This is why it's so infuriating to see little tiny, useless bureaucrats attempting to destroy him (UPDATED)

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Stephen Green, writing in Instapundit:

I’d add that SpaceX built the incredible Mechazilla “chopstick” tower in a few months for what was probably in the ballpark of a couple hundred million dollars — and it performed flawlessly on the first-ever catch of a rocket. That the rocket happened to be the biggest and most powerful to ever fly is almost beside the point.

Meanwhile, Bechtel is years late building an ordinary launch tower for NASA’s doomed SLS rocket and is charging taxpayers $2.7 billion for the privilege.

UPDATE: I used the Gulliver’s Travels picture to illustrate Musk being tied down by useless Lilliputians, then later in the day I discovered that Musk himself has used the same metaphor to describe what the bureaucrats are doing to our once-great country, not just him. I’d say it was a case of great minds thinking alike, but it’s really a dull mind coincidentally thinking like a genius.

They're getting desperate (UPDATED)

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“But It wasn’t supposed to be this way!”

And the response:

And Time’s a liberal rag.

Marc Benioff, who has owned Time since 2018, criticized the Democratic nominee on Sunday while pointing out that ex-President Donald Trump and President Biden — before he dropped out — both sat down for interviews during their campaigns.

“Despite multiple requests, TIME has not been granted an interview with Kamala Harris — unlike every other Presidential candidate,” tweeted Benioff, who is best known as the founder of Salesforce.com.

Well, the seller lived up to its name

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Out of town builder Flippin’ CT listed its project at 14 Sinoway Road in Cos Cob for $1,499,777 (cute) and has sold it for $1.560 million. It couldn’t have sold without a C/O, so I guess this passed muster, but I’m curious how an 0.11-acre lot in the R-7 Zone could be built out to 2,111 sq.ft. The FAR ratio in this R-7 zone is 0.36m ), this lot comprises 4,792 sq.ft, yielding a maximum footage of 1,724 sq,ft. I assume the finished third floor was put into the calculation by the builder, but when did that become legal? Understand, I think the entire FAR scheme was/is a huge error, and I don’t like it, but these houses built to exceed the limits intrigue me.

Contract up north

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149 John Street, on the market since June and reduced from $3.595 million to $3.495, is reported under contract. Four acres with stables (that are being sold “as is”, which sounds ominous), its interior doesn’t appear to look much like it probably did when it was built in 1855, but then, what 169-year-old’s does?

with horses so near, they probably thought a dead close cousin like a zebra would make them nervous

ABC's Martha Raddatz would say, "it's just a handful, so how dare you mention it?" Tampon Tim says “they’re just Newcomers we haven’t met yet — or at least been formally introduced to.”

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Young and vicious: Baby-faced Tren de Aragua crew at NYC migrant shelter targets Times Square — and they’re getting away with it

…. Nearly two dozen young migrant thugs, some as young as 11-years old, are now part of a dangerous asylum seeking brat pack that has graduated from purse snatchings to gunpoint heists targeting New Yorkers and tourists alike, a top NYPD official told The Post.

But they’re managing to stay out of jail because of their ages and the Empire State’s lenient criminal justice laws, Detective Bureau Assistant Chief Jason Savino said.

“You have individuals that are brazen,” Savino said. “We know they have access to guns, evident by the fact that they’ve done gunpoint robberies and they’ve been brazen enough to showcase pistols in and around their social media.

“This is the first formulated group that we found where this group of about 20 individuals that, in pack format, hang out every day, they post on social media, they boast about their crew,” the chief said. “You see little pockets in and around Times Square and in and around the shelters.

“But as far as a true threshold, it’s been limited to shelters.”

Calling themselves “Los Diablos de la 42” — Spanish for “Little Devils of 42” — the crew of about 21 gang members has been busted for 50 separate incidents, and yet not one is behind bars, Savino said.

“They committed the robberies [in] all the sexy places, in and around Central Park, in and around Times Square, in and around transit,” he said. “And targeting tourists.

The Roosevelt Hotel in Midtown is the main intake center for migrants arriving in the Big Apple — and is the home base for a crew of Venezuelan gang members, according to police.Helayne Seidman

“They kind of had a graduation of sorts, and a progression where originally it started as snatches and then went to strong armed robberies, and then started brandishing knives in a pack format.”

…. TDA, which grew out of the poverty and corruption that has long plagued [socialist — Ed] Venezuela, established a criminal foothold in the five boroughs in little more than a year.

Law enforcement sources said gang members hid among the millions of asylum seekers who crossed the US border with Mexico since 2022, then scattered throughout the country.*

Well, at least they’re not taking over apartment buildings — at least they’re not doing that!

Yet.

*From that link:

A one-time Venezuelan prison gang has erupted into a multinational migrant crime syndicate that is ravaging the US — and is the subject of more than 100 police investigations across the nation.

Tren de Aragua, a vicious South American gang that sneaked into the US among the millions of migrants who have crossed the border, is peddling drugs, guns and women across the 50 states — from urban centers like New York and Chicago to Florida beaches and once-tranquil Middle America.

In Colorado, the gang even got a “green light” to shoot at cops, according to a federal memo.

“I would say that like six months ago, their organized presence wasn’t so obvious on the border,” a Texas law enforcement source told The Post. “But now they’re getting organized and they’re staying.”

Uh huh

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Via The New York Times (emphasis added):

The electorate is faced with a choice, the story goes, between two models for masculinity. Toxic versus positive. In response to the vein-popping, furious, felon model of the right, the left is offering us a more morally upstanding and expansive “positive masculinity.”…

After the cartoon supervillainy of Donald Trump and the smarmy misogyny of JD Vance, the “positive masculinity” of Walz and his ilk is a joyful relief, and these programs are often doing good work. But when it comes to truly shifting cultural norms for the next generation of boys and allowing them to embrace their full humanity without shame, we might do better to ditch the masculinity rhetoric altogether. Because rather than challenging the old stereotypes and patterns, the whole positive masculinity framework actually seems to be reinforcing them…

There is a lurking sexism in the whole positive masculinity conceit. If we have to attach the label “masculine” to a behavior before it can have value to men, then we are subtly communicating that embracing anything associated with women is a demotion, even an indignity. “Positive masculinity” is not about de-gendering universal human qualities, and certainly not about encouraging boys to believe that they could have something to learn from women or female cultural norms. It’s more an attempt to scrub away the humiliating stain of womanhood from any trait or behavior before letting boys anywhere near it.

But there’s also this, which is encouraging: