December 18, 2025

ROUTINE BUT NEVER BORING:

I asked Grok to look at the record number of launches set each year by company, going back to 2025. Here are the results:

2005–2017: No single entity exceeded ~30 launches in a year. Russian state launches (via Roscosmos/RKK Energia) peaked around 25–30 in some years, but no major records were set in this timeframe compared to later surges.

2018: China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) – ~39 launches. China set a new modern-era high for a single organization, surpassing previous annual totals by any entity in the post-Cold War period.

2023: SpaceX – 98 launches (96 Falcon 9 + Falcon Heavy missions)
SpaceX more than doubled China’s mark, largely due to Starlink deployments and reusable Falcon 9 technology.

2024: SpaceX – ~134 launches (132–134 Falcon family missions)
SpaceX broke its own record again, with the Falcon 9 fleet alone achieving a Guinness-recognized high for a single rocket model.

2025 (as of December 18): SpaceX – 165 launches. SpaceX already set a new annual record mid-year, continuing the trend of rapid cadence growth. No other company (e.g., CASC in China, ~50–60 launches/year recently) comes close.

It really is SpaceX versus the world.

Posted at 12:45 pm by Stephen Green

DISPATCHES FROM THE LOST GENERATION:

The (very) lengthy tweet concludes with a reference to the above photo

I remember visiting a media company around 2015 that was very “hot” at the time, and the news floor was a sea of very young and hip-looking faces, mostly women and POC. Every once in a while a Steve Ballmer-looking guy in pleated khakis would emerge grinning from a corner office for a coffee refill. He’d peer out over the open-plan desks and hear fingers busily tapping on Macbooks. I sometimes wonder if that guy was smiling because he took pride in being a force for change, or if he was just waiting out the clock, and thinking about that lakehouse on Zillow.

***

My favorite memory from this era is this picture of a dozen white women, which was tweeted out in 2016 with the caption: Notice anything about this Huffington Post editors meeting?” Some poor girl thought this was going to be an iconic image of a bold new media era, where finally women would have a voice, only for it to be roundly ridiculed across dozens of thinkpieces for not including enough POC.”

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE:

(Classical reference in headline.)

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

OH, TO BE IN ENGLAND: We need more people ready to fight, military chief says.

The UK needs “more people being ready to fight for their country” as the nation seeks to deter a potential confrontation with Russia, the head of the military has said.

Chief of the Defence Staff Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton said “a whole-of-society response” was needed, including an increase in regular forces, cadets and reserves.

He also called for more school leavers and graduates to join the defence industry.

While the chief of the defence staff suggested there was only a remote chance of a direct Russian attack on the UK, he told an event at the Royal United Services Institute that so-called hybrid attacks showed the threat was worsening.

Sir Richard said: “Sons and daughters. Colleagues. Veterans will all have a role to play. To build. To serve. And if necessary, to fight.

“And more families will know what sacrifice for our nation means.”

To be fair, they’re busy sacrificing for the nation by being locked up for writing spicy tweets: Police make 30 arrests a day for offensive online messages.

The police are making more than 30 arrests a day over offensive posts on social media and other platforms.

Thousands of people are being detained and questioned for sending messages that cause “annoyance”, “inconvenience” or “anxiety” to others via the internet, telephone or mail.

Custody data obtained by The [London] Times shows that officers are making about 12,000 arrests a year under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 and section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988.

As Kurt Schlichter tweets:

This notion that young British men — specifically the working class ones — are going to sign up to go fight Russia for Ukraine is hilarious. This applies to other countries too, but let’s focus on the Brits. It’s a lesson in how the left skin-suits an institution, demands respect, and finds that it receives none.

These are the same young men who have been told they, their country, and their culture are garbage for the last 20 years. Racist, sexist, transphobic — you know the score. When they dare complain about their communities being changed without their consent, they get slandered. When foreign invaders rape their sisters and wives, the ruling class covers it up. If they take action, or even speak about it, they will be jailed. Yeah, I bet they’re just chomping at the bit to go get killed at the behest of their tormentors.

Of course, Old Blighty’s newfound saber rattling could simply be Labour’s version of Obama’s “stray voltage” mechanism to ride out a particularly bad news cycle:

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll

PEOPLE LOSE FAITH IN THE LAW WHEN IT ISN’T ENFORCED:

So let’s restore bigly faith in the law.

Posted at 11:27 am by Stephen Green

DISPATCHES FROM BLUE COLORADO: Expect a special interest stampede if ‘progressive’ tax passes.

You can predict some of the damage from Initiative 181 just by reading its miserably-written text:

It would amend the state constitution to strip away the protection of the single flat rate.

With constitutional protection gone, it would re-write the tax code to make it more complicated, replacing the single bracket with ten new ones—five for individuals and five for corporations.

The individual income tax brackets would range from 4.21% to 9.51%—far above that of any other state in the region and one of the steepest in the entire country. Moreover, there does not seem to be any protection from “bracket creep,” the insidious process whereby people’s tax rates rise relentlessly merely because they have kept up with inflation. Year after year, you would find yourself paying more and more of your income to the state.

On the corporate side, Initiative 181 would jack up the marginal rate to 9.51%, the nation’s third highest. This is higher than corporate taxes in lefty states such as New York, Massachusetts, and California. What’s more, this burden would be imposed on even relatively small corporations—those earning more than $1 million a year.

Initiative 181 would abolish your TABOR [Taxpayers’ Bill of Rights] tax refunds for any additional money generated.

It would send the extra funds to various social programs, most of which have a record of waste and corruption. Not a single dime would be spent to counter Colorado’s crime wave, retire our excessive debt, or repair our crumbling roads!

But there’s more than the text of this measure reveals. As I pointed out in a previous column, punitive (“progressive”) state income taxes have a documented record of discouraging investment and killing jobs. This is particularly so when a state hikes levies while other states are cutting them, as is happening now.

Colorado Democrats hate TABOR and have been chipping away at it for years, because the 1992 constitutional amendment limits state and local government revenue growth to inflation plus population increases, requires voter approval for tax hikes or debt, and mandates refunds of any excess revenue to taxpayers.

181 would gut the last obstacle separating Democrats and the total Californication of a once-great state.

Posted at 10:41 am by Stephen Green

AT MONTANA STATE, FAKE THREATS TO BOLSTER A FAKE RACISM CLAIM: 18-Month Sentence for Anti-Asian/Anti-Gay Threats Sent by Montana State Univ. Chinese Culture Club President. “Lin cynically exploited these fabricated threats as campaign material for her student senate race. Together, she and Defendant Wu orchestrated campuswide propaganda condemning MSU’s alleged indifference to ‘students of color’—all built on their manufactured crisis.”

At this point, i pretty much assume that anything like this is fake until proven otherwise.

Posted at 10:39 am by Glenn Reynolds

BEN DOMENECH: Trump’s chief of staff can’t sway a media that revels in Republican ridicule.

Oops, they did it again.

The White House decision to cooperate with Vanity Fair, giving the magazine exclusive access to top Trump administration figures, is one more example of what happens when you let the legacy media pretend that this time, it’s changed.

That its editors won’t screw you over, its reporters won’t put the worst possible spin on your remarks, its photographers won’t dream of using Photoshop to highlight your every blemish for social-media snipers to spread far and wide.

Why, oh why, does every Republican administration fall in love with the idea of trying to win over the people who hate them?

Beware of writers who act like you’re a friend.

Unless I’ve bailed you out and didn’t write about it, I assure you, we are not.

It’s been quite a week. An administration that took Hillary’s late 2016 mantra of “fake news” and made it their favorite catchphrase has to know that Vanity Fair is incapable of writing anything but a hit piece about a Republican president’s team. The Vanity Fair debacle, coupled with Trump’s angry wordblast about Rob Reiner and Dan Bongino announcing he’s leaving the FBI, as Trump joked(?), to go back to his talk show, is creating a strong impression of an administration ending the year in utter turmoil.

In a 2010 article headlined, “Obama’s Hell of a Ride,” John Podhoretz wrote:

Something weird happens when presidencies go wrong — presidents become incompetent at doing the things they were always able to do in their sleep, and their aides follow suit. I noted this when I wrote my first book, Hell of a Ride, about the decline and fall of the first President Bush, back in 1993. When Bush spoke, it rained, and his advancemen weren’t quick-thinking enough to move his events indoors. When he went to Japan on a state visit, he vomited. He was so intent on getting out his message of the day that he referred to it as “Message: I Care.”

This week’s events don’t bode well for next November. As John Hinderaker writes at Power Line, “The midterm elections were destined to be tough, given the hysteria into which the Democratic base has whipped itself. But if the midterms turn into a rout, as seems entirely possible, it will be because the administration’s inept public relations efforts constantly help the Democrats to distract the public from the administration’s signal achievements.”

Posted at 10:22 am by Ed Driscoll

THEY FIGHT: Democrats recruit candidates to run in every 2026 race in Texas.

The party is running 104 candidates to fill every congressional and state legislative seat, along with every statewide judicial and state Board of Education race, the Texas Tribune reported. Strategists speaking with the outlet said the move, which will see Democrats use resources in hopeless races, will have an upstream effect by pushing turnout in areas where top-level candidates usually cannot reach.

“Even the most relentless statewide candidate is never going to talk to every voter that they need to,” Texas Majority PAC Director Katherine Fischer told the outlet. “We need a network of talented, compelling Democratic communicators across the state to clearly communicate the message that Republican leadership has failed us, and that Texans should consider voting differently this cycle and in the future.”

The effort will also force Republicans to stretch their resources across the state.

The GOP should do the same in Dem strongholds, if for no other reason than to show Democrats a living, breathing, non-Nazi Republican to dispel the propaganda.

Longterm, the downstream effects could prove useful.

Posted at 9:39 am by Stephen Green

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Trump Hails 2025 Successes, but I’m Just Here for the Trolling. “I mean, I didn’t think that he could top the “official portrait” of the autopen, but Trump never ceases to surprise. The leftmedia hacks have been triggered and it’s beautiful to see. After what they put Trump through during the aforementioned Biden slog, I don’t think he can be too harsh to them. The harshness is all true, of course. His High Holiness the Lightbringer Barack Obama and Joe Biden have long been overdue for some honest assessments of their useless presidencies.”

Posted at 9:08 am by Stephen Green

YOU DON’T HAVE TO SELL ME ON IT, I’M ALREADY IN FAVOR: Ilhan Omar claims Trump travel ban is ‘cruel’ and ‘inhumane,’ says he has ‘creepy obsession’ with Somalians.

Omar appeared on CNN, where she discussed the travel ban in an interview with Wolf Blitzer and argued that the policy separates families. Groups of Somalians in Minnesota have been discovered to have been engaging in fraud by taking money for to provide government services that they never delivered. In some cases there have been kickbacks to others in the community who allowed those non-profit groups to claim they were providing benefits to those persons.

“The biggest worry of the new executive order is that it does separate families,” she claimed. “It doesn’t create an exception for US citizens to have their family members be able to come visit and celebrate milestones with them, so this is a very cruel, inhumane immigration policy that he is putting in place.”

Here’s another thing she recently said: DHS says Rep. Omar’s son was not pulled over by ICE, despite claims.

Posted at 8:37 am by Stephen Green