JON GABRIEL: New Arizona law makes it easy for extremists to harass regular donors like you. “Proposition 211 was sold as mere transparency. Instead, it places donors’ identities on a government list for everyone to see.”

LINCOLN BROWN SPEAKS FOR US ALL: For the love of everything sacred, holy, honorable, and sensible, will you actors, singers, models and influencers just shut up, shut up, Shut Up, SHUT UP?

ERIC BERGER: Europe’s Ariane 6 rocket is turning into a space policy disaster.

Member nations of Europe make financial allocations to the European Space Agency and expect roughly that amount of money in return in terms of space projects. So the development and production of Ariane 6 was spread across a number of nations under management of a large conglomerate, France-based ArianeGroup.

This approach combined the worst of the parochial politics that guide NASA funding in the United States with the sluggish activity of a traditional aerospace company accustomed to guaranteed contracts. Naturally, therefore, development of the project has lagged and gone over budget. As of this writing, the public date for the debut launch of Ariane 6 remains “late 2023,” but the rocket’s first flight will certainly slip into 2024. And its development budget has nearly doubled, to $4.4 billion.

That is a lot of time—nearly a decade—and money for Europe to develop what is essentially a poorer version of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. In the nine years since Europe began development of the Ariane 6 to compete with SpaceX, the Falcon 9 rocket has nearly doubled its payload capacity and become partially reusable, so it is now more capable and costs far less. It has also launched more than 215 times, which is nearly as many rockets as the Ariane program has launched since 1979. Because of this, the Falcon 9 is now extremely reliable and capable of launching on schedule.

So why is Europe developing a rocket that costs more than a Falcon 9 and is a decade late to the party?

Everybody — ULA, Boeing, Ariane, Roscosmos, I mean everybody — should have thrown out all their existing plans once SpaceX proved that reusable rockets were both reliable and profitable.

CHRIS QUEEN: Disney May Soon Wish It Hadn’t Messed With Florida. “Florida continues to put Disney on notice that the state will not bow to the far left and its corporate allies. In other words, this fight is far from over.”

CHANGE: Netflix announces end to DVD mailing service.

Netflix announced Tuesday that it would be sending its last red envelope on Sept. 29, 2023, ending its DVD mailing service after 25 years.

“Our goal has always been to provide the best service for our members but as the business continues to shrink that’s going to become increasingly difficult,” the company said in part of a statement shared with ABC News.

The now-ubiquitous streaming company began sending rented DVDs by mail in April 1998. Nearly a decade after its first disc was shipped out in a red envelope (that movie was “Beetlejuice”, by the way), the company introduced its online streaming and video service in 2007.

It’s been a long time coming. But compare the yawns that accompanied today’s announcement to the massive customer complaints in 2011 when the company briefly flirted with spinning off the DVD service into Qwikster.

EVERYTHING IN WAR IS EITHER AWFUL, ABSURD, OR BOTH: [Video] Russian Armored Recovery Vehicle Gets Stuck Recovering Stuck Armored Vehicle.

2024 PREVIEW: Newt Gingrich Discusses Potential Challenges in 2024 Presidential Election. “When you’re a very weak President, who doesn’t understand that we have real enemies, and doesn’t understand the requirements of real stakes, the world begins to realize that the United States is very unreliable.”

THAT’S DIFFERENT BECAUSE REASONS: Jon Tester Said It’s ‘Not Right’ for Senators To Hire Lobbyists as Staff. He Just Hired a Lobbyist To Run His Campaign.

KEVIN DOWNEY JR: Globalists Finally Say It Out Loud: Sex With Minors Is OK — and the UN Is Onboard.

OH: Google CEO admits he doesn’t ‘fully understand’ how AI chat bot works after it cites fake books, learns new language unprompted.

BEN BARTEE: When Science Fiction Becomes Reality: Brave New World.

THE ROT AT ANHEUSER-BUSCH RUNS A LOT DEEPER THAN JUST ONE WOKE BUD LIGHT MARKETING EXEC:

Growing up in St. Louis in the ’70s and ’80s, the Anheuser-Busch marketing machine was a thing to behold — but no longer. All they had to do was let the fuss over a single label, long in decline, blow over. Instead they’ve turned it into a corporation-wide rake-stepping contest.

A WELCOME CHANGE: Republicans on Judiciary Committee Playing Hardball Over Replacing Feinstein.

FREE INQUIRY: University ‘blocks’ academic from her own gender wars research over ‘dangerous’ data.

Dr Laura Favaro began the first ever taxpayer-funded study into whether social scientists at universities feel censored over their views on transgender issues in March 2020 at City, University of London.

But it has descended into chaos, with the study’s author allegedly hounded out of the university, stripped of the findings she collected and barred from publishing them amid claims of transphobia.

Dr Favaro is now bringing an employment tribunal claim against City for harassment, victimisation and whistleblowing detriment, and claims she was discriminated against for her protected philosophical belief in the reality of biological sex.

The most fundamental fact of human biology is just one “philosophical belief” among many, even within the scientific community.

THE ANTI-DESANTIS LEFTIES ARE NUTS: Here’s a Great Idea: Just Move Disney World to Somewhere Better-Run… Like PUERTO RICO?

Trump came out on the silly side of this one, too. Details at the link.

THAT ABOUT SUMS IT UP:

That was in reply to Lawrence Summers, who tweeted, “I heard a comment from somebody in a developing country who said, ‘Look, I like your values better than I like China’s. But the truth is, when we’re engaged with the Chinese, we get an airport. And when we’re engaged with you guys, we get a lecture.'”

H.L. MENCKEN, CALL YOUR OFFICE: Portland’s ‘Controlled Demolition’ Into Dystopia May Be Unrecoverable Thanks to George Soros and Dumb Voters. “The certified smart guys tasked with ‘solving’ the ‘homeless problem’ didn’t stand a chance of solving anything when they accelerated the numbers of people coming to the area with the open offer of accountability-free drug use, free tents, and free food.”

ACCOUNTABILITY: Prominent professor accused of falsifying racism data leaves university. “Prominent Florida State University criminology Professor Eric Stewart left his job after allegedly faking results in at least six studies about American crime to make racism seem worse than it is.”

THRILL-A-MINUTE: Disney’s Newest Ride Is Going to Be Just What You Expected. “In an effort to make sure that Disney’s newest offering was politically correct right down to the last jot and tittle, guests will essentially embark on a trip to resupply a food co-op.”

CRISIS BY DESIGN: U.S. Was Warned of Migrant Child Labor, but ‘Didn’t Want to Hear It.’

Over the past two years, more than 250,000 migrant children have come alone to the United States. Thousands of children have ended up in punishing jobs across the country — working overnight in slaughterhouses, replacing roofs, operating machinery in factories — all in violation of child labor laws, a recent Times investigation showed. After the article’s publication in February, the White House announced policy changes and a crackdown on companies that hire children.

But all along, there were signs of the explosive growth of this labor force and warnings that the Biden administration ignored or missed, The Times has found.

Again and again, veteran government staffers and outside contractors told the Health and Human Services Department, including in reports that reached Secretary Xavier Becerra, that children appeared to be at risk. The Labor Department put out news releases noting an increase in child labor. Senior White House aides were shown evidence of exploitation, such as clusters of migrant children who had been found working with industrial equipment or caustic chemicals.

Plus: “The White House declined to comment on why the administration did not previously react to repeated signs that migrant children were being widely exploited.”

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: ChiComs and Team Biden Have Eerily Similar Approaches to Message Control. “You can swap ‘Chinese Communist Party’ and ‘Biden administration’ in all of these stories and they still make sense.”

HOW IT STARTED: Portland REI location increases security following three break-ins in 1 week.

How it’s going: REI to close only Portland store, citing break-ins, theft.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Want To Avoid Woke Products? There’s an App for That.

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Can Chicago Survive Brandon Johnson?

Chicago’s election highlights several aspects of our research, including ballooning expenditures, rising crime, and cratering commercial real-estate markets. Perhaps more than anywhere else, the Windy City exhibits the telltale signs of a negative spiral.

In the 2010s, Chicago saw a small population increase of around 2 percent, but the number of municipal employees fell by almost 5 percent, owing to the pension crowd-out effect, in which rising pension costs squeeze other city priorities. Chicago’s pension spending has nearly tripled in the past ten fiscal years, from around $15,700 per full-time employee to more than $45,000. Pension expenditures now total more than $1.5 billion—over 12 percent of the city’s total revenue. For every person Chicago employs, in other words, it is effectively paying $45,000 to a city employee who has already retired. And the problem will worsen in the years to come, with the city’s pension debts exceeding those of 45 states and the recent market downturn intensifying its funding shortfalls. As these costs rise, they limit the revenue available for needed services.

And Chicago can hardly afford to tighten its belt on public safety. From 2020 through 2022, more than 2,000 people were murdered within city limits. The 2021 figure of nearly 800 was roughly 60 percent higher than that of 2019—yet the Chicago Police Department recorded less than half the number of physical arrests in 2021 as it did in 2019. Crucial to understanding these numbers is that the police force has shrunk by 8 percent in less than half a decade.

Under Johnson, Chicago won’t need as many police, anyway: Chicago Mayor-elect Brandon Johnson touts sending social workers to 911 calls as crime solution.

SANCTIONS FAIL: Russia Now Selling More Oil Now Than Before the War.