BREAKING: Illinois Supreme Court Overturns Jussie Smollett’s Conviction.

CHRISTIAN TOTO: Justine Bateman Shames Clooney, Hanks, Streep and More. “They saw what Bateman saw. They could have used their clout to strike a blow against speech suppression. They had endless opportunities to do just that. Awards show podiums. Social media pages. Late-night interviews.”

BREAKING: Rob Reiner Drives Himself Bonkers Post-Election, Checks Into a ‘Facility.’

The headline says “Breaking” but it’s been a long time coming.

NOT QUICKLY ENOUGH: Will DEI Die?

With Trump’s victory and the belated realization that wokeness has pushed the normies Too Far, there’s talk that the poison of social justice will finally die a well deserved death in the name of improving Democratic Party election chances.

I remain skeptical.

With the woke retreating to Bluesky in order to further isolate themselves from #WrongThink and all those hateful, hateful facts, it seems like the woke will be clinging more bitterly to their anti-rational, low calorie religion substitute than ever before.

They’ll come back to Twitter — er, X — for two reasons. The first is that Elon Musk made it back into a fun place to be. The other is that Bluesky is so heavily censored that the busybodies who populate won’t find anything new to complain about.

SOD OFF, SWAMPY: Joyless ‘Scientists’ Want to Police the Language on Your Invitations.

BEST NEWS OF THE DAY: SpaceX just got exactly what it wanted from the FAA for Texas Starship launches.

In a draft version of what is known as an “Environmental Assessment,” the FAA indicated that it will grant SpaceX permission to increase the number of Starship launches in South Texas to 25 per year from the current limit of five. Additionally, the company will likely be allowed to continue increasing the size and power of the Super Heavy booster stage and Starship upper stage.

“FAA has concluded that the modification of SpaceX’s existing vehicle operator license for Starship/Super Heavy operations conforms to the prior environmental documentation, consistent with the data contained in the 2022 PEA, that there are no significant environmental changes, and all pertinent conditions and requirements of the prior approval have been met or will be met in the current action,” the federal agency stated in its conclusion.

Then again, 25 launches for SpaceX is just getting started.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Are the Lawfare Lunatics Sweating Yet? “It is difficult to figure out who the most egregious Trump-hating perverters of the law were in this tawdry assault on justice, but Alvin Bragg and Juan Merchan would probably get my vote. Bragg is a daddy issues-laden freak show who doesn’t hide his creepy obsession with Trump. He’s a typical Soros hack who is more interested in protecting criminals than law-abiding citizens.”

YOU MEAN, “READY TO GOVERN AS PROMISED ON DAY 1”: Trump’s immigration crackdown is expected to start on Day 1. “Trump’s team is already thinking about how to craft executive actions aimed to withstand the legal challenges from immigrants’ rights groups — all in hopes of avoiding an early defeat like the one his 2017 travel ban targeting majority-Muslim nations suffered. This time, Trump may have friendlier arbiters. These fights will be refereed by a federal judiciary that he transformed during his first term, including by appointing more than 200 federal judges himself. And at the very top — the ultimate decider of these questions — is the Supreme Court, to which he appointed three conservative justices.”

UNAMERICAN: Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes: Business Receives Backlash After Refusing to Serve Trump Supporters.

FAIL, BRITANNIA:

BREAKING: The UK will scrap five warships, dozens of military helicopters and a fleet of drones to save money despite growing threats from Russia and a war raging in Europe.
John Healey, the defence secretary, announced the dramatic move in parliament on Wednesday, saying it…

— Deborah Haynes (@haynesdeborah) November 20, 2024

More: “How can the UK talk tough on defence while at the same time failing to ensure sufficient funding for the military to at the very least be able to mothball “outdated” warships, helicopters & drones? A key lesson from Russia’s war in Ukraine has been that old equipment brought out of deep storage is better than no kit.”

But as CDR Salamander noted, Britain’s decline is bipartisan:

Vote for Labour, get Labour.

…but to be fair, the “Conservative” party was not much better…and really, husbanded much of the decline.

This is inertia more than anything.

From its military, to its culture, to its freedoms, to its demographics, we are watching a nation… https://t.co/5SL9nkuyLn

— cdrsalamander (@cdrsalamander) November 20, 2024

Indeed.

LESSONS UNLEARNED: Democrats Are Going to Get Younger and More Radical.

TO BE FAIR, I GET CONFUSED BY THIS STUFF SOMETIMES, TOO: Self-Own: Fetterman Says Trans Rep. Can Use HIS Bathroom.

UM, CONGRATS?

JUST IN: Arizona finished counting votes

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) November 20, 2024

OUCH: The Bidenization of the Dallas Cowboys.

JOSH BARRO: Democrats Will Not Win By Changing the Subject.

I strongly recommend Simon van Zuylen-Wood’s cover story for New York magazine, in which he talked to voters into New York City’s outer borough neighborhoods that swung hard toward Trump. In neighborhoods with significant Muslim populations, he did hear complaints about Democrats’ positioning on Gaza. But mostly, the message for Democrats was that they’ll need to move rightward to win this rainbow coalition of disgruntled voters back.

Many voters told van Zuylen-Wood that the government was too tolerant of crime and disorder; one man, who said his daughter’s entry into this country was threatened by Trump’s Muslim ban, nonetheless said he was supporting Trump. (He complained about his local public school having students wear colored shirts to form a human pride flag — an activity he asked to have his children excused from — and said he was moving to a neighborhood in Brooklyn where he could send them to a private, religious school.) But most of all, they complained about the migrant crisis, and in a right-wing way: the government had allowed too many migrants in; the migrants caused quality-of-life problems, from illegal vending to prostitution; the government was prioritizing benefits for migrants over programs for those of us who were already here. This being New York City, these complaints often came from voters who are themselves immigrants. “You can see it all, the boobs out,” one Ecuadorean-American woman, a registered Democrat who voted Republican for the first time, remarked to van Zuylen-Wood about prostitution in Corona, Queens. “That is outrageous. That is what I am telling you — especially the Venezuelans, they came with attitude.”

And when these voters looked around at the Democrats who govern them at the federal, state, and local levels, they saw a party that didn’t even appear to be trying.

Democrats have by and large abandoned the business of governing in favor of unpopular social crusades and punishing heretics.

YOU GET MORE OF WHAT YOU SUBSIDIZE: Gang Affiliation, Taxpayer-Funded Flights, & More Infuriating Bombshells in the Laken Riley Murder Trial.

LAUGHING WOLF: Of Fractals And Fractures.

Many analysts talk about patterns in the data. The pattern stands out when recognized, and as you visualize and explore it, it can become a visual, a fractal that can then merge and grows into a larger shape or pattern. If one stands back far enough, these fractals can take on a different appearance, or meaning. What is a shape, perhaps even a thing of beauty at a small scale, can present a much less benign appearance when seen combining with other shapes at a distance.

Take for instance a crack in a piece of ice, or glass. By itself, it can be a thing of beauty within the crystalline solid of clear ice. However, if enough of them form and join together, you realize that the structure of the ice is compromised and what you are seeing is the shatter-pattern present just before unity disintegrates.

If you have ever seen a sheet of modern safety glass that has shattered, but held structural integrity, you know that it is a thing of beauty. The patterns within the glass are complex and can even add to the beauty by individual pieces reflecting and even refracting light in different ways. It is a beauty that lasts up until even the smallest of external forces knocks a piece out of place. Then, quite often, the whole thing collapses into a pile of pieces.

Right now, I’m trying to figure out if I am seeing fractals around the world, or shatter patterns.

Read the whole thing.

YET MORE SCHADENFREUDE: Buy Joe and Mika Now at These Bargain Basement Prices!

DEMAND QUICKLY SURPASSED SUPPLY: A year after ditching waitlist, Starlink says it is ‘sold out’ in parts of US.

The Starlink waitlist is back in certain parts of the US, including several large cities on the West Coast and in Texas. The Starlink availability map says the service is sold out in and around Seattle and Spokane, Washington; Portland, Oregon; San Diego; Sacramento, California; and Austin, Texas. Neighboring cities and towns are included in the sold-out zones.

There are additional sold-out areas in small parts of Colorado, Montana, and North Carolina. As PCMag noted yesterday, the change comes about a year after Starlink added capacity and removed its waitlist throughout the US.

Elsewhere in North America, there are some sold-out areas in Canada and Mexico. Across the Atlantic, Starlink is sold out in London and neighboring cities. Starlink is not yet available in most of Africa, and some of the areas where it is available are sold out.

Starlink is generally seen as most useful in rural areas with less access to wired broadband, but it seems to be attracting interest in more heavily populated areas, too.

Getting Starship into service should alleviate the new waitlists, delivering bigger, more capable Starlink satellites into orbit — and more of them, at less cost to SpaceX. Still, the urban demand for Starlink is surprising since high-speed access usually isn’t an issue, and satellite bandwidth is.

Any theories?

READ THE ROOM: Los Angeles Embraces ‘Sanctuary’ Status… Arizona to Follow? “Is it possible that there are a few Democrats who said the border was ‘very important’ because they don’t believe Biden-Harris opened the border wide enough? Technically, I suppose there could be some small number of middle-aged progressive female TikTok influencers with recently shaved skulls who sincerely believe (when the Xanax isn’t working) that not enough people from Burkina Faso snuck across. But it’s safe to say they aren’t a large enough constituency to bother catering to.”

Related (From Ed):

THERE MUST BE FIRINGS AND PROSECUTIONS: FEMA Chief on the Congressional Hotseat Trying to Explain Why the Agency Bypassed Trump-Supporting Homes.

IF THEY’D JUST GET BACK TO MAKING CARS THAT DELIVER “SPACE, PACE AND GRACE,” THAT WOULD BE GREAT:

ADMIN POST.

The new head of brand strategy at Jaguar.

Explains everything.

RIP Jaguar. pic.twitter.com/nNHA6bexPC

— Tommy Robinson 🇬🇧 (@TRobinsonNewEra) November 20, 2024

The genderfluid DEI people got control of another brand via the marketing department and the rest seems inevitable.

ANTITRUST: DOJ wants to force Google Chrome sale, Android de-bundling. “Additionally, the DOJ intends to ask for a range of other remedies, Bloomberg reported, all of them discussed in a court filing last month. These include imposing data licensing requirements and requiring more transparency for advertisers on where their ads appear, as well as requiring ‘measures related to artificial intelligence and its Android smartphone operating system,’ sources said. Those measures will likely stop Google from hoarding user data for both search results and AI products, with the DOJ seemingly paving the way for more users to opt their content out of AI training.”

BASK IN THE SCHADENFREUDE: Sonny Hostin Looks Suicidal As ABC Forces Her to Issue a Correction After Smearing Matt Gaetz.

CRISIS BY DESIGN:

Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs (D) said that she will work with Trump on border security.

Asked about mass deportations, she said she “will not tolerate misguided policies that don’t actually help with the critical work that’s happening here.

I will not tolerate terrorizing… pic.twitter.com/tDMBBQXLry

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) November 19, 2024

If Hobbs wants to try and turn Arizona into a sanctuary state, I can’t think of anything much better that could happen to the Arizona GOP.