June 3, 2026

FROM JEFF DUNTEMANN:  Cold Hands and Other Stories.

#CommissionEarned

Veteran computer author Jeff Duntemann’s second collection of short fiction runs the gamut from spaceflight to mathematically rigorous witchcraft. The volume includes “Cold Hands,” (nominated for the Hugo Award) “Our Lady of the Endless Sky,” “Inevitability Sphere,” “Whale Meat,” “Born Again, With Water,” “Drumlin Boiler,” “Drumlin Wheel,” and “Roddie,” plus a new excerpt from his hard SF nanotech adventure novel, The Cunning Blood.

Posted at 7:36 am by Sarah Hoyt

THE NEW SPACE RACE: SpaceX gets US approval to test new Starfall capsules for space manufacturing.

According to the newly released documents, Starfall will provide both in-space manufacturing and point-to-point cargo delivery services. This is in line with previously announced plans for Starship to rapidly deliver military cargo for the U.S. military.

The Starfall vehicles could also serve as a “proliferated successor” to the International Space Station (ISS), as they could support “a self-sustaining manufacturing economy in space”.

In order to create a “self-sustaining commercial in-space manufacturing market”, the vehicles would offer access to “microgravity and vacuum, loiter on orbit, and safe return from orbit as a service at scale,” the documents state.

The FAA’s documents do not provide any information regarding potential launch dates for the first Starfall missions. However, the agency does clearly state that Starfall would be a large-scale project if it is eventually greenlit and officially announced by SpaceX.

According to the documents, Elon Musk’s private space company “plans to develop a mass-producible reentry vehicle that can precisely deliver cargo from space to various locations on Earth, which would be able to launch on either Falcon 9 or Starship.”

Instead of One Big Station, think of Starfall as an “Army of Davids” approach to microgravity manufacturing and experimentation, to coin an Instaphrase.

Posted at 7:34 am by Stephen Green

BUT YOU CAN’T HAVE ANARCHO-TYRANNY IF PEOPLE CAN DEFEND THEMSELVES:

Posted at 7:25 am by Glenn Reynolds

SCOTT PELLEY FIRED FROM CBS NEWS AFTER 60 MINUTES CRASHOUT:

In an early statement to The New York Times, Pelley humbly compares himself to a combat veteran.

Mr. Pelley, in a telephone interview on Tuesday evening shortly after he was fired, said he had devoted decades of his life to “60 Minutes,” which he said he still cared about deeply.

“I have been in combat in Afghanistan,” Mr. Pelley said. “I have been in combat in Iraq. I have been in the war zone in Ukraine multiple times, risking my life and the happiness of my family because of my devotion to the broadcast.”

Of course, there’s only one thing Pelley can do now that he’s been fired by CBS:

I’m sure an audience of at least dozens are eagerly awaiting the Amazon Grand Tour-style reboot of 60 Minutes — just imagine the opening scene, when Pelley puts the band back together again!

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll

KONSTANTIN KISIN: How America’s Racial Politics Poisoned Britain.

To understand how we got here, you have to understand what the post-Floyd “reckoning” actually did to British institutions—especially the police. The response to Floyd’s death wasn’t merely emotional, nor was it just symbolic. It was ideological, and it was systematic. Police forces across the country, including the one that attended Henry’s murder, underwent mandatory diversity and anti-racism training. A page still on the force’s website today states that its officers are committed to “ensuring Hampshire & Isle of Wight Constabulary . . . is anti-racist in all it does.”

The principle drilled into officers, explicitly or implicitly, was that accusations of racism must be taken with the utmost seriousness—that the historic failure of institutions to believe minority victims of racism was the original sin, and it needed atoning for.

Racism is bad. Attempting to address it is good. The problem is what happens when you apply the concepts of anti-racism without real-world judgement: You train officers to weigh an allegation of racism so heavily that it overrides the evidence in front of their eyes. You produce exactly the outcome we saw in Southampton—a man bleeding to death on the pavement, begging for help, being told by the officers who should be saving his life that they don’t think he’s been stabbed.

What is particularly striking about this case is the way it mirrors, almost exactly, the injustice that movement was supposedly designed to prevent. George Floyd died saying “I can’t breathe” while a police officer knelt on his neck. Henry Nowak died saying “I can’t breathe” while police officers, kneeling on his back, handcuffed him. The British establishment that wept for Floyd has been conspicuously quiet about Nowak. Politicians who marched through London’s streets in 2020 have not rushed to the cameras. The corporations that changed their logos and funded diversity initiatives have not issued statements.

In his 2000 book, The Abolition of Britain, Peter Hitchens wrote:

Too often this era is dismissed lightly with the old cliché that the American troops were ‘overpaid, oversexed and over here’. Thanks to David Reynolds’ book Rich Relations: The American Occupation of Britain 1941–45, we now have a serious account of this immensely influential period in the national life, one which changed the British people’s view of themselves and turned the eyes of millions towards America as a place where life was more abundant and less bound in by history, tradition and class. More than fifty years after the American forces left, the radical journalist Jonathan Freedland urged in Bring Home the Revolution that this country should introduce American democratic methods and become a republic on the U.S. model. But what the British common people actually liked about America was its way of life, its food, its music, its language and its classlessness, not its way of choosing its town council, its judges or even its head of state.

They had already been exposed to a rather lurid idea of America through the cinema—even in the 1920s and 1930s it was noticeable that working-class audiences preferred American movies, while the middle class were happier with British-made films. Now real Americans, in huge numbers, arrived to live amidst the British.

Fast-forward to 2o2o:  George Floyd death: Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer takes a knee in support of Black Lives Matter movement.

UPDATE: “The race card would not have been used by the perps — indeed it would not even have been imagined by them — had it not been manufactured and indeed subliminally advertised,” Richard Fernandez tweets. “Two knives were plunged into the dying student that night. First the physical blade now in some evidence room. But there is a second political one and it is still loose on the streets.”

MORE:

Tweet concludes, “This is happening now. Real-time suppression. The cover-up is not history. It is happening in front of you. A British Prime Minister is silencing his own people to protect a narrative that kills children. Let that sink in. Then scream.”

UPDATE (June 3rd, 12:45 am): And thus, 2020 comes full circle:

Posted at 12:45 am by Ed Driscoll