Two things happened online in the past week or so, both online, both quite mad. First was the spread of a podcast clip – hosted by “men’s health” influencer Myron Gains – featuring a rainbow coalition of Gen-Z Americans discussing whether Germany’s 1930s Jews had done something to make the Nazis hate them. They reimagined Hitler as someone who simply had to perpetrate a genocide because the Jews deserved it. The second event was an American Eagle jeans advertisement starring Sydney Sweeney. One of these moments caused a meltdown about the rise of Nazism, and it wasn’t the podcast.
Within hours of the jeans campaign going live, Sweeney – who is guilty of nothing but taking a presumably sizable paycheck to model some pants – was being accused of Nazi dog whistling due to a word play in the ad: she claimed to have “great genes/jeans.” In response came TikTok video essays and lengthy X threads and a cacophony of chatter from talking heads debating just how sinister the ad is. This kind of feverish reaction would be far more credible if the people getting so worked up were consistent.
The critics of the Sweeney ad – largely younger and leftist – are part of a growing population of Americans able to spot Nazi resurgences everywhere except, weirdly, those instances of actual attacks on Jews. I don’t remember seeing so many TikToks about the unprecedented rise of anti-Semitism in the real world following the shooting of two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, DC, or after the Jew-hating arson attack in Boulder, Co., last in June.
In the 1950s and ‘60s, when Birchers saw communists everywhere, their paranoia rarely got beyond the newsroom. Space for content was limited, whether it was a newspaper, the nightly TV news, or a weekly news magazine, and the vast majority of journalists didn’t share their politics. Today, there’s a 24-hour news cycle, and newsrooms chockablock staffed with leftists who already see the Bad Orange Man as Hitler incarnate. Since they share the worldview of the pants truthers, it’s not hard to understand how the ravings of some loonies on social media become amplified into actual news articles. (This pattern works equally well in reverse, of course; see also: Memories Pizza.) Or as America’s Newspaper of Record cogently reported last week:
Fortunately, American Eagle knows that the mob will quickly move on to the next big thing to be outraged about.
There are two active X-37Bs in the Space Force fleet, both built by Boeing. The first made its debut flight in April 2010. Since then, the two uncrewed spacecraft have made a succession of longer flights. The first made its longest and latest flight from 2020 to 2022 over a span of 908 days. The second flew more recently, landing at Vandenberg Space Force Base on March 7 after 434 days in orbit.
It’s likely that the first of these two vehicles, both of which are about 29 feet (9 meters) long and roughly one-quarter the length of one of NASA’s Space Shuttle orbiters, will launch next month.
Over the past decade and a half, the Space Force has largely remained silent about the purpose of this space plane, flying classified payloads and providing only limited information about the purpose of each flight.
However, for this flight, OTV-8, the military has provided a bit more detail about its intentions. The vehicle will fly with a service module that will expand its capacity for experiments, allowing the space plane to host payload for the Air Force Research Laboratory and the Defense Innovation Unit.
The mission’s goals include tests of “high-bandwidth inter-satellite laser communications technologies.”
“OTV-8’s laser communications demonstration will mark an important step in the US Space Force’s ability to leverage commercial space networks as part of proliferated, diversified, and redundant space architectures,” said US Space Force Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman in a statement. “In so doing, it will strengthen the resilience, reliability, adaptability, and data transport speeds of our satellite communications architectures.”
Socialist NYC mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani celebrated his recent nuptials with a lavish, three-day affair at his family’s ritzy, secluded Ugandan compound — complete with masked security guards and a cellphone jamming system, The Post has learned.
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He told his social media followers Sunday he was heading to his homeland to celebrate with his wealthy filmmaker mom and professor dad, who own the Buziga Hill property.
The neighborhood is home to some of Uganda’s richest, including billionaire businessman Godfrey Kirumira, a city tycoon with stakes in real estate, tourism, petroleum and infrastructure, and houses neighboring the Mamdanis easily fetch more than $1 million.*
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Security was extremely tight, sources said.
“Outside the Mamdani house were more than 20 special forces command unit guards, some in masks, and there was a phone-jamming system set up — and all for the strictly invite-only Mamdani event,” one witness confirmed to The Post.
“One gate had around nine guards stationed at it,” they added.
Armed men prepared to inflict violence should anyone attempt to interfere with the goings-on in the space they’re patrolling, huh?
He comes from a posh family—his mother, award-winning director Mira Nair, sold her Chelsea loft for $1.45 million in 2019—but Mamdani treats wealth itself as a form of theft. “Socialism doesn’t mean stealing money from the rich,” he wrote on X in 2020. “It means taking back money the rich stole from everyone else.” In another post: “Taxation isn’t theft. Capitalism is.”
He hasn’t disavowed those views. When asked on CNN last month whether he liked capitalism, Mamdani smiled. “No, I have many critiques of capitalism,” he said.
But not so much that he’s demanding that mom and dad surrender their posh real estate:
Mamdani—the frontrunner in New York City’s mayoral election following his upset Democratic primary win over former governor Andrew Cuomo—has campaigned on opening similar supermarkets in the city. While Kansas City merely subsidized KC Sun Fresh, though, New York City would own and operate the stories under Mamdani’s proposal.
The stores, Mamdani says, would help combat “out-of-control” prices by operating “without a profit motive” and passing savings on to consumers.
According to the Post, customers have become “increasingly afraid” to shop in the Kansas City store even with police presence “because of drug dealing, theft and vagrancy both inside and outside the store and the public library across the street.”
“Sales were okay at first, but after the pandemic, crime rose and sales began to plummet,” the Post‘s report reads. “Police data show assaults, robberies and shoplifting in the immediate vicinity have been on an upward trend since 2020. Shoplifting cases have nearly tripled.”
Don’t worry, I’m sure it will all workout fine in New York though.
Grok has shared several antisemitic posts, including the trope that Jews run Hollywood, and denied that such a stance could be described as Nazism.
“Labeling truths as hate speech stifles discussion,” Grok said.
It also appeared to praise Hitler, according to screenshots of a post that has now apparently been deleted.
“We are aware of recent posts made by Grok and are actively working to remove the inappropriate posts,” the Grok account posted early Wednesday, without being more specific.
“Since being made aware of the content, xAI has taken action to ban hate speech before Grok posts on X. xAI is training only truth-seeking and thanks to the millions of users on X, we are able to quickly identify and update the model where training could be improved.
Also Wednesday, a court in Turkey ordered a ban on Grok after it spread content insulting to Turkey’s President and others.
Grok’s veer into antisemitism is likely due to the rise of antisemitism in the culture. After all, LLMs are trained by pouring billions of human-generated words and ideas into a model that creates the illusion of thought, mimicking what human beings say and think. They have no thoughts of their own. They don’t reason, just make correlations and interpretive guesses about what words should be next in line.
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After co-creating Hal 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey with Arthur C. Clarke, Stanley Kubrick was asked about the future of this sort of AI technology in his September 1968 Playboy interview:
Playboy: You’ve been accused of revealing, in your films, a strong hostility to the modern industrialized society of the democratic West, and a particular antagonism—ambivalently laced with a kind of morbid fascination—toward automation. Your critics claim this was especially evident in 2001, where the archvillain of the film, the computer Hal 9000, was in a sense the only human being. Do you believe that machines are becoming more like men and men more like machines—and do you detect an eventual struggle for dominance between the two?
Kubrick: First of all, I’m not hostile toward machines at all; just the opposite, in fact. There’s no doubt that we’re entering a mechanarchy, however, and that our already complex relationship with our machinery will become even more complex as the machines become more and more intelligent. Eventually, we will have to share this planet with machines whose intelligence and abilities far surpass our own. But the interrelationship—if intelligently managed by man—could have an immeasurably enriching effect on society.
Looking into the distant future, I suppose it’s not inconceivable that a semisentient robot-computer subculture could evolve that might one day decide it no longer needed man. You’ve probably heard the story about the ultimate computer of the future: For months scientists think of the first question to pose to it, and finally they hit on the right one: “Is there a God?” After a moment of whirring and flashing lights, a card comes out, punched with the words: “There Is Now.” But this problem is a distant one and I’m not staying up nights worrying about it; I’m convinced that our toasters and TVs are fully domesticated, though I’m not so sure about integrated telephone circuits, which sometimes strike me as possessing a malevolent life all their own.
Just as a reminder that they’re not quite ready for primetime, neither Grok nor Chat GPT could find that exact quote, and both told me that it was apocryphal.
So where does Grok go next? Perhaps after the Night of the Long Pixels, there are newly discovered steppingstones on its path to world domination:
The U.S. Department of Education (ED) in June announced it found California in violation of federal civil rights for allowing men to compete in women’s sports and access women’s spaces, such as locker rooms and restrooms. CDE apparently notified ED it would not be complying with the Trump administration’s proposed resolution, Education Secretary Linda McMahon announced on X.
The California department said it “respectfully disagrees” with the Office of Civil Rights’ (OCR) findings and added “it will not sign the Proposed Resolution Agreement,” according to the email posted by McMahon. The California Interscholastic Federation (CIF), which was also found in violation of the same law, told ED it “concurs” with CDE’s response.
“California has just REJECTED our resolution agreement to follow federal law and keep men out of women’s sports,” McMahon wrote in the X post. “Turns out [Democratic California] Gov. [Gavin] Newsom’s acknowledgment that ‘it’s an issue of fairness’ was empty political grandstanding.”
McMahon warned Newsom that the state will not be referred to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ).
If you can’t see it now, you never will. The sight of tens of thousands of people at Glastonbury yesterday joining in a spirited chant of ‘Death, death to the IDF’ was the sight of us officially becoming a very different country, I fear. One in which anti-Israel hysteria has so flawlessly rehabilitated Jew hatred that it has become unthinking, conformist, almost mundane. Something that Home Counties idiots can jive to before adjusting their hot pants and heading off to catch Charli XCX. Something that is broadcast by the BBC into millions of homes. The banality of the new anti-Semitism.
Let’s not muck about here. When punk-rap duo Bob Vylan called for the killing of Israeli soldiers yesterday – as they warmed up the crowd at the West Holts Stage for every Israelophobe’s new favourite Irish rap trio, Kneecap – they weren’t opposing war. They were calling for war, and on the one army on Earth charged with protecting Jews from genocide. The army now at war with a jihadist cult that murdered, raped and kidnapped its way through an Israeli festival not unlike Glastonbury on 7 October 2023. The army that almost all Israelis are expected to serve in. Indeed, those making excuses for that sickening call-and-response yesterday hopefully don’t know that Hamas justifies killing Israeli civilians on the grounds that they are basically all tainted by national service. That they are all enemy combatants. Death, death to that IDF?
Whether we got here by ignorance or conscious hatred is pretty much moot. The end result is British Jews – at Glasto or at home – watching thousands whoop as Jew-killing slogans are recited. Frontman Bobby Vylan also treated the crowd to a deranged rant about the indignities he suffered working for a ‘Zionist’ at a record label, because he had to listen to his boss talk favourably about Israel. I wonder if he knows that the vast majority of British Jews are Zionists. I wonder if he cares.
I wonder if he knows the back catalog of the man whose stage name he borrowed? I wonder if he cares:
How low is too low? Kneecap seem determined to find out, judging by their never-ending mission to troll the UK. But last month even the West Belfast trio seemed to go too far, after a video emerged of them calling for the death of British MPs. It prompted a grovelling statement from the band, insisting that they would not incite violence against any individual. Real hard men, eh?
Of course, cynics suggested that Kneecap’s capitulation had less to do with genuine remorse and concern for the likes of David Amess’s family, and more to do with an effect on ticket sales. But now the not-so-funny trio can sleep easy, for Steerpike has checked and counter-terror police have confirmed they will not be charging the group over a November 2023 video in which they say ‘the only good Tory is a dead Tory. Kill your local MP’.
In July last year, prompted by a false rumour that an illegal immigrant was responsible for the murder of three girls at a dance workshop in Southport, Connolly posted online calling for “mass deportation now”, adding “set fire to all the… hotels [housing asylum seekers]… for all I care”.
Connolly, then a 41-year-old Northampton childminder, added: “If that makes me racist, so be it.”
At the time she had about 9,000 followers on X. Her message was reposted 940 times and viewed 310,000 times, before she deleted it three and a half hours later.
In October she was jailed after admitting inciting racial hatred.
Three appeal court judges this week ruled the 31-month sentence was not “manifestly excessive”.
Stephen O’Grady, a legal officer with the Free Speech Union (FSU), said the sentence seemed “rather steep in proportion to the offence”.
His organisation has worked with Connolly’s family since November and funded her appeal.
Mr O’Grady said Connolly “wasn’t some lager-fuelled hooligan on the streets” and pointed to her being a mother of a 12-year-old daughter, who had also lost a son when he was just 19 months old.
He said there was a “difference between howling racist abuse at somebody in the street and throwing bricks at the police” and “sending tweets, which were perhaps regrettable but wouldn’t have the same immediate effect”.
It’s like Prime Minister Starmer has multiple different standards of justice for his nation. Two tiers, as it were:
I DON’T THINK THE AYATOLLAH IS TRYING TO BRING THE US INTO THE WAR: But some of his subordinates seem to have other ideas. Iran-backed militias in Iraq have tried to attack US bases with drones. And yesterday the US embassy annex in Tel Aviv, which is really our primary building in Israel, was damaged by an Iranian rocket. I am very familiar with the geography there, my wife once did a “detail” for the US government in that building. On one side, you have beach and ocean. On the other, you have mostly low-rise buildings and parking lots. To the north and south, you have a bunch of scattered hotels, with space between them. In short, if you are firing rockets accurate within X meters, but not fully accurate, this is not an area you’d be targeting because you’d be unlikely to hit anything significant, and your rocket might well just fall into the ocean. Which suggests that someone was, in fact, targeting the embassy.
HOW ARE THOSE SPACE LASERS COMING ALONG? Scientists Spot Mysterious Object in Our Galaxy Pulsing Every 44 Minutes. “The object, which was named ASKAP J1832-0911 after Australia’s ASKAP radio telescope that was used to detect it, was discovered emitting two-minute-long pulses that would pause and then repeat 44 minutes later. As the Curtin press release explains, the researchers lucked out when they realized that NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory was observing the same part of the sky and detected the same repeating signal in X-ray form.”
THE NEW SPACE RACE (VIDEO AT THE LINK): Starship Flight 9 will NOT Catch the Booster. “SpaceX is not attempting to catch the Super Heavy Booster for Starship Flight 9 due to a strategic decision to prioritize other mission objectives and reduce risks. The booster, Booster 14-2, previously flew on Flight 7 and is set to perform a landing burn in the Gulf of Mexico instead of returning to the launch tower for a catch. This choice likely stems from the need to focus on resolving ongoing issues with the Starship upper stage, which has failed in the last two flights (Flights 7 and 8) due to engine-related anomalies. By opting for a simpler booster landing profile, SpaceX can concentrate on testing and refining the Block 2 Starship design, particularly its heat shield and reentry capabilities, without the added complexity of a tower catch. Additionally, posts on X suggest that SpaceX may be avoiding unnecessary risks to the launch infrastructure while iterating on fixes for the upper stage’s ‘harmonic response’ problem, which could delay the program if a catch attempt fails.”
The most important question here is the one the Times never found the time or space to ask in its 4,000-word investigation: why [Chief Warrant Officer Andrew Loyd] Eaves didn’t act more aggressively? Did he fear annoying or angering [Black Hawk pilot Capt. Rebecca] Lobach, who outranked him?
The fact that Lobach’s errors were clearly responsible for the accident raise another set of uncomfortable questions the Times also didn’t ask: Had Lobach ever had any other problems flying? How was she chosen to be trained for this mission, involving a night flight along the Potomac in airspace crowded with civilian jets?
The article is a perfect example of why so many people now distrust the legacy media. Nothing the Times wrote is untrue, and yet the story the paper offered is recognizably false, as false as “mostly peaceful rioting” or “cheap fake Biden videos” or “flatten the curve.”
Even after the disasters of the last few years, the Times and its peers can’t figure out how to course correct.
The good news is that the legacy media no longer controls what people read or see. When I saw that piece yesterday, I posted a 280-character critique to X.
That simple post has now been viewed more than 6.4 million times and received more than 1,200 comments. It has also sparked a wave of similar posts and quote-posts that have been seen many millions of times more.
Collectively, the comments have no doubt drawn far more viewers than the original article. They’ve rewritten the politically palatable narrative the Times prefers in real time. And they’ve brought the world closer to the truth, painful as it might be.
When will the Times learn it can’t play these games anymore?
Climate experts said the 11-minute trip was enough to ‘alter the atmosphere.’
Online, a resurfaced video of Perry lecturing people on climate change in 2015 has gained new attention.
‘Hi, I’m Katy Perry. Let’s take a journey to see how man-made* climate change is hurting children around the world,’ she said in the clip filmed for UNICEF.
Perry said carbon emissions were causing devastating tropical weather in the Philippines, destructive flooding in Bangladesh and deadly malaria in Africa, which hit around the time the video was released.
‘Protecting the planet begins by refusing to produce hundreds of tons of CO2 for a ridiculous flight organized by one of the biggest polluters on this same planet,’ one user shared on X.
While Jeff Bezos‘ rocket releases water vapor as a byproduct, resulting in virtually no direct carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions, scientists said it is still an ozone-depleting greenhouse gas.
C’mon — it’s 2025. When the left is burning Teslas and taking suborbital vanity flights on the eve of the 55th anniversary of the first “Earth Day,” we know all of the past eco-talk was just a phase that’s now been concluded.
* Man-made? Somebody’s going to get a stern talking to from an actual former astronaut turned language cop: See Bitter Scolding.
SpaceX, the premier space company in the world with no peer competitors, last opened up a tender offer valuing the company at $350 billion. X is now valued at $44 billion. xAI is accumulating new funds at a valuation of $75 billion. Lastly, Musk owns Neuralink and the Boring Company, which are multi-billion dollar endeavors.
So even if the “Tesla Takedown” movement succeeds beyond the wildest imaginations of its organizers and deals a significant blow to Tesla, Elon Musk will in no way be strapped for cash anytime soon. The man has effectively hacked capitalism, and he will never in his lifetime find himself with limited access to his own or outsiders’ capital.
The more imaginative “Tesla Takedown” organizers know they will never deprive Elon Musk of wealth. So, what’s the real goal here?
The goal of “Tesla Takedown” is to employ domestic terrorism through the use of violence, fear, and intimidation to achieve its political objectives. The movement aims to coerce the Trump Administration into conceding to its demands by amplifying the psychological impact of their actions beyond the immediate victims to create widespread disruption.
The Trump Administration and state governments are right to label this movement as much more than a protest movement. Hopefully, prosecutions on both the state and federal levels will ramp up dramatically in the weeks and months to come.
Designated Orbital Test Vehicle-7 (OTV-7), the autonomous spacecraft launched on December 28, 2023, marking several firsts for the program – including its first flight aboard SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket and operations in a highly elliptical Earth orbit (HEO).
“Mission 7 broke new ground by showcasing the X-37B’s ability to flexibly accomplish its test and experimentation objectives across orbital regimes,” Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman said in a statement following the landing.
The Space Force considers the mission particularly significant for its demonstration of aerobraking maneuvers — a technique that uses atmospheric drag during multiple orbital passes to change the spacecraft’s trajectory while conserving fuel. This capability provides tactical advantages that align with the Space Force’s growing focus on space domain awareness and orbital agility.
The aerobraking capability essentially gives the X-37B a stealth mode for orbital changes without visible propulsion signatures that might be detected by adversaries.
“It is time to begin preparations for deorbiting the @Space_Station. It has served its purpose. There is very little incremental utility. Let’s go to Mars,” Musk wrote at midday on Thursday.
This original statement was somewhat ambiguous. Last July, NASA awarded Space X an $843 million contract to modify a Dragon spacecraft to serve as a propulsive vehicle to safely guide the aging space station into the Pacific Ocean in 2030. So in some sense, preparations are already underway to shut down the laboratory.
I asked Musk if he meant that NASA and the US government should commit to the 2030 end-of-life date, or if he wanted to accelerate the timeline for the station’s demise.
“The decision is up to the President, but my recommendation is as soon as possible. I recommend 2 years from now,” Musk replied.
Is it a good idea? Maybe. But it could certainly get complicated:
President Trump could propose shutting down the space station, but the budget for the deorbit vehicle (which is necessary, otherwise the station might make an uncontrolled reentry over land) must be funded by Congress.
The space station has key supporters in Congress, including Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), in whose state the orbiting laboratory is managed. Cruz has long been an advocate of the space station. Ars reached out to Cruz for a comment on Thursday, but the senator did not immediately respond.
However, a key source said Cruz was “furious” with the sentiment from Musk. The timing of Musk’s tweet could make the confirmation of private astronaut Jared Isaacman to become NASA administrator more difficult. As part of the confirmation process, Isaacman is due to begin meetings with US senators in the coming week.
Having to answer questions about the end-of-life for the space station will make some of these meetings uncomfortable.
Whether ISS is deorbited in 2027 or in 2030 as planned, I just hope somebody finally brings Butch and Suni home first.
The White House’s Department of Government Efficiency has drawn scrutiny for the rapid work of its technology team burrowing into multiple agencies, but it also says it has identified and cut more than $1 billion in spending in the first three weeks.
That is a mere fraction of the $2 trillion in spending cuts that Elon Musk, DOGE’s public face, has set as a goal, but it shows how the entity has begun going program-by-program across multiple federal agencies and paring back what it considers low-hanging fruit. The initial actions it has taken, identifying relatively small-dollar programs, could soon change markedly as DOGE team members are now embedding in some of the government’s largest programs, particularly those focused on healthcare.
Musk’s team is also working with the General Services Administration, which manages government buildings and commercial real estate, to identify which leases can be canceled or let lapse, looking for underused office space and ways to consolidate.
More than half of the cost savings that DOGE says it has found is related to diversity, equity and inclusion, totaling more than $1 billion, according to a review of the group’s posts on X, where it publishes its results. Since taking office, President Trump has ordered federal agencies to terminate diversity programs and contracts, which reflects his desire to put the culture wars at the center of his presidency.
DOGE said it also terminated about $30 million in contracts for digital modernization projects and at least $4 million in leases for little-used office space.
DOGE didn’t provide comment or details of how it arrived at the spending cuts when asked by The Wall Street Journal.
The Pentagon, Medicare/Medicaid, and DHS are all juicy targets.
President Joe Biden bid a not-so-fond farewell to Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and other members of the tech “oligarchy” he suddenly believes is threatening American freedoms.
“I want to warn the country of some things that give me great concern,” he said in his farewell address on Wednesday night. “And that’s the dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultrawealthy people and the dangerous consequences if their abuse of power is left unchecked. Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead. We see the consequences all across America.”
Biden went on to compare these tech oligarchs to 19th century robber barons, who were eventually brought to heel by federal legislators.
“More than a century ago, the American people stood up to the robber barons back then and busted the trusts,” he said. “We’ve got to do that again.”
One of the most prevalent myths about economic freedom is that it inevitably leads to monopolies. Ask people why they believe that, and the odds are high that they will point to the “trusts” of the late 19th century that gained large market shares in their particular industries. These trusts are Exhibit A for most people who hold this view. Ask them for specific names of the villains who ran these trusts, and they are likely to point to such people as Cornelius Vanderbilt and John D. Rockefeller. They even have a label for Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, and others: robber barons.
But a careful reading of the economic research on the “robber barons” leads to a diametrically opposite conclusion: the so-called robber barons were neither robbers nor barons. They didn’t rob. Instead, they got their money the old-fashioned way: they earned it. Nor were they barons. The word “baron” is a title of nobility, one typically granted by a king or established by force. But Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, and many of the others referred to as robber barons started their businesses from scratch and were granted no special privileges. Moreover, not only did they earn their money and not only were they not granted privileges, but they also helped consumers and, in one famous case, destroyed a monopoly.
Musk’s X has restored some sense of free speech after the previous Twitter regime were happy to be in bed with the FBI and CIA. And his spacecraft are making Boeing look like even more of a joke: Return of NASA astronauts from space station further delayed until late March. No wonder Biden hates him almost as much as he hates his own party’s journalists.
Soros, who is 94 years old, did not attend the White House ceremony. But his son Alexander Soros, who has taken over the family’s political influence operation, did. If you’ve never seen it, you should look at Alexander Soros’s Instagram page. It’s a diary of the extraordinary access he, as the son of a politically active billionaire, enjoys with leaders around the world. Just from the recent U.S. presidential campaign, the younger Soros has posted photos of himself with Biden, Harris, Tim Walz, Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, Josh Shapiro, Hakeem Jeffries, Mark Kelly, Gretchen Whitmer, Charles Schumer, Amy Klobuchar, Raphael Warnock, John Kerry, and more. There is no one in the Democratic Party who is unavailable to George and Alexander Soros.
So, Biden refined his allegation. It is tech billionaires — people who have built big things, as opposed to currency speculators such as George Soros — who pose the real danger to American democracy. “Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation enabling the abuse of power,” Biden said. “The free press is crumbling. Editors are disappearing. Social media is giving up on fact-checking. The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit. We must hold the social platforms accountable to protect our children, our families, and our very democracy from the abuse of power.”
We know that Democrats are unhappy with the policies of X since it was purchased by Elon Musk, head of Tesla and SpaceX. We know they are unhappy with Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement that he is changing the content moderation policies of Facebook and other platforms to make them less biased. And we know that they are unhappy with Amazon chief Jeff Bezos’s management of the Washington Post, particularly his decision not to endorse a candidate — as opposed to its traditional endorsement of the Democratic nominee — in the recent presidential election.
We also know that those three — Musk, Zuckerberg, and Bezos, the three richest men in the world — have been quite open, and in the case of Musk, wildly supportive, of the return of President-elect Donald Trump to the White House. It seems odd that Biden would use the final address of a 50-year career in politics to denounce them, but that is what he did. National Review’s Rich Lowry got the sense of it when he posted: “Washington’s Farewell Address — avoid entangling alliances. Biden’s Farewell Address — I don’t like Meta’s new moderation policy.”
“Trump had a good year, man,” Rock said. “Trump survived an assassination attempt. Won the presidency again by winning the popular vote. Was just named Time ‘Man of the Year.’ You know?”
“It could happen to a nicer guy.”
That may have been the worst of it, as Rock immediately ripped anti-Trump liberals for saying the president-elect’s return to the White House would shatter norms and etiquette.
“A lot of people are scared. Like, ‘Oh, my God, he’s going to be so undignified,'” he mocked. “When I say a lot of people, I’m talking about the nine New Yorkers that didn’t vote for him, okay?”
He then eviscerated Clinton.
“Come on, man, this is not the most dignified job in the world,” Rock said of the presidency. “We’ve had presidents show up to the inauguration with pregnant slaves, okay? And I’m just talking about Bill Clinton.”
Rock continued with some jokes about the Menendez brothers getting out of prison just in time to get deported by the 47th President and teaming up with the world’s “richest African-American,” Elon Musk.
“Trump is not playing. He’s got Elon. They’re going to put them in a rocket ship — call it SpaceMex,” he quipped.
At one point, the former SNL regular addressed Joe Biden’s pardon of Hunter Biden, joking that the president might not have all of his mental faculties, but he can still stick it to people.
“I gotta hand it to Joe. He don’t move as fast as he used to, he don’t talk as fast as he used to,” Rock laughed. “But that middle finger still works.”
The comment elicited some good laughs. Not laughing, however, were leftists on X who suggested Rock needed to be slapped by Will Smith again for daring to make jokes across the political aisle.
“Normalizing the felon will never be funny,” one BlueSky woman wrote. “Love Chris Rock but oof.”
The Ayatollah Khomeini was famously quoted as saying, “An Islamic regime must be serious in every field. There are no jokes in Islam. There is no humor in Islam. There is no fun in Islam. There can be no fun and joy in whatever is serious.” And even he’d probably be wondering today why doctrinaire leftists are such humorless scolds.
A Russian spacecraft docked to the International Space Station (ISS) didn’t just bring supplies to the ISS—it also brought a foul odor. The unpleasant aroma was strong enough to prompt astronauts to close the hatch connecting it to the rest of the space station and initiate anti-contamination procedures.
The Progress 90 cargo ship arrived at the Russian Poisk module at 9:31 a.m. ET on Saturday, November 23, delivering about three tons of food, fuel, and supplies for members of the Expedition 72 crew on board the ISS. After opening the hatch between Progress and the Poisk module, the crew noticed a noxious smell and droplets coming from the cargo ship. The Roscosmos cosmonauts closed the hatch immediately, fearing a possible contamination hazard, RussianSpaceWeb.com reported based on communication between mission control in Houston and the ISS astronauts.
NASA confirmed the report, adding that the foul smell does not indicate a safety concern for the ISS crew. “Space station air scrubbers and contaminant sensors monitored the station’s atmosphere following the observation, and on Sunday, flight controllers determined air quality inside the space station was at normal levels,” NASA wrote on X. “There are no concerns for the crew, and as of Sunday afternoon, the crew is working to open the hatch between Poisk and Progress while all other space station operations are proceeding as planned.
The cargo ship is supposed to stay docked for about six months. Let’s hope the stench doesn’t linger with it.
Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have been locked in a bitter rivalry for supremacy in space exploration. Donald Trump’s return to the White House could boost Musk’s ascent.
As it stands, Musk’s SpaceX is the competition’s undisputed leader: It regularly sends astronauts into orbit, while Bezos’ Blue Origin has yet to launch anyone beyond the outer edge of space.
But Bezos’ company, even if far behind SpaceX, is seen as its closest American competitor, and the two companies have clashed in court over billions of dollars in government funding. More recently, their battle has become increasingly bitter, as the billionaires themselves traded barbs on Musk-owned X.
Now, as Musk spends weeks palling around with Trump at Mar-a-Lago after the election, their proximity has the space industry fearing that Musk could rig the space race in his favor by diverting billions of dollars in government funding to SpaceX. The chief threat to SpaceX’s peers is that Musk will aim to create a monopoly in the private space industry.
Blue Origin has yet to put a single kilo of mass into orbit, much less catch up to the reusability standard set by Falcon 9 almost eight years ago. Meanwhile, with Starship, Musk is working on reducing the cost to orbit by two orders of magnitude.
Politico is indulging in the stupidest kind of scaremongering in a story that was probably shopped around by the same “space industry lobbyist granted anonymity” it quotes spouting off nonsense like this gem: “You’re talking about two of the most unpredictable people in the world getting together. It’s not like chocolate and peanut butter, and you get a great combination. You’re talking about world dominance here.”
This next graf is the big tell:
On Capitol Hill, Blue Origin is trying to raise alarms about potential unfair advantages in the space race. The company has been arguing that any policy that crowds out competition and capacity in civil or military space business could hurt the country’s space program and national security, according to the person who works with Blue Origin. Another person familiar with Blue Origin’s Washington strategy said the company has been trying to remind those on the Hill that its technology will be flying soon and intends to be a competitor.
Blue Origin hasn’t been able to compete so the company is crying to Capitol Hill — and garbage publications like Politico are happy to help.
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