September 20, 2026

DON’T WRITE MAJOR LEGISLATION IN A PANIC:

More:

In every case a genuine problem exists, but the threat is inflated out of all proportion and the costs of overreaction are overlooked. The resulting hysteria blocks clear thinking and closes off rational discussion. Consequently, individuals never notice that self-appointed experts are distorting the facts for their own gain.

Companies with billions in AI stakes are perfectly capable of staging “rogue LLM” incidents to stampede politicians into regulation that keeps out competitors or simply reduces their own liability.

Previous panics have already damaged trust in institutions and among ourselves. They have also intensified the political polarization that now endangers American democracy. We should resist the current panic rather than feed it. The costs of getting this one wrong dwarf those of the last several.

PATRIOT Act, CARES Act, TARP, etc.

Posted at 2:51 pm by Stephen Green

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

Posted at 2:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

YOU CAN’T MAKE THIS STUFF UP: Minnesota anti-ICE relief fund shut down after 2/3 of applicants flagged over fraud. “Hennepin County, Minnesota, approved $2 million in funding to local businesses in response to the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement operation, Operation Metro Surge. The county received over 300 applications and ended up distributing $500,000 to 82 applicants. However, over 200 applications were flagged for potential fraud, according to KARE 11.”

Posted at 2:20 pm by Stephen Green

MARK JUDGE: The New Yorker: Conservatives are Bringing Sexy Back.

The New Yorker just published a piece by Jennifer Wilson about America’s new ideas of what’s sexy. The trend is driven by conservatives, who’ve claimed breasts, lingerie and hotness in the wake of the left’s transgender, feminist and #MeToo madness.

Here’s the amazing thing about The New Yorker piece: it takes the side of the right. Wilson tries to protest, but her tone reveals that she thinks the left has become too rigid. “How had everything been turned so upside down?” she asks. “Had conservatives taken sexy back, or was this all just an optical illusion, not unlike the kind created by a padded bra or a pair of Spanx?” In response to popular athlete Sophie Cunningham wearing an Arby’s t-shirt, Wilson writes: “How did this happen? How did the right get the meats?” The conclusion: “While we were pretending not to be looking, breasts had somehow become Republican-coded.”

Wilson then turns her attention to Sydney Sweeney and the history of lingerie. Sweeney made feminists flip their wigs by doing a recent ad promoting gambling where she’s nude except for sports balls. Others are feeling equally bold, notes Wilson: “In 2024, Victoria’s Secret, under its new C.E.O., Hillary Super, had announced the return of its signature fashion show, which had been paused indefinitely in 2019. The year before, Ed Razek, the event’s producer, told Vogue that he had no plans to begin casting plus-size or transgender models (whom he called ‘transsexuals’) because the show was about ‘fantasy.’”

Super told Fortune that Victoria’s Secret would now be less “performative” when it came to diversity and would no longer “check every box and make sure every single thing someone could think of is covered.”

Flashback to the Kavanaugh hearings: Did conservatives win the culture war?

And physical fitness: Crazy Town: Masked Woman at ‘Socialism 2026 Conference’ in Chicago Explains Why Fitness is Fascist (Video).

And pretty much everything else:

Screenshot

Posted at 2:00 pm by Ed Driscoll

THREE DECADES, BUT OK:

Posted at 1:38 pm by Stephen Green

10 TIMES LEFTIST PRESIDENTS LOCKED OUT THE PRESS:

Posted at 1:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Washington’s new gun permit system moves ahead as one sheriff calls law ‘insane.’

“I think this is insane,” Raymond said in a phone interview Wednesday with The Center Square.

Raymond said he believes the new permit requirement is unconstitutional because law-abiding Americans already have a constitutional right to keep and bear arms.

His criticism centers on what he sees as another layer of government approval for people who have already passed existing background checks.

“It’s another level of control,” Raymond said.

The permit application itself will include fingerprints, proof of the required training and an application fee. The law allows the State Patrol to charge fees intended to cover the direct and indirect costs of administering the permit program. The Legislature’s bill report outlines the permit’s five-year validity and fee structure.

The new permit-to-purchase application will cost $126 — a $90 permit fee plus a $36 fingerprint-processing fee. Local law enforcement agencies may also charge an additional fee to collect fingerprints. The permit will be valid for five years.

Renewals will cost $90 if submitted before the permit expires. A renewal filed within 90 days after expiration will cost an additional $25 late fee.

Looks infringe-y.

Posted at 1:14 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 financially 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:

Posted at 1:00 pm by Ed Driscoll

WELL, WHEN YOU PUT IT LIKE THAT…:

Posted at 11:39 am by Stephen Green

BY THE TIME THEY COMPLETE THIS, SPACEX WILL BE THE INTERNET:

Hyperbole… but maybe not by much.

Posted at 10:44 am by Stephen Green

SO THE RIAL HAS LOST ABOUT ANOTHER SEVENTH OF ITS VALUE IN JUST THE LAST FEW WEEKS: Iran’s currency slide pushes costs as household purchasing power falls. “The US dollar is currently trading at around 230,000 tomans, a sub-unit of Iran’s official rial currency, with one toman equal to 10 rials. The currency slide has pushed up import and raw-material costs, while declining purchasing power is increasingly forcing Iranian households to rely on instalment purchases and government support, according to an analysis published by the Iranian news outlet Iran News Wire, that reports from outside the country.”

Posted at 10:12 am by Stephen Green

$1,291 TO REGISTER A TWO-YEAR-OLD CYBERTRUCK IN CALIFORNIA:

Gooder and harder.

Posted at 9:49 am by Stephen Green

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: NYT op-ed’s wildly woke argument against SATs includes shocking admission that students struggle with ‘basic math.’

A New York Times writer came out swinging against the push to bring back admissions tests at the University of California — even as she admitted that students are struggling with “basic math.”

But all of that is worth it, Miriam Pawal argued, because the university is now more inclusive.

“Students on University of California campuses may struggle with basic math, but they are graduating at record rates,” she wrote, hailing the “exceptional” university system for its “commitment to increase access without sacrificing excellence.”

She buttressed her point with statistics about how around 40% of its students are the first in their families to attend college. “More than half qualify for free tuition,” she gushed.

“When the University of California eliminated the SAT requirement for admission in 2021, UCLA saw a significant jump in applications from high-achieving black and Latino students, for whom the standardized tests had been a barrier,” she said.

“The percentages of underrepresented students have crept up, through a variety of initiatives. The California Dream Act gave undocumented students access to financial aid, as well as in-state tuition.”

As always, do the opposite of what California does: Florida bans undocumented [sic] students from selective public universities.

Posted at 8:45 am by Ed Driscoll

MAYBE I SHOULD JUST PUT ORWELL’s 1984 QUOTE ABOUT YOUNG WOMEN ON A LOOP:

Once more with feeling: “It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy.”

Posted at 8:41 am by Stephen Green

UM… WHAT? Cult of Anthropic Insiders Rumored to Be Worshipping Claude as a God.

The industry already has had its fair share of brushes with ominously cult-like behavior, from OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever commissioning wooden effigies to represent “unaligned” AIs to a murder sect that wanted to save the world from killer AI.

As it turns out, Dario Amodei’s Anthropic is apparently no different. Just getting hired there requires prospective employees to pledge allegiance to AI safety and undergo a psychological profiling test, per The Information.

And according to a rumor that, per The Spectator‘s Sean Thomas, is running rampant in Silicon Valley these days, some Anthropic engineers are going as far as to “worship” the company’s AI model Claude.

“If true, it chimes with an old sci-fi prediction and with what we know of human nature,” Thomas wrote. “If we build a superintelligence, we will first fall in love with it. Then we will worship it. Finally we will make sacrifices to it.”

Feeling a little smarter this morning for never having subscribed to Claude.

Posted at 8:20 am by Stephen Green

THE GOVERNMENT HAS VOTED TO DISSOLVE THE PEOPLE AND IMPORT ANOTHER:

Posted at 7:51 am by Stephen Green