LIVING HISTORY: I Served Aboard 57,500-Ton Iowa-Class Battleship USS Wisconsin And She Is A Floating History Lesson For The US Navy In 2026. “It reminds us that the industrial aspect of maintenance, repair, and overhaul is colossal—especially for older ships. Back then, the U.S. Navy fleet was getting younger and younger amid the frantic buildup to an (almost) 600-ship Navy. Today the fleet is aging, compounding the challenges, time, and cost of upkeep. You can run a classic car forever—if you’re willing to pay the cost, and don’t run it too hard. And spare parts for the classics become scarce. Hence our need to rummage for parts at the nearby Alabama museum ship.”

VOTE AS THOUGH YOUR LIFE, LIBERTY, AND PROPERTY DEPEND UPON IT:

THE ART OF THE DEAL:

“It even survives a hypothetical future independence of Greenland: in that event, Denmark and Greenland must ensure that the independent Greenlandic state ‘affirmatively assume[s] all of the rights and obligations of the Kingdom of Denmark specified in this Agreement.'”

I’M NOT USUALLY MUCH FOR CONSPIRACY THEORIES, BUT…:

MAKE HIGH-TRUST GREAT AGAIN:

A good first step is to stop importing people from low-trust societies with no intention or desire of assimilating.

GO AWAY: California Wants to Write America’s AI Rules.

The order cites the need for more stringent regulation following the Hugging Face attack and industry leaders’ call to action. It also accelerates the implementation of Senate Bill 813 and Assembly Bill 1405, which create a state framework for certifying and registering independent AI auditors but do not require developers to submit to audits.

​The announcement describes California’s AI framework as a “guidebook for the nation.” Adam Thierer, a senior fellow at the R Street Institute, sees it differently.

“It’s not a guidebook,” he tells Reason. “It’s a rule book.”

AI systems transcend state borders, and given California’s outsized role in the market, working around its laws is hardly an option; therefore, California law effectively becomes the national standard. This phenomenon is known as the “California effect,” and it has reared its ugly head in labor and environmental policy.

The last thing we need is a one-party kleptocracy that can’t even build a railroad writing regulations for the entire country on bleeding-edge tech.

NOPE, STILL NOT TIRED OF ALL THE WINNING:

HEIGHTENING THE CONTRADICTIONS INHERENT IN THE COMMUNIST SYSTEM: Hey, Xi — Good Luck Keeping AI on a Communist Leash. “Beijing is ‘pushing cheap, capable open-source models around the world’ and Xi wants AI ‘never so powerful that it slips beyond the control of the Communist Party.’ Which is like giving your teenage son a 1,000-horsepower Ferrari, but insisting that he keep his speed to 55 mph.”

NOVEMBER PREVIEW: Oopsie! Democrat Convicted Felon Drops Bid. “This is a blow to Democrats, because Lomick actually received a few hundred more votes in the primary election than the two Republicans candidates, indicating the new district might possibly be competitive.”

NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG:

Remember over the next few years, Los Angeles, that Pratt is the mayor you could have had.

THE QUIET DISSIDENCE OF THE BOSTON GLOBE

Mastio notes that the fear-mongering about a nonexistent trans murder “epidemic” is being driven by queer activists. He doesn’t call this out for the cynical power politics and moral blackmail that it is, but he does note, “What LGBTQ rights groups are doing to these folks with this unrelenting message that death is waiting for them around every corner is not healthy. They have their constituents living in fear when the best numbers we have show that the supposed ‘epidemic,’ ‘onslaught,’ or ‘genocide’ against trans people is not as potent as they suggest and is, in fact, lessening.”

The second Globe piece is a dispatch from a western Massachusetts lesbian bar, detailing how the recent(!) relaxation of the establishment’s N95 mask mandate led to a complete meltdown among the regulars. The pleasures of the piece are many, from one patron’s accusation that management is “complicit in a mass disabling event” to another’s that the move could “kill disabled people in the name of your own leisure and convenience,” to a third’s more simple wish that the bar be “firebombed” for its policy toward the immunocompromised. Distressed by the backlash and the bar’s struggling finances, one of its founders has, I jest you not, enrolled in clown college.

What both pieces have in common is understatement and restraint as editorial strategy. They both simply take the left-wing milieus they examine seriously, present the claims these people make in their own terms, even sympathetically, and then apply only basic empirical scrutiny to them, unladen by invective or antagonism. The results are nevertheless devastating, a kind of reductio ad absurdum of a whole worldview, the way many see the HBO show Girls as in fact subtle critique of a lifestyle it superficially valorizes.

I wonder how these articles are playing to the Globe’s core subscribers? Are they shocked that there isn’t an “epidemic” of anti-trans violence? Are they shocked that there’s still a bastion of mask obsessives even in 2026? But kudos to the Globe for exposing their perilously left-leaning readers to a fair amount of cognitive dissonance.