June 3, 2026

ANALYSIS: TRUE.

Posted at 10:55 am by Stephen Green

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 10:48 am by Ed Driscoll

NOT THAT I’M AWARE OF:

Posted at 9:53 am by Stephen Green

21ST CENTURY WARFARE: Pentagon pushes for battlefield AI, some military leaders urge caution.

In a recent annual special forces conference in Tampa, Florida, Adm. Frank Bradley, head of U.S. Special Operations Command, told attendees that troops “have to be very careful about how we come to (AI’s) employment and its inspiration into the delivery of lethality.”

“We, as humans, have to have the confidence that … it’s going to deliver violence only where we intend it to be delivered,” Bradley said.

In response to the remarks, a Pentagon official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told the Monterey Herald that the Pentagon was focussing on efforts to make “functional battlefield tools” with AI to help troops identify targets quickly.

Meanwhile, U.S. Special Operations Command officials said AI should not be a tool for eradicating targets, but to assist troops to focus on their mission. Sgt. Maj. Andrew Krogman said at the conference that AI could be used for administrative tasks or to modernize workflows.

AI performed very well in target selection during the active phase of the Iran War. But as always, please keep a human in the loop.

Posted at 9:38 am by Stephen Green

WHEN THE PUBLIC HEALTH ESTABLISHMENT WRECKED ITS CREDIBILITY FOR A GENERATION:

Posted at 9:32 am by Glenn Reynolds

THE ENEMY WITHIN:

Posted at 9:22 am by Stephen Green

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Sign O’ the Trump Times — Victoria’s Secret Is Hot Again. “I mentioned president Trump in the headline for the triggering effect, but he has played a huge role in corporations and institutions feeling comfortable enough to back away from DEI initiatives that they had been browbeaten for years into adopting.”

Posted at 9:07 am by Stephen Green

BLUE ORIGIN RUD UPDATE:

Posted at 8:51 am by Stephen Green

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE:

Posted at 8:35 am by Ed Driscoll

PEOPLE ON THE RIGHT WILL LIKELY CONCLUDE THEY HAVE TO PURGE THE LEFT OUT OF SELF-DEFENSE: Paul Krugman’s Deranged Call to Purge America of MAGA Is Scarier Than You Think. “Unfortunately, as much as we would like to think it is a mere rhetorical flourish, it is not one at all. If you think that Democrats aren’t serious when they propose what sound like insane measures, just remember what they did during COVID, what they are doing with alphabet ideology (literally sterilizing and mutilating kids and putting sex offenders into girls’ locker rooms), and what they did to President Trump before his reelection. . . . If you don’t know what that means exactly, let me tell you: outlawing political parties, rooting out supporters of the political cause you want to purge, removing academics, doctors, and other professionals associated with the movement, and banning them all from public life. It is Ursula von der Leyen’s wet dream when it comes to AfD. There were also, of course, trials and executions for the top-level malefactors.”

Related: Democrats’ rants confirm their enemies list is serious business.

Posted at 8:30 am by Glenn Reynolds

“THE MOST EXPENSIVE MAGIC TRICK IN AMERICA. AND THE THING THAT DISAPPEARS? IT’S YOUR HOME OWNERSHIP:”

UPDATE (from Steve): The plan was obvious just as soon as Mamdani announced it.

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll

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