August 11, 2026

TAPPER, LOL:

Posted at 3:33 pm by Stephen Green

MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE: American warship downs drones with laser weapon. “According to Lockheed Martin, the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer USS Preble employed its High-Energy Laser with Integrated Optical Dazzler and Surveillance system, known as HELIOS, to engage and neutralise four drones during a Navy-run counter-UAS event. The activity took place last year and was disclosed publicly as part of the company’s latest financial update.”

Cool. Now do at least 40.

Posted at 2:47 pm by Stephen Green

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

Agent J is going to be awfully busy between now and November:

 

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

‘WOKE ONE’ DERAILED MY LIFE. AOC can’t laugh off its excesses:

Ironically, the AOCs of the world wanted to abolish the uniformed police, even as they behaved like a secret police defending the tenets of hyper-progressivism. Were you a white guy wearing a sombrero on Halloween? You’re guilty of a hate crime. A scientist wearing a shirt covered in cartoon women? Made to weep on camera. Wait, you’re not putting your pronouns in your email bio — what kind of an asshole are you?

Careers were destroyed, reputations vaporized, and institutions bullied into submission, often over transgressions so slight that nobody outside the movement’s tribunal could explain what crime had actually occurred.

Worst of all, for those of us on the Left: Woke One was politically disastrous. It handed MAGA a decade of free material and discredited the Bernie-era proposition that universalist class politics could be popular politics.

Woke One offered a stark binary choice: identity politics or fascism. The writer Sam Kriss has described the function of the thing better than anyone: wokeness gave the ruling class a way to justify its position without ever mentioning the wage relation, swapping exploitation for “a vast mishmash of various forms of prejudice, hatred, and exclusion, which could be embodied in entirely ordinary words, hand gestures, or sometimes large and inert rocks.”

The Left is now confronting the specter of woke, but not because of a true internal reckoning; it’s only because the movement’s political candidates are getting cross-examined by the news media in this year’s elections about the things they said and did not that long ago.

Facing such scrutiny, [Francesca] Hong went on a podcast and produced one of the great non-sentences of the cycle: “My views have only become stronger in that I’m serious about public safety and I will not abolish the police.” Stronger! She has grown so radical she now supports the police. Give her another two years, and she will become a police chief herself.

But in the meantime: Panic at the Wisco: Dems Realizing Hong Might Cost Them Midterms.

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: The Worst Academic Scandal in 817 Years!

This is, quite likely, the worst academic scandal of all time. There have been other academic scandals over the centuries, but nothing quite like this one. It’s the worst academic scandal not only because it indicts one of the greatest universities in the world, but because it indicts all higher education in the English-speaking world! The Arday case is the symbol and culmination of the kind of intellectual and moral rot that has been seeping into higher education for sixty-plus years.

If Cambridge University—an 817-year-old institution—is to be saved (and it’s an open question as to whether it can or even should be saved), all those administrators and faculty involved in hiring, promoting, and defending Jason Arday should be fired immediately. Nothing less will do if Cambridge is to survive.

The great tragedy of the L’Affaire Arday is that there may very well be scores if not hundreds of similar cases around the English-speaking world.

Indeed: Meet Farah Ahmed, Jason Arday’s colleague.

The Spectator’s tweet concludes, “Ahmed has explicitly attacked ‘western education’ as a ‘threat’ to Muslims, condemned democracy and integration, and criticised British schools for teaching pupils that child marriage is wrong. During her time at Cambridge, she has written that the Islamic concept of education is sharply opposed to ‘gaining literacy and numeracy and other disciplinary skills demonstrated through qualifications’. These statements are part of her long record of bigoted, extremist and separatist views on education.”

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

THE ENEMY WITHIN:

Say what who will about the Trojans, but at least they had to be fooled into letting their enemies inside the gate.

Posted at 1:29 pm by Stephen Green

XI’S GOTTA HAVE IT! British Royal Navy Discovers Spy Cams on K3 Scout Vessels — Data Was Going Straight to China. The Royal Navy doesn’t have much of a fleet these days. But some of what what it does have left is transmitting data to the CCP:

Many have long suspected that China routinely buries spyware in electronic components and software it sells overseas. According to a new report, that’s exactly what they’re doing with British-made drones that were taught to phone home.

Information was allegedly being sent directly back to the Chinese Communist Republic:

Royal Navy spy drones used by Britain’s elite special forces secretly sent data to China, The Telegraph can reveal.

The cameras on the K3 Scout surveillance drones had components made in China which were secretly transmitting information to a device in the country.

The Royal Marines have been using the £12m fleet since March and the Ministry of Defence (MoD) was forced to remove all internet connectivity from the cameras after discovering the breach.

Although the drones weren’t manufactured in China, the cameras were discovered to be compromised:

The drones were supplied by a major British defence contractor, Kraken Technology Group, which sourced the cameras from a third party who had given assurances about their security.

An investigation into the drones revealed that the cameras were transmitting “heartbeat communications” – data to confirm they were online and functioning normally – to an IP address in China. The MoD insisted that there was no evidence that any sensitive data or systems had been sent abroad.

Just because they can’t find evidence of crucial information being transmitted doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. Whoever put spyware in those cameras presumably didn’t do it for fun.

We need a complete and total shutdown of the Royal Navy until we can find what the hell is going on there (and who is spying on who for who): Royal Navy captain steps back from duties over link to [Labour] MP whose husband faces China spy claims.

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

THIS IS A PHENOMENON I’VE BEEN WRITING ABOUT FOR GOING ON TWO DECADES:

I linked it earlier, but if you missed it here’s the underlying article in The Atlantic, which is excellent.

Posted at 12:37 pm by Glenn Reynolds

IT’S ALL A PSYOP, ISN’T IT?

Posted at 12:33 pm by Glenn Reynolds

‘I WAS JUST A KID’ IS THE EXCUSE FOR BEING INSANE THE LAST FEW YEARS:

Yesterday I wrote about AOC’s “defense” of the woke insanity of the past few years.

“Woke one was craaaazzy.“

She was speaking about Francesca Hong’s stated positions as a sitting state legislator, over 30-years-old, and she held those positions until she started getting trashed for them in her current campaign for governor.

But really, she was just a kid and shouldn’t be held responsible for anything she said outside the current context of her campaign.

Time is remarkably fluid these days:

But hey, 2020 was just a few bad tweets, right?

Tweet concludes, “it was the removal of choice for vaccines, it was the inflammation of racism, it was the numbing of meritocracy, it was the dismantling of the spirit of quite a few cities (and the accompanying declining property values), it was the collapse of a political party, it was the crushing of common sense (particularly in the young), it was the ruin of university value, it was the end of trust in the media, it was the fostering of the most selfish era in modern society. It was fascism, intolerance, and decidedly un-American. It was shameful and despicable. It was not ‘bad tweets.’”

Many more responses here: The replies to this tweet about the woke era are making my day.

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

NOW THIS IS MORE LIKE THE 21ST CENTURY I WAS PROMISED:

Tweet continues:

GHOST = Global Hypersonic & Orbital Spaceport Technology. A containerized, deployable launch site system that enables Electron and HASTE launches anywhere, anytime.

Missile defense. Responsive launch. Sovereign launch capability. Delivered where it’s needed most.

Coming soon across two pads in Alaska in 2027.

“Sovereign” is where the implications get truly interesting.

Posted at 12:27 pm by Stephen Green