May 23, 2026

HAVE YOU BEEN ASLEEP FOR THE LAST TWO DAYS? Because the Based Book Sale is going on. Books for ninety nine cents or less.

And here at crazy Sarah’s…. ahem in my office, we’re showing willing with six — that’s 6! — books at 99c each. The salient ones here are No Man’s Land. Look, I don’t intend to ever put them on Kindle Unlimited (whatever it’s called now) but I know some of you are strapped. So until early morning on 5/27 (and seriously only this time) it’s 99c each, $3 for the whole book-in-three-volumes. All 900 pages of it.

No Man’s Land Volume 1, Volume 2, Volume 3  and then, the new collection: Done with Mirrors  (with a half-never-published (long story) story in John Ringo’s Black Tide series.)  And two old but goodies: Draw One In the Dark and Death of a Musketeer.

 

Posted at 1:04 am by Sarah Hoyt

May 22, 2026

OPEN THREAD: Ring in the weekend.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

A SUCCESSFUL LAUNCH AND SEPARATION:

UPDATE:

Not sure a crew at Boeing would chant “USA!” Or be allowed to. If Boeing could do something like this.

UPDATE: From the comments: “Damn, how I wish Jerry Pournelle could be watching this.”

Posted at 7:06 pm by Glenn Reynolds

SPENCER FOR HIRE:

As Stephen Miller tweets, “If you tackle and dent or even solve rampant homelessness, a lot of people lose their jobs and a lot of the funding and donations cease and that’s why there’s a sudden flood of negative media going his way. They aren’t scared of him winning. But they are scared that once people realize problems can be solved, a whole lot of the slush funding dries up.”

17 years ago in Northern California, SF Weekly stumbled into the Fox Butterfield effect, when one of its writers observed, “Despite its spending more money per capita on homelessness than any comparable city, [San Francisco’s] homeless problem is worse than any comparable city’s.” In L.A., Pratt wants to break that cycle. Do the city’s leftist residents who foot the bill?

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

DEBRA SAUNDERS: The bell tolls for Facebook staffers.

Ahead of the big tranche of layoffs Facebook implemented on May 20, I finished reading “Careless People: A story of where I used to work,” a memoir by one-time Facebook (then Meta) big-shot Sarah Wynn-Williams. The memoir, first published in 2025, is a cautionary tale.

Wynn-Williams and I have very different politics. Still, I was drawn to her story of a New Zealand native who went to work for Facebook with the belief that the social-media platform would change the world for the better. It’s a life lesson that extremely smart people can be really stupid.

“Employees are encouraged to believe they’re changing the world, not working for a corporation,” Wynn-Williams writes. And: “Changing how people communicate will aways change the world.”

Problem: Practically no one at FB HQ knew how the world would change, and there was little consideration of the possibility that social media could affect modern life in a bad way.

At the beginning of 2016, Bloomberg’s Justin Fox suggested, “You want to ‘change the world’? Keep it to yourself.”

Whenever I hear people saying they want to “change the world,” I get suspicious. Do they want to change it for the better or for the worse? If it’s the former, what makes them think they know enough to do that? Wouldn’t it be more realistic and less arrogant to try to change their companies or their neighbourhoods ― or maybe just themselves?

Still, it’s a popular goal. There are books, college courses and conferences on how to do it. There’s also a new documentary film called How to Change the World (it’s about the origins of Greenpeace), and a not-so-new Eric Clapton song called “Change the World” (I think it’s about love). In a related and timely vein, the World Economic Forum, meeting in Davos, Switzerland, this week, tells us that it is “committed to improving the state of the world.”

Changing the world seems to be most popular, though, in and around Silicon Valley. The Wall Street Journal’s Yuliya Chernova once did an analysis of LinkedIn profiles and found that “change the world” was far more likely to show up in San Francisco Bay area profiles than those from any other region. “Here, the goal is to change the world,” LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman [pre-TDS] matter-of-factly wrote in October. “We have a greater capacity to change the world today than the kings and presidents of just 50 years ago,” former Facebooker Justin Rosenstein declared, somewhat more grandiosely, in 2012.

In September of that same year, at the Foundation for Economic Education, Donald J. Boudreaux explored “The Problem with Wanting to ‘Change the World.’” Only one?

Most people who want to change the world seldom pause to ponder what, exactly, about the world needs changing. After all, much about the world is pretty darn good, and, hence, is likely not an appropriate candidate for the wiles of any “change-agent.” Worse, most people who want to change the world have in mind schemes that involve forcing others to behave in ways that they would not otherwise.

Our world has massively changed, mostly for the better, over the past two or three centuries. And nearly all of this change came in doses so small that the names of those who performed each beneficial change were never widely known, and are today lost forever in the thick mists of history. Most – although by no mean all – of the “change-agents” whose names are known were human butchers (e.g., Hitler and Stalin) or arrogant ‘men of system’ (e.g., Clement Attlee and Franklin Roosevelt) who saddled others with counterproductive burdens and restrictions even if the destructiveness of these efforts is today still largely denied.

Evergreen question: “What Is To Be Done About Facebook?”

Posted at 4:31 pm by Ed Driscoll

SOMETHING TO HIDE? Lawyer claims Wisconsin ‘desperately’ trying to keep voter list secret. “The Wisconsin Elections Commission has received about $77 million over the last two decades from the federal government to maintain its computer systems, which includes the statewide voter registration database. The feds now just want the opportunity to inspect what they are largely paying for,” Lennington told The Center Square. “They do this all the time in other areas like Medicaid, unemployment, and other federally funded areas.”

Posted at 3:52 pm by Stephen Green

FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY [VIP]: It’s the Every Man but Florida Man Edition. “It’s time for your much-needed break from the serious news, and this week, I have so many reports lined up from seemingly every state except for Florida, that I figured maybe he deserved a break this once.”

Posted at 3:21 pm by Stephen Green