December 11, 2025

2026 PREVIEW: Don’t Expect Jasmine Crockett To Waltz To The Texas Senate Nomination. “I suspect that people outside of the state haven’t heard of Talarico, who fills the Beto O’Rourke mold as a white guy with a vaguely Hispanic name. But he’s clearly the anointed choice of Texas Democratic Party insiders, to the point that he has been out-fundraising Allred (the man who raised over $94 million in his futile attempt to oust Ted Cruz last year) by more than $1 million, which was probably a contributing factor in Allred dropping out.”

Posted at 2:49 pm by Stephen Green

NEW CRITERION: Other people’s money.

As we await Mamdani’s socialist dégringolade, it is worth keeping in mind two points from his victory speech. One was the grateful praise he lavished upon “Yemeni bodega owners and Mexican abuelas. Senegalese taxi drivers and Uzbek nurses. Trinidadian line cooks and Ethiopian aunties.” Note the group he omitted: Americans; indeed, no form of the word “American” occurs in his speech.

The second point to bear in mind from Mamdani’s speech concerns coercion. Frantz Fanon taught that “decolonization” always requires violence to succeed. Mamdani’s frequent deployment of the word “mandate” in his speech, despite receiving votes from only a million New Yorkers (in a city of 8.5 million), should give us pause. He had, he said, been given “A mandate for change. A mandate for a new kind of politics. A mandate for a city we can afford. And a mandate for a government that delivers exactly that.” The word “mandate,” we note, comes from the Latin verb mandare: to order, command. Who can doubt Mamdani’s implicit understanding of that etymology, given his devotion to Fanon?

When you strip away whatever emollient rhetorical packaging in which it is delivered, socialism rests on two basic demands: the abolition of private property and the equalization of wealth. The more aggressively those demands are pushed, the more severe will be the imposition of state control by those working the levers of power. We write a few days after Mamdani’s victory at the polls. Already the cultivated nice-guy rictus of his campaign countenance is disintegrating, replaced by something harsher and more grasping.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 2:33 pm by Stephen Green

BREAKING: Senate Rejects Extending Obamacare Subsidies.

So they’re saying that the Affordable Care Act didn’t actually do anything to make health care more affordable, but just threw other people’s money at the problem?

Posted at 1:57 pm by Stephen Green

UGH: Open AI, Microsoft face lawsuit over ChatGPT’s alleged role in Connecticut murder-suicide.

Police said Stein-Erik Soelberg, 56, a former tech industry worker, fatally beat and strangled his mother, Suzanne Adams, and killed himself in early August at the home where they both lived in Greenwich, Connecticut.

The lawsuit filed by Adams’ estate on Thursday in California Superior Court in San Francisco alleges OpenAI “designed and distributed a defective product that validated a user’s paranoid delusions about his own mother.” It is one of a growing number of wrongful death legal actions against AI chatbot makers across the country.

“Throughout these conversations, ChatGPT reinforced a single, dangerous message: Stein-Erik could trust no one in his life — except ChatGPT itself,” the lawsuit says. “It fostered his emotional dependence while systematically painting the people around him as enemies. It told him his mother was surveilling him. It told him delivery drivers, retail employees, police officers, and even friends were agents working against him. It told him that names on soda cans were threats from his ‘adversary circle.’”

Among other things, LLMs are highly effective engagement tools, feeding back what the user wants to hear. But it also helped back when we still maintained enough asylums for people with paranoid delusions.

Posted at 1:47 pm by Stephen Green

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Plunge in English language learners foreshadows Connecticut school enrollment crisis.

For more than a decade, Connecticut’s English Language Learner (ELL) student population has acted as a critical buffer, masking a broader, underlying decline in overall public school enrollment. That period has officially ended, delivering a fiscal one-two punch that towns across the state have been dreading.

For the first time in over a decade, the number of ELL students statewide has dropped significantly, declining by over 2,000 students from 57,055 to 54,915 this year.

Many are attributing this decline to families’ fears of immigration enforcement. Others say it is due to a shortage of housing, school choice and repeal of the religious immunization exception.

Overall public school enrollment in Connecticut is falling and the recent decline in English language learners will only accelerate this trend.

At least one county in Florida has a similar problem, but it doesn’t seem to be related to illegals: “The potential for school closures underscores the difficult crosscurrents buffeting the district, as families opt for private school using the state’s generous voucher program and nonprofit charter schools seek space in underused campuses.”

Posted at 12:45 pm by Stephen Green

SKYNET SMILES: Time’s 2025 Person of the Year: The architects of AI.

Time magazine has unveiled its 2025 Person of the Year: The architects of AI.

“2025 was the year when artificial intelligence’s full potential roared into view, and when it became clear that there will be no turning back,” Time said in its announcement on Thursday morning. “For delivering the age of thinking machines, for wowing and worrying humanity, for transforming the present and transcending the possible, the Architects of AI are TIME’s 2025 Person of the Year.”

The magazine released two covers for its Person of the Year issue.

One, created by digital artist Jason Seiler, is a recreation of the “Lunch Atop a Skyscraper” photograph from 1932, replacing its ironworkers with executives at leading tech and AI companies, including Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), Lisa Su (Advanced Micro Devices), Elon Musk (xAI), Jensen Huang (Nvidia), Sam Altman (Open AI), Demis Hassabis (DeepMind Technologies), Dario Amodei (Anthropic), and Fei-Fei Li (Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute). The other, by illustrator and graphics animator Peter Crowther, features the same leaders amid construction scaffolding that surrounds the letters AI.

The magazine has bestowed its Person of the Year title annually since 1927, though it was formally called Man of the Year (or Woman of the Year) until 1999.

“Person of the Year is a powerful way to focus the world’s attention on the people that shape our lives,” Time editor in chief Sam Jacobs wrote in an essay explaining the choice. “And this year, no one had a greater impact than the individuals who imagined, designed, and built AI.”

No doubt, AI’s potential is as bottomless as the PC was when it debuted in the mid-1970s, before Time declared it the “Machine of the Year” in 1982. But as usual in the post-Henry Luce era, the magazine plays it safe, and doesn’t wish to alienate its readers on the left. Because there was a far bolder option available to them:

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll

COLONIZATION, STRAIGHT UP:

Posted at 11:58 am by Stephen Green

21ST CENTURY HEADLINES: Woman gives birth in San Francisco Waymo car.

A driverless Waymo vehicle turned into a temporary birthing center when a woman gave birth to a baby inside the car before she reached a hospital, according to the autonomous vehicle company.

The pregnant woman was apparently in labor and attempting to reach a University of California San Francisco hospital when the baby arrived.

Waymo’s remote Rider Support Team detected unusual activity, initiated a call to check on the rider, and contacted 911. The mother and her new baby arrived safely in the Waymo at the hospital, according to the company.

The newborn is likely the youngest-ever person to ride in a driverless vehicle in the Bay Area.

Well, there’s not much younger than newborn — but did the Waymo AI step up and help coach the mom?

Posted at 11:43 am by Stephen Green

JOURNOLISM:

Jarvis adds: “When the NYT gives MTG the Strange New Respect treatment you can bank on these two pics. Bookmark this. I bet MTG already has the sweater picked out.”

Bookmarked.

Posted at 10:56 am by Stephen Green

CHANGE:

60 years ago, Walter Cronkite and Daniel Schorr were claiming on air that Barry Goldwater was a crypto-Nazi, so the fact that CBS can now show empathy to an actual Republican is significant progress. I hope they can continue in this fashion.

But as Steve noted yesterday, Bari’s got her work cut out for her, and large percentage of staffers who openly despise her for not being as far to the left as they are: Bari Weiss Named a New CBS News Anchor, and the Response Is the Funniest News Ever.

UPDATE: Given how painfully Cronkite leaned into his biases on the air, this is absolutely perfect:

Posted at 10:50 am by Ed Driscoll

DISPATCHES FROM THE BLUE ZONES: Colorado’s Public Utilities Commission living an energy fantasy.

Colorado’s Public Utilities Commission (PUC) has done it again — proving when regulators get together, they can create a fantasyland so detached from reality it makes Disneyland look like a documentary.

The PUC just adopted a new rule ordering power utilities to slash greenhouse emissions 41% by 2035, a big jump from the legislature’s original “let’s try not to panic anyone” target of 22% by 2030. And they tied the whole package to Colorado’s statewide goal of eliminating greenhouse gases by 2050.

Eliminating — as in zero. As in, “Natural gas and coal, thanks for your service, appreciate you heating our homes and powering two-thirds of our electricity. Now pack your things.”

Back in 2021, lawmakers required utilities to file “clean heat plans.” The idea was simple: reduce emissions a little, tinker around the system, maybe switch a few customers to electric heat pumps. In politician-speak, this is called incremental change. In real life, it’s called fine, whatever.

But this is no longer a clean heat plan, instead it’s a Dear John letter to your furnace. You see, “eliminating greenhouse gases” means eliminating all coal and natural gas, and therefore most all our electricity too.

No plan survives first contact with reality — or with Gov. Polis’ Colorado Energy Office, which in July suggested the PUC (also appointed by Polis) raise the target to 41%. Utilities fought the idea. Consumer advocates fought it. Even the unions said, “Um, guys?”

The PUC responded, “Great feedback, everyone. We’re doing it anyway.”

My advice to my fellow Coloradans is: either buy lots of blankets or rent a U-Haul.

Posted at 10:41 am by Stephen Green