SUMMARY EXECUTION WAS GOOD ENOUGH FOR PIRATES, AND TERRORISTS ARE EVERY BIT HOSTIS HUMANI GENERIS:Why Is KSM Still Alive?
August 28, 2026
21ST CENTURY MEDICINE: AI Tool Mapped Nerves During Brain Surgery That Saved A Man’s Eyesight. “Doctors at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery (NHNN) in London operated on the patient, Rhys Hibbert, using an AI tool to analyze live surgical footage and highlight vital nerves and blood vessels to avoid while removing the tumor, the BBC reported Wednesday. This real-time AI video tool was designed in-house at University College London’s Hawkes Institute and runs on NVIDIA’s Clara IGX computer, according to a Thursday University College London Hospitals (UCLH) NHS Foundation Trust announcement.”
THE HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES:
My students were always a bit gobsmacked when I showed them this in the Film Industry and Synergy classes. pic.twitter.com/UC8GKkUdJC
— Badger (@Bertrom) August 27, 2026
George Lucas stumbled into an extremely bulletproof formula: “Maybe The King’s Speech is simply the long-overdue art house equivalent of Star Wars.”
TRUE TALES OF THE ABSURD: Iran Mined the Strait of Hormuz With… Trash Bags?
LOTS OF SUSPICIOUS ACTIVITY ON THE INTERNET. IT’S BEEN THAT WAY FOR A COUPLE OF DECADES.
Done right this is an industry that won't just remake blue-collar workers lives, it will also remake communities that have been on their knees for 40 years.
Always be curious. Always be skeptical. If something does a 180 & politicians are suddenly demonizing it in a short period… https://t.co/0wJNrJDyM3— ZitoSalena (@ZitoSalena) August 28, 2026
PASS THIS BILL: America Strikes Back Against Foreign Censors With the Rulli GRANITE Act, HR 10174.
The GRANITE Act is a bill to stop foreign governments from censoring Americans on the Internet.
Per reporting in the Times, a federal GRANITE Act, the “Guaranteeing Rights Against Novel International Tyranny and Extortion Act,” was introduced in the House of Representatives by Congressman Michael Rulli of Ohio.
Representative Rulli’s GRANITE Act is the first federal foreign censorship shield bill in American history.
The bill text is available in full at congress.gov.
A GRANITE Act amends U.S. law to make foreign censorship threats against Americans toothless. The threat alone, even a threat that would be very difficult to enforce, is enough to chill speech and restrict the American marketplace of ideas.
Today, foreign governments threaten Americans for their online speech on a daily basis. Those threats must stop.
Read the whole thing.
IN THE ’80S, WE CALLED IT “BURDEN SHARING” WITH EUROPE:
As I have noted with regularity, Trump is on this issue is technically squarely within the mainstream of official US government foreign policy. For literally decades, the US government across Democratic and Republican administrations have urged Europe to do what Trump is forcing… https://t.co/nA16zAG6Y8
— Blume Industries CEO Balding 大老板 (@BaldingsWorld) August 28, 2026
SO MUCH MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE: State Department to Communist Activist: You Won’t Be Vacationing In the U.S.
LIMITED TIME DEAL: COSLUS ADA Accepted C20 Water Dental Flosser Teeth Pick. #CommissionEarned
OH MY: U.S. In Talks To Take Direct Ownership Of Venezuelan Oil Fields. “The Trump administration is reportedly in active discussions with Venezuela’s interim government to acquire a direct U.S. ownership stake in key Venezuelan oil fields. According to senior U.S. officials cited by Axios, the talks involve equity stakes in a select group of high-yield fields containing approximately 90 billion barrels of proven crude—a transaction that would significantly alter Washington’s foreign energy policy framework and expand U.S.-controlled global reserves.”
DISPATCHES FROM LAKE AMERICA:
Caring about Donald Trump's idiosyncrasies is a waste of time.
I care that the border is shut. That DEI is dying. That we're rebuilding our military.
If he wants to say he's renaming a lake to freak out the squares, that's a bargain. https://t.co/l0YtcDxmuc
— Kurt Schlichter (@KurtSchlichter) August 27, 2026
As Bill Maher told NPR’s Steve Inskeep: ‘Genius’ Trump Is Making Them Look Foolish.
Speaking with NPR’s Steve Inskeep on Wednesday’s (July 15) episode of the Newsmakers podcast, Maher noted how news organizations such as NPR were falling for Trump’s ploy to create “distractions” for the media to report on and discuss rather than the bigger issues.
Maher labeled the president’s proposed 250-foot-tall arch in Washington, D.C., as “meaningless.” He told Inskeep, “These are the things I don’t care about. This is his genius getting you to care about…”
Inskeep interrupted to ask, “I shouldn’t care about that arch or whatever?”
“F*** no,” Maher responded. “Absolutely not. Not the arch, not the pool, not the ballroom. This is all meaningless stuff. Steve Bannon famously said, ‘The way we win is we flood the zone with s***,’ and you’re eating the s***. You don’t have to.”
But they will, every time.
THE POLICY IS WORKING: Trump’s loan limits prompt UPenn to help graduates find jobs.
OH, CANADA:
At least four women's golf tournaments in Canada have been won by men this summer pic.twitter.com/YLJ4WFVBgj
— ripx4nutmeg (@ripx4nutmeg) August 27, 2026
GREAT MOMENTS IN MULTICULTURALISM: The Scandal of a Slave Market in Libya.
Reminder that in both Libya, Syria and Iraq, the moment civil war broke out and the ruling regimes lost control over entire regions, the locals immediately reopened slave markets.
As if it was the most natural thing to do.
Not all cultures are equal. pic.twitter.com/iK09iWodoZ
— 𝐍𝐢𝐨𝐡 𝐁𝐞𝐫𝐠 🇮🇷 ✡︎ (@NiohBerg) August 27, 2026
ROBERT SPENCER: Trump Says He’d ‘Absolutely’ Ban Sharia. “President Donald Trump jumped into the ongoing furor over Sharia on Thursday, telling Glenn Beck: ‘Number one on Sharia law, I would absolutely say that not — this country, there’s no Sharia law.’ This comes amid ongoing leftist efforts to portray Sharia as completely benign religious law that patriots only oppose because they’re racists, bigots, and ‘Islamophobes.’ Once again, however, the leftists are wrong and Trump is right.”
TEACHING ABOUT MARXISM IS FINE. WHAT YOU TEACH ABOUT MARXISM MATTERS, THOUGH. University of Pittsburgh curriculum features several classes on Marxism, including class on ‘racialized police violence’ and racial capitalism.
JEFFREY CARTER: The Slow Motion Trainwreck Everyone Paying Attention Saw Coming: Brightline Is In the Red. ““The Brightline case is a cautionary tale about the risks of investing in large-scale infrastructure projects. Even with strong political backing and a growing Florida economy, the economics of passenger rail are unforgiving. For investors, the key takeaway is that bond insurance does not guarantee full recovery; it simply shifts the priority of claims.”
Everybody likes the idea of taking the train, but not enough people want to shell out money to do so.
SAMUEL GREGG: Scotland’s Intellectual Triumph.
The 250th anniversary of The Wealth of Nations has brought a burst of renewed attention to the Scottish Enlightenment. Discussions have ranged widely, from Adam Smith’s conception of aesthetics to how the thought of his teacher, the “never-to-be-forgotten” Francis Hutcheson, shaped the American Revolution.
But amidst these discussions, one important question has received little consideration. Why did such a remarkable group of thinkers appear in one of eighteenth-century Europe’s most physically isolated, sparsely populated, and poorest nations?
On the face of it, the Scottish Enlightenment was a highly unlikely phenomenon. In 1603, Scotland lost a major stimulus for cultural development in early modern Europe when the Scottish king and court relocated to London following James VI’s succession to the throne of England. Many Scottish artists, musicians, and writers subsequently moved south to chase the type of royal patronage that stimulated intellectual life. The debilitating effects of this were accentuated 104 years later when the Scottish Parliament voted to dissolve itself and incorporate Scotland into what was always going to be an English-dominated Kingdom and Parliament of Great Britain. After 1707, some Scots called themselves “North Britons.” No one in England thought to label himself a “South Briton.”
This background does not suggest a self-confident and powerful nation, let alone one on the brink of an intellectual revolution in fields as wide-ranging as economics, medicine, and philosophy.
Yet that’s exactly what happened. This is a lovely essay, and well worth your time.
SARAH HOYT’S SHOCKED FACE WAS GENERATED BY BOTS:
The X Safety team conducted an investigation into suspected Chinese inauthentic accounts involved in influence operations:
We identified a bot farm of approximately 200,000 accounts. Within this farm, we found 200 accounts posting in a manner that could manipulate a legitimate… pic.twitter.com/Mj0SqerdlH
— Global Government Affairs (@GlobalAffairs) August 28, 2026
BUREAUCRATS FIND LOOPHOLE IN TRUMP’S DEI BAN: They always do. This one concerns the federal workers’ Thrift Savings Plan, part of their retirement benefit program.
HISTORY:
BRISTOL, TN-It was on the Tennessee side of this city, other half is in the state of Virginia, where 99 years ago the Carter Family made their 1st recordings; a pivotal event in commercial country-music history.
Dolly Parton paid an emotional homage to that moment when in 1976… pic.twitter.com/4WeVw2Fda4— ZitoSalena (@ZitoSalena) August 27, 2026
YOUR TERMS ARE ACCEPTABLE: Jelly Roll Dares Trump Fans to Stop Listening After Playing Court Jester for Jimmy Kimmel.
