Author Archive: Stephen Green

FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY [VIP]: He Did What We All Want to Do to Cyclists Sometimes. “It’s time for your much-needed break from the serious news, and this week, we’ll learn the worst excuse for super-speeding, how to get lucky with Sheriff Grady, and the perfect thing to wear to a robbery in Tennessee.”

21ST CENTURY HEADLINES: Laser used to shoot down cartel drones near Mexico border. “Officials described the drones, though exact locations were not disclosed, as ‘hostile’ and that they posed a ‘physical threat’ to U.S. service members and Customs and Border Protection personnel.”

IT’S TIME FOR VICTORIA TAFT’S West Coast, Messed Coast™: Califraudia’s Protection Act for Billion-Dollar Robber Barons “What an impressive week on the West Coast, Messed Coast™! Each state is battling for the title of Most Likely To Be Abandoned by normies. This, of course, occurs during the week those same states shook down Facebook/Instagram for billions for failing to properly parent their children.”

NIFTY: Army awards $2.2B in contracts for nuclear microreactors.

The initiative, dubbed Project Janus, looks to achieve greater energy independence so critical military missions can continue if the commercial electrical grid fails.

“Everything that we do, from communications to radar, just requires constant energy,” Jeff Waksman, principal deputy assistant secretary of the Army for installations, energy and environment, told reporters Wednesday. “As we start to think about where things are going in the future with drones, with energy weapons, there’s just more and more demand for electricity.”

Nuclear energy is a “natural game-changer” for the Army, he added.

My offer to host a microreactor in my backyard to power the neighborhood remains open.

THE FEMINISTS ARE TOO BUSY COSPLAYING AS “HANDMAID’S TALE” SEX SLAVES TO COMMENT:

VIGILANTISM IS THE NATURAL BYPRODUCT OF BAD GOVERNANCE:

Or in Spain’s case, criminal governance.

WELL, GOOD: Hoplophobe’s Hell: More Americans Are Rejecting Gun Control. “The decline wasn’t a landslide, but represents a consistent trend downward for America’s gun control industry. Sure, the right to keep and bear arms isn’t an 80/20 issue — yet — but it’s favorable enough that almost no one running for Congress outside a handful of crime-soaked blue cities wants to test voter support for more gun control laws.”

MAKE MERIT GREAT AGAIN:

SUMMARY EXECUTION WAS GOOD ENOUGH FOR PIRATES, AND TERRORISTS ARE EVERY BIT HOSTIS HUMANI GENERIS:Why Is KSM Still Alive?

21ST CENTURY MEDICINE: AI Tool Mapped Nerves During Brain Surgery That Saved A Man’s Eyesight. “Doctors at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery (NHNN) in London operated on the patient, Rhys Hibbert, using an AI tool to analyze live surgical footage and highlight vital nerves and blood vessels to avoid while removing the tumor, the BBC reported Wednesday. This real-time AI video tool was designed in-house at University College London’s Hawkes Institute and runs on NVIDIA’s Clara IGX computer, according to a Thursday University College London Hospitals (UCLH) NHS Foundation Trust announcement.”

PASS THIS BILL: America Strikes Back Against Foreign Censors With the Rulli GRANITE Act, HR 10174.

The GRANITE Act is a bill to stop foreign governments from censoring Americans on the Internet.

Per reporting in the Times, a federal GRANITE Act, the “Guaranteeing Rights Against Novel International Tyranny and Extortion Act,” was introduced in the House of Representatives by Congressman Michael Rulli of Ohio.

Representative Rulli’s GRANITE Act is the first federal foreign censorship shield bill in American history.

The bill text is available in full at congress.gov.

A GRANITE Act amends U.S. law to make foreign censorship threats against Americans toothless. The threat alone, even a threat that would be very difficult to enforce, is enough to chill speech and restrict the American marketplace of ideas.

Today, foreign governments threaten Americans for their online speech on a daily basis. Those threats must stop.

Read the whole thing.

IN THE ’80S, WE CALLED IT “BURDEN SHARING” WITH EUROPE:

OH MY: U.S. In Talks To Take Direct Ownership Of Venezuelan Oil Fields. “The Trump administration is reportedly in active discussions with Venezuela’s interim government to acquire a direct U.S. ownership stake in key Venezuelan oil fields. According to senior U.S. officials cited by Axios, the talks involve equity stakes in a select group of high-yield fields containing approximately 90 billion barrels of proven crude—a transaction that would significantly alter Washington’s foreign energy policy framework and expand U.S.-controlled global reserves.”

OH, CANADA:

ROBERT SPENCER: Trump Says He’d ‘Absolutely’ Ban Sharia. “President Donald Trump jumped into the ongoing furor over Sharia on Thursday, telling Glenn Beck: ‘Number one on Sharia law, I would absolutely say that not — this country, there’s no Sharia law.’ This comes amid ongoing leftist efforts to portray Sharia as completely benign religious law that patriots only oppose because they’re racists, bigots, and ‘Islamophobes.’ Once again, however, the leftists are wrong and Trump is right.”

SAMUEL GREGG: Scotland’s Intellectual Triumph.

The 250th anniversary of The Wealth of Nations has brought a burst of renewed attention to the Scottish Enlightenment. Discussions have ranged widely, from Adam Smith’s conception of aesthetics to how the thought of his teacher, the “never-to-be-forgotten” Francis Hutcheson, shaped the American Revolution.

But amidst these discussions, one important question has received little consideration. Why did such a remarkable group of thinkers appear in one of eighteenth-century Europe’s most physically isolated, sparsely populated, and poorest nations?

On the face of it, the Scottish Enlightenment was a highly unlikely phenomenon. In 1603, Scotland lost a major stimulus for cultural development in early modern Europe when the Scottish king and court relocated to London following James VI’s succession to the throne of England. Many Scottish artists, musicians, and writers subsequently moved south to chase the type of royal patronage that stimulated intellectual life. The debilitating effects of this were accentuated 104 years later when the Scottish Parliament voted to dissolve itself and incorporate Scotland into what was always going to be an English-dominated Kingdom and Parliament of Great Britain. After 1707, some Scots called themselves “North Britons.” No one in England thought to label himself a “South Briton.”

This background does not suggest a self-confident and powerful nation, let alone one on the brink of an intellectual revolution in fields as wide-ranging as economics, medicine, and philosophy.

Yet that’s exactly what happened. This is a lovely essay, and well worth your time.

SARAH HOYT’S SHOCKED FACE WAS GENERATED BY BOTS:

THE NEW SPACE RACE: The world’s busiest spaceport is about to get a lot quieter, at least for now.

A Falcon 9 launch early Tuesday was the last planned Starlink mission from Cape Canaveral until SpaceX begins flying Starship missions from Florida, according to Kiko Dontchev, the company’s vice president of launch. For at least the rest of the year, and maybe longer, this means the launch rate at the Florida spaceport will drop from eight or nine per month to perhaps two per month.

It wasn’t long ago when two launches per month was the norm, an indication of just how quickly SpaceX’s launch cadence has grown. Cape Canaveral and Kennedy Space Center sit on adjoining property and share the same range on Florida’s east coast, so it is worth considering them a single spaceport. The last time the Florida spaceport did not lead the world in space launches was in 2015.

“From here on, Starlink missions out of Florida will fly on Starship,” Dontchev wrote on X. “The West Coast team will continue regularly launching Starlink from Vandenberg.”

Yep, that’ll be louder — but everybody knows the real action will be in Louisiana, starting in 2029 or so.

CYBERSECURITY: ‘We have a limited window’: 116 companies, entities sign on to major AI cyber defense push.

Sophisticated AI models, capable of orchestrating agentic attacks in minutes, have upended the cyber industry in recent months, cementing the need for better security tools to combat mounting AI threats.

Open-source AI platform Hugging Face, which signed the letter, was recently at the center of a breach orchestrated by rogue OpenAI agents. The hack rattled the cyber and tech sector, raising questions over accelerating AI development.

Amid this backdrop, cybersecurity companies have skyrocketed in value as businesses recognize the security need and have managed to brush off earlier disruption concerns that rattled the broader software sector this year.

And sometimes they escape and attack without prompting.