September 23, 2026

GO AWAY: California Wants to Write America’s AI Rules.

The order cites the need for more stringent regulation following the Hugging Face attack and industry leaders’ call to action. It also accelerates the implementation of Senate Bill 813 and Assembly Bill 1405, which create a state framework for certifying and registering independent AI auditors but do not require developers to submit to audits.

​The announcement describes California’s AI framework as a “guidebook for the nation.” Adam Thierer, a senior fellow at the R Street Institute, sees it differently.

“It’s not a guidebook,” he tells Reason. “It’s a rule book.”

AI systems transcend state borders, and given California’s outsized role in the market, working around its laws is hardly an option; therefore, California law effectively becomes the national standard. This phenomenon is known as the “California effect,” and it has reared its ugly head in labor and environmental policy.

The last thing we need is a one-party kleptocracy that can’t even build a railroad writing regulations for the entire country on bleeding-edge tech.

Posted at 1:46 pm by Stephen Green

NOPE, STILL NOT TIRED OF ALL THE WINNING:

Posted at 1:32 pm by Stephen Green

HEIGHTENING THE CONTRADICTIONS INHERENT IN THE COMMUNIST SYSTEM: Hey, Xi — Good Luck Keeping AI on a Communist Leash. “Beijing is ‘pushing cheap, capable open-source models around the world’ and Xi wants AI ‘never so powerful that it slips beyond the control of the Communist Party.’ Which is like giving your teenage son a 1,000-horsepower Ferrari, but insisting that he keep his speed to 55 mph.”

Posted at 1:15 pm by Stephen Green

NOVEMBER PREVIEW: Oopsie! Democrat Convicted Felon Drops Bid. “This is a blow to Democrats, because Lomick actually received a few hundred more votes in the primary election than the two Republicans candidates, indicating the new district might possibly be competitive.”

Posted at 12:44 pm by Stephen Green

NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG:

Remember over the next few years, Los Angeles, that Pratt is the mayor you could have had.

Posted at 12:28 pm by Stephen Green

THE QUIET DISSIDENCE OF THE BOSTON GLOBE: 

Mastio notes that the fear-mongering about a nonexistent trans murder “epidemic” is being driven by queer activists. He doesn’t call this out for the cynical power politics and moral blackmail that it is, but he does note, “What LGBTQ rights groups are doing to these folks with this unrelenting message that death is waiting for them around every corner is not healthy. They have their constituents living in fear when the best numbers we have show that the supposed ‘epidemic,’ ‘onslaught,’ or ‘genocide’ against trans people is not as potent as they suggest and is, in fact, lessening.”

The second Globe piece is a dispatch from a western Massachusetts lesbian bar, detailing how the recent(!) relaxation of the establishment’s N95 mask mandate led to a complete meltdown among the regulars. The pleasures of the piece are many, from one patron’s accusation that management is “complicit in a mass disabling event” to another’s that the move could “kill disabled people in the name of your own leisure and convenience,” to a third’s more simple wish that the bar be “firebombed” for its policy toward the immunocompromised. Distressed by the backlash and the bar’s struggling finances, one of its founders has, I jest you not, enrolled in clown college.

What both pieces have in common is understatement and restraint as editorial strategy. They both simply take the left-wing milieus they examine seriously, present the claims these people make in their own terms, even sympathetically, and then apply only basic empirical scrutiny to them, unladen by invective or antagonism. The results are nevertheless devastating, a kind of reductio ad absurdum of a whole worldview, the way many see the HBO show Girls as in fact subtle critique of a lifestyle it superficially valorizes.

I wonder how these articles are playing to the Globe’s core subscribers? Are they shocked that there isn’t an “epidemic” of anti-trans violence? Are they shocked that there’s still a bastion of mask obsessives even in 2026? But kudos to the Globe for exposing their perilously left-leaning readers to a fair amount of cognitive dissonance.

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll

MAKE OF THIS WHAT YOU WILL: Mark Kelly Says US military ‘doesn’t need more testosterone.’ “The retired Navy captain rebuked the secretary as ‘a guy who runs around on the stage, yelling about killing people and maximum lethality and testosterone’ during an appearance on MS NOW’s ‘Morning Joe’ show.”

Tell that to these guys: Airmen can’t get enough of new, warlike basic training, leaders say. “It used to be, [trainees] would ask you those very simple questions about, you know, when will I get to fly home and see my parents next,” she continued. “Now it’s the really tough questions … ‘Ma’am, if they’re targeting us so closely and we’re actually hunted out there when we go out and deploy, how do we work through that? What tools are we going to have for that?’”

Posted at 11:42 am by Stephen Green

GEORGIA TECH BRINGS CIVICS ED TO STEM. “Simply put, society needs the creators, users, and regulators of future technologies to be not just savvy but wise.” Of course, we could always let the “effective altruists” have this field to themselves, but they might kill us all to spare the bugs.

Posted at 11:37 am by Robert Shibley

THE NEW SPACE RACE:

More:

• Isaacman showed a dark silhouette resembling a next-generation SR-71 Blackbird while discussing ‘radical airframe and engine designs’

• When asked if the image was the Blackbird, he responded: “You sure that’s the Blackbird?”

• NASA will soon be ‘flying once again as high and as fast as we have from decades past, and then even more’

• He criticized NASA being forced to spend its aeronautics budget subsidizing 40-year-old contractor engines instead of pushing technological boundaries

NASA’s job from the start was supposed to be the latter, not the former, of that last item.

Posted at 11:26 am by Stephen Green

CLEANUP ON AISLE 44: JD Vance’s Anti-Fraud Task Force to Boot More Than Half a Million Americans From Obamacare.

It is the largest purges of the insurance exchange since President Donald Trump’s administration began tackling fraud last year, the outlet noted.

The task force said eliminating the subsidies for the allegedly fraudulent enrollees would save an estimated $2.2 billion in taxpayer dollars.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, headed by administrator Mehmet Oz, was also expected to cut off hundreds of brokers and agents who get paid each time they sign up a new enrollee for government health insurance, The Journal reported.

Officials said 40 insurance agents and brokers were responsible for creating 50,000 fake accounts at a cost of $45 million — and CMS had already axed 66 agnets from its system.

Incentivize fraud, get more fraud — which seems to have been baked into ObamaCare from the start.

Posted at 10:40 am by Stephen Green

COMMUNITY NOTES FOR THE WIN:

Trump can’t do it all himself, Sen. Thune.

Posted at 10:24 am by Stephen Green