August 29, 2025

HOW WILL AI IMPACT HIGHER ED? My own feeling is that like a whole lot of “advancements” we have seen, it will end up benefiting people who are curious and energetic wildly disproportionately, and harm people who just use it as a crutch. Most will be in the latter category.

Posted at 4:25 pm by Robert Shibley

GOOD LORD: A general and an admiral turned down last-minute chances to keep Taliban out of Kabul.

A top U.S. general and a key U.S. rear admiral both turned down last-minute chances which potentially could have kept the Taliban out of Kabul during the August 2021 fiasco of evacuation from Afghanistan. General Frank McKenzie rejected a proposal from the Taliban to keep the enemy forces out of Kabul, while Rear Admiral Peter Vasely shot down an overture from allied Afghan commanders that may have saved the nation’s capital from the utter chaos that ensued.

McKenzie, the now-former commander of CENTCOM, held a mid-August 2021 meeting with Taliban leader Mullah Baradar in Doha, Qatar which would end with the Taliban taking control of Kabul and the U.S. relying upon the goodwill of Taliban fighters to provide security at the Kabul airport during the evacuation.

During that meeting, Baradar said the Taliban was willing to withdraw its forces from in and around Kabul and would let the U.S. send in as many troops as it wanted to secure the Afghan capital and conduct the U.S. evacuation free from Taliban interference, but McKenzie admits that he turned the offer down on the spot.

Neither McKenzie nor Vasely responded to Jerry Dunleavy’s requests for a comment.

Posted at 3:52 pm by Stephen Green

FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY [VIP]: That’s a Gun in My Pants AND I’m Happy to See You. “It’s time for your much-needed break from the serious news, and this week, we’ll learn how to get the police’s attention with undo haste, the uncomfortable truth about freelance dentistry, and why Kentucky Woman is your next ex-girlfriend.”

Posted at 3:21 pm by Stephen Green

THE SUICIDE OF EXPERTISE:

Spare me the crocodile tears at the CDC exits! This institution DESTROYED children and RUINED trust in health institutions for a generation. The whole place needs to be gutted!

When historians look back on the COVID years, they won’t just document a virus. They’ll document the collapse of America’s most trusted health agency into a factory of fear, censorship, and bad science. The CDC didn’t just miss the mark –> it repeatedly tripped over its own contradictions, buried evidence, and treated the public as an obstacle instead of a partner.

Read the whole thing.

Related:

(Classical reference in headline.)

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

EASY RIDERS, RAGING OEDIPAL RESENTMENT:

This isn’t a very new development of course. In a 2007 article by Norman Podhoretz, he quoted a Commentary staffer who said at a (very early) anti-Vietnam War protest in 1960, “Do you realize that every young person in this room is a tragedy to some family or other?”

It was of an evening in the year 1960, when I went to address a meeting of left-wing radicals on a subject that had then barely begun to show the whites of its eyes: the possibility of American military involvement in a faraway place called Vietnam and the need to begin mobilizing opposition to it. Accompanying me that evening was the late Marion Magid, a member of my staff at Commentary, of which I had recently become the editor. As we entered the drafty old hall on Union Square in Manhattan, Marion surveyed the 50 or so people in the audience and whispered to me: “Do you realize that every young person in this room is a tragedy to some family or other?”

The memory of this quip brought back to life some sense of how unpromising the future had then appeared to be for that bedraggled-looking assemblage.

Not least of which, conquering a heretofore conservative Hollywood. The estranged relationships between the leftist movie brats who became the “New Hollywood” of the late ‘60s and ‘70s and their more conservative “Greatest Generation”-era fathers is a theme that repeats frequently in Peter Biskind’s 1998 retrospective, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls:

[Candice] Bergen was deeply sympathetic to the antiwar movement, embarrassed by her father, Edgar Bergen’s, friendship with the Old Hollywood right—Ronald Reagan, Bob Hope, Charlton Heston, as well as the fact that he had made his living throwing his voice into wooden dummies.

* * * * * * * *

Carmine [Coppola] had been a child prodigy, whose instrument was the flute. He hit his peak in his twenties, and went downhill from there, once bottoming out by playing the piccolo at the track with a Nedick’s hat on his head. Like many people who flee from what they’re best at, Carmine took his talent for the flute for granted, and longed to spread his wings, compose symphonies or conduct opera.

Carmine was the “maestro,” and his wife, Italia, catered to his every whim. The emotional life of his family turned on what Francis later called the “tragedy” of his father’s career. Coppola once said of his father, he was “a frustrated man who hated anybody who was successful.” Remembers Talia, “All of us felt guilty, about being young, about having our own lives. I thought, How can I go to school, how can I be happy, how can I be anything, with my poor father not doing well. It’s a terrible thing when you feel that your success is occurring when someone close to you is experiencing failure.”

* * * * * * * * *

Once again, like Star Wars, The Godfather, and Taxi Driver, Apocalypse revolved around the issue of parricide. The New Hollywood directors were created in the crucible of generational conflict, and the highly charged relationship between fathers and sons became their core theme. Like the other Vietnam films, Apocalypse was less an attempt to grapple with the war in any realistic way than an occasion to hold up a mirror to the home-front struggles it provoked. Brando, of course, was the ur-father of this generation, the actor whose performances and rebellious example inspired its best work, yet who now stood a colossus astride the road to greatness, an obstacle Coppola—who long enjoyed a complicated love-hate relationship with the actor—had to overcome. Kurtz, lurking in shadow, clad in black, at once model and caution, became his Darth Vader, another incarnation of Charlie Manson, the scourge figure who had gone native and now, unchallenged, ruled over his family. The compound was his Spahn ranch. From another angle, Kurtz was one more incarnation of Coppola himself, or at least the monster of self-indulgence he had become.

* * * * * * * * *

The script [to Chinatown that Robert] Towne finally handed in told a long, intricate tale, teeming with characters and scenes, chock-full of detail and small touches that limned the texture of America in the ’30s. It contained a startling subplot, in which the theft of water and the rape of the land were mirrored by an unspeakable family crime, incest between Noah Cross, a rapacious developer, and his daughter, Evelyn. In the portrait of Cross, Towne may have been settling some family scores. Cross displayed a passing resemblance to Towne’s own father, Lou. Both were developers. According to Towne’s wife, Julie Payne, “Lou wanted him to go into the building business, which neither Robert nor his brother, Roger, had any interest in. I think his father hated Robert. He didn’t pay any attention to him until he became successful.”

Steven Spielberg and George Lucas eventually saw a different path forward in the plots of their movies, which were essentially 1950s b-movies and 1930s Republic serials shot on zillion-dollar budgets, rather than the dark European-inspired fare their friends had been churning out during the 1970s:

Spielberg’s father buried himself in his work, and was usually absent. He clashed with Steven over his son’s indifferent performance in school. Steven was an underachiever. He hated reading, watched TV instead, became, along with Lucas, one of the first directors of the TV generation. His great love was movies, and he occupied himself making elaborate productions in Super-8—sci-fi and World War II pictures using his classmates and contriving elaborate and resourceful do-it-yourself special effects.

* * * * * * * *

Because as much as Spielberg and Lucas wanted to indulge their Peter Pan complexes, return the boomers to the sandbox, much as they backed kids against adults, Spielberg’s movies in particular are colored by longing for the absent dad, a nostalgia for authority. His families are often fatherless; the plots are set in motion by the moral and emotional vacuum at the center of the home, and resolved by father surrogates. Both the Star Wars trilogy and the Indiana Jones trilogy end on a note of generational harmony, with the revelation that the repentant Darth Vader is Luke’s father, and the reconciliation of Indy with his father in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Indy’s final words are, “Yes, sir!” In Close Encounters, Neary-the-child, entering the mother ship in a trancelike daze, surrenders himself to the superior power of idealized grown-ups, grown-ups as they appear to children, in the same way that Star Wars ends with the famous parody of Triumph of the Will. The evil over-thirties of the Nixon era would become the avuncular adults of the Reagan era—Reagan himself in particular. Lucas and Spielberg finally succeeded in turning the counterculture upside down.

Not coincidentally, Lucas and Spielberg ended up ruling the industry in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s.

Posted at 2:12 pm by Ed Driscoll

NO FORM OF GOVERNMENT WILL SURVIVE A RULING CLASS THAT’S THIS BAD.

Posted at 1:40 pm by Glenn Reynolds

HMM:

Related: Harrison Butker, Harbinger?

Plus:

Posted at 1:23 pm by Glenn Reynolds

MORE NUKES IS GOOD NUKES: America’s first modular nuclear reactor begins construction near Idaho lab.

The facility, called Aalo-X, is being built next to the Idaho National Laboratory’s Materials and Fuels Complex in Idaho Falls. Aalo expects to complete construction and reach criticality by July 4, 2026, a timeline the company says demonstrates the speed at which small, modular nuclear reactors can be deployed.

The groundbreaking comes just two weeks after the Department of Energy (DOE) selected Aalo to participate in President Trump’s Nuclear Reactor Pilot Program, announced in June 2025.

The initiative is designed to fast-track the testing and approval of next-generation nuclear designs outside of national labs, clearing a quicker path toward commercial deployment.

Would it be rude to add a “Faster, please,” anyway?

Posted at 12:46 pm by Stephen Green

KURT WARNED THEM ABOUT THEIR NEW RULES, TIME AND TIME AGAIN:

Posted at 12:33 pm by Stephen Green

MORE ANTICOMMUNISM PLEASE: ‘Freedom’s Fury’: An Anti-Communist Documentary From Tarantino and Liu. “There’s a reason why the ‘blood in the water match’ is an ‘untold’ story. The political left, which is still putting up socialists for public office, does not like to remind people of the brutality of the old Soviet Union. It might offer a parallel to the crazy modern left in the West and warn people off of this evil pseudo-religion.”

Plus: “We told the Soviets we didn’t want to live a lie. We wanted to live a human life.”

The Left’s worst nightmare.

Posted at 12:25 pm by Glenn Reynolds