August 28, 2026

LOTS OF SUSPICIOUS ACTIVITY ON THE INTERNET. IT’S BEEN THAT WAY FOR A COUPLE OF DECADES.

Posted at 12:09 pm by Glenn Reynolds

PASS THIS BILL: America Strikes Back Against Foreign Censors With the Rulli GRANITE Act, HR 10174.

The GRANITE Act is a bill to stop foreign governments from censoring Americans on the Internet.

Per reporting in the Times, a federal GRANITE Act, the “Guaranteeing Rights Against Novel International Tyranny and Extortion Act,” was introduced in the House of Representatives by Congressman Michael Rulli of Ohio.

Representative Rulli’s GRANITE Act is the first federal foreign censorship shield bill in American history.

The bill text is available in full at congress.gov.

A GRANITE Act amends U.S. law to make foreign censorship threats against Americans toothless. The threat alone, even a threat that would be very difficult to enforce, is enough to chill speech and restrict the American marketplace of ideas.

Today, foreign governments threaten Americans for their online speech on a daily basis. Those threats must stop.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 11:44 am by Stephen Green

IN THE ’80S, WE CALLED IT “BURDEN SHARING” WITH EUROPE:

Posted at 11:28 am by Stephen Green

OH MY: U.S. In Talks To Take Direct Ownership Of Venezuelan Oil Fields. “The Trump administration is reportedly in active discussions with Venezuela’s interim government to acquire a direct U.S. ownership stake in key Venezuelan oil fields. According to senior U.S. officials cited by Axios, the talks involve equity stakes in a select group of high-yield fields containing approximately 90 billion barrels of proven crude—a transaction that would significantly alter Washington’s foreign energy policy framework and expand U.S.-controlled global reserves.”

Posted at 10:42 am by Stephen Green

DISPATCHES FROM LAKE AMERICA:

As Bill Maher told NPR’s Steve Inskeep: ‘Genius’ Trump Is Making Them Look Foolish.

Speaking with NPR’s Steve Inskeep on Wednesday’s (July 15) episode of the Newsmakers podcast, Maher noted how news organizations such as NPR were falling for Trump’s ploy to create “distractions” for the media to report on and discuss rather than the bigger issues.

Maher labeled the president’s proposed 250-foot-tall arch in Washington, D.C., as “meaningless.” He told Inskeep, “These are the things I don’t care about. This is his genius getting you to care about…”

Inskeep interrupted to ask, “I shouldn’t care about that arch or whatever?”

“F*** no,” Maher responded. “Absolutely not. Not the arch, not the pool, not the ballroom. This is all meaningless stuff. Steve Bannon famously said, ‘The way we win is we flood the zone with s***,’ and you’re eating the s***. You don’t have to.”

But they will, every time.

Posted at 10:35 am by Ed Driscoll

GREAT MOMENTS IN MULTICULTURALISM: The Scandal of a Slave Market in Libya.

Posted at 10:22 am by Ed Driscoll

ROBERT SPENCER: Trump Says He’d ‘Absolutely’ Ban Sharia. “President Donald Trump jumped into the ongoing furor over Sharia on Thursday, telling Glenn Beck: ‘Number one on Sharia law, I would absolutely say that not — this country, there’s no Sharia law.’ This comes amid ongoing leftist efforts to portray Sharia as completely benign religious law that patriots only oppose because they’re racists, bigots, and ‘Islamophobes.’ Once again, however, the leftists are wrong and Trump is right.”

Posted at 10:11 am by Stephen Green

JEFFREY CARTER: The Slow Motion Trainwreck Everyone Paying Attention Saw Coming: Brightline Is In the Red. ““The Brightline case is a cautionary tale about the risks of investing in large-scale infrastructure projects. Even with strong political backing and a growing Florida economy, the economics of passenger rail are unforgiving. For investors, the key takeaway is that bond insurance does not guarantee full recovery; it simply shifts the priority of claims.”

Everybody likes the idea of taking the train, but not enough people want to shell out money to do so.

Posted at 9:57 am by Glenn Reynolds

SAMUEL GREGG: Scotland’s Intellectual Triumph.

The 250th anniversary of The Wealth of Nations has brought a burst of renewed attention to the Scottish Enlightenment. Discussions have ranged widely, from Adam Smith’s conception of aesthetics to how the thought of his teacher, the “never-to-be-forgotten” Francis Hutcheson, shaped the American Revolution.

But amidst these discussions, one important question has received little consideration. Why did such a remarkable group of thinkers appear in one of eighteenth-century Europe’s most physically isolated, sparsely populated, and poorest nations?

On the face of it, the Scottish Enlightenment was a highly unlikely phenomenon. In 1603, Scotland lost a major stimulus for cultural development in early modern Europe when the Scottish king and court relocated to London following James VI’s succession to the throne of England. Many Scottish artists, musicians, and writers subsequently moved south to chase the type of royal patronage that stimulated intellectual life. The debilitating effects of this were accentuated 104 years later when the Scottish Parliament voted to dissolve itself and incorporate Scotland into what was always going to be an English-dominated Kingdom and Parliament of Great Britain. After 1707, some Scots called themselves “North Britons.” No one in England thought to label himself a “South Briton.”

This background does not suggest a self-confident and powerful nation, let alone one on the brink of an intellectual revolution in fields as wide-ranging as economics, medicine, and philosophy.

Yet that’s exactly what happened. This is a lovely essay, and well worth your time.

Posted at 9:40 am by Stephen Green

SARAH HOYT’S SHOCKED FACE WAS GENERATED BY BOTS:

Posted at 9:24 am by Stephen Green

BUREAUCRATS FIND LOOPHOLE IN TRUMP’S DEI BAN: They always do. This one concerns the federal workers’ Thrift Savings Plan, part of their retirement benefit program.

Posted at 9:00 am by Mark Tapscott

HISTORY:

Posted at 8:49 am by Glenn Reynolds

THE NEW SPACE RACE: The world’s busiest spaceport is about to get a lot quieter, at least for now.

A Falcon 9 launch early Tuesday was the last planned Starlink mission from Cape Canaveral until SpaceX begins flying Starship missions from Florida, according to Kiko Dontchev, the company’s vice president of launch. For at least the rest of the year, and maybe longer, this means the launch rate at the Florida spaceport will drop from eight or nine per month to perhaps two per month.

It wasn’t long ago when two launches per month was the norm, an indication of just how quickly SpaceX’s launch cadence has grown. Cape Canaveral and Kennedy Space Center sit on adjoining property and share the same range on Florida’s east coast, so it is worth considering them a single spaceport. The last time the Florida spaceport did not lead the world in space launches was in 2015.

“From here on, Starlink missions out of Florida will fly on Starship,” Dontchev wrote on X. “The West Coast team will continue regularly launching Starlink from Vandenberg.”

Yep, that’ll be louder — but everybody knows the real action will be in Louisiana, starting in 2029 or so.

Posted at 8:38 am by Stephen Green

IT’S A GOOD START, BUT THERE’S A LONG WAY TO GO:

And on the flip side:

Last month, Christopher Caldwell painted Trump as something like Blofeld leading an army of SPECTRE operatives in a Free Press article titled: Inside Donald Trump’s Ruthless Return.

Nuance has lately been in short supply. The president has suffered a humiliating defeat in a Middle Eastern war he launched against the wiser counsel of most of his advisers. The middle class is discontented, and the clamor for economic redistribution is louder than it has been since the 1930s. Many of Trump’s detractors claim to have told us so. Elect a barbarian and you’ll get a barbarian. Simple as that. W

But this is wrong. The more closely one observed Trump’s first term, the more surprised one would have been by his second. Trump Phase I was a joke. The 2020 press conference that his team called at “the Four Seasons” in Philadelphia—thinking they were booking a five-star hotel and winding up instead at a landscaping company next to a pornography emporium—is the perfect symbol of it. Trump was incurious. He knew as little about the workings of Washington on the day he left office as he did on the day he arrived. No one around him ever figured out how to recruit even a handful of people who could master the basics of the executive branch. A lot of what he did worked—there was bold diplomacy in the Middle East, an outstanding economy for lower earners until Covid came, and thereafter an impressive emergency program to develop a vaccine. But even the triumphs were shambolic. In the end Trump, like Gatsby and Père Goriot, left town abandoned by everyone. As Haberman and Swan point out, “no elected Republican of any stature” was present at Joint Base Andrews to see him off.

If Trump I was an error, Trump II is a terror. The hapless, almost slapstick first Trump administration, more embarrassing than threatening, was replaced after the four-year Biden interregnum by the most skilled and ruthless team of political operatives since the first term of Franklin Roosevelt.

To be fair, both Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. and Donald J. Trump assure me that FDR was one of the “Great” Presidents (if not the “Greatest”):

 

Posted at 8:22 am by Ed Driscoll