October 13, 2026

APPLYING OCCAM’S RAZOR TO THE TEXAS SENATE RACE MYSTERY:

Posted at 8:50 am by Stephen Green

OLD HABITS DIE HARD: The Arrest of a OK Guardsman for Carrying a Gun Shows More Adult Supervision Needed in Washington, DC. “According to an account from the Associated Press, on September 28, a 22-year-old off-duty specialist with the Oklahoma Guard deployed to Washington, D.C., as part of an ongoing safety task force was traveling in an SUV with another National Guard member when they were stopped by U.S. Park Police over an expired tag. Upon approaching the vehicle, the officer reportedly saw an empty holster inside. When the guardsman was asked if there was a firearm in the vehicle, he responded in the affirmative.”

Posted at 8:35 am by Stephen Green

21st CENTURY HEADLINES: Reanimated AI Greta Garbo stars again … in a ball-bearing advert.

She shimmered in Hollywood’s silent movie era and lit up the first talkies – now Greta Garbo may be about to star in cinema’s new AI age.

More than a century after her screen debut and decades after her ashes were laid to rest in a Swedish woodland cemetery, the Hollywood superstar’s descendants are ready to consider an AI version of her taking a 21st-century film role.

Her likeness has already been reanimated for an advert for a Swedish industrial company, using AI generation technology. The practice some critics call “ghostploitation” has also been used in the case of the actor Val Kilmer, who died last year.

Asked if the AI Garbo could be cast in other roles, Craig Reisfield, one of three relatives who manage her legacy, told the Guardian: “I won’t say no, especially having seen what I’ve seen. It’s pretty incredible and lifelike. So what’s to say that you can’t bring Greta Garbo back in some kind of fashion in a film role?”

Reisfield said he was “flabbergasted” when he saw the AI version of his great-aunt created for publicity for the ball-bearings giant SKF. The connection comes because Garbo’s second-ever screen role was in a 1921 promotional film involving the Gothenburg-based company.

In 1986 when he cowrote July 20, 2019: Life in the 21st Century, Arthur C. Clarke could foresee 21st century technology that would be able to reanimate the appearances and voices of long-dead actors. But he didn’t anticipate how 60 years of negative PR concerning AI – not least of which the epochal 1968 film he cowrote with Stanley Kubrick that gave the world one of the first movie supercomputers running amok and trying to kill every nearby human. And thus, the above Grauniad article gives AI Garbo a one star review, and the video is getting absolutely hammered by negative comments on YouTube:

Posted at 8:35 am by Ed Driscoll

WELL, THAT WAS UNEXPECTED:

Posted at 8:19 am by Stephen Green

DISCOVERY DAY — Or, why I keep Columbus Day.

[Howard] Zinn was right about Columbus, but he never once turned the critical lens he applied to the Spanish colonists to the native people of the New World. In Tenochtitlan, the Aztecs sacrificed war captives by the thousands, cutting out their hearts atop the Templo Mayor, and stacked the skulls in a tower of more than 650 heads cemented together, including women and children, while captors ate parts of the bodies in ritual feasts. Around 1450 on Peru’s coast, the Chimú cut open the chests of children, some as young as five. In South Dakota around 1325, attackers at Crow Creek slaughtered villagers, scalped and dismembered the corpses, and carried off the young women. In Colorado around 1150, Ancestral Puebloans at Cowboy Wash butchered and cooked people. And across the continent, slavery was widespread. None of this excuses Columbus. He was a savage. But so were these indigenous people.

Nor did Zinn turn the lens he trained on Columbus Day toward Martin Luther King Day. He was happy to put on his historian’s hat for the uncomfortable truths of Columbus the man, but he did no such thing for King, who plagiarized portions of his doctoral dissertation, serially cheated on his wife, rejected the virgin birth and the bodily resurrection that his Baptist congregants took on faith, and according to an FBI surveillance summary, may have looked on and laughed while a fellow minister raped a woman in a Washington hotel room. None of this approaches the scale of Columbus’s crimes, but it’s the principle that matters. We acknowledge the truth of the words King delivered at the Lincoln Memorial, and we honor the man even though he doesn’t live up to the symbol. But more importantly, we would never assume that someone celebrating MLK Day is celebrating being a scumbag husband, just as we don’t assume that someone celebrating Indigenous Peoples’ Day means celebrating eating children. Rather, these holidays celebrate the good parts, and we don’t sit around debating whether we can separate the good from the bad either. We just separate them. Readers familiar with my history may be wondering, what about someone like Vladimir Lenin? Do we get to celebrate him too? But with King and Columbus, we celebrate specific achievements worth honoring, and set the sins of the men aside. With Indigenous Peoples’ Day, we celebrate an ethnic identity, which I find less deserving, but not inherently immoral. But with someone like Lenin, the atrocities were not distinct from the achievement. When we celebrate King, we celebrate his antiracism. When we celebrate Columbus, we celebrate his discovery. But when people celebrate Lenin, they celebrate his revolution.

The decisive push for Indigenous Peoples’ Day came on the same anniversary when I was sitting in homeroom, learning about the real Columbus and what he did to the people of my mother’s homeland. In the Bay Area, activists formed a group called Resistance 500 and lobbied the Berkeley City Council, which voted unanimously to make Indigenous Peoples’ Day an official city holiday. In 2014, Seattle and Minneapolis adopted it too. And in 2021, President Biden formally recognized it.

Curiously, the author misspelled then-President Obama in that last sentence.

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll

XI’S GOTTA HAVE IT: Chinese carmakers increasingly rely on overseas markets as September exports surge.

China’s passenger car exports surged 64% in September from the same month in 2025, an industry association reported Monday, as Chinese automakers increasingly focus on exports to drive growth at a time of sluggish domestic sales.

China exported around 919,000 passenger vehicles in September, lifted by overseas demand for plug-in hybrids and pure electric vehicles, data from the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers showed. In the first nine months of 2026, China exported over 7.1 million passenger cars, up more than 70% compared with the same period last year.

Meanwhile, domestic passenger car sales in China have fallen for most of the year as they face weaker consumer confidence at home and scaled back government subsidies. They declined 27% in September year-on-year to over 1.6 million units, according to the association.

Why is Trump the only national leader who seems to understand that tariffs hit right at China’s achilles heel?

Posted at 7:33 am by Stephen Green

THE INTERNET OF DANGEROUSLY CONNECTED THINGS:

UPDATE. (FROM GLENN):

https://x.com/wretchardthecat/status/2109869245400297603

Posted at 7:17 am by Stephen Green

FROM C. CHANCY:  The Words of the Night (Colors of Another Sky Book 1.)

The Words of the Night (Colors of Another Sky Book 1)

It’s 1618. Do you know where your historian is?

Retirement wasn’t supposed to have dragons….

Historian Jason Finn crossed the planet to escape the Black Dog of depression – and almost got there. Over the mountains of Korea, a monster out of nightmares tore his plane from the sky… and into another world.

Hunting down ravenous shapeshifting pirates, Night Magistrate Lee Cheong found survivors from elsewhere. Survivors who say pirates are not the only threat. Over twenty years ago Hanyang burned in dragon flames… and that monster still lives.

Now the young magistrate must lead demon-hunters on a desperate chase, aided by a bandit sharpshooter, a seafolk medic, a Heavenly cultivator on the run for her life… and a time-lost historian.

Jason’s willing to help, but he’s cursed, fighting to survive, and struggling to understand a land of magic and monsters. All the while doing his best to keep a teenage girl alive.

Upside? Jason’s definitely not depressed….

 

Posted at 7:00 am by Sarah Hoyt