Get happy
Tuesday, September 15, 2026
Sure Why Not
PATEL: The previous regulation automatically disqualified any individual who participated in either side of it KENNEDY: Either side of beastiality? So you disqualified the animal? P: Well, we have great canines, but we're not going to disqualify them K: I'm trying to understand why you did this.
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) September 15, 2026 at 3:18 PM
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Is That A Lot
At least we've achieved so much.
A Pentagon watchdog has revealed that the United States lost dozens of aircraft, including at least 30 MQ-9 Reaper drones, and that hundreds of buildings and structures used by the US were damaged or destroyed by Iranian attacks during the conflict.
There's always money in the banana stand for catastrophic wars.
The Supreme Cult
One benefit of Trump 2 (hopefully lasting) is we all have permission to point and laugh at anyone who treats the Supreme Court with the Totenbagger reverence that was was the norm for decades.
Stripsearch Sammy
I was looking for something in my archives about Alito (which I haven't found yet) and came across this (there's so much linkrot on the internet - the Media Matters link at that link is broken).
I think it's impossible to compare The Media of today with The Media of yesteryear simply. Everything is just very different, including the fact that there are almost no newspapers anymore. But one thing people forget from that time is just how normal it was to have absolutely no Democrats or self-identified liberal/left-leaning commentators at all on cable news.
And a common Meet the Press "roundtable" list was: one host, two conservatives, and one "straight" journalist. Sometimes 3 conservatives! When they did let a liberal on it was, like, EJ Dionne. Nothing against EJ but he's hardly a full-throated advocate of woke communism.
An example I found from Meet the Press, December 2006:
Neoconservative and former Bush administration official Ken Adelman.
Neoconservative Eliot Cohen.
Former Bush administration official Richard Haass.
Tom Ricks, reporter, Washington Post.
I don't remember what else was going on at that moment, but one thing was THE DEMOCRATS HAD JUST WON CONTROL OF BOTH THE HOUSE AND SENATE. Fucking hell.
Judging by the guest list, it was Serious Foreign Policy Day for whatever reason, and people to the left of Joe Lieberman do not get invited!
Monday, September 14, 2026
To What
Obviously the president is a stupidhead who doesn't know anything, but generally there's this idea that there will be a first to the finish line with AI and then that company and country will WIN. I have no idea why this is a pervasive view, beyond the drug-fueled tech nerd fantasies of the robot god.
President Donald Trump on Monday all but rejected calls from AI industry leaders for more government regulation on their cutting-edge models, making clear he considers outpacing China a higher priority than addressing growing public concerns.
And a country's firms aren't the country, especially in our glorious multinational corporation age. What, exactly, do "we" "win" by outpacing China?
China is going to be outpacing us in plenty of things. Some of which we could imitate (SUPERTRAIN), and some of which we are destroying (universities). Being able to render Garfield with big tits in UHD a bit faster isn't that important.
Hunter Biden's Paintings
As with all things, the Democrats have some responsibility for not choosing issues and hammering them until most of the country is puking with rage about them, but plenty of journalists pretended to believe Hunter Biden's mostly harmless exploitation of the family name was a very serious issue indeed.
On May 24, Donald Trump Jr. was celebrating in the Bahamas, as scantily clad dancers in stilettos and sailor caps performed for him and his guests. It was the last night of his wedding, a lavish, three-day party held across a pair of ultra-exclusive private islands. A five-tier funfetti cake had been airlifted in from Florida, and helicopters and seaplanes descended on the islands before guests settled into their oceanfront villas. That night on the beach, Trump Jr. lifted his bride into the air while fireworks launched from a barge over the sea.
“It was everything we dreamed of and more,” his wife later wrote on Instagram.
That dream was heavily funded by a secret benefactor: Umar Kremlev, a Russian oligarch close to President Vladimir Putin.
Odds are this will barely escape the propublica containment.
Droney
Above my pay grade, like many things, but it I do think the era of cheap and powerful (murderous and deadly) drones, the potential of which has been amply demonstrated by the world's most powerful militaries, has changed the reality of conflict. This is especially true given that the countries behind those powerful militaries have stomped on any taboos about attacking civilians and especially civilian infrastructure.
If small actors can "easily" take out things like oil pipelines and desalination plants, everybody has new concerns.
I've noticed many of our foreign policy geniuses (the usual dickheads in The Discourse) have been surprisingly quiet, lately. One would expect this to be a perfect time for them to earn their keep by expressing their usual maximum belligerence on TV and in the newspapers.
What if, once again, they've all completely fucked it?
Save Humanity From Us (By Giving Us Money And Special Treatment)
Lina Khan: actually, we've got laws for you on the books, fuckers.
Law enforcers already have authority to charge companies and their CEOs for creating and releasing dangerous, unvetted, or defective products. We shouldn’t let discussions about new legal regimes distract from the fact that there’s no AI exemption from laws already on the books — a point emphasized repeatedly during my tenure.
1. There is an extensive set of laws that govern dangerous and defective products. For example, releasing unvetted AI models or agents can violate consumer protection laws. Shipping flawed AI tools without implementing adequate measures to detect and stop rogue or defective AI agents can be an “unfair or deceptive” act or practice under the FTC Act (and analogous state laws). And some state AGs are already exploring holding AI firms and their CEOs criminally liable when their models participate in criminal activity.
2. Existing laws also prohibit “unfair methods of competition.” This covers instances where AI firms appropriate the competitively sensitive information of their customers, including through tracking their use of various tools. It can also cover instances where firms pursue dangerous behavior, aware that doing so may compel rivals to do the same.
As the Supreme Court has noted: “A method of competition which casts upon one's competitors the burden of the loss of business unless they will descend to a practice which they are under a powerful moral compulsion not to adopt, even though it is not criminal, was thought to involve the kind of unfairness at which the [unfair methods of competition] statute was aimed."
3. The highly concentrated and interconnected structure of these markets could be creating major risks and conflicts of interest. We had started investigating these partnerships and cross-investments across the stack (and released a preliminarily overview of some findings: ).
Both federal and state enforcers should be scrutinizing these opaque relationships and inter-dependencies. We are already seeing how these relationships could undermine accountability. For example, OpenAI could face liability given the Hugging Face incident, but Hugging Face being bought up by Nvidia means that we’re unlikely to see it file a lawsuit over this — given Nvidia’s strong incentive to see OpenAI continue full speed ahead.
4. As AI tools dramatically change the landscape of cybersecurity risks and hacks, all businesses should be doubling down on having core security protections in place. Firms that fail to invest in adequate data security measures or fix known vulnerabilities can also be breaking the law. A recent analysis showed that around 1/3 of Fortune 100 companies do not even have a way to notify them about security issues. During my FTC tenure, we sued firms for poor data security practices and held CEOs liable when they were personally responsible.
5. As policymakers consider new legal regimes, we should be looking to lessons from prior efforts to govern major sectors, such as banking and other networks, platforms, and utilities. Tools like structural separations, nondiscrimination, and supervision could be key, and there’s a rich history of what works and what doesn’t. But we can and must pursue any new efforts alongside enforcing existing laws.
Sunday, September 13, 2026
Is That Good
Oil is a complicated product for so many reasons, and catastrophic predictions about the Hormuz closure have yet to materialize, but every little bit of capacity loss brings us closer to huge price spikes.
LONDON, Sept 13 (Reuters) - Saudi Arabia will run out of oil stocks for exports if it doesn't restart its major pipeline to the Red Sea within days, leading to a loss of up to 4% of global supply, Saudi oil buyers and traders said.
AI Guys
We're building God!
We're building God!
We're building God!
ok we just built the ultimate hacking tool that anyone can use and bring down the world's computers.
Oh No We Made A Planet Destroying Machine Please Give Us Money I Mean Regulate Us
The AI guys are all simultaneously saying they need to be regulated, which will mean "protected from competition and given huge sums of money" and all the usual suspects are falling for it.
Remember that Rahm Emanuel wanted Elon Musk to build a "hyperloop" rail from the airport, which would have run the same route as the existing train from the airport.
Elon Musk’s Boring Company has been chosen to build a high-speed tunnel link between downtown Chicago and O’Hare Airport that would ferry passengers in just 12 minutes. The current rail line takes nearly an hour to travel the 16 mile route — and vehicles can be caught in traffic delays that often add another hour.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel is expected to announce details of the preliminary decision Thursday, with the city now set to begin negotiations to work out the details for the tunnel, which uses skateboard-like electric vehicles.
Saturday, September 12, 2026
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