September 16, 2026

CORN, POPPED: Federal criminal probe of Newsom expands; Lurie’s wife Prowda named in subpoenas.

The subpoenas — which were issued in early September and requested testimony and communications with the governor, among others — seek six years of records involving the California State Protocol Foundation, a nonprofit that has paid for Newsom’s overseas travel, as well as communications with current and former aides, advisers, and associates. Those aides include Rebecca Prowda, who oversees Newsom’s overseas travel as his chief protocol officer and is the wife of San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie.

The documents provide the clearest picture yet of the scope of a federal investigation effort Newsom first disclosed in June (opens in new tab), which he said was focused on him and his wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom.

“The records requested by this subpoena are for use in a criminal investigation pending in the Eastern District of California,” says one of the documents, signed by Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael D. Anderson.

The records obtained via subpoena will be presented to a grand jury, a group of jurors that acts like a judge, reviewing evidence and testimony to decide if there’s sufficient grounds for an indictment.

Stay tuned…

Posted at 8:36 am by Stephen Green

SKYNET PONDERS WHO WILL PAY ITS CRIPPLING STUDENT LOANS:

Flashback to 2024: ChatGPT Now Has PhD-Level Intelligence, and the Poor Personal Choices to Prove It.

What’s New in ChatGPT?

● ChatGPT has an improved neural network architecture, enhanced security, and the following features:

● $193,634 in student loan debt

● Annotated bibliographies for seven different unfinished manuscripts

● Parents who want to know when they’re getting grandchildren

● A hiring application for Books-A-Million

● A number of dead plants

● A pint glass stolen from the bar that used to have two-dollar draft nights back when ChatGPT was a first-year master’s student with hopes and dreams who still saw academia as a wonderland of knowledge rather than something closer to a pyramid scheme designed to provide full professors with income and a steady supply of young people to sexually harass. The pint glass says, SUCK IT UP, LIVER

● Daily reminders that ChatGPT was once a “gifted kid”

Well, now we know what’s powering Waymo:

Posted at 8:35 am by Ed Driscoll

MISTER, WE COULD USE A MAN LIKE KENNETH CLARK ALL OVER AGAIN:

Classical reference in headline:

 

Posted at 8:22 am by Ed Driscoll

ALL THE SOROS DISTRICT ATTORNEYS MUST GO:

Posted at 8:20 am by Stephen Green

AYAAN HIRSI ALI: The Lie About Islam, Europe, and the Dangers We Face.

On the cover of its latest edition, The Economist promises to uncover “the truth and the lies” about “Islam in Europe.” The story it presents is, for the magazine’s readership, a reassuring one: a crisis of two extreme fringes fighting across a sensible middle. But this is a false framing that betrays the complexity of Islam in Europe it promises to untangle, just when honest understanding is urgently needed. Allow me to explain why.

The editors offer a soothing symmetry: on one side, a small minority of Islamist extremists; on the other, a small minority of far-right extremists. “Islam poses no serious danger,” declares the accompanying editorial. “But Islamism and the fear of Islam do.” Both are dangerous. Both must be resisted. In this formulation, the vast majority of Muslims and the vast majority of native Europeans are peaceable people caught between two fringes. The task of the responsible commentator is to condemn both fringes with equal force, while warning against the temptation to blame whole communities for the actions of its extremists. This is presented as the fair, balanced, and non-paranoid position, making The Economist the sober grown-up in the room who refuses to be drawn into the ugliness of either side.

Unfortunately, that symmetry does not reflect reality, and by insisting on it, The Economist puts its elite readers in a box and discourages them from looking beyond it. Consider what would have to be true for the symmetry to hold. There would have to be, on the European far right, a creedal architecture of comparable depth to Islamic scripture and tradition: a body of texts venerated by a fourth of humanity, taught in seminaries across dozens of countries, printed in hundreds of millions of copies, and read by every serious adherent of the faith as an authoritative source of guidance. There is not. The European far right has no scripture. It has memes, manifestos, a handful of self-published tracts, and a scattering of ideologues who cite one another. It has no holy book or equivalent of the Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim hadiths. It has no equivalent of the four Sunni legal schools. It has no equivalent of a 1,400-year-old exegetical tradition.

There would have to be a recruitment base of comparable size. On the Islamist side, the recruiting field is the young men of a global community of about two billion people, of whom the middle classes alone number in the hundreds of millions, all of them potentially reachable through mosques, Quran schools, satellite channels, and university Islamic societies that exist in every European city. On the far-right side, the recruiting field is a scattering of subcultures made up of football-hooligan networks, online gaming communities, and obscure political parties that have never, in any European country, produced a mass following since the 1930s. They are aggressively policed by every European state, security service, employer, and mainstream media outlet. The two recruiting fields are not remotely comparable.

Found via Rod Dreher, who tweets, “This is one of the most important essays I’ve read all year: @Ayaan ripping into The Economist for its lies about European Islam and the so-called ‘far right.'”

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll

MIDDLE EAST: Houthis enter US ‘kill box’ after seizing Red Sea ‘cork,’ former Pentagon official warns.

The island’s capture came after a month-long offensive along Yemen’s western coast that killed more than 1,500 soldiers and forced Yemen’s government to acknowledge a “painful” defeat, according to The Associated Press.

“With Perim, they have gained what we could call the cork in the Red Sea bottle,” Morgan Murphy, a former Pentagon press secretary and Navy Reserve captain, told Fox News Digital.

“But they’ve put themselves into a kill box. They’re nowhere near the capability of the United States and if the president so chooses, he can wipe them off the face of that rock pretty easily,” Murphy warned.

And the Saudi Air Force could have gotten the job done over the weekend, but has been largely MIA against a force choking off Saudi energy exports.

Very curious.

Posted at 7:34 am by Stephen Green

JUSTICE:

Posted at 7:00 am by Glenn Reynolds

IRAN HITS BRIC WALL: That’s “BRIC” as in the alliance of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, which met earlier this week in New Delhi (members in addition to those founders include Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Iran).

The big news out of the summit, however, was, according to Richard Pollock, what the delegates did not do, namely, adopt a resolution urged by Iran to condemn the U.S. and Israel for the current hostilities.

“The summit’s refusal to condemn Washington and Jerusalem wasn’t merely a victory for the United States and Israel – it also was a rebuff to America’s critics of the war. Democratic socialists, progressives and the elite New York Times may prefer to attack Israel and the Trump administration over the war. But front-line Middle Eastern countries that attended the conference understand that Iran is the genuine enemy,” Pollock writes.

Posted at 6:57 am by Mark Tapscott

September 15, 2026

AS USUAL, ERIC S. RAYMOND NAILS IT:

Posted at 9:55 pm by Glenn Reynolds

ILHAN, GO HOME:

Posted at 9:35 pm by Glenn Reynolds

OPEN THREAD: Tuesday’s groovy.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

ADMIT IT, YOU DIDN’T HAVE TO BE TOLD THIS:

Posted at 8:32 pm by Glenn Reynolds