Author Archive: Stephen Green
May 25, 2023
PJ MEDIA’S PAULA BOLYARD: A Note to Readers About Our Coverage of the 2024 Presidential Race. “We believe honest debate is what separates us from the Left, which forces conformity and doesn’t tolerate the slightest deviation from The Narrative.”
TO BE FAIR, THIS PROBABLY HAS MORE TO DO WITH WOKE DISNEY’S WORSENING BOX-OFFICE PERFORMANCE AND MONEY-LOSING STREAMING SERVICE: Disney Stock Down 33 Percent Since CEO Instigated Feud with DeSantis. “Disney stock was trading at $133.65 a share when Chapek accused DeSantis of promoting legislation that would “unfairly target gay, lesbian, nonbinary, and transgender kids and families.” Disney shares opened at $89.44 and continued to fall on Wednesday ahead of DeSantis’s formal entry into the 2024 presidential campaign.”
NOT ADDRESSED HERE IS THAT LEGITIMATE PAIN IS UNDER-TREATED BY DOCTORS AFRAID OF THE FDA: Addressing the Real Culprit of Skyrocketing Overdose Deaths. “During the last three years, prescription opioids were dispensed at the lowest levels in nearly 15 years, while overdose deaths have skyrocketed to record levels.”
TEXAS: Paxton vs. Phelan Slap Fight. “This would be an entertaining slap fight if it weren’t for the fact it was distracting two of the highest profile Republican office-holders in the state from real work.”
FOLLOW SILENCE THE SCIENCE: Major Journal Retracts Study On ‘Socially Contagious’ Transgenderism Among Kids Following Activist Threats.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: DeSantis vs. Trump Is the Heavyweight Fight We’ve Been Waiting For. “I’ll begin by saying that I will more than enthusiastically vote for either of these guys. If the Republican party somehow nominates somebody else to run in 2024 I’ll remove myself to a remote South Pacific island and fish until the ChiCom bombs hit.”
HOW IT STARTED: Meet the 29-year-old mayor making Illinois history and inspiring the next generation of leaders. “Darren Bryant, 29, was sworn in as the mayor of Robbins, located just outside Chicago, on May 11, making him not only the youngest African American mayor to hold office in the Cook County village, but the entire state of Illinois.”
How it’s going: More Chicago teens released without charges after killing. “Back in February, in the town of Robbins, southwest of Chicago, three teenagers stole a KIA and took off in a high-speed chase. They wound up crashing the stolen vehicle into a car being driven by 70-year-old Donald Carter. Carter was killed in the crash. An investigation was launched (sort of) and questions were raised about how it was being handled. Now, months later, the teenagers have all been released and no charges have been filed against them. David Carter’s family is apoplectic, as you might imagine. And the more details that we learn about the entire incident, specifically the involvement of Robbins Mayor Darren Bryant, the more it smells like something is really rotten in that town.”
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Rising costs erode buying power of Social Security earnings by 36%, report says. “Older Americans that retired before 2000 would have to earn an extra $516.7 more per month or $6,200 more this year than what they are currently getting to maintain the same level of buying power as in 2000, according to the study.”
May 24, 2023
KRUISER HAS MY VOTE: If Elected, I Will Outlaw All Virtue Signaling.
(ALMOST) SPACE: No one should be surprised Virgin Orbit failed—it had a terrible business plan.
That’s it. After six years, Virgin Orbit is done, and its LauncherOne will fly no more. The purpose of this article is not to criticize the company’s technology or employees. In truth, the engineering teams did a magnificent job of getting a liquid-fueled rocket to drop from a 747 aircraft, ignite its engine, and reach space.
No, the problem was Virgin Orbit’s management, including Chief Executive Officer Dan Hart and its founder, Sir Richard Branson. Due to their leadership, the company had a terrible, unsupportable business plan and compounded those issues by hiring an unsustainable workforce of 700 people.
Virgin Orbit originated more than a decade ago as an offshoot of Virgin Galactic, which was using an aircraft as a first stage to launch a suborbital space plane for tourists. In its early years, the company hired several engineers from SpaceX to begin designing a rocket that could be dropped from an aircraft.
This business ran fairly lean until Virgin Orbit was separated from its parent company in 2017, and Branson hired Hart, who had spent decades as a system engineer at Boeing’s Space division as its president. Hart instituted a more cautious approach and began staffing up the company. A planned first launch in 2018 was delayed by more than two years.
When LauncherOne finally took flight for the first time in May 2020, the company had spent a staggering amount of money, nearly $1 billion, developing the rocket and air-launch system. It was clear at the time that Virgin Orbit was never going to make that money back by charging $12 million to $15 million to launch a few hundred kilograms per mission.
I see two fundamental flaws here: “Cautious” and “Boeing.”
VODKAPUNDIT PRESENTS YOUR WEEKLY INSANITY WRAP: Trans Movement Hits the Toilet in Oregon. “Common sense broke out in one Oregon high school over trans issues — or was it just vandalism?”
CHANGE: Netflix’s password sharing crackdown officially hits US users. “You can share your Netflix account with someone who doesn’t live with you for $7.99/month more.”
ED MORRISSEY: Another MSM meltdown: The DeSantis/Florida “book ban” that was … none of those. “So this national story about Ron DeSantis’ Florida and book banning comes down to … one school district moving three books in a ‘media center’ from one shelf to another.”
ANALYSIS: TRUE. The Pride Cult Really Hates Judeo-Christian Values.
GREEN NUDE EEL: How solar farms took over the California desert: ‘An oasis has become a dead sea.’
Over the last few years, this swathe of desert has been steadily carpeted with one of the world’s largest concentrations of solar power plants, forming a sprawling photovoltaic sea. On the ground, the scale is almost incomprehensible. The Riverside East Solar Energy Zone – the ground zero of California’s solar energy boom – stretches for 150,000 acres, making it 10 times the size of Manhattan.
It is a crucial component of the United States’ green energy revolution. Solar makes up about 3% of the US electricity supply, but the Biden administration hopes it will reach 45% by 2050, primarily by building more huge plants like this across the country’s flat, empty plains.
But there’s one thing that the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) – the agency tasked with facilitating these projects on public land – doesn’t seem to have fully taken into account: the desert isn’t quite as empty as it thought. It might look like a barren wilderness, but this stretch of the Mojave is a rich and fragile habitat for endangered species and home to thousand-year-old carbon-capturing woodlands, ancient Indigenous cultural sites – and hundreds of people’s homes.
Residents have watched ruefully for years as solar plants crept over the horizon, bringing noise and pollution that’s eroding a way of life in their desert refuge.
“We feel like we’ve been sacrificed,” says Mark Carrington, who, like Sneddon, lives in the Lake Tamarisk resort, a community for over-55s near Desert Center, which is increasingly surrounded by solar farms. “We’re a senior community, and half of us now have breathing difficulties because of all the dust churned up by the construction. I moved here for the clean air, but some days I have to go outside wearing goggles. What was an oasis has become a little island in a dead solar sea.”
Well, they have been sacrificed — to appease an angry Gaia and to grease the correct palms.
I’d just add that carbon-free nuclear plants have tiny footprints and produce reliable energy for decades.