Author Archive: Stephen Green

IT’S TIME FOR VICTORIA TAFT’S West Coast, Messed Coast™: Harry and Meghan Think California Schools Suck Too. “Welcome to your weekly West Coast, Messed Coast™ update, where today we’ll cover yet another reason why Harry and Meghan are leaving California and booking it back to the British Empire. California Gov. Gavin Newsom appears to be shorting out before our very eyes — especially in response to a reporter’s question about the collapse of California schools.”

KEEP DIGGING: ‘Where’s the bottom’: Economics professor addresses Seattle area’s shrinking job market.

Layoffs at Starbucks’ Seattle headquarters is the latest sign of continuing job losses in western Washington.

Other major employers, including Amazon, Microsoft, META and Expedia have announced hundreds of local job cuts in recent months. The cuts come as King County saw its unemployment rate dip to nearly 5% in June.

Seattle University associate professor of economics Nick Huntington-Klein said the area is seeing a “sustained issue,” with big companies doing sweeping cuts at the same time.

There are several factors at play, he said. These companies cite AI as the potential to replace some employees. There was also over-hiring during the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, higher taxes in Washington state and Seattle specifically has been a reason for reductions in force or for some companies to relocate.

Previously: Socialist mayor’s blunt 1-word message to fleeing millionaires sparks outrage: ‘We’re doomed.’ “‘Bye,’ Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson said to millionaires leaving her state.”

NO MATTER HOW MUCH YOU DESPISE THE MEDIA…:

SARAH HOYT’S SHOCKED FACE IS STUCK LIKE THAT:

THEY’RE SERIOUS: Islamic advocacy group demands James O’Keefe be prosecuted after team dressed as Muslims to expose Minnesota elections. “CAIR-Minnesota called on authorities to investigate after O’Keefe and members of his team entered Minneapolis polling locations during the Aug. 11 primary wearing traditional Muslim clothing and using obviously fake accents to test how election workers would handle attempts to register voters through Minnesota’s vouching process. The demand comes after Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon similarly said law enforcement was reviewing the conduct and warned that the participants may have placed themselves in ‘legal jeopardy.’ O’Keefe and his team are undercover journalists with a long history of exposing fraud and corruption.”

It’s Minnesota, so who knows what will happen.

IT DOES SEEM THAT WAY: The Disconnect Between Some Military Families and Their Service Member’s Actual Job Is Stunning.

I have, as you might have noticed, pretty much stayed out of the brouhaha over the USS Abraham Lincoln and the other ships keeping watch and running operations in the Middle East.

Mostly because, in my unfiltered honesty, coupled with my personal experience, I haven’t much patience with the whining coming from the junior sailors on board or, frankly, the families who, to excuse a lot of it, oft times don’t really know any better. All they are hearing is that life sucks in every direction, and they hear it often enough, thanks to the age we live in, that they grow convinced that this is something out of the ordinary and their child or young spouse/father/wife/child/whatever is suffering some extraordinary deprivations and conditions that have never before been experienced in the history of modern seafaring.

None of which is true, but these experts would beg to differ, bolstered by a frenzied flood of press reports all feeding on anything that makes the Trump administration and Pete Hegseth’s War Department look really bad, with as much fervor as great whites on a dead humpback.

It’s an easy, lazy target filled with all the ingredients for a drama soup.

I have to admit, I have seen this dependent/family v duty conflict coming for a long time, and the innerwebs age has only exacerbated the situation.

Read the whole thing.

WELL, WHEN YOU PUT IT THAT WAY…:

ONCE AGAIN, REALITY OUTPACES THE BEE:

NICE WORK: Florida State U. removes ‘correct language’ threat after College Fix inquiry.

FIRE’s Director of Policy Reform, Laura Beltz, told The Fix “academic freedom affords faculty members a great degree of deference in how they govern their classroom” even if this includes “actions that typically run counter to free speech principles in other contexts.”

For example, Beltz described how a student “levying ad hominem attacks at other students during class and preventing the class from reaching the educational objectives of [a] discussion” could reasonably be disciplined by the instructor.

Beltz’s main free speech concern over the Civil Interaction section of the original syllabus is its potential to be unevenly applied based on viewpoint.

“Faculty certainly can’t discriminate against students, so to the extent a rule like this is applied to restrict some viewpoints but not others — not to shape class discussion and meet educational goals but instead to only shut down or grade speech based on viewpoint — that would be problematic,” she said.

Indeed. And after everything we’ve seen the last couple of decades, it’s the safe assumption that viewpoint discrimination is the likely goal.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Revisiting AOC ’28 After DSA Commie Uprising. “The ‘insatiable media interest’ is AOC’s gargantuan strength if she decides to take the big leap. While the flying monkeys in the mainstream media are incurious about any Dem’s faux pas, they’re positively charmed by everything that Squeaky gets monumentally wrong.”

NICE WORK IF YOU CAN GET IT? ‘Show How 3M Is 0% at Fault:’ Expert Witness Used ChatGPT to Write Report Defending Company in Deadly Explosion Lawsuit. “The incident shows that artificial intelligence has made its way into courtrooms not just in AI-generated legal briefings, hallucinated cases, and adversarial ‘prompt injections,’ but in expert witness testimonies. Court transcripts, deposition documents, and discovery records shared with 404 Media show extensive AI use in an extremely high profile case, where multiple people died and hundreds of millions of dollars in total liability are at stake in ongoing litigation about the explosion. The case also shows that the specific prompts used to create this type of expert testimony can be discoverable during a case, and that those prompts can be quite embarrassing.”

He reportedly was paid $90,000 for his “efforts.”

REMINDER: LEFTIES DECAMPED TWITTER FOR BLUESKY BECAUSE THE CLIMATE ON TWITTER WAS TOO TOXIC.

Disturbing but enlightening stuff.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: The floodgates are open after another Chinese company lands a reusable rocket.

The Zhuque-3, or ZQ-3, rocket lifted off from a commercial launch zone at China’s Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center at 7:35 pm EDT (23:35 UTC) Tuesday, about an hour after sunrise Wednesday at the spaceport in the Gobi Desert. Nine methane-fueled engines powered the 216-foot-tall (66-meter) rocket on a course southeast from Jiuquan, then the rocket’s upper stage took over the task of placing a single satellite into orbit.

The rocket’s first stage, made of stainless steel, soared to the edge of space, then maneuvered toward a prepared landing zone some 240 miles (390 kilometers) downrange, settling to a propulsive touchdown on four extendable landing legs. LandSpace, founded in 2015, declared the mission a total success.

“This mission marks China’s first-ever successful recovery attempt of the first stage of an orbital-class launch vehicle using landing legs, and China’s first successful booster recovery on land,” LandSpace said in a statement. “It is a pivotal flight test for Zhuque-3 as it transitions from the technological demonstration and verification phase toward the engineering application phase of reusability.”

That it took the Chinese — the world’s masters of high-speed copy & paste — a decade just to make their first two catches is a testament to just how difficult this is.

RELIGION OF PEACE UPDATE: