September 2, 2026

PROFILES IN COWARDICE: House Passes Gov’t Funding Bill That Does Nothing To Fix Debt Crisis. “The national debt surpassed $40 trillion on Aug. 20 and the deficit reached $2 trillion in the 2026 fiscal year. The 30-year Treasury bond yield reached a 19-year high due to the soaring government debt, prompting the Department of Treasury to double the size of its long-dated Treasury buybacks from $2 billion to at least $4 billion per operation.”

“If something cannot go on forever, it will stop,” the wise man once said.

Posted at 2:48 pm by Stephen Green

THIS IS CNN: Is Capitalism Tied to White Supremacy?

Asian Americans graduate high school at close to 99 percent. Black Americans graduate at closer to 81 percent (though it has been climbing). About 26 percent of black Americans have a college degree. For Asian Americans that figure is 70 percent. U.S. Census data shows that a family with parents who have college degrees are likely to earn about double what a family with parents who just finished high school earn and more than triple what a family of people who didn’t finish high school earn.

So getting married and graduating high school (and college) makes a huge difference in financial outcomes and home ownership. There are exceptions to every rule but for the most part these are things that correlate with success. And obviously there are a lot of personal choices connected to all of the factors I’m bringing up. If you choose to drop out of high school and choose to never marry, your likelihood of success is pretty slim compared to people who make the opposite choices. That’s why group differences in these areas make a big difference in group outcomes financially.

When you say that capitalism isn’t working for people today because of white supremacy, you actually need to make the case that these other obvious factors either don’t matter or are themselves products of white supremacy. That’s not so easy to do precisely because personal choices are involved. I don’t think Jemele Hill was remotely prepared to make that case nor was Leigh McGowan.

Finally, it’s worth noting that Jemele Hill is married and a college graduate and used to make $1 million a year working for ESPN (though that was before she got married). I’m sure she’s still doing pretty well for herself now.

It’s hard out there for a Neiman Marxist:

 

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

THE 21st CENTURY ISN’T TURNING OUT AS I HAD HOPED: KFC Debuts An Oreo-Flavored Chicken Sandwich, And Fast Food Lovers Are Horrified.

Starting August 28, KFC locations in China will debut an Oreo-flavored chicken sandwich. The Oreo Original Recipe Chicken Burger starts with a breaded chicken thigh and lettuce…and devolves from there.

Instead of the chain’s typical bread, this sandwich comes with Oreo-flavored buns that are tinted black and stamped with an image of the cookie. Inside the burger, KFC is adding a layer of mashed potatoes coated in crushed Oreo pieces.

On Chinese social media platforms like RedNote, initial reviews of the salty-sweet sandwich are positive. But on the other side of the world, people are horrified.

“KFC scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should,” one Reddit user said. Another added, “That sounds beyond terrible.”

Kill it with fire — or a flood:

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

HOW’S THAT POST-RACIAL SOUTH AFRICA COMING ALONG? Plan for a ‘white tax’ in South Africa.

Lamberti said that there is an increasing proliferation of transformation funds requiring businesses to pay into them.

“This represents a whole new offshoot of BEE. This could be a manifestation of the latest phase of BEE or of the direction the policy is generally moving.”

He said this shifts the transformation to where, instead of structuring equity deals, businesses just put money into a big government slush fund through equity equivalents.

“So, you just pay the money. Just pay the ‘white tax’, so you can pay to play. Once you’ve paid the tax, you’re allowed to participate,” he said.

Lamberti said that there are several problems with the transformation funds, which are essentially a white tax.

“Beyond the ethical issue, it still represents a considerable cost. This cost can easily be ratcheted higher at the government’s discretion,” he said.

Related: The Creeping Tide: South Africa’s Race Law Index Updated – More Laws, More Concerns.

Posted at 1:46 pm by Stephen Green

BETTER DEAD THAN RUDE:

As Mark Steyn wrote in 2005, “With hindsight, the defining encounter of the age was not between Mohammed Atta’s jet and the World Trade Center on 9/11, but that between Mohammed Atta and Johnelle Bryant a year earlier:”

Ms Bryant is an official with the US department of agriculture in Florida, and the late Mr Atta had gone to see her about getting a $650,000 government loan to convert a plane into the world’s largest crop-duster. A novel idea.

The meeting got off to a rocky start when Mr Atta refused to deal with Ms Bryant because she was “but a woman”. But, after this unpleasantness had been smoothed out, things went swimmingly.

When it was explained to him that, alas, he wouldn’t get the 650 grand in cash that day, Mr Atta threatened to cut Ms Bryant’s throat. He then pointed to a picture behind her desk showing an aerial view of downtown Washington – the White House, the Pentagon, etc – and asked, “How would America like it if another country destroyed that city and some of the monuments in it?”

Fortunately, Ms Bryant had been on the training course and knows an opportunity for multicultural outreach when she sees one. “I felt that he was trying to make the cultural leap from the country that he came from,” she recalled. “I was attempting, in every manner I could, to help him make his relocation into our country as easy for him as I could.”

In less than ten days, “2001 Live,” a rather sedate 25th anniversary-oriented Twitter/X account is about to go into hyperdrive:

Tweet concludes, “One student, Zacarias Moussaoui, keeps asking how to fly a plane, but insists that he doesn’t need to know how to take off and land. Moussaoui is arrested.”

(Classical reference in headline.)

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

HOW MILO OWNED HIMSELF:

Did Trump write a secret executive order decreeing that angry D-list British attention whores must be returned to their nation of origin? First, Prince Harry and his American wife mysteriously hightailed it out of their Montecito mansion for the Cotswolds, and now Milo Yiannopoulos gets deported back to the United Kingdom as well? We have enough undesirables entering the country without adding these shameless grifters. Hasn’t the UK suffered enough?

Apparently not. On Friday, Yiannopoulos – who just last year was calling for ‘on the spot deportation for anyone who can’t prove they are in the US legally’ – was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement at the Louis Armstrong Airport in New Orleans and sent back to his native England for overstaying his visa.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

BEEGE: Smiles in Ayn Rand: Von der Leyen Tells EU Citizens ‘All Your Monies Are Belong to Us.’

Maybe, just schmaybe, those cod-clasping Vikings in Iceland knew what they were doing on Sunday evening, when, by the hairs on their bearded chinny chinchins, they extricated themselves for the foreseeable future from any discussions about becoming a European Union vassal state.

Oh, excuse me – European Union ‘member,’ as if that implied some sort of chummy club filled with bonhomie, and all looking out for the other fellows’ best interests.

As someone said, it’s more the Hotel California. And at the rate the unelected Empress of Europe, current European Commission president, and epic Bond villainess Ursula von der Leyen is going, no one will be left standing to wonder how to check out, even if they could.

Once again, Beege is having way too much fun today.

Posted at 12:44 pm by Stephen Green

YEAH, ARCHITECTS SHOULD BE GLAD THEIR GUY LOST ON THIS. As this hilarious thread notes, they would have opened up a real can of worms establishing a precedent that you could sue if ugly buildings were inflicted on you.

Related (From Ed):

Earlier: From Bauhaus to Tom’s House: James Lileks on architect Louis Kahn.

“While browsing through an Architectural Record from 1977, there was a gushing review of the incredibly brilliant Yale Center for British Art by the incredibly brilliant Louis Kahn…Ah yes. That one. The building that gave us one of the best examples of life before and after the Second World War. Hint: Kahn’s building is on the left. You know how many years separate those two structures? Nineteen. The building on the right was completed in 1928. The building on the left was begun in 1947.”

Posted at 12:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

THE GOVERNMENT DOESN’T OFFER A SOLUTION BECAUSE THE GOVERNMENT DOESN’T SEE A PROBLEM. THIS IS THEIR GOAL.

Posted at 12:19 pm by Glenn Reynolds

ELON MUSK: The Future Is Power, Chips, and Data Centers. “SpaceX CEO and founder Elon Musk spoke some harsh truths to EU leaders at a G20 conference in North Carolina on Tuesday — and a reminder to Americans about where the future lies.”

Posted at 12:13 pm by Stephen Green

AMERICA’S GOVERNOR: A woke protester just learned why heckling Ron DeSantis is a bad idea.

Exit quote: “This ain’t my first rodeo, lady. I’ve seen it all. And you ain’t very good at it.”

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: $400K for AI Cheaters Luxury Camp: How many colleges will survive?

“I just don’t see a world in which parents continue to indefinitely fork up nearly half a million to send their kids to AI Cheating Young Adult Luxury Camp,” tweets Tyler Austin Harper, a professor turned Atlantic writer. “Some will, but how many? Enough to sustain most colleges?”

He envisions a “black-swan-esque event where significant chunks of higher ed collapse suddenly.” Colleges are playing chicken with parents, he tweets. “The wager seems to be that college is so entrenched as the default that parents will continue to pay for it even as the value proposition and quality collapse due to AI. I think that bluff gets called.”

The Syracuse University is in trouble, reports Douglas Belkin and Roshan Fernandez in the Wall Street Journal. Total cost of attendance at the private university increased to $98,544 this year. Enrollment fell short.

Syracuse borrowed “nearly half a billion in debt to build desperately needed new dorms,” they write. To fill the dorms, the university may need to lower admissions standards, risking its prestige and reducing its appeal to students whose parents can pay tuition.

To be fair, most universities have done much worse than that to damage their prestige.

Posted at 11:42 am by Stephen Green

“FOR THIS REASON, ACADEMIA DOESN’T JUST ATTRACT LEFTISTS, IT ATTRACTS THE MOST NEUROTIC, EMOTIONALLY FRAGILE, AND INTELLECTUALLY CONFORMING LEFTISTS”:

Posted at 11:26 am by Stephen Green