis was this: there were three things he liked to talk about with his staff — The Constitution, baseball and golf. I mean, OK, why is this bad? So, my takeaway from this is, this is the most flattering hit piece I have ever read. And if this is the worse thing they have on the DeSantises, wow, what great family! Role model family, I would say.”

Meanwhile, the Gray Lady tries its own approach to flatten DeSantis: New York Times notes that Ron DeSantis has young kids and wants America to know it.

Exit question:

JUNETEENTH ISN’T ‘WOKE.’ IT’S AS AMERICAN AS APPLE PIE.

Flashback: We Need More Juneteenths: Anything that gets the federal government to stop ‘working.’

FASTER, PLEASE: The Bidens Are About to Get ‘Harvey Weinstein-ed,’ and Here Are Joe’s ‘Secret Audio Bribery Tapes’ You’ve Been Dying to Hear!

The Bidens are done.

I know, I know, we have reasonable suspicion to believe the Biden crime family will never be held accountable for the treasonous bribes Joe has accepted and passed through to his family of Delaware trash, but remember this:

• Everyone knew Harvey Weinstein was a pig and no one said a word…
• Until one person started talking about it…
• Soon everyone was talking about it…
• Then cops had no choice but to stop playing dumb and arrest him.

That is where the Bidens are now. We all know they took mad stacks to make decisions for Burisma — and God knows who else — but the cat is out of the bag. Too many people know the truth. Will the swamp-dwelling lizard people risk losing their pensions to protect him? Not for much longer.

The FBI now has a choice: step aside or go down with him.

And then what happens? Biden/Harris: A Succession Not Worth Contemplating.

GREAT MOMENTS IN SELF-AWARENESS FROM GAVIN NEWSOM:

By the time I talked to Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, he was clearly frustrated. “This is ridiculous,” he said. “These guys write reports and they protest. But we need to build. You can’t be serious about climate and the environment without reforming permitting and procurement in this state.”

It hurts to get hammered by your friends. And that’s what’s happening to Newsom. More than 100 environmental groups — including the Sierra Club of California and The Environmental Defense Center — are joining to fight a package Newsom designed to make it easier to build infrastructure in California. …

California has become notorious not for what it builds but for what it fails to build. And Newsom knows it. “I watched as a mayor and then a lieutenant governor and now governor as years became decades on high-speed rail,” he said. “People are losing trust and confidence in our ability to build big things. People look at me all the time and ask, ‘What the hell happened to the California of the ’50s and ’60s?’”

As Victor Davis Hanson wrote in 2015 of Newsom’s predecessor: How Jerry Brown Engineered California’s Drought.

Brown and other Democratic leaders will never concede that their own opposition in the 1970s (when California had about half its present population) to the completion of state and federal water projects, along with their more recent allowance of massive water diversions for fish and river enhancement, left no margin for error in a state now home to 40 million people. Second, the mandated restrictions will bring home another truth as lawns die, pools empty, and boutique gardens shrivel in the coastal corridor from La Jolla to Berkeley: the very idea of a 20-million-person corridor along the narrow, scenic Pacific Ocean and adjoining foothills is just as unnatural as “big” agriculture’s Westside farming. The weather, climate, lifestyle, views, and culture of coastal living may all be spectacular, but the arid Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay-area megalopolises must rely on massive water transfers from the Sierra Nevada, Northern California, or out-of-state sources to support their unnatural ecosystems.

Now that no more reservoir water remains to divert to the Pacific Ocean, the exasperated Left is damning “corporate” agriculture (“Big Ag”) for “wasting” water on things like hundreds of thousands of acres of almonds and non-wine grapes. But the truth is that corporate giants like “Big Apple,” “Big Google,” and “Big Facebook” assume that their multimillion-person landscapes sit atop an aquifer. They don’t—at least, not one large enough to service their growing populations. Our California ancestors understood this; they saw, after the 1906 earthquake, that the dry hills of San Francisco and the adjoining peninsula could never rebuild without grabbing all the water possible from the distant Hetch Hetchy watershed. I have never met a Bay Area environmentalist or Silicon Valley grandee who didn’t drink or shower with water imported from a far distant water project.

The Bay Area remains almost completely reliant on ancient Hetch Hetchy water supplies from the distant Sierra Nevada, given the inability of groundwater pumping to service the Bay Area’s huge industrial and consumer demand for water. But after four years of drought, even Hetch Hetchy’s huge Sierra supplies have only about a year left, at best. Again, the California paradox: those who did the most to cancel water projects and divert reservoir water to pursue their reactionary nineteenth-century dreams of a scenic, depopulated, and fish-friendly environment enjoy lifestyles predicated entirely on the fragile early twentieth-century water projects of the sort they now condemn.

You know who built things in California? Jerry’s dad, Pat Brown. But in the 1970s, the left decided that the snail darter (and more recently in California, the delta smelt) were far more important than actually completing any new construction.

OBVIOUSLY, WE NEED TO BE IMPLEMENTING NUCLEAR POWER ON A CRASH BASIS: “A finite amount of human activity could result in a Hothouse Earth from which there is no return.”

DO TELL: Spotify exec: Prince Harry and Meghan are ‘f**king grifters.’ “Jump forward a full year later to January of 2022 and the couple had produced exactly one podcast that was about 30 minutes long.”

THE BOLOS’ COMBAT ETHICS MODULES SEEMED TO WORK WELL: Robot Souls and “Junk Code”: Should AI Be Given a Human Conscience?

The Berserkers, not so much.