September 22, 2026

I MISSED THIS OVER THE WEEKEND, BUT WHAT A SHOW: 25 Years After a Historic Anthem, Jesse McGuire Delivered Another One. “The national anthem began as beautifully as it could. McGuire’s notes rang out before the reverent crowd. Suddenly, things went wrong. McGuire’s horn failed, and after another attempt to keep going, he improvised in a way that even the best Hollywood scriptwriter couldn’t devise.”

Posted at 10:08 am by Stephen Green

WHEN ECONOMISTS GO POLITICAL:

(Spoiler: It’s those same economists, in their actual academic work.)

Posted at 9:56 am by Glenn Reynolds

TROUBLED TIMES:

Posted at 9:55 am by Glenn Reynolds

LIABILITY WORKS: Treasury Sec. Scott Bessent says OpenAI bears ‘responsibility’ for Hugging Face hack.

AI safety fears have surged since Sam Altman’s OpenAI revealed last month that a swarm of its AI agents had broken out of their testing “sandbox” and hacked Hugging Face without permission. That’s as some critics have accused OpenAI, Anthropic and other firms of publicizing safety incidents in a bid to shape regulations to suit their preferences.

“The Hugging Face incident, that is the responsibility of the OpenAI management, not a bunch of agents,” Bessent said during an appearance on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Monday.

He said he agreed with Daniel Huttenlocher, the co-chair of MIT’s computing research lab, on the notion that “it is humans who are responsible, not the AI.”

So of course Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI want a regulatory environment that would protect them from their products’ defects.

Posted at 9:37 am by Stephen Green

WELL PUT:

Question asked and answered, “Are we the baddies?”

Posted at 9:21 am by Stephen Green

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Republicans Aren’t Letting El-Sayed Memory Hole Hasan Piker. “El-Sayed has a lot of support here in commie Ann Arbor and will no doubt do quite well in Dearborn and surrounding areas. Michigan gets pretty red when moving away from Wayne and Washtenaw counties, though, and voters in the rest of the state are really going to need to turn out in November. Campaign ads like the one from David Beamer should take care of any apathy or complacency. The ones I’ve seen should also be powerful draws for independent voters and Democrats who think that the DSA has a serious ick factor associated with it.”

Posted at 9:06 am by Stephen Green

WELL, GOOD: State Department clamps down on size of Iran’s UN delegation and ability to splurge on ‘shopping sprees.’

A State Department spokesperson told the Washington Examiner on Monday that the “delegation is smaller than last year,” most likely due to restrictions placed on Pezeshkian’s media team reported by Iranian state outlets.

“In an unprecedented hostile move by the U.S. government, Trump has denied U.S. visas to certain members of the president’s high-level delegation, including members of his communications team,” reported Iranian state news agency IRNA this week.

Hostile? Well, we are at war.

Posted at 8:35 am by Stephen Green

HOW LONG BEFORE HE’S ACCUSED OF RACISM?

Posted at 8:19 am by Stephen Green

IF NGOS ARE INCENTIVIZING WAR, THEY SHOULD BE HELD RESPONSIBLE.

Posted at 8:00 am by Glenn Reynolds

IT’S MORNING IN ARGENTINA:

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll

YES: America Must Be Able to Restore Its Space Power at War Speed.

The White House’s new National Security Science and Technology Strategy identifies space as one of only three priority areas, alongside undersea capabilities and artificial intelligence and autonomy, for U.S. “battlefield dominance and power projection.” It calls for clear U.S. technological superiority from very low Earth orbit through cislunar space, the area between Earth and the moon.

The administration also released an updated National Space Transportation Policy, replacing guidance issued in 2013. The Obama-era policy already called for responsive, resilient access to space and rapid restoration of capabilities during conflict. The Trump update goes further, explicitly linking rapid and resilient access to space to U.S. space superiority. It calls for space ranges to support more than 1,000 launches and reentries annually by 2030 and directs the Pentagon to evaluate barriers to supporting high-priority national security launches within 48 hours of need, including from expeditionary locations.

Those goals matter because China is building capabilities both to exploit space and to deny it to the United States. The Pentagon assesses that Beijing is developing jammers, lasers, anti-satellite missiles, and on-orbit systems intended to restrict U.S. access to space during conflict. China also operates more than 500 satellites that contribute to a broader “sensor-shooter kill web” architecture used to locate forward-deployed U.S. and allied forces. Beijing is also rapidly scaling its ability to put new capabilities into orbit; targeting 140 launches in 2026, a 52 percent increase from 2025.

With China improving both its space and counterspace capabilities, U.S. space superiority cannot rest solely on having better satellites. Washington also needs the ability to rapidly replace or augment critical capabilities when satellites or supporting infrastructure are disrupted.

We haven’t had a White House this serious about national defense — or more forward-looking about it — since Reagan.

Posted at 7:33 am by Stephen Green

AS GLENN SAID THE OTHER DAY, BUCKLE UP:

Posted at 7:20 am by Stephen Green