March 27, 2026

HMM:

To be fair, LLMs are programmed to say what users want them to say in pursuit of increased “engagement.”

On the other hand, positive feedback loops are more dangerous than the unlikely event of an LLM killing to get a human body.

Posted at 3:05 pm by Stephen Green

SO MUCH MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE:

Posted at 2:34 pm by Stephen Green

IT’S FRAUD ALL THE WAY DOWN:

Posted at 2:03 pm by Stephen Green

BATTLESWARM: Iran Strikes Day 27. “Not one but two Iranian naval commanders get dirtnapped, more than 10,000 Iranian targets have been hit, Iran getting 12 year olds to join the fight, and claims it’s reinforced Kharg Island.”

Posted at 1:48 pm by Stephen Green

WHEN A LEFTIST SAYS “DEMOCRACY,” WHAT THEY MEAN IS SOME S***HOLE AUTOCRACY:

Posted at 1:32 pm by Stephen Green

RONALD RADOSH: The Hollywood Blacklist Gets Whitewashed. A Review of ‘Blacklisted: An American Story’ at the Capital Jewish Museum.

That claim, moreover, ignores that when the Nazi-Soviet Pact was signed in Moscow, overnight the Brigade veterans became anti antifascist, arguing publicly that Hitler’s Germany was a benign power, and that the real threat to peace came from the United States and Britain, which wanted to drive the United States into war. The last commander of the Brigades, Milton Wolff, speaking to the veterans at their annual convention that took place in May 1941, denounced as equally evil “Roosevelt, Hitler, Churchill, and Mussolini.” He attacked FDR for wanting America to participate in the “imperialist slaughter in which the youth of our country, will, if he has his way,” seek U.S. “involvement … in an imperialist war from which the great majority of the American people can derive only misery, suffering and death.” He stated that the Brigade veterans’ organization “opposes every move of Roosevelt and the warmongers in this direction.”

Members who opposed the Nazi-Soviet Pact were immediately expelled from the organization by Wolff. So much for their prescient antifascism! Why is this not in the exhibition?

Then one must pay attention to the most famous of all the blacklisted Hollywood writers, the talented and brilliant screenwriter Dalton Trumbo. During the years of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Trumbo had published his novel Johnny Got His Gun, a searing antiwar novel (made into a Hollywood film during the Vietnam war) about a World War I vet who lost his sight and all his limbs. It was meant to increase antiwar sentiment when the FDR administration was beginning to provide aid to Great Britain. It won the National Book Award for Best Original Novel in 1939.

When Nazi Germany invaded Russia in 1941, Trumbo and his publisher suspended printing of Johnny Got His Gun, and Trumbo appealed to readers who had bought it to return or destroy the book. He also did one other little-known action: In 1944, he asked the FBI to come to his house to look at letters he had received from people who wanted to know how they could get a copy of Johnny Got His Gun. Charging that the writers were clearly still antiwar, still isolationist, and some were as well pro-Hitler and opposed fiercely to the president, he gave their names to the bureau. His view, he wrote the FBI, was that his book “shouldn’t be reprinted until the war was at an end.” He was afraid, however, that the letter-writers “could adversely affect the war effort” if the book was made available. In 1970, he acknowledged that “I foolishly reported their activities to the FBI.” Yet he still thought he was right to oppose getting into the war in 1939 because it would be a “disastrous course” to move away from isolationism, which is also why he spoke up against Lend-Lease aid to Britain, arguing that would be like handing a gun to a “hot-headed man.”

Years later, Trumbo bragged that due to his influence in the film colony, he was able to stop a Hollywood movie that was to be made about Leon Trotsky. Yet, Trumbo himself came to see the truth about the totalitarian Soviet Union. He had read, he admitted, all the major anticommunist books, and hence, “I was not surprised.” As for the CP, he knew the blacklisted writers were used for the party’s own agenda. He was furious that they were “exploited for every left-wing cause that came down the pike.”

As Mark Steyn wrote of screenwriter and novelist Dalton Trumbo in 2003, when the off-Broadway play that was a likely inspiration for the 2015 biopic starring Breaking Bad’s Bryan Cranston as Trumbo, “Though the play won’t tell you the answer to that famous question – ‘Are you now or have you ever…?’ – the answer is: yes, he was. The more interesting question is: How do you feel about getting one of the great moral questions of the century wrong?”

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

YEAH, SAME GUY:

More:

Want to know why we stopped listening to Europe? There you go.

Posted at 1:09 pm by Stephen Green

BEEGE WELBORN HAS A TWOFER OF GOOD STUFF FROM THE ANTIPODES TODAY.

From NZ: Nut Zeroes: Kiwis Are Up a Creek in 3 Weeks and Nearly No Diesel in the Land Down Under. “In New Zealand, fascist former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, besides taking away every last firearm in the country and locking up every living soul as she indulged her dictatorial COVID powers during the pandemic, also set the island on its merry way to net zero and disaster by declaring a ‘global climate emergency.'”

You’ll never guess what happened next.

And a related item from Australia: You Can Still Hum ‘Leavin’ on a Jet Plane’ From Anywhere…But Australia. “Neither does the fact that successive Australian governments have never once maintained fuel reserves at the level needed in case this very thing happened, even as they marched into a climate cult Kool-Aid event.”

20 years ago, there was talk of the Anglosphere as a loose alliance of like-minded peoples bringing peace and prosperity to the world. But aside from the US — and us only barely — the rest of the English-speaking world seems to have lost its damned minds.

Posted at 12:46 pm by Stephen Green

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

SUPREME COURT BLOCKS MUSIC INDUSTRY’S PUSH TO CUT MILLIONS OFF THE INTERNET OVER PIRACY CLAIMS:

The Supreme Court has unanimously refused to let the recording industry turn internet providers into copyright enforcers with the power to cut millions of people off from modern life.

The ruling, handed down Wednesday in Cox Communications v. Sony Music Entertainment, kills a legal theory that would have given ISPs one rational choice when they received a copyright complaint: sever the connection first, figure out the truth later.

We obtained a copy of the order for you here.

All nine justices thankfully agreed that Cox Communications bears no liability for the piracy of its subscribers.

Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the majority, stated: “Under our precedents, a company is not liable as a copyright infringer for merely providing a service to the general public with knowledge that it will be used by some to infringe copyrights.”

The real significance of the ruling isn’t what it means for Cox’s balance sheet. It’s what prevents it from happening to everyone who depends on an internet connection to live, work, and communicate, which in 2026 is functionally all of us.

Consider what the recording industry was actually proposing. Sony Music Entertainment and more than 50 other labels, representing artists like Sabrina Carpenter, Givēon, and Doechii*, wanted courts to hold ISPs financially liable for not disconnecting users accused of piracy.

Not convicted. Accused.

The accusations themselves came from an automated system paid for by the Recording Industry Association of America, which hires an anti-piracy company to blast notices at internet providers whenever its software detects possible infringement. Nobody reviews these notices with any care. Nobody checks whether the flagged activity was actually illegal, whether it fell under fair use, or whether the person named on the account was even the one responsible.

Under the legal standard the labels wanted, an ISP that received enough of these automated complaints and didn’t disconnect the account could face catastrophic financial liability. A Virginia jury bought that theory in 2019 and hit Cox with a verdict of over $1 billion.

The incentive structure that kind of liability creates is terrifying if you think it through for more than a few seconds. When an ISP faces billion-dollar exposure for not cutting people off, the only financially rational response is to start cutting people off aggressively.

Exit quote: “A family of five loses their connection because one teenager allegedly downloaded a song. A hospital serving hundreds of patients and their families goes dark because someone on the guest Wi-Fi triggered an automated flag. A university campus gets throttled or disconnected because students were doing what students have always done. ‘That notion turns Internet providers into Internet police and jeopardizes Internet access for millions of users,’ Cox told the Court.”

* Evergreen:

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll

EXCLUSIVE: Top Trump Official Sheds Light On ‘Mess’ Lying Under Hood Of Illegal Trucker Crisis.

After investigating the circumstances that led to the fatal crash in Florida, the DOT in September handed down severe restrictions against non-domiciled CDL holders and identified state governments that were purportedly issuing licenses to foreign truck drivers unlawfully. The DOT in February doubled down with more rules to keep illegal migrants away from big rigs, rolling out new screening processes and eliminating a loophole that previously allowed foreigners with bad driving records to obtain trucking licenses.

Labor groups closely aligned with the Democrat Party quickly sued to squash the new regulations, claiming that the rules would harm hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals.

Barrs argues that the rules are solely intended to keep American highways safe.

“No one wants to lose good, qualified drivers,” Barrs told the DCNF, speaking about the number of migrant drivers expected to be taken off the roads over the next several years due to the tighter regulations. “To me, this is the safety aspect — we have to always bring it back to that piece.”

“I am not willing, in the role I have at FMCSA, to compromise safety just to put someone in the seat of a truck,” he continued.

His job would be a lot easier if certain blue states didn’t hand out CDLs like Halloween candy.

Posted at 11:44 am by Stephen Green