June 11, 2026

THE FREE MARKET IS ALWAYS BETTER:  The thing Anthropic’s repugnant and overbearing “safety controls” on their new model demonstrates, conclusively I think, is that if we allow one or two companies to control all AI research and development, we will also be giving those companies veto power over what thoughts we are allowed to think, what information we are allowed to know, what conversations we are allowed to have. The only solution to this is an open, fiercely competitive market where customers can freely choose to leave when a company behaves like this.

X-cancel.

Posted at 2:01 am by Sarah Hoyt

June 10, 2026

THANK YOU, GARBAGE PEOPLE OF THE LEFT, FOR SHOVELING DIRT ON BLACK LIVES MATTER’S GRAVE:

Posted at 10:13 pm by Glenn Reynolds

SOMALIS NOT GOING OUT OF THEIR WAY TO LOOK GOOD TO THE COUNTRY THAT IS LEANING TOWARD DEPORTING THEM ALL:

Posted at 9:55 pm by Glenn Reynolds

OPEN THREAD: Hump Day.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

WHICH WAY TO THE FRONT?

Read the whole thing.

Meanwhile, Ron Klain, Biden’s ex-chief of staff, has a new lie to explain away Der Oystergruppenfuhrer’s totenkapf tat, despite knowing better:

Flashback: Ron Klain and the Demise of Moderate Democrats, including this show-stopping Platner-adjacent moment during Klain’s tenure:

Posted at 9:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

PARIS IS BURNING:

Another recurring controversy in French classrooms concerns the teaching of the Holocaust. A 2020 survey of young French people between the ages of 15 and 24 by the Institut français d’opinion publique (IFOP) found that 21% of students criticize Holocaust education for excessive emphasis and question aspects of the genocide, and 13% of students outright reject it being taught because they find it offensive to their cultural or religious identity. Moreover, 70% of those surveyed agreed that teachers experience “real difficulties teaching about the Holocaust in schools located in the banlieues.” Already in 2004, the Obin report, authored by then national schools inspector Jean-Pierre Obin for the Ministry of Education, revealed growing tensions in several French schools regarding the teaching of topics such as the Holocaust, the history of religions, and evolution. These tensions included cases of student resistance, Holocaust denial, teacher self-censorship, and, in general, serious difficulties in delivering the curriculum within a framework of secular neutrality.

All these fundamental flaws in the system, which have been in place for years and which President Emmanuel Macron carries on today, are also what have allowed the existence in France of so-called no-go zones: neighborhoods where the gendarmerie either cannot or will not enter and where, in some cases, Sharia law is enforced unofficially. This failure of integration is the first dimension of the collapse of Europe’s multicultural experiment. The second is poverty and crime, since isolation cuts many immigrants off from the institutions and opportunities that could help them improve their education or find employment.

Does this explain the gratuitous violence that accompanies these celebrations? In theory, no. In practice, perhaps it does. There is a large population of French citizens of Arab and African origin who have grown up in cultural and religious bubbles where hostility toward the West is commonplace and, by extension, hostility toward France and what it represents in Europe. Among the most disadvantaged—nearly 40% of African immigrants in France live in poverty—that resentment is often compounded by frustration at having failed to achieve the aspirations that motivated migration in the first place. Life in the banlieues also exposes these communities to particular social problems such as unemployment, educational failure, drug trafficking, and the influence of radical Islamist movements.

Meanwhile in Belfast, the same authorities who cheered on 2020’s mostly peaceful but rather fiery protests in Minneapolis are breaking out the water cannons on their own citizens:

Related: After Single Night of Fiery But Mostly Peaceful Protests, Two-Tier Keir Starmer, Who Did Not Mention Henry Nowak Until the Video of His Police-Assisted Murder Was Released, Is Johnny-on-the-Spot in Condemning Riots.

UPDATE:

Posted at 8:44 pm by Ed Driscoll

VICHY FRANCE CONQUERS ENGLAND!

This black and white 1972 BBC documentary, titled “Moving to a ‘Town of the 21st Century,'” is simultaneously dreary and hilarious as hell. It’s about a young working class couple leaving their cramped flat and moving to Thamesmead, a brutalist concrete mixed-use project with both apartments and shops. You may not recognize the name of the development, but you’ve seen it: 

Thamesmead’s style of architecture was brutalism, a concrete-oriented architecture dreamed up by France’s Le Corbusier, after WWII, to cheaply build tower apartment blocks:

The use of béton brut was pioneered by modernist architects such as Auguste Perret and Le Corbusier. Le Corbusier coined the term béton brut during the construction of Unité d’Habitation in Marseille, France, built in 1952.

As Glenn noted in his New York Post column yesterday on “Trump’s Reflecting Pool glow-up:”

“Brutalism,” as a dominant architectural style, was a choice.

Gone were soaring columns, noble statuary depicting American heroes or abstract figures like Justice or Liberty, and welcoming spaces.

Instead we got modern architecture — which, as Tom Wolfe notes in his delightful book “From Bauhaus to Our House,” was quite literally designed to promote socialism.

Modern architects blamed bourgeois values for the horrors of World War II and wanted to promote socialist values instead.

They disdained “bourgeois” adornment and designed buildings to dwarf individuals, not uplift them.

As scholar James Scott points out, the French architect Le Corbusier, noted for his huge buildings amid vast, sterile plazas, dedicated his book “The Radiant City” thus: “To Authority.”

The Radiant City was published in 1933. So, which authority was Corbusier toasting a decade later?

Mr Jarcy said that in “Plans” Le Corbusier wrote in support of Nazi anti-Semitism and in “Prelude” co-wrote “hateful editorials”.

In August 1940, the architect wrote to his mother that “money, Jews (partly responsible), Freemasonry, all will feel just law”. In October that year, he added: “Hitler can crown his life with a great work: the planned layout of Europe.”

Mr Chaslin said he had unearthed “anti-Semite sketches” by Le Corbusier, and ascertained that the French architect had spent 18 months in Vichy, where the Nazis ran a French puppet government, where he kept an office.

The Le Corbusier Foundation, which works to promote the architect’s memory and works, barely touches on this side of his life, relegating his Vichy role to an “extended stay” in the town.

Just don’t mention the war. In 1995, Theodore Dalrymple wrote of the Corbusier-inspired brutalist buildings in England:

Until quite recently, I had assumed that the extreme ugliness of the city in which I live was attributable to the Luftwaffe. I imagined that the cheap and charmless high rise buildings which so disfigure the city-scape had been erected of necessity in great gaping holes left by Heinkel bombers.

* * * * * * * * *

“A great shame about the war,” I said to the store assistant, who was of an age to remember the old days. “Look at the city now.”

“The war?” she said. “The war had nothing to do with it. It was the council.”

Embrace the healing power of and, to coin a phrase.

Regarding Francois Truffaut’s 1966 adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, James Lileks once wrote:

The only convincing dystopian movie I’ve ever seen is “1984.” Other moves look dated. They dress the set with a few Futuristic Things, change the collars on the jackets, tweak some element of society so something we take for granted is forbidden and bad. Old age is bad, or food is scarce, or overpopulation ruined everything — a particularly amusing claim for “Soylent Green,” as if you could feed a teeming population with compressed rectangles of old people. Same with Fahrenheit 451 — it appeals to an adolescent’s need for unambiguous cackling illiberal villains.

Here’s what I find interesting: whenever the sci-fi movies of the 60s and 70s wanted to set something in a horrible totalitarian world, they just shot on location at a government housing project.

Observing the families in the BBC video moving into the exterior set of A Clockwork Orange brings to mind another Lileks quote: “You realize: no one in a dystopia probably thinks they’re living in a dystopia.”

At the end of the video, Geoffrey Horsfall, one of Thamesmead‘s architects, tells the BBC, “I’ve got every confidence in the future of Thamesmead and I think that it’s something that many of us will see, but certainly you younger people, you know, you will see this finished and complete and will be able to say, ‘Well, that chap I heard talking wasn’t all that wrong.’”

He was. The appropriately named Failed Architecture Website has a page titled: Ultraviolence in Representation: The Enduring Myth of the Thamesmead Estate.

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

THE EUROPEAN MIND CANNOT COMPREHEND THE WONDERS OF BUC-EE’S: The real star of Alabama’s World Cup match? Freddy from Germany and his 1 a.m. Buc-ee’s dinner.

Lee County was hit Tuesday with a deluge just before the match. But Freddy found a friend:

“I love Americans. We were about to walk an hour to the stadium in the rain to save on an Uber, and the receptionist at the hotel we were parked in front of decided to drive us there.”

Once inside Jordan-Hare, Freddy seemed surprised by a familiar sight to Alabamians. “There’s an eagle flying around the stadium,” he wrote.

Apparently, his upper deck seats were memorable. “This is the craziest stadium I’ve ever been to, and I’ve been to a lot of ones.”

With the view of the stadium as the sun set, Freddy was in awe. “This is the most ‘The European mind can’t comprehend this’ moment of my life,” he wrote. “One of my friends said, ‘Punch me five times tomorrow and I’ll still think this isn’t real.’”

As fireworks erupted following the match, he said, “What an experience.”

It was too late for Freddy to sample some lemonade at Toomer’s Corners, but he did make a tour of campus before a 1 a.m. stop at Buc-ee’s.

“DUDE LMAO THIS IS A GAS STATION,” he marveled, before heading back on the road.

Exit quote:

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

MOLOTOV–RIBBENTROP PACT SIGNED:

Bernie could use the reinforcements; his battle with “oligarchy” is an even deeper quagmire than Stalingrad:

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll