July 24, 2026

GOOGLE IS SO BAD (AND BING, TOO) THAT I ACTUALLY PAY FOR KAGI SEARCH:

“Don’t be evil” morphed into “Be lame” so slowly, most users never even noticed.

Posted at 1:34 pm by Stephen Green

JOHN NOLTE: Elon Musk’s AI ‘Odyssey’ Could Launch a Revolution that Sinks Hollywood.

Margaret Mitchell wrote and published exactly one novel in her life, a little Pulitzer winner called Gone with the Wind. Sure, prior to that, she’d written short stories and worked as a reporter in Georgia. Still, she basically came out of nowhere with a story that has enthralled hundreds of millions for 90 years.

There are Margaret Mitchells out there today who don’t even know they are Margaret Mitchells, and would never know were it not for the power of AI. No longer will a budding storyteller give up before he begins because he doesn’t know where to begin to convince a producer to finance his project. No more will a budding storyteller have to convince a left-wing studio to distribute his project. All the bottlenecks that keep the gatekeepers guarding the gate will be swept away by AI and YouTube.

Look at how giving Normal People access to national distribution (via the internet) disrupted and disgraced the national media.

Look at how the music and publishing industries have changed for the same reasons.

True movie fans should be ecstatic over competing versions of The Odyssey. Competition breeds greatness and Hollywood has become a groupthink cult with no cultural or political competition. For that reason alone, people should be encouraging Musk, not laughing at him.

I’m happy to see competing versions of The Odyssey, but only if the right director is attached. Who better to direct the adaptation of a 2700 year old story than the 2000 Year Old Man?

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

BILL WALTON: The Crusades Test “We were talking about why the West no longer defends its own culture, and whether the fading of Christian conviction explains it. And I said, half testing him, half testing myself: why don’t we think of ourselves as the Christians who fought the Crusades? Christians defended Western Europe for centuries. Successfully. Then one day we decided to hold the door open.”

Posted at 1:17 pm by Stephen Green

YOU ALWAYS NEED MORE DURING WAR THAN YOU PLANNED FOR DURING PEACE: Unlimited AI tokens aren’t unlimited after all as US Army burns through supply. “The Army uses Ask Sage, a multimodal generative AI platform where users can run different large language models (LLMs), including Alphabet’s Gemini, Meta’s Llama, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. ‘Apparently the whole Army burned through the whole year of tokens for just one service,’ says an Army employee who spoke to WIRED anonymously because they were not authorized to speak to the press.”

Posted at 12:46 pm by Stephen Green

I’M AFRAID ROB IS CORRECT:

Posted at 12:32 pm by Stephen Green

THIS IS CNN: Dana Bash’s Brad Lander Blunder: How CNN Let Facts Slip Through the Newsroom.

Lander’s accusations were part of a wider pattern of misinformation in the broadcast. In many cases, Bash failed to challenge his misinformation and even offered her own glaring historical revisionism regarding the Holocaust.

When asking Lander about attacks he has faced from various groups, Bash noted that some in the Jewish community had labeled him a “kapo,” a term from the Holocaust era used to describe Jews who betray their fellow Jews. Astonishingly, Bash defined kapos as “Jews who were helping keep the peace, so to speak, in the Nazi concentration camps.”

In reality, the SS deliberately designed the kapo system to incite conflict. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum notes that beating and punishing subordinate prisoners was a required duty for kapos, with many committing murders to meet SS expectations, a brutal reality Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel documented in his memoir Night.

Even the Biden administration’s envoy to combat antisemitism, Dr. Deborah Lipstadt, whom Bash quoted authoritatively during the segment, previously signed a letter alongside esteemed Holocaust scholars defining kapos as Jews forced to serve as “unwilling tools of Nazi brutality.”

As of publication, CNN has not corrected the error despite CAMERA’s communication.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

SHE’S AN OLD LADY, GIVE HER A BREAK:

Posted at 12:14 pm by Glenn Reynolds

UNSUNG HERO:

His spiritual descendant:

Posted at 12:13 pm by Glenn Reynolds

ED MORRISSEY: WSJ: No, Really, Trump’s Had It With Iran Negotiations.

Really? Really really? Color me a bit skeptical about this, but given the events of the last two weeks, perhaps more open to the concept now than I have been for months.

According to Wall Street Journal reporters Annie Linskey and Josh Dawsey, Donald Trump has finally gotten “fed up” with the IRGC’s carpet-merchant tactics at the negotiating table. He has soured on talks with the regime in Tehran entirely, their sources claim, even though Jared Kushner and Steven Witkoff want to keep pursuing diplomatic solutions to the war. Their sources claim that Trump was neither bluffing nor attempting to negotiate through the media when he told Axios’ Barak Ravid that he’s about to order a massive scale-up in kinetic action. Trump intends to communicate in the only language Ahmad Vahidi understands:

Has anyone in Trump’s inner circle planned out an endgame?

Tweet continues, “Yet while the IR merely laughs at the blows it is exciting the pity of the entire civilized world who are disgusted at the meting out of such a one sided beating, warning that the worse the thrashings the greater the reparation which must eventually be paid.”

“Of course in this case there will be no A bomb, but some as unforeseen development is needed to provide the same out.”

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll

NO MATTER HOW MUCH YOU DESPISE THE MEDIA…:

…it’s less than the media despises you.

UPDATE: Link was bad before, sorry! Should work now.

Posted at 10:57 am by Stephen Green

INCENTIVES MATTER: DHS issues $84B in fines to illegal immigrants under Trump administration.

Shortly after Trump’s return to office, the administration announced it would begin fining illegal immigrants subject to final removal orders $998 per day if they failed to voluntarily leave the United States or otherwise comply with their removal orders. Illegal immigrants are required to pay the fines before they are deported, and DHS has said it may seize assets from those who fail to pay.

The Trump administration has unveiled a series of measures designed to encourage illegal immigrants to leave the country, including DHS’ announcement that those who refuse to self-deport could face “significant financial penalty.”

DHS has argued the program costs significantly less than traditional deportation proceedings and is designed to encourage illegal immigrants to voluntarily leave the United States.

The press ripped Mitt Romney in 2012 for suggesting self-deportation.

Posted at 10:42 am by Stephen Green

YES:

Posted at 10:26 am by Stephen Green

UNEXPECTED HEADLINES: Ukraine Declares War on Wildberries (Really). “Residents of St. Petersburg woke up Friday to find their Wildberries on fire, following a series of Ukrainian drone strikes on Russia’s largest online retailer. The Associated Press sold the attacks as ‘hurting small businesses and bringing the war home,’ but there’s more to it than that.”

Posted at 10:11 am by Stephen Green