August 18, 2026

CONGRESS CLOSES HUGE TRANSPARENCY LOOPHOLE: But the issue now may be if President Donald Trump will sign it into law. Check it out in my latest for The Washington Stand. 

Posted at 3:14 pm by Mark Tapscott

WHERE DID ALL THE MEN GO? It’s true, a growing legion of men are dropping out of the workforce. They just stop looking for work. The result is not merely economic damage; the traditional family structure, among much else, suffers grievous damage when hard-working, responsible men aren’t available for marriage.

Writing for The Washington Stand, Zachary Patton, a talented young journo, offers this prescient analysis of the problem:

“A major driver of this contraction in the workforce is the direct consequences of social safety net expansion. What was once designed with the intention of being temporary cushions during economic recession has morphed into a permanent way of living for millions of able-bodied Americans.

“Divided amongst state-funded disability benefits, nutritional assistance, and low-income housing subsidies, the economic estuary that exists between a demanding career and remaining jobless has dried up to almost a point of non-existence. When safety nets mitigate non-work without demanding an exchange, the motivator to persevere through demanding labor dissolves.”

 

 

Posted at 2:39 pm by Mark Tapscott

STURDY, TOO:

And even more pics:

Starship flight 14 is tentatively set for Aug. 28.

Posted at 2:32 pm by Stephen Green

DANIEL MCCARTHY: Democrats’ Southern Strategy. “It’s actually about keeping power in the hands of the party establishment, the people who backed Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020, and who are likely to wind up supporting Kamala Harris in 2028.”

They sure can pick’em.

Posted at 2:16 pm by Stephen Green

WOLFGANG IS A PARODY ACCOUNT…:

…but I had to double-check to make sure.

Posted at 12:58 pm by Stephen Green

NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: NSA sat on election threat reporting over Trump ‘deep state’ label, memo shows. “In a tense March 2020 meeting just months before the presidential election, the National Security Agency’s (NSA) deputy director blocked the release of a long-delayed report on foreign targeting of U.S. elections—not because the intelligence was flawed, but because he feared it would brand the agency as part of the ‘deep state.'”

Posted at 12:43 pm by Stephen Green

NOW, WE’VE LOST THOSE COMPUTERS WITH ALL OF THE 13TH CENTURY IN THEM. NOT MUCH IN THE CENTURY, JUST DANTE AND A FEW CORRUPT POPES, BUT IT’S SO DISTRACTING AND ANNOYING! TV Station in a Fight to Retrieve Its Archive After Cloud Company Went Bust.

A local TV station is in a messy situation after the cloud company it was using to store 70 years’ worth of archival material vanished.

Gizmodo reports that Nine PBS in St. Louis had a rolling annual contract with Open Source Storage (OSS), a cloud storage provider, but when the station went to renew the deal earlier this year, OSS didn’t respond.

On the day the contract expired, Nine PBS suddenly lost access to its data without any warning. That’s when staff there realized that OSS’s website was inactive and the state of Colorado listed the company as delinquent.

The station lost access to 50 terabytes of archival materials, which included all of its footage of historical events that have taken place in St. Louis.

Note that below the article are two news articles on “Sabrent’s New Thunderbolt Dock [Which] Features a 16TB SSD and Tons of Ports.” Three of those and the PBS station would have been pretty much set with their own in-house backup.

(Classical reference in headline.)

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

THIS IS THE SAME THING DISNEY DID TO STAR WARS:

Posted at 12:22 pm by Stephen Green

GOODER AND HARDER, CALIFORNIA: California regulators approve new rules limiting what replacement tires you can buy for your car.

California regulators on Monday approved new rules that will restrict what tires you can buy when it’s time to replace them on your car.

In a unanimous vote, the California Energy Commission voted to adopt new rules that will phase out the sale of replacement tires that don’t meet certain energy efficiency standards.

“This ultimately is about protecting consumers,” said David Hochschild, the chairman of the California Energy Commission. “I see this as sheltering the public from higher costs in the long run.”

Tire manufacturers and the commission’s staff are at odds over whether this will add to the cost of living in the state. Both sides acknowledged this will no longer allow the sale of a significant portion of the tires currently sold in California.

War is peace, freedom is slavery:

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll

YES: Teens Need Sleep. Schools Can Afford to Give It to Them. “Medical experts have been clear for years: sleep cycle changes during puberty make it hard for teenagers to learn in the early morning. Later school start times have been linked to better sleep, improved mental health, stronger academic performance and even safer driving.”

Posted at 11:41 am by Stephen Green

A FLOATING TREASURE TROVE OF DATA:

Posted at 11:25 am by Stephen Green

COLEMAN HUGHES: Why the Left Needed to Believe in Jason Arday.

The Jason Arday scandal has left the academic world reeling. Found dead in his family’s apartment last Friday, Arday has been the subject of intense scrutiny over the past month. Appointed in 2023 as Cambridge University’s youngest-ever black professor, he faced extensive and credible allegations of plagiarism that exploded into public view last month. Those allegations led to public interest in the (literally) incredible details of his life. Arday claimed to have run 600 miles in six days—which would make him one of the best ultra-marathon runners on Earth. He claimed that he couldn’t speak until the age of 11 and couldn’t read until 18, but somehow managed to complete a PhD around 30. And he claimed to have raised the equivalent of several million U.S. dollars for charity.

Jason Arday was either the most interesting man in the world, or he was a liar. It turned out to be the latter.

All this has revealed many unflattering things about academia: DEI invites fraud by lowering standards, the bigotry of low expectations is alive and well, and a disturbing number of “experts”—not just Arday but all the Cambridge professors and BBC journalists who co-signed him—are compromised by ideology, cowardice, or both.

But the Arday scandal has also revealed something else: White liberals in the English-speaking world want to believe in the archetype of the up-from-nothing black intellectual who, despite huge disadvantages, goes on to achieve greatness. In fact, they want to believe in this sort of story so badly that they are willing to turn off every ounce of skepticism that they would normally bring to bear on fantastical claims.

The irony, however, is that we already have many examples of up-from-nothing black intellectuals who go on to greatness. It’s just that they usually turn out to be conservatives—or if not conservatives, then at least out-of-step with the left-wing religion of racial justice.

QED:

And conversely, Nathan Cofnas, the American expat professor who originally exposed Arday’s numerous lies is currently being demonized by a combination of those who desperately wanted to believe, and the mob they’ve ginned up for this week’s outrage of the century:

 

As Iowahawk has said:

That neatly sums up Cambridge’s transformation, which is why Arday’s tragic suicide is such a useful vehicle for the British left to deflect from the far bigger picture.

UPDATE: Backwards ran sentences until reeled the mind. Where it all ends knows God:

Posted at 10:55 am by Ed Driscoll