October 22, 2026

THE 21st CENTURY ISN’T TURNING OUT AS I HAD HOPED: Google Didn’t Invent This Racial Double Standard, but It Learned It.

Another medical journal declares that “There is no good clinical reason for choosing a white doctor rather than a doctor from an ethnic minority.” And these are the types of sources that Google is drawing on for its AI responses to questions like the ones I asked.

Honestly, I’m not sure why anybody would limit the doctors from whom they receive care to certain ethnicities, but we shouldn’t see such a disparity in the responses. It’s easy to simply dismiss it as bias on Google’s end, and that’s a big part of the problem. But what we also see is that medical academia is the source of heavy bias that Google is drawing from.

Google didn’t invent this double standard. It simply repeated what influential voices in medical academia have already decided: that the same preference can be perfectly reasonable or potentially racist depending on who’s expressing it. And when that sort of thinking becomes the foundation for the information Americans receive, the problem goes well beyond a biased search result.

Equal treatment shouldn’t come with a racial exemption.

Still though, it’s Google, so it could always be much has worse: Google’s AI Debacle. Why is Google creating pro-Nazi and pro-Confederate propaganda?

Posted at 5:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

IN SOME COMMUNITIES, SHE’S BEEN A LAUGHINGSTOCK ALL ALONG:

Posted at 5:39 pm by Stephen Green

ALL THIS AND WORLD WAR ELEVEN: Oh, Brother: ‘Not to My Knowledge?’

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) on Wednesday called allegations that she married her brother “insane” – but didn’t entirely close the door to the possibility of being related to her ex-husband.

“Not to my knowledge,” Omar responded, when asked by MS NOW’s Chris Hayes if there was any “weird kernel of truth” to the claim that she wed her brother.

The decade-old allegations that Omar and her ex, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, got hitched in a failed effort to get him a green card originated on a “Somali blog,” and spread when “right-wing conspiracy theorists” latched onto it, Omar explained in her first interview since federal agents raided her Washington, DC, home last week.

As Ed Morrissey concludes, “Get ready for bumpy days ahead, Ms. Omar-ish. And maybe M-SNOW ‘news’ anchors might try to catch up at some point rather than chuckle through a scandal that has unfolded for years.”

Posted at 5:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

WE’RE NOT LISTENING ANYMORE:

Sometimes the younger guys will take a look at TikTok and hear the screaming, crying lunatic women, either doing the usual rant about men or sobbing because no sane guy will come within twenty miles of her. There is a certain joy in the whiner’s misfortune, otherwise known as Schadenfreude, but almost immediately they will scroll over to look at guitars, sports cars, or check the score of the ball game. On the whole, the entire thing has become incredibly boring.

For years we did listen, actually until about seven or eight years ago. We listened through the ’80s, the ’90s, and the early 2000s, and then things began to change. We were dragged into Human Resources training and told we had to answer for scumbags like Harvey Weinstein and all the “sensitive” actors and Hollywood types that we knew were scumbags all along—and who were, incidentally, celebrated by women. We were told that we had to answer for Bill Clinton, when most men with even an ounce of testosterone despised the guy. The whole parade of #MeToo was apparently a shock to liberals, and especially liberal women, but there wasn’t a conservative guy on earth who couldn’t see these scumbags coming from miles away. Big shock that Hollywood producers, rock stars, politicians and celebrities might actually take advantage of a woman.

We listened as decent, hardworking men were lumped in with fictional characters like Don Draper, and we were told that somehow a sliver of revolting advertising guys from Manhattan represented all men. We listened through corporate diversity seminars that explained to us that when Neal grabbed Barb’s butt in the elevator, this was a bad thing. Thanks for the clarification. We listened as we were now expected to answer for creeps in New York and Los Angeles newsrooms and politicians who were sexting pictures of their weenies to their staffers, as though the rest of us had been consulted beforehand and somehow approved the plan.

We listened to all the lectures in college about toxic masculinity, which eventually seemed to encompass everything from men breathing oxygen to hiding in the garage. We listened while we were told that using rational argument was “mansplaining,” that “math was racist,” and abortion was “health care.” We heard all about the male gaze, so we stopped looking. We listened as we were told that women wanted to be judged equally in the workplace, except when they didn’t. Disagreement was fragility, attraction was objectification, and somehow lack of attention was discrimination. Opening the door for a woman was paternalistic, but not opening it was rude.

And thus we get to this recent moment, without much thought to the multiple steps in the cultural revolution leading up to it:

As Glenn likes to say, chivalry was a code that made behavioral demands on women as well as men.

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

THE FUTURE HAS ARRIVED — ON YOUR DRIVEWAY TO TAKE YOU WHEREVER YOU WANT TO GO:

Posted at 5:08 pm by Stephen Green

ELON MUSK WRONG TO THINK WE CAN COLONIZE MARS, SAYS NOBEL LAUREATE:

Elon Musk is wrong to claim that a million people could migrate to Mars, the co-discoverer of the first exoplanet has said.

The SpaceX owner has vowed to form a self-sustaining civilisation on the Red Planet within 100 years, but Prof Michel Mayor, a Nobel Prize-winning astronomer, said it was a naive notion.

He advised people to “take care” of Earth because he said no other planet could provide a “lifeboat” for humankind.
Speaking at the Starmus conference, in Tenerife, Prof Mayor said: “Could one million persons migrate to Mars in the next century?

“The pressure on Mars is something like one hundredth of the Earth’s atmosphere. It’s carbon dioxide, argon, but no oxygen. So it’s absolutely not convenient for man.”

“The mean temperature is minus 60C. The minimum temperature could be as low as 140C. You have strong dust wind. You have cosmic radiation, and the soil is not adequate for agriculture. It’s toxic, contrary to the film where he plants some salad,” he added.

“So to settle there, people would have to live in pressurised structures, either domes or underground, trying to protect themselves from the cold, and radiation. So, do you really dream of going to this surface? Do you believe that really we will migrate one million persons on the next century? No.”

It’s not like Musk doesn’t think big. But if not a million, why not aim for some sort of colony there, instead of immediately declaring the notion impossible? As Clarke’s First Law states, “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”

Posted at 4:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

SAY ANYTHING: Macron blames US-Iran war for riots and rising fuel prices.

French President Emmanuel Macron on Sunday blamed the U.S.-led war against Iran, in part, for the riots and looting sweeping across France, saying the conflict has driven up the cost of living and fuel prices. The remarks, made in a televised speech, drew sharp criticism from experts and from U.S. President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance.

Macron said the demonstrations reflected economic anxiety tied to the war. “Demonstrators expressed concern about the cost of living and the price of fuel. Both are driven by the conflict launched in the Persian Gulf, a conflict in which France has taken no part but whose consequences we are suffering,” he said.

He added that he understood the concern and noted it was being voiced in other European capitals as well. “That is why I have taken several initiatives at the international level to secure our fuel and our gas and to act on energy markets,” Macron said. He announced that he would travel to the Gulf on a three-nation trip to discuss the energy crisis.

I’m so old, I can remember when high gas prices was something the far left desired on both sides of the Big Pond. As Steven Chu, Obama’s then-incoming energy secretary, told the Wall Street Journal in the fall of 2008: “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.”

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

NEVER SPEAK UP AND REMOVE ALL DOUBT That would have been great advice for young Stephanie Attar of New Jersey before she posed a question and delivered an astounding harangue. What she said is a perfect illustration of one of the 7 “Mirages” Matt Towery describes in his new book, “The Honoring of Ignorance.” You’re definitely going to want to read the rest of this instructive story in my latest news analysis for The Washington Stand.

Posted at 4:12 pm by Mark Tapscott

TERRIBLE, NONSENSICAL HEADLINE, BUT THE STORY IS IMPORTANT: Meta agrees to let Mark Zuckerberg remain in California amid proposed billionaire wealth tax.

Mark Zuckerberg has reached an agreement with Meta to remain in California after raising the possibility of leaving the state amid concerns over a proposed billionaire wealth tax.

Zuckerberg, Meta’s CEO, previously told the company he was considering moving his primary residence outside California because of Proposition 40, a ballot initiative that would impose a one-time tax equal to 5% of net worth on billionaires who were California residents on Jan. 1, 2026, if approved.

Under the agreement, Zuckerberg will receive non-voting shares that he could sell to help cover a potential wealth tax bill in exchange for a commitment to remain a resident of California, or the state where Meta maintains its headquarters, for eight years, according to Reuters.

Stupid. This will only encourage California’s worst instincts, and at the expense of Meta shareholders.

I’m not one, FWIW.

Posted at 3:51 pm by Stephen Green

TO BE FAIR, THE TELEGRAPH IS ONLY “CONSERVATIVE” BY POSTMODERN BRITISH STANDARDS:

Also, it’s great having Grok to help create better-looking memes and parodies.

Posted at 3:40 pm by Stephen Green

VICTORIA TAFT: The Oregon School Shooter Story Has Just Gone to a Much Darker Place. “Authorities investigating the rampage in Bend, Ore., last week are exploring whether the 16-year-old mass murderer may have been motivated by connections to an online nihilistic, satanic sex cult. ”

The satanic scare stuff from the ’80s turned out to be just scare stuff, but these days, who knows?

Posted at 3:20 pm by Stephen Green