September 22, 2026

MAYBE WE OUGHT TO APPLY “PROOF OF HUMAN” TO THE CANDIDATES:

Posted at 11:25 am by Stephen Green

I WAS TOO DEAD FROM SARS TO EVEN NOTICE WHEN I DIED FROM TAX CUTS:

“The issue is never the issue — the issue is always the revolution.”

Posted at 10:54 am by Stephen Green

THE NEW SPACE RACE: SpaceX’s Super Heavy booster arrives at pad ahead of first orbital Starship launch.

SpaceX placed a Super Heavy booster on the launch pad at Starbase in Texas Monday, as it continues testing and preparations for the first planned orbital flight of Starship, scheduled for launch as soon as Sept. 28, pending final approval from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

The Super Heavy booster, with the tail number B21, departed its assembly building shortly before midnight local time and was placed on the launch mount at Pad 2, roughly two hours later. The stainless-steel booster stands 236 feet tall (72 meters) and boasts a diameter of 9 m (29.5 ft). By comparison, a Falcon 9 rocket has a diameter of 3.7 m (12 ft). The downcomer pipe that carries methane fuel down the center of the Super Heavy Booster’s liquid oxygen tank to the Raptor engines at its base is roughly the size of an entire Falcon 9 rocket.

I’m expecting an Earth-shattering kaboom, but hopefully only the kind that gets muffled a bit by the launch pad’s water deluge system.

Posted at 10:39 am by Stephen Green

THE CRITICAL DRINKER: Hollywood Is Dying — And These People Killed It.

Posted at 10:35 am by Ed Driscoll

I MISSED THIS OVER THE WEEKEND, BUT WHAT A SHOW: 25 Years After a Historic Anthem, Jesse McGuire Delivered Another One. “The national anthem began as beautifully as it could. McGuire’s notes rang out before the reverent crowd. Suddenly, things went wrong. McGuire’s horn failed, and after another attempt to keep going, he improvised in a way that even the best Hollywood scriptwriter couldn’t devise.”

Posted at 10:08 am by Stephen Green

WHEN ECONOMISTS GO POLITICAL:

(Spoiler: It’s those same economists, in their actual academic work.)

Posted at 9:56 am by Glenn Reynolds

TROUBLED TIMES:

Posted at 9:55 am by Glenn Reynolds

LIABILITY WORKS: Treasury Sec. Scott Bessent says OpenAI bears ‘responsibility’ for Hugging Face hack.

AI safety fears have surged since Sam Altman’s OpenAI revealed last month that a swarm of its AI agents had broken out of their testing “sandbox” and hacked Hugging Face without permission. That’s as some critics have accused OpenAI, Anthropic and other firms of publicizing safety incidents in a bid to shape regulations to suit their preferences.

“The Hugging Face incident, that is the responsibility of the OpenAI management, not a bunch of agents,” Bessent said during an appearance on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Monday.

He said he agreed with Daniel Huttenlocher, the co-chair of MIT’s computing research lab, on the notion that “it is humans who are responsible, not the AI.”

So of course Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI want a regulatory environment that would protect them from their products’ defects.

Posted at 9:37 am by Stephen Green

WELL PUT:

Question asked and answered, “Are we the baddies?”

Posted at 9:21 am by Stephen Green

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Republicans Aren’t Letting El-Sayed Memory Hole Hasan Piker. “El-Sayed has a lot of support here in commie Ann Arbor and will no doubt do quite well in Dearborn and surrounding areas. Michigan gets pretty red when moving away from Wayne and Washtenaw counties, though, and voters in the rest of the state are really going to need to turn out in November. Campaign ads like the one from David Beamer should take care of any apathy or complacency. The ones I’ve seen should also be powerful draws for independent voters and Democrats who think that the DSA has a serious ick factor associated with it.”

Posted at 9:06 am by Stephen Green

WELL, GOOD: State Department clamps down on size of Iran’s UN delegation and ability to splurge on ‘shopping sprees.’

A State Department spokesperson told the Washington Examiner on Monday that the “delegation is smaller than last year,” most likely due to restrictions placed on Pezeshkian’s media team reported by Iranian state outlets.

“In an unprecedented hostile move by the U.S. government, Trump has denied U.S. visas to certain members of the president’s high-level delegation, including members of his communications team,” reported Iranian state news agency IRNA this week.

Hostile? Well, we are at war.

Posted at 8:35 am by Stephen Green

HOW LONG BEFORE HE’S ACCUSED OF RACISM?

Posted at 8:19 am by Stephen Green