August 19, 2026

BEEGE WELBORN: Totally Into the Way the Trump Cabinet Dogs Each Other, Even Over Cats.

I am absolutely bonkers for the way the Trump cabinet, every last one of them, is so comfortable in their own accomplished skins, and are such naturally good-humored, confident people that they can bang away at each other in public like long-lost brothers, yet no one dissolves into a snit fit, or leaks enraged texts to Nicholas Kristof about abuse.

They are flat-out hilarious in their own right.

Witness Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent (WOOF – gimme a moment here) as he effortlessly bodies churlish imp Robert Reich on X the other day.

Beege is having way too much fun today.

Posted at 1:46 pm by Stephen Green

PARTNERING 4-YEAR DEGREES AND WORKFORCE ED IN FLORIDA: “The broader policy lesson is that technical education should not be treated as a fallback for students who are not ‘college material.’” A thousand times yes, especially as we have made college increasingly intolerable for (and intolerant of) more and more people. Moreover, it seems to me that making Ivy Leaguers figure out how to fix a broken air conditioner as a condition of graduation would be doing them an enormous favor.

Posted at 1:42 pm by Robert Shibley

“CIVILIZATIONAL SEPPUKU VIA SUICIDAL EMPATHY,” INDEED:

Posted at 1:39 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.)

UPDATE: “A judge has ruled that St. Louis public television station Nine PBS can regain access to more than 50 terabytes of its archival material dating back to the 1950s.”

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

EDGY COMEDIENNE DROPS F-BOMBS ON LATE NIGHT TV: Rosie O’Donnell Claims Trump Brought Back Fascism.

Rosie O’Donnell kicked off her second night of guest hosting ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live! on Tuesday, much like she did on Monday, with Kimmel-esque nicknames for President Trump coupled with accusations of fascism while not appreciating the irony of being able to host a show in such an allegedly fascist environment.

O’Donnell also made sure to follow in Anthony Anderson’s footsteps and mock Trump’s escape from Turkey by shrinking the size of the airport catering truck to a simple cart, “This has been kind of a strange experience for me, because all of a sudden I’m re-famous. I’m back in the spotlight all thanks to President Oompa J. Loompa, who is watching us this evening from inside a catering cart. You know, I couldn’t have done it without you, sweetie. You brought me back, just like you did with fascism and the measles. But enough about him.”

And yet curiously, when Trump was reelected president, she moved from America to Ireland without incident, and could fly back from Ireland to Los Angeles to guest-host for Kimmel, and presumably will soon return there without incident. Worst. Hitler. Ever.

Couldn’t Rosie’s writers come up with material that isn’t 60 years old? As Tom Wolfe wrote in “The Intelligent Co-ed’s Guide to America” about speaking at Princeton in the mid-1960s:

The next thing I knew, the discussion was onto the subject of fascism in America. Everybody was talking about police repression and the anxiety and paranoia as good folks waited for the knock on the door and the descent of the knout on the nape of the neck. I couldn’t make any sense out of it. I had just made a tour of the country to write a series called “The New Life Out There” for New York magazine*. This was the mid-1960’s. The post-World War II boom had by now pumped money into every level of the population on a scale unparalleled in any nation in history. Not only that, the folks were running wilder and freer than any people in history. For that matter, [Paul] Krassner himself, in one of the strokes of exuberance for which he was well known, was soon to publish a slight hoax: an account of how Lyndon Johnson was so overjoyed about becoming President that he had buggered a wound in the neck of John F. Kennedy on Air Force One as Kennedy’s body was being flown back from Dallas. Krassner presented this as a suppressed chapter from William Manchester’s book Death of a President. Johnson, of course, was still President when it came out. Yet the merciless gestapo dragnet missed Krassner, who cleverly hid out onstage at Princeton on Saturday nights. Suddenly I heard myself blurting out over my microphone: “My God, what are you talking about? We’re in the middle of a … Happiness Explosion!”

That merely sounded idiotic. The kid up in the balcony did the crying baby. The kid down below did the raccoon … Krakatoa, East of Java … I disappeared in a tidal wave of rude sounds … Back to the goon squads, search-and-seize and roust-a-daddy …

Support came from a quarter I hadn’t counted on. It was [Gunter] Grass, speaking in English.

“For the past hour I have my eyes fixed on the doors here,” he said. “You talk about fascism and police repression. In Germany when I was a student, they come through those doors long ago. Here they must be very slow.”

Grass was enjoying himself for the first time all evening. He was not simply saying, “You really don’t have so much to worry about.” He was indulging his sense of the absurd. He was saying: “You American intellectuals—you want so desperately to feel besieged and persecuted!”

He sounded like Jean-François Revel, a French socialist writer who talks about one of the great unexplained phenomena of modern astronomy: namely, that the dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe.

Not very nice, Günter! Not very nice, Jean-François! A bit supercilious, wouldn’t you say!

As for Rosie, six decades later:

* This was the original iteration of New York magazine, and a very different beast from its current form: New York Magazine Turns Its Back on the City’s Jews.

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll

HEINLEIN UNDERSTOOD THE IMPORTANCE OF SPACE AS A RELEASE VALVE FROM NANNY-STATERS DECADES AGO:

Posted at 11:57 am by Stephen Green

GET OFF MY CAR: When the State Determines What Rubber Meets the Road – Tired in California.

As purely an interested but unaffected and unassociated bystander watching from afar – and, lemme add, a truly horrified one at that – I find myself doubting that there ever will come a time that the majority of the state will willingly throw off the authoritarian bonds that are now constricting the very lifeblood that used to pulse through, arguably, one of the most vibrant, unfettered places to live in the country.

From Sacramento to the various commissions and agencies throughout the state, there are so many levels of unelected and enabled satraps who, at the stroke of a pen, can issue edicts affecting the way tens of millions of citizens live their lives. Citizens who have little recourse, in fact, often have little warning that some bureaucrat is once again fixin’ to rock their world with a regulation concerning something as mundane, but essentially a right-to-choose, as what replacement tire you prefer and can afford when you have a blow-out or the whole set goes old baldy.

And yet, God bless their pointy little bureaucratic, Big Brotherish heads. That’s exactly where we are.

The California Energy Commission has voted to phase out the sale of replacement tires that do not meet its desired energy-efficiency threshold.

Perhaps as much as 70% of tires currently sold.

Posted at 11:42 am by Stephen Green

WELL, WHEN YOU PUT IT LIKE THAT…:

Posted at 11:26 am by Stephen Green