August 9, 2026

MAKING YOUR LIFE WORSE IS THEIR CHIEF GOAL: California’s smart inverter push prompts fears home backup could be sidelined when blackouts hit. “Under these newer requirements, inverters are built to help stabilize voltage and frequency and to adjust their output automatically as solar production rises and falls. Comparable concepts are appearing in the national IEEE 1547 standard from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and in interconnection rules adopted in other states. If approved-equipment lists increasingly favor grid-focused designs over older inverters built for backup or off-grid use, households may have a harder time replacing the systems they depend. This can affect refrigerators, medical devices, and internet service during outages.”

Posted at 1:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

MATT MARGOLIS: Things Don’t Sound Good for Cancer-Stricken Joe Biden.

In an interview with the BBC on August 8, 2026, Hunter Biden said his father’s stage four prostate cancer has spread into his bones and beyond, describing it as “very painful and very debilitating.” Those are the blunt words of a son watching his father decline in real time.

As you may recall, Joe Biden first announced his cancer diagnosis in May 2025, months after leaving office. The timing of that announcement was… shall we say, suspicious. Many believed the cancer was caught years earlier, and the Bidens simply didn’t disclose it until Biden was out of the White House.

Here’s the thing about prostate cancer screening: a PSA blood test is a standard part of any routine physical for men of a certain age. I had one myself last year at 45, just as part of routine bloodwork. It’s not exotic. It’s not hard to order.

Does anyone seriously believe the president of the United States, a man in his eighties surrounded by a full medical team, wasn’t being screened for one of the most common cancers in older men? If Biden had cancer developing while he sat in the Oval Office, there are only two explanations. Either his doctors missed it, which would be staggering incompetence for a team charged with monitoring the health of the most powerful autopen in the world, or the Bidens knew and weren’t going to reveal the diagnosis until after the election.

Minus Biden’s disastrous debate with Trump, Kamala would be taking office right about now.

Posted at 12:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

THEATER KIDS WREAK HAVOC ON FUN CITY: Anti-rent radical and Mamdani pal who is ‘squatting’ in Brooklyn is Grammy nepo baby.

She’s unplugged from reality.

A rent-striking, rising-star radical orchestrating the Mamdani administration’s socialist housing agenda is the daughter of a famed music studio owner who recorded rock legends like David Bowie, the Ramones, Blondie, Lou Reed, Sonic Youth, the Foo Fighters and Coldplay, The Post has learned.

While framing herself as a champion of the proletariat, Tracy Rosenthal grew up in a trendy $1.7 million NoMad pad with elite access to the music industry — attending the Grammys at least twice with her dad, four-time winner Steven Rosenthal.

Her father recorded hit albums by some of the world’s biggest artists at the Magic Shop, the SoHo studio he founded in 1988, including Coldplay’s 2008 “Viva la Vida,” which sold more than 10 million copies worldwide; the Foo Fighters’ 2014 “Sonic Highways,” for which he was interviewed in the band’s HBO docuseries; and Bowie’s final album, 2016’s “Blackstar.”

Yet despite her first-class upbringing, she’s been on a four-year “rent strike” since moving back to New York City after a stint in Los Angeles — because the Bolshevik bugged out after spotting a cockroach in her hip $2,300 a month Bed-Stuy apartment.

As Norman Podhoretz wrote in 2007, “Do you realize that every young person in this room is a tragedy to some family or other?”

Posted at 12:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

ROGER KIMBALL: Great and Unfortunate Fabrications.

Jason Arday should ask for a cover charge. His entertainment value is that splendid. For the last couple of weeks, the “youngest ever black professor” at the University of Cambridge has been a nearly ubiquitous and nonstop source of hilarity. The proximate catalyst for the comedy is the imminent publication of Great and Unfortunate Things, co-written with the “book doctor” Eve Claxton. It is due out on August 11 from Simon & Schuster. Amazon lists it as an “Editor’s Pick” of “Best Biographies & Memories.” “A story of resilience, dignity, and the extraordinary power of those who hold steady for us when we cannot yet hold steady for ourselves,” says one blurber. “Makes you believe in the transformative power of grit and the magic of a mother’s love,” quoth another. A story easily worth the “$1.4 million” advance that Jason said he was offered for the book (though that figure is disputed). Did you know that poor Jason, now 41, was “diagnosed with autism and developmental delays at age three, and experts told his parents he would never speak, write, or live independently”?

And that was the least of Jason’s trials. The Atlantic got hold of an advance copy of the book and drew attention to what some have delicately described as numerous “inconsistencies” in Arday’s account of his life story. Comparing the final book with the book proposal, the author of “Icarus in the Faculty Lounge” uncovers some amazing things. In his proposal, Arday recounts being hit by a car, spending months in a sort of conscious coma, then waking up and having to relearn “everything—how to walk, to talk.” That remarkable experience is, we are told, entirely omitted from the book, as is his bout with testicular cancer (in the book he grapples with not one but two brain tumors). Arday has apparently never been to Brazil, but that quotidian fact did not prevent him from encountering a mysterious “shaman woman” there who predicted that he would suffer greatly but also achieve great things. “Every event she described has since come to pass,” he wrote.

Exit quote: “And then there is Hilary Cremin, a senior professor and dean of faculty in the Faculty of Education at Cambridge…Cambridge has a lot more than Jason Arday to worry about.”

Read the whole thing.

Related: Who Had to Lose for Jason Arday to Win? “It is hard to escape the impression that Cambridge wanted him as a visible symbol of its commitment to diversity, overlooking in the process his suitability for the job. He was, in blunter terms, hired to be the face of Cambridge’s diversity drive. Whether his work was any good or not was beside the point. He represented something that Cambridge wanted to show the world, and that was that. In the years since, however, the political climate has changed decisively. The excesses of identity politics have led to a backlash from society at large, while the higher education sector’s unpopularity has led some governments to inflict large cuts on universities. But many university officials on both sides of the Atlantic seem to be operating in a permanent 2020 mindset, blind to the fact that most of the world has moved on.”

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll

HYPOCRISY IS A FERTILE PLANT:

Posted at 9:10 am by Glenn Reynolds

SHRINK HIS TENT TO A STRAITJACKET:

Because the people inside it are kooks.

Posted at 8:30 am by Glenn Reynolds

GREAT MOMENTS IN SPORTS JOURNALISM:

It’s quite a product that the leftist skin suit known as Sports Illustrated is defending:

Iowahawk’s tweet concludes, “They whine when they don’t get attention, and whine 10x harder when they do. They whine hardest about the problematic ‘new fans’ who quadrupled their pay, tripled their TV audiences, 10x-ed their franchise valuations, got them charter jets, and staved off their inevitable bankruptcy for 10 years or so. I sincerely hope they achieve their dream of exorcising themselves of CC and all those dreaded ‘new fans,’ and return to their beloved Paradise Lost of half-empty 1000 seat high school gyms attended by girl fight fetishists with giveaway tickets printed on Subway Sandwich receipts.”

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Plagiarist Claudine Gay getting paid $3.1 million/year after “resigning” from Harvard.

The arithmetic is $1.4 million in W-2 earnings plus another $150k in “other compensation” and then, since she didn’t work for the first half of the year (“post-presidential sabbatical” (at home trying to figure out how to get ChatGPT to do the tedious plagiarism work on the next book?)), multiply by 2 = $3.1 million/year annualized.

Separately, Claudine Gay is the “Wilbur A. Cowett Professor of Government and of African and African-American Studies”. How much money would one have to give to Harvard to get her $3.1 million/year job retitled “the Jason A. K. Arday Professor of Government and of African and African-American Studies”?

The European mind cannot comprehend the spectacular heights to which a known plagiarist can rise in America:

Biden even earned the endorsement of the Labour MP whose speech he had cribbed: Three decades after Biden stole his speech, Neil Kinnock endorses his 2020 bid.

Exit quote: “DEI is synonymous with the collapse of the west:”

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll

TRUE:

Posted at 7:00 am by Glenn Reynolds

August 8, 2026

OPEN THREAD: Party on.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

HAPPY 25TH ANNIVERSARY TO INSTAPUNDIT! This blog started on August 8, 2001. I can’t promise I’ll still be blogging in 25 years — but I can’t promise that I won’t, either. (Bumped).

Posted at 9:04 pm by Glenn Reynolds

HAHA, I REMEMBER WHEN “CULTURE JAMMING” WAS JUST FOR LEFTISTS:

Posted at 9:01 pm by Glenn Reynolds