October 12, 2026

ASKING (AND ANSWERING) THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Did the Soviet Union really fire a cannon from a space station? “At the time, Soviet officials were concerned that the United States was already developing spacecraft that could approach, investigate, and either capture or disable Moscow’s sensitive satellites. The natural response to such concerns was to develop defense systems capable of neutralizing such threats — and the result became legendary in some circles as one of the strangest weapons of the Space Race. But was this Soviet ‘space cannon’ ever successfully fired in orbit?”

Posted at 5:35 pm by Stephen Green

I MEAN, WHEN YOU’RE A PROGRESSIVE DEM AND YOU CATCH THE EYE OF BIDEN’S DOJ…:

Posted at 5:09 pm by Stephen Green

SCENES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Publisher removes 200 papers University of Chicago statistician wrote in under 1 year.

Scholars are raising questions about AI usage and academic quality after University of Chicago statistician Nicholas Polson wrote more than 200 academic papers this year using AI.

“The question needs to be: do these add anything of value and should we rely on them or not?” Ivan Oransky told The College Fix in a recent interview. Oransky is a co-founder of Retraction Watch, a website that tracks academic retractions, and a New York University journalism professor.

A tenured professor, Polson’s papers primarily focus on advanced math and statistics such as statistical parameterization and financial markets. Some of his research highlighted on the University of Chicago’s website includes measuring the “energy cost” of using AI and analyzing the odds of cheating.

Recently, however, concerns about the large number of articles Polson was producing prompted SSRN, a pre-print server for academic papers, to retract 253 papers that he wrote or co-wrote within the past year, The Washington Post reported.

In comparison, he wrote 10 published papers in 2018, 14 in 2017, and 12 in 2016, according to the “Research” page on his website.

When asked why it removed his papers, SSRN told the Post, “The most significant issue was the unusual submission activity.”

Heh, yes.

Posted at 4:50 pm by Stephen Green

THE GOOD NEWS, MR. POTENTIAL ASYLUM-SEEKER, IS THAT THE GAZA ARABS MIGHT NOT HAVE ANY BUILDINGS LEFT TALL ENOUGH TO BOTHER THROWING YOU OFF OF…:

…the bad news is they’ll find a way, regardless.

Posted at 4:34 pm by Stephen Green

ROGER SIMON: Ilhan Omar Investigated in Time for… My Book?

No, I have not been conspiring with Tom Homan.

That Homeland Security agents raided Ilhan Omar’s DC apartment at 6 AM this morning, hours after Bob Goldberg of The Zionist Times published his glowing review of my novel EMET (thank you, Bob), which contained the following parody of Omar being shipped out, is entirely coincidental:

“Bilan Ali, a Minneapolis congresswoman Golub [the novel’s rabbi protagonist] regards as anti-American and extraordinarily ungrateful to the country that took her in, is packed into a foam-lined box with energy bars and lemon Gatorade. The Golem ships her to Mogadishu on Emirates, because it is the safest and most luxurious carrier. She arrives healthy, in a beekeeper’s suit labeled ‘RETURNED TO SENDER,’ and flies home first class within hours.”

20 minutes into the future?

UPDATE: All This and World War Eleven:

Posted at 4:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

VICTORIA TAFT: Portland Antifa Records Ambush of ICE Officer in Biggest Self-Own Since the Last Time She Did It. “What a day of historic immigration firsts: Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-N.Y.) releases 15,000 criminal illegal aliens into your neighborhood gen pop again after refusing to enforce Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainers, and suspected illegal alien Rep. Ilhan Omar’s (D-Minn.) Washington, D.C. home is raided by the feds to track down the documents her family used to allegedly fraudulently get into the country. But something that’s not a first, and should be a last, are the crimes committed by an Oregon woman who has organized ambushes of ICE agents before and who has just done it again.”

Posted at 4:19 pm by Stephen Green

ED MORRISSEY: Too Weird to NOT Check First: Did Talarico Have a Mental Health Crisis?

Held: Things that appear too good to be true often are. Also held: Better to wait for confirmation before jumping to a conclusion.

At any rate, it seems that Talarico didn’t get checked into that Ohio psych ward for the last two weeks. It still doesn’t answer the question of where Talarico actually was during that two-week period. The explanation offered – a two-week bout of the flu that had him down so bad he couldn’t even do a Zoom call – is absolutely absurd, especially in the context of a general election campaign. If you or I took two weeks off without any contact with our employer and claimed we were too sick to call, we’d be forced to bring a doctor’s note to save our jobs.

It’s not a HIPAA violation to demand accountability from politicians who disappear in the middle of a job. Better to get that now than to wait until Talarico disappears for months while supposedly representing Texas.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Steve Hayward quips, “don’t be fooled about the news of James Talarico checking in to a mental hospital just weeks before the election. Call me a cynic, but in Texas this is clearly a gambit to capture the John Fetterman sympathy vote. Don’t get your hopes up that Talarico is trying to signal that, like Fetterman, a mental health crisis will cause him to move to the right so that Republicans would like him!”

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

HEH:

Still, Hasan should be hung like a common criminal, and not shot like a soldier.

Posted at 4:03 pm by Stephen Green

HMM: The world’s hottest AI stock market has gone cold.

South Korea’s stock market has gone from the world’s hottest to its coldest in just a few months.

The Kospi, the world’s best-performing major stock benchmark in the first half of 2026, has since fallen about 24%, making it the worst-performing major market in the second half. It’s still more than 50% higher this year.

The AI trade isn’t losing its appeal. But investors are increasingly looking beyond South Korea’s memory-chip giants to companies with broader exposure to the AI hardware boom.

Every time a headline seems to say that, yes, there’s a bubble and it’s finally deflating, it turns out just to be another bump in the road.

Posted at 3:48 pm by Stephen Green

THE ENEMY WITHIN:

“Despite the discovery, the military continued using the cars due to a lack of alternatives.”

Europe, SMH.

Posted at 3:32 pm by Stephen Green

HOWARD KURTZ: The blue wave looks real until you look a little closer.

It’s like watching some sci-fi game with players competing on 470 different fields. Which is your basic definition of crazytown. No human being, without mainlining AI into his or her arm, could possibly track so many contests, so we bounce from one race to the next, with buzzers and bells, like a pinball machine.

Look! Charlie Cook is moving 18 House races in the Democrats’ favor! This is o-vah! The blue wave is getting stronger. Put a cork in this one, it’s done!

But wait a minute. The Republicans have a huge cash advantage. Big-time Democratic donors, for whatever reason, are sitting on their checkbooks. Don’t they realize the stakes? Are they all blinded by the sun on their private islands?

No cockiness, please.

Posted at 2:46 pm by Stephen Green

WELL, WHEN YOU PUT IT LIKE THAT…:

Posted at 2:29 pm by Stephen Green