December 15, 2025

HERE COMES DOGE II: Trump administration launches new cross-government recruitment effort to put Silicon Valle technologist/AI stars in key positions to help solve feds’ biggest, most complex digital problems.

Posted at 3:06 pm by Mark Tapscott

THE NEW SPACE RACE: China plans 2026 debut of new rocket for crewed lunar and LEO missions

The Long March 10 and Long March 10A are being developed as part of China’s next-generation human spaceflight plans. The former, a three-stage rocket featuring a triple-core first stage with 5.0-meter-diameter cores, is designed to launch a new crew spacecraft (Mengzhou) and a separate lunar lander into translunar orbit as part of plans to land Chinese astronauts on the moon before 2030.

The latter, the 10A, is a two-stage, single-stick variant for low Earth orbit (LEO) launches, designed to send a LEO variant of Mengzhou to the Tiangong space station. LEO Mengzhou is designed to be partially reusable and can carry more astronauts to Tiangong.

China’s human spaceflight agency, CMSEO, hinted in October at a planned first flight of the Long March 10 and the Mengzhou spacecraft in 2026, with a logo design competition for the Mengzhou-1 crew spacecraft mission.

CALT’s statement does not make clear if the debut flight will be crewed or uncrewed, nor did it explicitly state the mission will be an integrated launch of the Long March 10A and Mengzhou spacecraft.

When’s that next Starship flight test, Elon?

Posted at 2:46 pm by Stephen Green

SAD:

Posted at 2:33 pm by Stephen Green

I’VE HAD MY DOUBTS ABOUT THEM: Man shocks doctors with extreme blood pressure, stroke from energy drinks: His blood pressure was 254/150. Readings of 180/120 are considered an emergency. “Four weeks into his recovery, he was on five different drugs to try to bring down his blood pressure. At that point, doctors pushed for more lifestyle information from the man, who finally revealed that he had a habit of drinking an average of eight high-potency energy drinks every day.”

No. Just no.

Posted at 2:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BLOG: This is Why You Should Never Trust a CNN (Or Any Mainstream Media) ‘Expert’ Analyst…About Anything.

CNN’s Chief Law Enforcement and Intelligence Analyst John Miller:

What we’re told from law enforcement sources now is that the seized two firearms from this 24-year-old suspect [in the Brown University shooting]. One of those firearms, we are told, was equipped with a laser sight device.

This has significance because number one, that’s a fairly sophisticated device for a handgun where when you aim it, a red dot goes where you want to target, and if you fire at that point, the bullet goes where the dot is. It’s the kind of thing used mostly by professionals, tactical people, military people.

Are they now?

Posted at 1:44 pm by Stephen Green

A BILLION-DOLLAR LOSS IS STILL CHEAPER THAN STAYING IN NEWSOM’S CALIFORNIA, I GUESS:

UPDATE (From Ed): “Tim Waltz got caught. Gavin Newsom got a presidential campaign.”

Posted at 1:35 pm by Stephen Green

TINIEST TRUMP SCANDAL OF ALL TIME? New State Department FONT Policy!

This could qualify as the tiniest Trump scandal of all time — even smaller than the “Trump dumped all the fish food in the koi pond” scandal. It’s a FONT scandal. NBC News thought this was hot-buns news from the Department of State:

That’s right: we’re supposed be outraged by this: “Calibri font is the latest casualty in the Trump administration’s war on diversity and inclusion.” Admission of guilt: I use Calibri font constantly as I write up articles. I don’t remember anyone on the right railing against Calibri font.

* * * * * * * * *

Then it became more ridiculous: JustMindy at Twitchy flagged Steve Herman, a former White House reporter for the supposedly objective Voice of America, compared this to the Nazis:

The Nazis, in 1941, banned the Fraktur font because it was “too Jewish.”

Could there be a possibility that there is anything Team Trump does that can’t be compared to the Nazis?

At the Free Press, Nellie Bowles jokes, “That font is too woke:”

The State Department is cracking down on woke typefaces. They announced this week that the Biden-era font Calibri is banned from official forms, and we’re back to Times New Roman. A serif, like what this country was built on. Calibri is the streamlined font that has no serifs, and disability activists say it’s better for them, which doesn’t really make sense to me but whatever. I guess they want it to be like braille? Or Comic Sans, to draw in all IQ levels? I write in sans serif font but the lib one (Arial) and not the libertarian one (Helvetica).

Say what you will about Calibri, it has nowhere near the ubiquity that Helvetica had in the mid-to-late 20th century, seamlessly interlinking federal and local governments and the biggest of big corporations into one homogeneous whole. Or as I dubbed it in 2010, “Liberal Fascism: The Font.”

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

DISPATCHES FROM THE BLUE ZONES: Minnesota’s massive Medicaid fraud a warning for Colorado.

A natural question follows. Does Colorado have a similar program? Like birds of a feather flocking together, both Minnesota and Colorado have a bad habit of expanding Medicaid, dating to the first expansion allowed by ObamaCare and continuing on up through COVID.

It turns out we do. The story begins with House Bill 24-1322. While the bill doesn’t create a carbon copy of Minnesota’s Department of Housing Stabilization, it did start the ball rolling on something even bigger, tasking the Department of Healthcare Policy and Financing (HCPF) with studying the feasibility of creating a similar program subsidizing both housing and nutrition in Colorado.

From the bill: “If HCPF determines that providing these services is budget neutral to the General Fund due to offsetting reductions in medical services and other expenditures, the department must seek federal authorization to cover the services by July 1, 2025.”

I looked briefly through the study produced by HCPF, and sure enough they concluded that this Medicaid expansion could be done without spending any extra money. They also found that you could shuffle some existing services around, bundling them up for convenience.

If you’re wondering how more government-subsidized services could happen without spending more money, Senate Bill 25-308, which implements the changes into law, spells it out. In broad strokes it’s more Medicaid “money laundering” with Colorado convincing the feds to give us money for something and then shifting state dollars to other priorities.

From the bill’s fiscal note: “Under the approved waiver, the state can now draw down federal Medicaid matching funds, and redirect the freed-up state funds to expand and enhance the services.”

Why, it’s almost as though massive fraud were built into everything done in response to COVID.

Posted at 12:42 pm by Stephen Green

JACOB SAVAGE: The Lost Generation.

The doors seemed to close everywhere and all at once. In 2011, the year I moved to Los Angeles, white men were 48 percent of lower-level TV writers; by 2024, they accounted for just 11.9 percent. The Atlantic’s editorial staff went from 53 percent male and 89 percent white in 2013 to 36 percent male and 66 percent white in 2024. White men fell from 39 percent of tenure-track positions in the humanities at Harvard in 2014 to 18 percent in 2023.

In retrospect, 2014 was the hinge, the year DEI became institutionalized across American life.

In industry after industry, gatekeepers promised extra consideration to anyone who wasn’t a white man—and then provided just that. “With every announcement of promotions, there was a desire to put extra emphasis on gender [or race],” a former management consultant recalled. “And when you don’t fall into those groups, that message gets louder and louder, and gains more and more emphasis. On the one hand, you want to celebrate people who have been at a disadvantage. On the other hand, you look and you say, wow, the world is not rooting for you—in fact, it’s deliberately rooting against you.”

As the Trump Administration takes a chainsaw to the diversity, equity, and inclusion apparatus, there’s a tendency to portray DEI as a series of well-meaning but ineffectual HR modules. “Undoubtedly, there has been ham-fisted DEI programming that is intrusive or even alienating,” explained Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor in The New Yorker. “But, for the most part, it is a relatively benign practice meant to increase diversity, while also sending a message that workplaces should be fair and open to everyone.”

This may be how Boomer and Gen-X white men experienced DEI. But for white male millennials, DEI wasn’t a gentle rebalancing—it was a profound shift in how power and prestige were distributed. Yet practically none of the thousands of articles and think-pieces about diversity have considered the issue by cohort.

This isn’t a story about all white men. It’s a story about white male millennials in professional America, about those who stayed, and who (mostly) stayed quiet. The same identity, a decade apart, meant entirely different professional fates. If you were forty in 2014—born in 1974, beginning your career in the late-90s—you were already established. If you were thirty in 2014, you hit the wall.

Because the mandates to diversify didn’t fall on older white men, who in many cases still wield enormous power: They landed on us.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll