Author Archive: Stephen Green

WELL, RUSSIA SAYS A LOT OF STUFF: Russia: We Destroyed Ukraine’s Patriot Batteries! Satellite Images: Not So Much. “The U.S. admitted that a Patriot was damaged by the attack, very possibly from shrapnel, but that it was minor and quickly repaired. Satellite image analysis supports this claim.”

At last count, Moscow had also claimed to have destroyed more than twice as many HIMARS launchers as Kyiv has received.

WELL, YES: Solar panels – an eco-disaster waiting to happen?

“The world has installed more than one terawatt of solar capacity. Ordinary solar panels have a capacity of about 400W, so if you count both rooftops and solar farms, there could be as many as 2.5 billion solar panels.,” says Dr Rong Deng, an expert in solar panel recycling at the University of New South Wales in Australia.

According to the British government, there are tens of millions of solar panels in the UK. But the specialist infrastructure to scrap and recycle them is lacking.
Energy experts are calling for urgent government action to prevent a looming global environmental disaster.

“It’s going to be a waste mountain by 2050, unless we get recycling chains going now,” says Ute Collier, deputy director of the International Renewable Energy Agency.

“We’re producing more and more solar panels – which is great – but how are we going to deal with the waste?” she asks.

Plus this from Rowan Atkinson: I love electric vehicles – and was an early adopter. But increasingly I feel duped.

The first article was published by the Beeb, the second was in The Guardian — what’s up in Britain?

GET ON THIS, ELON: ‘Free Speech’ Platform Twitter STILL Banning Lab Leak Theory.

The scare quotes are a bit much. Musk has been very good about correcting these problems as they come to his attention and, in the case of “What Is a Woman,” using his considerable influence to promote stuff that had previously been suppressed.

But he’s a busy man and two things are clear. The first is that the censorship is baked into Twitter’s code, which is why Musk himself admitted the platform needs a total rewrite. The second is that there are still plenty of censoring wokesters left on the payroll.

Exit Riddle: What do you call firing 3,700 Twitter employees? A good start.

AGING: Lifechanging new drug could extend human life by 30%, study finds. “The senolytics developed at the Mayo Clinic, when administered, effectively purge the bloodstream of senescent or ‘zombie’ cells. These cells are implicated in numerous diseases and detrimental aging aspects. The study reveals that the elimination of senescent cells leads to a significant increase in the production of a protective protein known as a-klotho.”

CRISIS BY DESIGN: How Many Illegal ‘Got-Aways’ Is Border Patrol Missing? “According to official U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) statistics, Border Patrol has had 1,246,371 encounters in FY2023 to date. There’s another 570,587 encounters from the Office of Field Operations. That’s over 1.8 million encounters so far in FY2023. But the numbers of illegal migrants may be even more shocking than that.”

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Five Days Into Pride Month and the Rainbow Weariness Is Already Bone-Deep. “We care about being held hostage by the fringe of a fringe. We care about being told that the rules of biology and nature have been suspended and that there are more genders than there are flavors of ice cream at Baskin-Robbins. We care about being called bigots if we think that it’s monumentally unfair that biological male athletes are competing against biological females and ruining their dreams.”

THE TRUTH HURTS: ‘CNN Staffers Are Shocked’: Brutal Magazine Exposé Leaves Employees Angry and Frustrated.

Employees of CNN have expressed frustration and anger following a brutal exposé published in The Atlantic focused on newly-appointed CEO Chris Licht.

Brian Stelter, a former chief media correspondent who spent nearly a decade with CNN before leaving last August, publicized the sentiments of several employees admitting they were completely blindsided by the piece, written by Tim Alberta.

“I woke up to messages like this from CNNers: ‘He [Licht] made a bunch of these comments to Alberta without any apparent regard for how hurtful they’d be…’ ‘Even if he thinks these things…if he’s so concerned with the CNN brand, what is the point of saying any of this stuff publicly?’ Stelter tweeted on Saturday.

“The consensus, among people who knew @TimAlberta’s piece was coming, is that it’s much ‘worse’ than they expected. Licht confided in Alberta the way a client confides in a therapist. Some CNN staffers are shocked,” Steler wrote.

I read the piece over the weekend, and the only thing new were details filling in the gaps in what everyone already knew. The real story is that even The Atlantic seems to have given up on CNN.

HOLD ON TIGHT: Top economist David Rosenberg says the US economy is a ‘dead man walking’ – and warns of a ‘hard landing’ ahead.

“You look at the United States and it seems to me that we’re still making this transition from expansion to recession,” Rosenberg said.

“I know it sounds extremely controversial to talk about the US going into recession, just because the lagging and coincident indicators are telling you that we’re into something brand-spanking new about a no-landing or a soft landing. We’re heading into a hard-landing in the second half of the year,” he said.

That strengthened the case for a global recession, Rosenberg added.

Related: Costco CFO says customers switching from beef and steak to cheaper meats may indicate looming recession.

The old joke is that economists have predicted seven out of the last four recessions. But for what it’s worth, gas prices have been mostly holding steady or even dropping a bit just as we’re supposed to be entering peak summer demand.

NOBODY CARED ABOUT DRAG UNTIL THEY BROUGHT KIDS INTO IT: Federal Judge Rejects Tennessee’s Anti-Drag Law as Unconstitutional. “A lot of parents are wondering why is an adult male putting on women’s clothing and dancing and talking about sexual themes with other people’s children, not only in libraries but also in schools and other public institutions.”

MILE HIGH: Charles Barkley And Grant Hill Forced To Use Oxygen Masks To Combat Denver Altitude During NBA Finals Pregame Show.

As we all saw Thursday night, the Denver Nuggets blew the Miami Heat out of the water, 104-93, to get the Game 1 win to go up 1-0 in the 2023 NBA Finals. And one of the main reasons for that is Denver’s altitude. It’s obvious that Miami was affected, looking exhausted and out of sync the entire game. And that altitude could be a top contributor to the Nuggets winning the title.

But my Heat weren’t the only ones shook by the altitude, so were two Hall of Famers — Charles Barkley and Grant Hill.

The pair were doing coverage for NBA TV’s pregame show before Game 1’s tip-off and at one point during a commercial break both Barkley and Hill were forced to put on oxygen masks to combat the Denver altitude.

It’s a funny scene, but it truly shows you how intense things can be to the human body in Colorado.

Thanks to some stunningly bad seats at a Rolling Stones concert at Denver’s old McNichol’s arena in ’99, I was able to see Keith duck back and nurse an O2 bottle when he wasn’t in the spotlight.

Take it easy on the booze your first few days here, too.

REQUIRED READING: An Unapologetic Defense Of The Crusades. “The Crusades were wars of defense, with Christians attempting to drive out foreign Muslim invaders in lands that were formerly Christian. Far from being unenlightened savages, the Crusaders were a highly organized force that pushed the boundaries of what was possible in warfare, government, and religious practice. The great personal sacrifice of the Crusaders, along with moral arguments against the use of violence, disprove the idea that they did this for personal gain.”

THE NEW SPACE RACE: Boeing faces ’emerging issues’ ahead of Starliner capsule’s 1st crewed flight in July.

Boeing aims to fuel Starliner next month in preparation for liftoff. During a “checkpoint review” conducted last Thursday (May 25), however, the company and NASA identified a few “emerging issues that need a path to closure” to resolve before taking that big step, according to NASA.

For example, teams will replace a bypass valve in the system that helps cool Starliner’s avionics, NASA officials wrote in an update on Friday (May 26). Such work is expected to take just a week and won’t affect the planned CFT timeline, they added.

Technicians and engineers are also assessing whether a certain kind of tape used to protect some of Starliner’s wires poses a flammability risk. And Boeing and NASA teams are reassessing the efficiency of some joints in Starliner’s parachute system “based on new data reviews as part of the ongoing design certification process,” agency officials said in Friday’s statement.

“We are taking a methodical approach to the first crewed flight of Starliner incorporating all of the lessons learned from the various in-depth testing campaigns, including Starliner’s flight tests and the agency’s verification efforts,” Steve Stich, manager of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, said in the same statement.

NASA also says that all “anomalies are closed” from last year’s successful unmanned test flight, so at least there’s that.

COLORADO: NY billionaire Bloomberg spends in Denver mayor race; out-of-state money flows for Mike Johnston.

More than two-thirds of big-money, super PAC contributions supporting Mike Johnston for Denver mayor has come at the hands of just five people, and four of those are from outside Colorado — and all with ties to gun control or other “social justice” issues.

Probably the most recognizable is New York billionaire and radical gun-control activist Michael Bloomberg, who has poured $510,000 into the Super PAC “Advancing Denver.” Bloomberg, a New York City Democrat has poured millions into Colorado politics over the past decade to advance his gun-control agenda.

He donated heavily to two Colorado senators’ fight against recall campaigns in 2015 over their support of Bloomberg-backed gun-control measures. Both senators ultimately lost their seats.

Bloomberg, the former Mayor of NYC, is well known for his investments into Mom’s Demand Action (MDA), a political action group that advocates for extreme gun control ranging anywhere from open carry bans to full weapons bans. MDA has endorsed Johnston for mayor.

Mom’s Demand Action has been touring Colorado towns and cities over the past year working to pass gun rights restrictions at the local level, and also took their anti-Second Amendment efforts to the Democrat-controlled state legislature this past session, which passed a slew of bills aimed at gun owners.

However, Rocky Mountain Gun Owners (RMGO), a Loveland-based organization immediately launched lawsuits against at least two of the newly passed laws, raising the age to purchase a long gun to 21 and a three-day waiting period on all purchases.

Outside of the Denver-Boulder Axis, Colorado is still sane — but for how much longer? Retiring to Texas keeps looking better and better… and sooner and sooner.