August 14, 2025

FAIL, BRITANNIA: 10 Examples of Absurd Fallout From the U.K.’s Online Safety Act.

For U.K. residents, the options are either to accept that their internet experience will be sanitized as if they’re children, to circumvent the law by surfing the web exclusively using a VPN, or to submit to all sorts of different age-verification services (including ID checks and facial scans) that could leave their identities and information vulnerable.

“Even when these systems ‘work,’ they’re creating massive honeypots of personal data,” points out Masnick. “As we’ve seen repeatedly, companies collecting biometric data and ID verification inevitably get breached, and suddenly intimate details about people’s online activity become public. Just ask the users of Tea, a women’s dating safety app that recently exposed thousands of users’ verification selfies after requiring facial recognition for ‘safety.'”

U.K. residents are already reporting a host of troubles with accessing all sorts of content. Let’s dive into these mishaps, shall we?

Much more at the link.

Posted at 12:45 pm by Stephen Green 29

YES:

Posted at 12:34 pm by Stephen Green 90

BEEN CAUGHT STEALING: Camera Stolen from TV News Crew Reporting on London Street Thefts.

A TV news crew’s camera was stolen while they were filming a segment on the rising street thefts in London.

A television crew for Saudi Arabian news station Al Ekhbariya News was reporting on the rising number of thefts on Oxford Street, one of the busiest shopping destinations in the U.K., on Saturday.

However, the unsuspecting crew later realised they had captured footage of a man walking up to their equipment, taking part of the TV station’s camera, and running away with it, according to UAE newspaper The National News.

“While reporting on the recent surge in thefts on Oxford Street, a street said to have more CCTV cameras than anywhere else in London, something remarkable happened,” Al Ekhbariya News reporter Mohanad Alrawi says in the subsequent news segment aired on TV.

“Our own camera was stolen. That very camera has captured footage of thefts.”

Could be worse: Guy Ritchie’s London TV set ‘hit by £1m theft as director tightens security after second break-in.’ “The 56-year-old director is said to be furious over the repeated break-ins on the set of The Associate, his Paramount+ project featuring Helen Mirren and Pierce Brosnan.”

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll 27

FASTER, PLEASE: Cleaning Up Homeless Encampments Could Be Trump’s Next 80-20 Issue.

Donald Trump, of course, is a talented politician who can see the opportunity. I expect him to seize the issue as we approach the 2025 midterms. His attempt to clean up Washington, D.C., is, in my view, a test run of such policies, and the politics around them. He is also, shall we say, not a man inclined to focus on the inherent dignity of people who get in his way. Trump will vilify with his rhetoric those who he deems as his opponents, even if those opponents are his own destitute countrymen.

That’s not to say that the president will be wrong to highlight this issue. Americans ought to embrace a different paradigm on vagrancy and homelessness that cleans up our neighborhoods and our parks, and increases the quality of life for not only ourselves and our families, but also those who are currently living at the lowest ebb of their lives on our streets. While doing so, we must ensure that we respect the fundamental rights and dignity of all people, especially those who are, like us, citizens of this great country.

How exactly to do all that? I’ll be the first to tell you that I am unsure. This issue is complicated and thorny. Simply clearing out the tent cities won’t solve the underlying problems of mental illness, drug addiction, and poverty, of course.

We’ll know he’s serious about the issue if he wants to reopen state mental hospitals:

Flashback: It’s mental health, stupid: How Team Biden misunderstands homeless crisis.

Some rough-sleepers would relish permanent housing, yes. But many would also choose to stay on the streets. That’s because untreated mental illness, not a housing shortage, is the real source of the problem for a significant share of the homeless.

In 2015 (the most recent such survey), the Department of Housing and Urban Development found that at least 25 percent of the US homeless, or 140,000 people, were seriously mentally ill; 45 percent suffered from mental illness of some kind. Serious mental illness isn’t garden-variety anxiety or melancholy. It’s the sort of paranoid schizophrenia that can involve voices instructing the patient to push a young woman toward an oncoming subway train.

Others are haunted by the demon of addiction. As the Substance Abuse and Treatment Center has reported, “tragically, homelessness and substance abuse go hand-in-hand. The end result of homelessness is often substance abuse, and substance abuse often contributes to homelessness.” The National Coalition for the Homeless has found that 38 percent of homeless people are alcohol-dependent, while 26 percent are dependent on other harmful chemicals.

But solving the problem would mean a enormous and seemingly permanent gravy train would be derailed. In December of 2009, SF Weekly had this classic Fox Butterfield-esque line: “Despite its spending more money per capita on homelessness than any comparable city, [San Francisco’s] homeless problem is worse than any comparable city’s.”

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll 209

THE NEW SPACE RACE: After first operational launch, here’s the next big test for ULA’s Vulcan rocket.

Complicating ULA’s ability to ramp up its Vulcan launch cadence is the rocket’s design. Unlike SpaceX, which has a fleet of reusable Falcon 9 boosters, ULA has doubled down on building single-use boosters. This will keep ULA’s factory humming in Decatur, Alabama.

But the most pressing bottleneck restricting ULA’s ability to ramp up its launch cadence is at the launch site. United Launch Alliance has a single launch pad at Cape Canaveral and is outfitting another at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. What’s more, the company has just one active rocket integration hangar, where technicians vertically stack Atlas V and Vulcan rockets on their launch platforms.

Construction crews are racing to finish work on a second integration building a couple of miles south of the existing hangar. ULA officials project the new building to be ready to start stacking rockets before the end of this year, but teams have already missed an earlier schedule that would have brought the hangar online this summer.

ULA is also preparing a third mobile launch platform, giving managers more flexibility in moving rockets around the spaceport. Ground crews assemble the pieces of each rocket atop the launch platforms, which then transfer the complete launch vehicles to the launch pad for final countdown preps. Ultimately, this will give ULA the capacity to work on three simultaneous launch campaigns at Cape Canaveral, plus one at the Vandenberg spaceport on the West Coast.

Wentz told reporters earlier this week that the second rocket assembly building will theoretically allow ULA to launch as often as once every 13 days. This would get the company to its goal of flying 25 missions per year.

ULA does some impressive work, but their model is still pre-2017 — the year SpaceX first re-used a Falcon 9 rocket — going into the 2030s.

Posted at 11:43 am by Stephen Green 10

BLUE CITY BLUES: Inflation in NY outpaces national figures. It’s the rent, tuition, child care…

Bruce Bergman, an economist at the bureau, said the Consumer Price Index for the New York City area was up 3.2%, compared to the national figure of 2.7%. He attributed the increase in large part to the rise in rent, which is up 4.7% in New York and the region compared to 3.9% nationally.

But Bergman said the cost of living in the city, although higher than the national average, has eased somewhat from the steep rates of change in recent years, when it was as high as 6% in 2022 and over 4% through much of last year.

“ Recently we have seen those shelter numbers come down a bit,” Bergman said of local housing costs, “but we’re still at a point where it’s still elevated compared to where it was prior to COVID.”

Don’t worry, front-running Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani has a plan to make things so much worse.

Posted at 10:41 am by Stephen Green 94

MEH, OBAMA SAID WE COULDN’T DRILL OUR WAY OUT OF AN OIL SHORTAGE. AND YET…

Democrats want to dismiss the clear and simple and workable answers because they don’t produce enough graft. Also, once you solve a problem, you can’t use it anymore.

Posted at 9:56 am by Glenn Reynolds 174

I HAD BEEN ASSURED THAT THIS WAS IMPOSSIBLE WITHOUT AN ACT OF CONGRESS: Illegal Aliens Staying Away From Border Amid Trump Admin’s 3-Month Zero-Release Record.

In July, there were just 24,628 total encounters at the U.S. border, down from 170,180 in July 2024, marking the lowest monthly number of encounters in CBP history, according to the White House. No illegal aliens were paroled into the U.S. in July, compared to 12,365 in July 2024.

“Under President [Donald] Trump, the border is the most secure it’s ever been in American history,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday. “When you fortify the border, restore deterrence, and empower Border Patrol agents to do their jobs and enforce the laws on the books like President Trump has—this is the incredible result.”

Border Patrol encountered 4,601 illegal aliens between ports of entry at the southern border in July, marking a 23% decline from June and a 90% decline from July a year ago.

The crisis was always by design.

Posted at 9:39 am by Stephen Green 53

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Oh, NOW the Dems Are Worried About ‘Rewriting History.’ “Conservatives have no need to rewrite American history — we’ve always liked it here, warts and all. We’ve never downplayed the awful stuff, and we’re still able to be patriotic. The Democrats rewrite American history because they hate the United States of America, it’s that simple. That’s why Obama blathered on about fundamentally transforming it. Democrats have been hell-bent on doing just that ever since, and won’t stop until they’ve Sovietized the place to their liking.”

Posted at 9:08 am by Stephen Green 91

#JOURNALISM:

Posted at 8:31 am by Glenn Reynolds 82