April 24, 2026

FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY [VIP]: Meet Mayor McDUI. “It’s time for your much-needed break from the serious news, and this week, we’ll learn that you’re always the mayor of Naples, how to dress for a night out at Jensen Beach, and how to have a cow in upstate New York.”

Posted at 4:23 pm by Stephen Green

OH, TO BE IN ENGLAND AIRSTRIP ONE:

As Wikipedia notes:

The head of BBC history, Robert Seatter, has said George Orwell in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), “reputedly based his notorious Room 101 from the novel “on a room he had worked in whilst at the BBC.”[52]

On 7 November 2017, a statue of Orwell, sculpted by the British sculptor Martin Jennings, was unveiled, outside Broadcasting House. The wall behind the statue is inscribed with the following phrase: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear”. These are words from his proposed preface to Animal Farm and a rallying cry for the idea of free speech in an open society.

Serious question: Why doesn’t “the right to tell people what they do not want to hear” work both ways in 21st century England?

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Final Rule Drives a Stake Through Anti-Gun Left’s De-Banking Strategy.

Ultimately, this final rule eliminates reputation risk as a means of injecting politics into banking regulation by prohibiting examiners from using this subjective assessment to pressure or penalize banks. It also prohibits regulators from pushing banks to close accounts or deny services based on their ill-conceived aversion to the lawful firearms and ammunition industries, which are vital to supporting our constitutional rights.

This rule helps to mitigate unjustified biases against these business sectors left over from the Obama-Biden Administration and importantly helps to prevent future efforts in the same vein. In 2013, the U.S. Department of Justice, in coordination with regulators such as the FDIC, began pressuring banks to cut ties and services to industries they considered to be “high risk,” which under the anti-gun Obama-Biden administration unsurprisingly included firearm and ammunition-related business.re

The program, billed Operation Choke Point, encouraged broad financial “de-risking” and led to banks freezing or terminating services to lawful businesses based on “reputation risk,” instead of any proven misconduct or illegality. Guidance documents provided to banks at the time specifically listed firearm and ammunition sales as high-risk activity, although they are some of the most highly regulated industries in the country.

More like this, please.

Posted at 3:52 pm by Stephen Green

FRAUD ALL THE WAY DOWN…:

…and she also married her brother.

Posted at 3:36 pm by Stephen Green

A LAWYER READER MESSAGES: “I have not seen any updates from Lucas or anyone else on your blog, but the for your benefit, the Supreme Court of Virginia is going to hear argument on the redistricting fight Monday, April 27th, this coming Monday at 9AM. There is a link on the Supreme court of Virginia’s web page. Thanks.”

The link for the oral argument is here.

Posted at 3:31 pm by Glenn Reynolds

OUCH: Meta to cut 8,000 jobs, Microsoft offers buyouts to to staff as AI spending costs hit Big Tech workers.

Meta (META) on Thursday became the latest Big Tech company to announce layoffs as the ballooning costs of the AI build-out and efficiencies continue to hit workers in the industry.

The company says it will cut 10% of its workforce, or about 8,000 employees.
…
Microsoft (MSFT) will also offer voluntary buyouts to some employees as the company joins many of its Big Tech peers in seeking ways to control costs amid their AI spending sprees.

According to a source familiar with the matter, roughly 7% of Microsoft’s US employees, senior directors or below, can take part in the buyouts if their years at the company plus their age add up to at least 70.

How big are those AI build-outs? This big: “Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft alone will spend some $650 billion on capital expenditures in 2026.”

Posted at 2:50 pm by Stephen Green

TWO-TIER KEIR:

Posted at 2:34 pm by Stephen Green

KEEP HAMMERING ON THIS, DATA R:

Posted at 2:03 pm by Stephen Green

HEH: So When Are The ‘Punch A Nazi’ Sorts Going To Punch SPLC Donors? “Meanwhile, what are all those angry leftists who based their identity on ‘punching Nazis’ going to do now that it’s been revealed that their side were the ones funding the Nazis all along?”

I figure the ones with big enough names that you saw them on CNN or M-SNOW were likely in on it.

Posted at 1:48 pm by Stephen Green

PUBLIC EDUCATION THAT DOESN’T SERVE THE PUBLIC’S INTEREST DOESN’T DESERVE THE PUBLIC’S FUNDS…:

…or is representative government dead, despite all the left blather about “Our Democracy?”

Posted at 1:01 pm by Stephen Green

CONTAINMENT WALL BREACHED:

It’s good to see the SPLC bombshells making CBS News, but let’s give credit to America’s Newspaper of Record for being particularly succinct in covering the story:

Posted at 12:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

HMM:

More:

The reason she is moving at all is that Iran is running out of places to put the oil.

Kharg Island handles roughly ninety percent of Iran’s crude exports. Its onshore tanks had about thirteen million barrels of spare capacity when the US blockade began on April 13. Net inflow since has been running at one million to one point one million barrels per day because exports have collapsed to single digits of vessels while upstream production continues. The math is mechanical. Roughly twelve days of spare capacity. The calendar says that window closes this week.

NASHA is not a strategy. NASHA is what you do when you have run out of strategy.

A two-million-barrel floating storage vessel buys Iran approximately forty-eight hours of continued upstream production. After that, either the wells get shut in or the crude goes somewhere else. The parallel options being pursued, ship-to-ship transfers in the Riau Archipelago, AIS-dark transits, sanctioned VLCCs returning home through the blockade line, are not enough. Lloyd’s List Intelligence has tracked roughly twenty-six Iran-linked vessels evading since April 13. That cannot absorb a million barrels a day.

The wells will shut in. The question is which wells, for how long, and whether they come back.

Bringing those wells back takes months, at least.

This is exactly what Trump meant yesterday when he said time was on his side.

Posted at 12:29 pm by Stephen Green