The browser shut down and the wheel goes round every time my tab gets mentioned ...
Javier Milei: “I thought being on the left was a mental problem. The empirical evidence is so overwhelming that it never worked anywhere, and they refused to accept it.”
— Documenting Saylor (@saylordocs) August 16, 2026
“But what I discovered is that being on the left is a disease of the soul. The left is built on envy,… pic.twitter.com/K4PHXZBbmG
... The left is built on envy, hatred, resentment, and unequal treatment under the law. They are very violent, and since they have no way or arguments to answer, they go for physical violence.”
Ed: That's a very insightful view from Milei, all true, but not necessarily complete. That is how the Left is when outside of power, but they are even worse when they have power and the internal contradictions of Marxism lead to inevitable failure. As F. A. Hayek detailed in "The Road to Serfdom," Marxist systems produce ever more brutal leaders to force impossible outcomes.
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Alex Bronzini-Vender at The Spectator: Moments later, suited men emerged from the courthouse, carrying a lectern. Shortly afterwards, Mangione’s guilty plea was announced. But we knew that, didn’t we? Mangione’s defenders rarely dispute that he gunned down Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, on that Midtown Manhattan sidewalk. Only one person visibly reacted, a shirtless, tattooed man. He threw his hands in the air, grasping at the sun. He moaned in agony: “HHRRAAHH! HHRRAAHH!” Then he approached the press pen, mouthed a few profanities, and stumbled off.
Still, for some members of the crowd, Mangione’s plea stung. One young woman, Mahnoor, felt betrayed by her idol’s decision to plead guilty. “I think he should have fought a little more, have, like, a little more trust in the justice system.”
Others believed there had been chicanery in the outcome. “Jury nullification was definitely a possibility,” Ariel Roman, a 26-year-old law student, told me. The justice system, she said, had “treated him unfairly.” Prosecutors “withhold exculpatory evidence” and had “been leaking a lot of stuff to the press before they even told his defense counsel.” He should have gone to trial anyway. “It’s worth rolling the dice,” she said, “especially when public opinion is as positive.” ...
Such was the scene: the still-faithful celebrating a man for a crime they believe he may not have committed, or else wishing he’d kept up the fight in court. It seemed, that day, that the cult of Luigi had run its course.
Ed: Perhaps they will flock to Tyler Robinson next, although he's going to flame out as spectacularly as Mangione soon enough. The leftists do not flock to these figures because they are innocent, but because they know these murderers are guilty, and they want to support the violence. When the consequences arrive, they walk away and look for the next revolutionary that might get away with it. There's a reason why Che Guevara got turned into a fashion icon.
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Jon @ossoff subjects an innocent female staffer, a bone cancer survivor who credits President Trump’s Right to Try legislation for saving her life, to the oldest and most vulgar innuendo there is, simply because she’s at work seemingly all the time.
— Tim Murtaugh (@TimMurtaugh) August 17, 2026
Ossoff should apologize. https://t.co/1ATOdyBPei
Ed: What in the world ...? Did Ossoff just trash Natalie Harp to attack Trump? Seems like it ...
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Newsweek: Harp, 35, is the president's executive assistant and was one of three aides who joined him in his recent plane-swap, which was prompted by a potential threat of an Iranian missile attack. White House deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino and Walt Nauta, the director of Oval Office operations, also joined the president. ...
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement at the time, "Natalie Harp is one of the most loyal and hardest working aides on President Trump's team."
On Monday, Steven Cheung, the White House director of communications, re-posted a clip of Ossoff's remarks on X, and wrote, "Jon Jackoff has to be the biggest cuck loser in politics. Instead of denigrating hard working people serving their country, Jon should look deep into his soul and ask himself why he's a miserable person who hates this country. It's because he's a radical, extremist Dumocrat."
Ed: YGBFKM. Does Ossoff think Trump's sleeping with Scavino and Nauta, too? What a scumbag. The NRSC had better start roasting this jackass, and right now.
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REPORTER: "Jon Ossoff said that you'd rather travel with your aide Natalie Harp and build the ballroom than do your job as president..."
— Daily Wire (@realDailyWire) August 17, 2026
TRUMP: "Who said that?"
REPORTER: "Jon Ossoff."
TRUMP: "You mean Pee-wee Herman? Pee-wee Herman look-alike..." 😂 pic.twitter.com/uZnlbMdLNS
Ed: That's a pretty good accounting of what Trump intends with this construction project. The swipe at Ossoff isn't nearly as cheap as Ossoff's swipe at Harp. Maybe Trump is just getting warmed up.
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Mediaite: The Financial Times has added a disclaimer to an article bashing President Donald Trump, which admitted the story — published by a Harvard University professor — was crafted using artificial intelligence, as some readers had already suspected.
Semafor media editor Max Tani spotted the disclaimer was added on Sunday, three days after the story was first published. The post was written by Harvard economics Professor Ricardo Hausmann and criticized Trump’s tariffs, although it was hard to follow, thanks to the article being littered with em dashes, a ton of short sentences, and phrased bizarrely.
FT copped to AI being involved and made sure to point out Hausmann was a Harvard man in its disclaimer slapped to the top of the story[.]
Ed: Haaaahvaaaahd is the Jon Ossoff of higher education: useless, expensive, nasty, and lacking integrity. This reflects badly on both FT and on Harvard, neither of which can tell when someone has others do his work for him. So much for intellectual integrity in Academia, and so much for the value of "layers of fact-checkers and editors." As long as the point is Orange Man Bad, no one will bother to check.
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In all seriousness though, while I’m sure this felt good for Ossoff’s staff to write into the teleprompter and see their boss read it, this is such an unforced error—why brand yourself as “Guy who goes around spreading untrue rumors about female staffers banging their boss” ? —… https://t.co/DIozcq6XeL
— Peter J. Hasson (@peterjhasson) August 17, 2026
... — it tells me everyone in the Ossoff campaign is letting the 2028 hype go to their head way too much and way too quickly. Not ready for prime time.
Ed: Seriously ... what has Ossoff done in six years as a senator? Other than carry Chuck Schumer's water?
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Matt Taibbi: Al Jazeera already called Arday’s suicide “institutional murder,” and Ibram Kendi has already produced a headline in the Emancipator saying the media “lynched” him. Across the world, politicians, pundits, and activists have sounded the same note, denouncing the press for driving Arday to kill himself.
Bollocks. I’m all for beating up media, but in this case? The Arday story will be debated as a race matter, but the story is really about a deeper problem, the institutional rejection of reality itself, which at Cambridge was once celebrated in the form of Isaac Newton’s apple tree. ...
It will be claimed preserving the feel-good story of Cambridge’s “youngest black professor” was about defending the values of racial progressivism, but it wasn’t that. It couldn’t have been that, because it was very clearly the opposite. Anyone reading about how Cambridge promoted someone whose plagiarism was so sloppy he repeatedly carried over a grammatical error from pilfered text while simultaneously claiming he ran 600 miles in six days and overcame “autism, epilepsy, locked-in syndrome, testicular cancer, and a brain tumor” before age thirty would either conclude that a) Britain produced the black Barry Allen in a lab accident, or b) academia made a deliberate choice to call fabulism accomplishment.
It’s feasible that someone at Cambridge thought this trade-off was worth it before the matter became public, but once it spilled out thanks to Substack writers (legacy press was at first too spine-deficient to touch this), there’s only one way to interpret the behavior of Arday’s backers. Consider that Cambridge “effectively cleared” him of plagiarism that they later decided to re-investigate, and which Arday’s supporters now concede. The school thought it had enough pull to make this work, the same way academia has been trying for years to force the public to accept (because they’re the “experts”) that there aren’t two sexes, free speech shouldn’t be free, equity doesn’t come at the expense of equality, and jokes aren’t funny.
Ed: The elites still think they are in charge and that they can manipulate the public through woke nonsense. No one has told them the parable of the emperor's new clothes, or the boy that cried "raaaaaacist" for the zillionth time. They are completely flummoxed to find out that no one's buying their pretense to expertise any longer, mainly because the elites have spent the last few decades debunking any claims to superior thought or moral standing.
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Supporting trans people's right to live and let live and at the same time believing biological men should not play women's sports should not be adversarial views. The fact that the @WNBA, and most leftists, demand you can only choose one of the above is nuts.😵💫 https://t.co/j87jIdhlSY
— John Ondrasik (@johnondrasik) August 17, 2026
Ed: This reaction by the Atlanta franchise was absolutely revealing as to the nature of the leftist elites. This proves Milei's point precisely. They lack the intellectual capacity to compete in the public square, so they use force to shut down debate instead.
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Colin Wright at City Journal: It’s easy to call for inclusion, or feign ignorance about what a woman is, or claim not to know the purpose of women’s sports when presented with abstract hypotheticals. But the WNBA has just been presented with two very real, very large, and very male test cases.
Their declarations have been dismissed by many as “stunts.” And in one sense, of course, they are stunts. Neither Freedom nor White genuinely believes he is a woman with sudden desires to come out of retirement and play professional women’s basketball. They are deliberately creating a spectacle.
But stunts can be effective in highlighting absurdity and forcing clarity—in this case, about where the WNBA truly stands on transgender inclusion. Either the league blocks these men from playing, revealing that it understands what a woman is and why excluding males is necessary, or it lets them in, likely prompting a backlash so extreme that indifference on the “What is a woman?” question won’t be sustainable.
Ed: Kicking out the ticket-buying public for weighing in on the question in the vacuum left this week by the moral idiots in the WNBA is not a sustainable approach either. If the collective wisdom of the entire league couldn't come up with an answer to this question, why are officials attempting to intimidate people who are providing one? Isn't that a form of "inclusion" too?
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Keep this handy for when Democrats blame Republicans for the cost of healthcare.
— MAZE (@mazemoore) August 16, 2026
"Family healthcare for the price of a cable bill." 😜
Premiums and insurance company profits have skyrocketed, with the taxpayer subsidizing the entire scam. pic.twitter.com/gUi67Ehq18
Ed: Bookmark it!
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Los Angeles Times: A poll claiming Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass was leading Councilmember Nithya Raman by a wide margin — and picking up support from most voters who supported Spencer Pratt in the mayoral primary — was bogus, the company behind the poll acknowledged Monday.
The fake poll by Median Strategies showed Bass leading Raman by nearly 12 percentage points ahead of the Nov. 3 mayoral runoff, and said the results were based on a survey of 560 Los Angeles voters between July 30 and Aug. 5. It said it had a 4.1% margin of error.
But Monday, in response to repeated inquiries from The Times, the company said the purported “poll” was nothing of the kind.
“Median Strategies was created as a short term social experiment to examine how purported polling information could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification,” the company said in an email to The Times. “We are not seeking publicity or attribution for the individuals involved and are declining interviews.”
Ed: I wonder how many other polls will turn out to be "short term social experiments." I can think of a few in Michigan and Texas that might qualify.
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I'm not crying!
— Roxanne Hoge (@RoxanneHoge) August 17, 2026
It's dusty in here.
🥲🥲🥲 pic.twitter.com/qjPeEbCv8e
Ed: This is a great story. Bishop Kelly is offering a real education in what it means to be human – and still have fun.
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Saturday night's lyric: "Is She Really Going Out With Him" by Joe Jackson.
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