Author Archive: Stephen Green

I’VE SEEN THE VIDEO, AND IT ISN’T EASY TO WATCH…:

…but if it “radicalizes” just one more Briton into rejecting his country’s cultural destruction, then it’s worth it.

Visegrád 24 posted it here.

FORGET IT, JAKE:

STILL FURIOUS ABOUT THIS:

DISPATCHES FROM THE BLUE ZONES: Penn Station slashing suspect was free despite eerily similar 2022 attack.

The homeless madman who allegedly slashed five people with a double-edged knife in Penn Station carried out an eerily similar attack in New Jersey just four years ago, The Post has learned.

But despite the victim being grievously injured in that 2022 Newark stabbing, Hector Deleon, 51, was given just two years of probation as a sentence, court records show.

The victim in that heinous attack, a man who wasn’t publicly identified, landed in the trauma ward, where he received nine stitches to close the knife wound on the left side of his neck, a criminal complaint from February 2022 shows.

Still, Deleon doesn’t appear to have spent any significant time behind bars before Sunday evening — when he allegedly went on a random rampage in the busy Midtown commuter hub, according to law-enforcement sources and witnesses.

The mentally ill don’t belong on the streets.

THE NEEDS OF THE PARTY ARE SUBJECT TO CHANGE, COMRADE:

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Scott Pelley’s Podcast Tears Made My Schadenfreude Cup Runneth Over. “Pelley is such an arrogant piece of garbage that he probably thought that he was untouchable and wouldn’t be fired. He must have had amnesia regarding Dan Rather. He also must not have appreciated the resolve that the new sheriff in town at CBS News has.”

CHANGE: Once on the Brink, U.S. Steel’s Oldest Plant Is Getting a Big Renovation.

Tokyo-based Nippon Steel, which bought U.S. Steel last year in a controversial deal, said it expects to spend $2 billion to $2.5 billion at Mon Valley Works over the next three years to replace the equipment that rolls steel. The investment is more than double Nippon Steel’s original cost estimate for the project.

Replacing the current 88-year-old hot-strip mill at Mon Valley will lead to more domestically produced steel. The work is expected to generate as many as 6,000 jobs and up to $1.7 billion in economic activity for Pennsylvania, company executives said.

“The Mon Valley project will go a long way to make people feel like there’s a future here,” U.S. Steel Chief Executive David Burritt said in an interview. “We’ve got great partners with Nippon Steel. These investments would not have been able to happen without it.”

Burritt said U.S. Steel on its own couldn’t afford the costly upgrades and maintenance needed at Mon Valley, which consists of three plants in separate towns south of Pittsburgh.

In early 2025, then President Biden blocked the sale to the Japanese company over potential national-security risks. President Trump resurrected the deal and approved it on the condition that Nippon Steel increased its investments in U.S. Steel’s existing plants to $11 billion.

The White House also gets a veto over “plant closings, the transfer of production out of the country and other operational changes,” which in theory should prevent the industry from getting re-hollowed out.

WELL, WHEN YOU PUT IT LIKE THAT…:

VOTING FOR YOUR OWN DESTRUCTION:

SPACE: A Falcon 9 booster turns 5 years old—and just set a remarkable reuse record.

A little more than five years ago, a shiny white Falcon 9 rocket made its debut flight, boosting a Cargo Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station. Over the next year, it would launch a pair of astronaut missions and a handful of commercial spacecraft.

But since then, this first stage booster, designated B 1067, has mostly flown Starlink missions. It has launched them one after another, always returning safely to a drone ship before undergoing refurbishment and flying again. Sometimes it has flown twice in a single month.

On Monday morning, B 1067 once again took to the skies, launching 29 Starlink Internet satellites into low-Earth orbit from Florida. Upon landing on the A Shortfall of Gravitas drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean, the vehicle completed its 35th mission overall, retaining its title as fleet leader for SpaceX.

The successful launch brings SpaceX closer to its most recently stated goal of qualifying its Falcon 9 first stage vehicles to support 40 missions each. Since that goal was outlined more than two years ago and the company has continued flying its experienced boosters safely across dozens of missions, SpaceX may be intending to push past 40 missions.

To date, the only company in the world breaking SpaceX’s records is SpaceX.

That aside, the goal is to get Starship up to hundreds of flights with minimal refurbs in between. The lessons really only SpaceX has learned (the hard way) on reusability for Falcon 9 ought to be a huge leg up on the second generation of reusable rockets.

I LIKE THEIR WHOLE-BEAN ESPRESSO: Italian coffee giant Lavazza launches single-serve tablets to make espresso in the U.S.

The Italian coffee giant unveiled Tablì last year and launched the new brewing system first in Italy. The tablets, made of compressed ground coffee without a coating, binder or gelatin, can only be used with a Tablì coffee machine made by Lavazza. Each tablet is marked with the words “100% coffee. At launch, the tabs will come in five varieties: espresso, double espresso, decaf espresso, super crema and lungo, or a “long shot” espresso brewed with more water.

“The result that we’ve been able to achieve was through a very complicated industrial process in order to be able to have [the coffee tablet] very compact, to be able to deliver it without destroying it, to have it able to work in a coffee machine,” Lavazza CEO Antonio Baravalle told CNBC.

Tablì is the result of Lavazza’s acquisition of the Italian startup Caffemotive in 2020. The new system took five years of development, more than 15 patents and a new production facility in Gattinara, Italy, to bring it to market.

Anything that speeds up the delivery of caffeine with decent flavor is worth trying once.

THEY STILL MIGHT FINISH BEFORE CALIFORNIA: Peru election result close as vote counting continues. “It put the left-wing Roberto Sánchez on a marginal lead of 50.3% of the vote, compared with the right-wing Keiko Fujimori on 49.7%. While not an official count, the tally has been an accurate indicator of the final result in previous polls.”

MASSIE IS JUST AUDITIONING FOR HIS POST-CONGRESSIONAL PODCAST CAREER ALONGSIDE TUCKER AND MEGYN:

IT’S ALWAYS SOMETHING: Inflation inside the electronics you buy may soon become a bit more sticky. “When the Jubail petrochemical and industrial complex in Saudi Arabia was struck by Iranian missiles on April 6 and April 7, it was the final blow in a convergence of factors — geopolitical, financial, physical — that knocked out a key world reservoir of resin, leaving the crucial component for circuit boards in short supply. The plants had already shut down at the end of March as it became clear transit through the Strait of Hormuz was untenable during the conflict, and it is still not back online.”

PUT. THE SMARTPHONE. DOWN. Why Are Birthrates Down? You Might Be Looking at the Answer.

Caitlin Myers, an economist at Middlebury College, and Ezekiel Hooper, her student, used the spotty early rollout of the iPhone as a way to isolate the effects of the phone on fertility. The first iPhone was released in June 2007, they wrote, and was available only on the AT&T network until February 2011. The study compared fertility rates in U.S. counties that had near-universal AT&T coverage with counties that had little or none.

Their paper, published in the National Bureau of Economic Research, found that the iPhone caused as much as half of the fertility decline between 2007 and 2011. The most pronounced effects were among young people aged 15 to 24.

What happened in the counties with iPhones? One theory, Professor Myers said, is that young people began to socialize more on their phones and less in person, and consequently were less likely to have sex and become pregnant.

Professor Myers said iPhones may also have made pornography more accessible, which led young people to substitute it for sex, or young people may have used them to obtain better information on avoiding pregnancy, including contraception and abortion.

Researchers not involved in the study said the results were persuasive.

Makes at least as much sense as any other explanation I’ve seen.

ELECTION SECURITY, CALIFORNIA STYLE: