August 20, 2025

I KNOW THERE ARE CAR ENTHUSIASTS HERE:

Posted at 1:14 pm by Charlie Martin 73

“FOLLOW THE SCIENCE:”

Related: The Suicide of Expertise.

Posted at 12:39 pm by Glenn Reynolds 169

WHY AM I NOT SURPRISED? Cuba Mercenaries With Russian Forces In Ukraine

From an opinion piece in The Washington Times:

Havana traditionally supplied the fighting forces by which the Soviet Union’s ideological and military ambitions could be implemented across the developing world. Tens of thousands of Cuban troops, military advisers and doctors supported communist guerrillas and would-be despots in countries such as Ethiopia, Yemen, Angola and Grenada.

Now, more than three decades since the collapse of the USSR, a new generation of Cuban fighters is engaged in a Russian war, not under the banner of Marxist-Leninist fraternity but as contract soldiers.

With the number of Russian troops killed or wounded reaching potentially more than 800,000, Russia is bleeding more manpower than at any other time since the Second World War. To avoid the domestic political risks of further mobilizing Russians, President Vladimir Putin has turned to foreign mercenaries to plug this manpower gap.

More:

According to Dr. Orlando Gutierrez Boronat of the Assembly of the Cuban Resistance, 6,000 to 7,000 Cubans today are serving on the front lines in some of the most brutal battles of the war, with 10% of Cuban recruits dying in the first year of combat and 30% wounded. Ukrainian intelligence estimates that 20,000 Cubans have joined the Russian army since 2022.

North Korea in Ukraine, now Cuba. Cold War Russian Communist Empire comrades return as mercs. But they always were. In exchange for cheap Russian oil Castro spilled Cuban blood in Soviet peripheral wars waged in Africa and Latin America. As for the Russian 800,000 total casualties figure — Ukrainian sources claim it’s over one million.

Posted at 12:18 pm by Austin Bay 53

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: What Was Said on MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe’ Indicates Team Newsom’s Trump Trolling on X Is Backfiring.

Full text:

“You can see the Democrats are trying to find their footing and it’s quite embarrassing, actually.

I mean, Gavin Newsom. Have you seen what he’s doing online? And it’s like, ugh just take a deep breath… they don’t know what to do.

I have a good idea. Instead of trying to school Donald Trump, talk into the camera about affordability…”

F’ing hilarious!!!

Newsom’s California is the very opposite of “affordability” (gas prices, real estate prices, etc.), but that said, what is going through the tiny minds at Newsom’s comms shop when they crank out images such as these?

Earlier: Gavin Newsom: the chameleon who destroyed California.

UPDATE:

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll 137

UNTIL IT COMES BACK UNDER A NEW NAME, PERHAPS: Is This Finally the Dawning of the End of the Woke Corporate Era? “Bloomberg Law published a column, ‘DEI Chatter Plummets Among Previously Vocal Corporate Advocates’ that spells out how corporations are abandoning policies that discriminated against businesses that didn’t bend to the woke agenda. Author Drew Hutchinson wrote that woke language decreased by 68 percent year-over-year among S&P 100 companies. That includes woke policies that targeted and discriminated against firearm and ammunition businesses.”

Posted at 11:42 am by Stephen Green 42

THE RAMANS ARE UP AND MAKING COFFEE: Mysterious Object Hurtling Toward Us From Beyond Solar System Appears to Be Emitting Its Own Light, Scientists Find.

While there’s been a growing consensus among astronomers that the latest object is a comet, Loeb has continued to entertain the idea that it may have been sent to us by an intelligent species from outside of the solar system — and he’s far from backing down.

In a blog post over the weekend, Loeb pointed to observations by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, which showed a “glow of light, likely from a coma, ahead of the motion of 3I/ATLAS towards the Sun.”

A coma is the hazy and luminous cloud that surrounds the nucleus of a comet.

However, there’s “no evidence for a bright cometary tail in the opposite direction,” he wrote, with scientists suggesting it was evidence that dust was evaporating from the object’s Sun-facing side.

The observations led Loeb and his colleagues to an intriguing, albeit far-fetched possibility: is the mysterious space object generating “its own light?”

After deliberations with his colleague and Harvard astrophysicist Eric Keto, Loeb suggested that the “simplest interpretation” of 3I/ATLAS’ observed “steep brightness profile” is that its nucleus “produces most of the light.”

That would also mean that its actual size is much smaller than currently thought, roughly in line with the size of the first two interstellar objects we’ve observed, ‘Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov.

So not a massive cylindrical interplanetary habitat then?

Posted at 10:40 am by Stephen Green 163

PROMISES KEPT: State Department revokes over 6,000 student visas, citing law breaking and overstays.

The vast majority of those violations or alleged violations entailed assault, driving under the influence, burglary, and “support for terrorism,” according to a State Department official, although the State Department didn’t say whether those were accusations, arrests, charges or convictions.

Two-thirds of the recently revoked visas were because the students violated the law, the official said. Fox News first reported the student visa revocations.

Those roughly 6,000 students represent a fraction of the 1.1 million foreign students who studied at colleges and universities in the U.S. in the 2023-2024 academic year, the most recently available data.

The State Department official said between 200 and 300 of the visas pulled were over accusations that they engaged in “support for terrorism” under federal statute.

Guests should be polite.

Posted at 9:38 am by Stephen Green 71