ICYMI: NYT to WaPo: You Lied About Hegseth. “Everything I emphasized contradicts the WaPo’s sensationalist claims from last week. And, in journalistic terms, those three paragraphs amount to the NYT calling WaPo liars. I’d add that ‘sensationalist claims,’ in VodkaPundit terms, amounts to ‘WaPo either lied or was lied to and didn’t care.'”
Author Archive: Stephen Green
December 2, 2025
HERO: ‘High-G maneuvers’ amid enemy missiles earn USAF pilot Silver Star.
An Air Force squadron commander who led a history-making deployment to the Middle East was recently presented with the military’s third-highest combat award for combat heroism that reads like a Blockbuster movie script.
Lt. Col. William “Skate” Parks, who commanded the 480th Expeditionary Fighter Squadron out of Spangdahlem Air Base, Germany, until earlier this year, received the Silver Star at the Pentagon on Wednesday in recognition of a high-risk flight on March 27 that helped save the lives of his wingmen as well as his own from the urgent threat of running out of fuel, in addition to incoming enemy missiles.
The 480th EFS was designated in 2010 with one of the Air Force’s rarer and more risky missions: Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses, or SEAD. As the only squadron in Air Forces Europe and Africa performing SEAD, it destroys, spoofs and subverts enemy ground-based air defenses, such as surface-to-air missiles and anti-aircraft guns.
While Air Force releases and Parks’ award citation do not specify where the squadron was operating in the Middle East at the time, the timeframe aligns with Operation Rough Rider, a series of strikes against the Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen.
Read the whole thing.
ALWAYS LEAVE’EM LAUGHING:
🚨 LMFAO! President Trump making everyone crack up right now as he DUNKS on the Fake News 🤣
"I sit here and do 4 news conferences, I ask questions from VERY intelligent LUNATICS – you people." 😭
"You always find something new! Like, 'Is he in good health? BIDEN was great,… pic.twitter.com/YBv5If4Qwl
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) December 2, 2025
ASK A PR PRO: MAGA at the Crossroads: With Record-Low Approval Ratings, How Does Trump Roar Back?
Although to be fair, I’m not sure how much I buy into the record-low ratings.
THE LEFT DOES LOVE ITS VIOLENCE — SELECTIVELY, OF COURSE:
"If you don't want to be the target of violence don't do the thing I oppose" is applied with a selectiveness that curiously tends to whitewash the violent criminals rather than protect and honor the law-abiding.
— Sunny (@sunnyright) December 2, 2025
WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG? Macron proposes ‘labelling’ for ‘reliable’ news outlets. “Speaking to readers of the Ebra press group on November 28, a conglomerate that owns nine regional outlets across France, Macron insisted labelling news organisations amounts to a ‘democratic duty.'”
If government officials don’t tell the people what information is reliable, they might not elect the correct government officials.
HE’S SWEATING:
— DataRepublican (small r) (@DataRepublican) December 2, 2025
Related, from Sam J: ShipWreckedCrew Shares Mark Kelly Video That Proves He’s Actually VERY Nervous.
Background: The Franklin memes have been killing on X all day, and this is the cause.
Not as “inclusive” as they claim. pic.twitter.com/vkq7TkZSUk
— Nick Freitas (@NickJFreitas) December 2, 2025
Click, scroll, and enjoy.
MAID IN CANADA: Canada Euthanized a Record 16.4K People Last Year.
SHARKS GOTTA SWIM, BATS GOTTA FLY: Ilhan Omar Wants to Create an Illegal Federal Firearms Registry…Because of Course She Does.
I USED TO JOKE THAT OBAMA HAD “THE MERDE TOUCH”: Government Is King Midas in Reverse.
UK MAKES IT OFFICIAL: Jury trials scrapped for crimes with sentences of less than three years.
EVERYBODY KNOWS YOU NEVER GO FULL TOM NICHOLS: Just When You Thought Tom Nichols Couldn’t Possibly Go Fuller Tom Nichols.
CHANGE YOU CAN BELIEVE IN:
🚨HUGE ALERT🚨 @USDOT is giving THOUSANDS of trucking schools 30 days to comply with federal rules for drivers or they may be forced to close down.
The days of a “Wild Wild West” trucking industry are over under the Trump administration 🚛 https://t.co/ZRWebpTXij
— Secretary Sean Duffy (@SecDuffy) December 1, 2025
DISPATCHES FROM THE RED ZONES: Idaho Bar Offers Free Beer to Help ICE Catch Illegals.
The Old State Saloon in Eagle made an announcement Saturday on social media that ignited a firestorm online, Fox News reported.
“ALERT: Anyone who helps ICE identify and ultimately deport an illegal from Idaho gets FREE BEER FOR ONE MONTH at Old State Saloon!” its post read:
When word of the deal spread online, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) reacted with a gif of a dinosaur character dropping what appeared to be a beer can while it had a dumbfounded look on its face:
“If you’d like to claim your free beers, send a detailed email with any evidence, photos, videos, summary of events, dates, and times etc to: ,” the saloon wrote in a reply to its initial post.
The establishment later shared screenshots of what appeared to be messages from people taking up the challenge:
In a subsequent post early Sunday, the saloon, which is owned by Mark Fitzpatrick, announced another beer giveaway.
“For the month of December it’s ‘Merry Snitchmas’ at Old State Saloon: Manly American Mondays — all American Citizen males who support ICE get one free beer! Ladies’ ‘I’m Telling’ Tuesdays — BOGO for American woman willing to tell ICE about any illegals, to get them deported. Wednesday: American heterosexual couples get 10% off their entire bill. Get married and make American babies, if at all possible!” the post read.
Beer: Helping people get married and make American babies since 1776!
RICHARD FERNANDEZ: The Hollow Man.
People are at once the greatest treasure and the greatest bane. Who hasn’t watched the movie where sadistic convicts take the guards hostage with makeshift knives and threaten to kill them one by one unless their demands are met? Or the scenario where a cab driver refuses to drive all the way into a high crime area and drops his passenger off in a dimly lit street, leaving him to walk the rest of the way past a group of youths hanging menacingly out in an alleyway? Or perhaps we’ve heard of the pizza delivery employee hesitating to take a food order to a neighborhood that even the police avoid, leaving some elderly person without food because he can’t walk to the nearest store because of the gangs?
Drama is about good versus evil. The dilemma in each case is that people can be either the source of sentient evil or all that morally matters in the world; the ultimate good and the ultimate bad, depending on their choice. That’s a common view in many modern ethical systems—especially in humanism and most versions of utilitarianism or rights-based theories. Man was at the center of things for all recorded history. But if we could send robots into the mix, then humanity’s position could change.
Read the whole thing.
WHOSE COUNTRY IS IT, ANYWAY?
If we don’t use your taxes to buy everything for the foreigners imported by the government, the foreigners the government imported might kill you.
Have fun at work today! https://t.co/RFHOK9S2NS
— Oilfield Rando (@Oilfield_Rando) December 2, 2025
THE NEW SPACE RACE: China’s Shijian spacecraft separate after pioneering geosynchronous orbit refueling tests.
China’s experimental Shijian-21 and Shijian-25 satellites have separated in geosynchronous orbit after being docked for months conducting apparent low-profile on-orbit refueling tests.
Shijian-21 and Shijian-25 performed rendezvous and proximity operations during the first half of the year before apparently docking in late June or early July, when the pair became virtually indistinguishable when viewed from the ground, likely marking the start of planned refueling tests, according to independent satellite-tracking analyses. The docked pair then later performed fuel-intensive orbital plane change maneuvers, reducing their orbital inclination.
Optical ground observations Nov. 29 made by S2a systems, a Swiss company which develops and operates customized systems for optical space surveillance worldwide, reveal that the two satellites have now separated in geosynchronous orbit, close to the geostationary belt (GEO) at 35,786 km above Earth’s equator. The orbits of the pair are inclined by 4.6 degrees with respect to GEO.
The separation could mark a successful conclusion to a world-first refueling operation in GEO.
Beijing appears to be working very hard at making their space systems robust.
JOURNALISM: NYT to WaPo: You Lied About Hegseth.
NO SURPRISE: Apple AI chief steps down following Siri setbacks.
Apple AI chief John Giannandrea is stepping down from his position, according to an announcement on Monday. The change comes as Apple struggles to get its AI-powered Siri back on track after delaying its launch earlier this year.
Now, Amar Subramanya will serve as Apple’s vice president of AI. Subramanya spent 16 years at Google before joining Microsoft’s AI division as the corporate VP of AI in July. While at Apple, Subramanya will oversee the development of the company’s AI models, machine learning research, as well as AI safety and evaluation.
Embarrassing but overdue.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Dems Really Should Break Their Addiction to Voting for Scumbags. “Here’s the thing, though — unless Walz ends up in a federal penitentiary, his political career isn’t going to take a hit. The Dems in Minnesota have been electing this corrupt moron to office for 20 years now. Because Democrats love entrenched corruptocrats, Walz is running for his third term as governor.”
HMM: Hong Kong Contractors Used Unsafe Netting at Fire Site, Officials Say.
Hong Kong officials said on Monday that contractors at the ill-fated housing estate where a fire killed more than 150 people had blanketed buildings with substandard scaffolding netting, and then tried to conceal the unsafe material.
The Independent Commission Against Corruption said that after a summer typhoon, some of the scaffolding netting used at the Wang Fuk Court housing estate in northern Hong Kong was replaced with cheaper material that did not meet fire-safety standards.
To fool inspectors, netting that met the standards was installed at the base of the scaffolding, where samples are usually taken.
The findings emerged as the death toll from Wednesday’s blaze rose to 151, with the police still combing the towers for bodies and evidence of identification. More than 40 people were still missing. The work of locating and identifying remains would take another three weeks, officials said.
For what it’s worth, I had GPT perform a deep search for similarly deadly corruption before the CCP clamped down on Hong Kong, and it came up with nothing.
COOL, NOW DO NYC: Even When They Cheat They Lose: Another Country Rejects Communism.
L’ÉTAT, C’EST TOUT LE MONDE:
This is probably the scariest chart you'll see today. Let me translate it for you: only one-third of French people have a private-sector job.
How are they supposed to feed the remaining two-thirds with their taxes? It’s starting to feel like a failed state. pic.twitter.com/HLIHfG1PHo
— Michael A. Arouet (@MichaelAArouet) December 2, 2025
Previously:
Europe’s economic decline is becoming more painful. In 1995 European productivity was 95% of America’s; today it is less than 80%, which is a big enough gap for holidaymakers to notice.
The continent’s failure to exploit its scale is a problem https://t.co/zSMUX2NMB3 👇
— The Economist (@TheEconomist) September 11, 2024
Decline is a choice.
SILVER LINING: Strange Chernobyl dark fungus may ‘eat’ radiation and even help astronauts in space.
But Chernobyl’s fungi weren’t just adapting to the radiation — they were feeding off it. In 2007, Ekaterina Dadachova, a nuclear scientist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, built on Zhdanova’s research after revealing that the organism increased while in the presence of radiation. This indicated they were harnessing it — a phenomenon she dubbed “radiosynthesis.”
One could think of it like plants feeding off sunlight — but far more powerful. “The energy of ionizing radiation is around one million times higher than the energy of white light, which is used in photosynthesis,” said the researcher Dadachova. “So you need a pretty powerful energy transducer, and this is what we think melanin is capable of doing — to transduce [ionising radiation] into usable levels of energy.”
Radiosynthesis remains just a theory as scientists have yet to discover the exact mechanism by which the fungi convert radiation into energy.
However, if true, this has major ramifications for a variety of crucial applications, from radiation cleanup at sites like Chernobyl and Fukushima to space exploration — specifically shielding astronauts against harmful cosmic radiation.
Stay tuned.