Author Archive: Stephen Green
August 26, 2025
FAIL, BRITANNIA: From the ‘Banter Bill’ to Bias Hotlines: The Alarming Rise of Snitch Networks.
A troubling new piece of legislation continues to make its way through the British parliament. Dubbed the “Banter Bill,” the Employment Rights Bill would criminalize any speech that might be considered offensive by any passerby.
As Dominic Green reports for The Free Press, under this proposed law, “Britons can be prosecuted for a remark that a worker in a public space overhears and finds insulting.” Under this standard, whether a certain sentiment (for instance, that Britain should reduce immigration) is legal will now depend on whether someone in the vicinity takes offense.
Unfortunately, this new subjective standard for what types of speech are allowed isn’t restricted to Great Britain. In the United States, more and more states are experimenting with a similar system. The Washington Free Beacon reports that eight states have set up “bias-response hotlines” which citizens are encouraged to call if they hear a comment — from a neighbor, coworker, or even passersby on the street — that they consider to be offensive. As Oregon says of their hotline, if you see or hear someone “creating racist images/drawings; mocking someone with a disability; or telling or sharing offensive ‘jokes’ about someone’s identity” they want to hear about it.
“The Lives of Others” was not supposed to be a training film.
CONSEQUENCES: Unsafe spaces: Throw rocks at the teacher, get ‘Tiger tokens.’
Lax discipline policies are creating classroom chaos, writes Neetu Arnold, a Manhattan Institute policy analyst, in City Journal. Teachers, citing “chronic student misbehavior as the top source of stress and burnout,” quit.
Parents, worried about their children’s safety, turn to homeschooling, private or charter schools.
“Restorative justice” often gets the blame, writes Arnold but it’s far less common than Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS), which has been around for decades. PBIS “masks its anti-punitive bias behind uncontroversial goals” such as collecting data and setting clear behavior expectations. It’s not overtly political. The idea is to reward positive student behavior and avoid punishments. Schools have lots of discretion on how to use it.
The U.S. Department of Education has urged schools to use PBIS as an “equitable” way to reduce racial disparities in discipline, she writes. The easiest way to do that is to reduce discipline.
Unexpectedly, they get more of what the tolerate.
KAMALA’S REVENGE: Harris Screwed the Democrats So Badly I Can’t Stop Laughing. “Forget the old-school thrills of ‘F1,’ the family charm of ‘Freakier Friday,’ and even the surprisingly pro-life ‘Fantastic Four: First Steps’ — because this summer’s feel-good movie turns out to be an August sleeper hit that virtually nobody saw coming.”
“JOURNALIST”:
Hamas journalist Mohammed Salama infiltrated Israel on October 7.
Here is one of his videos from inside Israel, chanting “Allahu Akbar.”
He has been eliminated today. pic.twitter.com/Bgk8hBiA2s
— Open Source Intel (@Osint613) August 25, 2025
IT’S GOOD TO BE THE NOMENKLATURA: Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick voids ‘illegal’ $7.4B payment to Biden ally-staffed nonprofit for semiconductor research.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick canceled an Biden administration agreement Monday to distribute billions of dollars for semiconductor research through a nonprofit set up and staffed by former political appointees, according to a letter obtained by The Post.
The 2022 CHIPS and Science Act provided for $11 billion in semiconductor research and development funding to be given out by the Commerce Department’s National Semiconductor Technology Center.
“Rather than establishing these operations within the Department, however, Biden Administration officials spent significant time, effort, and resources creating an unaccountable, outside entity–Natcast–to administer taxpayer funds,” Lutnick wrote Natcast CEO Deirdre Hanford.
Four days before Biden left office on Jan. 20, Lutnick noted, the Commerce Department agreed to set aside $7.4 billion in “advance payments” to Natcast after spending nearly two years setting it up and tapping administration officials, advisers and allies to fill out positions.
That arrangement both effectively removed the incoming Trump administration from being involved in the process and provided “virtually all” of Natcast’s funding — prompting incoming Departments of Justice and Commerce officials to take another look at the Sunnyvale, Calif., nonprofit.
The most corrupt administration in history.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: England Continues to Hemorrhage Cautionary Tales for the U.S. “This is a fight for the soul of a once-great nation that, honestly, may not work out so well for the people who are fans of the principles that made it great. Free speech is also under relentless assault across the pond, where people are being detained, arrested, and jailed for their social media activity.”
JOEL KOTKIN: AI revolution will crush the blue states.
In the class I teach with Marshall Koplansky at Chapman University, several students predicted that the jobs they currently hold will soon disappear. Among them were a game designer, two human-resources executives, and a manufacturing and warehouse manager.
My engineering colleagues report a similar trend. While opportunities remain strong for mechanical and chemical engineers, as well as for those designing robotics, the outlook is far less certain for computer science students. Despite soaring profits at the largest tech companies, AI programming tools have enabled sweeping layoffs at firms such as Amazon, Intel, Meta and Microsoft. Today, among college graduates aged 22-27, computer science and computer engineering majors face some of the highest unemployment rates, according to a report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
In response, many firms are now focusing on building tangible products rather than merely shifting algorithms for commerce or generating more social media. In the aerospace and defence sectors, for example, AI is seen not as an end but a tool. It is a means to enhance human creativity and productivity rather than replace it. “Software is not in the greatest position with AI,” Delian Asparouhov, who runs a firm focused on in-space manufacturing, told me. “Now people are shifting to hard tech. Designing and building spaceships still needs people.”
This could spell trouble for elite universities, but represents a major advantage for schools that teach the practical skills companies actually need. So far, these opportunities are largely concentrated in red and purple states in the Midwest and South — the regions most focused on reshoring manufacturing and other industries from overseas.
Gavin Newsom can boast about California having the fourth-largest GDP in the world, thanks largely to the tech giants. But the benefits will keep trickling down to normal-sized people in places like Texas and Florida.
FINGER ON THE PULSE OF THE NATION:
During a presentation on crime at the DNC's summer meeting, a lady from left-wing think tank the Vera Institute tells them that "migrant crime and carjackings are things that don't matter to many Americans." pic.twitter.com/5c0qkCPm7O
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) August 25, 2025
And:
It’s a total mystery why the Democrat brand is in the toilet.
We may never know. pic.twitter.com/AOhgowhcDe
— Bonchie (@bonchieredstate) August 25, 2025
WHEN PURPLE STATES TURN BLUE: Coloradans getting first-hand taste of progressive squalor.
Have you noticed recently how trash-laden the Denver-area highways have become? It never used to be that way. It’s a sign of social and governmental breakdown. The last time I saw anything like it was in Greece in 2015 when the country was in the midst of a debt crisis brought on by socialist overspending. The last time before that was in Oklahoma in the mid-1980s, when government corruption coupled with an oil price crash devastated the state’s economy.
Colorado started on a pretty high plane, so thus far the rot is not as visible as in Bolivia, or as it was in Greece or Oklahoma. But the incipient signs are everywhere. First, of course, soaring taxes—oops, I mean soaring “fees” and “enterprises” (labeled that way so the people don’t get a chance to vote on them). Drugged-out zombies wandering around. Unsafe schools, with teachers who don’t dare to enforce discipline. Crumbling roads and traffic jams from projects that seem to take forever—projects of repair and showcase schemes of “progressive” virtue like the ongoing Colfax Avenue mess.
No wonder stores in Wyoming are selling bumber stickers that announce: “COLORADO — WYOMING’S MEXICO!”
If you have any doubts about how bad Colorado’s roads are, drive from our state into Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, or Utah. (I haven’t been to New Mexico or Arizona recently.) Once you are over the border you actually can drive around smoothly. Your teeth don’t rattle and your tires don’t fall into potholes. It’s really nice.
When I told a lady at the Kansas Welcome Center that their roads were a lot better than those in Colorado, she responded, “That’s the most common thing we hear from people who just left Colorado.”
And did I mention the highway trash? Oh, I see that I did.
When Bill Whittle dropped by from Los Angeles on his way to a conference here about a decade ago, he marveled at how clean our highways are.
But that was a decade ago.
NO MORE CASHLESS BAIL: Trump Takes Yet Another Step Toward Restoring Law & Order in D.C. and Nationwide.
INTERESTING:
They want to protect their women from the Islamic rape wave https://t.co/d3dLXgL2gj
— Tommy Robinson 🇬🇧 (@TRobinsonNewEra) August 25, 2025
TO BE FAIR, “DEM STEALS ELECTION” IS A “DOG BITES MAN” STORY:
— Paul (@WomanDefiner) August 25, 2025
MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Britain’s Newest Crisis: Too Many Patriotic Britons.
GEORGE MF WASHINGTON: It’s The Budgets, Stupid…
Like every movie Hollywood makes, “Lethal Weapon” was a gamble. But at $15 million, it was the kind of low-risk gamble that Movie Studios in the 80’s made all the time.
Here in 2025, we all know that the gamble was a runaway success. The movie which was produced for $15 million grossed more than $120 million ($350 million in today’s dollars), spawned three sequels and a network TV series and has become a universally known part of the culture.
In modern Hollywood, where budgets have exploded seemingly beyond anyone’s control, we generally expect sequel budgets to rival the GDP of small African nations. But while “Lethal Weapon” was indeed a wildly successful franchise starter, WB managed to avoid the temptation to break the bank on a sequel. Yes, they did double the budget (from $15 million to $30 million) but in the context of 2025 where studio blockbusters can cost $250 million or more (the last “Captain America” installment cost an eye-watering $450 million), even adjusted to 2025 dollars “Lethal Weapon” and its first sequel were both cheap to make.
So how did they do it?
Read the whole thing.
OUCH: The geo-economics of Russia’s bad harvest.
Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Western sanctions have sought to isolate the Russian economy. These have largely exempted agricultural exports to protect global food security, particularly in developing countries. For the Kremlin, this omission has become a secure stream of foreign earnings and influence that have helped stabilise the economy and support the war effort. But nature, indifferent to political constraints, may now be doing what Western policymakers have declined to do.
The 2025 harvest is shaping up to be Russia’s worst in years. July saw the country’s lowest grain exports for that month since 2008. This is a result of intensifying climate volatility. Unseasonable spring frosts damaged over 240,000 hectares of crops, with 100,000 hectares lost outright. These were followed by record summer heat, with temperatures above 40°C in key southern regions. Drought conditions this summer have been devastating, with nearly 500,000 hectares destroyed. The authorities in Rostov oblast, a major grain-producing region, declared a state of emergency. Fields once golden with wheat were left parched and cracked. Wheat production forecasts were revised downward from 90 million tonnes to 82m–84m tonnes. Total grain output, which peaked at 158m tonnes in 2022, is now expected to fall to around 130m tonnes.
This comes as pressure mounts on Russia’s once primary source of foreign earnings: hydrocarbon exports. In July, the European Union and the United Kingdom lowered their price cap on Russian crude from US$60 to US$47 per barrel and escalated sanctions on Russia’s shadow fleet of oil tankers. US President Donald Trump’s second administration has imposed tariffs on some buyers of Russian oil – most notably India. Crude oil and refined petroleum products now account for less than half of Russia’s export revenues, placing growing importance on alternative sources, including agricultural exports.
Maybe this would be a good time to take up Trump’s offer to broker a decent ceasefire.
“MARYLAND DAD”: ICE Arrests Kilmar Abrego Garcia Again.
VICTORIA TAFT: Why Don’t We Know What Caused the L.A. Fires?
WASTE: U.S. already has the critical minerals it needs – but they’re being thrown away, new analysis shows.
All the critical minerals the U.S. needs annually for energy, defense and technology applications are already being mined at existing U.S. facilities, according to a new analysis published today in the journal Science.
The catch? These minerals, such as cobalt, lithium, gallium and rare earth elements like neodymium and yttrium, are currently being discarded as tailings of other mineral streams like gold and zinc, said Elizabeth Holley, associate professor of mining engineering at Colorado School of Mines and lead author of the new paper.
“The challenge lies in recovery,” Holley said. “It’s like getting salt out of bread dough – we need to do a lot more research, development and policy to make the recovery of these critical minerals economically feasible.”
Exit quote: “The analysis in Science looks at a total of 70 elements used in applications ranging from consumer electronics like cell phones to medical devices to satellites to renewable energy to fighter jets and shows that unrecovered byproducts from other U.S. mines could meet the demand for all but two – platinum and palladium.”