June 12, 2026

UNEXPECTED HEADLINES: Pokémon Go players unwittingly contributed to tech with military drone uses. “A decade after the global craze for Pokémon Go peaked, an AI company has been using billions of real-world images captured by millions of players to develop navigation technologies for delivery robots and possibly military drones. That represents an intriguing but potentially discomfiting legacy for an augmented reality mobile game that has incentivized gamers to capture short smartphone videos of physical neighborhoods and landmarks.”

Posted at 4:54 pm by Stephen Green

FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY [VIP]: He Played Hide’n’Seek With a K-9 and Lost. “It’s time for your much-needed break from the serious news, and this week, we’ll learn the difference between hurricane-proof and chainsaw-proof, how not to tip the DoorDash driver, and to keep your pants on in Austin.”

Posted at 4:23 pm by Stephen Green

ANOTHER STUDY SAYS POORER, ACTUALLY: How Britain Became as Poor as Mississippi.

Britain has been left behind. The country’s output per person is now only just above that of Mississippi, America’s poorest state—and that slight lead is only achieved thanks to London. Outside the capital, in places where tourists do not visit, living standards fall well below Mississippi’s. Brits visiting the United States find that their currency has depreciated to the point where the pound today buys only about $1.35. British wages have lagged well behind those in the U.S., and also those in Germany, France, the Netherlands, Denmark; once you account for inflation, they’ve barely grown at all. Within the next decade, the typical Pole will have a standard of living equal to the typical Brit, if current trends continue.

One generation ago, Britain was a major global power; today, it is a middling one, gripped by sclerosis. Taxation is at the highest level since World War II, yet public services have deteriorated. The National Health Service, the celebrated pillar of the British cradle-to-grave welfare state, has a backlog of 6 million patients—almost a tenth of the population—waiting for treatment. The health service now has to spend more money settling maternity-malpractice claims than it does on actually providing maternity care. Many Brits can neither obtain an appointment with a publicly funded dentist nor afford a private one; in a 2023 survey, one in 10 reported doing DIY dental work, in extreme cases extracting their own teeth or gluing broken crowns back together.

Previously: Sorry, Britain, but You’re Just Another Europoor Country Now.

Posted at 3:52 pm by Stephen Green

IT’S BIG: New Look at America’s Next Ballistic Missile Submarine. “The Columbias feature several qualitative enhancements fostered in the 5 decades since the inception of the Ohio-class, including a quieting and propulsion technology leap (including electronic input for the control surfaces), new sonar arrays and other sensor upgrades, and additional space granted by the Columbia’s larger size. Despite the Columbia’s increased size, the amount of Trident missiles aboard drops from 24 on the Ohios to 16, with the jury still out on uses for the extra tonnage.”

I’d really like to know, but those who do know can’t say.

Posted at 2:50 pm by Stephen Green

DISPATCHES FROM HOLLYWEIRD:

Posted at 2:03 pm by Stephen Green

ZEROING OUT FRAUD WON’T FIX WASHINGTON’S DEBT CRISIS: President Donald Trump and several determined GOP Members of Congress are making huge inroads against the hundreds of billions – if not trillions- of tax dollars lost every year to waste, fraud and corruption in federal spending. And stopping that loss for good must be done as soon as possible, especially with regard to preventing Medicare/Medicaid bankruptcy.

But doing that will not on its own prevent the fiscal calamity that is coming if Congress and the White House don’t get serious about the oncoming insolvency of Medicare if radical changes aren’t soon forthcoming, according to Robert Moffit of the Heritage Foundation.

Posted at 1:37 pm by Mark Tapscott

COME SEE THE VIOLENCE INHERENT IN THE LEFTISM:

“The trial exposed a killer. The reaction exposed an entire grievance industry that treats intimidation as a legitimate continuation of the fight once the jury has spoken.”

The fight, apparently, is over whether members of one group may murder with impunity.

Posted at 1:32 pm by Stephen Green

JOHN PODHORETZ REVIEWS DISCLOSURE DAY: 

[W]hat Disclosure Day really evokes is [Spielberg’s] pre-movie television juvenilia—by which I mean his earliest professional work, as a director of series episodes and made-for-TV movies. If you’re not in your 60s, you don’t really know about the Movie of the Week. This was a staple of the American pop-culture junk diet in the 1970s. ABC aired one, or two, movies-of-the-week every week for years. They were the genius brainchild of the visionary Barry Diller, who figured out his network could make original fare for $450,000 a pop rather than paying Universal $600,000. There were comedies, mysteries, ghost stories, sensitive dramas. They ran in a 90-minute time slot, and since they needed to accommodate commercials, they had to be 72 minutes long. They were made quick and dirty, starring series actors on their summer breaks or has-beens between gigs. No one expected them to be good, and they mostly weren’t, but neither was most TV at the time.

Spielberg made four. One was a segment of an anthology called Night Gallery, in which the 22-year-old Spielberg directed the 65-year-old Joan Crawford, playing a mean blind woman who has her sight restored for a day, only to discover there’s a blackout. Another was a Rosemary’s Baby knockoff called Something Evil with the very, very nervous actress Sandy Dennis. Savage was about a reporter who gets dirt on a Supreme Court nominee. But it was the 90-minute car-vs.-truck chase he directed called Duel, universally considered the best MOW ever made, that opened the doors of the cinema wide for him.

Spielberg was the only major director to rise out of the Movie of the Week factory. So there’s something kind of touching about Disclosure Day’s evocation of the junk he had to helm to get his career going. I’m sure that’s not what he intended to do here, since the movie derives from an original idea of his (though the screenplay is by someone else) and is therefore theoretically some kind of passion project. But it’s just too silly to take seriously.

The Critical Drinker wasn’t impressed, either: “Disclosure Day bills itself as a movie of big ideas, but ultimately it feels small both intellectually and creatively. And worst of all, it’s a movie that feels weirdly dated and irrelevant now despite a few clunky references to AI and current-day conflict zones.”

UPDATE: Poor word of mouth isn’t helping the film at the box office:

Spielberg’s recent mutterings that “his alien movie will leave Christians questioning their faith in God” didn’t help its chances at the domestic box office, either.

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

ANALYSIS: TRUE.

Posted at 1:01 pm by Stephen Green

THE PURPOSE OF A SYSTEM IS WHAT IT DOES: California hit by another huge fraud bombshell as thousands of claims for $4 BILLION in taxpayer-funded compensation meant for sex crime victims are FAKE, investigator says.

Los Angeles County had agreed in April last year to pay over $4 billion to settle more than 11,000 claims of sexual abuse at county-run juvenile halls, foster homes and a notorious children’s shelter.

The claims, many of which stretch back decades, came after the Golden State changed its statute of limitations to give victims who were sexually abused as minors a new window to sue.

But District Attorney Nathan Hochman claimed in a court filing on Wednesday that he believes a whopping four out of five claims for which the county is paying the largest sex abuse settlement in American history are fake, the Los Angeles Times reported.

There was even evidence that some recruiters had paid people to file bogus claims.

More:

The District Attorney’s Office has been probing the claims since November, following reports that some plaintiffs fabricated stories of sexual abuse – and sometimes were never even in custody at the facilities.

An LA Times investigation in October found nine people who claimed they were paid small amounts of cash by recruiters to sue the county, claiming they were sexually abused in juvenile halls.

They described how a network of individuals approached them on the street and incentivized them to fabricate stories of sexual abuse within the juvenile justice system in exchange for cash payments ranging from $50 to $200.

Does Sacramento do anything anymore that isn’t meant to defraud taxpayers?

Posted at 12:46 pm by Stephen Green

FREDDY FROM GERMANY IMMANENTIZES THE ESCHATON: A German soccer fan has been live-tweeting his reaction to visiting the USA and it’s some of the best stuff on the internet right now. “This German madlad is currently on his way to New Orleans for the next part of his adventure. This guy wanted the full American experience. I gotta say, I couldn’t have planned a better trip myself.”

“Cynical Publius” adds, “Lots of Europeans visit the USA as tourists. They visit New York City, or Washington DC, or Hollywood, or Las Vegas, and if they visit natural beauty too, they go to really crowded places like the Grand Canyon or Yellowstone…Freddy is not seeing fentanyl and decline. He is seeing the real, hopeful, patriotic, kind America that European tourists rarely traverse. And he loves it. That’s why Freddy is a phenomenon.”

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll