MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT [VIP]: Israel Just Blew Up More of Yemen — and Peace Has Never Been Closer? “This is a two-track peace process Ronald Reagan would find familiar. Reagan’s ‘peace through strength’ wasn’t just a slogan — it was his strategy.”
Author Archive: Stephen Green
May 6, 2025
NARRATIVES DON’T MAINTAIN THEMSELVES, COMRADE:
A fun question for the Pulitzers is how 3 debunked stories about abortion laws gets an award but Free Beacon's investigative journalism resulting in the resignation of Harvard's president doesn't. https://t.co/XpKW7vp0eZ
— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) May 6, 2025
BLOAT: Hegseth orders Pentagon to cut number of senior generals by 20%.
US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has ordered senior Pentagon leadership to cut the number of four-star generals and admirals by at least 20% across the military, according to a memo signed by Hegseth dated Monday and obtained by CNN.
As of 2023, there were 37 four-star generals and admirals across the entire military.
The memo also directs the Pentagon to cut the number of general officers in the National Guard by 20%, and to cut the total number of general and flag officers across the military by 10%. There are currently about 900 general and flag officers — those with the rank of one star or higher — across the military.
Cynical Publius has suggestions:
Pete, I know you got this and you are totally awesome, but I also know the Joint Staff is going to come up with a bunch of COAs on how to make these cuts that will be presented in a 120-slide PowerPoint deck after 9 months of coordination with the Services and USD (P&R), so can I… https://t.co/36xgY1od1i
— Cynical Publius (@CynicalPublius) May 5, 2025
Full text:
Pete, I know you got this and you are totally awesome, but I also know the Joint Staff is going to come up with a bunch of COAs on how to make these cuts that will be presented in a 120-slide PowerPoint deck after 9 months of coordination with the Services and USD (P&R), so can I please make a recommendation on how to make these cuts in the next two weeks?
First, cut any flag officer who did not draw hostile fire pay at any time in the past 20 years.
If that doesn’t get you to the required % cuts, then cut any flag who ever signed a DEI policy statement or signed separation paperwork on anyone who refused the COVID vax.
Finally, if that does not get you there, hold a PT test for all generals/admirals under applicable Service standards, run by a bunch of angry E-6 drill sergeants who were passed-over for E-7, and then cut the lowest scores until you meet your quota.
You will then have a lean, mean combat-ready cadre of senior leaders, I promise.
Indeed.
THE NEW SPACE RACE: NASA’s Artemis II Orion Spacecraft Ready for Fueling, Processing.
The Orion spacecraft for NASA’s Artemis II crewed mission around the Moon has been on the move. Technicians relocated the spacecraft May 5 from the Neil A. Armstrong Operations and Checkout Facility at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where it was assembled, to its fueling facility at the spaceport.
“With the Artemis II on the horizon, seeing the Orion spacecraft depart the Operations and Checkout building for the Kennedy Space Center’s Multi-Payload Processing Facility reflects the many months of hard work, dedication, collaboration, and innovation of the entire team” said Howard Hu, NASA’s Orion program manager. “It demonstrates our ability to achieve ambitious goals to enable a safe and successful Artemis II mission. The Orion team was proud to turn over the first human-rated deep space exploration spacecraft in over 50 years to Exploration Ground Systems for fueling and stacking for our next mission to the Moon.”
Inside the Multi-Payload Processing Facility, engineers and technicians from NASA’s Exploration Ground Systems Program will load Orion’s propellants, high pressure gases, coolant, and other fluids the spacecraft and crew will need to maneuver and carry out their 10-day journey.
Trump’s pick for NASA administrator — Jared Isaacman, who has yet to receive a full Senate vote — says he’s committed to flying Artemis II and Artemis III with the SLS and Orion. But after that, budgets look grim for both the rocket and the space capsule.
SLS costs way too much and does far too little.
OPERATION GIDEON’S CHARIOTS: Israel to Hamas: You’ve Got 10 Days or It’s All Over.
THANKS, FELLAS: Oil settles down more than $1 a barrel as OPEC+ accelerates output hikes.
Oil prices fell by more than $1 a barrel on Monday to settle at multi-year lows, as an OPEC+ decision to expedite its output hikes stoked fears about rising global supply at a time when the demand outlook is uncertain.
Brent crude futures settled at $60.23 a barrel, down $1.06, or 1.7%. U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude ended at $57.13 a barrel, falling $1.16, 2%. Both benchmarks settled at the lowest since February 2021.
Last week, Brent shed 8.3% and WTI lost 7.5% after Saudi Arabia signaled it could cope with a prolonged lower price environment. That offset optimism on the demand side that U.S.-China tariff talks could occur, Saxo Bank analyst Ole Hansen said.
On Saturday, OPEC+ agreed to further speed up oil production hikes for a second consecutive month.
Unless OPEC nations think they need extra cash as a hedge against near-term disruptions, I have no idea what might drive these output hikes.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Now MAGA Also Stands for ‘Make Alcatraz Great Again.’
OH, FER CRYIN’ OUT LOUD: Female cop may be the reason Luigi Mangione goes free…
Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old who’s accused of murdering United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, might walk free, not because he’s innocent, but because a female cop allegedly mishandled the search that led to critical evidence being used against him.
According to his lawyers, Mangione’s backpack was illegally searched right after police found him at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania. Now they’re demanding that everything inside be tossed from the case.
And if a judge agrees, the entire case could fall apart, and one of the most high-profile murder trials in recent memory could blow up over a mistake made by a female officer.
But sadly, this isn’t just about one bad call. It’s about a dangerous pattern driven by DEI hiring, where meeting diversity quotas is more important than choosing the best people for one of the hardest, most stressful jobs on the planet. Just like the military, law enforcement shouldn’t be a social experiment. It’s life and death and more and more Americans are starting to ask the hard question: Are all these diversity-first hires really equipped to handle these high-performance jobs?
Developing…
IT’S USUALLY NICER TO ACCEPT THE CARROT THAN WAIT FOR THE STICK: Trump administration offers to pay immigrants in the US illegally for ‘self-deportation.’ “The Trump administration says it will pay immigrants in the United States illegally $1,000 plus travel costs if they leave voluntarily as it accelerates its mass deportation agenda. The Department of Homeland Security said Monday that people who use the CBP Home app to announce their ‘self-deportations’ would get the money and be ‘deprioritized’ for detention and removal.”
I LIKE THE IDEA BUT IT’S IN AWFULLY BAD SHAPE: Trump to Reopen Alcatraz to Jail the Criminal ‘Dregs of Society’
May 5, 2025
SAY IT WITH FLOWERS:
NIH Director @DrJBhattacharya says the agency stopped the beagle experiments on the NIH campus — and that @PETA even sent him flowers. pic.twitter.com/koFbZ9e9M9
— Fox News (@FoxNews) May 5, 2025
HEADLINE OF THE DAY: JB Pritzker, the Shoney’s Big Boy of the Democratic Party, Is Here to Save the Day!
LET’S GO GET THEM: New source of gold, platinum, and uranium discovered in space.
A flash of intense radiation seen in space has upended long-held ideas about how some of our heaviest metals emerge. Scientists have found that such a flare can pump out vast amounts of heavy, rare atoms in mere seconds, revealing a surprising origin for valuables like gold and platinum.
Brian Metzger from the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Astrophysics in New York City is one of the researchers behind this magnetar flare discovery.
Metzger and his colleagues worked to show how these unusually powerful neutron star outbursts can forge precious metals, called called r-process elements, at unimaginable scales.
Magnetars are the universe’s most intense magnets, and they’re not just strong – they’re wildly extreme. Born from the explosive death of massive stars, these neutron stars pack more mass than our sun into a ball just a dozen miles wide.
Their magnetic fields are a thousand times stronger than typical neutron stars, and trillions of times beyond anything found on Earth.
If you stood anywhere near one (which, thankfully, you can’t), it could scramble your atoms just by existing. That’s how intense these cosmic beasts are.
On second thought, maybe we aren’t quite ready to go get them.
NO MATTER HOW MUCH YOU DESPISE THE MEDIA…
"EDITED FOR CLARITY": NBC News cuts President Trump's mention of the emergence of damning evidence against Kilmar Abrego García from the Meet the Press broadcast.
PRESIDENT TRUMP: You see what happened just this morning. Tapes came out, horrible tapes from his wife. You don't… pic.twitter.com/ppr15BxLOa
— Jorge Bonilla (@BonillaJL) May 4, 2025
…it isn’t enough.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. The Shifting Morality of Gambling Isn’t Making Us Better.
GLORIOUS AC: Austin Mandates AC. “If you’re be reading this blog any length of time, you know I’m not a fan of Austin’s oppressive regulatory regime. So it may surprise you to learn that Austin recently passed a housing regulation I actually approve of. So get those cries of ‘sellout!’ ready as I disturb the shade of Ayn Rand* and approve of government intervening in the free market.”
ANOTHER HANGOVER FROM THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION, AND ALSO LARGELY POINTLESS: These Are the People You Can ‘Thank’ for Real ID.
IT ISN’T ANTI-RACIST; IT’S PRO-DEPENDENCY: How ‘anti-racist’ ideology hurt the students it was supposed to help.
In 2019, students at Ascend’s 15 charter schools — nearly all of them living in poverty — were “reading Shakespeare in the middle grades, studying the Dutch masters, and outperforming city and statewide averages on standardized tests,” writes Ginia Bellafante in the New York Times. Then, founder Steven F. Wilson came out for high expectations in a an essay titled The Promise of Intellectual Joy, and was fired for “white supremacist rhetoric.”
Wilson is back in the fray with a book titled The Lost Decade: Returning to the Fight for Better Schools in America. He tells Bellafante that anti-racist education failed students. At one school that went anti-racist, “the percentage of students meeting or exceeding standards on the math section of the SAT plummeted from 41 percent in 2017 to 4 percent in 2024,” he says.
Anti-racist programming failed, says Wilson, because “indoctrination is boring.”
It also isn’t educating — and isn’t meant to be.
…AND IT’S ILLEGALS: Beaten to Death in His Own Home — After ICE Was Ignored.
WELL, IT IS PROGRAMMED BY HUMANS: AI is just as overconfident and biased as humans can be, study shows.
GPT-4 outperformed GPT-3.5 when answering problems with clear mathematical solutions, showing fewer mistakes in probability and logic-based scenarios. But in subjective simulations, such as whether to choose a risky option to realize a gain, the chatbot often mirrored the irrational preferences humans tend to show.
“GPT-4 shows a stronger preference for certainty than even humans do,” the researchers wrote in the paper, referring to the tendency for AI to tend towards safer and more predictable outcomes when given ambiguous tasks.
What happens when AI decides humans are too unpredictable?