SORRY, BUT “INFAMOUS” IS THE BEST WE CAN DO:
Dear Diary… If I plead the Fifth, will I still be famous? pic.twitter.com/f0OwHbTOMO
— Secretary Kennedy (@SecKennedy) July 29, 2026
Author Archive: Stephen Green
July 29, 2026
YES, BUT…: China’s reported chip breakthrough comes with some big caveats.
“Any machine built by an unknown state-backed company are starting from a much worse spot. Reliability takes years of iteration in the field, which ASML has [and] China still has yet to achieve,” Patience added.
Another challenge for China is scaling these machines. The Information reported that the Chinese firm developing the DUV tool is aiming to produce five units this year and around 20 in 2027.
In comparison, ASML said it plans for a capacity of around 130 DUV immersion machines in 2026, and is planning to add 30% in 2027.
“Tool performance, scaling production of the machine itself, fleet performance, surrounding ecosystem and poor economics against fully depreciated ASML machines all stack up against China DUV,” a team of analysts at SemiAnalysis told CNBC.
“Scaling production of the machine itself [is] the most underestimated part.”
Yes, but if there’s one thing China does well, it’s scale up.
WAIT, IT’S STILL AFLOAT?
We’re sending a ship out to recover Starship https://t.co/fUqUZTITO9
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 28, 2026
It’s a spaceship and a ship-ship.
But you haven’t really seen the soft splashdown until you’ve seen this just-released drone footage of the soft splashdown:
NEW🚨: SpaceX shares insane drone footage from Starship's first-ever intact soft splashdown last week pic.twitter.com/OvMVWVtxhY
— Latest in space (@latestinspace) July 28, 2026
Impressive. Most impressive.
IT’S A FAR CRY FROM JAIL TIME, BUT AT LEAST HE HATED EVERY MOMENT OF IT:
Rand Paul did the impossible today: he found a way to make Anthony Fauci not talk. Rand Paul got the world’s most promiscuous media whore to suddenly not want to be on camera behind a microphone.
— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) July 29, 2026
ALIENS? JWST Just Examined Two Stars Suspected of Harboring Dyson Spheres. Here’s What It Found.
“A civilization can hide its star behind a shell of solar collectors, but thermodynamics always collects its tax, and all that captured starlight has to come back out as a warm mid-infrared glow.”
That glow would be unavoidable. Just as a laptop or lightbulb gives off waste heat, so too would any machine that harvests a star’s energy. The larger the hypothetical megastructure, the brighter that excess infrared radiation should become.
That excess is exactly what Project Hephaistos, led by astrophysicist Erik Zackrisson of Uppsala University in Sweden, set out to find. Even false positives could teach us how to better search for alien tech – by revealing the many ways the Universe can mimic it.
The search sifted through roughly five million Milky Way stars looking for exactly this kind of infrared excess – more mid-infrared light than an ordinary star should produce.
Seven stars survived the team’s increasingly stringent tests, with the two studied here emerging as the search’s most compelling candidates.
JWST quickly exposed the two candidates as Dyson sphere impostors – and the explanation was brilliantly simple. The light from both stars was being boosted by a distant galaxy almost perfectly lined up behind them.
So not aliens then.
SPACE:
Meet Sunbird, a nuclear fusion-powered space tug concept from Pulsar Fusion.
Using a Dual Direct Fusion Drive fuelled by deuterium and helium-3, it could one day help spacecraft reach Pluto in about four years.
Orbital demonstrations are planned for 2027. pic.twitter.com/EPO5KGXEJm
— Space and Technology (@spaceandtech_) July 28, 2026
Faster? Please!
JONATHAN TURLEY: Mamdani’s grocery stores will be the most expensive markets in NYC — paid for by you, the taxpayer.
Rather than deliver discount groceries, Mamdani is selling New Yorkers a bill of goods that will cost them millions.
It is not a description of a competitive grocery but a public charity. It is a quasi-food bank where taxpayers subsidize the cost.
As usual, Mamdani turns this into a class war, demonizing business owners. He suggests that real grocery stores are simply price gougers hoarding windfall profits from consumers. He ignores that they must pay rent, upkeep and fees — all things the city-run stores may simply write off.
He proclaimed, “May the most affordable grocery store win.”
Of course, the test is not which grocery is the most affordable, but which is the most sustainable. If you are willing to take a bath on sales, you can always offer the most affordable prices for as long as your excess cash holds out.
The first city-run grocery, in East Harlem, will cost $30 million to build — and perhaps more. It will never need to pay this money back nor factor it into its prices. The “warmth of socialism” will cover it; that is, you.
In reality, Mamdani will be selling apples at a far greater cost than any competitor, but those true costs will be buried in the city budget and paid for by the taxpayers.
There’s a new word for net taxpayers who stay in New York: Suckers.
Previously: Begun, the Class War Has.
“THEY ARE ALL DIFFERENT FACES OF THE SAME MANIA”:
Virtually the whole of Canada engaged in state-mandated paroxysms of self-abasement over a completely fake genocide.
Tens of thousands of parents across the Western world are eagerly consenting to the chemical castration of their confused children who have been brainwashed to… https://t.co/Jr8Kdd66lM
— Wesley Yang (@wesyang) July 29, 2026
‘WELCOME TO SOCIALISM’: A Clinton Hand’s Stark Warning About Mamdani.
CHANGE: AI tokens could become the kilowatt-hour of the AI age.
Earlier this year, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman declared, “We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter.”
Many other AI companies seem to be betting on a similar future. If that vision actually comes to be, then “AI tokens” may break out of the world of nerdy tech and econ conversations and become a much more familiar part of our lives. The number of AI tokens businesses and consumers use could even become one of the defining measures of a new industrial age — the AI equivalent of the kilowatt-hour for electricity: the standard way we measure and pay for AI usage.
Think of tokens as the meter running in the background every time you use AI. Every time an AI model reads your prompt, writes an answer, or does a task, that work is measured in tokens. They are the tiny chunks of text and other data that AI models read and generate. In general, the more work a model does, the more tokens it typically processes.
While AI companies still tend to offer flat-rate subscriptions to average consumers, they’re increasingly charging businesses and developers based on the number of tokens they use. At the same time, companies, particularly in the tech sector, have been using AI in more and more of their work. As their AI usage has soared, many businesses have discovered just how expensive token-based pricing can become.
AI upends the old software business model of basically zero marginal cost per additional unit sold. Tokens are much cheaper than they used to be, but each one still requires compute to generate. Not sure how that shakes out, but it’s difficult to imagine demand for chips and energy slacking off any time soon.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: It’s a Shame We Can’t Jail Dems for Torturing the Truth. “I run into that a lot here in my deep blue pinko commie neighborhood. There are ‘Stop the kidnappings! Report ICE…’ signs up all over the place. Of course, ICE agents aren’t kidnapping anyone. Leftists are incapable of dealing with anything intellectually, all they can do is rile up the low-info base with nonsensical emotional hysteria.”
NOVEMBER PREVIEW: Nine Republicans seeking Graham’s Senate seat.
Twelve attempted to get on the ballot; three were not certified by the state party.
Glenda Gail Parker and Danny Ford II, son of the former legendary football coach at Clemson, each filed before Tuesday’s deadline to a list led by Graham’s sister, two members of the U.S. House of Representatives, and a former congressman and governor who briefly ran for president. Ford, however, was not certified and will not appear on the ballot.
Graham died July 11, two days after his 71st birthday, and would have been seeking a fifth term.
Per state law, the filing period is one week, followed by the primary two weeks later on Aug. 11. If a runoff is needed, meaning no candidate gets 50% of the vote plus one, it happens Aug. 25.
The successful candidate in the primary will take Graham’s spot on the ballot on Nov. 3. Dr. Annie Andrews, a Charleston pediatrician, is the Democratic opponent in November and is joined on the ballot by Libertarian Kasie Whitener.
Gov. Henry McMaster appointed Graham’s sister, Darline Graham Nardone, to finish his term until the 120th Congress is seated in January. The 62-year-old Graham filed Friday and is backed for the six-year term by second-term Republican President Donald Trump.
Stay tuned…
VIGILANTISM IS MAN’S NATURAL STATE…:
Had been wondering when vigilantism was going to make a comeback in LA
Should have guessed some enterprising former gangsters would step in to fill the void left by city government
(Am a new subscriber to L.A. Material, which is great.) https://t.co/41i6qOx36Q pic.twitter.com/1GMeVPEFXz
— Moses Kagan (@moseskagan) July 28, 2026
…and we return to it when the authorities that were supposed to supplant it with something better fail.
BREAKING: ICE performs basic ICE functions, film at 11.
ICE is detaining foreign citizens at airports with expired U.S. visas, including spouses of Americans, according to documents obtained by The New York Times and interviews with immigration lawyers. https://t.co/gHPgFnhc6r
— The New York Times (@nytimes) July 28, 2026
You should probably rate the Community Note as Helpful: “That’s how visas work. Once expired, the holder is required to get a new one to reenter.”
SUPPLY, MEET DEMAND: Ukrainian drone boat deal to build in US could be ‘one of the most consequential partnerships.’
The Ukrainian company responsible for developing and manufacturing an autonomous drone boat used to sink several Russian navy warships has agreed to a deal with an American company to produce them in the United States for the U.S. military.
UFORCE produces the family of Magura drone boats, formally known as unmanned surface vessels, and it has become “one of the most capable platforms for [Ukraine’s] naval dominance of the Black Sea,” Sean Plankey, the company’s Chief Executive Officer for the U.S., told the Washington Examiner.
Ukrainian forces have used Magura drone boats to sink more than a dozen Russian warships and to shoot down Russian aircraft and helicopters as well. Between Ukraine’s use of the Magura USV and other drone boats, they have forced much larger and more expensive Russian warships to retreat from the Black Sea. They’ve also hit oil tankers and bridges.
The company came to a deal earlier this month with ReconCraft, an American-based boat manufacturer, to produce these vessels domestically.
Assuming Ukraine survives this war, they’ll end up a contracting powerhouse.
July 28, 2026
I CAN IMAGINE QUITE A BIT… BUT NOT THAT MUCH: Imagine Thinking More Gun Control is the Answer to California’s Crime Problem.
Tragically, a murderer opened fire at a Fourth of July weekend block party in Compton, California earlier this month, killing 37-year-old Eric Washington and 19-year-old Meah Bordenave-Jenkins and wounding three others. The victims and their loved ones deserve justice. Police arrested one suspect, 54 year-old Antoine Jones, two weeks later and charged him with murder in Bordenave-Jenkins’ death. He deserves prosecution and punishment to the fullest extent of the law. The suspect in Washington’s death is still at large.
California state Democratic Assemblymember Mike Gipson, however, quickly used this latest tragedy to call for…stronger state and federal gun control laws. He cited background checks, age restrictions and so-called “red flag” laws as “basics” that would reduce criminal violence.
The problem with Assemblyman Gipson’s demands, though, is that California already has all three.
Yes, but the next law, fee, tax, restriction, or requirement will work for sure.
DISPATCHES FROM THE OCCUPIED ZONES:
Last week, my mom got a "pied-a-terre" tax notice. She has lived full-time in her townhouse FOR 30 YEARS (she and my dad bought it for under $1 million). She has no other residence.
Is NYC not bothering with basic checking of its own tax lists?
She's 81 and has three weeks to… pic.twitter.com/aS9Nam5Htf
— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) July 27, 2026
THANK YOU FOR SHOPPING AT BANE GROCERS: Begun, the Class War Has.
OH FER CRYIN’ OUT LOUD: Women do more water chores due to ‘neocolonial gender blind spot,’ UCLA study says.
Society isn’t paying enough attention to how American women are disproportionately burdened by home tap water use, according to a new study from the UCLA Streisand Center’s Gender and Water research hub.
That’s when I thought I’d accidentally stumbled into a Babylon Bee article, but no:
Even though women in the study claimed not to be unfairly burdened, anthropology Professor Jessica Cattelino and her research team made the case that they still are.
The study “Gender and residential water use in Los Angeles: Ingrained, untapped, and porous,” was published in June in the journal Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space. It followed 36 families in the Los Angeles area for several years, tracking their residential water use through interviews and water diary entries.
Related: Unintentional fatal injuries arising from unpaid work at home.
Unpaid work in and around the home is a common and potentially high risk activity, yet there is limited information about the circumstances surrounding resulting injuries. This study aimed to describe circumstances surrounding fatal injuries resulting from home duties activities, in order to identify and prioritise areas for prevention. Coroners’ reports on all unintentional deaths in Australia from 1989-92 inclusive were inspected to identify deaths of interest. Rates were calculated using population data and incorporating measures of time engaged in particular home duties activities. There were 296 home duties deaths over the four year period. Most (83%) deaths were of males, and males had 10 times the risk of fatal injury compared with females.
Care to trade, ladies?