July 10, 2026
REPAIRING THE MANOSPHERE: On Fatherhood, Princesses and Simping w/Bradley.
ONE OF THE MAIN CONCERNS SEEMS TO BE THAT IT PROMOTES “TANNING CULTURE,” WHICH IS NOT A MEDICAL CONCERN: No, You Shouldn’t Inject a Peptide to Get Tan.
CORN, POPPED: Lab-Leak Payback Has Begun.
The origins of the coronavirus pandemic remain contested; the evidence is incomplete. But pundits, activists, and members of the Trump administration have long insisted that the case is closed, and that the virus slipped out from a lab in China. They’ve maintained the view that U.S. scientists were involved and later tried to hide the facts. They’ve said that justice must be served.
Now the reckoning they want appears to have arrived. An expert on the flu got hauled off by the FBI. A coronavirus researcher was indicted in Detroit. Two prominent virologists stepped down or were removed from senior roles. And a fifth infectious-disease researcher—Anthony Fauci, the central figure in an alleged “lab-leak” cover-up—was recently subpoenaed to appear before the U.S. Senate.
The precise timing of these cases, which have all come to light since April, may be a coincidence. Yet all five are centered on a small community of scientists affiliated with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which Fauci ran for nearly 40 years.
Of course — and read the whole thing.
NYC HAS ITS OWN “STATE DEPARTMENT”?: “A Top Mamdani Official Tried to Meet With Iran.”
A GEORGE, DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF, CANNOT STAND! The news feeds have been hijacked by endless memes of George Costanza. Here are the best ones. “I couldn’t possible understand the computing power that was about to be used to replace every record, photo, and person with George Costanza. I could have never predicted it. Everything was fine, and then, like a virus, George was everywhere. EVERYWHERE.”
Here’s the alpha and the omega, but just keep scrolling to see more than a few fistfuls of Costanza:
SO THAT’S WHY THEY STOPPED TEACH ARISTOTLE:
— Truth Teller (@GuidedBill) July 10, 2026
YOU’D BE AMAZED IF THERE WASN’T ONE: Hold On — Was There a Dirty Quid Quo Bro for Graham Platner?
THIS IS THE WAY: Rubio and DHS Deported Child Molester Walz Tried to Keep In US.
What exactly did Walz, Ellison, and Democrats get out of this? They made it clear that they will let sex offenders on the street as a means to frustrate the enforcement of immigration law. At the same time, Walz also demonstrated his own incompetence to game out this situation more than a single step at a time. In fact, Walz may have made Vang more of a target for DHS and the State Department with his ham-handed abuse of the pardon process. Would DHS have made Vang a priority had Walz not turned him into some bizarre, pedophilic cause celebre?
The end result is that Vang is out of the US and Walz exposed as a radical who will put children at risk to score cheap points on immigration. If Walz could have played this worse, someone will have to explain how.
Much more like this, please.
SMART: US Navy Issued RFIs to Korean Shipbuilders for Destroyers and Oilers. “The United States Navy has formally requested information from South Korea’s leading shipbuilders regarding their capabilities to quickly build destroyers and oilers, according to media reports in Korea. The Korean news agency Yonhap revealed that the U.S. Navy had issued requests for information last month, marking the first formal requests since South Korea launched its “Make American Shipbuilding Great Again” commitments.”
It sucks that we can’t do this domestically any longer — or at least no time soon — but this is where decades of bipartisan neglect by lawmakers and bad planning by the Navy have left us.
HIS LEGACY HAS CERTAINLY AGED BETTER THAN MORE RECENT PRESIDENTS WHO LEFT WITH HIGHER POLL NUMBERS:
Nixon will be vindicated, been saying it for years https://t.co/o7wTAPHa9x
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@christopherrufo) July 9, 2026
REMEMBER THE 80S: Members Only Original Iconic Racer Jacket for Men. #CommissionEarned
OR MAYBE THE DOG WILL EAT HIS HOMEWORK: Platner privately told staff he’ll formally exit Senate race Monday.
Graham Platner privately told staff that he is planning to officially file paperwork to end his Senate campaign on Monday — the drop-dead deadline for him to exit the race.
Why it matters: Though Democrats largely appear to think Platner is done with his bid, his last-minute timing is likely to cause a final pang of anxiety within the party.
Driving the news: Platner made the comments to his team Wednesday night shortly before he announced publicly he was suspending his campaign.
It seems unlikely, but I sure wouldn’t be surprised if he somehow managed to accidentally miss the deadline…
DIVERSITY PROBLEM: Only 1 in 10 Ivy League trustees is Republican, Yale has none: report.
SARAH HOYT’S SHOCKED FACE COULDN’T BE BOTHERED TO LOOK UP FROM ITS BOOK:
Hahaha @nytimes doubles down https://t.co/pYeFRs682c pic.twitter.com/2VVogBQtwN
— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) July 10, 2026
COLD COMFORT — AT BEST: It Looks Like the Democrats Have Been Sending Their Best All Along.
MAYBE BARI WEISS HAS MADE SOME REAL CHANGES AT CBS NEWS:
CBS News anchor tells viewers Democrats dropped Platner because he was looking 'like a loser' https://t.co/go1sW5WHLJ pic.twitter.com/Z1knUPDJyV
— Chris 🇺🇸 (@Chris_1791) July 10, 2026
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Let’s Trigger Lefties With Talk of a Third Term for President Trump. “I continue to marvel at not only how much President Donald Trump has on his plate, but also at the vigor with which he deals with it all. Yes, it’s true that presidents tend to have a lot on their plates, but this president has extra helpings because of the nightmare that preceded him in the Oval Office.”
THE NEW SPACE RACE: China lands reusable rocket for first time, state media says.
IF YOU TAKE SIDES, YOU’LL BE A LOT OF PEOPLE’S ENEMY:
If this is true, Anthropic has a lot to answer for—and much to lose. https://t.co/XcGZFqFRkK
— Mike Lee (@BasedMikeLee) July 10, 2026
STEPHEN CLARK BURIED THE LEDE MORE THAN HALFWAY DOWN ON THIS ONE: Payloads used to dictate the terms of launch. That’s finally changing.
A new report from the Aerospace Corporation helps elucidate why satellite companies are optimizing for Starship. It’s big and reusable, and once operational, it could cut the cost of launching a kilogram of payload into orbit by an order of magnitude from the Falcon 9. This means costs could come down from a few thousand dollars per kilogram to a few hundred.
Karen Jones, a space economist and lead author of the paper, said her research supports some of those optimistic cost projections. She outlines three scenarios, two of which assume an initial launch cost of $100 million for each fully reusable Starship and Super Heavy booster, with marginal costs of 20 or 35 percent. This is in line with the marginal costs of the smaller, partially reusable Falcon 9, which SpaceX can launch for as little as $15 million per flight on a dedicated Starlink mission.
This would bring the per-kilogram launch cost for a fully loaded Starship down to $133 to $233 after 10 reuse cycles. A more optimistic scenario with a $50 million initial launch cost and 20 percent marginal cost would reduce payload costs to $67 per kilogram for a Starship/Super Heavy launch at full capacity after nine use cycles. That’s less than it costs to fill the gas tanks of most SUVs. If SpaceX can make these more optimistic ambitions a reality, it would validate a claim made by Elon Musk in 2022 that a Starship flight could eventually cost as little as $10 million.
“I actually thought I would basically disprove that [claim], and on my first try, I got to $67 per kilogram after nine use cycles,” Jones told Ars. “It’s based upon some significant assumptions in the paper, but it’s not something that’s completely crazy. It certainly wouldn’t be something they’d reach on the first few times, on their first model; but over time, and with a learning curve, why not? I think it’s possible.”
As veteran aerospace engineer Will Collier reminded me recently, “These [Wall Street] analyst dweebs just have no clue what daily orbital access at under $100/kg means.”
Indeed.
I’M SO OLD, I CAN REMEMBER WHEN WIRED WAS A LIBERTARIAN-ORIENTED MAGAZINE: Dimming the Sun Would Help Lower the Risks of El Niño. No, Really.
This year’s El Niño is shaping up to be among the strongest on record, and it’s set to create chaotic weather around the world.
A new study suggests that there could be a way to mitigate some of the impacts of future El Niños and global warming: dimming the sun.
El Niño develops naturally in the tropical Pacific every few years, caused by weakened trade winds that push heat from the ocean toward the coast of South America. This tilts the odds toward higher-than-average global temperatures, as well as droughts in some regions, intense rains and floods in others, and more cyclones in the Pacific. Piled on top of warming driven by burning fossil fuels, a strong El Niño can mean hundreds of billions in economic losses.
The new study argues that deflecting solar energy could cool the ocean and help moderate El Niño events before they become too strong, staving off the worst impacts.
“El Niño is one of these things where something happens in the tropical Pacific, and then it rearranges the way the entire global atmosphere is holding energy that year,” says Katherine Ricke, a coauthor of the study published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances and a climate scientist at UC San Diego and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “It’s an ultimate pressure point in the climate system.”
Ricke and her coauthors looked at using marine cloud brightening, or MCB, as a way to dim the sun in the Pacific. The technique entails spraying seawater into marine clouds to enhance the clouds’ reflectivity. While some pilot projects and randomized controlled trials have tested the technique’s efficacy, they’ve only been on very small scales.
To boldly go to a place that even Barack Obama thought was too bonkers to implement during any of his three terms:
Still though, why bother with half-measures?
