RIDDLE ME THIS: How Did This One French Guy Make $50 Million Betting on Trump?
Author Archive: Stephen Green
November 7, 2024
AMERICANS CHOSE… WISELY:
Which way, western man? pic.twitter.com/tDQxN1mC2v
— T. Becket Adams (@BecketAdams) November 7, 2024
WE’RE USUALLY SO RETICENT: Gen X Delivered for Trump—and They’re Not Afraid to Tell You Why.
Update: Sorry, posted the wrong link at first. All fixed now.
MARK YOUR CALENDARS: SpaceX’s Starship Test, Weeks After the Last One, Highlights Rapid Changes in the Space Industry.
You’d think that a high-tech space company, in an industry known for painstaking research and vastly costly hardware development, would sit on its laurels for a while and carefully consider its next steps. Nope. It seems SpaceX’s engineers have already done that, and are so satisfied with the progress of the rocket’s development they just set a date for the next test flight, now scheduled for Nov. 18.
That’s about a month between the fifth and sixth flights of the world’s most powerful rocket. It means that SpaceX has the rocket and engine hardware for the next flight ready and waiting, and that it’s dealt with any issues like damage caused to the launch tower and the miles of complex fuel pipes, electrical wiring and mechanical systems needed to fuel the rocket up and get it flying into space. It’s a furious pace of development.
SpaceX’s post also notes that the next flight won’t merely be about replaying the previous mission. Instead the test will try to “expand the envelope on ship and booster capabilities and get closer to bringing reuse of the entire system online.” Reuse is a critical goal for the program, based on the company’s successes in reducing the cost of flying satellites to orbit achieved in its existing, much smaller, Falcon 9 rocket.
The biggest hurdles remaining are orbital refueling and safely bringing the upper stage into Mechazilla’s tender embrace. Mexico likely won’t allow reentry through their airspace until Starship has made a few safe landings elsewhere.
There’s much left to do but the results have been impressive.
I WENT LONG ON POPCORN MONTHS AGO: Pop Some Popcorn, Sit Back, and Watch the Democrats Tear Each Other Apart.
HEH: Australia’s ambassador in Washington deletes old posts calling ‘destructive’ Trump a ‘traitor.’
Australia’s ambassador to the US has deleted comments he had previously made online about Donald Trump, criticising him as “destructive” and a “traitor to the West”.
Kevin Rudd, a former prime minister, said his remarks did not reflect the view of the government and he was “looking forward” to working with the president-elect.
Dr Rudd, who scrubbed his social media days before Mr Trump’s election victory, wanted to “eliminate the possibility of such comments being misconstrued,” his office said.
Misconstrued, eh?
HE’S HAPPY SHE LOST: Chipper Biden Gives Post-Election Remarks.
JOANNE JACOBS: Trump’s back: What’s next for education? “Will President Donald Trump dismantle the U.S. Department of Education? ‘Nope,’ predicts Rick Hess. He’d need the House majority, as yet uncertain, and 60 filibuster-proof votes in the Senate to get it through Congress. ‘Meanwhile, plenty of influential right-wingers would rather see a Trump administration leverage the department than dismantle it.'”
So long as the levers are in place, professional lefties will eventually get control of them.
FINGER ON THE PULSE OF THE NATION: ‘Butter’s Over $3?’ Joe Scarborough’s Cluelessness on Everyday Costs Shows Why Trump Won.
Meanwhile, Colorado Democrats are so enthusiastic that they’ve created an egg shortage:
Last year, Colorado introduced a cage-free egg law, HB20-1343, mandating that by January 2025, all egg-laying hens must be housed in open environments.
The law is designed to improve conditions for hens but is also shaking up the egg supply in grocery stores statewide. As a result, grocery store shelves are seeing fewer eggs, leaving many shoppers to turn to local farms for fresh, cage-free options.
“I could expand here. I could probably have 100 chickens here, but that still would not be enough eggs for me to supply a store”, said Green Catching Farm owner Laurel Wilson.
While smaller producers, like Green Catcher Farms, are meeting some of this new demand, their limited supply can’t match the volume required by large retailers. Wilson reports steady interest in her six to eight dozen eggs produced weekly, but says that “supply chain-wise, it’s creating an issue” as smaller farms struggle to fully meet community needs.
“I sell six to eight dozen a week, which is about what my girls are putting out, because I get roughly a dozen a day from them,” said Wilson.
My little household includes two teenage boys so we consume nearly half of Wilson’s weekly production.
I’m curious to see if our well-meaning Dems decide to go for a legal “fix,” and how spectacularly that might backfire.
HOW’S THAT SPACE PROGRAM COMING ALONG?
NEWS 🚨: NASA continues to monitor an asteroid that could collide with Earth on Valentine's Day in 2046
Now has 'a 1 in 607 chance' pic.twitter.com/SBBmkzK0Fl
— Latest in space (@latestinspace) November 7, 2024
Those odds are down from one in 400 so they’re moving in the right direction.
MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: A Fond Look Back at Harris’s Train Wreck Car Crash Dumpster Fire Campaign.
THE BLAME GAME: Philly Democratic chair blames Harris’ campaign for defeats in Pa.
Philadelphia Democratic Chair Bob Brady blamed Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign for what looked like the lowest performance by a Democratic presidential candidate in the city in the last two decades and said he felt no responsibility for the red wave that descended on the state.
“They never dealt with us. They didn’t show us any respect. I never talked to the lady, and she’s the candidate,” Brady said of Harris.
As Democrats across the state grappled with the decisive victory for former President Donald Trump here, there was a lot of Wednesday-morning quarterbacking going on.
The city committee had sounded some alarms about the Harris campaign but largely quieted down in the lead up to the election. Brady, who has been chair of the party since 1988, has also faced his fair share of criticism about his ability to turn out voters in the city.
But on Wednesday, faced with the red wave that overtook the state, fueled in part by a lower margin of victory for Harris in Philadelphia, Brady, unleashed a torrent of criticisms.
He said he thought President Joe Biden should probably have remained the candidate.
Yeah, well, the Democrat cabal that removed Biden didn’t think they needed any input from the plebs — because of our sacred democracy.
YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BLOG: The Left’s 6 Enormous Transgressions That Helped Propel Trump to Victory.
MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE: ‘All Politics Is Local’: College Town Turns the Page on Its Woke DA.
A HUGE SWING AND A MISS: Pollster J. Ann Selzer: ‘I’ll be reviewing data’ after Iowa Poll misses big Trump win.
Renowned Pollster J. Ann Selzer said Tuesday she would be reviewing her data to determine why a Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll released just days before the election produced results so far out of line with former President Donald Trump’s resounding victory.
Trump handily won Iowa for a third time, defeating Vice President Kamala Harris by 14 percentage points with more than 90% of the vote counted ― a sharp contrast to Saturday’s Iowa Poll that had Harris leading by 3 points.
“Tonight, I’m of course thinking about how we got where we are,” Selzer, president of Selzer & Co., which conducts the Iowa Poll, said in a statement.
On the flip side, Nate Silver ran his renowned simulation 80,000 times on Monday night and it never produced anything more conclusive than a million-dollar shrug emoji.
Polling is broken. The betting sites performed much better — again.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Dems’ Blame Game Is Weaker Than Kamala’s Public Speaking Skill. “They’re going to keep pointing fingers in all of the wrong directions. In fact, so far they’ve been content to double-down on all of the hysterical hyperbole that got them a good old-fashioned butt-whuppin’ on Tuesday.”
BUT I ALREADY VOTED FOR HIM:
Trump will begin operations to deport millions of undocumented immigrants when he starts his term, campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Wednesday morning.
He'll launch the "largest mass deportation operation" of undocumented immigrants on Day 1.https://t.co/O5hbjaIY0e
— Axios (@axios) November 6, 2024
Mitt Romney got mocked for his comment about “self-deportation” in 2012, but disincentivizing illegal settlement/employment would go a long way towards making that happen — and save us a lot of money on repatriation expenses.
THE SAVIORS OF DEMOCRACY™ PRESENT THEIR NEXT PROJECT, KNEECAPPING THE PEOPLE’S NEW CHOICE: Biden team debates how to ‘Trump-proof’ foreign policy.
Despondent Biden administration officials are mulling how to protect their national security priorities before president-elect Donald Trump returns to the Oval Office in January. Whether it’s sending funds to Ukraine or imposing new sanctions on extremist Israeli settlers, an array of options are on the table.
But there’s no formal plan yet for how to lock in President Joe Biden’s big-ticket policies against a Trump effort to dismantle them, a senior Biden administration official said.
Some administration officials also believe having such a plan won’t make a difference.
Trump is sure to quickly halt or reverse much of what Biden’s team manages to push through in these final months, multiple current and former U.S. officials said. He will have broad executive authority to do so, as well as enough support in Congress and in the judiciary that almost nothing will stop him.
“You really can’t ‘Trump-proof,’” one U.S. official said. “You can ‘Trump delay,’ you can throw sand in the gears, but there is no way short of legislation to ‘Trump-proof.’”
It’s almost as though elections are supposed to mean something.
November 6, 2024
HEH:
Elon is such a dumbass. He spent $44 billion on Twitter and all he got was control of all 3 branches of the federal government.
— Whole Mars Catalog (@WholeMarsBlog) November 6, 2024
More seriously, a free-speech absolutist with far beyond eff-you money now has a seat at the table.
That’s a yuge (and possibly underappreciated) development.
LIKE JOHN KERRY 20 YEARS AGO, HER CONCESSION SPEECH WAS THE BEST ONE SHE DELIVERED DURING HER ENTIRE CAMPAIGN*: Kamala Harris Concedes With Bitter, Divisive Speech.
*Faint praise, granted.
PRETTY SMOOTH FOR A HOTLY CONTESTED ELECTION: Finally, Trump Wins Beyond The Margin Of Fraud.