Author Archive: Stephen Green
April 5, 2022
SPACE: Jeff Bezos and Amazon just hired everybody but SpaceX for Project Kuiper.
Amazon on Tuesday announced the largest commercial launch deal ever. The company said it has finalized agreements with three different rocket companies for a total of 83 launches. The rockets will deploy a majority of Amazon’s low-Earth-orbit constellation of broadband satellites.
With this deal, Amazon has acquired an extraordinary amount of medium- and heavy-lift launch capacity over the next five years, procuring launches from every major Western provider except for its direct satellite competitor, SpaceX. Aside from SpaceX, this purchase represents the vast majority of any “spare” launch capacity for larger rockets in the United States or Europe over the next half-decade.
Amazon announced launch agreements with the following companies as it seeks to build out its constellation of 3,236 satellites.
I couldn’t help but notice that Bezos’ own Blue Origin — which has yet to reach orbit — received the fewest orders of the three launch companies.
CASEY SMITH: My Nightmare Experience With Cruel, Fascistic Covid Policies at a California Hospital. “The following was written under a pseudonym for fear of reprisals against the author’s ailing mother.”
NIFTY: The US Air Force showed off an A-10 in its new ‘bomb truck’ configuration. “Until now the A-10 was limited to carry only a single weapon on each pylon; by using the BRU-61/A rack, the A-10 will be able to carry four SDBs on each weapon pylon, becoming a ‘bomb truck’ that can release these stand-off weapons to neutralize threats as far as 50 miles in the target area before starting to provide Close Air Support (CAS) to ground troops.”
THAT’S WHAT GRIFTERS DO: Hunter Biden sought to cash in with oligarchs during first Russian war on Ukraine, records show.
President Joe Biden’s son and his associates targeted Russian oligarch Yelena Baturina — who eventually was sanctioned by the U.S. a few years later in 2018 — for as much as $200 million after helping her get a bank account set up in America, the emails show.
Hunter Biden and his associates even arranged for Baturina and her husband, an ex-Moscow mayor, to meet with then-Vice President Joe Biden at an intimate dinner in Washington in 2015.
At the same time he and his team courted Baturina, Hunter Biden was securing lucrative board positions and consulting deals with Ukrainian oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky, a man whose company, Burisma Holdings, the United States and Great Britain wanted investigated for corruption.
The Big Guy was Vice President at the time — did he get his 10%?
VODKAPUNDIT PRESENTS YOUR WEEKLY INSANITY WRAP: We Need to Talk About Kamala Harris. “Welcome to Insanity Wrap, your weekly dose of the best of the worst. President Kamala Harris is the new big crazy.”
Plus:
- Hey, teacher, leave them kids alone (it’s the law)
- You can say anything you want in NYC (unless Mayor Adams disagrees)
- Short people got no reason (not to be hypocrites)
So much more at the link, you’d have to be crazy to miss it.
HEINLEIN’S CRAZY YEARS (CONT’D): NYC Health Official Calls White Women ‘Birthing People,’ Black and Hispanic Women ‘Mothers’ — Then It Gets Crazy.
IT’S GOOD TO BE THE NOMENKLATURA: Secret Service paying over $30K a month for Malibu home to provide security for Hunter Biden.
THE LEFT’S WAR ON WOMEN: Our Government Is Joining Big Tech in Erasing Women.
THAT’S NOT EVEN CLOSE TO HIS PERSONAL BEST: It Took Just Four Days For Biden’s Oil Price Scheme To Go Up In Smoke.
The Brent crude index, the global oil benchmark, increased to $108.07 per barrel Monday morning, surging more than 3.1% overnight. The U.S. WTI index skyrocketed more than 3.4% past $103 per barrel Monday.
“Will the release of barrels from strategic reserves fill a shortfall caused by sanctions and buyer aversion to Russian oil? In a word, no,” Stephen Brennock, an analyst at PVM Oil Associates, told Reuters.
Biden announced Thursday that he ordered the Department of Energy to release a million barrels of oil stored in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) every day for six months. The following day, the International Energy Agency said its 31 member nations pledged their own separate release of 62.7 million additional barrels of oil.
The US uses about 18 million barrels of oil each day, and every trader knows that at some point we’ll have to refill the SPR.
THE PROBLEM? GOVERNMENT. THE SOLUTION: MORE GOVERNMENT. Like True Commies, the Democrats Create Crime Then Use Crime Stats to Take Our Guns.
NEVER UNDERESTIMATE JOE’S WILLINGNESS TO F*** THINGS UP: Biden’s plan to cut Navy ships: Handing China victory at sea.
The Biden administration’s 2023 defense budget request falls far short of America’s strategic needs. The administration remains committed to concepts like “Integrated Deterrence,” a notion that the invasion of Ukraine showed to be strategically vacuous. Of equal importance is the budget’s proposed dollar amount, $813 billion: Given inflationary projections of above 7 percent, Biden’s proposed 4 percent increase amounts to a defense spending cut.
More relevant are the individual services’ budgets, which dictate the actual resource distribution between military capabilities. Specifically, the administration’s budget request for the Navy and its ship-retirement plans are cause for real concern. These suggest that the Sea Services have been tied to irrational political-economic and construction timelines that pay insufficient attention to the strategic consequences of their budgetary choices. A shrinking fleet does not simply send the wrong message to our foes in the abstract. In the concrete, the administration’s budgetary plans will diminish American combat power precisely when China is hungrily eyeing Taiwan.
Related? Spy agency sought Hunter Biden laptop back in 2020 to see if family compromised. “What our concern is, is that if there’s compromising information on that hard drive, this is before the election, the president could be compromised to the level of owing either China or or Ukraine something.”
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Elon Musk’s New Majority Stake in Twitter Makes Things Fun Again. “That 9.2% makes Musk Twitter’s largest shareholder now, which is kind of delicious. Yes, it’s a passive stake, which, in theory, means he won’t be influencing the company but this is still a bold move. Musk really doesn’t do anything passively. In fact, he wasted no time stirring things up, tweeting a poll that addressed and poked fun at what is one of the most frequent complaints of all Twitter users.”
WHOSE DEVICE IS IT, ANYWAY? Vizio showing ads over live TV is a glimpse of our hellish future.
Technology companies are eager to prove that the products we buy aren’t actually ours — and TV makers have embraced this more than most.
I mean, what other way is there to explain why Vizio has enabled a feature on its TVs that display banner adverts over live shows?
Named ‘Jump Ads,’ the idea is a visual overlay appears during a television spot, which then pushes users towards the series on an app available on Vizio’s devices.
For example, imagine catching the premiere of a new comedy on a TV channel. At the end of this episode a banner appears, encouraging you to visit a streaming service to watch the next entry in the series.
In fact, this is precisely what Fox — the first partner engaging with Vizio’s Jump Ads — is doing. The media giant placed a banner at the end of its new show Welcome to Flatch. This impels viewers to watch additional episodes on the company’s app, which is available on Vizio’s televisions.
Elvis had the right idea.
PJ MEDIA VIP ROUNDUP: Don’t forget that VODKAPUNDIT promo code if you’ve been thinking of joining us.
Stacey Lennox: Here’s What Arrogant Globalists Like Klaus Have in Store for the World. “Schwab assumes that approximately five dozen people can build out a framework that will work globally across cultures to accomplish this while meeting in a nation where homosexuality is criminalized and punishable by death. How very inclusive.”
Matt Margolis: Let’s Be Blunt About Identity Politics. “Ketanji Brown Jackson’s inevitable confirmation will not be a high point for our country. Let’s not get distracted by identity politics here. Yes, she is a black woman, but she will neither be the first black person on the court nor the first woman on the court. The glass ceiling for the Supreme Court has long been broken, so let’s not be distracted by Jackson’s race or gender because that’s exactly what Joe Biden wanted.”
Yours Truly: Two ‘Key’ Executives Quit Trump’s Truth Social Media. “There have been reports that Trump was ‘angry’ over the site’s ‘shaky launch,’ and let me tell you: He has every right to be.”
Bonus: Florida Man Friday: the Groin Injury He’ll Never Forget.
April 4, 2022
GLEICHSCHALTUNG: At Least Big Left Isn’t Telling Us What to Wear … Oh. “The Luddites of the European Commission (EC) have identified another route of attack in their endless war to force the peasants to conform to pre-industrial lifestyles.”
COLORADO: Egregious bill criminalizes clerks checking election accuracy. “This bunker-busting election bomb is aimed at preemptively blowing up any future trouble-makers who, like Elbert County Clerk Dallas Schroeder and Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters, have looked into what’s been happening inside the Dominion machines, and are now facing criminal charges for actually doing their jobs. Inquiring minds want to know: is the passage of this unprecedented secretary of state power play setting the stage for the manipulation of the 2022 elections?”
HOOKY EPIDEMIC: School’s Out For… Ever in NYC. “Meanwhile, New York teachers are lobbying for additional sick days and ‘true paid family medical leave.'”
IT’S A SCAM: Black Lives Matter Secretly Bought a $6 Million House “Allies and critics alike have questioned where the organization’s money has gone.”
NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: Spy agency sought Hunter Biden laptop back in 2020 to see if family compromised.
Retired Army Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer’s account to Just the News was confirmed by three other people who were approached by Shaffer or the agency or were involved in the approach.
They said the agency’s interest was to analyze the hard drive contents for any evidence or patterns of how foreign adversaries were seeking to compromise prominent Americans or their families.
Shaffer provided details about the approach during an appearance Friday on the Just the News television show on Real America’s Voice.
“A three-letter agency came to me and said, ‘Hey, we’ve heard that you have access to a copy of the Hunter Biden hard drive. Could we get a copy?'” Shaffer said during the interview. “And I said, like, ‘Do you know what’s on there? I mean, we’re talking about everything from child porn, to, you know, all these these issues regarding the president.’
“And they said, ‘We don’t care. … We want to either confirm or refute it. We want to act factual. We don’t have a political dog in the fight. What our concern is, is that if there’s compromising information on that hard drive, this is before the election, the president could be compromised to the level of owing either China or or Ukraine something. And this is what this three letter agency was concerned about.”
Related: The ‘cabal’ that bragged of foisting Joe Biden on us must answer for his failed presidency.
SAD: The descent of New York. “As New York emerges from its third wave of Covid, an exceptionally creepy atmosphere has developed on the streets and in the subways, where at times conditions appear to have fallen somewhere between post-modern anarchy and medieval misery. In such a setting, statistics seem almost pointless, although it’s impossible not to be aware of the rising murder and assault rates. According to the NYPD, crime in the city in February was 59 percent higher than February last year. Car theft doubled. Rape was up by 35 percent. A Quinnipiac University poll found that New Yorkers are more worried about crime now than any time since 1999.”