MEDICAL SCIENCE MARCHES ON: Oral pill could provide new option for people with sleep apnea.
September 17, 2026
OLD AND BUSTED: The Snail Darter and the Delta Smelt.
The New Hotness? Great crested newts could thwart Piddington migrant camp.
Great crested newts could scupper plans to build a camp near an Oxfordshire village to house as many as 1,256 asylum seekers.
Campaigners in Piddington, which voted to leave the UK in protest at the proposed camp, have unearthed records showing a plethora of protected wildlife next to and on its site.
In an apparent blunder, the Home Office’s ecological assessment of the area, submitted as part of its planning application, claimed that there was no evidence of protected newts, bats or reptiles.
Campaigners are claiming that unless the Home Office redoes its ecological assessment, and introduces protective measures possibly including moving the newts, it will be open to a legal challenge that could thwart the asylum camp.
The errors form the basis of a High Court challenge to the plans launched on Wednesday night.
Dr Claire Brenner, a resident with a zoology degree who uncovered the evidence, said: “If the Secretary of State determines this application with this materially incomplete information, that’s open to legal challenge.
“If they proceed to work on the site without a licence, then potentially it’s a wildlife crime.”
As one wag asked on X, “So let me get this straight… The Government care more about the safety of NEWTS than Women and Girls?”
Yes. Next question?
OUR CALIFORNICATION CONTINUES APACE: Amendment 87: How the Broncos play into Colorado’s tax fight.
Like any CEO, a head coach doesn’t have infinite money. He’s stuck with a salary cap, competing against 31 other teams for the same shrinking pool of ridiculously overpaid talent.
Enter Amendment 87, which offers most of us a token tax cut while nearly doubling the rate on those evil, hated rich people we call Denver Broncos. If it passes this fall, every Bronco currently taxed at Colorado’s flat 4.4% starts paying 8.4%.
Football players take a lot of hits to the head, but their accountants don’t — and unlike our legislators, accountants (and even concussed football players) can do arithmetic. All else equal, a player has to earn 8.4% more to play in Denver than to play somewhere with no state income tax at all.
Any player who plays for the Miami Dolphins, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Jacksonville Jaguars, Las Vegas Raiders, Tennessee Titans, Dallas Cowboys, Houston Texans or the Seattle Seahawks gets an instant 8.4% raise compared to playing for Denver under Amendment 87.
Run Peyton Manning’s numbers again: at $20 million a year, that 8.4% is $1.68 million a year — $8.4 million over a five-year deal. Double those figures to adjust for inflation, and you’re talking real money even by NFL standards.
Sure, plenty of things factor into where a star chemist, programmer, performer or quarterback decides to live and work. But an 8.4% pay cut isn’t a rounding error. It’s the kind of number that ends up circled on a napkin in some agent’s office come free agency.
Not that it matters, but it’s not just football teams competing for star talent. Every Colorado business is as well.
Few things are as mobile as talent.
INDOCTRINATION MASQUERADING AS EDUCATION:
cult is overused but exactly right in these sorts of contexts. as we know from a trillion institutional meltdowns centered on these trainings, if they weren't intentionally built to give power to power/control to certain Cluster B types, they may as well have been https://t.co/9dvqp7JpNe
— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) September 17, 2026
THEY DON’T DRIVE ANYMORE, LET THEM DO SOMETHING: The E-Bike Boom: Teen Independence vs. Parental Dread.
I JUST WANT TO TELL YOU GOOD LUCK, WE’RE ALL COUNTING ON YOU: Can James May land an Airbus A350?
AS FORETOLD BY THE PROPHETS: Harry and Meghan’s Two-Day British School Year Ends in a Predictable Security Soap Opera.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: How Turmeric Can Support Gut Health, According to Nutrition Experts.
THAT WOULD BE NICE: Soros-Backed DA Larry Krasner Going Down? “While I would be delighted to see pro-crime Krasner see hard time in Club Fed, I would be even more interested in possible revelations from a robust discovery process exposing just what communications pass between the numerous tentacles of various Soros-backed organizations and Soros-backed DAs.”
THE IRONIES OF DEM-SOC: In Blue State America, It’s Always 1984.
One thing Orwell understood about the all-powerful state is that it can’t tolerate the family or organized religion. In 1984, the state survives by turning children against their parents.
Massachusetts just proved that he was right.
In December 2024, Massachusetts child welfare authorities removed 15-year-old Sophie Kutzko from her devout Catholic parents’ home after they refused, on religious grounds, to affirm a transgender identity that a counselor at her school initiated with their knowledge or consent. Sophie is 17 now, still a ward of the state under the Department of Children and Families. Joseph and Arlene Kutzko are suing to get her back.
“You start with school policies that refuse to inform parents when a child rejects their sex and claims another identity,” said Vernadette Broyles, the attorney representing the Kutzkos. “That’s part of a system that starts everything down the rabbit hole.” She added there was “a direct school to DCF pipeline in this case as we have seen elsewhere.”
This isn’t confined to Massachusetts. Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.) signed two bills in 2021 letting minors hide abortions and transgender treatments from their own parents. And school districts across the country have quietly followed suit, concealing gender transitions from moms and dads who still, legally, have every right to know and reject.
When leftists started picking up Orwell’s 1984 after Trump took office, it wasn’t because they saw it as a warning; it was because they saw it as an instruction manual. Make no mistake about it: in blue states, there is a coordinated campaign to convince children that the state loves them more than their own families do. Orwell called it decades ago. The Democrat Party is out here proving him right.
Insert obligatory reference to Nat-Soc operatives asking themselves, “Are we the baddies?” here:
AND MERZ KNOWS JUST THE MAN TO DECIDE WHAT INFORMATION IS CORRECT AND PERMISSIBLE:
The chancellor of Germany says free speech is just a kooky American idea that he doesn't share:
“Please don’t come to me with free speech… That is at most a libertarian political understanding from parts of the USA that I personally do not share. A liberal society must still… https://t.co/xETjMt6RMB
— Ezra Levant 🍁🚛 (@ezralevant) September 15, 2026
Conveniently enough, that man just happens to be Friedrich Merz.
MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Say Goodbye to Hollywood… If It Even Exists Anymore.
Amid all this there was one radiant certainty: that he believed in civilization, and that civilization was still alive—precariously in England, perhaps, but magnificently in France, in its architecture, its wine, its national culture, in the villages and churches he had loved to visit on his Lambretta scooter ever since he first arrived in the Pyrenees. Even the president, Charles de Gaulle, had once granted a state funeral to the poet Valéry, and de Gaulle’s own memoirs, Scruton discovered, were both exquisitely written and illuminated by what the president called a certain idea of France.
In May 1968, then, as he visited Danielle in Paris, with his friends spending their days on the barricades, what Scruton saw shocked him. The atmosphere of that month was genuinely revolutionary. Ordinary life practically stopped, replaced by strikes, occupations, demonstrations, meetings, and spontaneous theater events. The entire city seemed to be involved in a mass political conference. The Paris police chief, Maurice Grimaud, called the events of May 1968 “the strangest . . . that Paris, and indeed France, had ever lived through.” As Arthur Marwick wrote in his history of the ’60s, the activists really believed that transformation was around the corner—that “the society we inhabit is the bad bourgeois society, but that, fortunately, this society is in a state of crisis, so that the good society which lies just around the corner can be easily attained if only we work systematically to destroy the language, the values, the culture, the ideology of bourgeois society.”
When the bricks started hitting the windows and the cars went up in flames, Scruton felt, at one level, a “literary critical” distaste: The whole performance was shallow and vulgar. More viscerally, he experienced an anger, a desire to fight back on behalf of what was most precious to him. He had little political knowledge. What he had—from his battles with his father and his headmaster, from his experiences as a grammar-school boy at Cambridge—was a long training in rebellion and its ironies. You can rebel against the left by being more radical than they are; you can rebel against people and institutions that you also respect; you can rebel to provoke; you can rebel on behalf of tradition and the establishment; you can rebel simply by baffling and disconcerting the people who think they’re better than you. (“What do you mean, potatoes?”) Many people in the 1960s were caught up in the revolutionary fervor of the hour, or swept along on a current of their own emotions. Scruton’s rebellion was always likelier to be conscious, deliberate, and original.
And so we come to the celebrated moment, described many times and most vividly in Gentle Regrets, when looking down from the little flat on the Rue de Bérite, Scruton recoiled with all his mind and heart from the revolutionary spirit of 1968. Probing his friends’ politics in the following days, he became convinced that whatever he believed, it was the opposite of that. “I came back to Cambridge,” he once said, “determined to reanimate a political outlook for the modern world.”
Rejecting “les événements de Mai 68” was extremely wise: Michel Foucault and the Glamour of Evil.
DEMOCRACY!
In a stunning political move, the chief judge of the Minneapolis federal bench disclosed the behind the scenes collaboration between all judges to thwart legal proceedings related to immigration cases this year.
Patrick Schiltz, who admitted his longtime involvement in a… https://t.co/DbkrOP9nGY
— Julie Kelly 🇺🇸 (@julie_kelly2) September 17, 2026
More:
Patrick Schiltz, who admitted his longtime involvement in a pro-migrant nonprofit, reveals how judges remained on their cell phones nonstop to halt deportation proceedings. And rather than evaluate each case individually — as is required — the judges developed pro forma orders (as I predicted) to immediately stop cases in their tracks.
This is something:
Schiltz: “Some judges built templates of legal orders so they could respond quickly to some of the detention issues that were arising again and again.”
Emphasis added.
NO ENEMIES TO THE LEFT: Dems Get Crazier, NYT Coverage Stays the Same.
Most normal Americans would agree: This year’s Democratic candidates are noticeably stranger and more radical than they’ve been in past elections. The New York Times, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to have noticed.
For whatever reason—blind partisanship, most likely—the Times’s coverage of these uniquely nutty and terrorist-adjacent cranks has been as flattering and credulous as ever. Scandals are downplayed or ignored, sketchy associations shrugged off. The past comments most Americans would consider genuinely insane are dismissed as old news. Business as usual.
No, her moment hasn’t come. Nixon is an anti-Israel socialist running in Florida. The Times fawned over her “high-volume tactics” and suggested she “doesn’t fit the mold” of other socialist candidates. As evidence, the paper cited her ownership of Cafe Resistance, a left-wing bookstore and coffee shop that glorifies convicted cop-killers. The Times didn’t mention that last part. Nor did it scrutinize her refusal to pay her fair share in taxes.
Much more at the link.
Also, I apologize for the mistake in the Insta-headline. There’s nobody to the left of the NYT.
PERSONNEL IS POLICY:
NEW from me:
Zohran Mamdani's newest senior adviser edits a magazine for "thinking gay communism," called for the "abolition of the police," praised a 1970s Marxist bank robber, called Gandhi "a racist anti-Black misogynist," signed a letter defending Hamas's "right to resist"…
— Jon Levine (@LevineJonathan) September 16, 2026
LIMITED TIME DEAL: Seat Cushion for Tailbone & Sciatica Pain Relief. #CommissionEarned
CLAUDE RAINS UNAVAILABLE FOR COMMENT: James Talarico’s Lesbian Minister Just Outed Him.
BEEGE: Said the Spider to the Fly: EU Issues Invitation to Canada to Be Its First ‘Associate.’
For a while there, I thought petite Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney was just flexing his minor muscles for local consumption and the elections in Quebec where his party is currently polling poorly.
But with this latest move, I do have to wonder if this globalist agenda wasn’t his aim all along – glomming onto any excuse to move the Syrupeans’ relatively minuscule economy out from under the protective, and what’s been nurturing umbrella of the United States into the arms of the European Borg Collective.
Spoiler: That was his agenda all along.
ROB LONG: Coyote Vs. Studio.
A successful studio walks a tightrope. It needs to be big enough to take the Coyote vs. Acme swing—big enough to green-light the oddball, release it widely, and eat the loss if it comes—but not so big and debt-saddled and answerable to a fractious quarterly-earnings call that the verdict on a promising movie gets made in the tax department instead of the theater.
Warner Bros., under David Zaslav, didn’t make it across the tightrope. It was big enough to pay for Coyote vs. Acme, but too big to release it. The studio is now in the process of being swallowed by Paramount Skydance, in a deal worth something north of $110 billion. The proposed combination is making its treacherous path through regulators and hostile state attorneys general. And to sweeten the prospect, David Ellison, the man trying to do the swallowing, has made a very specific California-friendly promise: The combined company will release 30 theatrical films a year, 15 from each studio, each with a real 45-day theatrical window. Last year, for comparison, Paramount released eight movies. So, big talk from Ellison. It’s worth remembering that in 2022, Zaslav promised that Warner Bros. would release 16 films in 2023 and 20 in 2024. He ended up delivering 11 and nine. Quarterly debt payments don’t care about your promises.
If Ellison keeps his promise, there will soon be a shelf of weird, specific comedies that got to exist because the combined company was large enough to absorb the risk but not too large to take the risk in the first place. But Ellison might simply end up owning the latest studio to fall off the tightrope, and the guys at Ketchup [Entertainment] will have another shot at picking up dead projects and making some real money.
Speaking of Warner Brothers: Warner Bros. Is Having Its Worst Box Office Stretch in Nearly Three Decades.
As September arrives, Warner Bros. still hasn’t produced a single $100 million domestic grosser this year. The Bride!, Mortal Kombat II, They Will Kill You and The Mummy have all failed to provide the sort of mainstream theatrical breakthrough the studio desperately needs. Practical Magic 2, arriving this week, was supposed to be one of the obvious candidates to change that. Current tracking, however, has been nowhere near the level required for a $100 million domestic run.
And that makes the historical comparison particularly fascinating.
Warner’s last comparable drought came in the late 1990s. Contact, released in July 1997, became a $100 million domestic film, finishing just above the century mark. Then Warner went roughly a year without another one until Lethal Weapon 4 arrived on July 10, 1998. Lethal Weapon 4 ultimately reached $130.4 million domestically.
There is a delicious bit of irony in that comparison. Contact was a prestige-minded science-fiction movie starring Jodie Foster, directed by Robert Zemeckis and based on Carl Sagan. Lethal Weapon 4 was the fourth entry in a wildly successful action franchise starring Mel Gibson and Danny Glover. Warner’s solution to the drought was not some carefully engineered brand strategy. It was simply a giant movie arriving at exactly the right moment.
The same problem feels different today because the theatrical marketplace itself has changed.
Assuming Warner Brothers is swallowed up by David Ellison’s Paramount Skydance, they’ll be yet another Covid-related death: Christopher Nolan’s Warner Bros. Partnership Betrayal Was a Big Mistake.
Like with all things regarding the current state of media, from the fading popularity of the MCU to the rise of video game movies, Nolan’s breakup with Warner Bros. can be traced back to the COVID-19 pandemic. On Mar. 15, 2020, all theaters in the United States shut down following the pandemic as many states went into lockdown. There was concern about whether theaters would ever open again. Christopher Nolan’s then-current film, Tenet, was given the director’s favored third-weekend-of-July release date and was set to be one of the year’s biggest films.
Nolan was never going to let Tenet be sent straight to streaming as Warner Bros. had done with Scoob!, and the studio wanted to keep the filmmaker happy after many years of creative partnership. Nolan wanted the movie delayed until September 2020 and hoped it could be positioned as the first major Hollywood film to welcome audiences back to theaters. Tenet had a limited release at first and was rolled out in the United States and a few select countries over the coming weeks. However, this was before a vaccine became available, leaving many moviegoers uneasy about returning to theaters.
Four months after Tenet’s limited release, Warner Bros. made the controversial decision to release its entire 2021 slate of films, along with Wonder Woman 1984 at the end of 2020, in theaters and streaming on HBO Max day-and-date. This initiative was known as Project Popcorn. Nolan, a big proponent of the theatrical experience, famously balked at the decision. On Dec. 7, 2020, Nolan told The Hollywood Reporter:
“Some of our industry’s biggest filmmakers and most important movie stars went to bed the night before thinking they were working for the greatest movie studio and woke up to find out they were working for the worst streaming service. Warner Bros. had an incredible machine for getting a filmmaker’s work out everywhere, both in theaters and in the home, and they are dismantling it as we speak. They don’t even understand what they’re losing. Their decision makes no economic sense, and even the most casual Wall Street investor can see the difference between disruption and dysfunction.”
Related: The Inexplicable Suicide of Hollywood.
“NONPARTISAN” EXPERTS: Nearly 100% of NIH employee donations go to Democrats.
ERIC S. RAYMOND:
This is the case against AI doom. Pass it on
First we recaptulate standard x-risk argument: we build AI substantially smarter than humans → it becomes an autonomous optimizing agent → its goals are misaligned → instrumental convergence makes it seek power and resist…
— Eric S. Raymond (@esrtweet) September 17, 2026
There’s really no way to properly excerpt from this one, so read the whole thing, as they say.
