December 11, 2025

GOODER AND HARDER, SILICON VALLEY:

To revise and extend the remarks by the late P.J. O’Rourke, you can’t get good Chinese takeout in China, Cuban cigars are rationed in Cuba, and tech employees are fleeing California. That’s all you need to know about communism.

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

REMEMBER PACIFIC PALISADES? Newsom wouldn’t budge on his duplex ban for the Los Angeles wildfire rebuild. So, a YIMBY group is suing him.

The lawsuit, filed by YIMBY Law on Wednesday in Los Angeles County Superior Court, alleges the governor unlawfully restricted homeowners’ ability to rebuild after the fires by allowing local governments to set aside Senate Bill 9, a 2021 state law that permits duplex construction and lot-splitting on single-family-home parcels.

Newsom issued his order in July in response to lobbying from property owners in the Pacific Palisades, the coastal L.A. community that was largely destroyed in the blazes. Palisades residents argued that allowing duplexes and spitting lots into two parcels would undermine the neighborhood’s character and worsen evacuation efforts in the event of future disasters. Following the governor’s order, all the jurisdictions affected — the cities of Los Angeles, Malibu and Pasadena and L.A. County — banned SB 9 rebuilds in high-risk fire areas. The suit includes each local government as a defendant as well.

YIMBY Law, which is based in San Francisco and sues public agencies to clear the way for more housing, had agreed in discussions with high-level Newsom staffers late last week not to file its suit if the governor allowed duplex construction again after a year, the group’s executive director Sonja Trauss told POLITICO.

When Newsom did not act, the group turned to the courts.

They f***** up — they trusted Newsom.

Posted at 3:51 pm by Stephen Green

HISTORY:

Posted at 3:04 pm by Stephen Green

2026 PREVIEW: Don’t Expect Jasmine Crockett To Waltz To The Texas Senate Nomination. “I suspect that people outside of the state haven’t heard of Talarico, who fills the Beto O’Rourke mold as a white guy with a vaguely Hispanic name. But he’s clearly the anointed choice of Texas Democratic Party insiders, to the point that he has been out-fundraising Allred (the man who raised over $94 million in his futile attempt to oust Ted Cruz last year) by more than $1 million, which was probably a contributing factor in Allred dropping out.”

Posted at 2:49 pm by Stephen Green

NEW CRITERION: Other people’s money.

As we await Mamdani’s socialist dégringolade, it is worth keeping in mind two points from his victory speech. One was the grateful praise he lavished upon “Yemeni bodega owners and Mexican abuelas. Senegalese taxi drivers and Uzbek nurses. Trinidadian line cooks and Ethiopian aunties.” Note the group he omitted: Americans; indeed, no form of the word “American” occurs in his speech.

The second point to bear in mind from Mamdani’s speech concerns coercion. Frantz Fanon taught that “decolonization” always requires violence to succeed. Mamdani’s frequent deployment of the word “mandate” in his speech, despite receiving votes from only a million New Yorkers (in a city of 8.5 million), should give us pause. He had, he said, been given “A mandate for change. A mandate for a new kind of politics. A mandate for a city we can afford. And a mandate for a government that delivers exactly that.” The word “mandate,” we note, comes from the Latin verb mandare: to order, command. Who can doubt Mamdani’s implicit understanding of that etymology, given his devotion to Fanon?

When you strip away whatever emollient rhetorical packaging in which it is delivered, socialism rests on two basic demands: the abolition of private property and the equalization of wealth. The more aggressively those demands are pushed, the more severe will be the imposition of state control by those working the levers of power. We write a few days after Mamdani’s victory at the polls. Already the cultivated nice-guy rictus of his campaign countenance is disintegrating, replaced by something harsher and more grasping.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 2:33 pm by Stephen Green

BREAKING: Senate Rejects Extending Obamacare Subsidies.

So they’re saying that the Affordable Care Act didn’t actually do anything to make health care more affordable, but just threw other people’s money at the problem?

Posted at 1:57 pm by Stephen Green

UGH: Open AI, Microsoft face lawsuit over ChatGPT’s alleged role in Connecticut murder-suicide.

Police said Stein-Erik Soelberg, 56, a former tech industry worker, fatally beat and strangled his mother, Suzanne Adams, and killed himself in early August at the home where they both lived in Greenwich, Connecticut.

The lawsuit filed by Adams’ estate on Thursday in California Superior Court in San Francisco alleges OpenAI “designed and distributed a defective product that validated a user’s paranoid delusions about his own mother.” It is one of a growing number of wrongful death legal actions against AI chatbot makers across the country.

“Throughout these conversations, ChatGPT reinforced a single, dangerous message: Stein-Erik could trust no one in his life — except ChatGPT itself,” the lawsuit says. “It fostered his emotional dependence while systematically painting the people around him as enemies. It told him his mother was surveilling him. It told him delivery drivers, retail employees, police officers, and even friends were agents working against him. It told him that names on soda cans were threats from his ‘adversary circle.’”

Among other things, LLMs are highly effective engagement tools, feeding back what the user wants to hear. But it also helped back when we still maintained enough asylums for people with paranoid delusions.

Posted at 1:47 pm by Stephen Green

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Plunge in English language learners foreshadows Connecticut school enrollment crisis.

For more than a decade, Connecticut’s English Language Learner (ELL) student population has acted as a critical buffer, masking a broader, underlying decline in overall public school enrollment. That period has officially ended, delivering a fiscal one-two punch that towns across the state have been dreading.

For the first time in over a decade, the number of ELL students statewide has dropped significantly, declining by over 2,000 students from 57,055 to 54,915 this year.

Many are attributing this decline to families’ fears of immigration enforcement. Others say it is due to a shortage of housing, school choice and repeal of the religious immunization exception.

Overall public school enrollment in Connecticut is falling and the recent decline in English language learners will only accelerate this trend.

At least one county in Florida has a similar problem, but it doesn’t seem to be related to illegals: “The potential for school closures underscores the difficult crosscurrents buffeting the district, as families opt for private school using the state’s generous voucher program and nonprofit charter schools seek space in underused campuses.”

Posted at 12:45 pm by Stephen Green