June 30, 2026

IT’S GOOD TO BE THE NOMENKLATURA:

Posted at 6:08 pm by Stephen Green

IS IT BANNED IN EUROPE YET? Sony’s Cooling Neck Device Is Coming to the US, and I Got a First Look. “The device’s plate uses a Peltier element, which a Reon representative described as a semiconductor module. When an electric current is applied, it can cool on one side and heat on the other. To maximize cooling performance on the plate’s skin-contacting side, a high-volume fan, a vapor chamber and heat-dissipation fins are used to release the internal heat generated on the opposite side of the plate.”

Posted at 5:53 pm by Stephen Green

FASTER, PLEASE: DOT announces “Return of Supersonic Flight” for commercial airlines.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): A flashback column of mine from 2017.

Posted at 5:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

CHRISTOPHER RUFO: “We’ve moved beyond the smear game.”

 

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

THE GHOST OF JIM WRIGHT SMILES:

Earlier:

 

Posted at 4:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

IT’S DEJA DINKINS ALL OVER AGAIN:  ‘No New Cops!’ Mamdani Ally Brags NYC Won’t End Up Hiring More Police, Despite Previous Reports.

One of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s (D) main political allies bragged that The Big Apple will not have more cops on patrol after the new budget was agreed to on Tuesday — despite NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch announcing in June that more police would be hired.

City Council Member Tiffany Cabán shared her glee on X, with a Canva-style graphic celebrating “No New Cops.”

Cabán noted there would be no increase to NYPD’s headcount, and that the city would instead be focused on “housing, mental health care, substance use treatment, and economic stability.” She said those are “the proven policies that actually keep our communities healthy and safe.”

The council member — who identifies as a queer abolitionist on her X account — took an obvious shot at the tough-on-crime policies of ex-NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

Caban (or whoever wrote her tweet) claims, “This budget is an important check on the failed policy of broken windows policing.” That policy was such a failure that it quickly transformed New York when it was implemented under then-Mayor Guiliani and Bill Bratton, his police chief in the mid-1990s, and largely kept in place by Mike Bloomberg until Bill de Blasio took office at the beginning of 2014.

As Kevin Williamson told me in late 2013, “the thing about Bloomberg is, he’s a busy body and a nanny and self-regarding and sanctimonious and unbearable, and Jesus, are we going to miss him when he’s gone, because Bloomberg, for all of this faults and his weird little psychosis about bacon and salt and soft drinks and sugar and all the rest of it, and smoking, especially, basically kept what was best about the Giuliani administration.”

Good and hard, Fun City, as Caban yearns for the bad old days: NYC, July 1993.

Related: Another Mamdani-Backed Muslim Wins Democrat Primary for State Senator; Claims That “Racism, Capitalism, White Supremacy, and Islamophobia” “Manifested” in 9/11.

Posted at 4:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

KURT SCHLICHTER: Cheer Up! The Birthright Citizenship Case Moves Us Toward Inevitable Victory.

Would I have loved Justice Barrett or Chief Justice Roberts to have defied their natural judicial conservatism—in the non-political sense—and embraced the new thinking today? Yeah, that would’ve been great, but it wasn’t in the cards. Instead, we got two votes that I frankly didn’t expect. And those two votes position us for victory. If one of those five majority justices goes away and President Donald Trump appoints the replacement, it’s very likely we will have a 6–3 majority that supports limiting the current idea of effectively unlimited birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment.

Let me put it in sportsball terms. We didn’t score a touchdown today, but we moved the ball down the field and put ourselves in position for a field goal or maybe even a touchdown in the next couple of plays.

So don’t freak out, don’t cry, don’t scream and yell. There’s no reason to. This result was better than we had any right to expect at this juncture in the process of changing the way the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause is viewed under the law. And this is why keeping the Senate in 2026 is more important than ever.

Cheer up. Don’t doom. We did better than we had any right to expect, and in the end we’re going to win.

Read the whole thing.

Related: Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson Uses … (Wait for It) … TikTok Slang in Concurring Opinion.

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Comcast Split Shows Bigger Is No Longer Seen As Better In The Media Business. “Things have been trending this way for a while, with AT&T’s ill-starred $85 billion acquisition of Time Warner helping to cement the idea that it was possible to be too diversified. Long gone are the days of Redstone or Murdoch empire-building, or GE’s Six Sigma spell-casting.”

Disney was supposed to be too big to fail after buying out every studio it could, but look at what’s become of Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and Marvel under its stewardship.

Posted at 3:49 pm by Stephen Green

THE CRITICAL DRINKER: Supergirl — The Most Predictable Of Disasters.

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

WOEING:

Exit quote: “We question $127.9 million in payments to Boeing, in addition to the $43 million we questioned in a prior 2019 CCP-related report, for a mission that is far from certain.”

Posted at 2:31 pm by Stephen Green

SPACE: This Scrappy Little Rocket Company Just Made a Big Play Against Elon Musk. “Maybe you’ve heard of Rocket Lab, the scrappy New Zealand-based launch company whose innovative Electron small-lift rocket quickly became one of the most popular in U.S. service, thanks to its high success rate and rapid launch cadence. Except for nerds like me paying close attention to the launch industry, Rocket Lab gets a little lost in SpaceX’s shadow. But that might be about to change with the company’s multibillion-dollar acquisition.”

Posted at 2:16 pm by Stephen Green