Archive for 2025
May 2, 2025
CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE:
Second Amendment issues are civil rights issues. https://t.co/SQixK0ZO6S
— Harmeet K. Dhillon (@HarmeetKDhillon) May 2, 2025
THE NEW SPACE RACE: FAA grounds Firefly Aerospace’s Alpha rocket until failure investigation is complete.
The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is requiring an investigation into Alpha’s latest flight, an April 29 launch from California’s Vandenberg Space Force Base that ended in failure.
“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,” the agency wrote in an update the day of the mishap. “In addition, Firefly 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 April 29 mission, which Firefly called “Message in a Booster,” was the sixth to date for the two-stage, 96.7-foot-tall (29.6-meter-tall) Alpha. The rocket was supposed to deliver a prototype version of Lockheed Martin’s LM 400 multi-mission satellite bus to low Earth orbit, but that didn’t happen.
Just after its two stages separated, Alpha suffered a mishap “that led to the loss of the Lightning engine nozzle extension, substantially reducing the engine’s thrust,” Firefly wrote in a post-launch update. (Alpha’s upper stage is powered by a single Lightning engine.)
Better luck next time, fellas.
EVEN YALE (MY LAW SCHOOL ALMA MATER) IS LOOKING RELATIVELY GOOD (BUT ONLY RELATIVELY): I Don’t Mean to Brag, but I Didn’t Go to Harvard. Money quote: “It’s almost like certain Harvard affiliates want to give the Trump administration ammunition in its war against the university.”
LIKE DRUDGE IF HE WERE STILL RELEVANT: White House introduces White House Wire.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: ‘Maryland Dad’ Is Such a Scumbag Dems Will Probably Run Him in ’28. “The only way that the Democrats will move on from Kilmar Abrego Garcia is if they can swap him out for another criminal lowlife who is fresher in the news cycle. It’s almost riot season in the cold weather Dem-run cities, and you know they’re casting their eyes about for their next George Floyd.”
TRUE. WE NEED MORE ACTION FROM CONGRESS, THOUGH: Trump and His Team Win When They Lead From the Front.
THIS WAS INEVITABLE: Google is quietly testing ads in AI chatbots.
A report from Bloomberg describes how Google began working on a plan in 2024 to adapt AdSense ads to a chatbot experience. Usually, AdSense ads appear in search results and are scattered around websites. Google ran a small test of chatbot ads late last year, partnering with select AI startups, including AI search apps iAsk and Liner.
The testing must have gone well because Google is now allowing more chatbot makers to sign up for AdSense. “AdSense for Search is available for websites that want to show relevant ads in their conversational AI experiences,” said a Google spokesperson.
If people continue shifting to using AI chatbots to find information, this expansion of AdSense could help prop up profits. There’s no hint of advertising in Google’s own Gemini chatbot or AI Mode search, but the day may be coming when you won’t get the clean, ad-free experience at no cost.
It’s a sure thing that advertisers would pay dearly to tailor ads to the privacy-busting data made available by LLM queries and chatbots.
PEAK WASHED-UP HIPPIE CRINGE SO FAR. Neil Young Slammed For New Anti-Tesla Song: ‘Peak Washed-Up Hippie Cringe.’
PEOPLE SAY THE GOVERNMENT DOESN’T WORK, BUT IT WORKS FINE AS A MONEY LAUNDRY FOR THE CONNECTED: Elon Musk and the DOGE Team Do Group Interview – What Big Balls Has Uncovered Will Infuriate You.
An accountant friend comments on Facebook: “If you’ve not yet watched yesterday’s FoxNews DOGE bros interview, it’s really a must. DOGE has unconvered just ASTOUNDING levels of incompetence in our federal government. In fact, incompetence doesn’t even begin to reach it. Rather it seems very much to be a system that was intentionally set up without, or more likely robbed of, even basic internal controls so that TRILLIONS and TRILLIONS of money could be spent in ways that are completely unaubitable and therefore unaccountable.”
This isn’t by accident. It’s by design, to facilitate stealing.
THE NEW YORK TIMES IS NOT HAPPY, BUT I’M OKAY WITH IT: The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive. “I think the best way to understand politics right now is that the United States, for the first time in my lifetime, has a real right-wing counterculture — an edgy, radical-seeming alternative to the status quo.” It’s awfully long, and there’s a lot of blather, but there are some interesting nuggets.
Including this on college: “The thing I’ve thought long and hard about — and what I saw when I was a lecturer at UCI — there’s been this severing of a continuity between the past and the present, and I think it’s an intentional severing. These kids, they’re not well read. They don’t really know anything. I spent half of my classes just teaching Wikipedia-tier history just so we can have enough context to have the conversation about the actual stuff we’re talking about.”
WHY DID THE SCORPION STING THE FROG? Who Are the Maudes, and Why Did Biden Try to Ruin Their Lives? “If you watched Donald Trump’s cabinet meeting on Wednesday, you may have seen Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins hold up a photo of the Maude family of South Dakota. I’d heard a little bit about the fifth-generation ranching family before that, but I decided to learn more because I couldn’t believe the story Rollins told about how the Joe Biden administration treated them. It’s unbelievable. Or maybe it’s not, given all we’re learning about the last four years.”
2026 PREVIEW: Kemp neck and neck with Ossoff in possible Georgia Senate matchup. “Kemp has not announced whether he will enter the race to unseat Ossoff, but he is facing unyielding pressure from Republican leaders who see him as their strongest shot.”
LIGHTNING DEAL: 12×56 High Power Monocular Telescope with Smartphone Adapter. #CommissionEarned
WELL, HE HOLDS ALL THE CARDS, AND THE MONEY: Trump Is Likely to Win His Fight with Universities. “Critics of higher education over recent decades will not have much sympathy for Harvard and similarly situated universities in this contest. Beginning in the 1970s, liberal activists discovered that they could use the threat of withdrawn federal funds to induce colleges to reform their faculties by hiring feminists, blacks, environmental activists, and others associated with progressive causes—all for the purpose of promoting “diversity” on campus. Trump has now turned the tables by using these same tactics against them in a campaign to reform the universities from a different direction. As to Trump’s wish to lift Harvard’s tax exemption, he is merely citing a Supreme Court precedent (Bob Jones University v. United States, 1983) created by civil rights activists when they sought to withdraw that school’s tax status because of its racially discriminatory policies. Large research universities are vulnerable to these threats because they are highly dependent on federal funding to sustain their complex scientific and medical establishments. All told, the federal government sent more than $60 billion to colleges and universities in 2023 for research and development alone, most of it in grants and contracts from the National Institutes for Health, the Energy Department, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Health and Human Services.”
I GREW UP WITH FAMILY STORIES ABOUT THE NAPOLEONIC INVASIONS: The Vanished World.
Vanished worlds are alive under the surface of ours.
And at the same time several worlds vanished just in my life time… and more are passing as we speak. Some deservedly. We don’t just live in places. We live in slices of time. It is all that is given to us.
I’M CONVINCED, THEY DON’T HAVE TO KEEP PROVING IT: California Democrats Prove Again That They Care More About Perverts Than Kids.
IT TAKES THE DRUDGERY OUT OF KEEPING UP WITH ADMINISTRATION NEWS: The White House Launches Familiar Looking Website for ‘Trusted News Sites and Resources’.
THEY HAVE BEEN A DISASTER … FOR THE LEFT: No Wonder Why the Liberal Media Thinks Trump’s First 100 Days Are a Disaster.
IT’S HARD NOT TO: House GOP Reps Mock Dems for Being Totally Lost and Adrift.
ALWAYS. THAT’S MORE OPPORTUNITIES FOR GRAFT AND CORRUPTION: Lefty policies come with additional costs.
THE ACCOUNTANT 2 WAS GOOD: Target Rich Environment.
The best part about this is that it shows the criminal horrors of an open border policy and how those who come in get exploited even as the country is being destroyed. I don’t think the filmmakers realized how revelatory they were.