IT’S RELIABLE AND PRICED RIGHT: Europe turns to the Falcon 9 to launch its navigation satellites. “Somewhat to the ESA’s embarrassment, the continent has had to purchase several launches from its direct competitor in launch, SpaceX, during the last two years. In 2023, Europe launched its Euclid space telescope on a Falcon 9 rocket, and later this year, an ESA Earth observation satellite and an ESA asteroid probe will launch on Falcon 9 missions.”
Author Archive: Stephen Green
March 20, 2024
HIGHER ED IMPLOSION UPDATE: Woke College Redefines Racism: Minorities Can Be Bigots, but All Whites Are Racist.
18 YEARS IS A LONG TIME: Navy projects fleet will expand to nearly 400 ships. “The plan shows the Navy’s battle force bottoming out at 280 warships in fiscal 2027, as the service continues to retire littoral combat ships. The Navy has admitted dozens of the ships it built over the last two decades were largely a failure.”
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Trump Suing Stephanopoulos Is Just the Pick-Me-Up My Week Needed. “Trump’s problems with the media are legendary. If history is ever once again written truthfully, the media’s treatment of him will be recorded as a dark chapter. He has often referred to members of the leftmedia as ‘the enemy of the people,’ which is by far the most accurate description of that mob that I’ve ever heard.”
THE DEEP STATE: Elon Musk reveals Twitter had FBI ‘portal that auto-deleted all comms’ after 2 weeks.
He added that the move struck him “as a FOIA violation, a Freedom of Information Act violation…because you shouldn’t be able to delete orderly things after two weeks.”
Musk also revealed that “there’s a little-known agency in the state department called the Global Engagement Center, which most people have never heard of, but they might have been the single worst offender because they demanded the suspension of over 250,000 accounts which I think all Twitter largely complied with.”
“The suspension demands were so broad that they accidentally demanded a suspension of a journalist on CNN and an elected Canadian politician. It was just an incredibly broad swath.”
Meanwhile, at the New York Times: It Turns Out the ‘Deep State’ Is Actually Kind of Awesome.
FAILING ON PURPOSE: Google’s Woke AI Wasn’t a Mistake. We Know. We Were There.
The world has been horrified—and amused—by the extreme ideological bent of Gemini, Google’s much-hyped new AI tool, which the company launched last month.
But Shaun Maguire, who was a partner at Google Ventures, the company’s investment wing, from 2016 until 2019, had a different reaction.
“I was not shocked at all,” he told The Free Press. “When the first Google Gemini photos popped up on my X feed, I thought to myself: Here we go again. And: Of course. Because I know Google well. Google Gemini’s failures revealed how broken Google’s culture is in such a visually obvious way to the world. But what happened was not a one-off incident. It was a symptom of a larger cultural phenomenon that has been taking over the company for years.”
Maguire is one of multiple former Google employees who told The Free Press that the Gemini fiasco stems from a corporate culture that prioritizes the ideology of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) over excellence and good business sense.
These ex-Googlers, as they’re called, said that they were discouraged from hiring white, male employees; that DEI “is part of every single thing” in the company; and that engineers even had to list the “DEI impact” for the tiniest of software fixes. All of them agreed that the Silicon Valley giant entered the artificial intelligence race with an upper hand but has squandered it by cowing to an activist faction in the company that’s more committed to advancing social justice than making world-class products.
Users should take note but also shareholders.
Previously: Mea Culpa: Google Is Even More Evil Than I Thought.
PAULA BOLYARD: Biden’s Bloodbath. “Next time you hear Democrats complaining about Trump, remind them of these numbers and point out that theirs is the party of death. They don’t build; they destroy.”
March 19, 2024
JUST BECAUSE HE HAS A VESTED INTEREST DOESN’T MAKE HIM WRONG: Saudi Aramco CEO says energy transition is failing, world should abandon ‘fantasy’ of phasing out oil.
MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: The EPA Is About to Outlaw Your Car. “‘Outlaw your car’ sounds like such an outrageous phrase, and technically speaking, it isn’t true — but only barely. What practical difference is there between outlawing something, and regulating it out of existence?”
DISPATCHES FROM THE BLUE ZONES: Navy Yard is a failing experiment in gentrification.
The high-end apartment complexes in which neighborhood newcomers live are all carbon-copied, with their rooftop pools, twenty-four-hour gyms, stainless steel appliances, floor-to-ceiling windows for natural light. The easiest way to distinguish between them is by their scandals: do you live in the one that had Legionnaire’s bacteria in the pool, or the one opposite, where the Iranian agents got raided? Perhaps the one up the street where Representative Cuellar got his car stolen? (They took his sushi, too.)
“Carjackings have become a joke,” Elissa de Souza, a Navy Yard resident and community activist, tells me. “If one person stole a car and they were strictly punished for it, would the others really do that? These people know that there’s no accountability. Just a slap on the wrist. So why wouldn’t anybody and everybody join in on the fun?” There were nearly 1,000 carjackings in DC last year — 2024 is maintaining the same pace, with eighty-four in the first two months.
You might think a rise in violent and property crime and decrease in employees going into the office would result in a price drop in the rental market: you’d be mistaken. Rents for studio apartments here remain at around $1,800 a month, with most one-bedroom apartments still north of $2,000. A lawsuit from the DC attorney general suggests an explanation: it accuses fourteen large residential landlords of delegating price-setting authority to an outside company, which uses “a centralized pricing algorithm to inflate prices.”
If renters are fairly stuck, businesses have started to flee. A Navy Yard franchise of Swingers, a putt-putt golf bar, opened and closed within a matter of months. Chic athleisurewear store Lululemon has also turned heel. “I did talk to the manager of Lululemon and it was really sad,” de Souza says. “They had to shut down because of crime. They were just robbed at gunpoint too many times.”
Will neighborhood residents follow? “I would have to get a car if we moved to Virginia,” a Capitol Hill staffer who lives in the area tells me. “I’ve had two different friends get held at gunpoint on the Metro during the day and don’t want the risk of that happening to me, especially with how many late nights there are working on the Hill.”
We need a total and complete shutdown of Washington until… well, maybe forever.
WELL, GOOD: Over 450 Jewish Creatives and Professionals Denounce Jonathan Glazer’s ‘Zone of Interest’ Oscars Speech in Open Letter. “We refute our Jewishness being hijacked for the purpose of drawing a moral equivalence between a Nazi regime that sought to exterminate a race of people, and an Israeli nation that seeks to avert its own extermination.”
PRIMARY UPSET: 21-Year-Old Ousts GOP Incumbent in North Carolina. “Wyatt Gable is a junior at East Carolina University, where he studies Business Management and Political Science. He is also the president of the school’s chapter of Turning Point USA. During his tenure, he fought against an effort by the school to convert all of the campus bathrooms to ‘all gender.’ He was inspired to run in the wake of COVID-19, a time during which he saw governments ‘stripping away individual rights with no one stopping them.'”
I HAD BEEN ASSURED THE SCIENCE WAS SETTLED: There is no Dark Matter and the Universe is Twice as Old as We Thought.
Gupta went on to state that if the universe is 26.7 billion years old as his team believes, “the Universe does not require dark matter to exist.” I’m obviously nowhere near smart enough to grasp everything these eggheads are talking about, but the layman’s explanation for this part of it boils down to missing data. Previous studies all suggested that the universe is expanding faster than it should be based on the amount of physical matter we are able to observe in space. That’s why physicists had to dream up dark matter (and its corresponding partner, dark energy) to explain what was being observed. But the vastly larger universe now being posited would allow for the apparent motion of all of the heavenly bodies.
Dark matter always seemed like a cop-out to me — insisting that something invisible must be there to make the theory work, instead of figuring out what might be wrong with the theory.
If Gupta is correct, now we just need to figure out how we got the age of the universe so wrong…
THE SCIENCE IS SETTLED: The Woke Are Just Trying to Inflict Their Misery on Everyone Else.
CHANGE: Young Americans Lose Hope — and Turn Against Biden.
Consider the calamities and policy collapses experienced by Generation Z, the demographic born since 1998 and raised in this century. These young adults – 41 million of whom will be eligible to vote in 2024 – have vivid memories and lived experience of the Great Financial Crisis, intense political and cultural polarization in society, and the tyranny of the unscientific and illogical virus panic starting in 2020.
In fact, regarding the lockdowns and other macro abuses of the Covid panic, young Americans suffered the pain of the inane policies most acutely. At times, it seemed as though Covid tyrants like Anthony Fauci and Governor Gavin Newsom were actually trying to inflict maximum pain on the young, even though statistically young people were nearly invulnerable to harsh consequences of the virus.
Those same young people have also endured an education system that focuses on indoctrination rather than teaching usable skills. Specifically, they were subjected to curricula and a pop culture that impart lessons of collective guilt and shame, rather than patriotism and pride.
Nonetheless, young Americans were encouraged to take on mountains of personal debt to fund these toxic educational experiences. Upon leaving school, far too many of them discovered that they were prepared for little besides unhealthy self-loathing.
Read the whole thing.
DISPATCHES FROM THE BLUE ZONES: Hotel California: Majority of Small Business Bosses Want Out but Feel ‘They Can Never Leave.’
THEY’RE BAD FOR BUSINESS AND OTHER LIVING THINGS: CEO steps down after being hit with expensive EV repairs and low resale prices following purchase of 100,000 Teslas.
Stephen Scherr, who ran Hertz for just over two years after three decades at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., has decided to step down, the rental-car company said late Friday in a statement. It’s replacing him with Gil West, the former chief operating officer of General Motors Co.’s Cruise robotaxi unit. West also will join the board of directors on April 1, according to the statement, which confirmed an earlier Bloomberg report.
Scherr, 59, joined Hertz several months after it emerged from bankruptcy and started making splashy wagers on electric vehicles. Under new owners Knighthead Capital Management and Certares Management, the rental company announced plans to order 100,000 vehicles from Tesla Inc., sending the automaker’s market capitalization soaring past the $1 trillion mark at the time.
Business is oftentimes no more immune to popular fads than individuals are, sad to say. But you have to wonder if, in Hertz’s case, bringing in a finance guy from a Democrat-friendly Wall Street firm made them extra susceptible to the EV frenzy.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Now More Than Ever, the Left Is Terrified of Free Speech. “This all gets back to the Democrats’ disinformation fairy tale. They would prefer to be able to label any truths that interfere with their false narratives as disinformation and to lean on social media platforms to censor conservatives. Traditional media is already doing their bidding, so they don’t need any help there. Dems are also nervous about not having Twitter/X in their pockets anymore.”
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): The dumber their ideas get, the more afraid of contradiction they become. And they’ve gotten pretty damn dumb.
THE NEW SPACE RACE/ELON MUSK’S INSURANCE POLICY AGAINST DEEP STATE EFFORTS TO SHUT DOWN SPACEX: SpaceX building hundreds of spy satellites for US government, report says.
SpaceX is “building a network of hundreds of spy satellites” for a US intelligence agency under a $1.8 billion contract signed in 2021, Reuters reported on Saturday. Reuters cited “five sources familiar with the program” in its report on SpaceX’s classified contract with the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), a Defense Department agency that deploys surveillance satellites and calls itself the “global leader in space-based intelligence.”
“The satellites can track targets on the ground and share that data with US intelligence and military officials, the sources said,” according to Reuters. The newly reported details are consistent with a Wall Street Journal report in February 2024 that said SpaceX had “entered into a $1.8 billion classified contract with the US government in 2021.”
Reuters wrote that it “was unable to determine when the new network of satellites would come online” but stated that about a dozen prototype satellites have been launched in the past few years. The prototypes reportedly launched “among other satellites on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets.”
SpaceX, of course, has deployed thousands of low-Earth orbit satellites for its Starlink division that provides broadband service to consumer, business, and government customers. The spy satellites for the NRO also operate in low-Earth orbits, the Reuters report said.
“The plans show the extent of SpaceX’s involvement in US intelligence and military projects and illustrate a deeper Pentagon investment into vast, low-Earth orbiting satellite systems aimed at supporting ground forces,” Reuters wrote. “If successful, the sources said the program would significantly advance the ability of the US government and military to quickly spot potential targets almost anywhere on the globe.”
Combine that ability with “rods from God” and other rapid-delivery systems and you’ve really got something.
On the other hand, after everything else we’ve learned about Washington these last several years, I hope Musk built in a single kill switch for the entire constellation.
SCHLICHTER: Stunning! There Is Some Very Good News for Republicans.
We’re not used to hearing it, but for the last week or so, the RNC has done everything right. The organization has totally failed for seven years under the rule of the dumbest member of the Romney family. People like RedState’s own Jennifer van Laar and superlawyer Harmeet Dhillon would point out how she was wasting tons of money on useless fluff, donors would stop giving, and she would just continue wasting tons of money on useless fluff. She studiously ignored the grassroots and imagined that her role was to go on TV and talk about policy as if anyone cared what some party bureaucrat thought. But now she’s gone, and good riddance.
Her replacements have, astonishingly, done the right things, and they have done it right away. First, they clearcut a bunch of the deadwood at the RNC, firing tons of people. Some characterize that as a purge of unbelievers, but what it really is is a purge of unachievers. Have you seen a lot of election integrity lately? People who do a bad job should be fired. This used to be basic knowledge and understood by Republicans. But apparently, some people think we ought to have a tenure system in our party apparatus. No. Party flacks and functionaries ought to live in perpetual fear that they will be canned should they fail to perform adequately. These mass firings are a great sign. The new leadership has even started to build an election integrity team.
The best time to build an election integrity team was four years ago. The next best time is right now.
THAT’S A FANCY WAY OF SAYING “PARTY APPARATCHIK”: Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson Has a Horrifying View of the First Amendment.