March 5, 2026

WHERE WE ARE TODAY:

UPDATE:

Posted at 7:00 am by Glenn Reynolds

FROM JEFF DUNTEMANN:  Ten Gentle Opportunities.

Having been caught cheating a powerful magician out of ten nuggets of pure uncommitted magic in a rigged card game, Bartholomew Stypek needs a place to hide. As a spellbender he is at best a partial magician, who can read and change magic spells, but, absent a stash of magical force, cannot cast his own. With his anarchic familiar spirit Pickles and the ill-won kitty of magical Opportunities, Stypek throws himself on the mercy of the all-powerful Continuum and leaps blindly across universes, hoping to be dropped someplace far away, boring, and utterly without magic. As the Continuum chuckles in the background, Stypek lands in the break room of a small-town advertising agency in Upstate New York.

Because this new universe doesn’t support spirits, Pickles manifests as the nearest local equivalent: AI software in the agency’s heavily networked copier. She wanders into a nearby corporate network looking for allies, and discovers a virtual universe where AIs live in virtual bungalows and meet in virtual coffee shops for virtual doughnuts. Pickles is soon seducing Simple Simon, an earnest but naive AI tasked with controlling an immense robotic assembly line in the corporation’s manufacturing plant. Stypek, meanwhile, is mistaken for a penniless Eastern European computer science intern, and is taken in by Carolyn Romero, the ad agency’s copywriter. Expecting the usual suspicion and contempt, Stypek is humbled by the kindness he’s shown, and one by one uses the stolen Opportunities to help his new friends with their problems, including Carolyn’s failed marriage.

But Jrikk the magician isn’t so easily thwarted. Soon Stypek, Pickles, Simple Simon, and their human and virtual friends must fight for their lives against the evil force sent to retrieve Stypek to the magician’s dungeons.

Posted at 7:00 am by Sarah Hoyt

March 4, 2026

LESSONS:

Posted at 10:01 pm by Glenn Reynolds

OPEN THREAD: Hump Day.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

THEY NEVER SACRIFICE THEMSELVES, ONLY OTHERS:

Posted at 9:26 pm by Glenn Reynolds

FISH CALLED WANDA SUDDENLY DISCOVERS WATER:

See also, David Ellison’s earlier impact on former denizens of CBS News:

Posted at 9:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

THE ABOLITION OF BRITAIN: How the Royal Navy shrank to its smallest ‘since English Civil War.’

In the mid-1990s, Royal Navy officers at staff college in Shrivenham were asked to map out their predictions for what the service would look like in 30 years. One submariner said the navy would have 30 of the American Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyers, the same number of frigates and 20 attack submarines.

More than a decade earlier, the navy had deployed 127 ships for the Falklands conflict, including 43 warships. The British nuclear submarine HMS Conqueror had sunk the Argentine cruiser ARA General Belgrano, killing 323 sailors onboard.

The submariner, who recently retired, cannot believe the size of the navy now. “Nobody wrote down that you would have six Type 45s [destroyers] that never work, two aircraft carriers we can’t man because we don’t have enough people, and seven frigates, many alongside. Nobody wanted this navy.”

Or the lack thereof, based on the numbers:

America’s Newspaper of Record posits that Iran’s numbers may be shrinking quite rapidly in the coming weeks:

 

Posted at 8:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

FIND ANOTHER METAPHOR: O’Donnell Suggests Trump’s Military Operates like Hitler’s WW2 Forces.

On Monday night’s opening to The Last Word, host Lawrence O’Donnell, in his usual deranged fashion, decided to compare President Trump’s military actions in Iran to Adolf Hitler’s “rules of engagement” against Americans in World War II. He then implored Barron Trump and Donald Trump Jr. to go fight in Iran since Trump started the “burden of war,” without pointing out the Iranian uprising arose without the help of Trump.

O’Donnell opened his show with a vast display of opposition and rage to military operations in Iran. His outrage spiraled into comparisons of the US Military under Trump to Nazis, because Secretary Hegseth said they weren’t going to issue any of the infamously “stupid” rules of engagement he was subject to in Iraq and Afghanistan:

The Defense Secretary also said today that there are, quote, these are his words, “No stupid rules of engagement.” And that means the American military under Donald Trump will be operating under the same no rules of engagement used by Adolf Hitler’s forces in World War II against Americans.

Last Thursday, before many Iranian leaders began to assume room temperature, O’Donnell, a self-described “socialist. I live to the extreme left, the extreme left of you mere liberals,” brought on 88-year old actor Morgan Freeman for another round of redlining the Godwin Meter: On M-SNOW, Actor Morgan Freeman Compares Modern US to Nazi Germany.

As Freeman appeared to promote the series The Gray House about a group of Southern women who spied for the Union during the American Civil War, host Lawrence O’Donnell brought up the time Freeman read the final message of civil rights icon John Lewis* for O’Donnell’s show, leading the actor to remark, “The world today is not the world he left.”

The MS NOW host then posed: “With all your life experience, and to say that the world he left is a different world from where we are now, how would you describe where we are now?”

After pausing, Freeman commented: “Can I use any profanity? … Well, we have somebody sitting in the White House who’s leading us down a s–t hole.”

He invoked President Donald Trump’s history of being prosecuted for felonies by Democrats, leading O’Donnell to follow up: “Were you, with your life experience, did it feel like we were going backwards? Did it feel like the country was on, as Martin Luther King would say, you know, the arc of history was turning toward progress all the time, and did this feel different?”

Freeman then jumped into his Nazi Germany comparison:

Very different, very different. I’m constantly reminded of Germany in 1935, what was happening there, the Brownshirts, those people that are marching through particularly Berlin, rounding up people and putting them in box cars and sending them off. Now, this administration wants to build large detention centers and — for what? Question.

Residents of Martha’s Vineyard can easily answer that question. Naturally of course, the Nazi-obsessed M-SNOW will avoid giving Graham Platner, a one-man Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, the third degree in the coming months:

* Is Trump a bigger Nazi than Newt Gingrich? In 1995, Lewis wasn’t much of a fan of Gingrich and the new Republican Congress. “Democrats John Lewis and Charles Rangel compared silence in the face of the new conservative agenda to silence in the early days of the Third Reich. They didn’t just disagree with conservatives; they Nazi-fied them.”

And how: “During the debates over the Contract with America Rep. John Lewis read Martin Niemoller’s timeless speech about the Nazi takeover: ‘They came first for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist. Then they came for the Jews … trade unionists … Catholics … Protestants …’ And then with all the gravity he could muster he said, ‘Read the Republican contract. They are coming for the children. They are coming for the poor. They are coming for the sick, the elderly, and the disabled.’”

Similarly, in 2008, “Obama surrogate Congressman John Lewis (D-Georgia) invoked Alabama racist George Wallace in talking about McCain and his running mate Sarah Palin.”

Long before Lewis skipped Trump’s first inauguration in 2017, “Lewis and [Barbara] Lee, along with some other Democratic lawmakers at the time, also boycotted to make a point when President George W. Bush was inaugurated in 2001. The Washington Post reported at the time that Lewis ‘thought it would be hypocritical to attend Bush’s swearing-in because he doesn’t believe Bush is the true elected president.’”

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll