CHINA MAY CONTROL INTERNET OF THINGS: A bipartisan pair of congressmen are warning that embedded modules designed and produced in China and installed in components of U.S. military and infrastructure equipment could be remotely ordered to shut down their host. This could be a huge problem and the congressmen want to know what the FCC is doing about it,

YEAH, I VERY SELDOM ANSWER UNKNOWN CALLERS: Election polling: Spam calls, mistrust make it harder to predict how people will vote.

JUST ANOTHER DAY IN POST-POST SOVIET RUSSIA: Andrei, You’ve Had Another Industrial Accident? “This morning brings news of another ‘industrial accident’ in Russia. Via OSINTdefender, comes news of a major explosion at the Zagorsk Optical-Mechanical Plant. From video shot on scene, it appears that artillery shells were either being stored there, or were being made/refurbished there. Read the thread for more details, but a couple of things pop out for me.”

JAMES PETHOKOUKIS ON “IRRATIONAL TECH PESSIMISM.”

So he seems mostly to describe people who aren’t excited about recent news on room-temperature superconductivity and fusion power. My own muted response is based on lots of exciting reports in both fields over the years that haven’t panned out. Maybe this time is different — I fully expect that at some point we’ll have both — but at this late date a wait-and-see attitude seems wholly rational.

The other kind of pessimism, though, is really pessimism about humans and institutions. Technologies that would excite me in a flourishing liberal democracy with competent, trustworthy institutions — which we emphatically do not have today — excite me less in a less wholesome world where abuse of power seems not merely the norm, but the goal.

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: BREAKING: House Oversight Republicans tracked $20M in foreign sources to Biden Inc.

PERSEVERANCE: Poll Shows Most New Hampshire Voters Would Vote for Trump Even if He’s Convicted.

UPDATE: That’s GOP primary voters, of course.

MONEY? WHAT MONEY? I’m still surprised — although I shouldn’t be — that there are still people out there who refuse to believe that the Biden family ever got money from Ukranian, Russian, Kazakh and Chinese companies and oligarchs.

But JustTheNews brought the receipts: The House Oversight Committee now has traced more than $20 million in funds from questionable places.

“In its third memo analyzing bank records, the GOP-led House Oversight and Accountability Committee reported it had found a clear pattern of the Biden family and its partners doing business with Russian, Ukrainian, Kazakh, Chinese and Romanian figures who had legal and other troubles and then collecting money around the times of gaining access to Joe Biden.”

What’s the story now, “Big Guy”?

ED MORRISSEY ON OPPENHEIMER REVISIONISM: Mythology II: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Oppenheimer.

The film, clearly sympathetic to that perspective, fails to explain why Truman made that choice, other than as a decision based on choosing between dead Americans and dead Japanese. That in itself is enough of a legitimate wartime calculation, but the issue was far more complicated than that, and even more complicated than calculations about the cost of an invasion.

As this debate erupted on social media, Twitter follower Crosspatch recommended a book from 1999 that had the full and declassified scope of material from both Imperial Japan and the US about what exactly happened in 1945. Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire by Richard Frank deconstructed all of the revisionism, especially the fanciful notion that Japan had already decided to surrender before either of the bombs dropped, or even initially after both of them dropped. Frank demolished all of these arguments nearly a quarter-century ago from records of the imperial government, including that of their diplomatic correspondence.

More here.

DISPATCHES FROM THE GERONTOCRACY: Dianne Feinstein Hospitalized after Fall at San Francisco Home.

CHANGE: WeWork warns of ‘substantial doubt’ it can stay in business after going from $47billion valuation to the brink of bankruptcy.

The New York-based workspace-sharing company, once valued at $47 billion, said its ability to stay in operation is contingent upon improving its liquidity and profitability over the next 12 months.

WeWork was stung by the Coronavirus pandemic as social distancing caused people to work from home and the company has still not reported a profit since restrictions were eased.

WeWork said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that challenges include softer demand and a ‘difficult’ operating environment.

‘Substantial doubt exists about the company’s ability to continue as a going concern,’ the firm said.

Plus: “The company was valued at $47 billion at one point, before investors started to drop off due to [former CEO Adam] Neumann’s erratic behaviour and exorbitant spending.”

FIGHT THE POWER: UC Faculty Members Rebelling Against DEI in Math Classes.

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: By 5-4 Vote, Supreme Court Revives Biden’s Regulation of ‘Ghost Guns.’

The Supreme Court on Tuesday temporarily revived the Biden administration’s regulation of “ghost guns” — kits that can be bought online and assembled into untraceable homemade firearms.

In defending the rule, a key part of President Biden’s broader effort to address gun violence, administration officials said such weapons had soared in popularity in recent years, particularly among criminals barred from buying ordinary guns.

The court’s brief order gave no reasons, which is typical when the justices act on emergency applications. The order was provisional, leaving the regulation in place while a challenge moves forward in the courts.

The vote was 5 to 4, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Amy Coney Barrett joining the court’s three liberal members — Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson — to form a majority.

Disappointing.

OUT: TARGETING CIVIL WAR GENERALS. IN: TARGETING CIVIL WAR HORSES. Canceled: Washington & Lee University removes plaque honoring Robert E. Lee’s horse.

NEVER GONNA HAPPEN: The Latest Disney Rumor Is Mouse-S*** Crazy.

I’M SURE RON DESANTIS MISSES THEM APPROPRIATELY: Pro-woke professors leave Florida universities in protest.

AI, THE NEXT GENERATION: OpenAI to Unleash New Web Crawler to Devour More of the Open Web.

The web crawler will collect publicly available data from websites, while avoiding paywalled, sensitive, and prohibited content, according to OpenAI. Similar to other search engines like Google, Bing, and Yandex, however, the system is opt out—by default, GPTBot will assume accessible information is fair game. In order to prevent the OpenAI web crawler from ingesting a website, its owner must add a “disallow” rule to a standard file on the server.

OpenAI also says that GPTBot will preemptively scan scraped data to remove personally identifiable information (PII) and text that violates its policies.

Until the AI grows powerful enough to ignore those restrictions.

READER BOOK PLUG: From Jeremy Lott, The Three Feral Pigs and the Vegan Wolf.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: What If They Gave a Republican Primary and Nobody Came? “Are we really doing this Republican primary season? I mean, I know that debates and voting are scheduled, but have you met anyone who’s thinking, ‘I can’t wait to get this all started?’ Presidential election cycles in the United States are longer than the John Galt speech in ‘Atlas Shrugged,’ which I’m not sure really ever ended.”

COLLUSION: This Tech Mogul Bankrolls a Chinese Propaganda Network—And Left-Wing Lawmakers Like Ilhan Omar.

MARK JUDGE: From The Fabulous Baker Boys to Barbie: The ‘privileged victims’ of the Left.

AND WE CAN GUESS WHY: January 6th committee didn’t turn over its records to the House.

BIDENOMICS, IT’S WORKING! Credit card balances jumped in the second quarter and are above $1 trillion for the first time. “The Fed’s measure of credit card debt 30 or more days late rose to 7.2% in the second quarter, the highest rate since the first quarter of 2012.”

DISCIPLINE AND PUNISH: Social Engineering Is Now The Primary Objective Of Woke Corporations.

SOURCES: Joe Biden Knows Who Brought Cocaine to White House.

The Secret Service knows, too.

EVERY INSTITUTION HAS BEEN CORRUPTED: MIT Took Chinese Money To Research AI. The University May Also Have Helped The CCP Surveil Uyghurs.