September 26, 2026

VOTE AS THOUGH YOUR LIFE, LIBERTY, AND PROPERTY DEPEND UPON IT:

Posted at 8:17 pm by Stephen Green

THAT’S IN LINE WITH PREWAR SHIPPING:

Posted at 7:15 pm by Stephen Green

GREAT MOMENTS IN SPORTSMANSHIP: Texas defensive star flagged for pretending to urinate on field after sack in ‘idiotic move.’

Colin Simmons’ crude celebration flushed any positives from his sack.

The Texas edge rusher pretended to urinate on the field after taking down Tennessee freshman quarterback Faizon Brandon in the second quarter of the No. 1 Longhorns’ road game Saturday, with President Donald Trump in attendance.

Simmons got flagged almost immediately for an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty, turning what would’ve been a 16-yard loss for Tennessee into a 15-yard gain and an automatic first down for the Volunteers.

The celebration from the Longhorns captain was so daunting that it riled up ESPN’s Kirk Herbstreit, leaving him stunned on the ABC broadcast.

“Just an absolute idiotic move by Colin Simmons doing that,” Herbstreit said.

Added play-by-play man Chris Fowler: “It’s idiotic, and it doesn’t get much more vulgar, either.”

The disturbing display comes after a spectacular season for the All-America Second Team pick. He’s fresh off a 2025 season in which he had 43 tackles, 12 sacks and three forced fumbles.

Shouldn’t coaches be instructing their players not to do stupid taunts that cost their teams yardage and downs?

Translated, the tweet reads, “DE Collin Simmons has just been penalized for: ‘Simulating going to the bathroom!'”

My extremely well-worn 1982 edition of The Illustrated NFL Playbook begins with the following anecdote:

Once during a Green Bay Packers offensive slump, head coach Vince Lombardi called a team meeting. “We’re going back to basics, he said. “Back to fundamentals.”

“Now this,” he said, holding up a ball, “is a football.”

“Hold on, coach,” interrupted split end Max McGee. “You’re going too fast.”

Perhaps additional fundamentals need to be taught as well, in all levels of football.

UPDATE: This incident also happened, apparently: Texas’s Touchdown Celebrations Are Officially Unhinged — Raleek Brown Just Sniffed His Balls And Passed Out. “And now we’re sniffing balls and passing out. Just two of THE most ridiculous celebrations you will ever see by the same team in the same game. Remarkable stuff. And to think the NFL gives out fines for beer drinking. NFL would ban them for life if they saw this stuff on a Sunday. Insane. Compliance office gonna have a field day on Monday!”

Posted at 6:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

OLD AND BUSTED: Charles Manson interpreted the songs on the Beatles’ “White Album” as being a call for a titanic race war.

The New Hotness? Columbia professor wins award for book on ‘white paint’ being racist.

Among the many woke winners of this year’s prestigious National Book Awards is a black Columbia University professor whose screed attacks “white paint” as racist.

Professor Wendy Walters’ new book, “A Dead White: An Argument Against White Paint,” claims that white paint is not the “neutral” architectural design element that it initially appears to be.

Instead, she “interrogates all that we have taken for granted about the substance that colors, or fails to color, the structures and objects that surround us—and what the collective impulse toward white paint can tell us about culture, politics, and individual desire,” the publisher’s description states, in part.

The idea for the book originated with the Ivy League professor’s “genuine and visceral dislike of white paint – a feeling that is at times overwhelming,” she explained in a 2021 video for Creative Capital Foundation on YouTube.

But Walters pushed back on the idea that her emotional response is “possibly irrational.”

“As I tried to understand why my response to white paint was so strong, I discovered numerous examples of the way that it figured into systems of erasure, exclusion, violence, and the masking of power in the social and natural world,” she said in the video.

Most of the examples she gave linked white paint to racism.

In one, white supremacists splattered white paint outside the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas in 2018, and, in another, white paint was used to vandalize a 100th anniversary memorial gallery to the Tulsa race massacre in 2021.

She also mentioned a rainbow crosswalk for “LGBTQIA+ persons” in New Brunswick, Canada being painted over with white paint in an “act of intolerance.”
“I hope to encourage the reader to think about how practices of decoration and adornment might allude to hidden narratives of power, whether or not they recognize them as being so,” she said in the video.

Haven’t we been here before though? In December of 2023, Red State’s Mike Miller wrote: ‘Interior Race Theory:’ Your Home Is Likely ‘Racist,’ White People.

According to interior designer Jacquelyn Ogorchukwu Iyamah, people can creatively resist “structures of domination in their homes by challenging themselves to think about the various ways that politics are embedded into the built environment and encouraging more ‘racial wellness’ within the spaces they create” — particularly concerning the objects they display.

Iyamah also warns that people of color shouldn’t emulate white people in the interior design of their homes.

* * * * * * * * *

The Use of the Color White

You knew we’d get around to this, right?

In addition to the unforgivable sin of decorating a home with “racist objects” like “mammy jars, colonial busts, war memorabilia, and Confederate flags,” Iyamah argues that the use of white paint is just as “racist.”

The use of the color white has been weaponized to symbolize purity
. There’s [sic] a lot of ways that this theory can deconstruct conservative values that really align with whiteness.

So there you have it. Before you buy that next can of white paint to, say, repaint your kitchen, remember: the color white has been “weaponized to symbolize purity.”

Not to mention, weaponized to attack the socialist founders of modern architecture, who were obsessed with white on white buildings for the sake of minimalism. I don’t think they were intending their work to be coded as white supremacism, but given their ideological leanings in the 1930s and ’40s, perhaps Walters and Iyamah are on to something. From Bauhaus to David Duke’s House?

Or, as Northern Barbarian tweets, “Just when you think they couldn’t get weirder.”

Posted at 5:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

BILL GATES CALLED IT IMPOSSIBLE: 2027 Tesla Semi First Drive: We Get Seat Time in Tesla’s 500-Mile Electric Big Rig. “In the last year, I’ve put approximately 10,000 miles on MotorTrend’s long-term 2023 Tesla Model Y, which makes me eminently qualified to evaluate almost any Tesla. My Achilles’ heel in this situation is that I have zero Class 8 truck driving experience. The largest trucks I’ve ever driven have been heavy-duty versions from Ford, Chevrolet, GMC, and Ram, which sometimes have dual rear wheels, fifth-wheel receiver hitches, and the ability to tow upwards of 30,000 pounds, but I’ve never towed that kind of weight, as that would require a commercial driver’s license (CDL). So I’m a big-rig rookie. And yet, driving the Semi was surprisingly familiar, shockingly easy, and dare I say, several tons of fun.”

Related: Tesla Marked the Start of High Volume Semi Production, and the Engineering Story Sits Underneath the Cab. “I drove one. Fully loaded, tractor and trailer, and I came away impressed by three things in particular: the power, the acceleration, and the ride quality. The acceleration is the part that will get written about because it is the part that surprises people. The ride quality is the part that would matter to me if I were putting a driver in it every day. There is also a detail from behind the wheel worth naming. You barely touch the service brake. Regenerative braking handles so much of the deceleration that the driving rhythm changes, and anyone who has run mountain grades understands immediately what that implies for brake wear and for the cost line that goes with it.”

Posted at 5:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

JONAH GOLDBERG: The Last Ditch for Mask Hysteria.

“The Western Massachusetts [Communist Party USA] rejects the use of conflicts among LGBTQIA+ people and organizations as a tool of division by the extreme right,” the statement said. “We reaffirm our solidarity with all those struggling against the genocide of transgender people.”

Okay, like whatever. But here’s the thing. Or a thing. Or something. The people profiled in the story aren’t mobilizing and protesting against Donald Trump or Republican governors. They’re tearing down a lesbian bar opened to be a safe haven for “dykes, transsexuals, gender freaks, workers, and their friends.” It even welcomes the “poor and unhoused” and serves them for free when necessary. The only condition: You had to wear a KN-95—or higher filtration—mask.

Because the bar was struggling financially—who could’ve guessed that serving people for free was not a great business model?—its operators announced, very politely, that they were going to go mask-optional on Saturday nights. A fierce backlash ensued. One patron replied, “I hope you get firebombed for robbing my fellow immunocompromised people of their Saturday plans just to scrape extra revenue from ablists[sic].”

Now, call me a cis-heteronormative, sellout-to-neoliberalism-and-patriarchal-values square, but I kinda think this is overkill.

One of the central themes of communist history, and radicalism generally, is the tendency to tear down the groups, institutions, tribes, whatever, closest to you. Who were the first victims of the Jacobin Reign of Terror? Their fellow revolutionaries, the Girondins. Long before the Nazis turned on the Jews, they first turned on the leadership of the SA, aka the Brownshirts. Stalin’s Terror mostly liquidated fellow Communists. In the 1960s, the new left disliked conservatives and Republicans, but they hated liberals and moderate Democrats. The radical jabronis of the new right hate the Reaganites and Bushies, maybe not more than they hate the left, but they dedicate a lot more time and energy to them.

I think there’s a lot of this kind of dynamic in the riot of dysfunction chronicled by the Globe. But the more interesting thing to me is how the ideological rhetoric the angry patrons of the Last Ditch deployed is really a mask for something else. For instance, Soe Noire, the stage name of a leading critic of the bar and the head of another “Queer COVID-conscious collective in Western Massachusetts,” hurls all sorts of ideological buzz phrases at the bar’s proprietor during a struggle session. Noire accuses the owner of shedding “WHITE THEY THEM TEARS” and accuses the Last Ditch of not being “a safe environment nor interested in revolutionary praxis.”

If your irreducible requirement for a good bar is that it be dedicated to “revolutionary praxis,” you might end up drinking alone more than you want. That’s late capitalism for you.

Read the whole thing. The surprise that the struggle session over the Last Ditch and its perma-marked barflies went viral is vaguely reminiscent of the reaction to Leonard Bernstein’s infamous fundraising party for the members of the Black Panthers being tried by the state of New York for terrorism-related charges, which Tom Wolfe memorialized in his legendary1970 article for New York magazine, “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s.” After its publication, all of the participants were surprised at just how weird they looked to everyday Americans when the spotlight was shown on them.

But why did the left-leaning Boston Globe of all publications write up the story of the Last Ditch? At NRO, Jeffrey Blehar adds: Beleaguered Lesbian Bar Hits Potential Jackpot.

This story perfectly embodies and makes human a dynamic they’ve been living through for 20 years. Armand Domalewski, a YIMBY San Francisco progressive (which is to say, not leftist enough for many activists in the city) put it perfectly last night: “The reason this lesbian bar story went so viral is that basically every left wing person in America has personally experienced some version of this story in their life over the course of the last decade and is really goddam sick of it.”

If these bar owners are smart, they’ll manage to turn all of this new attention into a profit. (Rosa DeLauro, the famously blue-haired crone/representative from nearby Connecticut, proposed a solidarity trip over the state border on Twitter, which is honestly kind of touching.) But chances are they’re not all that smart, because — in a development no professional comedy writer in modern times would have been daring enough to script — at least one of them has already dropped out of the entire rotten, debt-ridden commitment . . . to instead attend clown school. Good writers would consider themselves too sophisticated to write on-the-nose, audience-pandering slop like that. Or the detail where one patron mused about how to save the Last Ditch, proposing a Lady Gaga–themed dance night: “Gaga is canceled,” she says. “Gaga is Zionist.” But the Boston Globe didn’t have to invent the comedic absurdities; they only had to report on them.

There’s likely no way someone writing fiction could invent a story this crazy. At Spiked, Jenny Holland writes: That lesbian Covid-conscious bar is beyond a satirist’s wildest dreams.

Another attendee, a person by the name of Yams – a ‘gender fluid, racially ambiguous, black biracial, a mom, low income’ – offered some real talk: ‘Nobody is owed comfort on land in which rape and pillage has happened.’

Not surprisingly, Soe Noire features heavily in the struggle session as well. ‘I’m rescinding all my monetary support from now on’, ‘he’ (she) huffs. And then issues the demand: ‘Pay me.’

There is not a single comedian or satirist on Earth who could come up with a better parody of woke. Yet however much we might laugh, this lunatic fringe is not exactly fringe any longer. The obsessions these ladies demonstrate – with disability, with Covid, with queerness – have made their way into the bloodstream of the body politic through an increasingly influential Democratic Socialists of America and an increasingly radicalised cohort of downwardly mobile, overeducated and unemployable children of elites. It was only two weeks ago that I was writing about the socialist conference that damned GLP-1s, fitness and even healthcare as fascist. And yet, here we are, once again.

These people take themselves very seriously. We should take them seriously as well.

In the 1970s, liberal satirists could poke fun at their fellow leftists. A thinly disguised Patty Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army were an important plot point in Paddy Chayefsky’s Network. In 2026 though, the Last Ditch is a Saturday Night Live sketch begging to happen, but likely no writer on the show will touch this story.

Related:

Posted at 4:53 pm by Ed Driscoll

SPACE: With PRIMA, NASA will try to build a billion-dollar space telescope in record time.

PRIMA, which has a cost cap of $1.2 billion excluding launch costs, will not be as big and complex as Roman, so it’s natural to assume a shorter development cycle. NASA wants to launch PRIMA seven years from now, in 2033. The telescope will observe the Universe in faint, far-infrared light in a range of wavelengths between 24 and 235 micrometers, requiring its primary optics to be cooled to 4.5 Kelvin, or minus 451° Fahrenheit.

This would usually require a brand-new build of a sophisticated cryocooler. PRIMA will instead use a spare leftover from the development of the James Webb Space Telescope, modified to use helium-3 instead of helium-4 as the cooling fluid. The focal planes of PRIMA’s kinetic inductance detectors will be chilled even lower to 100 milliKelvin, putting the mission’s optics in contention for the coldest ever sent into space.

Nifty.

Posted at 3:39 pm by Stephen Green

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Flock’s Optional Gunshot Detection Feature Has Fourth Amendment Implications for Gun Owners. “Flock is just one of many suppliers in the global gunshot detection market, which has an estimated total value of $1.5 billion. But the company’s marketing material raises concerns about the technology’s capabilities, which go beyond simply detecting gunfire. In Flock’s own words, a confirmed gunshot’“can surface the vehicles seen entering or leaving the area around the time of the sound, using nearby Flock license plate reader cameras.’ That statement deserves scrutiny, since it describes a mechanism for turning suspected gunfire into a list of nearby vehicles.”

Posted at 2:54 pm by Stephen Green

JAW, JAW IS BETTER THAN WAR, WAR:

Posted at 1:21 pm by Stephen Green