Author Archive: Stephen Green

EPIC FURY: When the Can Finally Stops Getting Kicked Down the Road.

Almost fifty years of being the murderous troll under the world’s bridge, threatening to blow it sky high every other week, even as it plucked travelers off the boards to consume and satiate its bloodlust.

Whatever manifestation of evil spewed forth from the bearded, turbaned trolls under the bridge, the world would always turn away, turn that other cheek. Ignore what was going on under the bridge, wiping a tiny tear for the random victims summarily pulled off the bridge, while coldly considering them sacrifices to keep the trolls themselves from climbing up onto the roadway and into our world proper.

Eyes averted, fingers in ears. Humanitarian aid, and pallets of cash feeding almost fifty years of malignant troll tumor growth.

Much of it is very personal to Marines. Much of it is very personal to our family.

Read the whole thing.

FASCINATING:

“Regardless of your opinion on Trump, everyone agrees he’s a master at playing competitive forces against each-other.”

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: The GOP Can’t Be Rid of Thom Tillis Quickly Enough. “Tillis is one of those backstabbing members of the GOP who have me convinced that the Democrats have Manchurian candidate plants in the party. He’s not reliable on most big votes. If he does end up not screwing over his own party, it’s only after a lot of grandstanding so that he can get some all-important facetime in front of the cameras.”

FASTER, PLEASE: Federal bureau approves lithium mine expansion.

The mine sits alongside the roughly 250 person town of Silver Peak and has been in operation since 1965 by international mining company Albemarle. It pumps water from local brine water aquifers into open air ponds, then distills the lithium down with solar evaporation. Annually, the mine produces around 5,000 tons of lithium, according to the American Association of Petroleum Geologists.

“I don’t have any issues with the expansion of the mine,” Shaaron Netherton, executive director of the Friends of Nevada Wilderness, told The Center Square of the mine, which employs roughly 60 people. She added later, “It’s sort of the lifeblood of the little town of Silver Peak.”

Netherton also said that the environmental disruption to the Silver Peak area had already been done over the mine’s past 60 years of operation, which would likely see minimal new damage from the expansion.

The Silver Peak mine expansion has been billed as a matter of national security, with less than 1% of global lithium production coming from within the U.S., according to the Dallas Fed.

Speed up rare earths, too, please.

THIS IS THE HARDEST THAT THE ATLANTIC HAS EVER ATLANTICKED: Pete Buttigieg in the Wilderness. “He has a beard, a splitting maul, and a house in Michigan. Is that enough to convince America that he’s a man of the people?”

This brings us back to what we might call the IOP problem: Buttigieg has punched his card, has followed all the prescriptions, has received every honors grade and service patch one can get by the age of 44. But it turns out that lots of people, and not just jealous Ivy Leaguers, hate this. They hate pretensions of expertise. They hate people who work to become what they are not—even when they work to become better people, or better presidents. “I’m like you,” Gavin Newsom told a crowd in Atlanta in February. “I’m no better than you. I’m a 960 SAT guy.” That score is well below average. The audience cheered.

Buttigieg’s critics seem to fault him for the vaguest reasons, many of which come down to: he’s too perfect; he’s not authentic; he’s not a man of the people. It’s an odd line of attack. Is it possible to be too perfect? Is perfection a flaw? Social psychology has documented something known as the “pratfall effect”: the distrust of people deemed too perfect.

I swear to you this is a real Atlantic piece and not a Babylon Bee or old-school Iowahawk sendup.

Related (From Ed): Iowahawk does have thoughts on the Atlantic giving Buttigieg the full Annie Leibovitz treatment, though:

IT WOULD TAKE A HEART OF STONE NOT TO LAUGH:

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: How long do electric vehicle batteries actually last?

As the fleet of EVs on the road ages, new data pooled from tens of thousands of vehicles is showing those batteries are lasting longer than expected.

Lithium-ion batteries undergo two kinds of aging. First, there’s calendar aging: They degrade as time goes on, holding less juice, even if they just sit in storage.

Then there’s cyclical aging, which is how much a battery degrades based on its use — being charged and discharged, over and over again.

That means there’s no way to dodge degradation. Whether you use a vehicle a lot or a little, eventually, the battery will hold less energy.

But the trajectory of aging isn’t a straight line. Recurrent, a research firm that pulls in data from over 30,000 EV drivers, describes it as an “S curve.” There’s a rapid decline at the beginning, a long leveling off, and then a more rapid decline at the end.

It’s nice that they last longer than initially thought. But that’s still a very expensive replacement with no repairability.

RE-OPENING THE STRAITS:

I DON’T KNOW WHO SAID IT FIRST, BUT THE SOCIAL CONTAGION THEORY HAS BEEN AROUND FOR ALMOST AS LONG AS THE “IDENTITY” EXPLOSION:

WHAT’S THE OPPOSITE OF A CUSTODY FIGHT?

Related: Trump Hits Back at Megyn and Tucker “Part-time Hitler apologist Tucker Carlson and gal pal Megyn Kelly used their shrinking-to-nonexistent MAGA credentials to question Operation Epic Fury, but President Donald Trump is having none of it from either of them.”

IF YOU HAD ANY DOUBTS ABOUT MOSSAD, THE IAF, OR WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THEY GET TOGETHER…:

NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG:

BUT THE MONEY SEEMS TO HAVE BEEN SPENT: NYC never opened 25 planned preschools despite demand surge — and may not have even known one existed.

Roughly 20 planned early childhood education centers in the Big Apple mysteriously sit idle as demand surges for universal pre-K and 3K seats close to home, The Post has learned.

More than 25 of 47 3K “initiative projects” at sites first earmarked under former Mayor Bill de Blasio are still unlisted on the official NYC MySchools directory — despite costly construction contracts, rent payments to private owners and official Department of Education signage posted outside some “phantom” schools.

The list of leased shell sites includes a converted Brooklyn warehouse on the Columbia Street waterfront — where nearby young families face waitlists of more than 100 students for a nearby seat, parents told The Post.

Exit quote: “If we’re paying for the school to be built and it already exists, it’d be great to be using that school.”

HMM:

They must feel at least some sense of safety against the Mullahs’ security forces. That right there is a yuge change.