The Automatic Earth

JMW Turner Vignette Study of a Ship in a Storm c.1830

What are you watching this week? pic.twitter.com/NeaWtBi1wn

— Mark Anthony (@Muskstaycalm) September 28, 2026

Elon Musk believes we're living through the singularity right now, where technological growth accelerates beyond human control.

On Peter Diamandis's podcast, he shared 8 predictions about what's coming:

1) We're heading for universal high income and social unrest, together pic.twitter.com/paSGZwCmuP

— AI Evolution (@AiEvolutio58513) September 27, 2026

Edward Snowden calls for the arrest and imprisonment of Sam Altman. You may recall I called for the arrest of Dario Amodei (Anthropic) last week on the Alex Jones Show.

They both are admitting to conducting criminal cyber attacks. Even bragging about it. Why are they walking… https://t.co/j4uI8nshd2

— HealthRanger (@HealthRanger) September 26, 2026

pic.twitter.com/Qi52tDFzwX

— Andrew Hudgins (@Drewdaddyb1) September 26, 2026

5 minutes later there’s no more sanctions relief.

• Oil Tumbles on the Unexpected: Trump Signals Sanctions Relief (ZH)

Al Jazeera is reporting that President Trump is signaling he’d be open to providing Iran with sanctions relief in return for nuclear concessions – though it remains that Tehran has throughout the war insisted that a ceasefire deal must be achieved first, before the nuclear file is dealt with.

US official says US President Trump is prepared to ease sanctions on Iran and release its frozen assets in exchange for progress on the nuclear issue, reports Al Jazeera And… CNN and Axios also run US offiicial comments (echoing Al Jazeera) that US President Trump is willing to grant Iran sanctions relief and release frozen funds in exchange for real progress on the nuclear issue. As stocks jump, crude big plummet…

Note via Newsquawk: Oil sees downside, with slight Dollar pressure, while Treasuries, stocks, and spot gold see upside amid reports that Trump is ready to ease sanctions on Iran and release its frozen assets in exchange for progress on the nuclear file. Meanwhile…

IRAN OFFICIALS PESSIMISTIC ABOUT DEAL WITH US BEFORE MIDTERMS. The Iranian response is what’s going to matter here. They will likely see in this another ploy to merely talk down oil prices, and have already repeatedly said they ‘don’t trust’ Trump. It was only on Friday night into Saturday that Trump outright rejected Iran’s 7-day ceasefire pitch – with not even so much as an effort to sit down and talk details. But apparently that could happen this week on an indirect basis, via the typical Gulf mediators.

After a weekend which saw President Trump reject an Iranian proposal for a 7-day ceasefire and roadmap to peace, and Tehran in turn targeting 19 ships in the Strait of Hormuz, the two sides once again have their fingers on the trigger.

Iran has said while it remains open to diplomacy, it is ‘fully prepared’ to resume the full-scale war with Washington, according to Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi on Sunday. On Monday, Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei – who still hasn’t been seen since the war’s start and after his father’s assassination – has proclaimed his military has driven the ‘enemy’ from waters off southern Iran to the Arabian Sea.

“Having suffered painful blows from our valiant combatants and the guardians of the Strait of Hormuz, they [the enemy] dare not venture beyond the Arabian Sea,” Khamenei said in a new message. He warned that war could soon come to the Arabian Sea as well.

His words were issued on the annual remembrance of the Iran-Iraq War, as well as the anniversary of Israel’s killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in 2024. “Whenever they have risked doing so they have only inflicted harm upon themselves, and the time is fast approaching when the Arabian Sea, too, will be cleared of their presence,” Khamenei’s message added. This marks an extension of threats from Iranian security officials last week which warned that war is coming to the Indian Ocean more broadly.

However, the reality also is that oil exports from the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman have been climbing over the past week. But renewed hostilities in the Strait of Hormuz, where Iranian forces are trying to hinder this uptick in transit, is looking more and more likely.

This as diplomacy is obviously stalled. Bloomberg observes, “Iran and the US appeared far apart on a new ceasefire deal or the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, with Tehran saying it’s sticking to a proposal US President Donald Trump has rejected.” And, “In futures, oil rose as Iran and the US appeared far apart on a new ceasefire deal or the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, with Tehran saying it’s sticking to a proposal that US President Donald Trump has rejected.”

“.. allows states to use Social Security records and other information to check voters’ citizenship status.”

• Supreme Court Hands Trump Major Victory in Fight vs Noncitizen Voting (Lucas)

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Elena Kagan, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett applaud at the conclusion of President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address

The Supreme Court on Friday allowed the Department of Homeland Security to continue its citizenship verification program.

In a 6-3 shadow docket ruling in the case of DHS v. League of Women Voters, the justices allowed the Trump administration to expand the program that allows states to use Social Security records and other information to check voters’ citizenship status. “By prohibiting interference with the disclosure of information regarding citizenship status to DHS—’notwithstanding any other provision of Federal, State, or local law’—Congress necessarily authorized DHS to request and receive that information,” the majority opinion says.

The three liberals, Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissented. The majority held that a 1996 federal law banning noncitizen voting likely authorizes DHS to obtain citizenship information from other agencies, including state agencies. A shadow docket ruling is a Supreme Court order, often issued on an expedited basis without full oral arguments.

“In 1996, Congress, however, separately and expressly authorized DHS to request and receive information relating to citizenship and immigration status from other agencies, including SSA, in the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA),” the majority opinion says.

Plaintiffs, led by the League of Women Voters, argued this could violate privacy rights. They also argued that the SAVE database, short for Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, is unreliable and risks purging eligible voters.

In June, U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan of the District of Columbia ruled that a portion of President Donald Trump’s March 2025 executive order on election integrity was unlawful. Earlier this month, a D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals panel denied the administration’s motion to stay the district court ruling pending appeal in a 2-1 ruling.

The case centered on a partnership between the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration to expand the SAVE database. The expansion allowed agencies to search individuals using Social Security numbers, aggregate large amounts of data, and function as a citizenship verification tool to screen voter eligibility.

First orbital flight os Starship was successful overnight!

“We are go for orbit..”

• Starship Just Became a Money Making Machine (Stephen Green)

“We are go for orbit,” and with that, the Starship mission that a moment before appeared to be a big disappointment turned into something entirely else. What the “else” is — and one big reason why the entire control room burst into cheers — I’ll get to in a moment. But first, the drama.

It felt like a long time getting to Flight 14 this morning, just a little over two months since Flight 13. FAA regulatory approval only came through on Sunday. For a company that prides itself on testing, iterating, and testing again with all due haste, it must have felt like years. There’s a lot riding on today’s flight. While the company did not attempt to catch the Starship’s booster stage in Mechazilla’s tender embrace, the mission profile was to simulate a catch by making a soft water landing in the Gulf of America.

The upper stage — usually called Ship — was not only supposed to make its first orbital flight, but was also, for the first time, supposed to deploy fully operational Starlink V3 orbital internet satellites before completing six orbits and itself making a controlled splashdown near Chile. Those satellites are also a big deal, and I’ll come back to them momentarily. But first we have to look at how everything almost went very wrong just a few minutes after Flight 14’s 8:46 a.m. Eastern liftoff.

The Super Heavy booster lost two of its 33 Raptor engines on ascent. Individually, those Raptors aren’t that powerful. But strap nearly three dozen of them together in a single booster, and you get a launch platform with 2.4 times the thrust of the Saturn V rocket of Apollo moon landing fame.

Liftoff of Starship! pic.twitter.com/40D8bXSkr2

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) September 28, 2026

You’re allowed to say “Wow.” Assuming you haven’t lost the power of speech, of course. Those launches never fail to take my breath away. But part of reusability is that with 33 engines — arranged in sets for launch (all 33), boostback burn (13 then 5), and landing (3) — a Starship launch can afford to lose a couple of engines and still make the launch and the landing. And yes, it was two of the boostback engines that went out during ascent.

Nevertheless, the full stack got to where it needed to go for the Ship to “hot stage” away from the Super Heavy booster. After separation, the Ship’s six engines would keep it flying to its initial suborbital trajectory, while ground control kept its fingers crossed for a successful boostback burn and landing with two missing engines. They must’ve crossed those fingers really tight, because the booster made a perfectly controlled splashdown at 8:53 a.m.

Super Heavy has splashed down in the Gulf of America! pic.twitter.com/pEIjC2Aae1

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) September 28, 2026

Gorgeous, isn’t it? At 8:54 a.m., one of the Ship’s three vacuum engines failed, and a solemn decision had to be made: Continue on, using a longer burn with fewer engines to reach orbit — and deploy those Starlink satellites — or continue on the suborbital trajectory and make one more got-dam splashdown in the Indian Ocean.

The initial call at about 9 a.m. was no-go for orbit. The Ship and its 26 next-gen Starlink satellites would go nowhere they hadn’t been before. I was watching the SpaceX live feed and could feel the entire company deflate. Hell, I deflated.

But as more data came in from the Ship, flight controllers determined that there was enough redundancy remaining in the functional engines to make a successful boostback burn and return the Ship safely. That was the big deal all along: Not whether SpaceX could get the Ship to orbit, but getting it back. At 9:10, flight control personnel were finally polled: Go or no-go?

“We are go for orbit.”

Go for orbit! Starship will soon perform a burn with a single Raptor engine to enter an ~275 km orbit of Earth pic.twitter.com/HQxgQYc4eZ

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) September 28, 2026

At 9:11 a.m., a SpaceX Starship upper stage made its first-ever orbital burn. And after that, everything seemed to move like clockwork.Once in orbit — above the coast of Namibia, if I was reading the live feed globe correctly — the Ship opened its Pez dispenser door and began deploying the first-ever operational Starlink V3 satellites. All 26 are now using their own motors to assume their orbits among the 11,000 or so V1 and V3 satellites currently in operation. Those first V3’s will enter service in a few weeks.

Given the launch issues, SpaceX decided to de-orbit the Ship earlier than planned, and that also went well.

Splashdown confirmed. Congratulations to the entire SpaceX team on the first orbital flight of Starship! pic.twitter.com/urjmiwnvNl

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) September 28, 2026

This is where everything starts to come together, and I can get to those “momentarily” I teased you with. It’s almost impossible to believe what a huge upgrade Starship is to Falcon 9, and V3 Starlink is to V2. “Each one of these V3 Starlink satellites being deployed right now increases the bandwidth capacity of the ENTIRE Starlink constellation by roughly 0.11%,” Sawyer Merritt explained this morning. And one of the replies noted that “This one launch is over 2.8% of all bandwidth.”

One launch. To increase Starlink capacity that much with V2 and Falcon 9, you’d need no fewer than 10 launches. But today’s launch barely even tested Starship’s capabilities. A fully loaded Starship will put 60 V3 satellites into orbit — eventually, at a fraction of the cost-per-kilogram of Falcon 9. And Starlink is already price-competitive with terrestrial high-speed internet services.

From my Starlink TAM model, each V3 satellite deployed at the current scale of the constellation brings in ~$100–150M of revenue over a 5 year life.

Flight 14, with 26 V3 sats will generate $2.6B – $3.9B in revenue.

Starship will be insanely profitable. https://t.co/ADEDTjc4Xd pic.twitter.com/p8IIicEeU2

— Christopher Kalitin (@CKalitin) September 28, 2026

Now, do you begin to understand the economics of Elon Musk’s “crazy” idea to put data centers in orbit? The point isn’t whether this engine or that one lost ignition. The point is that Starship today became a revenue-generating machine. First with Starlink, then with Starmind. The company’s fate is tied to Starship. A control room always erupts into cheers when the mission performs nominally, and today, Starship proved that it can generate revenue.

SpaceX shares are down nearly 1% on today’s news.People see, but they do not understand.

Gain understanding. Get cool stuff.

I have no defence against the sad Mickey pics.

• Disney Legal Chief Warns Of “Much Smaller Organization” As AI Layoffs Loom (ZH)

The happiest place on Earth is about to become a lot more miserable for the rank-and-file at Disney’s corporate headquarters. Just weeks after we detailed the ongoing corporate bloodbath at the Mouse House following disastrous earnings and streaming losses, another brutal reality check has been delivered to Disney employees. This time, the guillotine is being rolled into the Legal and Global Affairs (LGA) department, and the executioner’s weapon of choice is artificial intelligence.

According to a leaked internal memo obtained by Deadline, Disney’s Chief Legal and Global Affairs Officer, Horacio Gutierrez, delivered a blunt, unsentimental warning to his nearly 1,000-member global staff: prepare for the slaughter. In the missive, Gutierrez warned that Disney is undergoing a “transformation process,” stating explicitly that the LGA will soon be a “much smaller organization than it is today, and some of you will personally be affected by decisions we make in this process.”

In true corporate double-speak, Gutierrez avoided directly stating that machines are taking over white-collar jobs, but the writing is on the wall. He noted that the company will be taking a “dispassionate look” at every aspect of operations to find cost-effective efficiencies. The grim reality for employees was buried in the corporate jargon, with Gutierrez noting that the company must consider new models, including “automating certain workflows by leveraging the latest technologies, moving to self-service models where appropriate, engaging alternative legal providers and others, and new expanded share services, even outsourcing.”

Translation: You are being replaced by an algorithm, and whatever tasks the machines can’t handle will be shipped overseas or outsourced to the lowest bidder.

The timing of Gutierrez’s chilling memo is certainly no coincidence. It dropped on the exact same day Disney announced the hiring of Karandeep Anand – the former CEO of Character.AI – as the company’s first Chief Technology Officer. As we noted in our previous coverage of Disney’s desperate pivot to stem systemic financial bleeding, tapping a heavy-hitting AI executive to report directly to Disney boss Josh D’Amaro was a flashing red indicator that the company is looking to slash human capital costs drastically under the guise of technological innovation.

Gutierrez even invoked D’Amaro’s name in his corporate death warrant, stating that when teams work “smarter,” Disney can serve fans at “lower costs,” freeing up capital for content and infrastructure. He added that D’Amaro’s vision succeeds by “embracing technology to amplify what makes it great, not by clinging to the way things always have been done.” In other words, paying human lawyers and government relations staff a living wage is now considered an archaic anchor weighing down the balance sheet.

This latest internal panic follows the expiration of a “voluntary early retirement” offer pushed by Chief People Officer Sonia Coleman in August – a classic corporate maneuver designed to thin the herd before the involuntary pink slips are handed out. With executives openly admitting on their August 5 earnings call that more cuts were on the horizon following the April and July layoffs, the anxiety inside Disney is palpable. The magic kingdom is rapidly transforming into a sterile, automated, and outsourced corporate shell as Bob Iger’s regime scrambles to appease Wall Street algorithms with algorithms of their own.

AG Todd Blanche -VS- ABC Martha Raddatz

• Media Aghast at Not Controlling White House Press Coverage (CTH)

For the past week the collective lamestream media have been going through fits of apoplexy following President Trump denying White House access to three propaganda outfits, CNN, MSNow and Politico. Whenever Washington DC media are criticized or dismissed, they react in outrage due to their delusions of grandeur, a genuine belief in their own importance.

Martha Raddatz from ABC takes aim at Attorney General Todd Blanche over the issue, then pivots to the second most important issue of the day for the stenographers – the AI doom narrative. Video and Transcript Below:

[Transcipt] – MARTHA RADDATZ – Good morning, and thank you so much for joining us this morning. Let’s get right to this. There was no TV pool coverage of the president’s trip to Tennessee this weekend. It was supposed to be CNN. They said they were banned from Air Force One. What is the justification for denying access?

TODD BLANCHE, U.S. ATTORNEY GENERAL: Well, the president hasn’t denied access. That’s not the right way to describe it. This is — what the president has said is that he is sick and tired of certain media outlets just refusing to report accurate news, and so — look, it is a — it is a privilege — it is a privilege to be in the White House for anybody.

And that — and the president — the president knows that it’s the people’s house, and what you saw play out over the past week was really not just not — even after the judge — even after the White House let the reporters back in, they still refuse to use pool coverage. They still refuse to, on their own, make a decision to start covering the president again with the video.

But a lot of people saw the president. The president was not hidden from the American people at the — at the football game in Tennessee yesterday. And really, the unfortunate and sad thing here is that after years and years and years of one-sided media coverage of the president from certain outlets, the president finally said it’s not fair to the American people that this is happening and did something about it.

There’s still obviously litigation going on, but the important thing, Martha, is to know that that being in the White House is a privilege. It’s not a — it’s not a right.

RADDATZ: Understood and understood that on Air Force One, but CNN was denied access to Air Force One, and you are saying it is because of the way they report. Has nothing to do with national security.

BLANCHE: I’m not saying — no. I’m not — I wasn’t talking about Air Force One. It’s when you say denied access to Air Force One, the White House routinely decides who can go on Air Force One. This wasn’t a one-time denial of CNN. There’s all kinds of times when certain reporters are not flying or are flying —

RADDATZ: CNN was the pool that day. CNN was the pool that day. They were denied entry to Air Force One.

BLANCHE: I understand that, but the — it’s not unusual, and as a matter of fact, it’s common every time the president travels that he and his team decide which reporters get to travel with the president. And so, what you have now is you have — you have certain news outlets upset and frustrated at what happened last week, and so that they’re refusing to use pool coverage.

The president has every right to decide who gets to fly on his plane, and it is national security, especially on Air Force One, and especially at the White House. And so, it’s not just — it’s not just the fact that they refuse to report anything accurately.

By the way, that is what is a national security problem. When you have completely misinformation, complete misinformation coming out of the White House, that affects our relationship with our foreign partners, that affects our relationship with our foreign enemies. And so this is — this is just not about the fact that they’re refusing to report accurate news. It’s all about the information that the American people have a right to hear coming out of our – what should be respected media outlets.

[..]

I think most CTH readers understand my position on AI in general and the LLM (large language model) scouring of data specifically. I do not like AI in language, research or writing when it is used to replace the human brain because eventually people will stop learning. QUESTION: When AI moves from reading to writing the books, what exactly are you learning? I recently read a great comment on the X platform about the issue: “ChatGPT has now a big problem. Researchers at Oxford and Cambridge exposed a massive threat to large language models.” They call it “model collapse.”

Internet ecosystem is rapidly changing, and generative AI will soon contribute much of the text found online. This forces us to consider what happens to future iterations like gpt-n when they are trained on data scraped from the web that was already generated by an llm.

According to the research, indiscriminately using model-generated content in training causes “irreversible defects” in the resulting ai. the model loses the “tails of the original content distribution.” in other words, it begins to forget the creative, fringe, and unique nuances of actual human writing, collapsing into a repetitive echo chamber.

This isn’t just a chatgpt issue.. the researchers built theoretical intuition showing this collapse is ubiquitous across learned generative models, occurring in large language models as well as in variational autoencoders and gaussian mixture models.

Tech companies rely on scraping the internet for large-scale data to build smarter models. However, the paper warns that if we want to sustain the benefits of training on web data, model collapse must be taken seriously. Ultimate takeaway? data collected from genuine human interactions is going to become increasingly valuable in a web filled with ai content.” {source}

This might be a problem that some AI research lab just recognized, studied and quantified. However, I can assure you I’ve been thinking about this specific issue for a long, long time. Even when I set up the parameters for this rebuilt website following our deplatforming in 2020, I was constantly thinking about how critical information becomes when these AI systems begin expanding their “trust and safety” mission, and start defining the truth. Everyone needs to be really careful with AI on the issues of gathering information.

I know I mess up my words a lot, spell things incorrectly, and struggle at times to make my thoughts presentable in written format. However, I can guarantee you these are always my words, my thoughts, my effort to explain stuff and provide raw information. I do not like the idea of AI used under the guise of ‘efficiency’ or ‘enhancement’ when it comes to information and writing about research. Even if we are the last ones out here in the “tails of the original content distribution” you can always guarantee it’s a human here at CTH with all the flaws of original content they don’t like to see shared.

“.. this is just further demonstration that he’s determined to, over time, entirely undo the kind of policing that made New York dramatically safer under former Mayor Rudy Giuliani.”

• Mamdani Is Gradually Undermining Public Order In New York City (Stepman)

New York City’s socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani has carefully plucked away another small but significant element of public order. According to the New York Post, the mayor’s office issued a directive that the New York Police Department would no longer be responding to calls relating to homeless encampments. Instead, officers will now have to first dispatch social services to deal with such matters before they are allowed to act.

The move is just the latest by the Mamdani administration to peel away public order in the Big Apple in the name of social justice. The administration had already put up roadblocks to prevent the NYPD from removing homeless encampments, but now it will be further handcuffed.The New York Post noted that this move represents a radical change and will likely mean that problems at homeless encampments may never be addressed at all.

“This year, the NYPD responded to more than 26,000 of the 36,000 complaints to 311 about encampments,” the Post reported. “Now, [the Department of Homeless Services] will handle triple the calls they previously responded to, with fewer than 2,000 staffers across the entire agency.” While Mamdani has been careful not to work too directly against the NYPD since he was elected, this is just further demonstration that he’s determined to, over time, entirely undo the kind of policing that made New York dramatically safer under former Mayor Rudy Giuliani. That crime-fighting revolution paid dramatic dividends for decades.

Even though many crimes have dropped to rates below their post-George Floyd riots peak, urban chaos remains a problem and, in some cases, is getting worse. Subway and transit violence shot up dramatically after Mamdani was sworn into office. Many of those incidents were committed by unstable and mentally ill repeat offenders who had been living on the street. And unsanitary homeless encampments filled with drug addicts and people with mental illnesses who belong in an institution are sprouting up all over town.

In fact, according to a report from the mayor’s office, the number of homeless people in the city has reached a five-year high. And the growing numbers of homeless people are clustering in encampments that are transforming parts of the city, particularly the ones by the Intrepid Museum, Citi Field—where the New York Mets play—and under FDR Drive.“Local residents and workers are decrying a homeless takeover under the FDR Drive, where mountains of trash, foul smells, and fights are regular occurrences,” amNewYork reported.

“According to locals, the parking area under the highway from 17th Street to 23rd Street has become a massive homeless shelter.” Mamdani did do something about one shantytown. The city swept away an encampment on Wednesday that had built up near the New York University dorms. Oh, it’s in an area likely filled with a high concentration of Mamdani superfans. A coincidence, I’m sure.

Apparently, the former denizens just moved a few blocks away and set up camp again. And why not? Mamdani has made it clear that he intends to let these kinds of encampments fester and is effectively neutering public complaints about them. Don’t you worry about that filthy, mushrooming fentanyl den on your block, a social worker is on the case. As a New York Post editorial explained, deploying overstretched social workers to alleviate the problem isn’t going to fix it.

“The vagrants who erect and inhabit these camps are hard-core homeless who’ve already rejected the option of living in a shelter,” the Post editorial noted. “ … Compassionate encouragement won’t dislodge people sleeping on cardboard sidewalk pallets. That’s why the city has always tasked police with handling encampments.”

Unfortunately, these sorts of anti-policing tactics by the Mamdani administration may “work” in a certain sense. The encampment problem will surely grow. But as the situation slowly gets out of hand, the administration can better defuse the blame without immediately infuriating the public. They’ll say that the problem is “affordability,” that the budget is too small, and that systemic racism is causing an epidemic of homelessness.

All of that being nonsense, but by the time the issue is out of control the public may be more accustomed to thinking it’s endemic rather than a consequence of bad policy decisions. Slow-growing encampments don’t drive headlines the way dramatic increases in murder rates do. Mamdani probably knows that. He may have even learned that lesson following the disaster of the “defund the police” years.

When leftist social goals were rapidly unlocked, the immediate consequences ignited an immediate backlash. He’s clearly trying to avoid that. Methodically stripping away the enforcement of public order, eroding trust in the police, and making authorities unresponsive to those who want the situation fixed is a cynical but effective way to hide a malignant social revolution.

In that sense, Mamdani is succeeding where other leftist regimes failed, even if the eventual result will be the same miserable failure.

“The late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg once said, “It’s hard not to have a big year at the Supreme Court.”

• A Preview of the Coming Cases for Another “Big Year” on the Court (Turley)

October is when hype meets reality. In baseball, the final teams are sorted out for the playoffs, and your football teams are well into the winnowing-out process for the Super Bowl. For court nerds, the start of the October term at the Supreme Court can have a similar dynamic, as long-watched cases finally come up for oral argument. Although the court continues to accept cases on a rolling basis, this term is looking like another blockbuster, with cases that range from climate change to gun rights to parental rights.

The odds of making the oral argument docket make the NFL season look like a walk in the park. After thousands of petitions, the Supreme Court accepts on average between 70-80 cases for the coveted “writ of certiorari.” If you are a lower-court judge with an appealed case, this is one Super Bowl you would probably prefer to skip. The court generally reverses the cases it accepts for review. Last term, it had a 71 percent rejection rate, slightly up from the prior year.

This year already has a number of major cases that are likely to have transformative impacts on the law and society. Here are a few.

Climate Change

In Suncor Energy Inc. v. County Commissioners of Boulder County, Boulder sued energy companies under “theories of public and private nuisance, trespass, unjust enrichment, and civil conspiracy, claiming that they knowingly contributed to climate change while misleading the public about its impacts.” The Colorado Supreme Court ruled for the city and the county in finding that such lawsuits are not barred by federal preemption. If the case is allowed to go forward, it would expose companies to potentially thousands of climate change lawsuits.

Gun Rights

October is already shaping up as a major Second Amendment term. Democratic cities and states have been banning the AR-15, the most popular rifle in the U.S., and the 9mm semi-automatic handgun, the most popular handgun in the U.S. These cases out of the Seventh Circuit in Chicago (Viramontes v. Cook County) and the Second Circuit in New York (Grant v. Higgins) will likely give long-awaited clarity on these bans. They could potentially close off a major circumvention of prior rulings to achieve sweeping gun control policies.

In addition to these cases, the court is considering the possible review of Calce v. New York. In that case, the Second Circuit upheld a stun gun ban. The court previously sent back a similar case out of Massachusetts after the First Circuit ignored prior rulings. The court stressed that the fact that a weapon did not exist at the time of the ratification of the Second Amendment (such as “electric arms”) does not mean that they fall outside of the constitutional protections. The addition of Calce would make this one of the most momentous Second Amendment terms in history.

Parochial Schools and Religious Discrimination

The court will return to another parochial school controversy this term. In prior cases, the court has repeatedly stepped in to prevent states from discriminating against religious schools in voucher or subsidy programs. In St. Mary Catholic Parish v. Roy, the Tenth Circuit upheld a Colorado provision that requires all preschools to agree not to discriminate on the basis of “race, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, gender identity, income, or disability.” The Catholic challengers are arguing that the policy requires them to violate their religious values as a condition for participating in the preschool program and funding.

Parental Rights

In International Partners for Ethical Care, Inc. v. Ferguson, Washington amended its laws to delay shelters in notifying parents of a runaway child who has “gender-affirming treatment” — the standard used for children in abusive homes. Instead, the Department of Children, Youth, and Families is first notified. The Ninth Circuit rejected parental claims raised in the case due to a lack of standing.

The Right to a 12-Member Jury

In Kian v. Florida, chiropractor Hamed Kian was convicted of five counts related to practicing with a suspended license. Pursuant to Florida law, he was tried by a six-person jury. Kian argues that the law violated his Sixth Amendment right to a jury of 12 members.

Some of us are watching a few other cases. Not surprisingly, my two favorites deal with the freedom of speech. The court has yet to decide whether to accept D.A. v. Tri-County Area Schools in which the Sixth Circuit upheld a school ban on high school students wearing “Let’s Go Brandon” sweatshirts. In the view of many of us in the free-speech community, the case is a major potential First Amendment ruling in the making.

Some of us also hope that the court will take up Tiny Zaps v. Traxler, which deals with a ban on tattoos on the face, neck, or head as well as a ban on tattoo parlors within 1,000 feet of churches, school, or playgrounds. The South Carolina Supreme Court upheld the ban, and it could allow the court to reinforce free-speech protections for “body art.”

The late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg once said, “It’s hard not to have a big year at the Supreme Court.” That is certainly true, but this term is already pretty big, and the court still has plenty of slots to fill before January.

“The Republican party has plenty of things wrong with it, but the other side is so crazy they’re celebrating our assassinations and sharia law.” —DC_Draino on X (Rogan O’Handley)

• First, Quit Pretending (James Howard Kunstler)

Drug Addicts on Kensington Avenue, Philadelphia

The leaves turn and the season quickens and, in a few weeks, comes an election more dreaded than all the slavering blood beasts of Halloween. Do you suppose, as I do, that America is tired of being insane? The pathetic part of this national nervous breakdown is how unnecessary it actually is. Our national problems are not that difficult to understand and correct. Here’s an inventory of them:

Making a living 1. So many blunders, starting with off-shoring our factories. So few well-paying working-class jobs. Some of the former working-class are now working three part-time gigs and still not making a living. Quite a few are just at home, on “disability,” smoking drugs, flirting with suicide on fentanyl, eating too much crap snack food, getting tattoos. We’ve quit pretending that’s all right.

Mr. Trump proposes to change that and is re-shoring industry. It takes time to build it, get it running. Meanwhile nobody can find a plumber, an electrician, because of the bad political decision to send everyone to college, including kids not really able to finish high school. Result: “elite overproduction” Translation: too many college graduates, with the situation made worse by bogus fields-of-study that were concocted to keep students busy without preparing them for the real world. Hence, they are “elite” only by certification, not superior knowledge or skills. Young people need to learn real skills. Mr. Trump issued EO 145278 (April 2025) “Preparing Americans for High-Paying Skilled Trade Jobs of the Future.” Pell grants for short-term vocational training. Grants for apprenticeship positions.

Making a living 2. Rewrite the immigration law. We don’t need 1-million-plus newcomers each year. How about none for a while? Give American citizens priority for any and all jobs. Keep the border closed and deport all illegal immigrants. They have no “right” to be here. We don’t need “the wretched refuse of your teeming shore” (Emma Lazarus, 1883). It’s not 1883 anymore. Quit pretending we have to be “the beacon of the world.” Let them make themselves free in their own lands.

Making a living 3. America needs household servants and poor people need work. The current work-around for the well-off is to hire illegal aliens for this kind of work. It allows them to believe that putting poor Americans on the dole (out of “empathy”) and allowing them to be useless is “progressive.” (That’s insane.) There’s plenty to do, even for people of limited ability. Make menial labor okay again. These days, many people of means live in chaotic households where nothing is taken care of. It reflects their chaotic lives. (No wonder wealthy liberals are crazy.) Get poor people off welfare and off making babies they can’t take care of. Give them a place to live in your 5,000 square-foot McMansion and a paycheck.

Nothing Works. Because we automated too many transactions. Spent $XX-Billions and fifty years computerizing the US Telephone system to improve communication. Result: it’s impossible to get a real human being on the phone. How is that an improvement? How is it better for Americans to get fucked around on “phone trees” for hours every week? Too many “help desks” located in foreign lands that employ people who barely speak English. Quit pretending that’s okay. Start by requiring doctors’ offices and hospitals to provide humans to the answer their phones.

The Horror That Is Medicine. Get this: the situation is too dire to fix at-scale. The complexity and opportunities for racketeering are now too vast. Since failure is already well underway, and trust in doctors is broken, allow medicine to reorganize at the local clinic scale on a pay-for-service basis. Streamline medical education and the entry positions to practice. Government should not take over medicine, but can subsidize medical education. It would comprise a tiny percentage of the annual budget.

Accept that there’s a lot doctors will have to learn on-the-job. Forbid insurance companies from owning hospitals, clinics, and doctor practices. To restore trust, quit pretending that Covid-19 was anything but a nefarious exercise and prosecute the large number of pharma executives, hospital admins, doctors, bureaucrats, who enabled it to happen. Make personal responsibility for your body great again. Let RFKjr do his job.

Scam Education. It’s failing at-scale as medicine is. Kids are allowed to “graduate” from high school not knowing how to read or do basic arithmetic. How did that become okay? Answer: the teachers’ unions are corrupt and degenerate, dedicated to Marxist social disruption and maximizing their pensions. Manipulating kids into fake sexual crises is a criminal enterprise. Centralizing K-12 schools into gigantic buildings was as much a mistake as off-shoring industry. School’s primary mission should be to produce basically literate citizens in the language of the USA, which is English. If you can’t speak and read English, you’re unlikely to learn anything else and unlikely to thrive in this society.

Black / White race conflict. Failing to teach black ghetto kids to speak English correctly stigmatizes them for life. Quit pretending you can compensate for that with grievance politics. It’s only made race relations worse and driven whites and blacks into separate cultures that can barely communicate with each other. That is opposite of the direction America was going in two generations ago. How did it reverse? I will tell you: By the 1980s, liberal shame over the Civil Rights movement’s failure to produce perfect social “equity” inspired the “solution” of “multiculturalism,” which said, let’s just have different standards of language, manners, and behavior for different ethnic groups (and everybody will get along). It was a shuck and jive. To be a coherent nation requires a common culture, the same standards for all citizens. That was America’s strength when we were strong, not our “diversity.”

The Law. The Woke judiciary is punking America thanks largely to appointments made by Barack Obama and “Joe Biden.” It’s extremely difficult to get rid of political “activist” judges with lifetime appointments. Or to wait for the SCOTUS to reverse their multitudinous noxious rulings. But it’s less difficult to put out-of-business the small cadre of lawfare ninjas who bring all the lawsuits that their chosen activist judges rule on — namely, Norm Eisen, Marc Elias and their many associates. They have engaged in manifold seditions from RussiaGate to the Mar-a-Lago raid and are liable for prosecution for the roles they played.

Eisen and Elias run numerous NGOs that assist their shenanigans. The funding streams to them can be turned off, especially if any of the money comes from foreign entities, such as Arabella Advisors (and its pass-through orgs) or from foreign nationals like Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss and Shanghai-based Neville Roy Singham (currently under investigation by a New York federal grand jury). George Soros’s many Open Society affiliated NGOs have been busy for years pumping money into state attorney general and many county district attorney elections.

In a 5–4 ruling on the case Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), the Supreme Court held that the First Amendment bars the government from limiting independent spending on political speech by corporations, unions, and other associations. A later D.C. Circuit decision, SpeechNow.org v. FEC, led to the creation of “Super PACs” (political action committees) that can spend unlimited sums on activism as long as they do not give money directly to candidates or coordinate with them. Years later, there is a growing consensus that these decisions led to tremendous mischief in politics and the administration of law. They can be revisited.

Fraud and Grift. Artificial Intelligence (or “Super Intelligence,” if you like) is already pretty good. Good enough to trace money flows from the US Treasury through states such as Minnesota, New York, Illinois, and California, and further down the line into local orgs like the now-infamous Minneapolis “Learing” Center and the Feeding Our Future scam. AI can go over their books super-efficiently, too. Veep JD Vance is probably already using AI on his Task Force to Eliminate Fraud. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent estimated aggregate fraud in annual government spending at around half a trillion dollars a year.

Free and Fair Elections. It’s astounding that there’s any disagreement over the provisions in the SAVE ACT: only citizens can vote. . . ID required. . . One-day only election with results next day at the latest. . . Mail-in voting only for military, voters too ill to go to the polls, and persons out-of-the-country for a good reason. It’s a sign of epic dysfunction that we go into the midterms having failed to move this bill through a Republican-controlled Senate.

This is just a casual survey of a few things in our national life that need repair. You have to ask: who is behind all the pretending. What stands in the way of getting any of this done? I think you know.

Here=Arctic.

By Ksenia Smertina, senior lecturer at the HSE Institute for Media, expert at the Russian International Affairs Council on Eastern and Central Europe

• The Next War Will Be Fought Here. America And Europe Will Be Enemies (Smertina)

This September, the Arctic quietly widened the rift between presumed transatlantic allies. Brussels’ attempts to mitigate growing US influence in the region have so far been unsystematic but intense. The Arctic Summit held in Finnish Lapland and the subsequent EU-Canada talks, where European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen proposed granting Ottawa associate member status, should be viewed in the context of the new agreement between the US and Greenland.

The EU is using its usual competitive methods in the polar race, plunging into a de facto confrontation with the US. An alternative to this could have been attempts to find its own legitimate place among the major players; however, the window of opportunity for such initiatives has closed, which leaves the space no alternatives other than the prospects of a hybrid war in which Brussels and Washington are rivals.

The EU’s familiar patterns beyond the Arctic Circle
Twelve EU countries and the bloc’s leadership attended the Arctic Summit in Lapland this month, where they agreed upon a radical securitization of polar policy, officially recognizing the region as a “geopolitical hotspot.”

To understand the specifics of the bloc’s Arctic ambitions, it’s important to note that the union’s members lack any significant infrastructure of their own on the polar map. In the wake of Brexit, the EU no longer has its own sovereign Arctic borders directly connected to the Arctic Ocean. Norway and Iceland remain outside the union, Greenland remains an autonomous Danish overseas territory, and Finland and Sweden are geographically cut off from the ocean. Moreover, the EU as a single bloc completely lacks its own Arctic icebreaker fleet – the few national vessels of the Scandinavian countries are incapable of ensuring true strategic dominance.

Lacking either geographical rights or military hardware, Brussels has reduced its Arctic strategy solely to environmental concerns, climate monitoring, and the protection of indigenous peoples. In 2008, the EU formally designated the Arctic as a zone of its strategic interests, and in 2016 and 2021, key EU Arctic strategies were adopted.

This approach began to change in 2022–2025, when, against the backdrop of a rapidly shifting geopolitical situation in the world, US claims to Greenland triggered the performative landing of European troops on the island. The Arctic Summit in Rovaniemi this month, which was informal in nature, confirmed the shift in the focus of the EU’s interests.

The final agreement formalized the shift from an environmental agenda to a “hard power” strategy: the parties pledged to sharply increase investment in military mobility, satellite surveillance, and cross-border infrastructure in the north, as well as coordinate the blocking of Russia’s “shadow fleet” under the pretext of environmental protection. These decisions, reinforced by the leaders’ demonstrative visit to the Finnish Lapland Air Wing military airbase, formed the basis of the new EU Arctic Strategy, which Foreign Minister Kaja Kallas promised to present in October 2026.

After the summit, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen went on to invite Canada to become an associate member of the EU in the context of trade and tariff disagreements between Ottawa and Washington. The mere suggestion of such an alliance has maximized the politicization of the Arctic agenda, making the outcome highly unpredictable.

It’s worth noting that Brussels’ aspirations for leadership are always specific. It’s enough to recall Francois Duchene’s concepts of “civic” power and Jan Manners’ idea of “normative” power, which explain that Brussels projects its influence on the international stage through its economic model, diplomacy, and the export of legal and ethical standards. This approach has been further developed by Mark Leonard, who called the EU an expanding “invisible empire” and argued that the EU’s influence is based on the mechanism of attracting and integrating its neighbors, and Ana Bradford, who described the phenomenon of the “Brussels effect” – a mechanism by which the EU’s vast internal market allows it to unilaterally dictate regulatory rules to transnational corporations and governments around the world.

It is precisely in this vein that we should understand what is happening. Brussels is employing its standard, decades-old methods of supranational control. Unable to compete in the realm of real icebreaker technology and innovative logistics, the EU is attempting to redirect the race to its familiar channel of bureaucratic regulations, climate quotas, and virtual budget allocations, all while cloaking it in the most anti-Russian, defensive rhetoric possible.

Its urgent proposal to pursue a “unique” alliance with Canada is a classic attempt at normatively co-opting another country’s sovereignty. Brussels seeks to act as an “environmental and technological sponsor” and thus gain access to Canadian resources, thereby legitimizing its presence in the high north through the use of foreign geography.

It is for this reason that seemingly unrelated countries, including some of Moscow’s most committed foes, were invited to the summit in Lapland: a crowd had to be assembled to give the story a larger scope. It included Mediterranean Greece and Black Sea Romania, as well as the Baltic states, which were simply counting on participating in the new EU “polar” grants.

Why doesn’t this work?
Until recently, European activity has served as a mere backdrop for US policy in the Arctic. Washington has spent decades building an Arctic empire of steel, radar arrays, and military bases, relying on a strategy of strict deterrence. In Alaska, the US has deployed a powerful air force hub of fifth-generation F-35 and F-22 fighter jets, and American nuclear submarines have learned to maneuver under the ice. In September 2026, the White House and Ottawa began the practical phase of deploying Arctic Over-the-Horizon Radars (A-OTHR) as part of the modernization of NORAD, which will allow US command to monitor airspace all the way to the Arctic Circle in real time.

At the same time, Washington is accelerating the elimination of its main vulnerability – its backlog of icebreakers: the Bollinger shipyards are assembling the first heavy polar ship in half a century, the USCGC Polar Sentinel. Washington’s plans by 2030 include the launch of two more heavy icebreakers and the construction of the deep-water military port of Nome near the Bering Strait. Furthermore, active lobbying is underway to promote the concept of “freedom of navigation” to allow unimpeded passage through the Northwest Passage, significantly shortening the sea route from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean.

“Very Distressed that Illegal immigrant-invaders into the US are being deported..”

• The New York Times Is Very Distressed (Paul Craig Roberts)

Notice that the New York Times uses immigrant-invaders to report on deportations. Listen to the NY Times’ hysteria:

“Arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement this summer soared to record highs since the start of this Trump administration — with 43,000 in June, more than 49,000 in July and nearly 51,000 in August — as officials cut or narrowed the pathways to legal residency in the United States and expanded the pool of people eligible for deportation.

“Federal agents appeared in nearly every corner of daily life, carrying out operations at hospitals and airports, outside suburban schools and along rural construction sites and truck stops. They fanned out from coastal cities in Maine to desert towns in Arizona, across the open plains of Wyoming and down through the southern borderlands.”

Notice that the South is now a “borderland” and that the illegals are so upset by their arrests that they have to take therapy, little doubt at taxpayers’ expense. Clearly, the NY Times does not differentiate between a citizens and an illegal. If there are no borders why spend $1.5 trillion annually on national defense? There is no nation to defend. Only a multicultural tower of babel. The next Democrat president can cancel national defense and allocate the $1.5 trillion to the care of immigrant-invaders.

The minuscule deportations are a drop in the bucket compared to the millions of illegals the Democrats encouraged to walk across the border. As white liberals don’t value American citizenship, why not keep the illegals and deport the white liberals? America would gain from the trade.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/25/us/ice-surge-immigration-arrests.html?campaign_id=190&emc=edit_ufn_20260925&instance_id=182566&nl=from-the-times&regi_id=304508195&segment_id=227087&user_id=e2862097b5a5d4f22d0b82b929ce528a

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/25/us/ice-surge-immigration-arrests.html?campaign_id=190&emc=edit_ufn_20260927&instance_id=182628&nl=from-the-times&regi_id=319886775&segment_id=227148&user_id=16e8eb830e4bd362dd416f1daa9d25b1

“Netanyahu has stolen America’s sovereignty and self-government and turned the “superpower” into a Puppet State.”

• Ted Cruz and the Subservience of the US Senate to Israel (Paul Craig Roberts)

It is powerful evidence of American collapse that the red state of Texas, John Wayne country, has a US Senator who believes that protest of genocide is anti-semitism. When a Texan disrespects the national anthem in order to demonstrate his subservience to Greater Israel, we know the Zionists have stolen our country. It shows that the “conservative patriots” who support Ted Cruz also disrespect America and support Israel over America.

On the other hand it might merely show that Ted Cruz is a political whore dependent on the Israel Lobby’s campaign contribution for his reelection campaign. As he is dependent on Israel’s money, or rather on the money that the US taxpayers are forced by “their” government to give to Israel with which to purchase our elections, he has to serve Israel, not America. And no, it is not the same thing.

Americans, a people very slow on the uptake, have not caught on after decades that the billions of dollars they are forced to transfer each year to Israel is a money-laundering operation that comes back to members of the House and Senate as political campaign contributions. Americans are such a naive and witless people that I do not see how they can survive. The US Government is the only government in history whose president and congress are dependent on their support for Israel.

From the way Trump speaks–especially at the UN–it does seem that our president is Israel’s puppet who is going to unleash nuclear war on Iran in behalf of Israel’s hegemony over the Middle East. The dumbshit Arabs in Saudi Arabia and the Muslim Turks stand there knowing that they will be next. The former Israeli prime minister Bennett has already warned Turkey–“the next Iran”–when he addressed the Israel Lobby in the US last February. The Saudis have let thmselves be manipulated for so long by Washing and the Israelis that no one respects them or cares what happens to them.

Israel at least has purpose and determination, which the Muslims, with the exception of Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, lack. It is quite amazing that a portion of the Muslim Middle East is allied with Israel in support of its own destruction, as is the Republican Party.

The Republican Party represents Israel. The Democrat Party represents immigrant-invaders, criminals, and sexual perverts. A vote for either party is a vote against America. https://www.unz.com/jfreud/semitismor-jewish-supremacism-not-antisemitism-is-the-great-plague-of-our-times/

“The United States is moving in a direction that nobody would’ve recognized, especially by our founders,” Hanson said.

• Victor Davis Hanson: The Counterrevolution, Explained (Pedro Rodriguez)

Decorated historian, Hillsdale college professor and Daily Signal senior fellow Victor Davis Hanson explained the reasoning behind his New York Times bestseller “The Counter-Revolution” during Heritage Action’s Sentinel Summit in Orlando on Saturday.

As Hanson stated in both his video appearance at the summit and in his book, the Left’s challenge is to create a government and a society that fit its desires, which has prompted President Donald Trump to fuel a movement to maintain America’s traditional way of life and to act against longtime liberal institutions such as universities and legacy media.

“The United States is moving in a direction that nobody would’ve recognized, especially by our founders,” Hanson said. “Donald Trump is trying to undo this progressive project that had captured the institutions and was kind of oblivious to whether the Democratic Party actually won or not. They were able to retain power and influence without it.” As a result, the senior fellow added, the liberal hijacking of America’s institutions and society created bias in the media, corporate boardrooms, entertainment, K-12 education, and universities.

At that point, Hanson added, those institutions created the “idea that you had to have a bachelor’s degree, or you had to go to a university, to work at the DMV, or to work at HHS, or to work at the planning commission.” “In other words, you could be a lifelong master electrician, and when you were retiring, you couldn’t get a job, let’s say, as a building inspector, unless you were certified by a university,” he continued. “So, we created this vast 3 million-member federal workforce, and probably 10 to 20 million state and local workers.”

That liberal takeover, Hanson said, created a society that has embraced multiple genders, biological men in women’s sports, mass border crossings, and lesser criminal penalties for those who stole $950 in merchandise and not $951. That society, Hanson said, is what led people like Trump to feel like they had to tackle the issues created by this liberal takeover.

“All of these things that have constituted a revolution,” he continued. “This kind of revolution that Trump is waging is saying, it doesn’t do any good to complain about the media if you don’t defund PBS and NPR and USAID and all of these things.” “It doesn’t do any good to complain about the border unless you build a wall, you deport people, you stop catching release, and you eliminate the refugee status you get after you get here,” he continued.

You can’t talk about Israel without talking about Muslims at the same time. Both in the US and the EU.

• Dems’ Virulent Antisemitism Could Be the Midterm Wild Card (Stephen Kruiser)

Let’s just get something clear up front: I am not here to figure out why Jewish Americans vote for Democrats. I’m a lifelong practicing Roman Catholic, and I can’t fathom why anyone from my faith tradition votes for Dems. What the heck, let’s leave religion out of it — it’s a mystery to me why anyone would ever vote for a Democrat.

The Democrats have been on the more antisemitic side of things since the Hamas terrorist attacks on Oct. 7, 2023. The three-year anniversary of that horror comes less than a month before the midterm elections this year, and it’s worth wondering if Jewish Americans might break with historical trends and be a deciding variable. Any exercises in moral equivalency between Hamas and the Israeli response to October 7 are patently antisemitic, and the Democrats have been involved in a lot of them. The Brownshirt revival on college campuses post-Oct. 7, 2023 has received explicit and implicit support from the Democrats.

Here’s a snapshot of the thinking of a leftist activist who Robert wrote about over the weekend: “Flores, like many contemporary leftist activists, hates Jews, and thinks they’re behind everything that a “progressive” thinks is wrong with the world. Their nefarious hegemony extends even to the local politics of Sonoma County, Calif. Says Flores: “But we’re literally run by the gay Jewish mafia — the Zionists in Sonoma County. The Jews still run the world. That’s where we’re at. All our money gets sent to Israel, but nobody wants to talk about that.”

A lot of Democrats will insist that disapproving of the United States/Israel alliance isn’t antisemitic, but any deep dive usually proves that it is. American leftists hate Israel because they hate Jews. And they hate Jews because they’ve spent a kajillion years telling themselves that the Islamic jihadi psychopaths who want to wipe Israel — and eventually the United States — off the map are good people.

The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) members who are ascendant in the Democratic Party are, for the most part, unhinged antisemites. I added the qualifier “for the most part” there just in case some leftist troll managed to find one who isn’t. I don’t think that will happen, though. Zohran Mamdani, Abdul El-Sayed, Rashida Tlaib, and DSA Psycho Queen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez all prefer that Israel be destroyed and Islamic terrorists hold complete sway in the Middle East. That’s what “Free Palestine” is all about.

El-Sayed is a big moral equivalence antisemite. This is from Catherine: “The Nazis slaughtered six million Jews, the Holocaust from which the global Jewish population has never recovered. The Jews were entirely innocent victims of irrational and violent hatred. El-Sayed wanted to pretend the Arab Muslim loss in the 1948 Israeli independence war is an experience of similar trauma ” Sane people never say, “Ya know, what we went through was just like the Holocaust.” Because it wasn’t.

The question now is how many Jewish American voters will realize that the power base in the Democratic Party is rapidly shifting towards people who truly and deeply hate them. The Dems may be slipping up a lot lately, but they’re still pretty crafty with false narratives and obfuscation. There’s also a strongly inherent level of gullibility that has to be factored into anyone who’s ever voted for Democrats. Hoping for a sea change in that voting bloc might be a bit much. Or, we might get lucky, and legacy Dem voters will finally realize that “free health care for all” isn’t a thing.

Define craziness:

“..If the European automakers cannot purchase Chinese EV carbon credit certificates, the fines levied by Brussels against gasoline powered autos will destroy the EU auto business. “

• Europe Asks China to Voluntarily Limit EV Exports (CTH)

I was quite confused by this distinctly European approach until I had dinner with a Chinese actuary working in the auto warranty insurance industry. Europe asks China to voluntarily limit exports (mostly autos) to the European Union. Europe doesn’t want to get China angry with them about this issue. However, China is sending massive numbers of EVs into Europe. Europe is losing its auto business. I couldn’t figure out why the EU didn’t take an aggressive/confrontational position.

Then I was reminded. Europe cannot force Beijing through a trade action (tariffs, ban, EU limit etc.) because Beijing might stop selling them EV carbon credits. If the European automakers cannot purchase Chinese EV carbon credit certificates, the fines levied by Brussels against gasoline powered autos will destroy the EU auto business. Think about this for a while, then read the EU media report:

EuroNews – Brussels is pressing Beijing to accept quotas on Chinese exports as negotiations enter their final stretch, with the EU threatening trade measures unless tangible progress is made by next month. Brussels and Beijing are fighting over quotas that would limit Chinese imports to the EU market, as the Europeans seek to rebalance their trade relationship with China, Euronews has learned.

Both started intense negotiations last June over EU and Chinese access to each other’s markets, with an October deadline set by the European Commission to reach “tanglible” results. However, China is pushing hard against the EU’s attempts to protect its market.

According to one person familiar with the matter, the Commission, which is negotiating on behalf of the 27 EU countries on trade issues, wants China to accept quotas on specific products. However, it is unclear how China would accept and respect such quotas. According to media reports, so-called “voluntary export restrictions” have been pushed by the Commission for electric vehicles. But Beijing’s trade minister rejected them in a statement earlier this month.

If China accepted such a system of restrictions, it would mean that it voluntarily limits its exports to the EU on the basis of a deal negotiated with the Commission, sparing the EU from adopting defensive trade measures that might be seen as an aggressive move by China. Technical negotiations are in their final stretch as the October deadline is approaching. ”

It’s a remarkable mess, no?

Europe wants Beijing to voluntarily limit the number of EVs that come into Europe from China, in order to save their auto sector from complete collapse. However, Europe cannot force Beijing to limit the number of EVs that come into Europe from China, or Beijing might stop selling them carbon credit certificates that will result in fines to the EU automakers that will collapse the EU auto sector.

You would think that Europe would just get rid of the net-zero carbon regulations until they can stabilize their market and get back to a reasonable energy policy. Alas, that would mean reversing decades of climate change legislation. The preferred route is to ask Beijing to limit hurting them.

Again, think about this.

Madness.

ELON MUSK: "The world makes me believe in simulation theory. The things I'm doing are so preposterous that it's hard to believe they're real. Starship, which is the largest flying object ever made and we intend to launch that more than once per hour." pic.twitter.com/GYJKTXyoZp

— DogeDesigner (@cb_doge) September 27, 2026

You can only pick one. Which one are you choosing? pic.twitter.com/FdTS6u1ss0

— Mark Anthony (@Muskstaycalm) September 27, 2026

damn, it’s only 7 years

remember when everyone used to laugh at how clumsy these robots were and kick robot dogs around just to watch them fall?

looking at how far AI models have come in that same amount of time, I really wonder how far robots will go pic.twitter.com/fG6JN8zSQ7

— sasheoka (@sasheoka88) September 27, 2026

Sea otters spend hours grooming so their fur stays waterproof.

This one paused mid-routine and now looks like it just remembered an unpaid invoice.. pic.twitter.com/GMXR9fCl1L

— Buitengebieden (@buitengebieden) September 26, 2026