RADICALISM AMONG HILL STAFFERS: Not sure whether this means more or fewer than expected of the congressional aides working on Capitol Hill view themselves as holding more radical views than their bosses?

GAYLE KING WAS SHOOK WHEN SHE HEARD THE HOLDOUT CLANCY JUROR IS A BLACK GUY:

King: Is the holdout a person of — a black man?

Juror: Yes.

King: A black man is the holdout juror?

Juror: Yes.

King: Well, I have to sit with that for just a second.

Nine white ladies and two beta white men spent a week badgering a black man to get him to change his mind so they could protect a mom who strangled her kids!

Good news, though:

Bari Weiss has a lot more work to do to reform CBS News though:

Tweet concludes, “Clarence Thomas spoke about exactly this mindset during his confirmation hearings 35 years ago, i.e. the idea that a black man is expected to think a certain way, hold certain views, and arrive at certain conclusions. And when he doesn’t, a lot of people simply cannot compute it. 35 years later, here we are again. A black man thinks for himself, reaches his own conclusion, and the reaction is disbelief.”

SHANA TOVA:

THE ENEMY WITHIN:

CHINA IS ASSHOE: Anthropic disrupts Russian, Chinese AI campaigns targeting its Claude models.

Anthropic on Thursday said it had disrupted several alleged malicious uses of its Claude models over the past eight months, including a suspected Russia-linked cyber espionage campaign and ​efforts by Chinese AI firms it accused of trying to extract and replicate Claude’s ‌capabilities.

Cybercriminals and state-backed hackers were increasingly using AI not just to assist with tasks but to orchestrate and execute large portions of cyberattacks, Anthropic said in its latest Threat Intelligence report, ​adding that humans were often overseers rather than hands-on operators in the campaigns.

“A ​majority of the operations … were enabled by AI via direct execution ⁠or orchestration. The use of AI went beyond simple questions and responses from ​a chatbot but rather involved the use of multi-agent frameworks executing” tasks, Anthropic said.

Anthropic ​said it had disrupted what it described as attacks from seven China-based labs during that period. Among the labs Anthropic named were tech giant Alibaba, Moonshot, DeepSeek and Xiaomi.

More: “Anthropic said it ‌observed ⁠more than 151 million exchanges it attributed to Alibaba between May and July 2026, peaking at nearly 3 million per day from more than 3,500 accounts it described as fraudulent.”

‘A GENTLE AND GENEROUS SOUL:’ X Pays Tribute to Andrew Wimsatt.

Related:

Tweet concludes, ” A civilized society can only exist if the monsters are put away; if the monsters are not allowed into your midst;if the monsters know that there are astoundingly severe consequences for their monstrosity. Please stop swimming in the infinitely pool of suicidal empathy. The line between a civilized society and barbarity is very thin.”

ANOTHER FEDERAL WELFARE PROGRAM?: Family Research Council President Tony Perkins cautions Trump administration against expanding eligibility for the Child Care Development Fund (CCDF)  that provides cash assistance to working lower income families for child care.

Expanding CCDF eligibility to include married Stay-at-Home-Spouses (SAHS) taking care of children — as in a draft regulatory proposal at the White House — has a solid intention behind it, but, Perkins points out, why expand the number of dependents on tax dollars when the government is $40 Trillion in debt? Better to expand the Child Care Tax Credit.

“Historically, we have addressed these issues through tax credits. If you fall below the threshold of paying taxes, it can be a refundable tax credit. We championed the Child Tax Credit at the FRC. We’ve long been a champion of trying to encourage family formation, parent-child bonding. But government direct payments, government programs, is a step that Republicans have not really taken. That’s been Democratic, that’s been socialistic,” Perkins warned.

NOT UNEXPECTED: US Treasury yields surge as $6 billion bond buyback disappoints markets.

The yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note rose above 4.85%, its highest level in nearly three years, before easing slightly.

The yield on the 30-year bond stood at 5.29%, up from 5.26% a day earlier. It reached 5.33% in August, its highest level since 2007.

Treasury yields influence interest rates across the US economy, meaning sustained increases can make mortgages, business loans and other forms of borrowing more expensive. Higher borrowing costs can also slow economic growth and weigh on share prices.

The rise came after the Treasury Department said it would buy back up to $6 billion of bonds maturing in 10 to 20 years on Thursday. This is three times the size of its previous long-dated buyback operation.

Bessent can play around on the margins — or maybe “rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic” is more apropos — but it’s hard to see rates coming down so long as Congress adds another two trillion dollars to the country’s MasterCard every years.

BURN DOWN PUBLIC EDUCATION:

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Any Moral Equivalence About 9/11 Is Pure Evil. “I’m glad I’m on the side that remembers the horror of 9/11 and still calls it a horror. The side that’s not electing politicians who think we had it coming. The side that doesn’t have Palestinian flags displayed in their United States congressional offices.”

OMG, THIS STORY JUST KEEPS GETTING BETTER:

I’VE POSTED A LOT OF STUFF ON SEPTEMBER 11TH OVER THE LAST 25 YEARS. But this year, it’s just this: Brad Todd’s 109 Minutes essay. “Just 109 minutes after a new form of terrorism — the most deadly yet invented — came into use, it was rendered, if not obsolete, at least decidedly less effective. Deconstructed, unengineered, thwarted, and put into the dust bin of history. By Americans. In 109 minutes.”

Ordinary Americans have tremendous skill and ability. That’s why people who want to rule over them hate and fear them.

CDR SALAMANDER: No European NATO Navies are Ready to Fight Today’s War at Sea.

We are coming up on three years from the final wakeup call after October 7th, 2023, that conventionally armed ballistic missiles are the premier threat to critical capabilities ashore and at sea.

In the U.S. at least, though production was minimal and inventories allowed to be too small, we at least had the technology to meet the threat from Medium, Intermediate, and Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles.

At sea, which will be our focus today, we just made it across the finish line in time with the RIM-161 SM-3, which built off the success of the iterative development of the SM-2 for decades.

This work has paid off via the exceptional performance of our Arleigh Burke Class destroyers off Israel, and in defending our fleet from the Red Sea to the Arabian Sea against Iran and her proxies.

With each engagement, our software gets better…the next update to our missiles gets better, and, more importantly, it has yanked the Lotus off the dinner plate of our defense establishment to expand production and inventories.

Bravo Zulu to those people who fought, mostly nameless and unseen, for decades to ensure we did not take our eye off the need to be able to meet the threat from ballistic missiles.

Here’s the issue. We’re alone here, and our European allies just don’t seem to get it.

That’s the issue with our European allies pretty much across the board.