Author Archive: Stephen Green

RESIST:

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Soy Boy Talarico’s Macho Cosplay Might Be Working. “This is a frustrating one for the GOP. Talarico keeps reinventing himself seemingly by the hour. After months of having his masculinity called into question, Talarico’s campaign people have had him on a ‘butch it up’ photo-op jag of late. They’ve got video of him driving a truck. They’ve got pictures of Talarico chowing down on meat like a man going to the electric chair. That was after he told voters that we shouldn’t do that because it’s killing poor Mother Earth.”

Yes, but…:

BECAUSE OF COURSE: GOP Sen. Murkowski says she’ll vote against Blanche confirmation, jeopardizing the nomination. “Murkowski said the job needs to go to an Attorney General who will “‘check the worst impulses of the administration,’ and she doesn’t think Blanche would do that. She said she is also concerned about the weaponization of the Justice Department, which she said has become more frequent under the Trump administration.”

Murkowski voted to confirm Barack Obama’s “loyal wingman,” Eric Holder, as AG.

NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: California scrubs political conflicts of interest from its donation portal.

California’s ethics agency oversees an unlimited, blank-check system of payments solicited by elected officials — including the $347 million Gov. Gavin Newsom has steered through California politics. An investigation by The Center Square has found the state’s “transparency” portal shows the money, but it omits the conflicts of interest.

Voters using the database have no way to search whether donors had business before the government at the time of their donations, even though that information is collected by the California Fair Political Practices Commission (FPPC).

The omission matters because California caps campaign checks. It does not cap “behested payments.” State law allows elected officials to solicit unlimited sums of money from corporations, unions, tribes, foundations and other special interest groups — so long as the money goes to a third party instead of a campaign account.

That means a donor who would otherwise be limited to $39,200 per election for a governor’s campaign can give millions more to a nonprofit, public project, or outside cause if the money is solicited by that same official and reported as a behested payment.

“It’s another way of trying to influence government,” explained Richard Briffault, a Columbia University law professor and campaign finance expert.

You don’t say.

Exit quote: “California’s FPPC was born from a demand for transparency. Voters created the agency in 1974 in the wake of the Watergate scandal to shine light on political money and government ethics.”

Light’s off.

NOVEMBER PREVIEW: Michigan bar grovels to ‘Free Palestine’ activists for hosting event for El-Sayed’s opponent.

A Grand Rapids, Michigan, bar, Pux Cider Taphouse, has apologized on Instagram for hosting Michigan Senate hopeful and Democrat Haley Stevens at its establishment.

“When Pux was approached to book this event, we were only told it would be a private women’s Dem event,” the message read. “Pux was never advised that Haley Stevens would be connected with this event. We are heartbroken as we pride ourselves on being not only a queer-friendly space but also have advocated and continue to call for a free Palestine.

Well, there’s their problem.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Penn professor claims ‘cisness’ is unnatural, ‘sex isn’t real’ in new book.

University of Pennsylvania Professor Beans Velocci published a book this year claiming “sex isn’t real” and the gender “binary” is “incoherent.”

Velocci is an assistant professor in history and the sociology of science who claims to be nonbinary and transgender. This identification has shaped the professor’s questions and conclusions because “that is how knowledge works,” Velocci wrote in the book titled “Sex Isn’t Real: The Invention of an Incoherent Binary.”

In an interview with Duke University Press, which published the book, Velocci expressed joy that “any right wing or TERF detractor who wants to s***-talk the book is going to have to say or write the phrase ‘Sex Isn’t Real’ in the process.”

Well, when you put it like that, it sounds more like an angry political agenda than serious scholarship.

Besides, Velocci isn’t a biologist — who is he to define what a woman isn’t?

WHAT A MESS… AND A PREVIEW OF MESSES TO COME:

OH, CANADA: RBC is Latest Bank to Discriminate Against US Gun Companies.

Nate Treadaway, CEO of Vigilant Gear, LLC, tagged NSSF in a LinkedIn post, writing, “Should I be surprised that a Canadian based bank ‘restricts’ lending (aka discriminates) to the firearms industry? Probably not. But, for the love of God, don’t solicit me first and then tell me you won’t do business because our industry. Shame on him. Shame on RBC. Shame on First American.”

Treadaway wasn’t done.

“PS — No, I don’t need any lending services today so please don’t solicit me with your lending proposals. I get 5-6 a week, but this one made it though [sic] my spam filter and thought I’d hear him out. Lesson learned,” he added.

Treadaway isn’t a “Johnny-come-lately” to the firearm industry. Previous to his role at Vigilant Gear, he was CEO of BPI Outdoors and prior to that, President & CEO of Blackpowder Products, Inc. He’s been in the firearm industry for nearly two decades. He’s seen the devastating effects of Operation Choke Point and what happened when banking discrimination was privatized by corporate banks. He was at the helm of these companies when they had to navigate the Biden administration weaponizing the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network to spy on Americans exercising their Second Amendment rights by legally purchasing firearms and ammunition.

Read the whole thing.

WE KNOW IT ENDS BADLY:

BATTLESWARM: Pipers At The Exit Gates Of The Democrat Party. “Now, I realize that in the year of our Lord 2026, saying, ‘Oh, the Democrats are crazy. The Democrats are mental,’ is not actually terribly incisive political commentary. However, it’s always different when you’re on the outside compared to when you’re on the inside. And getting the inside story is actually more revealing, because of course from the outside there are a bunch of things about the situation we just weren’t aware of that it’s nice to be aware of.”

LOOK FOR THIS FAMILY IN FIVE YEARS…:

…and they’ll almost certainly be doing great.

HE’S A PLAGIARIST AND A FABULIST, AND NEEDS TO BE FIRED. END OF DISCUSSION:

Either academia is for academics, or it’s a DEI jobs program for the otherwise untrustworthy and unemployable. But it can’t be both.

SPACE: NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, launching on a Falcon Heavy on 30 August 2026, carries a mirror the size of Hubble’s but sees a patch of sky about a hundred times wider.

Two big questions drive the mission. The first is dark energy, the name given to whatever is causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate. Roman will survey something on the order of a billion galaxies, measuring how they are distributed and subtly distorted, to trace how that expansion has changed across the history of the universe. It is not designed to explain dark energy so much as to measure its effects far more precisely than we can now.

The second is planets. Roman will stare at the crowded star fields toward the centre of our galaxy and watch for gravitational microlensing, the brief brightening that happens when one star, and any planets around it, passes in front of another and bends its light. Monitoring something like 200 million stars, it is expected to find well over a thousand planets this way, including cold, distant worlds far from their stars that other techniques tend to miss.

But have patience: “After the 30 August launch, Roman faces the same outbound trip as Webb did, out to the second Lagrange point about 1.5 million kilometres from Earth, followed by months of commissioning before any science begins in earnest.”

SPEAKING POWER TO TRUTH OR SOMETHING:

THE LEFT IS NOT ONLY MORE ABSURD THAN YOU IMAGINE, IT IS MORE ABSURD THAN YOU CAN IMAGINE:

Kafka today reads like a news report, back when you could still trust news reports.