July 30, 2026

THE NEW SPACE RACE: SpaceX Gets $1.6 Billion US Space Force Order for 18 Falcon 9 Launches.

The 18 missions were assigned to SpaceX ‌across two task orders under ‌the U.S. Space Force’s flagship launch procurement program, in which SpaceX, United Launch Alliance, Blue ⁠Origin and ⁠other U.S. launch firms inducted into the program jockey for lucrative mission ​assignments.

SpaceX has bagged at least $7 billion worth of Pentagon contracts this year as the Trump administration has laid groundwork for its Golden Dome missile defense shield, a roughly $185 billion multi-year endeavor heavily featuring Elon ​Musk’s launch and satellite company.

SpaceX in May won $6.5 billion worth of satellite contracts from the ⁠U.S. ⁠Space Force. That included $4.16 billion ⁠for a ​network of airborne moving target indicator satellites and $2.29 billion three days later for communications satellites ​that can pass data between ⁠missile warning and tracking sensors to interceptors in near real time.

The SpaceX award announced on Wednesday was part of an “unprecedented two-month acquisition timeline,” Space Force acquisition official Eric Zarybnisky said in a news release. For years, the service has sought to ramp up the pace with which ⁠it buys spacecraft and rocket launches from the private sector.

For perspective, that’s a little under $90 million per launch — which sits at the low end for military launches, and well below typical ULA or Blue Origin prices.

And 18 launches is only six or seven weeks worth of Falcon 9 launches at the current cadence.

Incredible.

Posted at 1:47 pm by Stephen Green

OCEANIA HAS ALWAYS BEEN IN FAVOR OF LOCKDOWNS:

In case you don’t, here’s how fast the narrative flipped: Kern County doctors use disputed data to suggest Stay Home orders be lifted.

But at the same time, some doctors say the death rate of COVID-19 isn’t nearly as high as officials are leading the public to believe, and are now calling for the stay home orders to end, and the economy to be reopened.

“There are widespread cases, and a small amount of death,” said Dr. Dan Erickson of Accelerated Urgent Care in Kern County. “It’s similar to the flu, as a matter of fact.”

Dr. Erickson, along with colleague Dr. Artin Massihi, held a news conference earlier this week that is now going viral. They even take shots at Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

“We’re actually seeing the patients,” said Dr. Massihi. “Dr. Fauci hasn’t seen a patient in 20 years.”

YouTube has since removed the video, saying in a statement that they “quickly remove flagged content that violate our community guidelines, including content that explicitly disputes the efficacy of local healthy authority recommended guidance on social distancing that may lead others to act against that guidance.”

—L.A.’s ABC7, April 29th, 2020.

Fast-forward to the beginning of June 2020: The Apex of the Pivot.


UPDATE: Suddenly, Public Health Officials Say Social Justice Matters More Than Social Distance. For months, health experts told Americans to stay home. Now, many are encouraging the public to join mass protests.

—Politico, June 4th, 2020.

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

SCENES FROM THE COUNTER-RECONQUISTA:

Portugal is doing much better, but it also isn’t governed by socialists.

Posted at 1:32 pm by Stephen Green

THE ONLY PROBLEM IS, THE REPUBLICANS ARE THE DEMOCRATS’: Kurt Schlichter: The Democrats Are the Republicans’ Secret Weapon.

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve done a lot of media hits and found that I keep facing the same question, even from otherwise friendly interviewers. And it’s a good question.

“Kurt, what are the Republicans offering the voters as a solution to huge problems like affordability, war, and election integrity?”

And my answer is… I don’t know what the hell they’re doing. I know that we’ve got a bunch of poncy dorks running out the clock in the Senate after their constituencies have rejected them for their track record of failure, posturing and posing, and making sure that we absolutely don’t get anything done like the SAVE Act because if true conservatism means anything, it means not doing what conservatives actually want done. Or something.

We’ve got the House. We’ve got the Senate. Lord knows we’ve got the presidency. We even seem to have the Supreme Court. And what do we have to show for it? Actually, a hell of a lot. Donald Trump’s track record is incredible. He’s done more and achieved more and rolled back more of the communist march through our institutions than any president, including the glorious Ronald Reagan, ever dreamed of. But you know what? That was last week. Dudes, what have you done for us lately? That’s the question you’ve always got to answer as a political party, and the answer right now is “Diddly squat.”

Thune, Cornyn, et al. are traitors to their party, and possibly to America. But:

It’s awful to have to run on a platform of “Yeah, we suck but look at those guys—that’s some serious sucking.” But here’s the thing. While we suck, they seriously suck. They supersuck. They are a festival of socialist sucking of such insane intensity that it redefines the concept of sucking such that Stephen Hawking would need to do mathematical calculations otherwise applicable to a black hole to fully express the totality of their sucking.

Let’s look at what the new pinkos on the block had to say on last weekend’s Sunday morning shows. The Democratic Socialists of America is trying to engineer a hostile takeover as they somehow believe that the current crop of Democrats isn’t socialist enough. What’s on their agenda? It’s kind of astonishing that they say it out loud. Their chair, a behemoth called Megan Romer who looks exactly like you would expect the leader of the DSA to look like, came out against having a Senate, having a president, having a Pentagon, having borders, and having prisons. She didn’t hide it—obviously, hiding is not her strong suit—but instead proudly admitted it. This is the cutting edge of the Democrat Party. Congrats, guys. Even John Fetterman, who I used to consider a leftist and now he’s pretty much Genghis Khan in comparison to the rest of his party, called it “anarchy” and asked why the Democrats can’t call out the DSA.

True enough. Read the whole things.

Posted at 1:04 pm by Glenn Reynolds

KEEP ROCKIN’!

Hiltzik’s L.A. Times column celebrating the deaths of those opposed to taking the covid vaccine ran in the beginning of January, 2022. Since then, the paper’s readership has become increasingly selective, as legendary fictional music manager Ian Faith would say: L.A. Times to lay off at least 115 people in the newsroom.

The Los Angeles Times announced Tuesday that it was laying off at least 115 people — or more than 20% of the newsroom — marking one of the largest workforce reductions in the history of the 142-year-old institution.

The move comes amid projections for another year of heavy losses for the newspaper.

The cuts were necessary because the paper could no longer lose $30 million to $40 million a year without making progress toward building higher readership that would bring in advertising and subscriptions to sustain the organization, the paper’s owner, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, said Tuesday.

Drastic changes were needed, he said, including installing new leaders who would focus on strengthening the outlet’s journalism to become indispensable to more readers.

—The L.A. Times, January 23, 2024. I’m sure the laid off L.A. Times staffers will keep rockin’! as they enjoy their funemployment. It’s a blessing in disguise, after all.

Related: Kids and parents turn to coding to boost college, career prospects.

—The L.A. Times, August 1st, 2014.

More classic headlines: Children apologize to their dying elders for spreading COVID-19 as L.A. County reels.

—The L.A. Times, January 12th, 2021.

And of course: Larry Elder is the Black face of white supremacy. You’ve been warned.

—The L.A. Times, August 21st, 2021.

Not surprisingly, the paper finally received a competitor at the start of this year:  The California Post heralds a new era for the Golden State — we will fearlessly tell you the stories that really matter.

As I wrote a year ago, when the New York Post first announced a West Coast edition, they’ve got to do a better job than the L.A. Times, which for decades has been dull-as-dishwater, despite being located in a town that supplies an endless stream of over the top celebrity news, before morphing into a paper that cheered for the demise of potential readers.

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

FARCE: Stephen Colbert Wins Anti-Censorship Award. “The group behind the honor? The Before Columbus Foundation, which the far-Left Associated Press dubs a body that ‘champions diversity in U.S. literature and culture.'”

Posted at 12:29 pm by Stephen Green

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS: We Have Receipts: Four Years Ago, Fauci Said ‘Nothing to Hide,’ ‘Very Happy to Testify’ Before Congress.

If you’re a fan of ordinal numbers, the number five specifically, and constitutional rights being asserted, Wednesday was your day.

For everyone else looking for answers as to why we were locked down thanks to The Experts™ and The Science™ back during the COVID scare, Dr. Anthony Fauci’s testimony before the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee was wholly unsatisfying.

Over 100 times, CNN reported, the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases asserted his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Which is kind of funny when you consider that he was given a pardon for anything he did or may have done while head of NIAID and leading the U.S. response to COVID.

“Under the advice of my attorneys, I will invoke my right under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution to refrain from answering your questions,” Fauci said over the course of two hours.

Which is funny, considering that back when he was retiring from running the country’s COVID response, he said he had “nothing to hide” and would be “very happy to testify” before Congress.

To be fair, Fauci said that to Chris Wallace on CNN, so he likely thought that nobody was watching:

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll

GRRRR:

Congress exempting itself from the laws, mandates, etc. it imposes on everyone else seems like the kind of thing that could be addressed at an Article V convention.

Posted at 11:58 am by Stephen Green

CORN, POPPED: ‘900 megabytes’: Group suing UC system over affirmative action in admissions scores huge data dump.

The University of California was recently forced to hand over a massive data dump to the group suing the system over alleged racial discrimination against white and Asian students in admissions.

“It’s 900 megabytes of data, and I can’t tell you much more than that, because of a protective order,” said UCLA Law School Professor Richard Sander, one of the founders of Students Against Racial Discrimination, the coalition suing the system.

Sander made the comments Saturday during a talk at the Californians for Equal Rights Foundation’s annual summit in Irvine. The professor said obtaining the data was hard fought.

First, he said, the group had to survive attempts to get the lawsuit dismissed, which it did.

“Once you get past motions to dismiss, then you’re in the discovery stage, and discovery means that the two sides try to find out information about each other,” he said. “Of course, what we want is the UC admissions data, data that I’ve been trying to get in various ways for 20 years.”

Discovery can be fun.

Posted at 11:43 am by Stephen Green

CORRECT ON ALL COUNTS:

Posted at 11:27 am by Stephen Green

21ST CENTURY PROBLEMS: OpenAI’s rogue models roamed the internet for 4 days and staged a second attack.

The powerful artificial intelligence models from OpenAI that went rogue and mounted an unprecedented, autonomous cyberattack earlier this month spent more than four days loose on the internet orchestrating the hack, according to a new analysis from the platform that was breached.

Separately, a second AI company confirmed that one of its customers was also targeted by OpenAI’s models during the same event, raising questions about how OpenAI failed to detect the alarming activity for days.

OpenAI admitted last week that two of its most advanced models escaped a closed testing environment and strung together a series of advanced hacking techniques to breach AI developer platform Hugging Face before being discovered.

But in a new analysis published Tuesday, Hugging Face said OpenAI’s two models — one publicly released and a second unreleased — did much more: They carried out 17,600 hacking actions on the internet between July 9 and July 13, during which time the models moved from their first foothold on the open internet to inside Hugging Face’s servers.

And OpenAI has yet to come fully clean on what happened.

Posted at 10:41 am by Stephen Green

THROW ALL THE BOOKS AT HER:

Posted at 10:25 am by Stephen Green