IT’S ONE OF THOSE ISSUES EVERYBODY KNOWS ABOUT BUT NOBODY WILL DO ANYTHING ABOUT: US bases ‘ill-equipped’ to stop drone attacks, NORAD deputy says.

ICYMI: Pop Your Corn: It’s Billionaire Vs. Billionaire for the Future of California.

SCENES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Engaging, culturally relevant and useless: Teachers aren’t trained to teach writing.

When he took master’s degree courses at Teachers’ College, Columbia, Hunt thought his charismatic graduate-school professor would explain how to teach writing in The Teaching of Writing class. Nope. “Every class discussion found its way to the subjects of power and identity,” writes Hunt. There was “Writing As Social Action,” but nothing on how to give effective feedback to students.

“Literacy” has become “a general skill that could be bolted onto any domain or concept,” he learned. That opened the door to “digital literacy, critical literacy, media literacy, and something we talked about ad nauseum called racial literacy.”

Traditional literacy was considered outmoded and oppressive.

Of course.

MINITRUE IS FULLY OPERATIONAL ON AIRSTRIP ONE:

Fucking mental https://t.co/4BLcnbYOD1

— Tommy Robinson 🇬🇧 (@TRobinsonNewEra) August 17, 2026

SETON MOTLEY: Is Ohio Dem. House Candidate Leonard Lying to Keep His DSA Under a Bushel?

TO ASK THE QUESTION IS TO ANSWER IT: Why Is the University of Michigan Hiding Grades?

Starting in fall 2027, the University of Michigan will exclude first-semester grades from overall GPAs for first-year students in its College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, purportedly to curb a “mental health crisis.” The university declined to tell the Wall Street Journal how it decided to launch its “grade covering” pilot program. But university documents suggest that grade covering is part of a larger effort to reshape the university around the students it admits rather than expecting those students to adapt to a demanding academic environment.

Starting in fall 2027, the University of Michigan will exclude first-semester grades from overall GPAs for first-year students in its College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, purportedly to curb a “mental health crisis.” The university declined to tell the Wall Street Journal how it decided to launch its “grade covering” pilot program. But university documents suggest that grade covering is part of a larger effort to reshape the university around the students it admits rather than expecting those students to adapt to a demanding academic environment.

It looks to me like the school is just setting at-risk student up to fail later rather than sooner.

THEY WON’T: The 15 Questions We DARE the Media to Ask Michigan Nutjob Abdul El-Sayed.

TO BE FAIR, SOCIALISM IS JUST LEGALIZED THEFT: Socialists Now Say That Shoplifting Is A-OK.

DISPATCHES FROM THE BLUE ZONES: SCOTUS takes up pre-K religious discrimination case against Colorado.

One consequence of Colorado’s lurch to the political left has been the adoption of massive new state and regulatory programs. (This has led, predictably enough, to large budget deficits and neglect of core government services). Among the new programs is one that enables residents, including undocumented immigrants, to send children to pre-kindergarten (pre-K) schools at taxpayer expense.

However, Roman Catholic pre-K schools found themselves excluded from participating because the law mandated that “each preschool provider provide … an equal opportunity to enroll and receive preschool services regardless of … sexual orientation [or] gender identity.”

Of course, requiring acceptance of non-binary gender ideology directly contradicts most traditional religious teachings, including Catholic doctrine. Moreover, at the pre-school level, one might suspect that gender dysphoria is more likely the product of adult mismanagement than the child’s real proclivities.

As if this were not enough, the Colorado Department of Early Childhood, which administers the pre-school program, adopted regulations permitting schools to discriminate in ways favored by “woke” ideology. For example, they are permitted to give preferential treatment to certain racial groups and, in the phrase of the program director, “the LGBTQ community.” The program director justified this by saying that the beneficiaries of this treatment were groups that, in America, historically faced discrimination.

Stay tuned…

IT MIGHT BE AN EVEN BIGGER WIN THAN IT FIRST APPEARS: Trump Reveals YUGE Win on Drug Prices.

“MORE TREES, LESS CRIME” DOESN’T REALLY SEEM TO ADD UP: The Ivy League Solution: Plant More Trees to Reduce ‘Gun Violence.’

“WELL, YEAH,” SAY AMERICAN LEFTIES:

Tom Homan on anti-ICE Democrats:

"So you want to abolish an agency that found 151,000 children. You want to abolish an agency that seized enough fentanyl to kill every American three times over again. You want to abolish an agency that is attacking sex trafficking" pic.twitter.com/PTLEAt7Mrc

— Open Source Intel (@Osint613) August 17, 2026

THAT THING THAT NEVER HAPPENS HAPPENED FOR TWO DECADES: ICE Helps Catch Illegal Alien Who Voted for 20 Years.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: NASA Administrator ‘extremely confident’ in Artemis 3 mission in 2027. “The Artemis 3 mission will begin with the launch of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket, which will send a test version of its Blue Moon Mark 2 lander into low Earth orbit. That will be followed days later by the launch of the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft, which will rendezvous and dock with Blue Origin’s vehicle.”

FROM THE ONGOING “WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO TUCKER?” CHRONICLES:

By the way: Osama bin Laden’s letter was never “censored.”

TikTok just stopped pushing it to the top of the algorithm.

That’s what Greenwald and Carlson are mad about, because they hate America and love America’s enemies.

— Max 📟 (@MaxNordau) August 17, 2026

It helps to remember that Greenwald is a commie and Carlson is… whatever the hell he is now.

POP YOUR CORN: It’s Billionaire vs. Billionaire for the Future of California. “Disagreements between a couple of Google billionaires over how to best fight California’s so-called billionaire tax might just help the ballot initiative become law in November, according to a New York Post report this weekend — but there’s so much more to it than that.”

AND THIS IS AT BERKELEY: I teach calculus at Berkeley. Some of my students can’t do middle school math.

I teach mathematics at UC Berkeley. Three days a week, I stand in front of lecture halls with 500 to 1,400 students. By the second week of the semester, I already know who is in trouble. Some students are five to eight years behind in mathematics. Office hours that should be spent discussing integrals instead become lessons on fractions and basic algebra you would expect students to learn in middle school.

That is why this spring and summer, thousands of faculty members across all 10 UC campuses — including more than two-thirds of UC’s mathematics faculty — signed open letters urging the system to restore the SAT and ACT in admissions. Five Nobel laureates joined us, along with professors from across the university, including Beatriz Manz, Berkeley’s first Latina full professor.

We did so because what an admission letter is supposed to mean — that a student is ready to attend the school — no longer matches what we see in our classrooms.

Read the whole thing.

TO BE FAIR…:

CHROMOSOMES ARE NOW OFFENSIVE. WE’VE REACHED PEAK STUPIDITY. https://t.co/zN4RbXxihZ

— Brandi Kruse (@BrandiKruse) August 17, 2026

…reality is offense to people living in denial of it.

DISPATCHES FROM AL-BRIṬĀNIYĀ: The Policewoman Who Remembered Britain Was Still Britain.

GOOD LUCK WITH THAT: Recall Petition Filed Against Seattle’s Far Left Mayor Katie Wilson. “Certainly the current crop of far-left ‘Democratic Socialists’ mayors ruining American cities are not the sharpest knives in the drawer (though Zohran Mamdani seems to display the sort of unprincipled cunning exhibited by many confidence artists), but Seattle’s Katie Wilson, someone who was still being financially supported by her parents at age 43 when running for mayor, strikes one as possibly the very dullest in the lot. From refusing to investigate fraud at Somali-run daycare centers to encouraging capital flight from Seattle via a proposed ‘billionaire’s tax’ (‘I think the claims that millionaires are going to leave our state are, like, super overblown. And if, you know, the ones that leave, like, bye!’), Wilson seems a particularly obtuse example of the breed. Now two Seattle citizens have filed a recall petition against her.”

THE BIDEN CABAL HANGOVER WILL LAST FOR YEARS:

🚨ARRESTED AGAIN🚨

A drug trafficker who was pardoned by Joe Biden over fentanyl-trafficking charges has been arrested AGAIN for allegedly selling fentanyl.

Walter Lee Muhammad made an appearance in federal court on possession with the intent to distribute controlled substances… pic.twitter.com/xAImTtu53M

— Breanna Morello (@BreannaMorello) August 17, 2026

KDJ FILLING IN FOR KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: There Goes the Neighborhood — A Chinese Sniper Just Moved Where? “In a move that seems far too stupid to be real, Philip Qiu, a man who is ‘linked’ to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), bought an historic building roughly 650 feet from the White House. The money, $8.4 million, came from a family foundation.”

BECAUSE OF COURSE: DSA Praises Fidel Castro in 100th Birthday Tribute, Denounces Marco Rubio as ‘Genocidal.’

The Democratic Socialists of America website called deceased Cuban dictator Fidel Castro a “stalwart symbol of anti-imperialist struggle and self-determination,” while denouncing Secretary of State Marco Rubio as genocidal.

In a tribute to Castro on what would have been his 100th birthday Thursday, the DSA website commemorated the “historic significance of both this day and the man.”

The fast-growing socialist organization that’s made strong inroads in Democratic Party primary elections over the past year, said that they have “a long history of solidarity with the Cuban people, their revolution, and their self-determination.”

Any solidarity with their hunger, crushing poverty, or desire for American liberty?

HMM:

🚨 SPLC Had A Paid Informant inside INFOWARS that feed inside info to Sandy Hook Attorneys

This Is Plenty to Overturn Both Sandy Hook Default Judgements Against Alex Jones & Get Alex Jones New Trials in Texas and Connecticut, and Have the Attorneys Disbarred@RealAlexJones https://t.co/Arm6ZBTrNF pic.twitter.com/PnT9iYhbLY

— INFOWARS FAN (@InfoWars_tv) August 15, 2026

DON’T BET ON IT: Is Mark Cuban FINALLY Figuring Out His Side Is Nuts?