October 31, 2026

THEY HAVE A STRONGER STOMACH THAN I. I QUIT READING IT ALMOST TWO DECADES AGO:  Neo-kremlinologists still find value in The E-Communist, er, I mean The Economist.

For us neo-kremlinologists, the magazine has been unduly generous in the last week, providing two interesting snapshots into the neuroses and instincts of the lumpenintelligentsia at the present moment. Before I go any further, it is important to add that these people are not uniformly specious or slow on the uptake — like the Soviet intelligentsia in the 1970s, it includes many highly intelligent and perceptive people, who may be thoughtful or even forthright about the crises that beset us, but only discreetly and on an individual basis. In the atmosphere of stultifying intellectual conformity that they inhabit, what matters is what they feel comfortable discussing and admitting to one another in public, because it is that which shapes the direction of policy. And it is on that that the Economist‘s cachet can be helpful, by virtue of the freedom it lends its unbylined writers to think aloud.

It was the more recent of the two articles that has garnered the most attention. An article titled “Do immigrants from some countries commit more sex crimes?” on 25th October admitted that, yes, they do. The piece was accompanied by a graphic showing — on a logarithmic scale — the rate at which immigrants in Britain were convicted of sexual crimes, by nationality, relative to that of British nationals. The graphic showed very clearly that nationals of countries in non-EU Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East were substantially more likely to be convicted of sexual crimes than British nationals, with people from Afghanistan way out ahead of any other group. EU nationals, meanwhile, were slightly less likely to be convicted of such offences, and East Asians and Australasians even more underrepresented in the statistics. People from the Americans and the Caribbean were, on average, roughly equal to British nationals in their prolificness.

Posted at 3:00 am by Sarah Hoyt

October 30, 2026

HOW IT STARTED: Bad News, Abdul. Tucker Carlson Wants to Be Your Bestie.

[O]n his podcast, Carlson heaped high praise on El-Sayed. In an interview Carlson was conducting with Saagar Enjeti, the two talked about the El-Sayed campaign for the Senate in Michigan.

Carlson and Enjeti were talking about how El-Sayed has very obviously and very disingenuously moved to the middle to run in the general election against Republican Mike Rogers. You can bet your last dollar that he will revert back to his Islamic socialist roots if elected. But that’s not how Carlson framed it.

Enjeti said the quiet part out loud when he pointed out that El-Sayed is doing a bit of “shape shifting.” Anyone with an eye for politics can see that should El-Sayed win in November, he’d enter the Senate to the left of Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.), and he’d be just as radical an Islamist politician as Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.).

—Tim O’Brien, PJ Media.com, September 3rd, 2026.

How It’s Going: Dems In Disarray After Abdul El-Sayed Features Tucker Carlson In Campaign Ad.

Michigan Democrats are clashing over Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed decision to feature conservative commentator Tucker Carlson in a campaign ad, with prominent party figures demanding that he pull the spot days before Election Day.

The ad, released last week, features Carlson saying he “wouldn’t vote for Mike Rogers at gunpoint,” referring to El-Sayed’s Republican opponent. The spot also includes clips of Fox News personalities praising El-Sayed, part of the Democrat’s effort to appeal to voters who might otherwise support President Donald Trump.

Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI), whom El-Sayed narrowly defeated in the August Democratic primary, said Friday that she hopes the nominee will take down the advertisement, calling its use of Carlson an insult to the black congregation where the two Democrats are scheduled to appear Sunday alongside Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-SC).

Former Obama administration official Van Jones also condemned El-Sayed’s use of Carlson.

“No Democrat should ever celebrate the words of a white nationalist who actively undermines the safety of black people and Jewish people,” Jones posted on social media. Jones also condemned Republican attacks on El-Sayed’s Muslim faith.

Earlier: Is This the Most Antisemitic Ad to Ever Air for a Senate Race?

Evergreen question: Seriously, What the Hell Is Wrong With Tucker Carlson?

UPDATE:

Posted at 11:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

OPEN THREAD: Ring in the weekend.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

Posted at 9:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

OLD AND BUSTED: Tea, Earl Grey, Hot.

The New Coldness?

 

Posted at 9:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

HOLY SMOKES: Looks Like Poland Might Be in the Middle of a Tusk-Orchestrated Coup.

God bless America – what is in the water in EUROPE?!

This past January, former professional boxer and now Polish President Karol Nawrocki put a shot across the European Union’s bow and finally opened the schism in the fragile truce existing between himself and Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk.

The populist and popular president said a government is supposed to protect freedom, not restrict it. And he vetoed the EU’s censorship bill much to Tusk’s fury.

Read the whole thing.

Tweet concludes, “Poland is about to get weird.”

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

OPENAI CEO SAYS IT’S ‘QUITE TERRIBLE’ FOR YOUR PC TO HAVE RAM: Sam Altman says data centers offer better utilization.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has data centers full of memory, but seemingly it’s the 32GB of RAM in your desktop that’s the problem. In an interview over beers with the YouTube channel Cheeky Pint, Altman said that local inference, and, by extension, people having DRAM in computers at home, is “quite terrible.”
When discussing local inference on home computers with open-source models, Altman discussed the assumption that people will be able to run local AI on their own computers, the ones they may already own or want to build. Then he explained why that’s a bad idea (at the 29-minute mark):

“From a global allocation perspective, actually, it’s quite terrible to have everybody have a bunch of the world’s limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer and being used 5% of the time,” Altman said. “You want maximum utilization in the cloud if you’re trying to deal with this very supply-constrained environment. And somehow many people’s intuition is the opposite of that.”

The general public alternately loathes or his terrified of AI, so I’m really thrilled to see the industry barons making an effort to ingratiate themselves with the masses:

Related: Tech Stocks Plunge as Wall Street Enters ‘Show Me’ Phase.

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

VET ORGANIZATIONS AGAINST VETS:

“Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing,” the wise man once said.

Posted at 5:39 pm by Stephen Green

YEAH, MY EMPATHY FOR THAT KIND OF THING RAN OUT BEFORE I EVER HAD ANY:

Posted at 5:09 pm by Stephen Green

HOW ARE YOU GOING TO GET VOTERS TO CHOSE THE WRONG CANDIDATE IF THEY HAVE TO SHOW ID?

Posted at 4:38 pm by Stephen Green

THE GREATNESS OF PATRICK STEWART:

He was not an easy man, as he was happy to admit, and both his personal and professional lives were not free of conflict. But when he was on song, which he was often, there were few actors of his generation who could touch him.

Star Trek made him rich and famous, of course, and he dealt with the respect and adulation that his best-known role brought him with the good humor and self-effacement that many veteran actors who become successful late in life display. Even for those who were not natural sci-fi fans, his Picard – authoritative and charismatic, yes, but also winningly human – was a fine reason to watch the show, and Stewart, who reprised the role as recently as 2023, relished the opportunity to play an intergalactic version of Horatio Hornblower, and approached the part with swashbuckling zeal. It is hard to think of any actor who played a role of such longevity with such conviction and talent, and his enormous popularity at fan conventions was testament to how beloved he was.

But he never turned his back on his first love, the stage, and continued to perform well after his enviable bank balance would have led less committed actors to take it easier.

In his 1983 book Inside Prime Time, Todd Gitlin wrote:

In recent years many producers have been dismayed that the networks have not only usurped the casting of leads but have insisted that whole committees sit in on the casting of minor parts. “I think we should be involved in casting, it’s our money,” says NBC’s genial number-two programming executive, Perry Lafferty. He adds, “The key to every television program’s success—and this will get a lot of people mad, but it’s true—is casting,” Lafferty insists. “It’s who plays the lead. I can’t tell you any plots from The Rockford Files. I used to love it. I love James Garner. I loved Telly Savalas’s Kojak. That’s what the audience goes for. They go for the performer. They don’t remember the plots; you can’t write that good over a period of time. So it comes down to who do you put in there.”

Unlike most successful TV shows which start strong and slowly jump the shark, TNG was the opposite – its creation and first two years were a shambolic mess, a topic explored at length in the William Shatner-narrated 2014 documentary, Chaos on the Bridge. But for the third season, an aged and dissipated Gene Roddenberry stepped back (read: was pushed out), new writers were brought in, and the show quickly became what we remember as TNG for the rest of its run. But without Stewart’s charisma and crisp line readings, there’s no way TNG would have made it to its third season. For its first two years, he was the show.

Or as Sunny Bunch writes, “The Next Generation was always my show: It’s one of the first instances of must-see viewing I can remember, and the biggest reason was the bizarre magnetism of this wiry, bald Brit who, for some reason, had a French name. This, naturally, didn’t quite make sense (though he had a good explanation), but none of that mattered because Stewart was so damn commanding onscreen. This may have been the first time I really realized what ‘acting’ is: He just had a presence, an authority, one that transcended mere Starfleet rank. You could buy him as a leader because he had both forcefulness and empathy.”

Posted at 4:30 pm by Ed Driscoll