September 18, 2026

I THOUGHT IT WAS BASED ON GREED AND ENVY: California’s Proposed ‘Billionaire Tax’ Is Based on Bad Research.

A survey conducted September 4–10 by the Public Policy Institute of California found 52 percent support for Proposition 40, which would impose a (supposedly) one-time 5 percent tax on the wealth of people with assets worth over $1 billion. Interestingly, 51 percent of respondents also support Proposition 41, which requires audits for new taxes and bars the way the wealth tax measure would allocate collected revenue, and 54 percent favor Proposition 42, which prohibits taxes on financial assets. Under California law, “if provisions of two or more measures approved at the same election conflict, those of the measure receiving the highest affirmative vote prevail.”

Those conflicting measures could save Californians from themselves, since the proposed wealth tax is based on bad assumptions and would do enormous damage to the state’s economy. Unfortunately, much self-inflicted harm is already locked in. In March, a Hoover Institution study found that wealthy individuals leaving the state in fear of Proposition 40’s passage had already removed “$536 billion, or nearly 30 percent of aggregate billionaire wealth, from the tax base.”

And the flawed research? It came from a couple of French-born Berkeley professors who seem to specialize in justification for taxing the bejeezus out of stuff.

Posted at 12:46 pm by Stephen Green

NOT MUCH CHANGED EXCEPT FOR THE TITLES:

“Deputy Director-General for the Harmonization of Harmonizing Procedures” doesn’t have quite the romance of “Burgrave of Rosenfels” or whatever, but it will do.

Posted at 12:28 pm by Stephen Green

JONATHAN TURLEY: Gandhi is Out, Mangione is In: Political Violence is in Vogue in America.

For years, politicians, pundits and professors have fueled political rage by claiming that those with opposing views are seeking to end democracy, bring back the Confederacy or turn citizens into slaves of the oligarchs. Such apocalyptic claims give a sense of license to people to free themselves from all social and moral constraints, allowing them to hate completely and unreservedly.

The saddest aspect of this trend is what it says about our hold on not just our civility but our humanity. The irony is that the arc of the moral universe, famously described by Martin Luther King Jr., is being bent back in the name of perverted notions of equity and justice. By demonizing others like corporate executives, many on the left are now free to enjoy gratuitous violence, even the killing of a new mother in Times Square.

In “Rage and the Republic,” I write about the fear of the founders that democracies historically devolved into what Benjamin Rush called “mobocracies.” John Adams put that history in its starkest terms: “there never was a democracy yet, that did not commit suicide.”

The founders watched as the French Revolution, occurring shortly after our own, unleashed a blood-soaked “Terror” as a population engaged in a spasm of violence against aristocrats, clergy and then themselves.

Maximilien Robespierre would legitimize the slaughter by telling citizens that violence was noble and mercy was weakness. He explained that “Terror is only justice: prompt, severe and inflexible; it is then an emanation of virtue.”

Past movements from the French Revolution to the Cultural Revolution to recent genocidal campaigns in Europe and Africa show that a dark element rests deep within us that can be released when we are sufficiently angry or afraid.

In my book, I call it the “Saturn Gene.” During the French Revolution, journalist Jacques Mallet du Pan observed that “like Saturn, the Revolution devours its children.” It is an inexorable pattern where movements release long-suppressed rage only to destroy those who led the mob to collective acts of murder and mayhem.

To be fair, violence wasn’t that far removed from anti-Vietnam War era late ‘60s and early ‘70s, though it did frequently take a very different form: The Bombings of America That We Forgot.

It may be hard to recall now, but there was a time when most Americans were decidedly more blasé about bombing attacks. This was during the 1970s, when protest bombings in America were commonplace, especially in hard-hit cities like New York, Chicago and San Francisco. Nearly a dozen radical underground groups, dimly remembered outfits such as the Weather Underground, the New World Liberation Front and the Symbionese Liberation Army, set off hundreds of bombs during that tumultuous decade—so many, in fact, that many people all but accepted them as a part of daily life. As one woman sniffed to a New York Post reporter after an attack by a Puerto Rican independence group in 1977: “Oh, another bombing? Who is it this time?’”

The underground groups of the 1970s were a kind of grungy, bell-bottomed coda to the protests of the 1960s; their members were mostly onetime student leftists who refused to give up the utopian dreams of 1968. While little remembered today, there was a time during the early 1970s when the U.S. government—the Nixon Administration—considered these groups a genuine threat to national security. Alarmed by a series of Weatherman attacks, Nixon told J. Edgar Hoover during a June 1970 Oval Office meeting that “revolutionary terror” represented the single greatest threat to American society. Hoover promised to do what he could, which wasn’t much.

As paranoid as Nixon could be, it was hard to argue with his line of thinking: Bombing attacks were growing by the day. They had begun as crude, simple things, mostly Molotov cocktails college radicals hurled toward ROTC buildings during the late 1960s. The first actual bombing campaign, the work of a group of New York City radicals led by a militant named Sam Melville, featured attacks on a dozen buildings around Manhattan between August and November 1969, when Melville and most of his pals were arrested.

Weather’s attacks began three months later, and by 1971 protest bombings had spread across the country. In a single eighteen-month period during 1971 and 1972 the FBI counted an amazing 2,500 bombings on American soil, almost five a day. Because they were typically detonated late at night, few caused serious injury, leading to a kind of grudging public acceptance. The deadliest underground attack of the decade, in fact, killed all of four people, in the January 1975 bombing of a Wall Street restaurant. News accounts rarely carried any expression or indication of public outrage.

The leaders of those crazy Weathermen. Whatever happened to them?

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll

IS THERE ANYTHING ELON CAN’T DO? Satellites Have Made This Costly Broadband Subsidy Obsolete.

In a recent FCC filing, SpaceX calls for the Commission to “wind down outdated and redundant High Cost programs that now clearly provide diminished – or even negative – returns and redirect these resources to an enhanced affordability program that will deliver clear and impactful benefits to consumers.”

The comments to the FCC pointed out the Commission’s own data show that 97 percent of Americans have access to two or more broadband providers. The small number of U.S. residents on the wrong side of the divide can be serviced better by low-earth orbit (LEO) satellite providers, the letter argues.

“The architecture of next-generation satellite systems is optimally suited to provide high-capacity, low-latency broadband services that are durable, cost-efficient, and economically self-sustaining – even in areas that are the most challenging and expensive to serve for terrestrial networks.”

The High-Cost Fund is the most expensive of the four components of the Universal Service Fund (USF), costing taxpayers about $4.5 billion annually, which represents more than half of the USF’s $8 billion to $8.5 billion annual budget.

The one thing Elon probably can’t do is get Congress to end this subsidy.

Posted at 11:44 am by Stephen Green

ANALYSIS: TRUE.

Posted at 11:28 am by Stephen Green

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Trump Pulls Rank on DOJ in Major Guns Rights Fight. “Even as multiple Justice Department lawyers wanted to challenge the ruling, reports surfaced Thursday that President Trump had assured several Republican members of Congress he would not allow the DOJ to appeal Judge Hendrix’s ruling.”

Posted at 11:13 am by Stephen Green

BOMB CANADA, THE CASE FOR WAR:

As Latin America turns more conservative (and friendly), whoever imagined that Canada would become China’s Third World anti-American vassal?

Posted at 10:57 am by Stephen Green

THE NEW SPACE RACE: China conducts four launches inside 48 hours as launch options diversify. “China carried out four launches in less than 48 hours beginning Tuesday, with missions originating from the Jiuquan and Hainan spaceports as well as the East China Sea. SpaceNews reports the rapid series highlights the ‘diversification of China’s launch activities,’ with four different rocket families flying from separate facilities as the country’s megaconstellation projects drive increased launch activity.”

Posted at 10:42 am by Stephen Green

THE DEATH OF GENERAL EDUCATION. When I was in college I thought the idea of a “core curriculum” or general education was silly because everyone already knew the basics. But with K-12 the disaster it is, colleges probably need to buckle down more and skip the “Video Game Storytelling” and “Indigenous Sci Fi, Horror, Fantasy, and Futurisms” and just make students read The Iliad or something.

Posted at 10:24 am by Robert Shibley

FINGERS CROSSED: Trump Fires Opening Salvo in Renewed Battle to Exclude Illegal Aliens from the Census. “If implemented, millions of illegal aliens would no longer distort the political map. House seats and Electoral College votes would be divvied up based on population numbers reflecting the ‘We the People’ our system exists to represent. The rule would neutralize foreign influence; eliminate the undue political power sanctuary jurisdictions have accrued through decades of mass illegal immigration; and restore the “one man, one vote” principle by ending the dilution of Americans’ voting power that has occurred through counting non-citizens in the population figures used to draw up districts.”

Posted at 9:40 am by Stephen Green

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Just In Time for Halloween — Somewhat Lifelike Mitch McConnell. “It is difficult and painful to watch those we love experience rapid, age-related decline. When it comes to our loved ones, we do whatever we can for their quality of life. That rarely involves making them go to work. It never involves parading them in front of television cameras and subjecting them to intense media scrutiny.”

Posted at 9:09 am by Stephen Green