November 9, 2026

RUSSELL BRAND SENTENCED TO OVER 10 YEARS IN PRISON FOR RAPE, SEXUAL ASSAULT OF FOUR WOMEN:

British actor Russell Brand was emotionless as he was sentenced to 10 years and six months in prison Monday, after a jury last week convicted him of raping one woman and sexually assaulting three more.

Judge Joel Bennathan handed down the sentence in Southwark Crown Court after the 51-year-old “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” actor was convicted Thursday on one count of rape and three counts of sexual assault. He had faced a maximum of up to life in prison.

Brand was cleared on two other rape charges and one charge of attempted indecent assault tied to the claims of three other women.

In his sentencing remarks, the judge blasted the disgraced comedian’s “casual, arrogant disregard of any woman’s right to say no to you.”

He was slapped with nine years for the count of rape plus 18 months for the three sexual assault charges, which will run consecutively.

What happens next for Brand will be very different to his time in Hollywood: Inside Russell Brand’s Hollywood bubble, where nobody could say no.

When Jimmy Zona started working as Russell Brand’s assistant in about 2011, his first task was to wake his boss up.

Zona recalled walking uncertainly up to the front door of the house in Hollywood that Brand shared with the chart-topping singer Katy Perry, then his wife, before knocking on the door.

“He gets out of bed in his underwear, was like, who the f*** are you?” Zona said. Brand then told him: “From now on, you’re going to come over to my bedside and you’re going to whisper in my ear, ‘Russell, it’s time to start your day’.”

“And I did that until I quit,” Zona said.

He gently broached the possibility of Brand using an alarm on an iPad to wake him up instead. “He was like, ‘No. I need you to do this’.”

This was Brand in Hollywood, where his marriage to Perry had catapulted his fame to dizzying heights.

Brand’s next few years, possibly his next decade, will not be as cosseted: What prison life will be like for Russell Brand.

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll

CORRECT:

Posted at 11:24 am by Stephen Green

JOB OPENINGS: NASA Is Looking for Astronauts to Live and Work on the Moon.

If you feel you’re up for it, you can apply on NASA’s website. The agency said in an announcement that those who are accepted “will join NASA as America returns to the Moon, builds the Moon Base, and lays the groundwork for the first crewed missions to Mars.” They will “train to operate on the lunar surface, live and work beyond Earth, and take on missions that will push the boundaries of human exploration farther than ever before.”

Not just anyone can join. Among NASA’s many requirements are that applicants be U.S. citizens with a STEM field master’s degree, including in “engineering, biological science, physical science, or computer science from an accredited institution.” The window to join isn’t a big one; those interested have until 11:59 PM EST on December 3, 2026, to submit an application. NASA will select its new crop of space-farers in “late 2027.”

Freshen up those resumés.

Posted at 10:38 am by Stephen Green

HEGSETH ALSO CUT OUT MUCH OF THE OBAMA-ERA ROT:

Posted at 10:22 am by Stephen Green

206 BONES MAKE QUITE A SYMPHONY: Human bones, that is. Our skeletons have 206 distinct bones and they work together in some amazing ways. And no, this is not a delayed HillFaith Halloween post!

 

Posted at 9:48 am by Mark Tapscott

GAMBLING LOST SOME BETS ON TUESDAY: It’s not getting much Mainstream Media attention, but the expanding industry took it on the chin last week despite big-time lobbying and advertising outlays. The Washington Stand’s Dan Hart reports.

Posted at 9:42 am by Mark Tapscott

HONEYPOT: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang admits to affair with suspected Chinese spy.

“I was unfaithful to my wife,” Huang wrote in a company-wide letter seen by Semafor. “My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did. I am deeply sorry.”

“To my colleagues at NVIDIA, including those I have worked alongside for decades, and to our board, partners, and shareholders around the world: you deserve better from me. Leading NVIDIA is the privilege of my life. My responsibility is to serve you and be worthy of your trust. I have fallen short of that responsibility. I am fully committed to NVIDIA and will work to earn back your confidence.”

The revelations come after The New York Times reported that US Secretary of State Marco Rubio had drafted a memo to top Trump administration officials warning that the Nvidia CEO was in a close relationship with Chinese citizen Alice Huang, an executive at Singapore-based Megaspeed, which builds data centers in Southeast Asia and provides compute to mainland giant Alibaba. US officials fear the company may have acted as a backdoor for funneling export-controlled Nvidia chips to Beijing, the Times reported.

Flashback to May:

Full details at the thread.

Posted at 9:36 am by Stephen Green

THIS IS HOW IT’S DONE:

“They were shouted over from the first slide. Months of headlines about data centers draining aquifers and spiking bills did that work before anyone walked in. Some residents stayed after the presentation to tell SpaceX they want it there. The county’s planning and zoning hearing is December 9.”

Posted at 9:20 am by Stephen Green

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Trump’s Legacy Will Brilliantly Survive Last Tuesday. “Democrats are always better at messaging because they’re not honor-bound by things like telling the truth or basing their policies in reality. That doesn’t excuse the Republicans from historically having almost no messaging skills whatsoever, though. Republicans not named Donald Trump, that is.”

Posted at 9:05 am by Stephen Green

RICK MCGINNIS AT STEYNONLINE: It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World: Russell Crowe in Master and Commander.

Fans of Peter Weir’s 2003 adventure movie Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World are often heard to ask, “Why didn’t they make a sequel?” as a halfway stop to the question “Why don’t they make more films like this?” The answer to the first question, like any Hollywood mystery, has to do with money and studio expectations.

The answer to the second requires you to think about men, what they like, what they want, and if any of those things have been a priority at any movie studio in the near quarter century since Master and Commander came out.

Because the audience that’s grown up around the film is palpably male, which GQ magazine thought worth exploring, in a 2023 story written by senior editor Gabriella Paiella that stated plainly: “If you kidnapped a hundred of Hollywood’s top minds and forced them to work around the clock, they could not engineer a more exquisite Dad Movie.”

It’s worth mentioning that the GQ story came out at the same time social media was briefly aflame with women asking men in their lives how often they thought about Rome. So it was time once again to hire a woman to wonder aloud just what was up with men, after all – in no less than GQ magazine. (Men’s magazines have, for years, hosted regular variations of this exercise – a regular, occasionally hostile and more than faintly condescending interrogation of its readership, their tastes and motivations that’s rarely echoed by women’s magazines.)

QED: British GQ’s condescending 2018 interview with Jordan Peterson, at the height of his superstardom. As I wrote back then:

Why would British GQ — whose name is a contraction of its original American title Gentlemen’s Quarterly serve as a platform for a radical feminist interviewer who so hates their core audience of British males? It’s the equivalent of Ebony hiring an anti-black racist or Rolling Stone hiring a reviewer who hates rock music and its fans. To Americanize what Robin Ashenden writes above at Spiked regarding the modern BBC’s disdain for Python, evidently British GQ also believes the role of the corporation is to patronize and re-educate its readers.

During Trump’s first term, Hollywood began to settle into a similar stance (see also: Kennedy, Kathleen), which answers why there are so few — if any — modern films with the tone of Master and Commander. 

Posted at 8:35 am by Ed Driscoll

LESS THAN IT SEEMS: Google and Microsoft among those signing up to OpenAI’s plan for a new website crawling standard — including opting-out of internet scraping.

Google and Microsoft have joined OpenAI and Anthropic in promising to honor a single line in robots.txt that tells AI developers whether a website’s content can be used to train their models.

Until now, a site that wanted to say no had to write a rule for each company’s crawler, and sometimes for several crawlers run by the same company. The shared signal is meant to replace that sprawl with a single entry that every participating provider reads the same way.

That is genuine progress for overworked webmasters, but the promise is narrower than much of the coverage suggests: The new line states a preference about how content may be used rather than stopping bots from fetching it; it is not an approved standard, does nothing about content already collected, and none of the four major players fully honor it yet.

So less of a new standard and more like something the companies involved can point to and claim they’re doing something.

Posted at 8:34 am by Stephen Green

JONATHAN TOBIN: Why do American Jews vote for antisemites like El-Sayed?

In order to fully understand why the majority of Jews remain among the most loyal supporters of the Democrats, one needs to comprehend the cultural shift among Americans in general when it comes to politics. It is now axiomatic that in this hyper-partisan era, in which most Americans are thoroughly secular, politics now plays the role in their lives that was once played by religion.

That is even more the case for the overwhelming majority of Jews, who are non-Orthodox and politically liberal.

For this dominant sector of U.S. Jewish demography, liberal political stands—a list of beliefs that can shift with changing political fashions on the left—and devotion to the Democrats is their religion. Indeed, the positions taken by the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, the policy arm of the largest U.S. Jewish denomination, are more or less those of most Democrats on a host of issues, many of which are not specifically Jewish in scope.

Dennis Prager made a similar point back in 2006: “Despite their secularism, Jews may be the most religious ethnic group in the world. The problem is that their religion is rarely Judaism; rather it is every ‘ism’ of the Left. These include liberalism, socialism, feminism, Marxism and environmentalism. Jews involved in these movements believe in them with the same ideological fervor and same suspension of critical reason with which many religious people believe in their religion. It is therefore usually as hard to shake a liberal Jew’s belief in the Left and in the Democratic Party as it is to shake an evangelical Christian’s belief in Christianity. The big difference, however, is that the Christian believer acknowledges his Christianity is a belief, whereas the believer in liberalism views his belief as entirely the product of rational inquiry.”

Posted at 8:22 am by Ed Driscoll

DON’T LISTEN TO CRAZY PEOPLE:

Posted at 8:18 am by Stephen Green

GOTTA FLY THAT FREAK FLAG: You Thought Woke Was Dead? It Was Hibernating. “The woke can’t contain themselves. On Sunday, New Jersey Democrats introduced legislation that adopts a definition of Islamophobia that includes factual criticism of the religion and its customs and includes civil and criminal penalties. The Houston mayor has already told his officers not to honor ICE detainers, despite a state law banning sanctuary cities. And even in Washington, D.C., they can’t keep hiding the ball.”

Posted at 8:03 am by Stephen Green