“INTERNET-CONNECTED REFRIGERATOR” ISN’T CASE ENOUGH? The Case Against an Internet-Connected Refrigerator.
Author Archive: Stephen Green
September 29, 2026
DISPATCHES FROM THE BLUE ZONES: Newsom signs law easing rules requiring students to learn English, change will impact 1 million. “They furthermore said too many students classified as English learners were held back months or even years after mastering the language. Under the new law, students will have to pass only one state-approved English assessment to show they are proficient, the newspaper also reports.”
You’d have to trust Sacramento’s figures to put any stock in that.
I look at the new law as just more sand in the gears of America’s once-might assimilation machine.
THIS IS SOME OF THE WORST REPORTING I’VE SEEN DURING DECADES OF BAD REPORTING:
You don’t hate the legacy media enough. pic.twitter.com/sc3Ask29a9
— DogeDesigner (@cb_doge) September 29, 2026
The legacy media deserves nothing but contempt.
UGH: A Horrific Find in Mexico’s Mass Graves. “Given that the number of clandestine graves found in Mexico is also on the rise, it’s entirely possible that the number is much higher. The Mexican government likes to downplay this topic, but a United Nations committee on enforced disappearances has estimated that more than 4,500 graves have been found, containing over 6,200 bodies and 4,600 human remains, in addition to some 72,000 unidentified human remains. Other human rights organizations have cited similar numbers.”
FACT: The math at the pump: Before you blame Trump, follow the damn barrel.
What I reject is the lazy explanation that says, “There’s a war in Iran, therefore gas is expensive.” That is like explaining a hamburger’s price by showing me the cost of a cow while ignoring the slaughterhouse, trucking company, restaurant, taxes, labor, and the gentleman behind the counter who apparently believes adding bacon now requires financing.
Crude is the raw material, not the finished product. EIA breaks gasoline prices into crude-oil costs, refining costs and profits, taxes, and distribution and marketing. Showing only a crude-oil chart is showing one chapter of the book and pretending you’ve read the ending.
Refining is especially important because EIA reported in September that elevated crude prices and elevated crack spreads are contributing to higher pump prices. Crack spreads measure the difference between the value of refined products and the crude used to produce them. When those spreads become unusually large, refining becomes a much bigger part of what motorists pay.
You can’t fill’er up with gas nobody was able to refine.
GOOD TIMES:
🚨 WOW! President Trump was just asked what his midterm message is for millions of Americans to vote red, and he dropped RAPID FIRE truth nukes to the Fake News in the Oval Office:
– 17 months in a row of ZERO illegal crossings
– The best crime numbers in history, even after… pic.twitter.com/0todedjOiS— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) September 28, 2026
Anyone else having flashbacks to when the media helped sell the 1992 economy as the worst since the Great Depression?
VICTORIA TAFT: Want to Kill Christianity in America? Try This One Simple Trick the State of Maine Pulled. “While mom was adjudicated to be a good mother, dad was working behind the scenes to establish that taking their daughter to church was harmful. He hired a cult expert out of California, and the expert began watching Calvary Chapel of Greater Portland’s Sunday sermons as they build a case against Ava attending church.”
I VOTED FOR THIS: Once Recession-Proof, D.C. Feels the Pain From Federal Workforce Reductions. “Downsizing of the federal workforce concentrated in the DMV area—the District of Columbia and parts of Maryland and Virginia—has hit many residents hard, and some are considering leaving or have already done so. While it’s not nice to wish troubles on anybody, there’s nothing wrong with introducing government employees to the same risks and uncertainty that participants in the private sector face every day.”
To say the very least.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: AOC May Have Greatly Overestimated Her Political Shelf Life. “Ocasio-Cortez has to be struggling with the knowledge that she might not be the prettiest mean girl in the Dem commie clown car. She’s pretty much just been able to giggle her way through everything since she got to Congress. Now she wants to be a grown-up and there are candidates out there who need more from her than the ability to make unserious Instagram content.”
CHINA IS ASSHOE: Beijing’s Trojan Yacht.
Ferretti Group, the Italian builder of luxury yachts, is also a defense contractor. Since 2016 it has supplied patrol and fast-attack craft to the Italian Navy, Coast Guard and Carabinieri, and Rome designates it a strategic asset. Its “dual-use” technology can be used for both military and non-military purposes. The hull that lets a Pershing sports yacht exceed 45 knots, the composites that trim radar signatures, the propulsion that quiets the acoustic profile and the integration of sensors and weapons stations are engineered the same for both civilian customers and maritime security services. For example, Ferretti’s FSD195 naval interceptor craft, which is employed by a variety of countries, is derived from a Pershing hull.
Ferretti’s controlling shareholder is Weichai, a Chinese state-owned conglomerate founded after World War II to manufacture arms for Mao’s People’s Liberation Army. Today, Weichai builds diesel engines that power everything from trucks to mobile rocket launchers for the Chinese military. One customer, Norinco, answers to the Chinese Communist Party’s state-asset system. Weichai’s joint-venture partners are spread across countries adversarial to U.S. interests, including Russia, Belarus, and others.
Weichai owns 39.5 percent of Ferretti but was able to capture eight of nine board seats at the company’s May board meeting.
Read the whole thing.
EXPERTS: AI was supposed to hit new grads hard. So far, unemployment data says otherwise.
In “The Early Impacts of AI on Employment Among Recent College Graduates,” researchers Robert Fairlie and Jane Wu said they decided to focus on recent graduates “because changes in labor demand may first appear through reductions in hiring.” As AI gets good enough to at least perform the “relatively standardized tasks” in many entry-level office jobs, they argue, firms could reduce new hiring for simpler roles rather than laying off more experienced long-term employees.
There’s some reason to believe 2026’s graduating job seekers might be more at risk of AI displacement than those graduating just a year or two prior. The CESifo researchers point to a recent sharp increase in the number of firms “replacing a large number of employee tasks with AI” in a Census survey, as well as broad increases in AI spending per employee and ChatGPT Enterprise token use in the last 12 months.
Anecdotally, some major names also think that this is the year AI is finally capable enough to start replacing the jobs of some recent graduates. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen said earlier this year that “AI literally until December [2025] was not actually good enough to do any of the jobs that they’re actually cutting.” And BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said in March that “the speed at which AI is changing” led him to worry that “when this year’s college graduates enter the workforce, we could see the highest unemployment rate among them in years—even without a recession.”
Innovation typically destroys existing jobs, but is a net job creator in new fields. Maybe AI really is different and will drive millions out of work permanently.
I’m not sure anybody really knows.
September 28, 2026
THEY’RE ALSO FUN: Yes, Airsoft Guns Can Be a Useful Part Effective Firearm Training.
TO BE FAIR, HE MADE IT WORSE FOR CRIMINALS:
He admits his mistake. I think that’s admirable. https://t.co/d4Ziyazpht
— Elvon (@_Elvon_) September 27, 2026
VICTORIA TAFT: The Pressure on Lindsay Clancy Holdout Juror Is About to Go Nuclear. “Besides being left in shock over Reddington’s stunning move to ask the judge to investigate the juror who has been in hiding since the death threats began following Clancy’s mistrial, he wants juror Michael Desronvil to turn over his phone for technical exploitation.”
“Conform or else,” they explained.
SAD: Teach for America veered left and lost its way: Can it refocus on achievement?
Teach for America, founded 35 years ago, “lost its way” completely “in the last 8-10 years,” tweets Doug Lemov, author of Teach Like a Champion. “For years TFA brought smart motivated people into schools and focused them on student achievement in areas of high need. [T]hey traded that noble work for a set of political objectives that made corps members feel virtuous at the expense of the very students they claimed to serve … It’s been a long time since they cared more about student achievement than say trying to ‘teach young people to interrogate systems of power’.”
Teach for America produced achievement gains for students, and a huge group of alumni who’ve shaped education reform, writes Dale Chu, a former TFA teacher and now an education consultant. But he thinks Lemov, “hardly a TFA hater,” is right.
When Chu joined the corps in 1997, Teach For America focused on teaching, not politics, he writes. “Equity” meant holding “all students to high expectations, especially those living in marginalized communities.”
Applications for TFA slots peaked in 2013, then began a long slide as mission creep set in, he writes. The size of the teaching corps declined. And, Chu writes, TFA’s “public messaging began weighing in more directly on policing, structural racism, gender, and identity.”
Went Woke, going broke.
See also Robert Conquest’s Second Law of Politics: “Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.”
BY THE NUMBERS:
— Alexander Stahel 🌻 (@BurggrabenH) September 28, 2026
“Over the past weeks, the key development has been the squeeze on Saudi exports. Originally, the Saudis recovered exports back in March by redirecting crude loadings away from the Arabian Gulf (also known as Persian Gulf :-). That meant exports somewhere between 30-40% below the January baseline. But it worked. Aramco exported 4.5mbpd of crude and 700kbpd of products in June through the Red Sea. Not bad.”
UM…: Your SEO Guy Should Probably Not Be Fabricating Federal Court Orders. “The SEC inspector general says the largely overseas reputation-management company fabricated a U.S. District Court order and submitted it to an internet search engine in an effort to get information about the settlement removed from search results.”
LAST WEEK, THE WHITE HOUSE SQUASHED THIS RUMOR: Trump ‘very seriously’ considering diesel export ban as global supply crunch worsens. “The idea of the world’s largest diesel exporter implementing an outright ban has prompted firm pushback from the U.S. energy industry, while analysts have warned that the move could backfire and exacerbate the global fuel crisis.”
STOP VOTING FOR PEOPLE WHO HATE YOU II:
1,000+ military-age men broke into Britain last week…
Only one person got arrested…the man who tried to stop it…
Today, the Prime Minister went on TV and called him a racist… pic.twitter.com/FFGItm4OnB
— Liz Churchill (@liz_churchill10) September 27, 2026
ANOTHER TORPEDO CIRCLES BACK: Cancel Culture Comes for the Bar It Built.
POSITIVELY SOVIETESQUE: China broadens travel curbs to encompass family of top AI talent.
That marks a broadening of existing curbs on the freedom of movement of China’s most influential tech talent — a category that encompasses entrepreneurs, researchers and executives. While not an outright ban on travel, the new requirement is likely to exert a further chilling effect on a tech sector already facing unprecedented curbs. China has restricted foreign travel for top AI professionals in private firms such as Alibaba Group Holding Ltd and DeepSeek since earlier this year, Bloomberg News reported in May, reflecting Beijing’s determination to safeguard its technology as it makes big strides in AI and chipmaking.
It’s unclear whether all those people’s families need to follow the new strictures, the people said. China is also separately implementing rules, which became effective Sept 15, for enforcing exit bans in cases ranging from criminal investigations to potential violations of the country’s industrial and technological security.
Beijing’s plan is to add relevant individuals to the list as time goes by, the people said, asking not to be identified discussing a sensitive issue. Government departments have already notified several people of the need to clear family travel, two of the people said.
But why would anyone ever want to leave the workers’ paradise?
UPDATE (Charlie): The original story seems to have disappeared. Here’s a link to a similar report.
OR THE LAST TWO YEARS OF TRUMP 45 FOR THAT MATTER:
We have an obligation to hold GOP Congress members accountable, and when they fall short, we need to primary the living hell out of them.
But to sit out the midterm? You’ve already seen how Democrat power works.
Did you not live through the Biden administration?
— Eric Matheny (@ericmmatheny) September 28, 2026