Author Archive: Stephen Green
April 4, 2025
FACEBOOK WINDS DOWN ITS CENSORSHIP PROGRAM:
By Monday afternoon, our fact-checking program in the US will be officially over. That means no new fact checks and no fact checkers. We announced in January we’d be winding down the program & removing penalties. In place of fact checks, the first Community Notes will start…
— Joel Kaplan (@joel_kaplan) April 4, 2025
FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY [VIP]: He Had a Knife, Started a Gunfight. “It’s time for your much-needed break from the serious news, and this week we have the Taco Bell paradox, how not to kill time at a Metro Rail station, and Pennsylvania Man’s instant karma.”
IT WOULD ALMOST BE SHOCKING IF THEY FOUND SOMETHING THAT WASN’T: DOGE Discovers Giant Social Security Fraud.
BEEGE: The Menace of Malicious Compliance in Our Military.
The poster boys for the modern woke military might be long gone, but the damage they did and the subversive ideology they nurtured are still very much in situ within the rank and file that make the big machine run. They infest every nook and cranny of the military bureaucracy.
There have always been examples of the concept in government. For example, during a shutdown, the National Park Service will go to great lengths to close off open parks, like the monuments in D.C., that don’t require any National Park Service presence to begin with, just to make their point. In much the same way, they recently expressed their ire with the Trump administration by having only one person with keys and restroom rescue knowledge in all of Yosemite. See what happens to the park when the knuckle-dragging Luddites furlough him?
HAH! GOTCHA
This has been the case in the military since the moment Pete Hegseth issued his first directive.
Read the whole thing.
NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: Hamas Quietly Drops Thousands of Deaths From Gaza War Casualty Lists.
THE NEW SPACE RACE: SpaceX tests previously flown Super Heavy booster.
SpaceX is having trouble with Starship’s upper stage after back-to-back failures, but engineers are making remarkable progress with the rocket’s enormous booster. The most visible sign of SpaceX making headway with Starship’s first stage—called Super Heavy—came at 9:40 am local time (10:40 am EDT; 14:40 UTC) Thursday at the company’s Starbase launch site in South Texas. With an unmistakable blast of orange exhaust, SpaceX fired up a Super Heavy booster that has already flown to the edge of space. The burn lasted approximately eight seconds, Ars reports.
This was the first time SpaceX has test-fired a “flight-proven” Super Heavy booster, and it paves the way for this particular rocket—designated Booster 14—to fly again soon. A reflight of Booster 14, which previously launched and returned to Earth in January, will happen on the next Starship launch, SpaceX confirmed Thursday. “This booster previously launched and returned on Flight 7 and 29 of its 33 Raptor engines are flight proven,” the company said. “The first Super Heavy reuse will be a step towards our goal of zero-touch reflight.”
The next Starship flight test is expected late this month or in May.
YES: Rubio Urges NATO Members To Increase Their Own Defense Spending To 5% Of GDP.
“I understand there’s domestic politics, after decades of building up vast social safety nets that maybe don’t want to take away from that and invest more in national security,” Rubio added. “But the events of the last few years … full-scale ground war in the heart of Europe as a reminder that hard power is still necessary as a deterrent. We do want to leave here with an understanding that we are on a pathway, a realistic pathway to every single one of the members committee, and fulfilling a promise to reach up to 5% of spending.”
Rubio stated the United States would also spend 5% of its GDP on defense as well.
“The majority of the 32 NATO members currently spend 2% of their nation’s GDP per previous NATO commitments, eight nations – Croatia, Portugal, Italy, Canada, Belgium, Luxembourg, Slovenia and Spain – have yet to meet their defense spending pledges,” Fox News noted. “Only Poland spends over 4% of its GDP on defense, while four other nations spend over 3% – Estonia, the U.S., Latvia and Greece.” The United States spent 3.38% of its GDP on defense in 2024.
We fell badly behind during the Biden years and it shows.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN):
Every single nation in this photo combined wasn’t enough to stop the Houthis from closing the Suez Canal
Together our navies are weak. That’s just a fact minister. And some (e.g. Canada) are straight up pathetic. https://t.co/J79JxvOdww
— John Ʌ Konrad V (@johnkonrad) April 4, 2025
Why are American taxpayers defending Europe rather than European taxpayers, defending Europe? pic.twitter.com/c7ZAdvvedf
— Steve Gill (@TheGillReport) April 4, 2025
KRUISER: When Dems Don’t Like What They See in the Mirror, They Insist That It’s the Mirror’s Fault. “The Democrats are obviously struggling with coming to terms with the rejection they faced last November. They’re always bad at introspection and taking responsibility for anything, but this is like nothing I’ve seen in all of my years in politics. It’s gotten to the point where I have to read at least one or two of the 2024 post mortems in the mainstream media every day to get my fix. Yeah, it’s a blast watching them not get it. The real joy for me, however, is seeing the myriad ways that they are finding to not come to the proper conclusions about why they lost.”
FRAM2 IS NEARING SPLASHDOWN:
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) April 4, 2025
MORE ON “ADOLESCENCE”: Netflix’s ‘Adolescence’ Has Heart But Doesn’t Understand Its Subject. “The show is designed and has been promoted in a way to scare middle-class white parents with the message, ‘Don’t get too comfortable; it could be your son [who murders a female classmate].’ However, that doesn’t bear out in reality. The show conflates incels with the manosphere, and Jamie’s profile doesn’t map onto known incel archetypes, let alone the most murderous ones. It’s being used to advocate for censorship and crackdown on content like Andrew Tate on the basis that it radicalizes young incels (a completely different camp) into murdering young women. While sexless young men have always posed a real danger for malevolence and violence, the majority of incels are more suicidal than homicidal. Young boys who watch Andrew Tate are more likely to grow up to be objectifying misogynistic douchebags obsessed with money and status than sexless murderers.”
And as Stacy McCain wrote in a post linked by Ed yesterday: “How many actual murders in England have been inspired by ‘incel subculture’ on social media? If it’s not zero, it’s pretty darned close. Which is to say, the plot of Adolescence is entirely fictional. No such teenage suspect as ‘Jamie Miller’ has ever committed a murder in England with a motive like the one dramatized in this series.”
Netflix race-swapped a murder — the kind that rarely happened in Britain before mass Third World immigration — but that is now commonplace enough to make a (heavily) fictionalized movie about it. That’s because the elites in politics and entertainment fear the reaction, justifiable as though it might be, if the popular culture reflected the reality of what the elites hath wrought.
So as Glenn noted on Monday, “Denial of that reality is the whole point.”
IT’S DIFFERENT NOW BECAUSE REASONS:
1) 1996 Nancy Pelosi encourages all of Congress to back reciprocal tariffs
2) 2008 Bernie Sanders wants tariffs, says jobs are going overseas
3) 2018 Barack Obama calls for reciprocal tariffs
4) 1988 Donald Trump says foreign countries must pay tariffs
Only 1 hasn’t sold out pic.twitter.com/6jqXqaYALC
— Wall Street Apes (@WallStreetApes) April 4, 2025
HOW’S THAT SPACE PROGRAM COMING ALONG: NASA catches a glimpse of ‘city-killer’ asteroid before it disappears until 2028.
Astronomers are watching 2024 YR4 closely, trying to learn everything they can before it disappears from view by mid-April, Kelly Fast, a planetary defense officer at NASA, told ABC News earlier this year. Its unique elongated orbit takes the asteroid around the sun and into Earth’s vicinity before it ventures far out between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter and out of sight, Fast said.
NASA’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies used the James Webb Space Telescope — the largest, most powerful telescope ever launched into space — to capture photos of the asteroid, the space agency announced on Wednesday.
New infrared observations indicate that the asteroid measures between 174 feet and 220 feet in diameter — about the size of the 10-story [sic] building, according to NASA. While it is not forecast to strike Earth in 2032, the asteroid now has a 1.7% probability of hitting the moon at that time, the space agency said.
Luna takes a lot of hits for Team Earth.
I’M SHOCKED, SHOCKED TO FIND GAMBLING IN THIS ESTABLISHMENT: The ‘Mary Poppins of Disinformation’ Says There’s No ‘Censorship-Industrial Complex’ in America.
WINNING: Trump Cancels Biden Grants to China-Tied Think Tank Behind War on Gas Stoves.
The Department of Energy canceled two climate grants the Biden administration awarded to the Rocky Mountain Institute, a left-wing climate think tank that has pushed for heavy restrictions on gas stoves and that has collaborated with the Chinese government.
The first grant was worth about $5.3 million and designed to fund the Rocky Mountain Institute’s pilot project retrofitting a 120-unit building in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with green energy technology. Then-energy secretary Jennifer Granholm said in March 2022 the grant funding proved the Biden administration was “in an all-out sprint to beat the climate crisis” while Sen. Ed Markey (D., Mass.) said it would help protect the country “from upheaval caused by the global fossil fuel market.”
The second was a $1.5 million grant to fund research into the viability of electric vehicle carshare programs. The research, according to the Department of Energy, would assess business models in the United States for resilience and “equity.”
Let lefty billionaires pay for their own BS.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: The World Is Suddenly Full of International Economics Experts. “I may not be an expert on the economy — domestic or global — but I do know that the mountain of messes that Trump inherited for his second term aren’t of the easy fix variety. Yeah, executive orders got the ball rolling on a lot of things, but there’s still a lot work to be done on every issue that those addressed. “
BLUE STATE BLUES:
Roblox has filed to leave Delaware and reincorporate in Nevada. pic.twitter.com/5jXI0kA2Su
— Robert Anderson (@ProfRobAnderson) April 2, 2025
More:
This is becoming worrisome for Delaware, not only because this keeps happening, but also because the companies seem to be coalescing around Nevada. That will make it viable.
I think Delaware’s amendments made a difference, but they may have just come too late in the proxy season after companies had already gone through their processes. The decision to vilify Musk and explicitly deny him the benefit of the law his case inspired probably hurt as well.
Companies like Roblox leaving are the known costs. Then there are the companies that might have incorporated in Delaware but will do so elsewhere due to unknowns about its current business climate.
ICYMI, IT’S THIS WEEK’S THURSDAY VIP ESSAY: The Case For (and Against) Trump’s Tariffs.
Members asked for longer pieces and I’ve been happy to oblige.
CHANGE: Hungary withdraws from International Criminal Court during Netanyahu visit.
A senior official in Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government confirmed this hours after Israel’s leader Benjamin Netanyahu, who is sought under an ICC arrest warrant, arrived in Hungary for a state visit.
Orban had invited Netanyahu as soon as the warrant was issued last November, saying the ruling would have “no effect” in his country.
In November, ICC judges said there were “reasonable grounds” that Netanyahu bore “criminal responsibility” for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity during the war between Israel and Hamas.
Netanyahu has condemned the ICC’s decision as “antisemitic”.
The ICC, a global court, has the authority to prosecute those accused of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.
In theory, maybe. In practice, the ICC is just another far-left enforcement mechanism.
April 3, 2025
CHRISTIAN TOTO: Amber Ruffin Weaponizes ‘Very Fine People’ Hoax.
The former Peacock talker got hired, and then dismissed by the White House Correspondents Association to emcee its April gala.
The WHCA didn’t mention Ruffin’s name in the cancellation announcement. Nor did anyone from the corrupt group explain why she was chosen for the honor and, later discarded.
She deserves better. That doesn’t mean she wouldn’t be a train wreck on the night in question.
Even by far-Left standards, Ruffin is a progressive bomb thrower, a clapter-approved satirist who hits mostly one side. That’s exactly the image the WHCA wants to avoid on its biggest night of the year.
Case in point: Ruffin threw a public tantrum on “Late Night with Seth Meyers” this week. And, in the process, she cited one of the biggest Fake News stories of the past decade.
She never should have been tapped for the WHCA gig in the first place.
I’m assured she’s a comedian but I just don’t get it.