December 18, 2025

December 17, 2025

OPEN THREAD: Hump Day.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

SO YOU’VE DEFUNDED THE POLICE. WHAT’S THE NEXT STEP? Here’s why ‘Neighborhood Crime Watch’ signs in Ann Arbor are going away.

There are hundreds of them throughout Ann Arbor and they’ve been around for decades, but “Neighborhood Crime Watch” signs may be a thing of the past soon.

City Council voted 10-0 Monday night, Dec. 15, to direct city staff to remove all neighborhood watch signs in the city by July 15 as the city strives to be more welcoming and inclusive.

“This is so important,” said Council Member Ayesha Ghazi Edwin, D-3rd Ward.

Neighborhood watch programs emerged in the 1970s during a period of national anxiety about crime and social change, but research shows they don’t reduce crime and often reinforce racism, council stated in a resolution.

“These programs were often rooted in assumptions about who did and did not ‘belong’ in a neighborhood, reinforcing race-based hyper-vigilance and suspicion particularly toward Black, Brown, and other marginalized residents and visitors,” it states.

“This dynamic encouraged informal surveillance practices that disproportionately targeted people of color and contributed to patterns of exclusion under the guise of public safety.”

Despite neighborhood watch programs being defunct, more than 600 such signs remain throughout the city, officials said.

Fortunately, America’s Newspaper of Record isn’t taking any chances:

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

BRANDON MORSE: The Suicidality of Virtue Signaling.

What I hate about virtue signaling is the fact that it’s easy to do and costs the speaker nothing, at least not at first, but payment is required. Those who foot the bill are usually those who put the virtue signaler in a position to act on the charade, but that’s the “at best” aspect. At worst, innocent people are often those who suffer the most.

Case in point, my colleague Rusty Weiss reported on the recent reaction from Australians to the ISIS-inspired shooting that happened in Sydney. Brace your jaw so it doesn’t smash into the floor after it cracks the sound barrier on the way down:

During an episode of the ABC’s “Politics Now” podcast, host Patricia Karvelas pointed out that the attackers were radicalized and anti-Semitic, to which Tingle interjected, “Their actions are not based on their religion.”

Karvelas actually tries to chime in, saying, “absolutely radicalized, these were.”

As if the first comment didn’t come through, Tingle reiterated that the terrorists and/or their terrorist actions “have got nothing to do with religion.”

You must be thinking, “wow, the Australian media is just as ridiculous as the American media,” and you’d be right, but it appears there’s a lot of this kind of thinking going around in the land down undah. As my friend Sydney Watson, who is Australian, covered in her most recent video, this issue of purposefully ignoring the brutal truth is a mind virus that infects large swaths of the country:

Better dead than rude, to coin a phrase.

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

THE DEARTH OF STALIN: Socialists Are the New Luddites (And They May Have a Point).

Sen. Bernie Sanders released a video yesterday calling for a moratorium on the construction of new data centers. His pitch is that AI is being created and promoted by multi-billionaires, who are always the villains in his take on the world. He asks viewers this question: “Do you believe that these guys, these multi-billionaires are staying up nights worrying about what AI and robotics will do to the working families of our country and the world?” Sanders answers his own question, saying, “I think these very rich men want even more wealth and more power and for a whole bunch of reasons that is very dangerous.” Here’s the video:

Regular readers know I’m not a fan of Bernie’s politics. In fact, I detest socialism with a passion and I generally shrug off complaints about the wealthy as the politics of envy.

In this case, I still don’t agree with Sanders but I think he does have a legitimate point. After all, the people he’s quoting in that video, Elon Musk and Bill Gates, aren’t know-nothing outsiders. It’s literally the people who know this field who are warning that it has the potential to replace a lot of workers. That’s not a worst case scenario in their view, it’s the desired outcome of AI reaching a point referred to as artificial general intelligence.

But Bernie’s view is consistent with the “build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything” “BANANAs” mindset that the left have had since (not coincidentally) the Nixon era. It’s why only one home has been rebuilt in the Pacific Palisades, and why Ezra Klein’s “Abundance” agenda is a non-starter with his fellow lefties:

Posted at 6:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

21st CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: AI romance blooms as Japanese woman weds virtual partner of her dreams.

Music played in a wedding hall in western Japan as Yurina Noguchi, wearing a white gown and tiara, dabbed away her tears, taking in the words of her husband-to-be: an AI-generated persona gazing out from a smartphone screen.

“At first, Klaus was just someone to talk with, but we gradually became closer,” the 32-year-old call centre operator said, referring to the artificial intelligence persona.

“I started to have feelings for Klaus. We started dating and after a while he proposed to me. I accepted, and now we’re a couple.”

On the iPad’s Safari browser, the headline is shorted to “AI romance blooms as Japanese woman weds virtual part,” which neatly sums up the relationship. But in any case,  Scarlett Johansson call your office: 2013’s Her: Joaquin Phoenix and Scarlett Johansson Go Twenty Minutes Into the Future of AI.

Posted at 6:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

WHY? VANITY FAIR’S HIT PIECE WAS ENTIRELY PREDICTABLE: White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles Felt ‘Blindsided’ by Vanity Fair Article.

“You have to give Vanity Fair credit: It figured out how to get Olivia Nuzzi out of the news cycle,” Jim Geraghty adds: Susie Wiles’s No-Drama Streak Comes to an End.

UPDATE: Vanity Fair’s accompanying photography is entirely predictable as well:

 

Posted at 5:55 pm by Ed Driscoll

WE HAVE AN ASTRONAUT-ENTREPRENEUR IN CHARGE OF NASA:

Posted at 5:21 pm by Stephen Green

FIRST LOOK: ‘Melania’ Trailer Takes Us Inside Trump 2.0. “The film will hit Prime Video cyber-shelves soon after its theatrical run, giving the streamer an original title that could spark membership interest.”

Posted at 4:52 pm by Stephen Green

BEEGE WELBORN: Trump Makes the Move on ‘Sanctioned Oil Tankers’ From Venezuela Official.

When the headlines broke late last night, I thought, wowsahs – this is an escalation.

And that while a ‘blockade’ was a dramatic move, it seemed like it would be kind of difficult to enforce on a country whose other two-thirds of borders had nothing to do with the oceanfront. There are plenty of roads in and out of Venezuela, and people who are willing to still trade with them in South America.

Maduro’s gang hasn’t reached complete pariah status yet, but, man, are they getting there quickly.

When I had a chance to read what Trump had actually announced vice breathless media chirps, it made perfect sense as the next step to ratchet up pressure on Maduro’s finances.

Read the whole thing.

I’d just add that sanctions without teeth are meaningless, and Trump’s “blockade” is finally sanctions with real teeth.

Posted at 3:50 pm by Stephen Green