FRAUD ALL THE WAY DOWN:

NEW: RFK Jr. says Medicare spending on wound care patches exploded from $200 million in 2019 to $14 billion last year: "It's all stolen."

Bad actors billed Medicare billions by slapping the most expensive skin grafts on elderly and dying patients who didn't need them.

"The… pic.twitter.com/IUQxlzFNSr

— KanekoaTheGreat (@KanekoaTheGreat) September 30, 2026

More:

“The doctors who prescribed them would get 6% of the sales cost. And so, they were incentivized to prescribe more expensive products. In Europe, they spend 35 cents a cubic inch. We were spending $135, and that went up to $2,000 a cubic inch.”

“So 2019, we were paying $200 million. Last year we spent 14 billion. All stolen. It’s all stolen. And we were on track to spend 23 billion this year.”

“We put an end to it, and we now have driven that cost down to somewhere around a billion dollars.”

Bravo.

IT’S MY THURSDAY ESSAY FOR VIP SUBSCRIBERS: Three Brilliant Movie Adaptations Their Authors HATED.

HEY, BIG SPENDER: South Korea to invest up to $200B in Alaska LNG pipeline, US power plants, Trump announces.

The investment also includes a natural gas plant in Texas and eight new nuclear power plants across the country, Trump said during remarks in the Oval Office.

Trump said the deal came as part of a trade agreement between South Korea and the U.S. in which the U.S. would lower the Asian country’s tariff rate to 15 percent in exchange for hundreds of billions of dollars in investment.

Trump particularly touted the Alaska pipeline investment, known as Alaska LNG because it would transport liquefied natural gas, as allowing the U.S. to export more gas.

“The United States is already the largest natural gas producer and exporter in the world, and this pipeline will help us expand those exports even further,” he said.

Energy dominance, indeed.

GIRL CAN’T HELP IT:

they cannot pic.twitter.com/uuICcbU502

— crunchyrugger (@crunchyrugger) September 30, 2026

WOW: Israeli Who Helped Take Down Hijacker Describes Harrowing Scene.

HEH:

100 Israeli passengers vs One Muslim Pilot. What a completely disproportionate response from israel.

— Anastasia Volkova (@thedutchessil) September 30, 2026

NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: Rockefeller Brothers Fund Sent Nearly $32 Million to China-Based Nonprofits, Watchdog Finds. “While political spending by far-left billionaires and networks has attracted attention, the role of nonprofit organizations such as the Rockefeller network has been less extensively scrutinized, even though it is influential. If people think of Rockefeller charity at all, they might recall John D. Rockefeller Sr.’s role in founding the University of Chicago, where the Rockefeller Chapel is a campus landmark, or Abby Aldrich Rockefeller’s role in founding New York City’s Museum of Modern Art, where the central sculpture garden is named after her. Today’s Rockefeller charities have taken a dramatic turn in a different direction, the new report says.”

CHRISTIAN TOTO: Jan. 6 Themed ‘Social Reckoning’ Expected to Bomb at Box Office.

World of Reel shares a pointed reaction to the film and its subject matter:

January 6th eventually comes up, the entire film builds toward it. The film’s arc leads naturally to the suggestion that January 6th was, in part, a product of Facebook itself.

Sorkin has literally said the same thing on the record regarding Facebook and Jan. 6.

The problem?

Who will actually see the movie? Box office projections have “The Social Reckoning” opening to a very soft $6-$10 million on its opening weekend. The competition won’t be stiff.

$6 million seems high.

ICYMI: Can We Just Execute This Terrorist Already?

ADAM THIERER: What Hayek Can Teach Us About AI Safety.

This is where a dose of Hayekian thinking is particularly useful. Hayek would tell us that AI alignment is not a computable math equation, and that efforts to treat it as such will lead to the sort of authoritarian thinking and proposals we witnessed with previous efforts to remake economies and humanity according to some grand design.

In his 1974 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Hayek warned of the “pretence of knowledge,” or the belief that experts understand society well enough to direct everyone else’s choices according to their supposedly enlightened plans. He argued that the “limits to his knowledge ought indeed to teach the student of society a lesson of humility which should guard him against becoming an accomplice in men’s fatal striving to control society—a striving which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellows, but which may well make him the destroyer of a civilization which no brain has designed but which has grown from the free efforts of millions of individuals.”

Hayek teaches us that technical “alignment” can be a pretext for dangerous political control of our economy and liberties. Empowering global elites to guide humanity’s acceptable risks and technological future raises other risks in the process. Aligned with whose values? Imposed by whose authority? And at what cost? “Progress by its very nature cannot be planned,” Hayek wrote in The Constitution of Liberty, but instead “civilization [is] the accumulated hard-earned result of trial and error,” and “the sum of experience.”

As a general rule, put your guard up whenever powerful people suggest a political solution to a technical problem.

PRETTY MUCH, YEAH:

This hijacking story is INSANE but I’m looking forward to hearing the terrorists side of the story on Miss Rachel today.

— Jimmy Failla (@jimmyfailla) September 30, 2026

KRUISER: Dems’ Haplessness Makes Them an Even Bigger Existential Threat to the Republic. “What does worry me, though, is that the Democrats are not unlike an unhinged, cornered rabid animal these days. Because it’s now a party dominated by coastal elites, there is also an almost feral quality when Dem politicians are out in normal America. There is a complete lack of regard for civility and convention that makes them unpredictable and dangerous.”

EAT MORE MEAT: Nearly a third of Americans eating fewer fresh vegetables after ‘explosive diarrhea’ virus outbreak.

Nearly a third of Americans cut back their produce consumption and nearly two-thirds changed their behavior this summer after an “explosive diarrhea” parasite ravaged rectums across the country, according to a poll.

At least 30% of people said they were buying less fresh produce at grocery stores over the cyclosporiasis parasite outbreak, which left tens of thousands of people cramping on their commodes from vicious bouts of viscous diarrhea.

I like to think I was ahead of the curve on this one. Way out ahead of the curve.

NEVER BEND THE KNEE: Why Jews Who Turn on Israel to Be Loved Still Get Hated.

THAT’S GONNA LEAVE A MARK:

Best way to sandbox an AI is to put it on a Delta flight – it will have no chance of accessing the Internet!

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 30, 2026

In-flight Starlink ought to be industry standard — it’s just that good.

TOP-HEAVY: Hegseth to double cuts to generals, admirals in major Pentagon shakeup. “War Secretary Pete Hegseth will announce plans to reduce by 20% the number of positions reserved for generals and admirals during his State of the Force address on Wednesday.”

TEACH YOUR CHILDREN TO HATE WHAT GOVERNMENT DOES TO CAPITALISM:

"Gen Z voters hate capitalism—but they’ve barely even seen it…look at where their pain is concentrated: education, housing and health care…the most regulated, subsidized sectors of the American economy, and therefore the least like capitalism" https://t.co/Cn5sGB8GBA

— Rob Henderson (@robkhenderson) September 30, 2026

NEWS FROM DOWN UNDER: Australia’s Federal Court Boards the Gender Train and Wins September’s Dishonorable Conduct Award.

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Anti-Gun Orgs Bullied YouTube Into Squeezing Gun Content Creators Even Harder. “Gun control advocates appear to have succeeded in pushing YouTube to change its policies to restrict firearm-related content and tighten its rules governing manufacturer-supported videos. Is it just a coincidence? The implications extend beyond whether “GunTubers” can publish a product review. They reach the increasingly consequential question of when independent firearm coverage becomes corporate advertising.”

NICE: What Are the Odds? Russian and Ukrainian Pilots Save Hijacked Flight to Israel.

“ALTERCATION” IS JUST ANOTHER WORD FOR THE TERRORIST HIJACKINGS WE THWART TOGETHER:

Delete your paper.

— Stephen Green (@VodkaPundit) September 30, 2026

The Community Notes are appropriately brutal, if you’d like to vote them to Helpful status.

ROBERT G. NATELSON: The Slippery Constitutionality of Open Primaries.

Open and semi-closed primary laws have been around for some time. However, in recent years they have proliferated, promoted mostly by center-left organizations.

The most salient stated goal for promoting these laws is to favor “moderate” candidates who “appeal to a wider portion of the electorate” over more “extreme” and “partisan” candidates. The promoting organizations contend that parties must accept such restrictions in exchange for state financing of primary elections. Constitutional wonks may recognize that the latter argument disregards the Supreme Court’s unconstitutional conditions doctrine: A state may not force you to give up a constitutional right in order to receive a government benefit.

I suspect that the sponsors’ primary goal is to affect GOP primaries. Outside a few regions where socialists can win intra-Democratic Party races, most Democrat primaries display few real policy differences. It is in Republican contests where the real debate happens. The goal of the promoters seems to be to prevent strongly conservative or government-cutting candidates from getting to the general election ballot—or, if they cannot prevent that, to force those candidates to temper their message.

An instance of the latter effect recently came to light in the Colorado lawsuit, where several Republican candidates asked the court not to mandate an immediate change back to a closed primary because they had fashioned their nomination campaigns for an electorate that included liberal independents as well as Republicans.

In a November 6, 2025 Law & Liberty essay—written well before the new SCOTUS decision in National Republican—I contended that open and semi-open primary laws were likely unconstitutional.

Fascinating article on a topic that doesn’t get much attention.

I’ve never understood what a party is supposed to be, if just anybody can select its candidates.

THE ADMINISTRATION IS SENDING MIXED MESSAGES ON THIS ONE: Can We Just Execute This Terrorist Already?

“SKIPPED TIMELINES,” INDEED:

The path we were on. The path we’re now on.

We’ve skipped timelines. pic.twitter.com/hC18Vg6JUz

— Casual Observer (@CObserving) September 29, 2026

HENCE THE NEW “REGULATE ME BEFORE I SPEND MORE” RUSH: Anthropic IPO Prospectus Reveals $8 Billion Operating Loss.

Anthropic posted a roughly $42 billion net loss in 2025 as soaring computing costs and a massive accounting charge overwhelmed rapid revenue growth ahead of the artificial intelligence company’s planned initial public offering.

The Claude maker generated about $4.6 billion in revenue during 2025, up roughly twelvefold from the prior year, while its operating loss widened to $8.06 billion, according to its confidential IPO prospectus reviewed by Reuters. Most of the gap between Anthropic’s operating and net losses came from a roughly $34 billion non-cash accounting charge tied largely to financing instruments that may eventually convert into company shares.

The results offered one of the clearest looks yet at the enormous costs behind the artificial intelligence boom as Anthropic prepares to ask public investors to value the company at more than $2 trillion.

Meanwhile:

Anthropic has reportedly agreed to pay SpaceX up to $84.5 billion for access to Nvidia based computing capacity through 2029 and that is nearly double the roughly $45 billion maximum value SpaceX previously disclosed.

SpaceX is building an AI cloud business that could eventually compete with CoreWeave, Nebius, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Oracle.

ARK models SpaceX’s active AI compute capacity increasing from 0.3 gigawatts in 2024 to 66.6 gigawatts by 2031.

Terrestrial data centers drive the early growth, but ARK expects orbital compute to become a major source of capacity after 2029 and potentially represent more than half of the total by 2031.

That would be phenomenal growth — and in orbit.