Author Archive: Stephen Green

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Sign O’ the Trump Times — Victoria’s Secret Is Hot Again. “I mentioned president Trump in the headline for the triggering effect, but he has played a huge role in corporations and institutions feeling comfortable enough to back away from DEI initiatives that they had been browbeaten for years into adopting.”

BLUE ORIGIN RUD UPDATE:

THE NEW SPACE RACE: SpaceX gets US approval to test new Starfall capsules for space manufacturing.

According to the newly released documents, Starfall will provide both in-space manufacturing and point-to-point cargo delivery services. This is in line with previously announced plans for Starship to rapidly deliver military cargo for the U.S. military.

The Starfall vehicles could also serve as a “proliferated successor” to the International Space Station (ISS), as they could support “a self-sustaining manufacturing economy in space”.

In order to create a “self-sustaining commercial in-space manufacturing market”, the vehicles would offer access to “microgravity and vacuum, loiter on orbit, and safe return from orbit as a service at scale,” the documents state.

The FAA’s documents do not provide any information regarding potential launch dates for the first Starfall missions. However, the agency does clearly state that Starfall would be a large-scale project if it is eventually greenlit and officially announced by SpaceX.

According to the documents, Elon Musk’s private space company “plans to develop a mass-producible reentry vehicle that can precisely deliver cargo from space to various locations on Earth, which would be able to launch on either Falcon 9 or Starship.”

Instead of One Big Station, think of Starfall as an “Army of Davids” approach to microgravity manufacturing and experimentation, to coin an Instaphrase.

CHEATING TAKES TIME:

UPDATE: Vital context from Jarvis follows.

Another update (along with a bump):

UPDATE (From Ed):

IT’S BACK ON: White House Correspondents’ Dinner rescheduled for July 24 after shooting disrupted initial event.

The White House Correspondents’ Association announced Tuesday that it will reschedule its annual press dinner for July 24 after the initial event was disrupted when a gunman attacked the gathering attended by President Trump, senior administration officials and scores of journalists.

Weijia Jiang, who is the president of the association and a CBS News senior White House correspondent, said in an email to members of the White House Correspondents’ Association that the rescheduled event would be a “more intimate gathering” and feature “significantly enhanced safety measures and new access procedures.”

Mr. Trump said he has accepted an invitation to speak at the dinner next month, calling it a “‘HOT’ ticket!”

Stay tuned…

INDEED:

COSMIC INDIGESTION: Scientists Find Cosmic ‘Rosetta Stone’ To Decode Baffling Signals From Deep Space.

Just a few years ago, a strange signal was received from the plane of the Milky Way.

It was something astronomers had never seen before, pulsing with a radio beat too slow to fit any known astronomical object.

It may have just come and gone as a one-off anomaly.

But then they found another one.

And another.

To date, around a dozen of these long-period radio transients (LPTs) have been detected from diverse corners of the galaxy, leaving scientists baffled.

Now, a team led by astronomer Kovi Rose of the University of Sydney in Australia thinks they may finally have found their Rosetta Stone, the object that could help them interpret at least some of these weird, pulsating objects.

In the direction of the galaxy’s inner regions, the researchers traced an LPT signal directly to a magnetic cataclysmic variable star – a strongly magnetized white dwarf cannibalizing its companion and belching periodic radiation.

Rude.

I JUST WANT TO KNOW IF THIS MEANS MORE (AND MORE AFFORDABLE) HOUSING: Berkshire Has $400 Billion in Cash and Just Put $6.8 Billion Into Housing. What That Means for Investors. “Wall Street has been practically holding its breath waiting for Berkshire Hathaway’s new CEO to make his first big move. It is important because Greg Abel only took over the top spot at the $1 trillion market cap conglomerate from Warren Buffett at the start of 2026. The day has finally come: Berkshire just announced it is paying $6.8 billion to acquire Taylor Morrison Home.”

THE HENRY NOWAK FALLOUT CONTINUES:

RESIST: More Virginia Counties Announce They Won’t Enforce Spanberger’s ‘Assault Firearms’ Ban.

How quickly the courts will act on these challenges is anybody’s guess, and regardless of what decisions are handed down, it’s unlikely any of them will be resolved until every step of the appeals process in either the federal or state courts is exhausted. If the courts rule in favor of the Second Amendment or the Virginia arms guarantee, anti-gun Virginia Attorney General Jay Jones will surely appeal. And if any ruling goes the other way, NRA and others will appeal.

So, we could be looking at several years of court cases.

On the other hand, there’s the very real possibility that the bans will be neutered in other ways; at least in parts of Virginia.

The Washington Times reported that prosecutors in five Virginia counties have indicated there will be no prosecutions under the new law in their jurisdictions. Commonwealth’s Attorneys in Powhatan, Pulaski, Scott, Smyth, and Spotsylvania Counties have all signaled there will be no prosecutions for otherwise law-abiding Virginians simply possessing the items Governor Spanberger is trying to eradicate.

Of course, prosecutions for actual offenses committed by criminals while in possession of any firearms—irrespective of their status as “good” or “bad” guns as determined by anti-gun extremists—will continue in these counties.

Pulaski County Commonwealth’s Attorney Justin L. Griffith stated, “I am not going to take law-abiding citizens as of June 30th, 2026, and criminalize that same behavior on July 1st, 2026, solely on the basis of this new law.”

These are the Left’s rules. The Right is just playing by them.

BUBBLE OR NOT? Anthropic Joins the IPO Stampede — Profits Still Optional. “But then there’s the sharpest business analyst I know of, Stratechery’s Ben Thompson, who argued earlier this year that AI’s ‘economic imperatives are going to be impossible to resist, and will fuel demand for even more compute over time, further supporting the case that this is no bubble.'”

OUT: THE VOICES IN MY HEAD. IN: THE VOICE ON MY SCREEN. Florida sues OpenAI, Sam Altman after multiple ChatGPT-linked murders.

The civil lawsuit comes after Florida opened an unrelated criminal probe into OpenAI, following a ChatGPT-linked mass shooting where two people were killed at Florida State University. In statements, OpenAI has insisted that ChatGPT isn’t responsible for the FSU shooting, merely providing factual information, but Uthmeier does not seem to agree. In his complaint, Uthmeier noted that Florida has now been blindsided by two violent events where suspects used ChatGPT to assist in planning.

“Horrifically, ChatGPT has aided and abetted in more than one multiple murder in the State of Florida,” Uthmeier’s complaint said. “The 2026 deaths of University of South Florida graduate students Nahida Bristy and Zamil Limon were also plotted using ChatGPT, which advised Hisham Abugharbieh on how to dispose of bodies, change VIN numbers on a car, and whether cars were checked at the crime scene.”

Uthmeier then went on to list all the ways ChatGPT has allegedly fueled violence. In 2025, ChatGPT was blamed for encouraging several users to commit suicide, including teenager Adam Raine and a 56-year-old bodybuilder who murdered his mother based on a ChatGPT-hallucinated conspiracy.

More recently, in February, a man with mental health struggles killed his wife and attacked his mother “after talking with ChatGPT several hours a day and coming to believe robots were taking over the world, ” Uthmeier said. And a small mining town in Canada was shocked by a school shooting that claimed nine lives the same month. Altman later apologized for not alerting law enforcement about the shooter’s ChatGPT logs, which some believe could have averted the shooting.

Developing…

DEFUND THE NGOS, AND RESTRICT NONPROFIT STATUS TO GROUPS HELPING THE NEEDY:

SLIPPING RIGHT DOWN THE SLOPE:

UPDATE/CORRECTION: Hat tip to the ever-sharp Eugene Volokh for this one, but the study’s authors seem to be “two anti-euthanasia academics hypothesizing such a model, and using it as a reductio ad absurdum to argue against Canada’s voluntary euthanasia programs.”

Well done, fellas — the abstract had me.