September 21, 2026

QUESTIONS ASKED:

 

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll

TO BE FAIR, THEY’RE USUALLY IN HYSTERICS ABOUT SOMETHING: Congressional Democrats in Hysterics About Saving the World From AI.

One way to react to these demands for public money, cartel-like behavior, and something approaching extortion is to haul everyone involved with these companies into police stations for questioning. But rather than stopping tech tycoons taking the law into their own hands, lawmakers have descended into hysteria, demanding that somebody “do something” to save the world. House Democrats are calling on Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to cancel recess and get to legislating. A bipartisan Senate group including Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Ted Cruz (R-TX), and Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) is negotiating an AI safety bill that, among other things, would pre-empt the only existing state laws on AI safety.

Lawmakers have a poor track record on panic-induced lawmaking over the past quarter-century. After the September 11 attacks they compromised American liberty with the PATRIOT Act and struck out to start an endless war with Iraq, which had nothing to do with anything. After the financial collapse they used billions in taxpayer money to bail out banks while 10 million families lost their homes. In both cases, members of Congress had minimal understanding of the capabilities they were enabling, and listened to those who had better semblances of a plan, whether in the national security or banking establishment.

A smarter way to respond to the latest disaster is to avoid codifying the preferences of the very companies who are generating the panic.

The shocker is that this piece is in The American Prospect.

Re-upping this from Sunday:

Posted at 7:32 am by Stephen Green

STACY MCCAIN:

Full post here.

Posted at 7:30 am by Glenn Reynolds

BURIED LEDE: Gen3 Starlink will be SpaceX’s orbital data center before SpaceX builds its Starmind orbital data center.

Posted at 7:16 am by Stephen Green

#JOURNALISM:

Posted at 7:09 am by Glenn Reynolds

ROBERT SPENCER: Yes, They Really Want to Destroy Us: The Startling Details of the Islamic/Leftist Coalition. “Simpson exposes the interlocking structure of tax-exempt organizations that fuel what he describes forthrightly as a Communist movement — not socialist, certainly not democratic, but full-on Communist in its desire to destroy the United States as a free society and establish in its place a totalitarian government that will, due to modern technological advances, be able to control every aspect of individual lives more than the Soviet Union or East Germany or Democratic Kampuchea ever dreamed of doing.”

Posted at 7:01 am by Stephen Green

STEAK AND SHAKE WEIGHS IN:

Posted at 7:00 am by Glenn Reynolds

September 20, 2026

OPEN THREAD: Ring out the weekend.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

“WHEN THEY GET IN TROUBLE, THEY SEND FOR THE SONS OF BITCHES.”

The quote is attributed to Admiral Ernest King, right after Pearl Harbor. But I predict that the necessary demographics in Europe will be slow to answer the call after the last decade.

Posted at 8:46 pm by Glenn Reynolds

BUCKLE UP:

Posted at 6:14 pm by Glenn Reynolds

INTRODUCING THE PEOPLE ANTHROPIC WANTS IN CHARGE OF REGULATING AI ON YOUR BEHALF:

Posted at 6:09 pm by Stephen Green

ANGELA MERKEL’S TENURE “REPRESENTED THE HIGH POINT OF POSTWAR EUROPEAN EXTREMISM.”

Why, it’s as if:

 

Posted at 6:00 pm by Ed Driscoll

CRICKETS:

If you needed more evidence that LGBTQ+ organizations are just Marxist fronts that care a lot more about the revolution than any actual LGBTQ+ person, here you go.

Posted at 5:37 pm by Stephen Green

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Nikole Hannah-Jones Just Wrote the Best Case for School Choice She’ll Ever Publish.

The neighborhood school system in New York is atrocious. She knew this before sending her child to one. This is a mother who visited the cafeteria herself, who pulled fighting kids apart, who sat down and read through the ungraded homework page by page. She saw it happen, in real time, year after year. And she kept her child in that system anyway, all to make a point.

Middle school didn’t fix it. At Urban Assembly Unison, the school eliminated homework outright and adopted an “Algebra for All” policy that pushed advanced math onto students, Najya included, before they’d mastered the material underneath it. An outside tutor later found Najya hadn’t even mastered long division or fractions, the building blocks the algebra was supposed to rest on. Najya got A’s at Unison. She also, by her own account years later, “didn’t know anything.”

Hannah-Jones wants readers to see this as evidence of a broken, racially rigged system that owes her daughter something it never delivered. Some of what she documents is real: underfunded schools, high teacher turnover in high-poverty buildings, and the well-established fact that screened, selective public schools skew whiter and wealthier in a city like New York. That part of the argument isn’t fiction. It’s also not the part that determined what happened to Najya.

What determined what happened to Najya is that her parents, fully informed and financiallyN able to choose otherwise, chose a demonstrably struggling school for seven consecutive years, and admit, in the mother’s own essay, to reading every warning sign along the way.

Then something remarkable happens in the piece, and it’s the part that should have led the article: as an eighth grader, Najya finally got the freedom to choose her own high school, guided by her own criteria rather than her mother’s cause. She picked a rigorous, selective school her mother had spent a career arguing against.

Related: Question asked and answered:

UPDATE:

MORE:

Exit quote: “You’re welcome Nikole. Your daughter’s chosen high school would not exist but for parents like me who fought so hard to keep screened schools.”

Posted at 5:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

OPPORTUNITY KNOCKS: Avio seeks to cash in on Falcon 9 retreat.

Italian launch services provider Avio has seen an influx of customers who were unable to secure launch opportunities with SpaceX, European Spaceflight reports. “I can tell you SpaceX has already gone captive because we have a whole bunch of customers coming to us and saying, ‘Oh my God, can you fly us?’” Avio CEO Giulio Ranzo said during the company’s September 10 earnings call. In recent months, SpaceX told multiple prospective customers that it was no longer accepting new orders for commercial Falcon 9 launches.

Europe’s answer to this, a subsidy? … According to Ranzo, some customers who had been turned away by SpaceX used the International Space Summit in Paris last week to lobby European institutions for financial support that would help offset the higher cost of launching with a European provider. Although prices for Avio’s Vega C rocket are not public, it likely costs about $60 million for a launch on the solid-fueled rocket. In our view, subsidizing launches on expendable launch technology is a poor plan. The continent should increase investment in developers of more competitively priced rockets.

Doing things the same way but with subsidies is what they do in Europe instead of innovate.

Posted at 5:11 pm by Stephen Green

EAGLES-TITANS GAME TURF WAS 157 DEGREES, PER FOX TELEVISION BROADCAST:

A heat advisory and temperatures in the mid-90s in Nashville had players from the Tennessee Titans and Philadelphia Eagles pulling out all the stops to keep themselves — and their cleats — cool on Sunday.

The Fox broadcast reported the Nissan Stadium turf was 157 degrees in the third quarter. Cameras showed Titans players getting their cleats sprayed with water on the sideline, a strategy the team may have prepared for after playing in similar temperatures in its Week 1 loss to the New York Jets. The Eagles eventually won Sunday’s game vs. the Titans 24-20.

Titans safety Amani Hooker told team writer Jim Wyatt that his cleats melted during the season opener.

“It was hot, it was really hot,” Hooker said. “My cleats actually had melted; the midsoles melted completely off, so I had to change cleats right before halftime.”

Roger Goodell wants to make the NFL a global concern, with games this season locations such as Australia, Brazil, London and Paris. Apparently he wants to go interplanetary as well, what with today’s game having been played on the surface of Venus.

Posted at 4:55 pm by Ed Driscoll