July 24, 2026

NO MATTER HOW MUCH YOU DESPISE THE MEDIA…:

…it’s less than the media despises you.

UPDATE: Link was bad before, sorry! Should work now.

Posted at 10:57 am by Stephen Green

INCENTIVES MATTER: DHS issues $84B in fines to illegal immigrants under Trump administration.

Shortly after Trump’s return to office, the administration announced it would begin fining illegal immigrants subject to final removal orders $998 per day if they failed to voluntarily leave the United States or otherwise comply with their removal orders. Illegal immigrants are required to pay the fines before they are deported, and DHS has said it may seize assets from those who fail to pay.

The Trump administration has unveiled a series of measures designed to encourage illegal immigrants to leave the country, including DHS’ announcement that those who refuse to self-deport could face “significant financial penalty.”

DHS has argued the program costs significantly less than traditional deportation proceedings and is designed to encourage illegal immigrants to voluntarily leave the United States.

The press ripped Mitt Romney in 2012 for suggesting self-deportation.

Posted at 10:42 am by Stephen Green

YES:

Posted at 10:26 am by Stephen Green

UNEXPECTED HEADLINES: Ukraine Declares War on Wildberries (Really). “Residents of St. Petersburg woke up Friday to find their Wildberries on fire, following a series of Ukrainian drone strikes on Russia’s largest online retailer. The Associated Press sold the attacks as ‘hurting small businesses and bringing the war home,’ but there’s more to it than that.”

Posted at 10:11 am by Stephen Green

DON’T STOP: Team Trump’s anti-fraud drive is making more news than anyone can follow. “One day this week, the Justice Department announced it had finally nabbed a fugitive Medicare fraudster on the lam since 2022, who allegedly stole more than half a billion dollars, even as Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Medicare-Medicaid czar Dr. Mehmet Oz froze over $1 billion in funding to California and Minnesota over apparent Medicaid fraud. About the same time, Scott Bessent’s Treasury stopped $100 million in tax money going to dead people thanks to new verification procedures, while the IRS chief revealed that a recent scrub of the Social Security Number database found that one in 10 recipients were erroneously listed.”

Posted at 9:48 am by Glenn Reynolds

KASPAROV WAS AN EARLY SUFFERER OF TDS, AND SHOWS NO SIGN OF RECOVERY:

Posted at 9:24 am by Stephen Green

I REMEMBER WHEN THE LEFT WAS AGAINST “ELIMINATIONIST RHETORIC.”

Or pretended to be.

UPDATE:

Posted at 9:04 am by Glenn Reynolds

UKRAINE DRONES ARE KILLING PUTIN: Rod Martin documents how Ukraine is giving the world a brutal demonstration of the power of drones to turn Russia’s greatest defensive asset — its vastness — into the Bear’s worst handicap. Question: Why didn’t the U.S. military/industrial complex figure this out before Ukraine?

Posted at 9:00 am by Mark Tapscott

JAMES PETHOKOUKIS: America’s AI Regulation Should Be Rooted in Free Enterprise Principles.

If you think super-advanced AI isn’t on the horizon—which is the forecast of five out of six AI technologists, according to one recent survey—then we can treat AI models and their corporate creators in a more “normal” fashion. These open and near-frontier models should be treated as engines of competition and diffusion. As tech analyst Ben Thompson argues, the economic panic over Chinese models like Kimi K3 mostly misreads market economics:

Right now there is a price umbrella that is downstream of the lack of compute; I highly doubt that Chinese models are cheaper to serve on a marginal cost basis, they just seem cheaper because Anthropic and OpenAI are so supply constrained that they are charging far more than they would if there were sufficient supply to meet the demand for intelligence.

Washington should think hard about how policy currently works against a proliferation of advanced American models—starting with the informal national-security review process that, as tech policy analyst Adam Thierer has explained, can hold up a model’s release with little public explanation or transparent process. That’s a dicey situation for a wealthy frontier AI company—and an impossible one for an open-model startup.

There are genuine security problems here. My AEI colleague Ryan Fedasiuk has usefully catalogued many of them, such as user data flowing to Chinese servers subject to Beijing’s National Intelligence Law and tampered model files in the supply chain. The right response is targeted rules on AI models used in government systems, sensitive data, and what major American platforms distribute. So an argument for safeguards, not suppression.

I’d add that rules and regulations written in the heat of a panic are even worse than those that aren’t — and the ones that aren’t rarely work as intended.

Posted at 8:38 am by Stephen Green

BLACKPILLERS BE REMINDED:

Posted at 8:30 am by Glenn Reynolds

JUST ANOTHER OBAMA MESS FOR SOMEBODY ELSE TO CLEAN UP:

“So many of our black contractors have NOT GOT THEIR MONEY! A lot of the black community do not know these people have not been paid!”

Posted at 8:22 am by Stephen Green

DR. STRANGEVIEW, OR HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB: The View Claims Trump Is Being Bribed By Saudis to Let Them Nuke U.S.

[Joy] Behar’s hysterics started with her spinning a new nuclear energy deal into Trump plotting to allow Saudi Arabia to stockpile nuclear weapons:

The thing that I really can’t stand about him right now is that he starts a war in Iran because they’re going to get a nuclear weapon. Now, he’s making a deal with the Saudi Arabians that will allow them to produce a nuclear weapon.

In an instant, Behar’s psychosis escalated the situation into Trump plotting with the planners of 9/11 to drop a nuclear bomb on Cleveland. She then lashed out at Republicans for only acting against him after it happened:

BEHAR: Now, where is the head of the Republican Party in this, because they have the power to get rid of him?!

ALYSSA FARAH GRIFFIN: And they will say that the Saudis are not allowed to make a nuclear weapon but they’re allowed to enrich.

BEHAR: Oh, I see. Then we’ll go to war with the 9/11 group. The Saudis were behind 9/11 and – and – Are they waiting for him to drop a nuke on Cleveland?! What are they waiting for to do something?!

The media’s schizophrenia regarding Trump is completely out of hand. For years, they told me he wasn’t a president obsessed with the environment. And now the women of The View have done a complete 180:

Posted at 7:44 am by Ed Driscoll