May 13, 2026

THE NEW SPACE RACE: Blue Origin may need external funding to hit ambitious launch targets.

Chief Executive Dave Limp told employees at a recent all-hands meeting that the company would require outside investment if it were to significantly increase its launch cadence, according to details of the meeting from two people who attended.

He said it would “take a lot of capital” to achieve the number of rocket launches Blue Origin has targeted—more money than would be available with “just one investor,” the people added.

Blue Origin has set ambitious launch targets after reaching orbit with New Glenn, a 98-meter-tall heavy-lift rocket, for the first time in January 2025. It is competing with SpaceX for large commercial contracts and to develop a lunar lander for Nasa’s Artemis program.

Blue Origin is considering fundraising as SpaceX, which dominates the space launch market, gears up to list on the public market as early as June, with a valuation in excess of $1.75 trillion.

Limp told employees Blue Origin would have to demonstrate strong economics but that external funding was one option “on the table,” the people added.

Where’s Jeff Bezos?

Posted at 2:48 pm by Stephen Green

HANG IN THEIR KEIR, JUST LONG ENOUGH TO DRAG ALL OF LABOUR WITH YOU: The Starmer Drama Continues. “A rift is actively tearing the Labour Party to pieces. CNN reports that some 100 MPs signed a letter warning against a leadership contest — which Downing Street swears it didn’t organize. Yeah. Sure.”

Posted at 2:17 pm by Stephen Green

DISPATCHES FROM THE BLUE ZONES: Colorado’s one-party rulers steadily chip away at democracy.

If democracy is truly hanging by a thread, then surely Colorado’s Democrat majority is heroically defending it. I mean, they say that’s their job one, next to banning ketchup packets (Senate Bill 146, seriously).

Which leaves me confused.

Because from my tiny little “just-a-citizen” brain perspective, they seem to spend an awful lot of time removing voters’ power, hiding meetings, dodging taxpayer consent and nullifying ballot initiatives.

Maybe I’m missing the advanced theory of democracy taught only in elite government seminars and overpriced Aspen retreats.

Take Senate Bill 150. It strips away two-thirds of RTD’s publicly elected board seats and replaces them with appointees.

Silly me. I thought democracy involved electing people.

But apparently true democracy is when insiders choose insiders to protect the public from the dangerous unpredictability of… the public.

Then there’s House Bill 1326, which exempts the all-powerful Public Utilities Commission from open meetings laws.

Again, I’m sure there’s a sophisticated democracy-enhancing explanation for this.

Perhaps democracy works best when the public cannot actually watch government decisions being made. Sort of a “trust us you peasants” model of self-government.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 1:46 pm by Stephen Green

HERE’S HOPING/PRAYING THAT “STUDENT LEADERS” AT ELITE (HAH!) COASTAL UNIVERSITIES ARE THE FUTURE LEADERS OF THIS COUNTRY:

Posted at 1:39 pm by David Bernstein

THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC CALLED AND SAID CALIFORNIA MIGHT WANT TO DIAL BACK A NOTCH OR TWENTY:

Much more at Rufo’s Substack: Watching Porn on California’s Death Row. Under Gavin Newsom, state prisoners are turning taxpayer-funded tablets into personal sex machines.

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

OCTOBER 7 BARBARISM BEYOND ALL IMAGINATION: NEW REPORT DETAILS HOW TERRORISTS PERFORMED ALMOST UNIMAGINABLE HORRORS — which some on the Left STILL cast doubt on.

Among the mutilated and butchered bodies of young women slaughtered on October 7, it was their colourful, polished nails that many of the morgue staff remember.

Bright, beautiful, shiny, pink manicures glistening amid the pervasive ‘grey and green’ of death were often the only reminder of who these girls had been just hours earlier.

Because Hamas-led terrorists had not just executed these women. They had ‘deliberately and systematically’ defiled them, as the most comprehensive account of the atrocity released by The Civil Commission today shows.

The terrorists shot their eyes, their faces and their breasts, and even targeted their most intimate parts, to destroy their beauty and rob their loved ones of a final goodbye.

Women were stripped, bound, stabbed, shot and burned. They were executed both during and after rape amid an orgy of violence in which 1,200 people were killed and 250 taken hostage.

Heads were decapitated. Pelvic bones shattered. Even after death, sexual assault continued.

A grotesque, medieval obsession with sexual organs pervaded the crime scenes at the Nova Festival and in the Kibbutzim near Gaza.

At Kibbutz Be’eri, nails, sharp objects, and pieces of metal and plastic were similarly embedded in a woman whose body was discovered naked and bound. On another victim, grenades were used.

While ordinarily newspapers censor the full horrors of such accounts, today, as hard as it is, over 430 witnesses, survivors, experts and medical staff ask that you do not look away.

But the New York Times does: When it comes to Oct. 7, the New York Times prefers baseless claims over actual reports — editorial. “It’s a simple proposition: Whatever our views on the Middle East conflict, we should all be able to agree that dogs cannot be trained to rape human beings…[Nick] Kristof’s column was published and promoted prominently on the NYT’s website, even including a separately produced video clip, one day ahead of a monumental Israeli report into Hamas’s systematic sexual crimes on October 7, which over the past two-and-a-half years have been downplayed or outright denied by a multitude of human rights and women’s rights activists, organizations, and officials.”

UPDATE:

Much more here: The Last Public Editor. In 2017 the New York Times decided social media would be its watchdog. This week we found out what that means.

Posted at 12:55 pm by Ed Driscoll

THAT CAN’T BE GOOD: A Russian ship sank in mysterious circumstances. It may have been carrying submarine nuclear reactors to North Korea.

A Russian cargo ship likely carrying two nuclear reactors for submarines, possibly destined for North Korea, suffered a series of explosions and sank in unexplained circumstances, about 60 miles off the coast of Spain, a CNN investigation has found.
The extraordinary fate of the Ursa Major has been shrouded in secrecy since it sank on December 23, 2024. But it may mark a rare and high-stakes intervention by a Western military to prevent Russia from sending an upgrade in nuclear technology to a key ally, North Korea, CNN reporting suggests. The ship set sail just two months after Kim Jong Un had sent troops to assist with Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.

A flurry of recent military activity around its remains has deepened the mystery around its cargo and destination. US nuclear “sniffer” aircraft have flown over the sunken ship twice in the past year, according to public flight data. And its wreckage was also visited a week after it sank by a suspected Russian spy ship which set off four further explosions, according to a source familiar with the Spanish investigation into the incident.

The Spanish government has said little, only releasing a statement on February 23 after pressure from opposition lawmakers. It confirmed that the ship’s Russian captain had told Spanish investigators the Ursa Major was carrying “components for two nuclear reactors similar to those used in submarines,” and that he was unsure if they were loaded with nuclear fuel.

Not good, but still probably better than North Korea getting them.

Posted at 12:44 pm by Stephen Green

DAVID STROM: Who Thinks Like This?

Karen Bass, when discussing the plight of homeless meth addicts doesn’t ask how to get them off drugs and off the streets, but rather how to provide them with replacement teeth so they can keep on doing meth, setting fires, and pooping in the streets as children walk by.

Who thinks like that? Why? Is that the first question you need to ask, or should you first address the fact that the homeless drug addicts are making parts of L.A. unlivable for people who pay the taxes to make fixing the teeth of homeless meth addicts even possible?

Spencer Pratt’s response to the insanity hits home. He just dropped another AI ad that focuses your attention on the insanity, right after the Los Angeles unions dropped one saying everybody should be proud of Bass.

Instead of doing the Republican thing of laying out detailed policy proposals and taking veiled shots at the failure of Democratic Party policies, Pratt goes for the jugular.

He asks the simple question: Do you want to live in squalor? In Los Angeles, of all places, which has every natural advantage, and one big disadvantage: Democrats.

The excuse for Obama having very little political experience before running for the White House is that his “lived experience” trumped (sorry) his political experience. But so does Pratt’s, thanks to Karen Bass’s incompetence:

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG:

Posted at 12:28 pm by Stephen Green

GET OFF MY LAWN: Chrome Secretly Installing AI On Your PC. “It’s not just Microsoft is stuffing everything full of AI, whether or not its users want it. It is now Google as well with Chrome. Apparently, they’re stuffing AI into Google Chrome. They did not ask people. And according to Futurism, fury is erupting after Google Chrome sneakily installs a 4 gigabyte AI model on users’ PC.”

Posted at 11:42 am by Stephen Green

REALITY BITES: Mamdani Drops NYC Property Tax Hike Plan.

The democratic socialist mayor is expected to formally abandon his proposal to raise property taxes nearly 10% after months of backlash from homeowners, business leaders, and even fellow Democrats worried the move would further damage New York’s struggling economy.

Mamdani’s executive budget instead will rely heavily on billions of dollars in additional state aid negotiated with Gov. Kathy Hochul to help close the city’s budget deficits, multiple outlets reported.

Hochul and Mamdani announced Tuesday that Albany approved another $4 billion in support for New York City, bringing total new state assistance to nearly $8 billion over two years.

So the state will bail out the city.

Posted at 10:40 am by Stephen Green

NEW DEFINITION OF FASCISM JUST DROPPED:

Old and busted: “Making the trains run on time.”

The new hotness? Making the fire engines run on time and having enough water in the reservoir to put out the Pacific Palisades fire.

As George Orwell wrote in 1944, “It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley’s broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.”

Flashback: Fascism, Again. An explainer, of sorts.

UPDATE:

Posted at 10:35 am by Ed Driscoll