September 3, 2026

HEY, BIG SPENDER: Elon Musk’s America PAC Discloses First Wave Of Spending On Midterm Senate Races. “In July, the New York Times reported that Elon Musk has authorized America PAC to spend between $100 million and $120 million to back Republican candidates during the midterm cycle. The world’s richest man has donated more than $90.5 million for election spending for the midterms, giving primarily to his own super PAC.”

Posted at 3:51 pm by Stephen Green

ASTROTURF ALL THE WAY DOWN:

Posted at 3:35 pm by Stephen Green

THE BEST THING THE AMERICAN LEFT HAS GOING FOR IT…:

…is that the press has been largely successful in shielding the public from just how radical and dangerous the Left actually is.

Even so, people have a difficult time believing it when told: Republican activists say they have to water down the reality of their opponents’ agenda in focus groups. ‘They just don’t believe it’s true. It can’t be.’

Posted at 2:33 pm by Stephen Green

A $600K BLOW TO MANDATORY ‘LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS’ ON CAMPUS. Congrats to University of Washington professor Stuart Reges and the FIRE litigation team who defended his right to parody the university-approved “land acknowledgement.” This is America. Public universities don’t get to write sacred texts and make you respect them.

Posted at 2:10 pm by Robert Shibley

FASCINATING:

Read the whole thing, but here’s the takeaway: “Palmer Luckey is the face of a new military-industrialist consensus which is seeking to hire American workers for American jobs, to build factories and weapons at home, to remilitarize and reindustrialize, to get away from asset inflation and FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate) as a sterile, parasitic rent-seeking economic system.”

Posted at 2:02 pm by Stephen Green

ELECTING A RED-DIAPER BABY HAS CONSEQUENCES:

Of course, the electorate was also primed for a smooth-talking red-diaper baby, so maybe the cause and effect are all swirled together.

Posted at 1:32 pm by Stephen Green

RYAN REYNOLDS JUST SLANDERED THE ’80S — PEOPLE HAVE OPINIONS:

“The 80s was a brutal, brutal time for people,” he said for some reason. “It was a fu**ing mess and people forget that. It was a tremendous strife. Socio political tensions everywhere. We were still pretty fresh off a Cuban missile crisis, which was only 15-20 years before. It’s a tumultuous period, but you look back at it now and you’re like, ‘Oh, yeah. ‘Top Gun.’ Cocaine!’ Like, ‘No!’ It was really scary.”

Yo, bro. That’s people’s childhoods you’re talking about. It was a time of patriotism and hot dogs and Fourth of July fireworks. The only places where it was a “fu**ing mess” were communist hellholes like the Soviet Union, who ate it in the 1980 Olympics “Miracle on Ice,” and East Germany, where people were trying to escape the Stasi.

It’s unfortunate that modern liberals didn’t take the hint that you shouldn’t model your country on places millions of people try to flee — to the United States, by the way. When the Berlin Wall came down, we expected it to stay down — not for control freaks to put a Digital Curtain back up with Flock cameras.

Also, people really didn’t obsess about politics the way Woke Hollywood actors like yourself do today.

So, when you start attacking the 1980s as if you were given a script to revise American history, you’re really striking a nerve. And people weren’t bashful about letting Ryan Reynolds have it.

For obvious reasons:

Also, was it over when the Russians bombed Pearl Harbor?

 

 

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

EVERYTHING GETS HACKED:

More:

The foundation of many cryptographic algorithms like RSA — algorithms that keep your online communications safe — is that multiplying two huge prime numbers is easy, but starting with the product and figuring out which two primes made it is incredibly hard. That difficulty is what makes encryption impossible to crack.

One of those numbers RSA published (to challenge people to try and factor large numbers and see if the assumptions RSA was built on really were secure) was RSA-260: 260 digits, 862 bits. It sat unfactored for 35 years.

Today Eric Lu just posted a 130-digit number with the words:

“divides RSA-260”

And it does.

That single number is enough to factor RSA-260, apparently setting a new record for the largest RSA challenge number ever factored.

Now the really interesting question is: how the hell did he do it?

The previous record required enormous amounts of traditional CPU compute. Did he use a giant GPU cluster? Improvements to the number field sieve? AI to optimize some part of the attack? Some new technique entirely?

Nobody has any fucking clue.

Exit quote: “Now most RSA used in production today is 2048 bit or more, so we still haven’t found a way to crack RSA quite yet… but this is one the largest numbers that’s ever been successfully factored.”

Posted at 12:29 pm by Stephen Green

GLORIA STEINEM, A POTENT VOICE OF US FEMINISM AND CO-FOUNDER OF MS. MAGAZINE, DIES AT 92:

Steinem began her career as a journalist, notably reporting in 1963 on degrading conditions in Hugh Hefner’s Playboy empire — an undercover assignment she came to later regret. She credits a meeting six years later, where women spoke out in favor of abortion rights, with changing her career path.

“That speak-out was the beginning of activism for me,” Steinem, who had undergone a secret illegal abortion herself at age 22, told the AP in an email in 2022, reflecting on the reversal of Roe v. Wade. “Either our control over our own bodies is equal, regardless of sex or race, or we’re not living in a democracy.”

Those who watched Steinem denounce discrimination for so many years likely never suspected that she’d had to overcome a deep fear of public speaking. She would have simply stuck to writing, she said, if only editors at the time had been willing to let her write about the women’s movement.

But they weren’t interested, she told the AP in 2015. “So I ended up going out and speaking, which was my nightmare,” she said. “I mean, I was terrified. But I’m grateful, even though I still get scared even now.”

Curiously absent from the AP’s obit: CIA Funded Feminist Icon Gloria Steinem Dies: “In my experience the Agency was completely different from its image; it was liberal, nonviolent, and honorable.”

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll