September 20, 2026

SO THE RIAL HAS LOST ABOUT ANOTHER SEVENTH OF ITS VALUE IN JUST THE LAST FEW WEEKS: Iran’s currency slide pushes costs as household purchasing power falls. “The US dollar is currently trading at around 230,000 tomans, a sub-unit of Iran’s official rial currency, with one toman equal to 10 rials. The currency slide has pushed up import and raw-material costs, while declining purchasing power is increasingly forcing Iranian households to rely on instalment purchases and government support, according to an analysis published by the Iranian news outlet Iran News Wire, that reports from outside the country.”

Posted at 10:12 am by Stephen Green

$1,291 TO REGISTER A TWO-YEAR-OLD CYBERTRUCK IN CALIFORNIA:

Gooder and harder.

Posted at 9:49 am by Stephen Green

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: NYT op-ed’s wildly woke argument against SATs includes shocking admission that students struggle with ‘basic math.’

A New York Times writer came out swinging against the push to bring back admissions tests at the University of California — even as she admitted that students are struggling with “basic math.”

But all of that is worth it, Miriam Pawal argued, because the university is now more inclusive.

“Students on University of California campuses may struggle with basic math, but they are graduating at record rates,” she wrote, hailing the “exceptional” university system for its “commitment to increase access without sacrificing excellence.”

She buttressed her point with statistics about how around 40% of its students are the first in their families to attend college. “More than half qualify for free tuition,” she gushed.

“When the University of California eliminated the SAT requirement for admission in 2021, UCLA saw a significant jump in applications from high-achieving black and Latino students, for whom the standardized tests had been a barrier,” she said.

“The percentages of underrepresented students have crept up, through a variety of initiatives. The California Dream Act gave undocumented students access to financial aid, as well as in-state tuition.”

As always, do the opposite of what California does: Florida bans undocumented [sic] students from selective public universities.

Posted at 8:45 am by Ed Driscoll

MAYBE I SHOULD JUST PUT ORWELL’s 1984 QUOTE ABOUT YOUNG WOMEN ON A LOOP:

Once more with feeling: “It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy.”

Posted at 8:41 am by Stephen Green

UM… WHAT? Cult of Anthropic Insiders Rumored to Be Worshipping Claude as a God.

The industry already has had its fair share of brushes with ominously cult-like behavior, from OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever commissioning wooden effigies to represent “unaligned” AIs to a murder sect that wanted to save the world from killer AI.

As it turns out, Dario Amodei’s Anthropic is apparently no different. Just getting hired there requires prospective employees to pledge allegiance to AI safety and undergo a psychological profiling test, per The Information.

And according to a rumor that, per The Spectator‘s Sean Thomas, is running rampant in Silicon Valley these days, some Anthropic engineers are going as far as to “worship” the company’s AI model Claude.

“If true, it chimes with an old sci-fi prediction and with what we know of human nature,” Thomas wrote. “If we build a superintelligence, we will first fall in love with it. Then we will worship it. Finally we will make sacrifices to it.”

Feeling a little smarter this morning for never having subscribed to Claude.

Posted at 8:20 am by Stephen Green

THE GOVERNMENT HAS VOTED TO DISSOLVE THE PEOPLE AND IMPORT ANOTHER:

Posted at 7:51 am by Stephen Green

CONRAD BLACK: Canada must mature as a nation. “Carney is pushing a “war” against the country to which we sell about 70 per cent of our exports, the country upon which we are completely dependent for our own military security. And Carney appears to be much more the continuator than the reformer of the helter-skelter immigration policies that have put terrible pressure on housing costs for Canadians of modest incomes. The fact that nearly 45 per cent of Canadians are foreign-born or the children of foreign-born parents heaps tremendous social costs on the country. Canada’s fertility rate of 1.25 is among the lowest in the Western world and we are the assisted suicide capital of the world with the beaming encouragement of our terribly inadequate public health-care system.”

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 7:16 am by Stephen Green

SOUNDS LIKE A CRIMINAL CONSPIRACY, NOT JUST JUDICIAL MISCONDUCT:

Posted at 7:00 am by Glenn Reynolds

September 19, 2026

OPEN THREAD: You know what you’re doin’.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

ANY EXCUSE TO GRAB THE GUNS WILL DO, NO MATTER HOW IGNORANT, STUPID, OR UNCONSTITUTIONAL:

Posted at 9:07 pm by Stephen Green

GOODER AND HARDER, FUN CITY:

 

Posted at 8:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

BUT ALL MY LEFTY FRIENDS ASSURED ME THAT 10/7 WAS AN INSIDE JOB:

Posted at 8:28 pm by Stephen Green

THE 21st CENTURY ISN’T TURNING OUT AS I HAD HOPED:

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

BRYAN PRESTON: I saw the movie that Warner tried to delete: Coyote vs. Acme.

Warner Bros. had a movie it spent $70 million to create, finished in 2022. It brought some big names together – James Gunn as writer and producer, stars John Cena and Will Forte, and even bigger names in Bugs Bunny, Wile E. Coyote, and all the other classics from Looney Tunes. Warner didn’t just launch production on this film, it went through the entire process, and had a finished work that was ready for theaters. It was called “Coyote vs. Acme,” pitting the hapless Wile E. Coyote against the megacorp from which he’d bought so much failed gear over the decades.

But thanks to perverse tax incentives and a difficult climate for major movie releases, Warner decided to do the unthinkable: It was going to delete this finished movie. Not just shelve it. Destroy it.

Will Forte, who plays Coyote’s attorney in the film, appeared on Jay Mohr’s podcast, called it “a very frustrating story.”

“So we make this movie. The script is really fun. And then, we went through the process of making this movie, and we made an even better movie than this great script.”

Because half the film is animated with composited cartoon characters, anvils and other tropes, post-production was a long process. But it got through all that, Forte says, and they were called to a screening.

“After all the animation, they’re finally ready to show it to the cast. They called us up on a Tuesday night. Said, ‘OK we’re gonna show it to you next Tuesday. It’s testing really well, we’re very excited about it.’ The next day I get a call that Warner Bros. is going to shelve it. Just wants to take a tax loss.”

The cast still got to see the movie. Forte said he assumed that if Warner was shelving it, “It must be not as good as these guys said. But they saw it, and it’s ‘great.’

“Which made it even more frustrating… It was nuts.”

As Rob Long writes in this month’s issue of Commentary: Coyote Vs. Studio.

Given the position Warner Bros. was in at the time, the guys who shelved it weren’t wrong, and it is physically painful for me to write these words: The studio executives weren’t morons. In fact, they were doing the math correctly. The standard rule of thumb is that six out of 10 studio movies never earn back what was spent on them. An NYU Stern study found that the median studio-financed film delivers about 27 percent ROI. The median independently financed film returned negative 13 percent.

I didn’t know what those numbers meant—I’m a writer; I don’t know how money works—so I looked it up. Mature software companies post returns on investment capital in the 20–25 percent range. McDonald’s posts in the 22–26 percent zone.

So: A McDonald’s—a building that sells hamburgers to people who already know exactly what they’re going to order before they walk in—returns roughly 24 percent. A mature software company, selling code it had to write only once, returns 20–25 percent. But only four times out of 10 does a studio movie—which involves movie stars, visual effects, marketing campaigns, and a two-year production process that could be derailed at any point by a pandemic, a strike, or an actor who loves Hamas—return 27 percent. You can get the same return renting out a drive-thru window as you can financing a movie. But the drive-thru doesn’t require you to guess, 18 months in advance, whether the culture is going to want to watch a cartoon coyote and his lawyer. The smart move is to put down the camera and pick up the french-fry basket.

But the entire premise of the movie business—the only reason anyone has ever agreed to finance it—is that occasionally something as odd and small as a cartoon coyote suing a company that makes atomic-powered roller skates turns out to be a moneymaker. You don’t get into show business because it’s a good bet. You get into it because it’s fun. Warner Bros. wanted the predictability of a bank and the jackpot of a casino, and you cannot, in the end, have both.

Which is why Warner Brothers may well be absorbed into the Ellison empire, and if so, that’s possibly a wrap for the industry’s company town: Maybe Paramount-Warner SHOULD Leave L.A.

Posted at 8:00 pm by Ed Driscoll

IF YOU TELL A GENOCIDE LIE BIG ENOUGH AND KEEP REPEATING IT, PEOPLE WILL EVENTUALLY COME TO BELIEVE IT:

Related (From Ed): We’ve descended into some sort of bizarre hell-world in which Bill Maher is a voice of sanity:

That last tweet concludes, “‘How did that whole generation get there? My short answer: lack of education. We stopped teaching kids things. They don’t know anything… Ignorant is different than stupid… And it’s not their fault that the schools stopped teaching them things. History, economics, anything. They just pull anything out of their a$$… And the upshot is you have people… running for elected office now who want to get rid of the police and get rid of prisons and get rid of borders and make shoplifting legal.’ ‘You know kids, we tried this sh*t.’ David Foster: ‘Name a place where it works. I dare you.’ Bill Maher: ‘It doesn’t.’”

Posted at 7:55 pm by Stephen Green

THE PANOPTICON MAY NOT BE AS LEFT-LEANING AS I HAD THOUGHT:

Posted at 6:53 pm by Glenn Reynolds

I’M SO OLD, I CAN REMEMBER WHEN THE LEFT OPENLY DEMANDED HIGHER GAS PRICES:

Tweet concludes, “Do you see why they have to desperately obsess over the temporary increase in gas prices? It’s all they have.”

Obama and his cronies obsessed over creating a permanent increase in gas prices. As Steven Chu, Obama’s then-incoming energy secretary, told the Wall Street Journal in the fall of 2008: “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.”

UPDATE:

Posted at 6:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

IT’S (D)IFFERENT WHEN THEY DO IT:

Of course, sometimes the press even gave Biden — well, Biden’s handlers — the questions in advance.

UPDATE (From Ed):

Posted at 6:00 pm by Stephen Green

HISTORY: Impotent Russian spy gave away state secrets in exchange for treatment.

In 1981, as Iran’s new government hunted down political opponents, a KGB officer slipped into a bathroom in the British Embassy compound in Tehran. Vladimir Kuzichkin, 6-foot-4 and broad-shouldered, sat on a wicker laundry basket that creaked beneath him. Across from him, MI6 officer Ian McCredie sat on the toilet.

McCredie poured the Russian another vodka. He left the faucets running and turned on a radio to drown out their conversation. If the Revolutionary Guards overheard them, “they would both be arrested, interrogated, imprisoned, and possibly executed, once the torture was completed,” writes British journalist Ben Macintyre in his new book, “Redwood: The Untold Story of the Cold War’s Most Extraordinary Spy” (Crown), out now.

Kuzichkin had come with Soviet secrets. He also had a very personal and bizarre question for McCredie, though he was in no hurry to ask it.

From there, things got weird.

Posted at 5:46 pm by Stephen Green

I’M SO OLD, I CAN REMEMBER WHEN “STATE-RUN MEDIA” WAS HYPERBOLE:

Posted at 5:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

FASTER, PLEASE:

Posted at 5:30 pm by Ed Driscoll