May 14, 2026

NEWS YOU CAN USE:

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll

THE NEW SPACE RACE: SpaceX unveils sweeping Starship V3 upgrades ahead of May 19 launch.

Here is an explicit, broken-down list of the key changes, first starting with the changes to Super Heavy V3:

  • Grid Fin Redesign: Reduced from four fins to three. Each fin is now 50% larger and stronger, repositioned for better catching and lifting performance. Fins are lowered on the booster to reduce heat exposure during hot staging, with hardware moved inside the fuel tank for protection.
  • Integrated Hot Staging: Eliminates the old disposable interstage shield. The booster dome is now directly exposed to upper-stage engine ignition, protected by tank pressure and steel shielding. Interstage actuators retract after separation.
  • New Fuel Transfer System: Massive redesign of the fuel transfer tube—roughly the size of a Falcon 9 first stage—enables simultaneous startup of all 33 Raptors for faster, more reliable flip maneuvers.
  • Engine Bay / Thermal Protection: Engine shrouds removed entirely; new shielding added between engines. Propulsion and avionics are more tightly integrated. CO₂ fire suppression system deleted for a simpler, lighter aft section.
  • Propellant Loading Improvements: Switched from one quick disconnect to two separate systems for added redundancy and reduced pad complexity.

Next, we have the changes to Starship V3:

  • Completely Redesigned Propulsion System: Clean-sheet redesign supports new Raptor startup, larger propellant volume, and an improved reaction control system while reducing trapped or leaked propellant risk.
  • Aft Section Simplification: Fluid and electrical systems rerouted; engine shrouds and large aft cavity deleted.
  • Flap Actuation Upgrade: Changed from two actuators per flap to one actuator with three motors for better redundancy, mass efficiency, and lower cost.
  • Faster Starlink Deployment: Upgraded PEZ dispenser enables quicker satellite release.
  • Long-Duration Spaceflight Capability: New systems for long orbital coasts, orbital refueling, cryogenic fluid management, vacuum-insulated header tanks, and high-voltage cryogenic recirculation.
  • Ship-to-Ship Docking + Refueling: Four docking drogues and dedicated propellant transfer connections added to support in-space refueling architecture.
  • Avionics Upgrades: 60 custom avionics units with integrated batteries, inverters, and high-voltage systems (9 MW peak power). New multi-sensor navigation for precision autonomous flight. RF sensors measure propellant in microgravity. ~50 onboard camera views and 480 Mbps Starlink connectivity for low-latency communications.

Believe it or not, there’s more.

Two years ago, the biggest and most powerful rocket ever flown was Starship V1. Last year, it was Starship V2. V3 is about to become the biggest and most powerful rocket ever flown — but don’t worry, the company already has plans for V4.

Posted at 11:43 am by Stephen Green

EUROPE WILL NEVER FORGIVE THE JEWS FOR THE HOLOCAUST:

Exit quote: “By finding a way to stain the Jews and Israel with those same moral evils they themselves feel the weight of, but for imaginary instead of genuine reasons, Europeans can not only remove but reverse the mark of the evil they inflicted on Jews over their entire history, not remotely least during the Holocaust.”

Earlier: Brendan O’Neill on Holocaust Envy.

UPDATE:

Posted at 11:30 am by Ed Driscoll

HOW MUCH LONGER WILL SACRAMENTO ALLOW THE HARSH LANGUAGE? The Only Bear Defense Still Legal in California Nat’l Parks: Horns, Bells and Harsh Language.

California is, well, California. Besides being America’s utopian ideal for the civilian disarmament industry, the left coast’s great minds work damned hard to ensure that even defensive measures are difficult to acquire or downright illegal. This is a place, for instance that tried (though thankfully failed) to ban civilians from owning body armor. Self-defense ammo is banned in San Francisco. We could go on, but the list is virtually endless.

But we can’t blame the ban on carrying bear spray in California’s national parks on Golden Staters. The parks are under the aegis of the National Park Service. The feds.

That’s right, if you’re going to be hiking, camping, or carrying a pick-a-nick basket into Yosemite or one of the other four national parks in Cali, don’t bring bear spray with you. It’s against the law. As ActiveNorCal notes, that usually comes as a surprise to visitors from normal states where carrying a (somewhat) effective defense against being mauled by a bear is just common sense.

What’s the rationale for outlawing bear spray?

“The reason it is banned comes down to the bears themselves. California’s national parks are home exclusively to black bears, which are far less aggressive than grizzlies. The National Park Service says bear spray is unnecessary for black bear encounters and that no one has been killed or seriously injured by a black bear in Yosemite’s recorded history.”

Oh. They claim you really don’t have to worry about California’s black bears. They’re just more docile there.

Heh.

Posted at 10:41 am by Stephen Green

TRUMP-XI SUMMIT:

Posted at 10:25 am by Stephen Green

AT REALCLEARBOOKS, a powerful review of Roger Simon’s new novel, Emet. “Although the tale starts in Nashville, it soon shifts to Cyprus and then Israel, and it has plenty of action with scenes of danger and suspense. The settings are ones Simon is familiar with, and he describes them with great specificity. This assists in making a boldly imaginative story more believable.”

I read it and liked it. The book — with my blurb — is here.

Posted at 9:55 am by Glenn Reynolds

THEY’RE STILL ADDICTED: To earmarks, that is, the Gateway Drug to Federal Spending Addiction, as Dr. No, aka Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), famously said years ago as he exposed the infamous “Bridge to Nowhere.” Today, Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) unveils the 2026 edition of its Pigbook, documenting the thousands of earmarks Democrats and Republicans pigged out on in the current federal budget.

Posted at 9:48 am by Mark Tapscott

CDR SALAMANDER: Carriers: Not Dead Yet, and Unquestionably not Unloved.

Ethan Gossrow over at Naval News did a detailed look at the carrier portion of the 30-year shipbuilding plan that gives some texture for those who, like myself, are concerned about the slow approach to bringing new carriers online.

Even though today is no different from any other day over the last half decade, there are those who will continue to try to explain why the USN’s CVNs are “obsolete” and not worth the investment. However, reality continues to get in their way, as he quotes from the Plan:

“Underpinning Expanded Maritime Maneuver (EMM) the CVN serves as a persistent, survivable, mobile sea base that enables the Navy to dominate contested environments and deliver decisive effects at ranges that outpace adversary anti- access/area-denial (A2/AD) envelopes without the need for Access, Basing, and Overflight.”

There is no other way to project national will anywhere on the planet like a CVN. There just isn’t.

Even though we are an 11-carrier navy in a 15-carrier world…we’re not growing.

Read the whole thing. I’d just add that if I had a dime for every time the carrier had been pronounced obsolete, I could almost buy one.

Posted at 9:39 am by Stephen Green

THIS IS MY STATE ON DEMOCRATS:

Exit quote: “HB26-1430 is basically lawmakers looking voters dead in the eyes and saying: ‘Aw that’s cute. You thought ballot initiatives still controlled government.'”

Not one more word about “democracy,” Democrats. Not one more word.

Posted at 9:23 am by Stephen Green

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: I’m California Dreaming About Karen Bass Losing Her Job. “The wild card in the Los Angeles mayoral race is the unmitigated awfulness of Karen Bass. It’s nigh on impossible to put lipstick on the pig that is her legacy as mayor. Pratt has the money to keep attacking Bass for the duration. He may very well be able to inspire a flood of independent voters to propel him to victory. He’s so good at staying on message that some Democrats could shed their blinders. His potential path to a win is loaded with ifs, but the fact that he’s in the conversation at all is miraculous.”

Posted at 9:08 am by Stephen Green

THE MANAGERIAL GOVERNING CLASS’S WORST NIGHTMARE IS FOR THE VOTERS TO GET WHAT THEY WANT: Why the European Right Keeps Rising.

What is rising across Europe, in Germany, in Austria, in France, in the Netherlands, in Italy, is not a single party but a recognition by an every growing number of citizens: That elections, in the form they have taken since the 1990s, have stopped producing the changes voters keep asking for. The British political scientist Colin Crouch described this condition twenty years ago in a book called Post-Democracy. Although the formal rituals continue – people going to the polls, watching the debates, not studying the party manifestos – all the substantive decisions most people see as existential priorities like migration and energy, are made elsewhere: At the European level, in supranational bodies, in NGO networks supported by public money, and in administrative organs accountable to nobody the voter can remove. The state, whose representatives often speak about “saving democracy” these days, actually likes this pattern.

Something similar obtains here, and our managerial class is brutally resisting the loss of its unaccountable power, and has been for a decade.

Posted at 9:06 am by Glenn Reynolds

WELL, GOOD: Overdose deaths fall for 3rd straight year amid a changing drug supply and funding cuts.

About 70,000 Americans died of drug overdoses last year — about 14% fewer than the previous year, according to preliminary government data.

It was the third straight annual drop, making it the longest decline in decades, according to federal data released Wednesday. The 2025 total is about the same as the tally in 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Declines were seen across a number of drug types, including fentanyl, cocaine and methamphetamine.

Overdose deaths fell in the vast majority of states, although seven saw at least slight increases, including jumps of 10% or more in Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico, the preliminary data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed.

“I’m cautiously optimistic that this represents really a fundamental change in the arc of the overdose crisis,” said Brandon Marshall, a Brown University researcher who studies overdose trends.

It might be, like the crack epidemic of the ’80s and early ’90s, fentanyl is beginning to run out of victims.

Posted at 8:37 am by Stephen Green

THE REAL LEWIS & CLARK: School children used to learn about the incredibly courageous expedition undertaken beginning in 1804 by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to explore the vast lands acquired by President Thomas Jefferson with the Louisiana Purchase. Today, if they hear about it at all, it’s likely in the false context of the White Man stealing the frontier from the “Indigenous Peoples.”

In fact, as Rod Martin lays it out this morning, the Lewis & Clark Expedition was a crucial event in the establishment of the young American republic as a continental power. Without it, the North American continent likely would today look like Europe, an assemblage of disparate, feuding dominions. Lewis & Clark expanded America and not just geographically.

“Together they left behind an incalculable contribution to science, to exploration, and to the advance of the American Republic. Their expedition was not merely an adventure but an assertion: that America would not be a coastal power clinging to the ocean’s edge, but a continental one, willing to push into the unknown, to master it, and to make it a civilization and a home,” is how Martin puts it. This one ought to be essential reading for every American, beginning in elementary school.

Posted at 8:34 am by Mark Tapscott

ANOTHER TARGET OF TRUMP’S ANACONDA STRATEGY:

If you wonder why the Pope is attacking Trump, this is why.

Posted at 8:30 am by Glenn Reynolds

THAT’S A TELL:

Posted at 8:21 am by Stephen Green

YES: House Judiciary Chairman urges DOJ to permanently dismiss all Trump cases after bombshell report.

“It’s probably time that this all just ended,” Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, said Wednesday night after Just the News reported new documents it obtained revealed the FBI at the end of the Biden presidency secretly took the rare step of preserving evidence from a dismissed January 6 prosecution until 2030, raising alarm the bureau could revive its prosecution after Trump leaves office.

The agents in the controversial Arctic Frost case also wrote a new memo insisting they believed Trump violated laws, creating a fresh roadmap for prosecution after Trump’s presidential immunity from prosecution ends in 2029.

Jordan, who played a crucial role in debunking Russia collusion allegations against Trump and chronicling FBI abuses in the targeting of conservative figures since 2016, reacted to the report by saying Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche should declare “this thing is done, over with. A-B see you later.”

He said DOJ asking the courts to discard all prior prosecutions with prejudice — meaning they couldn’t be re-filed — was “the right approach.”

More at the link.

Posted at 7:35 am by Stephen Green