Author Archive: Stephen Green

HE LEFT OUT “POWER MAD,” BUT YEAH:

THERE’S REALLY NO OTHER CONCLUSION TO DRAW — AND IT’S BEEN OBVIOUS FOR YEARS:

INDEED:

FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY [VIP]: He Wet the Cop, Not the Bed. “It’s time for your much-needed break from the serious news, and this week, we’ll learn a brand-new way to fail the field sobriety test, what’s on the other side of that pond, and how Wyoming Man pretty much arrested himself.”

IT HELPS TO THINK OF THE MEDIA AS A NARRATIVE-ENFORCEMENT MECHANISM AND LITTLE ELSE:

BECAUSE OF COURSE:

IT’S TIME FOR VICTORIA TAFT’S West Coast, Messed Coast™: Is It the End of the Line for Gavin 2028? “Gavin Newsom and his political party have been the ruination of California. Of course, you’ve been reading this for years in your West Coast, Messed Coast™ update, but now Newsom is taking his act to a national audience, and it’s not going so well.”

NIFTY: We’ve flown a radiation-blocking vest to the Moon and back, and it worked.

Spacecraft designers have spent decades weighing shielding options, from aluminum hulls to water-filled walls to superconducting magnets that would deflect charged particles before they reach the crew. All of them run into the same challenge. “The question was how to use mass in a very efficient way,” Milstein says. “Mass is really the bottleneck—every gram counts.”

A shielding garment an astronaut could wear is simultaneously sensible and ridiculous. The ridiculous part was that, for a long time, people thought that a protective garment would need to look like full-plate armor in order to offer meaningful protection. It would presumably need to be made of lead or other high-density materials that would add mass and make moving around nearly impossible.

StemRad engineers, though, figured dressing as a medieval knight doesn’t really get you all that much. The human body, Milstein explains, isn’t uniformly vulnerable to radiation. “Tissues like the bone marrow are a lot more sensitive to radiation compared to the brain,” he says. Following this idea, StemRad developed a belt for nuclear first responders, worn around the hips, which hold roughly half the body’s bone marrow, the tissue that makes blood cells. Protecting even a fraction of the bone marrow lets a person regrow it and survive a high-dose exposure.

So, StemRad, working with Lockheed Martin, expanded this idea into a female vest that, aside from the hips, also covered the breasts, stomach, colon, and reproductive organs. These are all less immediately life-threatening when irradiated, but carry a long-term cancer risk.

The details are intriguing.

KRUISER: WaPo’s Assessment of Potential 2028 Dem Field Reads Like a Program for a Sad Circus. “There are no centrists in the Democratic Party, not even relative to the Democratic Socialists of America. Also, as I’ve been writing all summer, the only real difference between the establishment Dems and the DSA upstarts is the average age of the people claiming to be one or the other. What WaPo is trying to do here is make it seem as if there has been some sort of Dem course correction by asserting that there are objective ideological differences in a party that hasn’t allowed them since Lyndon Johnson was a young racist.”

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Plaintiffs in NFA Challenge Press DOJ for Clarification After Injunction Takes Effect.

As of Thursday, certain people could buy suppressors and short-barreled long guns without a Form 1 from the ATF. While the tax stamp died, we still had to have those products registered with the feds to avoid breaking out in handcuffs. However, a federal court ruled that with the tax gone, the registration is unconstitutional, and a temporary stay in that ruling’s impact expired at midnight Wednesday. Thursday was a brand new world.

At least, it’s one on paper.

Right now, no one seems to know precisely what the hell any of it means. The people covered are numerous, but the people who aren’t covered are also numerous. Some gun stores aren’t covered, but individuals are. Then there are affiliated groups that have an exemption because they’re affiliated with a plaintiff organization, even if they weren’t part.

In theory.

What a mess.

WE’LL HAVE TO SMUGGLE THEM ARMS:

LEAVE THEM KIDS ALONE: JD Vance refers medical child sex change providers to DOJ for prosecution over fraud.

The Trump administration on Thursday released a new report detailing how hospitals have placed profits over the safety of children in prescribing so-called “gender affirming” medical treatments, such as sex-change surgeries and hormones. Vice President VD Vance announced that he has referred the matter to the Department of Justice.

In a letter to Attorney General Todd Blanche, Vance wrote that he is referring the report to the DOJ “to determine whether the providers identified have violated federal law, regulations, or policies including, but not limited to, the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, the False Claims Act, 18 USC 24, and federal fraud and conspiracy laws.”

He continued, “When providers miscode treatment in order to secure insurance coverage for gender-transitioning interventions that insurance would not otherwise cover, they should be held accountable. If they have done so intentionally, thereby perpetuating a fraud on Medicaid or on private insurers, they should go to prison. Rather than allow the proliferation of harmful, sex-rejecting procedures on our children, we must sent a clear message that any hospitals and providers that have participated in these practices will face justice.”

Worse, large number of so-called “trans” kids are just ordinary tomboys, gays, and even the autistic just going through an awkward adolescence. Instead of getting counsel or just letting them figure things out like kids usually do, they got permanently altered.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Dear Gavin Newsom — When You’ve Lost Ann Arbor… “The adoring throngs never materialized. One could hardly refer to the smattering of people who showed up for Newsom’s public events as ‘crowds.’ Democrats are very adept at astroturfing attendance, but the party wasn’t doing any favors for Newsom.”