KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Scott Pelley’s Podcast Tears Made My Schadenfreude Cup Runneth Over. “Pelley is such an arrogant piece of garbage that he probably thought that he was untouchable and wouldn’t be fired. He must have had amnesia regarding Dan Rather. He also must not have appreciated the resolve that the new sheriff in town at CBS News has.”
Author Archive: Stephen Green
June 9, 2026
CHANGE: Once on the Brink, U.S. Steel’s Oldest Plant Is Getting a Big Renovation.
Tokyo-based Nippon Steel, which bought U.S. Steel last year in a controversial deal, said it expects to spend $2 billion to $2.5 billion at Mon Valley Works over the next three years to replace the equipment that rolls steel. The investment is more than double Nippon Steel’s original cost estimate for the project.
Replacing the current 88-year-old hot-strip mill at Mon Valley will lead to more domestically produced steel. The work is expected to generate as many as 6,000 jobs and up to $1.7 billion in economic activity for Pennsylvania, company executives said.
“The Mon Valley project will go a long way to make people feel like there’s a future here,” U.S. Steel Chief Executive David Burritt said in an interview. “We’ve got great partners with Nippon Steel. These investments would not have been able to happen without it.”
…
Burritt said U.S. Steel on its own couldn’t afford the costly upgrades and maintenance needed at Mon Valley, which consists of three plants in separate towns south of Pittsburgh.In early 2025, then President Biden blocked the sale to the Japanese company over potential national-security risks. President Trump resurrected the deal and approved it on the condition that Nippon Steel increased its investments in U.S. Steel’s existing plants to $11 billion.
The White House also gets a veto over “plant closings, the transfer of production out of the country and other operational changes,” which in theory should prevent the industry from getting re-hollowed out.
WELL, WHEN YOU PUT IT LIKE THAT…:
Nithya Raman even LOST her own district (CD-4) to Spencer Pratt and Karan Bass, but you expect us to believe she beat them BOTH by winning 40% of the vote in the rest of the city by mail-in ballots? 🧐 pic.twitter.com/H43ws28F0J
— Gays For Trump (@GaysForTrump) June 8, 2026
I KEEP HOPING FOR AN UPDATE ON THESE TWO, BUT ALAS, NOT YET: Score Two More Big Wins for Israel Vs. Iran… Maybe.
VOTING FOR YOUR OWN DESTRUCTION:
The thing is — it keeps winning power in major American cities. It keeps cannibalizing the Democratic Party. It may not be popular in opinion polls, but it is unstoppable in intramural contests within institutions. https://t.co/iYlTEP7ALp
— Wesley Yang (@wesyang) June 9, 2026
SPACE: A Falcon 9 booster turns 5 years old—and just set a remarkable reuse record.
A little more than five years ago, a shiny white Falcon 9 rocket made its debut flight, boosting a Cargo Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station. Over the next year, it would launch a pair of astronaut missions and a handful of commercial spacecraft.
But since then, this first stage booster, designated B 1067, has mostly flown Starlink missions. It has launched them one after another, always returning safely to a drone ship before undergoing refurbishment and flying again. Sometimes it has flown twice in a single month.
On Monday morning, B 1067 once again took to the skies, launching 29 Starlink Internet satellites into low-Earth orbit from Florida. Upon landing on the A Shortfall of Gravitas drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean, the vehicle completed its 35th mission overall, retaining its title as fleet leader for SpaceX.
The successful launch brings SpaceX closer to its most recently stated goal of qualifying its Falcon 9 first stage vehicles to support 40 missions each. Since that goal was outlined more than two years ago and the company has continued flying its experienced boosters safely across dozens of missions, SpaceX may be intending to push past 40 missions.
To date, the only company in the world breaking SpaceX’s records is SpaceX.
That aside, the goal is to get Starship up to hundreds of flights with minimal refurbs in between. The lessons really only SpaceX has learned (the hard way) on reusability for Falcon 9 ought to be a huge leg up on the second generation of reusable rockets.
HOMESTEADING ON THE NAVAL OBSERVATORY GROUNDS: Are the Vances Adding More Than Just a New Baby to Their Family?
June 8, 2026
I LIKE THEIR WHOLE-BEAN ESPRESSO: Italian coffee giant Lavazza launches single-serve tablets to make espresso in the U.S.
The Italian coffee giant unveiled Tablì last year and launched the new brewing system first in Italy. The tablets, made of compressed ground coffee without a coating, binder or gelatin, can only be used with a Tablì coffee machine made by Lavazza. Each tablet is marked with the words “100% coffee. At launch, the tabs will come in five varieties: espresso, double espresso, decaf espresso, super crema and lungo, or a “long shot” espresso brewed with more water.
“The result that we’ve been able to achieve was through a very complicated industrial process in order to be able to have [the coffee tablet] very compact, to be able to deliver it without destroying it, to have it able to work in a coffee machine,” Lavazza CEO Antonio Baravalle told CNBC.
Tablì is the result of Lavazza’s acquisition of the Italian startup Caffemotive in 2020. The new system took five years of development, more than 15 patents and a new production facility in Gattinara, Italy, to bring it to market.
Anything that speeds up the delivery of caffeine with decent flavor is worth trying once.
REALLY HARD, THAT’S HOW: How Ukraine Is Hammering Russian Logistics.
THEY STILL MIGHT FINISH BEFORE CALIFORNIA: Peru election result close as vote counting continues. “It put the left-wing Roberto Sánchez on a marginal lead of 50.3% of the vote, compared with the right-wing Keiko Fujimori on 49.7%. While not an official count, the tally has been an accurate indicator of the final result in previous polls.”
MASSIE IS JUST AUDITIONING FOR HIS POST-CONGRESSIONAL PODCAST CAREER ALONGSIDE TUCKER AND MEGYN:
Massie's "Justice Delayed" speech on the House floor today asserts that Israel deliberately attacked the USS Liberty with the intention to murder its crew, and that the US government covered it up.
However, the comprehensive documentary record—spanning more than a dozen official… pic.twitter.com/M6yAzgMTHm
— David Reaboi, Late Republic Nonsense (@davereaboi) June 8, 2026
IT’S ALWAYS SOMETHING: Inflation inside the electronics you buy may soon become a bit more sticky. “When the Jubail petrochemical and industrial complex in Saudi Arabia was struck by Iranian missiles on April 6 and April 7, it was the final blow in a convergence of factors — geopolitical, financial, physical — that knocked out a key world reservoir of resin, leaving the crucial component for circuit boards in short supply. The plants had already shut down at the end of March as it became clear transit through the Strait of Hormuz was untenable during the conflict, and it is still not back online.”
FINGERS CROSSED: Score Two More Big Wins for Israel vs Iran… Maybe.
PUT. THE SMARTPHONE. DOWN. Why Are Birthrates Down? You Might Be Looking at the Answer.
Caitlin Myers, an economist at Middlebury College, and Ezekiel Hooper, her student, used the spotty early rollout of the iPhone as a way to isolate the effects of the phone on fertility. The first iPhone was released in June 2007, they wrote, and was available only on the AT&T network until February 2011. The study compared fertility rates in U.S. counties that had near-universal AT&T coverage with counties that had little or none.
Their paper, published in the National Bureau of Economic Research, found that the iPhone caused as much as half of the fertility decline between 2007 and 2011. The most pronounced effects were among young people aged 15 to 24.
What happened in the counties with iPhones? One theory, Professor Myers said, is that young people began to socialize more on their phones and less in person, and consequently were less likely to have sex and become pregnant.
Professor Myers said iPhones may also have made pornography more accessible, which led young people to substitute it for sex, or young people may have used them to obtain better information on avoiding pregnancy, including contraception and abortion.
Researchers not involved in the study said the results were persuasive.
Makes at least as much sense as any other explanation I’ve seen.
ELECTION SECURITY, CALIFORNIA STYLE:
This is insane. You can even write the purported date on the ballot envelope, no postmark needed!
California is ground zero for election fraud in the United States. https://t.co/Szh16vQlDn
— Kyle Becker (@kylenabecker) June 8, 2026
MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Boomers: A Generation of Scrooge McDucks?
BESSENT IN BEAST MODE: Economic Fury Tightens Stranglehold on Iranian Dark Fleet. “The designation of Nobitex adds further layers of complication to Iranian government financial transactions, following the designation of the Hossein Shamkhani trading network on April 15, and the Babak Zanjani business empire on January 30. All three entities, run with huge profits by families all closely connected with leading religious figures in the Iranian political elite, made heavy use of apparently legitimate front companies operating in Turkey and the United Arab Emirates. But now that the UAE is abandoning transactionalism and regards Iran as an enemy, the previously relaxed approach of the Emirati authorities toward such activities has been replaced by a determination to tighten controls — as well as to avoid a return to the Financial Action Task Force’s Gray List. The message was made very clear in a video conference on June 3 covering money laundering, convened by Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed, a call that rounded up almost the entire Emirati leadership and business elite.”
WELL, WHEN YOU PUT IT THAT WAY:
I’ll bite. Why do 34 of 47 European counties completely forbid the practice of mail in voting? They’re way to the political left of the US.
Why Russia, Japan, Israel, Mexico?
People like this are the ones proving to me that humanity is moving backward despite endless access to… https://t.co/b5q9AG2GMk
— Seth Keshel (@RealSKeshel) June 7, 2026
Not every mail-in election is stolen, but they’re all suspect.
THIS IS A PROBLEM: The Colorado River’s largest reservoirs are heading toward a ‘system crash,’ experts warn.
Colorado River experts and decision makers gathered in Boulder, Colorado, this week to discuss the future of the water supply for 40 million people across the Southwest. At the registration table, a new white paper set the tone for the conference at the Colorado Law School: “Colorado River Basin Storage Continues Slide Toward System Crash.”
If the Colorado River Basin has another dry year, even if water consumption is at or near historic lows, Lake Powell and Lake Mead will likely drop to levels that could threaten dam infrastructure and downstream deliveries to major southwest cities and agriculture hubs at the start of the 2028 water year, according to the paper co-authored by Colorado River experts.
If next year is more similar to a heavy snow year like 2023, then the nation’s two largest reservoirs would recover to an extent, but that cushion would likely only last for about two years, the paper says.
“We’re going to have to work harder to save water than we have ever worked before in the 21st century,” said Jack Schmidt, one of the paper’s co-authors, in an interview before the conference.
Previously, a possible solution:
Now it’s time to build nuclear powered desalination plants and canals to green large parts of the American desert West. https://t.co/MkzCLWKXG1 pic.twitter.com/t4nHHu3JzW
— Unfiltered Artist (@EmpireEnjoyer3) June 5, 2026
HE’S JUST GETTING STARTED:
Ah good.
The Islamist is now twisting scripture to support his socialist policies.
What could go wrong? https://t.co/cD3nfxVCd6
— Bonchie (@bonchieredstate) June 8, 2026
THE BIDENS HAVE ALWAYS BEEN SLEAZY, HE WAS JUST THE MOST PUBLIC ABOUT IT: Hunter Biden Is Posting Like the Biden Name Needs Rescuing.