August 31, 2026

SPACE: Watch Rocket Lab launch Japanese radar satellite to orbit early on Sept. 1. “Synspective is assembling a constellation of about 30 Strix satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO). These spacecraft — which are named after a widespread genus of owl — use synthetic aperture radar (SAR) to study our planet both day and night, and in all weather conditions.”

Posted at 2:46 pm by Stephen Green

THE FUTURE AND ITS ENEMIES:

More:

Those guys are utterly furious that the Legislature built some legal protections for the aerospace industry into the state statutes in this past session, without which SpaceX probably doesn’t come here.

After all, Louisiana has a very well-deserved reputation as a judicial hellhole, so a large industrial undertaking like SpaceX would rightly be skittish about coming here.

The trial bar is a big loser in this exchange, which is something they aren’t used to at all. Not in this state. So they’re doing everything they can to stir up outrage over it, declaring that Jeff Landry and Susan Bourgeois sold out the state and so on.

Exit quote: “It does seem like a dead-ender move, though.”

Indeed.

Posted at 2:32 pm by Stephen Green

GEORGE MF WASHINGTON: The Lost Art of the Blockbuster Movie Opening.

The job of selling a blockbuster Hollywood theatrical release doesn’t stop until the last screening in the last theater on the last day of the movie’s theatrical run… and sometimes not even then. “Always. Be. Closing” as Alec Baldwin once said, performing David Mamet’s dialogue, and this maxim remains operational even when the audience is already in their seats, their money has been spent, and the movie has begun spooling through the projector.

Because once the movie is over… and if you’ve done your job well… the audience becomes your evangelists. They will emerge from the theater and head back out into the world where they will immediately begin doing the job of selling your movie to their friends and family.

In this context, the ending of a movie is critical, but so too is the opening. If you don’t hook the audience right away, you risk losing them. And even if the rest of the movie is a lead-pipe banger with an ending that is just so, you still will have spent valuable time overcoming the initial disappointment you created when you stumbled during the opening sequence.

Sometimes simply setting the tone is enough. Sometimes it’s a chance to tell the audience something about the movie’s main character in a way that feels fun rather than the hum-drum delivery of basic plot points (“Die Hard” does an excellent job in this regard). Sometimes, as with the opening aircraft carrier sequence in “Top Gun,” these sequences are designed to introduce the audience to a world they’ve never seen before. And sometimes it’s a chance to show the audience how dastardly the movie’s villains are so that when we do finally meet our heroes, we’ll know exactly how much they’re up against.

The opening of “Beverly Hills Cop 2” checks many of those boxes…. it introduces us to the villain first and to our hero second… and if you can watch this without a smile curling across your lips, if at least one toe doesn’t start tapping, then I don’t know what to tell you:

 

George Lucas obsessed over the opening shot of the original Star Wars – the small “blockade runner” spaceship first appearing onscreen before the giant triangular Star Destroyer eventually envelopes the entire movie screen. In Skywalking, his 1983 biography of George Lucas, Dale Pollock wrote:

As the effects footage improved, the atmosphere at [Industrial Light & Magic] lightened. “Some guy across the stage would say, ‘Oh, another first!’” remembers Richard Edlund. “Some other new thing had been done that we knew hadn’t been done before. This was going on every day and was very exciting.”

The most important shot in Star Wars was the opening one—the looming Star Destroyer would either make or break the movie’s credibility. “If somebody sat down in a theater and saw this monstrous thing come over the screen and keep coming and coming, and they were awed by that, then we had our audience just where we wanted ’em,” says Edlund. “But if they laughed, we were dead.” Edlund shot the opening sequence five times until he was sure nobody would laugh.

They didn’t:

The screening of Star Wars for cast and crew came three weeks later, on May 21 at the Beverly Hills headquarters of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. It, too, was at 10:00 A.M. on a weekend, with a luncheon that followed at Dr. Munchie’s, a local restaurant. Lucas first showed a classic Chuck Jones cartoon, Duck Dodger in the 21st Century, and the laughter quickly cut through the tension in the audience. As Star Wars began, the laughter abruptly ceased. “We all sat with our mouths open, and all you could hear throughout the audience was ‘Wowwww!’” remembers Richard Edlund.

* * * * * * * *

The May 25 release date drew ever nearer. It was time to screen Star Wars for a real audience. As he had with Graffiti, Lucas scheduled a Sunday morning screening at San Francisco’s Northpoint Theater on May 1, inviting a carefully selected cross-section of the movie audience—a small delegation from Fox, including Ladd and his wife, and Lucas’s family and closest friends. George and Gary had their tape recorders to gauge the audience reaction. They didn’t have long to wait; as soon as the opening crawl ended and the Star Destroyer appeared on the screen, the audience went crazy. “I was relieved more than anything else,” Lucas remembers. “It was a very high moment—I knew the film worked.” Privately, he and Kurtz were disappointed that the reaction wasn’t quite as enthusiastic as it had been for American Graffiti in the same theater five years earlier. Lucas now felt secure, however, that Star Wars at least would make back Fox’s investment. “But I had no idea of what was going to happen,” he insists. “I mean, I had no idea.”

That opening shot was the beginning of a franchise that would print endless amounts of money (until it didn’t, of course).

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

THE ONLY FUN PART OF COMMUNISM IS WATCHING THIS REALIZATION SINK IN:

Posted at 2:08 pm by Glenn Reynolds

DIDN’T EARN IT: Inside Cal Berkeley Law Review’s Admissions Team, Where ‘Diverse Life Experience’ Matters More Than ‘Editing Abilities.’

“When I first joined [Politico], I realized that the newsroom lacked the diversity necessary to reduce bias and improve our content,” Parthasarathy wrote in her application to the admissions committee. To fix the problem, she said, her team at Politico “did not consider grades,” instead creating a “holistic” review process that included, among other things, an editing test.

“For candidates on the borderline of a passing score on our test, we considered strengths they showed in other parts of their applications, and experiences they would bring to the table,” Parthasarathy said. “At the end of my tenure at Politico, our team had grown from just one person of color — me — to fifty percent hires from underrepresented backgrounds.”

Parthasarathy’s boasts were probably a legal liability for Politico, which did not respond to a request for comment, insofar as they described how the company sought to change the racial composition of its employees by de-emphasizing objective factors. But they were catnip for the California Law Review, which elected Parthasarathy to serve on the admissions committee in a journal-wide vote.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 1:44 pm by Stephen Green

WHERE’S HUNTER, FAT? Hunter Biden reveals dad Joe used to visit him in crack den with motorcade and Secret Service.

Hunter tells Manheim of his father’s visits:  “I mean, again and again. He’d call and he’d call, and then… he literally, you know, would drive over with a, you know, with a motorcade. You know what I mean? Like as small as he could possibly make it.”

When Manheim asks what that scene was like, Hunter says: “I’d look out my, you know, window because I’d hear all these cars and you’d see like six SUVs, you know, pull up and my dad get out and walk with one or two [Secret Service] guys because they have to be next to him. And I’d hear a knock on my door, and I’d open it, and, you know… there I would be, and you know [in] all of the obviousness of someone that was, you know, in distress.”

He recalled the then-Veep telling him, “‘Please, like, what are we gonna do tomorrow? What’s the plan?’ And I’d say, I got a plan, and this is what it is.”

Soon after, Hunter fled on a “crack road trip,” as Manheim calls it, in 2018 to Hollywood and infamously checked into the Chateau Marmont.

“I come out to LA and I check into the Chateau Marmont,” Hunter recalled of the celebrity haunt. “[It’s] 100% like right out of a movie. That’s the spot… and I live in one of the bungalows for about close to two months.”

When Manheim mentioned the hotel was where John Belushi overdosed, Hunter says, “Exactly. Yeah, which was always in like the… forefront of my mind. I mean, I think I went more than anything because I was… like, ‘hey, might as well go out with a bang.’”

A prospect that apparently had occurred to the Chateau Marmont management as well, who likely wanted to avoid deja OD all over again: Hunter Biden was banned from the Chateau Marmont for ‘drug use.’

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

SPOILER: She is unwilling to learn the difference.

Posted at 1:28 pm by Stephen Green

DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF AI VAGINAS? AI vaginas, customizable personalities and fake bruises: the sex doll market is booming. Does it matter how the dolls are treated?

Two weeks ago, two distressed citizens stumbled across what they assumed was the mangled corpse of a woman, stuffed into a suitcase in a small town about three hours south of Sydney. They called the local police, who in turn issued a statement that a body in a suitcase had been found. The wider public waited sombrely for Australia’s tally of dead women to tick up by one.

But instead, a day later, after forensic analysis, it was determined that the woman in question wasn’t a woman at all. The “body” was that of a sex doll, marked with fake bruises, left to rot on a lonely dirt road. In Australia, as in the UK and some other European countries, it is not illegal to own a sex doll unless it resembles a child. Given the doll’s seemingly mature presentation, police investigations were called off.

The sex doll trade is flourishing. A 2026 market analysis estimates that the global market was valued at US$6.6bn in 2025, with a projection that it will more than double, to US$13.4bn, by 2033. As the market booms, and involves increasingly lifelike facsimiles of women, does how these dolls get treated matter?

And when a sex doll with “bruises” and rain-matted hair is tucked into a suitcase and left on a roadside, should we be concerned?

Yes, actually. Very much so:

As the above image illustrates, the Tyrell Corporation wouldn’t lose much collective sleep over the current quality and sophistication of android sex dolls. Meanwhile, Skynet isn’t yet bringing its A-game, when it comes to robotics. Jeremy Clarkson writes: I don’t fear AI but a robot hyena’s no laughing matter.

We are told that the next major financial crash will certainly be caused by AI because while it’s very clever, it doesn’t understand insanity. So when there’s panic selling, it will panic sell and never once think “hang on a minute, this is madness”, which is what a human would do. And has done many times over the years. Or would it do that? And if it could, why would it, because if it gets rich, what’s it going to buy? A Ferrari? And how’s it going to drive that, when it’s in a box?

It’s going to need some kind of body. And it’s the same story when it comes to this business of taking our jobs. Because while it may know what’s wrong with a patient by examining his blood work, it needs form to be able to lift him on to the operating table. It also needs form if it wants to mend your fuse box or paint your front door or make a pushchair. It’s all very well being super clever, but it’s a bit pointless if you live in an iPhone and you don’t have opposable thumbs, or even arms.

of which brings me on to the robot Olympics that were held last week in China. Now I touched on the hilarity of robot sport back in April when I wrote about some robot running races, but, on the amusement-o-meter, the Olympics were in another league.

Yes, one of them broke Usain Bolt’s 100m world record but they had to put crash pads on the finish line because it couldn’t slow down. And then there was the football, which was like watching a bunch of eight-year-olds. They all ran after the ball constantly and only very occasionally did one of them land an actual kick. In the right direction? Not usually, no.

With the athletics, they all looked like humans but only humans that had ingested large quantities of LSD. They were so uncoordinated that frankly, I wouldn’t allow any of them to so much as load my dishwasher.

Also in news of robotics: ICE Is Eyeing Another Huge Tech Purchase. The purchase in question:

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

THE CUSTOMER IS ALWAYS RIGHT: Responding to Their Customers, Gun Stores Take Down Their Flock Cameras “The​ir ire is but the latest manifestation of a nationwide privacy-rights backlash against​ ​Flock’s artificial intelligence-powered cameras discreetly installed on street corners, in parks, parking lots, neighborhoods or on drones buzzing overhead.”

Posted at 12:42 pm by Stephen Green

IF ONLY THERE HAD BEEN SOME SORT OF WARNING, SOMEHOW:

Posted at 12:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE:

More on the Anaconda Strategy here.

Posted at 12:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds