August 18, 2026

WOLFGANG IS A PARODY ACCOUNT…:

…but I had to double-check to make sure.

Posted at 12:58 pm by Stephen Green

NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: NSA sat on election threat reporting over Trump ‘deep state’ label, memo shows. “In a tense March 2020 meeting just months before the presidential election, the National Security Agency’s (NSA) deputy director blocked the release of a long-delayed report on foreign targeting of U.S. elections—not because the intelligence was flawed, but because he feared it would brand the agency as part of the ‘deep state.'”

Posted at 12:43 pm by Stephen Green

NOW, WE’VE LOST THOSE COMPUTERS WITH ALL OF THE 13TH CENTURY IN THEM. NOT MUCH IN THE CENTURY, JUST DANTE AND A FEW CORRUPT POPES, BUT IT’S SO DISTRACTING AND ANNOYING! TV Station in a Fight to Retrieve Its Archive After Cloud Company Went Bust.

A local TV station is in a messy situation after the cloud company it was using to store 70 years’ worth of archival material vanished.

Gizmodo reports that Nine PBS in St. Louis had a rolling annual contract with Open Source Storage (OSS), a cloud storage provider, but when the station went to renew the deal earlier this year, OSS didn’t respond.

On the day the contract expired, Nine PBS suddenly lost access to its data without any warning. That’s when staff there realized that OSS’s website was inactive and the state of Colorado listed the company as delinquent.

The station lost access to 50 terabytes of archival materials, which included all of its footage of historical events that have taken place in St. Louis.

Note that below the article are two news articles on “Sabrent’s New Thunderbolt Dock [Which] Features a 16TB SSD and Tons of Ports.” Three of those and the PBS station would have been pretty much set with their own in-house backup.

(Classical reference in headline.)

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

THIS IS THE SAME THING DISNEY DID TO STAR WARS:

Posted at 12:22 pm by Stephen Green

GOODER AND HARDER, CALIFORNIA: California regulators approve new rules limiting what replacement tires you can buy for your car.

California regulators on Monday approved new rules that will restrict what tires you can buy when it’s time to replace them on your car.

In a unanimous vote, the California Energy Commission voted to adopt new rules that will phase out the sale of replacement tires that don’t meet certain energy efficiency standards.

“This ultimately is about protecting consumers,” said David Hochschild, the chairman of the California Energy Commission. “I see this as sheltering the public from higher costs in the long run.”

Tire manufacturers and the commission’s staff are at odds over whether this will add to the cost of living in the state. Both sides acknowledged this will no longer allow the sale of a significant portion of the tires currently sold in California.

War is peace, freedom is slavery:

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll

YES: Teens Need Sleep. Schools Can Afford to Give It to Them. “Medical experts have been clear for years: sleep cycle changes during puberty make it hard for teenagers to learn in the early morning. Later school start times have been linked to better sleep, improved mental health, stronger academic performance and even safer driving.”

Posted at 11:41 am by Stephen Green

A FLOATING TREASURE TROVE OF DATA:

Posted at 11:25 am by Stephen Green

COLEMAN HUGHES: Why the Left Needed to Believe in Jason Arday.

The Jason Arday scandal has left the academic world reeling. Found dead in his family’s apartment last Friday, Arday has been the subject of intense scrutiny over the past month. Appointed in 2023 as Cambridge University’s youngest-ever black professor, he faced extensive and credible allegations of plagiarism that exploded into public view last month. Those allegations led to public interest in the (literally) incredible details of his life. Arday claimed to have run 600 miles in six days—which would make him one of the best ultra-marathon runners on Earth. He claimed that he couldn’t speak until the age of 11 and couldn’t read until 18, but somehow managed to complete a PhD around 30. And he claimed to have raised the equivalent of several million U.S. dollars for charity.

Jason Arday was either the most interesting man in the world, or he was a liar. It turned out to be the latter.

All this has revealed many unflattering things about academia: DEI invites fraud by lowering standards, the bigotry of low expectations is alive and well, and a disturbing number of “experts”—not just Arday but all the Cambridge professors and BBC journalists who co-signed him—are compromised by ideology, cowardice, or both.

But the Arday scandal has also revealed something else: White liberals in the English-speaking world want to believe in the archetype of the up-from-nothing black intellectual who, despite huge disadvantages, goes on to achieve greatness. In fact, they want to believe in this sort of story so badly that they are willing to turn off every ounce of skepticism that they would normally bring to bear on fantastical claims.

The irony, however, is that we already have many examples of up-from-nothing black intellectuals who go on to greatness. It’s just that they usually turn out to be conservatives—or if not conservatives, then at least out-of-step with the left-wing religion of racial justice.

QED:

And conversely, Nathan Cofnas, the American expat professor who originally exposed Arday’s numerous lies is currently being demonized by a combination of those who desperately wanted to believe, and the mob they’ve ginned up for this week’s outrage of the century:

 

As Iowahawk has said:

That neatly sums up Cambridge’s transformation, which is why Arday’s tragic suicide is such a useful vehicle for the British left to deflect from the far bigger picture.

UPDATE: Backwards ran sentences until reeled the mind. Where it all ends knows God:

Posted at 10:55 am by Ed Driscoll

DECLINE IS A CHOICE: Colorado regulatory burden, affordability drives business exodus.

Furman says 98 large businesses have left Colorado since 2019, taking nearly 14,000 jobs with them. These aren’t failed companies or departures caused by mergers and acquisitions, she explains, but companies relocating operations to other states, with Texas, Florida, Utah and Tennessee among the biggest beneficiaries of the Colorado exodus.

Furman points to burdensome employment mandates, energy and environmental rules, paid family leave and permitting hurdles as examples of regulations that individually may seem manageable, but collectively impose substantial compliance costs, especially for businesses without dedicated legal or human-resources departments.

The consequences are showing up in state rankings, with Colorado falling from 11th to 25th in overall business competitiveness. Furman notes Colorado still does well in areas such as technology, workforce and quality of life, but argues those strengths are increasingly giving way to affordability and regulatory problems.

Surely, the next round of taxes and regulations out of Denver will make it all better.

Posted at 10:39 am by Stephen Green

TWENTY MINUTES INTO THE FUTURE:

Posted at 10:35 am by Ed Driscoll

SQUIRREL!

Related:

Democrats covered for Swalwell until he stopped being useful. But what was he useful for?

Posted at 10:23 am by Stephen Green

THIS IS WHAT A REAL GENOCIDE LOOKS LIKE:

Posted at 10:23 am by Ed Driscoll

THE LINE BETWEEN NEWS AND SATIRE BARELY EXISTS:

Posted at 9:52 am by Stephen Green

CHANGE (IT BACK): Tech companies are fighting the AI “slop” they helped create.

It appears in everything from fake biographies and questionable recipes to music, videos, social media posts and online reviews.

In response, technology companies are beginning to remove spam and low-quality content, label AI-generated material, and give users more control over how much AI content they see. Companies such as LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok and Substack have introduced different methods for identifying, removing or limiting this material.

The problem is complicated because many of the same companies trying to control AI slop also created or promoted the tools that make it possible. AI-generated content can increase engagement, but excessive amounts of low-quality material can eventually become a liability because users have difficulty finding the content they want.

But the real problem might be that as AI-generated slop increasingly pollutes the internet, newer models risk being trained on the slop generated by older models — a phenomenon known as Model Collapse. It’s in Big Tech’s interest to stop that from happening.

Posted at 9:37 am by Stephen Green

SANE ENOUGH TO FLEE, SANE ENOUGH TO STAND TRIAL:

Sure, you’ll have to wait for the next crime — but is there any doubt if he comes back there will be a next crime?

Posted at 9:21 am by Stephen Green