UNEXPECTEDLY: Carlee Russell, who went missing in Alabama after 911 call about child, says through attorney she wasn’t kidnapped. “Derzis said charges against Russell are possible and his office is discussing the case with the Jefferson County District Attorney’s office. Police do not know what Russell’s motivation was, Derzis said.”
Author Archive: Stephen Green
July 25, 2023
A BILLION HERE AND A BILLION THERE…: The Five States Sending the Most High Earners to Florida All Have This One Thing in Common. “The Florida Chamber of Commerce might just have a message for the five states sending the most high earners to the Sunshine State, even if it’s a sure thing they’ll never listen.”
HERE’S HOW THAT SPACE PROGRAM IS COMING ALONG: ‘Swarm of boulders’ in space shows the gory aftermath of NASA’s asteroid-smashing DART mission.
On Sept. 26, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft disintegrated as it smashed into the asteroid Dimorphos, which is 7 million miles (11 million kilometers) from Earth, successfully changing the asteroid’s trajectory.
Now, by using Hubble to study the impact, astronomers have found that DART’s roughly 14,540 mph (23,400 km/h) impact on the asteroid produced a “swarm of boulders.” The rocks, which range from 3 to 22 feet (0.9 to 6.7 meters) in diameter, were most likely shaken loose from the asteroid’s surface during the impact. The researchers published their findings July 20 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
“This tells us for the first time what happens when you hit an asteroid and see material coming out up to the largest sizes,” David Jewitt, a planetary scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, said in a statement. “The boulders are some of the faintest things ever imaged inside our solar system.”
One small step for planetary defense, one giant leap for Hubble imaging.
GET OFF MY LAWN: IRS to End ‘Unannounced Visits’ to Taxpayers.
BIDEN CRIME FAMILY UPDATE: Biden’s narrative on never discussing business deals with Hunter continues to crumble.
There’s nothing new in this report but it’s the first I’ve seen that details the whole damning history dating back to Biden’s time as Barack Obama’s veep.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Democrats’ Desperate Biden Options—Basement or Replacement. “Now that Sir Sniffsalot has committed to running for reelection, it appears that some of his sycophants are belatedly realizing that — when it comes to their guy — there is no ‘there’ there anymore. Not that there was much there even in Biden’s prime.”
BIDEN CRIME FAMILY UPDATE: Hunter Biden’s gallery sold his art to a Democratic donor ‘friend’ who Joe Biden named to a prestigious commission.
That buyer, Insider can reveal, is Elizabeth Hirsh Naftali, a Los Angeles real estate investor and philanthropist. Hirsh Naftali is influential in California Democratic circles and is a significant Democratic donor who has given $13,414 to the Biden campaign and $29,700 to the Democratic National Campaign Committee this year. In 2022, she hosted a fundraiser headlined by Vice President Kamala Harris.
Insider also obtained internal documents from Hunter Biden’s gallery showing that a single buyer purchased $875,000 of his art. The documents do not indicate the buyer’s identity, which is also unknown to Insider at this time.
In July 2022, eight months after Hunter Biden’s first art opening, Joe Biden announced Hirsh Naftali’s appointment to the Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad. It is unclear whether Hirsh’s purchase of Hunter Biden’s artwork occurred before or after that appointment. Membership on the commission is an unpaid position that is often filled by campaign donors, family members, and political allies — the same crowd that often winds up with US ambassadorial appointments. Hirsh Naftali’s fundraising activities mark her as the kind of well-connected donor who often wins such appointments, regardless of any relationship they might have with the president’s family. But they do not address the possibility that Hunter Biden might have voiced his support for her appointment.
Or maybe Joe was in on the phone calls and didn’t need to be told.
ENERGY: A Vast Untapped Green Energy Source Is Hiding Beneath Your Feet. “New experiments in the deserts of Utah and Nevada show how advances in fracking — technology developed by the oil industry — can be repurposed to tap clean geothermal energy anywhere on Earth.”
Right now, Speyrer’s equipment is about 8,500 feet below us, or about 2 percent of the way through that layer, where the heat is already so great that every extra foot, every extra inch, is a hard-won victory. Down there, any liquid you pumped in would become, as Speyrer puts it, hot enough to deep fry a turkey. “Imagine that splashing you,” he says. At that temperature, about 450 degrees Fahrenheit (228 degrees Celsius) his gear can start having problems. Electronics fail. Bearings warp. Hundreds of thousands dollars worth of equipment might go down a borehole, and if it breaks down there, make sure it doesn’t get stuck. In that case, best to just plug that hole, which probably cost millions to drill, tally up your losses, and move on.
Even when things are going well down there, it’s hard to know from up here on the Earth’s surface. “It’s frustrating as hell,” says Joseph Moore, a geologist at the University of Utah, as he watches the halting movements of a 160-foot-tall rig through a trailer window. It’s a cool day in 2022, in a remote western Utah county named Beaver, a breeze whipping off the Mineral Mountains toward hog farms and wind turbines on the valley floor below. The rig looks much like any oil and gas installation dotting the American West. But there are no hydrocarbons in the granite below us, only heat.
Since 2018, Moore has led a $220 million bet by the US Department of Energy (DOE), called FORGE, or the Frontier Observatory for Research in Geothermal Energy, that this heat can be harnessed to produce electricity in most parts of the world.
It’s always fascinating to watch the left to backflip to gushing about practices like fracking — which was once going to destroy entire ecosystems or something — as soon as they can be harnessed for the left’s goals.
July 24, 2023
TO WHICH THE LEFT SAYS, MISSION ACCOMPLISHED: Solar Panels Don’t Really Help the Environment, but They Do Help Our Enemies.
COLORADO: Proposed ballot measure mandates violent offenders serve most of prison time prior to parole.
Michael Fields, President of Advance Colorado is currently pursuing a ballot initiative for 2024 that would mandate violent offenders serve a large percentage of their sentence before being released back into the public.
Fields said his initiative is the result of a 2021 crime in which Kenneth Dean Lee was arrested for impersonating an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent to an Aurora family and then sexually assaulting their 7-year-old daughter while they were in the home.
At the time of his arrest, Lee was on parole for similar crimes he committed a decade earlier. For those crimes, Lee was sentenced to 23 years to life but was released after serving nine and half years, or just 40 percent of his sentence.
If passed, Initiative 71 — which it is known as for now — would force violent offenders to serve most of their sentences, possibly lowering the recidivism rates and reducing crime in Colorado, Fields said.
Locking up violent offenders — it just might work!
MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: How the Biden Campaign Is Trying to Hide Joe’s Obvious Decline (With an Assist From NBC News). “’Addressing?’ I would like to say to NBC News in my best Inigo Montoya voice. ‘You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.’”
LIVING HISTORY: Remembering the Rosemary Lehmberg DWI Arrest 10 Years Later. “Here’s a pro-trip, boys and girls: If you you find yourself driving around at night (well, any time, but especially at night) while drinking from an open vodka bottle (she evidently had a blood alcohol level of .239), you have a problem, and you should seek professional help and/or check yourself into rehab.”
I once asked my bartender to make me a Rosemary Lehmberg, and he poured me a mug of warm vodka with my car keys at the bottom.
HALF OF THEM STILL WON’T ADMIT THE LAPTOP IS REAL: Democrat Reaction to MTG Splaying Hunter’s Dirty Laptop Pictures in Public Is Beyond Ironic.
DEFUND THE FBI: FBI Improperly Used Surveillance Powers on US Officials. “While the officials weren’t named, the report says the FBI used section 702 of the act, which allows the agency to spy on foreigners abroad without a warrant. It’s been criticized before for being a way to surveil Americans who are in touch with foreigners.”
BIDEN CRIME FAMILY UPDATE: Hunter Biden’s Ex-Business Partner to Expose Joe Biden’s Involvement.
BEIJING-MOSCOW AXIS: China secretly sends enough gear to Russia to equip an army.
These shipments point to a China-sized loophole in the West’s attempts to hobble Putin’s war machine. The sale of so-called dual-use technology that can have both civilian and military uses leaves just enough deniability for Western authorities looking for reasons not to confront a huge economic power like Beijing.
The wartime strength of China’s exports of dual-use products to Russia is confirmed by customs data. And, while Ukraine is a customer of China too, its imports of most of the equipment covered in this story have fallen sharply, the figures show.
Russia has imported more than $100 million-worth of drones from China so far this year — 30 times more than Ukraine. And Chinese exports of ceramics, a component used in body armor, increased by 69 percent to Russia to more than $225 million, while dropping by 61 percent to Ukraine to a mere $5 million, Chinese and Ukrainian customs data show.
“What is very clear is that China, for all its claims that it is a neutral actor, is in fact supporting Russia’s positions in this war,” said Helena Legarda, a lead analyst specializing in Chinese defense and foreign policy at the Mercator Institute for China Studies, a Berlin think tank.
Is anyone surprised?
HISTORY: Islamic Terror and the Church Bells of Noon: The Siege of Belgrade. “Yesterday in history, on July 22, 1456, the West scored one of its greatest victories over the jihad — and, in so doing, inaugurated the ringing of church bells at noon.”
NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: New York Times quietly admits COVID deaths were overcounted by ‘almost one-third’.
Buried in the 17th paragraph of a newsletter titled “A Positive COVID Milestone” by David Leonhardt, a former Washington bureau chief for the outlet wrote: “The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had [the] virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other CDC data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions.”
Leonhardt added, “Almost a year ago, President Biden angered some public health experts when he declared, ‘The pandemic is over.’ He may have been premature to make that declaration. But the excess-deaths milestone suggests that it’s true now: The pandemic is finally over.”
It’s been over.
THAT’S ENTERTAINMENT? The ‘Club’ That Used To Solve Hollywood’s Labor Problems Is Extinct. So Now What?
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Trump Thinks That the Dems Might Want to Be Careful What They Wish For. “Trump is right though. Not only are the hardcore ‘Escalator MAGA’ supporters passionate, but there are a lot of people who had grown ambivalent about him who are outraged by the Democrats’ relentless election interference witch hunts. At this point, they may even be minting brand new Trump supporters.”
CHINA: China Scrambles to Mollify Wary Domestic Firms and Foreign Investors.
For years, Xi Jinping has browbeaten China’s big private-sector companies as he increased Communist Party control of the economy, all while codifying the primacy of national-security. Now it seems he’s surprised at the result.
With private-sector investment contracting in spite of the post-pandemic reopening, foreign capital inflows declining and more than one-in-five people aged 16 to 24 struggling to find a job, China’s leader and his lieutenants have launched a massive messaging campaign.
The message? We didn’t really mean it.
In recent weeks, there’s been a raft of party and government statements and pledges and meetings with executives (foreign and domestic) to assure them that China is open for business. Analysts at China consultancy Trivium observed on Thursday, “Beijing has devoted more attention to supporting private businesses this year than at any time we can remember since the founding of the People’s Republic.”
As Ronald Reagan liked to say, “If you’re explaining, you’re losing.”