DISPATCHES FROM AIRSTRIP ONE: UK Imprisons Man for 17 Days — for Each X View of His ‘Hate’ Speech.
Author Archive: Stephen Green
December 17, 2025
M&A: Warner Bros. Discovery recommends investors reject Paramount’s hostile takeover bid.
The company’s board said in a statement that it determined the Paramount Skydance offer “is not in the best interests of WBD and its shareholders.”
The Warner Bros. board’s recommendation to shareholders effectively means Paramount’s offer is dead. Paramount could, however, return with a higher offer.
“This offer once again fails to address key concerns that we have consistently communicated to Paramount throughout our extensive engagement and review of their six previous proposals,” WBD’s chair, Samuel Di Piazza, said.
Warner Bros. Discovery said it was instead sticking with its initially announced deal to sell its studio, HBO, and HBO Max to Netflix. “The terms of the Netflix merger are superior,” WBD said in a letter to shareholders.
Sad end for a storied studio.
YES:
If the most prominent leftist in America was shot and killed on camera during a Democrat administration, the Democrats would spend every waking moment, for as long as they hold power, using it as an excuse to ruthlessly crackdown on the Right, throwing hundreds of us in prison,…
— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) December 17, 2025
Exit reply: “They did this after January 6th, and the J6ers weren’t even armed.”
SHE EFFED UP, SHE TRUSTED THEM: What the Hell Was Susie Wiles Thinking?
HEY, BIG SPENDER:
Brown University has offered $0 as a reward to catch the shooter.
You read that correctly.
$0
The FBI offered the $50,000.
Brown University…
$8 billion endowment
$3.17 million a year salary for president
$180 million in taxpayer dollars per year$0 for reward.
Unreal.
— C3 (@C_3C_3) December 17, 2025
Message sent and received.
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Greatly reduced expectations: Students read few ‘whole books’ or none at all.
“Twelfth-grade reading scores are at historic lows,” she writes. “College professors, even at elite schools, are increasingly reporting difficulties in getting students to engage with lengthy or complex texts.”
Andrew Polk, 26, who teaches 10th-grade English in suburban Ohio, tells the Times he was assigned many whole books and plays when he was in high school not that long ago. But he’s supposed to use McGraw-Hill’s StudySync, which centers on excerpts. He has time for a few longer works each year, such as Macbeth, Fahrenheit 451 and John Green’s Paper Towns, a young-adult mystery. Teenagers still feel “passion for a good story,” and “can and do rise to the occasion.”
Teaching excerpts can expose students to more diverse writers, writes Goldstein. Schools can avoid controversial passages, such as sex scenes. The passages students read resemble what they’ll see on standardized tests. And providing online excerpts can be cheaper than buying books.
But students don’t build reading stamina. They don’t have a chance to dive into a different time or place, see characters develop or get to the happy ending.
What shame. Some of my best and most enjoyable reading was books I didn’t want to read, but that teachers required.
WELCOME TO THE PARTY, PAL: Even Some Democrats Are Starting to Side-Eye Gavin Newsom’s Coastal Lefty Elitism.
ALSO FILED UNDER, “NO JEWS, NO NEWS.”:
More people were killed in the Sudan in the last three weeks than the whole war in Gaza. Have you heard a peep? Nope. Why? Because it doesn’t further the case of dismantling western civilization.
— Insurrection Barbie (@DefiyantlyFree) December 17, 2025
Exit question: “Has anyone heard from Tucker on this war — estimates on those killed go as high as 400,000. Tucker’s been as quiet about this as he’s been on the genocide of Nigerian Christians by Islamists.”
GROOMING, STRAIGHT UP: San Diego school district teaches young kids 28 sexual orientations, 9 gender identities. “Using a rationale rejected by the Supreme Court’s Mahmoud precedent against a suburban D.C. district’s no-exceptions LGBTQ curriculum, SDUSD claims it can expose children to such mature and disputed concepts because it’s ‘not trying to change the religious beliefs or ideologies of any person’ but rather ‘to change how we respond to the most vulnerable populations that we serve.'”
Stick to the three R’s and leave them kids alone.
RELIGION OF PEACE UPDATE, IOWAHAWK STYLE:
I feel it would wrong to use the actions of a couple of bad apples tarnish the reputation of the entire Syndney October 7 Mass March to Gas The Jews community https://t.co/L4MhsKWxxx
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) December 17, 2025
2028 PREVIEW: Rubio: I Won’t Run If Vance Enters 2028 Race.
“If J.D. Vance runs for president, he’s going to be our nominee, and I’ll be one of the first people to support him,” Rubio told author Chris Whipple in a “Vanity Fair” interview published Tuesday.
Rubio, 54, and Vance, 41, are widely viewed as leading GOP presidential candidates when Trump’s second term ends. Presidents are constitutionally limited to two terms under the 22nd Amendment.
Trump this year publicly praised Vance and Rubio and floated the idea of them running together on a future Republican ticket, without specifying who would lead.
“We have J.D., obviously — the vice president is great,” Trump said while traveling in Asia in October. “Marco’s great. I’m not sure if anybody would run against those two. I think if they formed a group, it would be unstoppable.”
Of course, intentions often change as the primaries come closer.
SAD:
📰 SYDNEY: JEWISH-OWNED BAGEL SHOP CLOSES AFTER FEAR OF BEING MURDERED
Avner’s, a Jewish-owned bagel bakery in Sydney, has closed effective immediately following the Bondi chanukah massacre and escalating antisemitic threats.
The owners say police and security agencies warned… pic.twitter.com/W8kMXLZ6mE
— Mossad Commentary (@MOSSADil) December 16, 2025
“Police and security agencies warned the bakery had become a potential target, and that they were unable to guarentee their safety.”
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: In a Perfect World, Merrick Garland Would Be Living in GITMO. “There are so many people to despise from the Biden years that it’s probably best to just go with a Top 10 list. Number One on mine is Merrick Garland, who who turned the Department of Justice into Joe Biden’s personal goon squad. For four years, the chief law enforcement officer in the United States had zero respect for the law. Garland’s focus was getting revenge on Republicans for keeping him off of the Supreme Court. He had enormous power and the emotional maturity of a prepubescent boy whose parents didn’t like him.”
ERIK DURNEIKA: The Myth of an American Retreat From the Indo-Pacific Debunked.
A Financial Times article alleges, based on anonymous sources, that the Japanese government feels abandoned by Washington amid an escalating row with Beijing. The same Financial Times published a now-debunked piece claiming that the Trump administration had blocked the Taiwanese president’s planned transit through the U.S.
None of these stories and talking points align with reality, though. The Trump administration isn’t turning away from the Indo-Pacific region and doesn’t plan to do so in the foreseeable future. In fact, quite the opposite is happening.
The NSS’s main priority is the Western Hemisphere, in line with the administration’s focus on protecting the homeland. Much of this focus is due to China’s and other adversaries’ expanding influence on America’s doorstep. China, for example, weaponizes migration and drug trafficking to the detriment of the U.S. and the rest of the free world.
At the same time, the Trump administration remains committed to the Western Pacific. The NSS covers a range of topics relating to the region, from China’s economic warfare and coercion to Taiwan, the South China Sea (SCS), the First Island Chain, and defense burden-sharing.
Contrary to attempts to paint the NSS as a dark, isolationist, “far-right” document, there is an emphasis on strengthening Indo-Pacific alliances and partnerships, including with Japan and India — another country Democrat elected officials claim President Trump has left behind.
A quibble or two aside, this is the best set of foreign policies and national defense priorities since Reagan.
THE NEW SPACE RACE: Oh look, yet another Starship clone has popped up in China.
The trend began with the Chinese government. In November 2024 the government announced a significant shift in the design of its super-heavy lift rocket, the Long March 9. Instead of the previous design, a fully expendable rocket with three stages and solid rocket boosters strapped to the sides, the country’s state-owned rocket maker revealed a vehicle that mimicked SpaceX’s fully reusable Starship.
Around the same time, a Chinese launch firm named Cosmoleap announced plans to develop a fully reusable “Leap” rocket within the next few years. An animated video that accompanied the funding announcement indicated that the company seeks to emulate the tower catch-with-chopsticks methodology that SpaceX has successfully employed.
But wait, there’s more. In June a company called Astronstone said it too was developing a stainless steel, methane-fueled rocket that would also use a chopstick-style system for first stage recovery. Astronstone didn’t even pretend to not copy SpaceX, saying it was “fully aligning its technical approach with Elon Musk’s SpaceX.”
And then, on Friday, the state-aligned China.com reported that a company called “Beijing Leading Rocket Technology” took things a step further. It has named its vehicle “Starship-1,” adding that the new rocket will have enhancements from AI and is billed as a “fully reusable AI rocket.”
Presentations and buzzwords are easy. Space is… you know.
MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE: Ding-Dong! The Obamacare Subsidies Are Dead!
December 16, 2025
SPACE: ULA Atlas 5 launch puts Amazon’s 180th broadband satellite in low Earth orbit.
United Launch Alliance aced its final launch of 2025, a predawn flight of an Atlas 5 rocket carrying 27 satellites for Amazon’s recently re-branded Leo broadband internet service.
The on time liftoff from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station happened at 3:28 a.m. EST (0828 UTC), as the RD-180 engine on the booster roared to lift alongside five solid rocket boosters. The rocket flew on a north-easterly trajectory upon leaving the launch pad.
The mission, referred to by ULA as Amazon Leo 4 and dubbed Leo Atlas 4 (LA-04) by Amazon, was ULA’s fourth launch for the venture, previously known as Project Kuiper.
That’s almost it for the Atlas V, facing retirement after the existing inventory of 10 or 12 rockets runs out. It’s had a nearly perfect record so far, with 106 launches and only one partial failure.
Impressive.
But it’s also a bit of a relic. The total number of launches for Atlas V, going back to 2002, barely matches the last eight or nine months of launches for Falcon 9.
BUT THE NARRATIVE! US Homicide Rates Fell as Much As Australia’s, But Without the Radical Gun Confiscation.
There are four critical pieces of evidence missing from the discussion which either significantly weaken or outright defeat the claims that gun control is responsible for Australia’s success on mass shootings and homicide:
1. International mass shooting comparisons usually fail to take population differences into account;
2. Australia has always had a low homicide rate and very few mass shootings, including before its gun law changes following Port Arthur;
3. The United States and Australia have very different demographics;
4. Australia omits assisted suicides from its overall suicide data.This article will take each point in turn. While the focus here is on Australia, a very similar analysis could be done for European countries and Canada.
Read the whole thing.
NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG:
Brown University wiped its Mustapha Kharbouch page within the past hour or so…https://t.co/dJWBHpoFBV
— Jonathan Bowen (@BostonByBirth) December 16, 2025
This one is new but already nearly obligatory status:
They/Them pronouns meets Free Palestine. pic.twitter.com/vzbt3p1EfU
— Stephen Green (@VodkaPundit) December 16, 2025
Developing…
CONSTITUENT SERVICE: Newsom Brags About Giving Illegals Healthcare.
TALK ABOUT LONG-RANGE FIRES: US’ new hypersonic missile can hit targets 2,175-mile away in just 20 minutes.