August 21, 2026

ONCE AGAIN, REALITY OUTPACES THE BEE:

Posted at 10:26 am by Stephen Green

NOBODY TELL ANN ALTHOUSE: Important thoughts about men wearing shorts to the office. “Let’s acknowledge what this is really about: the overwhelming advantage women have in the workplace over the summer months. Sure, women have endured countless millennia of violence and misogyny and discrimination — but sundresses are a godsend for the summer and men do not really have an comparable article of clothing. The fairer sex clearly has a sartorial advantage and this cannot stand is all I’m saying here.”

The A/C was partially out in my law school earlier this week, but luckily the floor with my office and classrooms wasn’t on the dead circuit. I threw shorts and a t-shirt in my car just in case. I’ve taught in those a couple of times in the past. Improvise, adapt, and overcome!

But I don’t think most people want to look at most men’s calves.

Posted at 9:56 am by Glenn Reynolds

NICE WORK: Florida State U. removes ‘correct language’ threat after College Fix inquiry.

FIRE’s Director of Policy Reform, Laura Beltz, told The Fix “academic freedom affords faculty members a great degree of deference in how they govern their classroom” even if this includes “actions that typically run counter to free speech principles in other contexts.”

For example, Beltz described how a student “levying ad hominem attacks at other students during class and preventing the class from reaching the educational objectives of [a] discussion” could reasonably be disciplined by the instructor.

Beltz’s main free speech concern over the Civil Interaction section of the original syllabus is its potential to be unevenly applied based on viewpoint.

“Faculty certainly can’t discriminate against students, so to the extent a rule like this is applied to restrict some viewpoints but not others — not to shape class discussion and meet educational goals but instead to only shut down or grade speech based on viewpoint — that would be problematic,” she said.

Indeed. And after everything we’ve seen the last couple of decades, it’s the safe assumption that viewpoint discrimination is the likely goal.

Posted at 9:40 am by Stephen Green

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Revisiting AOC ’28 After DSA Commie Uprising. “The ‘insatiable media interest’ is AOC’s gargantuan strength if she decides to take the big leap. While the flying monkeys in the mainstream media are incurious about any Dem’s faux pas, they’re positively charmed by everything that Squeaky gets monumentally wrong.”

Posted at 9:09 am by Stephen Green

NICE WORK IF YOU CAN GET IT? ‘Show How 3M Is 0% at Fault:’ Expert Witness Used ChatGPT to Write Report Defending Company in Deadly Explosion Lawsuit. “The incident shows that artificial intelligence has made its way into courtrooms not just in AI-generated legal briefings, hallucinated cases, and adversarial ‘prompt injections,’ but in expert witness testimonies. Court transcripts, deposition documents, and discovery records shared with 404 Media show extensive AI use in an extremely high profile case, where multiple people died and hundreds of millions of dollars in total liability are at stake in ongoing litigation about the explosion. The case also shows that the specific prompts used to create this type of expert testimony can be discoverable during a case, and that those prompts can be quite embarrassing.”

He reportedly was paid $90,000 for his “efforts.”

Posted at 8:38 am by Stephen Green

REMINDER: LEFTIES DECAMPED TWITTER FOR BLUESKY BECAUSE THE CLIMATE ON TWITTER WAS TOO TOXIC.

Disturbing but enlightening stuff.

Posted at 8:22 am by Stephen Green

TWENTY MINUTES INTO THE FUTURE:

As James Lileks once wrote, “Here’s what I find interesting: whenever the sci-fi movies of the 60s and 70s wanted to set something in a horrible totalitarian world, they just shot on location at a government housing project.”

Posted at 7:44 am by Ed Driscoll

THE NEW SPACE RACE: The floodgates are open after another Chinese company lands a reusable rocket.

The Zhuque-3, or ZQ-3, rocket lifted off from a commercial launch zone at China’s Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center at 7:35 pm EDT (23:35 UTC) Tuesday, about an hour after sunrise Wednesday at the spaceport in the Gobi Desert. Nine methane-fueled engines powered the 216-foot-tall (66-meter) rocket on a course southeast from Jiuquan, then the rocket’s upper stage took over the task of placing a single satellite into orbit.

The rocket’s first stage, made of stainless steel, soared to the edge of space, then maneuvered toward a prepared landing zone some 240 miles (390 kilometers) downrange, settling to a propulsive touchdown on four extendable landing legs. LandSpace, founded in 2015, declared the mission a total success.

“This mission marks China’s first-ever successful recovery attempt of the first stage of an orbital-class launch vehicle using landing legs, and China’s first successful booster recovery on land,” LandSpace said in a statement. “It is a pivotal flight test for Zhuque-3 as it transitions from the technological demonstration and verification phase toward the engineering application phase of reusability.”

That it took the Chinese — the world’s masters of high-speed copy & paste — a decade just to make their first two catches is a testament to just how difficult this is.

Posted at 7:36 am by Stephen Green

WELL, GOOD:

Key bit: “DHS tells me blue states are quietly and very secretly working with the Trump administration to assist in the mass deportation of criminals. The criminal alien issue has become so “politically toxic” and “costly” that Democrat Governors have given the green light to Sheriffs and Police Chiefs in major blue cities to drop their illegals off with undercover ICE for removal. It’s happening. You just don’t see it.”

Related:

Posted at 7:30 am by Glenn Reynolds

RELIGION OF PEACE UPDATE:

Posted at 7:20 am by Stephen Green

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: God and Man at Yale at 75.

The purpose of Gamay (the publisher’s abbreviation) was clear. “I propose,” Buckley explained in the foreword, “simply, to expose what I regard as an extraordinarily irresponsible educational attitude that, under the label of ‘academic freedom,’ has produced one of the most extraordinary incongruities of our time: the institution that derives its moral and financial support from Christian individualists and then addresses itself to the task of persuading the sons of those supporters to be atheistic socialists.” Yale, widely believed a fortress of conservatism, had lost its sense of mission as a private university, and its alumni, a large and loyal group of donors (customers), Buckley suggested, might play a more proactive role in shaping educational policy through its elected representatives (trustees).

Buckley anticipated the ensuing uproar. Every major periodical devoted space not to careful consideration of the book’s propositions but mostly to distorting and misrepresenting them, while leveling ad hominem attacks on Buckley. The gist of the outrage exhibited by leading voices in the public and private sectors was that Buckley was a draconian menace ruling with an authoritarian fist to shape the university, where Woodbridge Hall would resemble the Kremlin and trustees the Politburo issuing ukases in between five-year plans. As well, Buckley was compelled to question the sanity of a Yale trustee who declared, “the book is one of which has the glow and appeal of a fiery cross on a hillside night. There will undoubtedly be robed figures who gather to it, but the hoods will not be academic. They will cover the face.” Such is what Gamay drove otherwise nice and intelligent people to say.

Plus ça change: 

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll

I LOVE THIS IDEA:

Posted at 7:09 am by Glenn Reynolds

FROM JEFF DUNTEMANN: Drumlin Circus / On Gossamer Wings.

A starship malfunctions and strands its 800 passengers on a planet eerily like the Pleistocene Earth, complete with prehistoric mammals including woolly mammoths, dire wolves, and smilodons. And something else: tens of thousands of abandoned alien machines consisting of a bowl and two pillars that respond with drum-like sounds when touched. Tap 256 times on the pillars in any combination, and…something…coalesces in the bowl. It might be a spoon or an axe or a twisted lump of silvery metal. These artifacts (dubbed “drumlins”) help the unwilling colonists survive, but there’s something a little weird about what comes out of the “thingmaker” machines. High-pitched sounds sometimes make drumlins twitch and combine into more complex things. Stranger still, what drumlins do seems to depend on the thoughts of nearby humans. Wish hard while you whistle just so…and something amazing may happen. 260 years on, the castaways have created a civilization resembling late 19th Century America, based in part on coal, steam, iron, and hard work–and in part on the mysterious drumlin artifacts. Both short novels in this volume are set against this background.

Drumlin Circus: Every spring, Bramble Ceglarek takes Pretty Alice’s Wonderland Circus down the dirt roads of the west country, dazzling townfolk with clowns, acrobats, calliope music, and trained animals — especially trained animals. His wife Julia trains them with a drumlin whistle, and they obey with peculiar precision. The cultlike Bitspace Institute, hoping to train animal assassins, sends agent Simon Kassel to steal the whistle. Unknown to him, Kassel has been set up to fail by his Institute rivals who want to be rid of him, and after Julia and her apprentice Rosa are abducted by Institute thugs who attempt to kill him, Kassel switches loyalties and joins the circus as a very scary clown. He returns to Institute HQ to rescue Julia and Rosa, only to discover that the training whistle is much more than merely a whistle: a mysterious “function controller” that compels animals, human beings, and even the alien drumlin artifacts themselves to obey its bearer.

On Gossamer Wings: From out in the dry rye fields of the west, rumors have come to the Bitspace Institute that someone has drummed up something valuable from the alien thingmakers: a large sphere of pure iron. Institute agent Hiram König rides out to investigate, and discovers the strange, mute young woman who has done the drumming. He also learns that the Big Ball of Iron is just the beginning of the previously unknown drumlins that she has discovered in the vast “bitspace” of the alien thingmakers. Despite the slow progress of technology in the Valeron colony, where steam locomotives and the first primitive hydrogen airships are state of the art, Natalie Bishop is using her talents with the thingmakers to seek out the drumlin parts she needs to build a heavier-than-air flying machine. For her, the flier is her masterpiece, the work that will prove her worth to the people she cares about. The race is on for König to extract Natalie from the pressure-cooker of a small town that is her home, before it blows up around her and before she takes the dazzlingly risky final step and tries to fly.

Posted at 7:00 am by Sarah Hoyt