THE NEW SPACE RACE:
Honda has tested its reusable launch vehicle for the first time, trying to emulate the technology used by @SpaceX
It reached an altitude of 270 meters and landed just 37 cm from the target point pic.twitter.com/ltMHrGvF3Z
— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) June 18, 2025
Impressive.
WHY DO I GET THE FEELING THE BEE IS MAYBE JUST TWO WEEKS AHEAD OF REALITY — AGAIN?
No Foul Called After Caitlin Clark Crushed By Anvil https://t.co/1V72XATxF6 pic.twitter.com/zLspcX493F
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) June 18, 2025
NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: Chicago suspends online portal allowing illegal immigrants to get IDs after ICE seeks data. “The decision came in response to a subpoena from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that sought personal information about noncitizen applicants, raising concerns among anti-ICE city officials that the federal agency could use the online portal for deportation efforts.”
BECAUSE THEY CAN: Who are the Henrys, and Why Is the Government Stealing Their Property?
WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Walmart expands drone delivery service to 3 more states in race against Amazon.
In partnership with Google’s Wing, Walmart is expanding the service to launch at 100 stores in Atlanta, Charlotte, Houston, Orlando and Tampa, building on the existing operations in Northwest Arkansas and Texas. The retailer said that it’s the first to scale this service across five states – Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Texas – underscoring its aim to become a leader in tech-enabled retail.
Wing flies its drones beyond visual line of sight of up to a 6-mile aircraft range from the store. The products arrive to customers in under 30 minutes, according to Walmart.
“People all around the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex have made drone delivery part of their normal shopping habits over the past year,” the company said. “Now we’re excited to share this ultra-fast delivery experience with millions more people across many more U.S. cities.”
The only thing I wonder about what happens when drone delivery comes to Colorado is how Democrats will figure out how to tax it like they did with traditional deliveries.
They call it a “fee” to avoid TABOR restrictions on new taxes without voter approval. But, c’mon — it’s a tax on an activity, not a fee consumers pay to get a service or entry to a park.
BY GIVING A DAMN ABOUT EDUCATION: How Red States Left Blue States in the Dust in Education Achievement.
SHE’S CERTAINLY SEEMS TO BE OUT OF STEP WITH THE REST OF THE ADMINISTRATION: Tulsi Gabbard Joins Trump In Situation Room Amid Reports Of Rift With President.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard joined President Donald Trump in the Situation Room on Tuesday following a report that she was not invited to attend a June 8 Camp David retreat, where the president “convened senior national security officials to discuss the Middle East.”
According to a report from Fox News White House Correspondent Peter Doocy, Gabbard “had a scheduling conflict with National Guard orders, but was never invited [to Camp David] in the first place.” A senior intelligence official told The Daily Wire that the Camp David retreat was not originally planned to be an intelligence meeting and that CIA Director John Ratcliffe also wasn’t initially invited to attend, but he ended up going at the last minute. The senior intelligence official added that Tuesday’s national security meeting with Trump in the Situation Room was moved to the afternoon so that Gabbard could attend.
Last week, just after that Camp David meeting she wasn’t invited to: What the Hell Was That Tulsi Gabbard Video About?
NO KINGS? HOW ABOUT A SHAH INSTEAD? Pahlavi Calls on Iranians to ‘Reclaim Iran.’
JOHN ONDRASIK: My 2001 Hit Song, ‘Superman,’ Is for the Hostages in Gaza.
When I first released “Superman (It’s Not Easy)” in April 2001, I couldn’t have imagined it would become an anthem for first responders, men and women in uniform, and the broken everyday people working to heal our country. My song struck a chord because it wasn’t about capes or flying. It was about the vulnerabilities we all share and the burdens we all carry.
The country felt united after 9/11. Red and blue became meaningless labels. We all felt the same fear, the same heartbreak, and the same determination to rebuild. Music bridges divides. I saw that firsthand when I performed “Superman” at the Concert for New York City on Oct. 20, 2001. I took pride in the American spirit, our resilience after such an atrocity. I remember somehow locking eyes with a 250-pound union worker in the crowd who held a beer in each hand. We sang “Superman” together, loud and proud, and the tears streaming from his eyes were my tears, too.
Decades later, “Superman” didn’t die. Oceans away, it found a second life.
Read the whole thing.
(Update: here’s an archive copy. — Charlie)
HMM: Teens in Crisis: School Versus Family. “What is triggering this precipitous decline in our children’s mental well-being? Dr. Peter Gray writes in Psychology Today that teen suicides jumped more than 400% from 1950 to 1990, largely due to what he has dubbed “the imprisonment theory,” or constraints on independence by institutionalized schooling and correspondingly altered home life.”
CHANGE: Streaming Viewership Surpassed Cable and Broadcast Combined for the First Time Ever in May, Nielsen Finds. “The news comes from the Gauge, Nielsen’s monthly TV consumption report, which has now been running for four years. From its launch in May 2021 to this May, streaming usage has jumped 71%, with broadcast down 21% and cable down 39%.”
KRUISER: Dear Democrats: I Won’t Let You Exhaust Me With Your Diaper-Filling Tantrums. “While I have never been a fan of the Democrats’ motivating principles, I do miss the days when they had something other than seething hatred driving them. After Hillary’s fall from relevance, they’ve all become her.”
HMM: Microsoft and OpenAI play high-stakes tug-of-war.
Microsoft and OpenAI are engaged in tense negotiations that could unravel one of the most important alliances in AI and fundamentally reorder the industry.
Why it matters: Microsoft has injected billions of dollars in OpenAI and made it a cornerstone of its AI strategy, but the companies have also remained rivals that, in many cases, offer competing AI services.
State of play: The two companies have been in talks for months to amend their partnership, with OpenAI needing approval from Microsoft to move forward with the corporate restructuring it has promised recent investors it would make.
Driving the news: The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that tensions have escalated between the two companies, with OpenAI considering a “nuclear option” of accusing Microsoft of violating antitrust laws.
To date, AI looks an awful lot like the late-’90s dot-com bubble. There’s an awful lot of investing into things people don’t really understand, and zero returns — except for infrastructure providers like Cisco (back then) and Nvidia (today).
Unless something changes, the shakeout ought to be nasty.
NO. NEXT QUESTION? Is Israel Dragging the U.S. Into Another Regime Change War?
WINNING:
Trump Overnight Presidential Job Approval – is in.
Single overnight approval for last night: 55.96%
He remains unchanged today in the 5-day rolling average pic.twitter.com/VT30gYY394
— Rasmussen Reports (@Rasmussen_Poll) June 18, 2025
A MACH 2.5 SHOTGUN: F-15E Armed With Drone Killing Laser-Guided Rockets Appears In Middle East. “We now have a picture showing a U.S. Air Force F-15E Strike Eagle down-range in the Middle East with an air-to-air loadout that includes six seven-shot 70mm rocket pods, as well as four AIM-9X and four AIM-120 missiles. This comes a week after TWZ was the first to report on testing of the laser-guided 70mm Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System II (APKWS II) rockets as a new armament option for the F-15E. As we noted at that time, the exact loadout we’re now seeing on a deployed Strike Eagle turns the jet into a counter-drone and cruise missile ‘weapons truck’ with a whopping 50 engagement opportunities, not counting the internal gun.”
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Dems’ Fave Argument for Illegals Just Took a Kick to the Groin. “The notion that illegal immigrants became a significant part of the labor pool in the United States because Americans just decided to stop working is absurd. American workers were replaced with cheaper options, plain and simple. Employers got addicted to their off-the-books, substandard pay laborers. It never had anything to with concern for illegal immigrants or the lack of available American workers.”
THE NEW SPACE RACE: China conducts pad abort test for crew spacecraft, advancing moon landing plans. “Footage of the test shows the escape system rapidly boosting the spacecraft away from the ground. Around 20 seconds later, the vehicle reached a predetermined altitude. The return capsule separated from the escape tower and its parachutes deployed successfully.”
HMM: If Iran’s Oil Is Cut Off, China Will Pay the Price.
Iran exports around 1.7 million barrels of crude a day, less than 2% of global demand. The U.S. reimposed sanctions on Tehran’s oil exports in late 2018, a few months after President Trump withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal during his first term.
Most countries won’t touch Iran’s sanctioned crude, so Tehran is forced to sell at a discount and find covert ways to get it onto the market. It uses a “dark fleet” of tankers that sail with their transponders turned off to ship cargoes of oil.
More than 90% of Iran’s oil exports now go to China, according to commodities data company Kpler. Most of it is bought by small Chinese “teapot” refineries clustered in the Shandong region that operate independently from state-owned oil companies. They switched to illicit Iranian oil en masse in 2022 to protect their margins.
The discount on Iran’s oil compared with a similar grade of nonsanctioned crude such as Oman Export Blend is currently around $2 a barrel, according to Tom Reed, vice president of China crude at commodity data provider Argus Media. The gap has narrowed recently because of worries that conflict with Israel and stricter enforcement of U.S. sanctions could disrupt Iranian supply. The discount has been wider in the past, averaging $11 in 2023 and $4 in 2024.
With few alternative buyers for Iranian oil, Chinese refineries have leverage. Last year, an official from Iran’s Chamber of Commerce characterized the trading relationship as “a colonial trap.” As the sanctioned oil is paid for in renminbi rather than in dollars, Iran has few choices about where to spend its crude earnings except on Chinese goods, reinforcing its dependency on one country.
Tiny Israel might just knock the I right out of CRINK.
HARDLY AN OSCAR-WORTHY PERFORMANCE: Alex Padilla Cries As He Continues His Fake Victim Performance on the Senate Floor.
I’D NEVER HEARD OF HIM: The Most Brilliant Man You’ve Never Heard Of. “What’s of greater interest is how this extraordinary man with incredible insights into the way the mind works lived such an obscure life.”
I HAD BEEN ASSURED THAT CANCEL CULTURE WAS A MYTH: Year in review: 101 campus cancel culture incidents during 2024-25 school year.
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