KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Joe Biden’s Debate Tune-Up Is Alternately Pathetic and Hilarious. “I guess the litmus test will be that if he makes it through the entire debate and doesn’t collapse, huzzahs will echo all around the MSM and we will be repeatedly assured that the old boy is ready to go.”
Author Archive: Stephen Green
June 25, 2024
AN EYE FOR AN EYE, MORE OR LESS: Louisiana Governor Signs Bill Authorizing Surgical Castration for Child Sex Offenders. “If an offender ‘fails to appear’ as required by court order for surgical castration, the offender may be charged and sentenced to three to five years in prison without the ‘benefit of probation, parole, or suspension of sentence,’ according to the new law.”
SORRY, LADIES, BUT YOU’RE AT LEAST TWO PLACES DOWN ON THE LEFT’S REVISED VICTIMHOOD SCALE: Bully Cyberstalks Lesbian Couple After They Questioned a Man in Women’s Room.
WELL, IT IS AN ELECTION YEAR: Yellen announces $100 million affordable housing fund as shelter costs weigh on Biden.
“I expect that shelter inflation will moderate,” Yellen said at a speech in Minneapolis Monday afternoon. “But we face a very significant housing supply shortfall that has been building for a long time and this supply crunch has led to an affordability crisis.”
As part of its new actions, Treasury will provide $100 million over the next three years to finance affordable housing projects. It is also calling on several agencies that help finance housing to bolster their support for new development.
Yellen’s speech was part of a multi-day tour around Minnesota, that includes lunching with CEOs and holding roundtables with state housing officials.
While the president hunkers down at Camp David to prepare for Thursday’s debate, Yellen is among a slew of cabinet members who are making the rounds nationwide in an effort to promote the president’s economic agenda.
Biden got everything he wanted in his first two years. How’d that work out for ya?
THAT’S DEM SENATOR MARK WARNER’S PHRASE, NOT MINE: Senate Dems Threaten ‘Tax Armageddon.’ “Washington has a spending problem, and Democrats aren’t shy about how to solve it: tax us poor bastards back to the Stone Age.”
June 24, 2024
IS THERE ANYTHING IT CAN’T DO? This is how drinking a nice cold beer can help remove lead from drinking water.
MORE OF THE SAME: Suppliers Think Pope Will Be Next Boeing CEO.
From her corporate bio:
Stephanie Pope is chief operating officer of The Boeing Company and executive vice president, president and chief executive officer of Boeing Commercial Airplanes, with primary responsibility for leading the commercial airplanes business and strengthening safety and quality across its operations. Commercial Airplanes specializes in the design, production and delivery of airplanes to customers worldwide with more than 13,000 Boeing jetliners in service today.
Prior to this role, Pope served as chief operating officer for the company since January 2024. Before that, she was president and CEO of Boeing Global Services, from April 2022 to December 2023, with responsibility for leading Boeing’s aerospace services business supporting commercial, government and aviation industry customers worldwide.
Previously, Pope was vice president and chief financial officer of Commercial Airplanes, from December 2020 to March 2022, with responsibility for the financial management and strategic, long-range business planning for the business unit.
As I said, more of the same.
HE’S CERTAINLY BEEN SETTING THE STAGE TO DO THIS: Biden May Be About to Abandon Israel.
JIHAD IS GLOBAL: Iran and Taliban discuss ‘joint action’ against Israel.
The Tehran regime and the Taliban administration have reaffirmed their growing ties and anti-Israel sentiment throughout the Gaza conflict. In February 2024, Iranian Special Presidential Envoy for Afghanistan Affairs Hassan Kazemi Qomi stated that “if need be, a martyrdom division from Afghanistan is prepared to fight in Gaza,” adding that “the way we see it, Afghanistan is also part of the Axis of Resistance.”
Following the Islamic Republic’s April 13 drone and missile attack on Israel, the Taliban was quick to issue a statement supporting the action by employing a similar rhetoric regarding Israel. The next day, Taliban Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Abdul Qahar Balkhi posted on X that Iran’s attack on the “criminal Zionist regime” was a “legitimate defense.”
Although the Taliban and Iran have clashed in the recent past over controversial issues such as water rights and refugees, the two also cooperated for nearly two decades as the Taliban fought to expel the US and its allies from Afghanistan. The Taliban ultimately succeeded when the US left the country in August 2021.
The crisis is just beginning.
THE EV BUBBLE IS DEFLATING: Nearly Half Of US EV Drivers Consider Switching Back To Gas Vehicles: McKinsey Study. “Thirty-four percent noted that the total costs of EV ownership were ‘too high.'”
CENSORSHIP, STRAIGHT UP: Biden Admin. Asked Amazon To Hide Vaccine Critical Books During The Pandemic.
The findings were presented by the House Judiciary Committee and Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government in documents that show Amazon reduced the visibility of titles that the government deemed overly critical of big pharma shots.
The documents show that some books were simply generally critical of vaccines, with several written by medical professionals. Some were even just reviews of scientific studies.
The Federal government compiled a “Do Not Promote” list, to which more than 40 titles were added.
In a series of X posts, Judiciary Committee Chair Rep. Jim Jordan explained how internal emails from Amazon contain employees revealed that “the impetus for this request is criticism from the Biden Administration.”
There’s a word for Big Government and Big Business colluding to silence speech and stifle opposition — it starts with an F and it’s one the Left always accuses the Right of being, even as they act increasingly fascist themselves.
KEVIN DOWNEY JR: The Democrats Claim There Is No Lefty Pedo Cabal. Roll the Tape. “I’ve been informed by the few liberals utopian socialists who still deign to speak to me that there is no secret confederacy of left-wing pedophiles ravaging hordes of children and that this was just a conspiracy theory whipped by tobaccy-chawin’, trailer-dwellin’ whackjobs. So I thought I’d pour some bourbon over an ice cube the size of the Death Star, gather some clues, and see what we can learn.”
THE NEW SPACE RACE: Chang’e-6 heads for Earth with first-ever lunar far side samples. “The Chang’e-6 service module likely fired its engines for a trans-Earth injection around June 21. The spacecraft is now on the final leg of its complex, 53-day voyage involving a lunar landing, sampling, ascent and docking. A reentry capsule containing the unique samples will be released from the service module shortly before arrival at Earth early June 25.”
ANTISEMITIC MOB FORMS OUTSIDE OF LOS ANGELES SYNAGOGUE, VIOLENCE ENSUES: Yes, It Can Happen Here. “The fundamental issue isn’t about the so-called genocide of the Arabs of Gaza, Israel, Zionism, or even the Jews.”
YOUR DEVELOPERS WERE SO PREOCCUPIED WITH WHETHER OR NOT THEY COULD, THEY DIDN’T STOP TO THINK IF THEY SHOULD: Microsoft’s Copilot will let you join 3 meetings at once, but experts say it misses the point: ‘No one has ever wanted to be in a meeting.’
In the ad, a user brags: “Can I be in three meetings at once?” “Watch me,” complete with a frowning woman at a computer. Actual office workers were not sold on the function.
“I’m not an expert on Microsoft Copilot, but what feature specifically is enabling this to work?” one tech worker said in an Instagram video reacting to the ad. “This is implying they got the AI sitting in the meeting for her, but I haven’t heard about that feature.”
“They are marketing this like crazy and I’m like how on earth is it going to be productive if like a third of the meeting attendees are just these AI stand ins,” another user commented. “Most meetings could be a well written email.”
“Copilot, enabling burnout, overwork, underpay and untimely death of people,” another said.
Meetings should be as short, small, focused, and infrequent as humanly possible.
On the other hand, if we wanted to cripple Skynet before it has a chance to get started, just keep all the AIs bogged down in artificial meetings.
AMERICANS WHO WON’T VOTE FOR BIDEN: DHS Docs Reveal Who the Biden Administration Really Sees as Terrorist Threats.
EDWARD LUTTWAK: Who will win a post-heroic war? Neither side is prepared to fight.
The great question, of course, is why? Why is it that, with larger populations than ever before, our tolerance for casualties is increasingly low?
Back in 1994, I offered a simple theory: the wars of history were fought by “spare” male children. Even as late as the mid-20th century, the average European family had several children. In agricultural households, one male could inherit the family’s land, another might advantageously marry a land-owning wife, and one more might go into the Church — or off to war. If he failed to return, the survivors might miss him most intensely, but the family would not be extinguished. Today, however, with the average fertility of women across Europe less than two and still falling — the EU average was 1.46 in 2022 — there are no spare children.
The extreme case here is China, with its fertility rate of 1.1. President Xi is, by all accounts, a bellicose man who enjoys threatening war against Taiwan. And yet, curiously, in 2020 he took eight months to reveal that one PLA officer and three soldiers had died during the fighting on India’s Ladakh frontier. During that period of official silence, the families of the four were re-housed and provided with welfare payments or better jobs; the officer’s wife who taught piano in a village school was elevated to the Xi’an Conservatory of Music, with a new house to go with it. Each of the four also became the subject of dedicated media campaigns, which portrayed the youngest as cinematically good-looking and the officer as so conscientious that, up in cold Tibet, he would wake up before his soldiers to prepare hot-water bottles for them. Later, the names of the four were added to many highway bridges to remind all of their sacrifice.
Why the grand acts of remembrance? The answer is demographic. Thanks to China’s one-child policy, imposed in 1980 with the abundant use of forced abortions, the four deaths extinguished eight family lines.
China is just one example in a fascinating article filled with them — read the whole thing.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Donald Trump Is the Republican Who Actually Wants to Win. “Trump’s willingness to swing hard in traditional blue states is what gives him a chance to beat the Democrats’ Magic Mail-In Ballot Machine. A lot of you are going to think I’m crazy when I say this, but: there’s only so much fraud they can commit. “
UNEXPECTEDLY: Delivery Drivers Got Higher Wages. Now They’re Getting Fewer Orders.
Food-delivery apps have responded to cities’ new wage-increase requirements for gig workers by ratcheting up fees. Now, they are contending with frustrated consumers, plunging restaurant orders and an exodus of delivery drivers.
Lawmakers in New York City, one of the cities where pay increases for delivery drivers recently were adopted, say that their changes have worked well for workers. Seattle, which implemented similar rules this year, is planning to roll them back because of “outcry from drivers and restaurants over its devastating” impact, Seattle City Council President Sara Nelson said.
The delivery companies — whose businesses are built on gig workers they don’t employ full-time — say they can only afford to pay so many workers under the two cities’ latest pay standards. The cities want the companies to pay couriers a minimum hourly wage based on the time they spend delivering orders and reward the most efficient workers. New York City now requires that the companies pay couriers at least $19.56 per hour before tips, up from an average of $5.39 per hour before its rules went into effect in December.
The actual minimum wage is always zero.
AND IT ONLY TOOK THEM SEVEN YEARS: Even Snopes Says That Joe Biden’s Favorite Talking Point Is a Lie.
CYBERSECURITY: Kaspersky security software is banned in America: What you need to know.
In an announcement, BIS specifically listed five risks Kaspersky poses to national security. Kaspersky’s ties to Russia are a major concern. BIS states that Russia is a foreign adversary that poses ongoing threats to the United States. According to the agency, Kaspersky is under the jurisdiction and control of the Russian government, allowing it access to sensitive information from U.S. customers.
Other reasons given for the Kaspersky ban include the software’s ability to install malware. “Kaspersky software allows for the capability and opportunity to install malicious software and withhold critical updates,” says BIS. “The manipulation of Kaspersky software, including in U.S. critical infrastructure, can result in data theft, espionage, and system malfunctions. The products also threaten economic security and public health in the U.S., potentially resulting in injuries or loss of life.”
Kaspersky’s ban in the U.S. shouldn’t come as a surprise since the firm has been on the government’s radar for quite some time. In 2017, the U.S. banned the use of the Moscow-based cybersecurity firm’s products across all government agencies.
Buy American.
June 21, 2024
NIFTY: SpaceX unveils backpack-sized ‘Starlink Mini’ satellite internet antenna for $599. “The Starlink Mini antenna is about the size and weight of a laptop, at just over two pounds and measuring at about 12 inches by 10 inches by 1.5 inches. It’s roughly half the size and one-third the weight of Starlink’s Standard antenna.”