May 11, 2026

CHANGE INCENTIVES, CHANGE BEHAVIOR:

Posted at 1:28 pm by Stephen Green

ONE OF THE WAYS YOU CAN TELL THAT LEFTISM IS A RELIGION IS ITS RELIANCE ON SHUNNING APOSTATES:

As Glenn noted in the very early days of Instapundit, “As the old saying has it, the left looks for heretics and the right looks for converts, and both find what they’re looking for. The effect is no doubt subliminal, but people who treat you like crap are, over time, less persuasive than people who don’t. If people on the Left are so unhappy about how many former allies are changing their views, perhaps they should examine how those allies are treated.”

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

THE EVIDENCE IS PRETTY SOLID IN FAVOR: Is testosterone therapy safe and effective? What we know. I love this:

Testosterone’s reputation has had its ups and downs since the hormone was first synthesized in the 1930s. After an initial golden period, in which it was described as “one of the most potent drugs recently introduced to medicine,” the therapy fell out of favour for fear that it could cause cancer. This idea originated from the work of urologist Charles Huggins who, in 1941, found that prostate cancer depends on testosterone and that lowering the hormone levels caused tumours to shrink. It was a groundbreaking discovery for which he was awarded a share in the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1966.

Morgentaler says that when he was training as a urologist in the 1980s, there was a widespread belief, based on Huggins’s findings, that testosterone therapy could promote prostate cancer. Despite the presumed risks, he says he still thought that the hormone could help some of his patients who had low testosterone and sexual problems. So, he started treating them while monitoring them closely.

They didn’t get cancer, Morgentaler says, and they benefited from the treatment greatly. Some of his clinical findings — along with the revelation that Huggins’s most dire warnings about the hormone causing cancer were based on observations of a single person — helped to clear the way for renewed interest in testosterone therapy.

Sample size: One. So much received medical wisdom comes from this sort of thing.

Posted at 1:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

TECH REVOLUTION?

Posted at 12:45 pm by Glenn Reynolds

CHANGE: Trump budget targets ‘valley of death’ with new military contractor accountability model.

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth told the House Armed Services Committee that funding alone will not solve the problem – the procurement system itself must change.

“The historic, generational, and transformational changes we implement will move us from the current prime contractor-dominated system defined by limited competition, vendor lock, cost-plus contracts, stressed budgets and frustrating protests – to a future powered by a dynamic vendor space that accelerates production,” Hegseth said.

At the center of that shift is a new multi-year procurement model – contracts lasting up to seven years for critical munitions – designed to give manufacturers the certainty needed to build new facilities rather than add shifts to existing ones. Under the model, contractors fund their own capital expenditures up front and face financial penalties if they fail to meet agreed-upon production ramp rates.

Jules “Jay” Hurst III, performing the duties of Under Secretary of War Comptroller, said the previous approach, in which the government financed capacity expansion, had produced marginal results.

“We’re making them put skin in the game,” Hurst said at an April 21 Pentagon budget briefing. “We’re giving them a multi-year order, and we expect them to meet the ramp rates that they agree to, and if they don’t, there’ll be penalties for them.”

Accountability in procurement would be a helluva legacy.

Posted at 12:42 pm by Stephen Green

THOMAS HAZLETT: Ted Turner, Entrepreneur of His Age.

In 1970, cable TV service was essentially outlawed in 90 percent of American households. The powerful VHF stations, dominated by the NBC-CBS-ABC triopoly, ruled the world. Weak UHF stations were virtually worthless, given their stunted reception under FCC rules, though cable operators wanted to retransmit their signals to homes in crystal clarity.

Turner’s simple vision was to think of a world with such stupid rules gone. Then a nothingburger outlet in Charlotte could be delivered via cable, ending its “UHF discount.” Then a losing proposition like WTBS could bounce its product to 30,000 communities via satellite, produce its own popular programs, and compete head-to-head—against the choice set of My Mother the Car, Hello Larry, or SuperTrain—in households everywhere.

Turner picked just the right time. What the TV insiders (and Malcolm Gladwell) decried as a sop to Turner was officially labeled the “deregulation of cable TV” at the Carter-era FCC. As The New York Times softly described them, these 1980 rulings “reversed 15 years of emphasis placed by the commission on protecting broadcast stations from significant inroads by the cable companies. They opened the possibility that broadcasters and cable TV outlets would be able to compete more equally for viewers and advertisers.”

Gladwell finished his exposé by condemning Ted Turner as a business simpleton. “Turner has played embattled entrepreneur, television savior, right-wing point man, and—for his own whims—communications peacemaker. What he really wants to do is make a lot of money.”

Yes. That’s the beauty of the system.

In his sweeping 1980 book The Third Wave, Alvin Toffler predicted the coming world of “The De-massified Media:”

All these different developments have one thing in common: they slice the mass television public into segments, and each slice not only increases our cultural diversity, it cuts deeply into the power of the networks that have until now so completely dominated our imagery. John O’Connor, the perceptive critic of The New York Times, sums it up simply. “One thing is certain,” he writes. “Commercial television will no longer be able to dictate either what is watched or when it is watched.”

What appears on the surface to be a set of unrelated events turns out to be a wave of closely interrelated changes sweeping across the media horizon from newspapers and radio at one end to magazines and television at the other. The mass media are under attack. New, de-massified media are proliferating, challenging—and sometimes even replacing—the mass media that were so dominant in all Second Wave societies.

The Third Wave thus begins a truly new era—the age of the de-massified media. A new info-sphere is emerging alongside the new techno-sphere. And this will have a far-reaching impact on the most important sphere of all, the one inside our skulls. For taken together, these changes revolutionize our images of the world and our ability to make sense of it.

Ted Turner, with all of his manic energy and his goofy and contradictory political views got there early and created the media world of the 1980s. And helped preserve the media world of the past, to boot:

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

MORE DETAILS: Scenes From The Labour Party Wipe Out.

Nigel Farage’s Reform went from two council seats to 1,453. Labour, by contrast, lost 1,446 seats. But the conservative also lost council seats, 563 of them, which now puts them behind the Liberal Democrats, something that hasn’t happened since, well, ever.

Indeed, as this Sky News video notes, this is the first time since they started keeping track in the 1970s that the combined Labour/Tory share of these seats fell below 50%, and is now down to 35%.

Well, Britain’s establishment parties haven’t done very well by Britons in recent decades.

Posted at 11:40 am by Stephen Green

NORM FOR THE WIN… AGAIN:

Posted at 10:53 am by Stephen Green

THOSE DON’T EVEN REGISTER AS ROOKIE NUMBERS: Germany deports 135 Iraqi migrants in first three months of 2026.

In January 2025, the German parliament approved a controversial migration bill aimed at tightening enforcement measures. The legislation included provisions to curb illegal immigration, accelerate deportations, remove foreign criminals, detain individuals facing removal orders, and restrict family reunification.

Official data released to the Left Party faction in October last year showed that 328 Iraqis, including 18 minors, were deported during the first half of 2025.

Kurds from Iraq and Turkey have also been affected by Germany’s broader immigration crackdown, which saw more than 8,200 refugee residence permits revoked over the past year. The stricter policies have coincided with a sharp decline in asylum applications, which fell to their lowest level in a decade.

That new law needs much more tightening.

Posted at 10:38 am by Stephen Green

MAKE LA GREAT AGAIN:

Tweet concludes, “I wish I lived in LA just so I could vote for him.”

But in 2026, is that really an issue?

Related: “Spencer Pratt and The Art of Persuasion,” a Scott Adams-style look at Pratt’s campaign techniques.

Posted at 10:35 am by Ed Driscoll

NOT TO MENTION DECADES WORTH OF MEDIA BIAS*:

When Obama says, that the GOP should be “the loyal opposition,” hoping that they’ll blindly go along with their nearly 120 years of power grabs is what he’s referring to.

* As Tim Groseclose observed in his 2012 book, Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind,  “Groseclose contends that the general leftward bias of the media has shifted the PQ of the average American by about 20 points, on a scale of 100, the difference between the current political views of the average American, and the political views of the average resident of Orange County, California or Salt Lake County, Utah.”

Posted at 10:22 am by Ed Driscoll

DEALING WITH DEATH CULTS: Islam is not the first foreign threat to the United States that practiced a warrior death cult. Richard Pollock reminds of the Japanese Bushido code in World War II. There are lessons here for dealing with Islam.

Posted at 10:14 am by Mark Tapscott

JONATHAN TURLEY UNDERTAKES a distasteful task. “Under Schapiro, a wide array of speech was deemed “microaggressive” or intolerable in the interests of harmony and inclusion. He did little to quell the viewpoint intolerance at Northwestern and the virtual purging of faculty ranks of conservative or Republican faculty. Now the mob has come for Schapiro.’

Posted at 10:00 am by Glenn Reynolds

I FOLLOW THESE THINGS FOR A LIVING AND THIS STORY FLEW RIGHT UNDER MY RADAR UNTIL NOW:

WDIV-4 News called her “an Oakland County woman” in its lede.

Posted at 9:51 am by Stephen Green

IT’S COMPLICATED: Russia said to be sending Iran drone parts via Caspian Sea, bypassing Hormuz blockade.

According to the sources, who spoke to the American outlet on condition of anonymity, the long-overlooked trade corridor is helping Iran rebuild its military capabilities in the wake of the US-Israeli bombing campaign that ended last month in a tenuous ceasefire.

If shipments from Russia continue at their current pace, Iran could quickly restock its drone arsenal, US officials said, some 60 percent of which was lost during the recent war.

The Caspian Sea acts as a bridge, connecting the two countries which do not share a border but both have long coastlines on the massive inland sea. It allows Russia and Iran to trade openly, without fear of interdiction by US or other countries for evading sanctions, the New York Times reported.

According to the news outlet, Russia is sending goods that would normally pass through the Strait of Hormuz, which has been blockaded for weeks now by both the US and Iran. Goods transiting the Caspian Sea include grains, animal feed, sunflower oil and other staple products.

Previously: Ukraine war briefing: Distant strike on Russian missile ship in Caspian Sea.

Who knows what Kyiv might do if somebody slipped them some drone parts cargo ship targeting data.

Posted at 9:36 am by Stephen Green

FUN IS CONTAGIOUS:

Posted at 9:20 am by Stephen Green

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: We’ve Finally Found Something That United America. Sort Of. “So, why do I say it’s the first thing to unite Americans in quite a while? Because every single person I know mentioned it to me this weekend. And I’m pretty sure even some people I don’t know mentioned it. I saw it all over social media. I saw it from Democrats and Republicans and Independents. I saw it from skeptics and believers. I saw it from X-Files-obsessed dads and conspiracy theorist grandmas and aviation nerds who spend all their time on Reddit and FlightRadar24.”

Posted at 9:05 am by Stephen Green