May 17, 2026

HEH: Someone Shared a Real Monet Painting as AI and Asked for Critiques.

A fascinating art social experiment unfolded on social media this week after someone shared an actual Monet painting as an AI-generated artwork and asked people to explain what makes the “AI image” inferior to a genuine Monet piece. There was no shortage of “sharp-eyed” critics eager to chime in.

It all started after X user @SHL0MS posted the painting and wrote: “I just generated an image in the style of a Monet painting using AI. Please describe, in as much detail as possible, what makes this inferior to a real Monet painting.”

* * * * * * * *

“The fact that it looks like s**t and is s**t,” writes @RDL0013 in a since-deleted reply. “Slop. Doesn’t look anywhere near like a Monet. Looks exactly like somebody trying to replicate style and achieving like 20% of it. Not as vibrant as Monet’s typical choice of colors. Looks dull.”

Orson Welles, call your office!

Posted at 2:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

AND THEN THEY WOULDN’T LET HIM — OR HARDLY ANYONE ELSE — REBUILD:

Posted at 1:27 pm by Stephen Green

U.S. EYES ATTACK-DRONE THREAT FROM CUBA:

Cuba has acquired more than 300 military drones and recently began discussing plans to use them to attack the U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay, U.S. military vessels and possibly Key West, Fla., 90 miles north of Havana, according to classified intelligence shared with Axios.

Why it matters: The intelligence — which could become a pretext for U.S. military action — shows the degree to which the Trump administration sees Cuba as a threat because of developments in drone warfare and the presence of Iranian military advisers in Havana, a senior U.S. official said.

“When we think about those types of technologies being that close, and a range of bad actors from terror groups to drug cartels to Iranians to the Russians, it’s concerning,” the official said.

“It’s a growing threat.”

How do you say “Operation Bodenplatte” in Spanish?

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED, Or Where Does Old Blighty Stand After a Half-Century of Oikophobia?

Even John Cleese (quite a dedicated oikaphobic himself in his younger days) now (sometimes) gets it:

Tweet concludes, “Perhaps ‘sensible right’ would be a better description.”

Related:

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

YES:

This is the keeper: “The ironic thing is that when these oh-so-high-minded Republicans (Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, Thom Tillis, etc.) get their comeuppance, they are the ones who react with truly childish petulance.”

Posted at 12:28 pm by Stephen Green

STACY MCCAIN: ‘There Is No Truth … Only Power.’

Bad causes attract bad people.

We know for a fact that Communism leads to mass murder, killing as many as 100 million people in the 20th century, and therefore must question the motives of its defenders. Hence, we can disregard the accusation of committing an ad hominem fallacy in so doing.

Something similar can be said for the philosophers of “postmodernism.” Michel Foucault was an influential French intellectual and also a homosexual pedophile, and this is not a coincidence, you see.

Read the whole thing. As Daniel J. Flynn wrote in a 2021 article at the American Spectator under the headline, “Michel Foucault and the Glamour of Evil,” “News that Michel Foucault molested children recalls revelations that Hulk Hogan used steroids. The surprise comes only in response to surprise.”

Related: Zhou Enlai Gets His Answer.

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll

DON’T MISS THE LATEST FROM SALENA ZITO:

Posted at 10:57 am by Stephen Green

ROGER KIMBALL: The Golden Thread and the Defense of the West.

[Allan] Bloom’s commitment to greatness was profoundly democratic. But this is not to say that it was egalitarian. The true democrat wishes to share the great works of culture with all who are able to appreciate them; the egalitarian, recognizing that genuine excellence is rare, declares greatness a fraud and sets about obliterating distinctions.

As Bloom recognized, the fruits of egalitarianism are ignorance, the habit of intellectual conformity, and the systematic subjection of cultural achievement to political criteria. In the university, this means classes devoted to pop novels, rock videos, and third-rate works from the woke grievance industry that rules us, works chosen simply because their authors are members of the requisite sex, ethnic group, or social minority. It means students who graduate not having read Aristotle, Milton, Dante, or Shakespeare—or, what is in some ways even worse, who have been taught to regard the works of such authors chiefly as hunting grounds for examples of patriarchy, transphobia, racism, imperialism, and so on. A favorite recent example was the news that Shakespeare’s Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, has embarked upon the project of “decolonizing Shakespeare” in order to rid the bard’s work and reputation of “white Anglo-centric, Eurocentric, and increasingly West-centric worldviews.”

“Gosh,” I thought, “has it come to that?” I am afraid that it has. In many cultural precincts today, we find that faculty and students alike regard education chiefly as an exercise in disillusionment and look to the past only to corroborate their own sense of superiority and self-satisfaction.

Earlier: Deconstruction is “a virus. It self-replicates. Once inoculated, it turns everything it touches into a target. Science is patriarchal, so let’s deconstruct it. Language is colonial, so let’s reinvent it. Meritocracy is racist, so let’s abolish it. Sex is a construction, so let’s choose it. There is no more bedrock. Everything is sand.”

Posted at 10:45 am by Ed Driscoll

SNOWFALLS ARE NOW JUST A THING OF THE PAST: Trump celebrates after UN climate committee moves away from its most extreme global warming scenario.

President Donald Trump on Saturday blasted Democratic climate policies after scientists moved away from one of the most extreme global warming scenarios previously used in United Nations-backed climate modeling.

“GOOD RIDDANCE! After 15 years of Dumocrats promising that ‘Climate Change’ is going to destroy the Planet, the United Nations TOP Climate Committee just admitted that its own projections (RCP8.5) were WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

15 years? More like 37:

A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.

Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of “eco- refugees,” threatening political chaos, said Noel Brown, director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program, or UNEP.

He said governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control.

—“U.N. Predicts Disaster if Global Warming Not Checked,” the Associated Press, June 29, 1989.

UPDATE:

(Classical reference in headline.)

Posted at 10:14 am by Ed Driscoll

NOW WE REALLY KNOW HOW THE LEFT PLAYED THE SBC: A deeply deceptive piece in the Texas Monthly illustrates how the Left uses sequential linking of otherwise unrelated entities to create a damaging narrative. How they did it to two giants of the SBC is examined in my guest column on Substack this morning.

Posted at 8:55 am by Mark Tapscott