AND THIS IS AT BERKELEY: I teach calculus at Berkeley. Some of my students can’t do middle school math.

I teach mathematics at UC Berkeley. Three days a week, I stand in front of lecture halls with 500 to 1,400 students. By the second week of the semester, I already know who is in trouble. Some students are five to eight years behind in mathematics. Office hours that should be spent discussing integrals instead become lessons on fractions and basic algebra you would expect students to learn in middle school.

That is why this spring and summer, thousands of faculty members across all 10 UC campuses — including more than two-thirds of UC’s mathematics faculty — signed open letters urging the system to restore the SAT and ACT in admissions. Five Nobel laureates joined us, along with professors from across the university, including Beatriz Manz, Berkeley’s first Latina full professor.

We did so because what an admission letter is supposed to mean — that a student is ready to attend the school — no longer matches what we see in our classrooms.

Read the whole thing.

TO BE FAIR…:

CHROMOSOMES ARE NOW OFFENSIVE. WE’VE REACHED PEAK STUPIDITY. https://t.co/zN4RbXxihZ

— Brandi Kruse (@BrandiKruse) August 17, 2026

…reality is offense to people living in denial of it.

DISPATCHES FROM AL-BRIṬĀNIYĀ: The Policewoman Who Remembered Britain Was Still Britain.

JUST SAY NO: Universities threaten students with investigations, disciplinary actions over ‘deadnaming.’

GOOD LUCK WITH THAT: Recall Petition Filed Against Seattle’s Far Left Mayor Katie Wilson. “Certainly the current crop of far-left ‘Democratic Socialists’ mayors ruining American cities are not the sharpest knives in the drawer (though Zohran Mamdani seems to display the sort of unprincipled cunning exhibited by many confidence artists), but Seattle’s Katie Wilson, someone who was still being financially supported by her parents at age 43 when running for mayor, strikes one as possibly the very dullest in the lot. From refusing to investigate fraud at Somali-run daycare centers to encouraging capital flight from Seattle via a proposed ‘billionaire’s tax’ (‘I think the claims that millionaires are going to leave our state are, like, super overblown. And if, you know, the ones that leave, like, bye!’), Wilson seems a particularly obtuse example of the breed. Now two Seattle citizens have filed a recall petition against her.”

THE BIDEN CABAL HANGOVER WILL LAST FOR YEARS:

🚨ARRESTED AGAIN🚨

A drug trafficker who was pardoned by Joe Biden over fentanyl-trafficking charges has been arrested AGAIN for allegedly selling fentanyl.

Walter Lee Muhammad made an appearance in federal court on possession with the intent to distribute controlled substances… pic.twitter.com/xAImTtu53M

— Breanna Morello (@BreannaMorello) August 17, 2026

HORSESHOE THEORY MAY HAVE A FREE SPEECH EDITION. FIRE’s latest survey finds very liberal and very conservative Americans are much more comfortable discussing controversial issues than moderates, even as most Americans remain deeply reluctant to speak freely on the toughest topics like Israel/Palestine and ICE.

THE NEW SPACE RACE:

"In the vast expanse of low Earth orbit, a new era of manufacturing is dawning. The semiconductors which drive the global economy are created in multi-billion-dollar facilities, notably in Taiwan. The semiconductors of the future will include innovations and designs enabled by…

— wretchardthecat (@wretchardthecat) August 17, 2026

SPENCER PRATT: Bombs, Burnt Beef, and the Big $20 Burrito Battle.

At some point, we will have to reckon with the fact that we shut down the world’s largest economy over the flu. You can’t do that. You can never do that. Not for global wars, not for nuclear holocaust, you never ever shut down your economy. Despite what decades of communist propaganda may have you believe, concern over the economy isn’t just vanity, it’s not greed…the economy is the proxy for our collective lives. Shutting down the economy means people die from missed cancer screenings, business owners kill themselves because their legacy family restaurant shuts down for good, people can’t afford basic human needs. We crippled the global economy and attempted to backfill the void by printing more money than had ever been printed in the history of human civilization and doled it out with alacrity. This grand experiment in universal basic income led to hyperinflation on a level that we only see in collapsing communist countries. The factories went dormant while the money printer went “brrrrrrrr”, so with too many dollars chasing too few goods, there was only one predictable outcome; prices go to the moon.

It will take decades for us to absorb and dilute the shock of the deluge of cash flooding into our economy. In 2015 in Mexico, eight straight days of torrential rainfall on Cozumel flooded the coast with freshwater. This temporary disruption of the salinity in the marine ecosystem was devastating for aquatic life, and it took years for the system to stabilize and recover from that singular shock. Similarly, it will take decades for us to absorb and dilute the shock of the deluge of cash that flooded into our economy during the government’s irrational shutdowns.

Unfortunately, this reckoning with our past mistakes is unavoidable. We can’t legislate nor print our way out of the most colossal fuck-up in the history of economic policy. No government program can unring that bell. The $20 burrito is a teachable moment: NEVER SHUT DOWN YOUR ECONOMY. EVER. The problem is, we have short memories, so nobody is going to connect the expensive burrito to the bad choices of yesteryear.

Read the whole thing.

BECAUSE OF COURSE: DSA Praises Fidel Castro in 100th Birthday Tribute, Denounces Marco Rubio as ‘Genocidal.’

The Democratic Socialists of America website called deceased Cuban dictator Fidel Castro a “stalwart symbol of anti-imperialist struggle and self-determination,” while denouncing Secretary of State Marco Rubio as genocidal.

In a tribute to Castro on what would have been his 100th birthday Thursday, the DSA website commemorated the “historic significance of both this day and the man.”

The fast-growing socialist organization that’s made strong inroads in Democratic Party primary elections over the past year, said that they have “a long history of solidarity with the Cuban people, their revolution, and their self-determination.”

Any solidarity with their hunger, crushing poverty, or desire for American liberty?

THE COUNTRY’S MOVING IN A DIRECTION WHERE ONE SIDE OR THE OTHER WILL BE PUTTING PEOPLE IN CAMPS:

Don’t worry everyone…they plan to put us in camps where we can concentrate on learning their morality. I wonder what they will call them. https://t.co/f8b4WDorF9

— Nick Freitas (@NickJFreitas) August 16, 2026

NOPE, THEY’RE OUT AND PROUD: Out in the Open: Antisemites Not Even Trying to Hide It Anymore.

THIS JUST IN: Active deployment frequently causes soldiers and sailors to lose weight — and Ro Khanna is on it! 

My views on why what the nation should be feeling now is gratitude in regards to the war in Iran.

Gratitude that a sailor losing 25lbs on deployment is the worst Ro can dig up. https://t.co/XWyjErqasC pic.twitter.com/KiP8MT3dwL

— John Ʌ Konrad V (@johnkonrad) August 17, 2026

HMM:

🚨 SPLC Had A Paid Informant inside INFOWARS that feed inside info to Sandy Hook Attorneys

This Is Plenty to Overturn Both Sandy Hook Default Judgements Against Alex Jones & Get Alex Jones New Trials in Texas and Connecticut, and Have the Attorneys Disbarred@RealAlexJones https://t.co/Arm6ZBTrNF pic.twitter.com/PnT9iYhbLY

— INFOWARS FAN (@InfoWars_tv) August 15, 2026

DON’T BET ON IT: Is Mark Cuban FINALLY Figuring Out His Side Is Nuts?

THE LEGAL PROFESSION HAS A DIVERSITY PROBLEM:

But you still see progressives talking about how law firms are a “conservative” stronghold. https://t.co/W94L9qgm4E

— David Bernstein (@ProfDBernstein) August 16, 2026

JULIE BURCHILL: The True Tragedy of the Death of Jason Arday.

This wild merry-go-round of fantasy came to a screeching halt last month when the American academic Nathan Cofnas, who had been sacked from Cambridge due to his unpalatable views on race, accused Arday of plagiarism. The thread was pulled, the lies unravelled, and Arday soon resigned from his post, unable to withstand “an unrelenting level of public scrutiny and personal attack.” This week, he committed suicide.

We live in an age of Magical Thinking. Men identify as women and annoying people identify as neuro-divergent; what’s not to say that both Arday and those white saviours who hired him — while all of them knowing the reality — felt that feelings trump facts every time and that if he identified as a person of super-human talents and achievements, that was who he should be accepted as?

The trouble with this way of thinking is that eventually the facts catch up with the feelings, and there can only be one winner. So what started as a “Silly Season” story has ended as a true tragedy. It’s also the prompt for yet another round of the Culture Wars, with the left blaming the press for interrogating him and the right blaming academia for believing him. Meanwhile, the family of Jason Arday — the persons who knew him and loved him for what he was, not what he pretended to be — mourn him and prepare to bury him. So in the end, no one won.

Noam Blum of Tablet tweets, “Academics are big mad that the media wrote a bunch of true things about someone they were too conformist to spot as a fraud. Their anger is just a manifestation of shame and projection.”

As for British journalists, well:

Elite class fails to understand that it has already destroyed its own status. https://t.co/22qoKG23yJ

— Eric S. Raymond (@esrtweet) August 17, 2026

LIGHTNING DEAL: Rechargeable Motion Sensor Closet Light, 500LM Wireless Ceiling Light White. #CommissionEarned

NOT EVEN A GENTLEMAN’S C: Harvard Professor Faces Backlash for Allegedly Using AI to Draft Anti-Trump Op-Ed.

A Harvard professor is facing scrutiny after critics alleged that a Financial Times opinion piece he authored criticizing President Trump was largely produced with artificial intelligence, with some online commentators dismissing it as “slop.”

The column, written by Ricardo Hausmann, a former Venezuelan government minister and Harvard Kennedy School academic, was published Thursday and has since been updated with an editor’s note from the FT.

“It has come to our attention that AI was used to condense a longer draft of this column prior to submission to the FT and our own editorial involvement,” the note at the top of the article states.

“The FT editorial code of conduct specifically prohibits the use of AI in the writing process,” the statement adds.

The disclosure followed a wave of criticism on social media, where readers flagged the op-ed — which took aim at Trump’s tariffs — for prose they described as awkward and unnaturally polished.

“Gotta be the worst AI slop I’ve seen in a major publication,” one user wrote on X.

But did it contain any references to Madagascar?

HMM: The best states for swingers revealed — with a few surprising Southern states taking the top 3 spots. “Florida topped the list, boasting 148 swingers clubs — the most in the country. The state has a bustling swingers community on Reddit, according to LoveHoney. Texas and Georgia round out the top three. The Lone Star State has the second-highest number of swingers clubs, while Georgia has club availability, high search interest and Reddit activity.”

Or course, it’s not really a measure of swinging as such: “The list analyzed each US state using nine factors, including Google search interest for swinging-related terms, the number of swingers clubs, swinger-related Reddit activity, bars and hotels per capita, and the percentage of married residents in each state. Each state was given a ranking out of 10. The list doesn’t tell you how many swingers are in each state, but rather looks at public data that indicates a state’s level of interest and openness to the practice.”

I LIKE THE CUT OF HIS JIB:

Javier Milei: “I thought being on the left was a mental problem. The empirical evidence is so overwhelming that it never worked anywhere, and they refused to accept it.”

“But what I discovered is that being on the left is a disease of the soul. The left is built on envy,… pic.twitter.com/K4PHXZBbmG

— Documenting Saylor (@saylordocs) August 16, 2026

GO SOUTH, YOUNG MAN:

JUST IN: Mississippi 4th graders rank No. 1 in U.S. for reading & math score improvement since 2013, after ranking 49th in reading & 50th in math that year.

— Polymarket (@Polymarket) August 16, 2026

OH: Expert and FDA Commissioner Flagged Adverse COVID Shot Events for Fauci in Early 2021.

ON SUNDAYS I PUT A PROMO POST FOR (MOSTLY) INDIE AUTHORS ON MY BLOG:  Book Promo And Vignettes By Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.

There’s also a fun vignette challenge.

QUICK-FRIED TO A CRACKLY CRUNCH: Fifth Circuit Completely Roasts Biden DOE’s Stove and Oven Efficiency Rules: The court voids the rules after determining that Biden’s Energy Department improperly tried to fast-track the measure as a “direct final rule”, which is usually reserved for noncontroversial matters.