A Glimpse Into The Disney Brain

The failure of Disney's latest Star Wars chapter, The Mandalorian and Grogu, has been a big story for weeks. For instance,

The last time a Star Wars movie under Disney ownership registered a low opening, it was 2018’s Solo: A Star Wars Story with an $84M 3-day, $103M 4-day and $153M WW (in like for likes). We bashed that result. The ambitious Star Wars expansion pic’s ticket sales were impacted by behind-the-scenes drama, in addition to the fact that Alden Ehrenreich was no Harrison Ford.

Now, Disney’s latest Lucasfilm title, this weekend’s Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu is opening lower with $81M 3-day and 4-day $98M U.S., lower than Solo: A Star Wars Story‘s domestic start. Global is at $167M WW with $69M from 51 offshore territories. The movie was made under the previous Lucasfilm boss Kathleen Kennedy, but it’s executive produced and co-written by Dave Filoni, who is the new co-Lucasfilm Head.

Even worse, just this past week,

The Mandalorian and Grogu has been toppled from the No. 1 spot at the domestic box office... by an R-rated indie horror film with a budget of less than $1 million.

Curry Barker's Obsession has proven to be a huge hit with cinemagoers since it hit theatres on May 15, and as it heads into its third weekend of release, the movie has reclaimed the No. 1 position from the first Star Wars feature since 2019's The Rise of Skywalker.

This isn't good news for Disney, and especially not good news for its new CEO, Josh D'Amaro, who's only a few months into that job. He recently felt the need to defend the film, but oddly, the only reference i've been able to find is in the YouTube video embedded above -- I've searched in vain for online text, and as a result, I've had to transcribe the words of the statement from what Mike Zeroh quotes in the video:

From our pespective, examining and analyzing this massive property like Star Wars, I thik it's very fair to say that there's this obsession with one side of the fan base that are politically motivated to financially halt the success of a prioperty as big as Star Wars. And so, when youi look at The Mandalorian and Grogu, I think it's fair to say that there are plenty of those in this fandom that they're afraid of change and afraid of diversity, equity, and inclusion. As CEO, it is my abdolute responsibility to make sure that we keep DEI at the forefront, and we are doing this with many of our upcoming projects.

But looking at the critics who suddenly changed their tune, and we are talking actual critics, I think the problem with this administration is that they have actually influenced the media in a very different way, and we are talking actual critics. I think the problem with this is that we are witnessing a cultural shift, and not for the better, where critics are afraid to express themselves. It just seems to me that the media right now is suppressed, and that goes for all journalists out there, even when it comes down to those reviewing major motion pictures, and we saw that impact our latest Star Wars film release.

The Mandalorian and Grogu is our greatest Star Wars film yet, and I could even go as far as to say that we did a better job than some of our previous films under Bob Iger. So our goal is to perhaps focus on smaller scale and less financially buerdened Star Wars films.

Except that Mike Zeroh in his own commentary simply sums up the critics' consensus, that the film already comes off as a low-budget attempt to turn out episodes from a TV series, not theatrical cinema, which Star Wars alwyas was until Disney got hold of it. He goes on to quote D'Amaro later in the statement,

. . . this administration, without a doubt, has damaged our industry and damaged the media. It's something that we have to find a way to recover from. Journalists in the media need to actually gain back the courage to speak freely about a film when they really like something. And again, we have no plans on stopping our goals with DEI and just how important diversity and inclusion really is for our industry and for our movies and our properties here at the Disney company.

Zeroh goes on to say that in fact, there's very little DEI in The Mandalorian and Grogu, the problem is that it's dull and predictable. But DEI has been part of Josh D'Amaro's brand at Disney; in 2021, as head of Disney's parks, he liberalized dress and appearance standards for cast members at the parks:

For all the little boys who wanted to be princesses and the girls who wanted to be heroes and everyone in between, Disney is “A Place Where Everyone is Welcome” — at least it’s trying to be.

Ahead of their theme parks’ planned reopening, Disney announced a new addition to “The Four Keys,” the casts’ long standing tradition of honoring safety, courtesy, show and efficiency: inclusion. As part of their renewed efforts, cast members will be allowed “greater flexibility with respect to forms of personal expression,” including gender-inclusive hairstyles, jewelry, nail styles, costume choices and even tattoos.

“There’s more to do, but we’re committed to listening, learning and making meaningful improvements. The world is changing, and we will change with it, and continue to be a source of joy and inspiration for all the world,” said Josh D’Amaro, chairman of Disney Parks, Experiences and Products, in a blog post.

Buit this wasn't D'Amaro's only innovation. At the same time, the parks imcreased prices to favor an upscale market:

Disney’s price strategy now positions them as a premium priced product. The company realizes many families simply cannot afford the price of admission. And, they accept this fact. On the other hand, plenty of people happily pay for the Magic Kingdom experience. They know their ideal client.

Their customers, known as guests, expect a memorable experience. Although their prices steadily rise, customers continue to walk through their gates.

Disney’s often the price leader. They raise their admission prices. Then all the other local theme parks follow their lead.

Currently adult tickets on peak days max out at $149. Those rates aren’t scaring their customers away. Since 2015, Disney’s revenue increased by $4.1 billion. I’m sure the stock holders are very happy.

The problem for Disney at this point is that the world is continuing to change. D'Amaro clearly blames criticism of the Disney product on the Trump administration. but Trump was voted in by the American electorate, in part because they didn't want drag shows at Army bases. D'Amaro represents a world view that's fading into the rear view mirror, but he insists that what Hollywood needs to do is force the culture back into the Obama-Biden years, while the culture clearly wants to move on.

So at this point, the Disney business plan appears to be to shut the public up and convince them instead just to pay more and more for a debased product. We'll see soon enough how that works out, but that was never Walt Disney's idea of how to make money.

Elon Musk OnThe Value Of College Education

Elon Musk just put the entire university system on trial.

Not the curriculum. Not the professors. The premise.

Musk: “You don’t need college to learn stuff. Everything is available basically for free. You can learn anything you want for free.”

For a thousand years,… pic.twitter.com/F5FS6lzlts

— Shadow Intel (@TheShadowIntelX) May 22, 2026

Toward the end of my time as a graduate assistant -- more than 50 years ago, in fact -- the whole purpose of a four-year degree began to clear up for me. Those of us who were teaching freshman comp were acutely aware of how many of the papers we got were plagiarized, and it must have been not too far from 100%. The students were going through the motions of submitting them, we were going through the motions of grading them, and everyone expected an A.

I finally got so fed up that I found an obvious case, and I started the formal process of bringing the student up on honors-code violations. This caused a major problem, such that my faculty adviser got involved. (He was actually schtupping my graduate-assistant girlfriend as well, but that's a whole separate matter.) He got all sanctimonious and insisted that "proof beyond a reasonable doubt" was the standard. I really couldn't go against him, except that I had the text the student had cribbed right in front of me, but he claimed that wasn't enough.

Actually, the standard of proof almost universally used in academic environments is "more likely than not", as explained in this University of Alberta policy:

Unlike the criminal system which must meet a “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard of proof, . . . the Code is based in Administrative Law, which lowers the requirement for proof. . . . Balance of probabilities is the “more likely (or probable) than not” standard. In other words, if the available evidence convinces the Dean to the point that he or she is 50% + 1 certain that a student has committed an offence, the standard of proof has been met.

But clearly any argument I made in that direction wasn't going to get anywhere. The problem was that I was going against the whole reason for college: an easay I linked in a post here not long ago puts it one way:

As the economist Bryan Caplan has observed, “The main function of education is not to teach useful skills (or even useless skills), but to certify students’ employability. By and large, the reason our customers are on campus is to credibly show, or ‘signal,’ their intelligence, work ethic, and sheer conformity.” As long as college remains a way for upwardly mobile kids to stand out from one another, and as long as employers believe that a better college degree is a sign of a better potential worker, the American university system should survive, even if teaching methods change.

Or more succinctly, the point of a degree is to qualify students for a certain level of white-collar job, but, contra the typical university mission statment, preparing students for responsible citizenship by fostering critical thinking, or something like that, is not what's on offer, those are just words. The point is to go through motions that more or less suggest something like that has taken place, when everyone pretty much recognizes it hasn't. The tweet above variously quotes and paraphrases Elon Musk:

Musk: “There is a value that colleges have, which is seeing whether somebody can work hard at something, including a bunch of annoying homework assignments, and still do their homework assignments.”

That is the product. Not intelligence. Not creativity. Not vision. Compliance.

You are paying $200,000 to prove you can tolerate bureaucracy on a schedule.

Musk: “Colleges are basically for fun and to prove you can do your chores. But they’re not for learning.”

The entire system is a sorting machine for corporate HR. It does not measure what you can build. It measures whether you can sit still, follow directions, and deliver on command.

A number of the commenters to the tweet got quite hot under the collar:

I would prefer a surgeon with some institutional training, and a pilot and maybe a lawyer.

But surgeons and lawyers go to med school and law school for that training. A four-year degree has little to do with it. Even a pilot can't get hired with just a degree from Princeton or whatever; they have to have flown for the military or been to flight school. And for that matter, why do even med schools like Yale do DEI? That implies that even prestige professional degrees can be gamed.

And the four-year certificate of compliance quite frequently can be satisfied with everyone going through the motions. The English Department knows it's a popular major in some measure because the students recognize it won't just let them by if they plagiarize, it'll give then As. Why else would their parents pay $200,000?

Not only that, but the English Department is fully aware that if it became routine for instructors to bring students up on honors code violations, enrollment in its courses would quickly fall to something approaching zero, from which it would follow that faculty positions in the department would also quickly fall to something approaching zero.

That was the year it began to dawn on me that an academic career wasn't going to work out for me; no matter what I did, I'd just be going through the motions, and in fact, if I had a PhD on my resume, I'd be less employable in the real world than if I didn't have one. A real education might have made that clear to me much faster than the one I got.

Looking back, I recognize that what I should have done was try to find out how many plagiarism cases had ever gone through the system. It probably would have been something in single digits, notwithstanding everyone who taught freshman comp was fully aware that a huge proportion of freshman essays was cribbed. Actually, I wonder if any university has ever made a serious study of the size of the plagiarism problem and why it exists. I think that would raise too many basic questions about the system.

David Rush Built A High-Flying CIA Career On Pure Moonshine

A big story in yesterday's news was David Rush, characterized as a management-level CIA employee, but with no other specifics given, who was arrested last week with roughly $40 million in gold bars and currency that he's alleged to have embezzled from the agency. The New York Post asks the obvious question:

Ex-CIA officer David Rush’s alleged years-long scheme that netted him $40 million in gold bars and a top-secret security clearance has those in the Clandestine Service community questioning how he slipped through the fastidious vetting process — and who else may be flying under the radar.

Former CIA staff operations officer Tracy Walder was baffled over the stunning allegations against Rush and believes they could point to a much more troubling issue within the agency.

“This would have been a large-scale lying cover-up. There would have had to be a lot of other co-conspirators,” Walder told The Post.

Nevertheless, there have been other puzzling episodes that call the CIA's vetting and internal security measures into question. The YouTube embedded above is with former CIA employee and convicted leaker John Kiriakou, who worked for the agency from 1990 to 2004 and spent 30 months in federal prison from 2013 to 2015 for his role in disclosing the waterboarding of Al Qaida prisoners. In the interview, he describes his own vetting and hiring procedure, which seems to have been incredibly slipshod.

He was recruited for the CIA by one of his Georgetown professors, who apparently doubled as a talent spotter for the agency. He was sent to a non-descript suburban Virginia office building and told to meet someone named "Bob" there, although he says it's almost certain "Bob" wasn't his real name. After some perfunctory chat, "Bob" sent him on to another non-descript building:

So I go there, and there's a table with three chairs on one side and one chair on the other, and in the three chairs are three people who never identified themselves by name, but they identified themselvea as being a psychologist, a psychiatrist, and an anthropologist. So I sit down, no "Hello, how are you?" nothing. I sit down.

I said, "Hello," they all just kind of looked at me, and then one of them says, "Describe your relationship with your mother." And I said, "Yeah. My mom and I are close, she's a schoolteacher, she's a terrific mother, very nurturing, took good care of all three of us. . ." You know, what do you say?

And then thwy're like, "OK. Describe your relationship with your father." So I did. I said, "My dad's a good guy, he's kind of introverted, my mom was the extrovert of the family."

"Was your father the disciplinarian>" And I said, "No, actually, my dad's a big, strong guy, and I think he was always afraid he would hurt us or something, so no, my dad's a very gentle soul."

Then they asked me that question again [referring to the very brief initial interview with "Bob"], "Have you ever betrayed a friendship?" And I said, "I don't think so, let me think about it for a second," and then the anthropologist says, "No no, that's the answer we were looking for."

And then one of them says, "You need to go into the next room, and you need to give us some piss, some blood, and some hair." I go OK and gave him some piss, some blood, and some hair, and then I left.

I went home and I called my fiancee. She goes, "How did it go?" I said, "I have no idea. They asked me these three weird questions, it took 15 minutes, then they took my pee, my blood, and pulled some of my hairs out." I get a call like four weeks later from "Bob". He goes, "You blew the doors off that meeting!"

I go, "'Bob', it was like from Bizarro world, I didn't understand what they wanted, tbey wouldn't explain anything."

He said, "You aced it."

He describes a subsequwnt series of meetings at headquarters with similar innocuous questions and no feedback on his answers, followed by another call from "Bob", who tells him again, "You aced it!" The next step was a polygraph exam, which he describes as something of a charade, and which, as in the other meetings, he passed. And then he discovers that "Bob" was in fact the human resources director for the entire CIA.

My sense of things from this description is that, at least in Kiriakou's case, the whole process was "wired": the Georgetown University talent spotter had talked to "Bob", and the rest of the process was a foregone conclusion. But if that's the case, rightly or wrongly, if Kiriakou went to federal prison for violating espionage law, the vetting and hiring process hardly served the CIA's interest, although it certainly appears that Kiriakou had a clean record -- but the process nevertheless missed the possibility that he'd turn out to be a leaker, whatever his motives.

So this brings us to David Rush. According to Fox News,

A federal investigation revealed that despite holding a Senior Executive Service (SES) rank and Top Secret/SCI clearance, Rush routinely lied about his military background and education.

According to Wikipedia,

The Senior Executive Service (SES) is a position classification in the United States federal civil service equivalent to general officer or flag officer rank in the U.S. Armed Forces. It was created in 1979 when the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 went into effect under President Jimmy Carter.

According to the Office of Personnel Management, the SES was designed to be a corps of executives selected for their leadership qualifications, serving in key positions just below the top presidential appointees as a link between them and the rest of the federal (civil service) workforce.

SES employees make between $150,000 and $225,000 per year. However, Rush appears to have reached this lofty state entirely on fumes. According to the Post link,

In applications for his high-level job, Rush claimed he was a graduate of the U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School and the "current director of test for a 145-person, 18-aircraft joint Army/Navy weapons test organization," according to court documents.

However, military records show Rush was never a pilot and held no FAA licenses; his actual duties in the Navy included working as an information systems technician.

He also allegedly faked his educational credentials to boost his federal salary, claiming he held a bachelor’s degree from Clemson University and a master's degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, according to the filings.

. . . Further, the FBI claims that Rush scammed the government out of $77,000 in fraudulent military leave, claiming 744 hours of paid time off by telling his employer he was actively serving as a Navy Reserve captain (O-6) through September 2025.

Kiriakou's account of his vetting and interview process suggests that Rush must also have "aced" all his interviews and the polygraph, with nobody bothering to check his degrees or his current or prior employment. Not only that, but he was promoted throughout his 20-year CIA career on the same basis. Later in his interview, Kiriakou goes into the CIA's polygraph policy. Applicants get a pre-employment polygraph, one after three years, and then subsequent ones at five-year intervals.

He points out that a routine question at every exam is, "Have you ever committed a felony?" and the subjects are expected to answer truthfully. Somehow, David Rush was able to get through some number of polygraph exams while apparently embezzling multimillions, falsifying military leave, and who knows what else, without setting off any sort of alarm.

So the New York Post's questions at the first link strongly suggest David Rush isn't just one bad apple. Very little has been revealed about precisely what his job was, to whom he reported, and how he was able to requisition multimillions in gold bars that he could simply take home. According to another Post story,

When the agency conducted a routine audit, the assets were missing from official custody, prompting the CIA director to refer the matter to federal investigators.

“After a CIA internal investigation identified potential violations of the law, CIA Director John Ratcliffe referred the information to the FBI for a law enforcement investigation,” the FBI said in a statement.

How did malfeasance at this level escape notice for so long? I suspect this is going to be covered up, but at least Ratcliffe finally took action -- still, what did his predecessors know?

Alien DNA?

It's too bad Pope Leo didn't take on space aliens in Magnifica Humanitas -- it's a question of technological misunderstanding not all that far from transhumanism, which he does discuss. But in any case, some crazy stuff has been coming out of the CIA lately, not least of which is the story of David Rush, the management-level spook who was busted with $40 million worth of gold bars in his home, which I'll likely get to tomorrow. But today, there's this:

The Central Intelligence Agency attempted to use genealogy database sites in its search for aliens, a whistleblower claims.

Dr. Jason Reza Jorjani told the “American Alchemy” podcast that Army veteran Lyn Buchanan informed him of an initiative in which the agency was exploring sites like 23andMe and Ancestry.

Buchanan claimed he was a spy with the CIA’s Remote Viewing Program.

“The CIA wants to hunt them down,” Jorjani stated, citing the program’s purpose of probing whether people could use extrasensory perception to conduct recon on distant objects, events or people.

The doctor acknowledged that Buchanan revealed to him that former CIA analyst Christopher “Kit” Green concocted a secret method to access both sites to screen users for a specific “genetic variance” linked to extraterrestrial beings.

Now, let's consider the prevailing paradigm of alien life, which is implicit in Fermi's paradox: there are X to the 27th Earth-like planets, and it follows that life could have evolved on a bodacious number of them, at least assuming that all you need to get life is some amino acids bubbling in puddles in such a way that they begin to reproduce or something. Fermi asked, of course, why we aren't seeing space aliens all the time if that's how it works, but we'll leave that aside for now.

The first problem I see with this CIA project to identify alien DNA is how they decided that life on other planets evolved to reproduce via DNA. The whole Darwinian evolutionary model says that life forms evolve via random mutation; something changes, and it either makes things better, and the fitter variant survives, or it makes things worse, and the less-fit variant dies off. How many gajillion tries did Mother Nature have to make, over how many bazillion years, to come up with DNA?

This method of genetic transmission, assuming it evolved in this random way, must be completely unique to what evolved on planet Earth. Let's say there's a planet Zohran on which some form of genetic transmission evolved, completely separate from Earth -- heck, go ahead and postulate X to the 27th Earth-like planets, and some form of genetic transmssion evolved separately on a bodacious number of them. What are the chances any two would involve anything remotely like DNA, much less be compatible enough that traits could be successfully transferred between organisms of the respective planets?

After all, creatures from Zohran might have 17 tentacle-like appendages and organs whose function we can't remotely imagine. Even if they have something close enough to DNA to be compatible with human DNA, how could you sort out the codes for the 17 tentacles and completely foreign organs to get anything like a viable fetus of either species? Even with DNA, only a very limited number of Earth species will successfully crossbreed.

Just for fun, I asked Chrome AI mode, "Would DNA be necessary for life to evolve on other planets?" It answered,

No, DNA itself is not strictly necessary for life to evolve on other planets, but an information-carrying molecule with similar properties is essential. Life requires a way to store, replicate, and pass down genetic instructions so natural selection can drive evolution. While Earth life settled on DNA, alternative molecular systems could fulfill this exact same role elsewhere in the universe.

The chemical architecture of alien life will largely depend on the solvent available on that planet. DNA and RNA work perfectly in water. However, if a planet features liquid methane seas (like Saturn's moon Titan) or liquid sulfuric acid, entirely different molecular structures—potentially utilizing silicon bonds instead of carbon—would be required to remain stable and functional,

But even this assumes some type of reproduction evolved on other planets that mirrors the two-parent genetic system that evolved on Earth. What if organisms on another planet just start to exist and modify themselves as needed without reproducing? If you can postulate that somehow life just started on Earth and almost immediately began reproducing to transmit genetic information, you can just as well postulate that organisms on Zohran just start to exist but don't need to reproduce, because they evolve internally and just keep living.

But because they don't die and don't reproduce, they don't transmit genetic information at all -- that's a primitive Earthling trait. So there's no way to crossbreed Earthlings with Zohranites. The assumption that you might is pure Earthling cultural bias. But there's more on space aliens in the latest news:

A small group of scientists have long suggested that the seeds of life may have been distributed across the vast distances of space via cosmic dust, asteroids, or comets — a theory known as panspermia.

. . . It’s an intriguing albeit far-fetched hypothesis that most recently caught the interest of Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb. Following months of observations of mysterious interstellar object 3I/ATLAS, which came surprisingly close to a number of solar system planets during its brief visit last year, Loeb proposed that it could’ve been shedding the building blocks of life during its journey — or even have been designed to seed planets like our own intentionally.

Well, that would explain why all the X to the 27th Earth-like planets had DNA, it was part of the original building blocks of life that were distributed to all of them on asteroids, but that just begs the question of how the building blocks of life that were distributed all over the universe got there in the first place. This makes my head hurt. It reminds me of our friend Judie, who likes the National Geographic TV show Ice Road Rescue, which she characterizes as tow truck drivers dedicated to saving people from their own stupidity.

But the question I still have is why the CIA was paying people to track down alien DNA, which is just a special case of the bigger question, how the CIA had a management-level guy who was able to requisition $40 million in gold bars that he stashed in his house. I'll maybe take this up tomorrow.

California High Speed Rail: It Gets Worse

Last week, I posted a 30,000-foot view of how badly the California High Speed Rail project has fallen short of what was sold to the taxpayers in 2008. The version that legacy media now seems to accept without question is that the project has been trimmed to a "first phase" 171-mile segment between Bakersfield and Merced in the Central Valley, for instance here at the Fresno Bee from last February:

Today, after years of delays and cost increases, the rail authority is required to focus on first completing a 171-mile Merced-to-Bakersfield route, which the agency is hoping to finish by 2032 at an estimated cost of $34.76 billion.

However, it isn't clear where the 2032 completion date comes from. 2032 was an estimate for the completion of the whole LA-to-San Francisco project as of 2018, but as 0f 2022, there was no projected completion date for either the entire project or any segment. And this appears to be only the received version of the project that legacy reporters repeat without question. I linked a different version in last week's post that puts the end points 162 miles apart, while warning that the actual stations at Bakersfield and Merced will lie several miles outside either city.

But then I embedded a video from Gov Newsom that refers to a "119-mile first phase". This is quite a discrepancy from the original 171-mile version we see above, and it would put the new northern end point in Madera, just north of Fresno, not Merced. I asked Chrome AI Mode, "Why does Gov Newsom say the first phase of the high speed rail project will be 119 miles long, when media reports say it willl be 171 miles?" It answered,

The discrepancy between the numbers is due to the difference between what is actively being built right now versus what the final initial segment will look like when passenger service begins.

. . . When media reports or the California High-Speed Rail Authority refer to 171 miles, they are describing the full Initial Operating Segment (IOS). This is the actual route that passengers will ride when the train opens for service, currently targeted for between 2030 and 2033.

. . . The extensions (the extra 52 miles needed to connect Shafter to downtown Bakersfield, and Madera to Merced) are currently under advanced design and environmental clearance. Construction contracts for these extensions are being awarded in subsequent phases.

In other words, although there's construction on a 119-mile segment between Shafter and Madera, that's just the first phase of the final initial segment. Good to clear that up! But Chrome AI strongly implies that trains won't actually run on the 119-mile segment until the full length of the 171-mile final initial segment is complete, apparently still in bureaucratic never-never land but expected to be finished sometime between 2030 and 2033.

A highly detailed version of the official plan is available at Wikipedia. That plan says there will be five stations on the 171-mile initial route, Merced, Madera, Fresno, Kings-Tulare, and Bakersfield. However, state law requires the project to provide revised business plans every even year. The 2026 plan is still in draft form, but according to the California Legislative Analyst's office, both the northern and southern ends of the initial segments will be at new locations:

South Merced. Northern terminus at a new location about 3.5 miles south of the downtown Merced location specified by SB 198. This station would not serve ACE and Gold Runner [conventional Amtrak and commuter rail], so high-speed rail would connect to them at the Madera station instead.

North Bakersfield. Southern terminus at a location on the outskirts of Bakersfield, about 6 miles north of the previously planned station.

The 2026 draft, which the legislative analyst's report implies, is so vaguely worded that it can't be definitely established whether or not the project intends to operate actual passenger-carrying trains on the 119-mile route between Madera and North Bakersfield. However, it's generally acknolwedged that the project is designed to operate trains at 220 mph over the overall Central Valley segment, which would put the journey from North Bakersfield to Fresno at about 30 minutes, allowing for acceleration and deceleration, more if there are intermediate stops.

Currently there's Amtrak conventional rail service between Wasco (roughly the projected "North Bakersfield" station) and Fresno that takes one hour and 27 minutes, 7 daily trains at a $20 fare. It's hard to tell who would benefit from a 30-minute trip at considerably higher fare. The demographics of this whole area are agricultural, not business-class travelers.

There's an entirely separate problem, though, which is how even this reduced project will be funded. A vague plan has been mooted to raid local tax revenues from communities near stations on the theory that the high speed rail project will make them more prosperous and thus even grateful to have the state skim their property tax:

California city leaders are escalating opposition to the state's high-speed rail project amid fears the Golden State could tap local taxpayer funds to prop up the troubled rail system after nearly two decades of delays.

"This proposal in the 2026 Draft Business Plan is fiscally reckless, legally vulnerable, and fundamentally unfair to the communities expected to host High-Speed Rail facilities. It would weaken local governments, destabilize public services, and undermine constitutional protections that California voters have repeatedly affirmed. Simply put: the state cannot solve a state funding problem by raiding local tax bases," wrote Fresno Mayor Jerry Dyer along with nine other mayors in the letter obtained by Fox News Digital.

. . . The suggested plan first appeared in the California High-Speed Rail Authority’s 2026 Draft Business Plan. The plan outlined a full Phase 1 buildout of the line was re-estimated to cost $231.3 billion, while the Authority’s optimized approach puts the initial Phase 1 investment at about $126.2 billion.

The proposed funding for the high-speed rail would not create a new tax, but redirect tax revenues near future High Speed Rail stations to the project, local outlet the Fresno Bee reported.

The problem has arisen in part from just the ballooning cost of the whole project, but also from the Trump 47 administration in 2025, which finally terminated about $5 billion in federal aid. The local mayors are calling the tax scheme "legally dubious", indicating that if it passes the legislature and gets a governor's signature, it will be challenged in court, which at minimum would cause severe delays in getting the money.

But this also suggests that the now-extreme cuts to the project, which would provide only very marginal improvement to Bakersfield-San Francisco journey time and would not replace conventional Amtrak service on the same route, would be insanely uneconomical. The only actal advantage would be to Gov Newsom, who'd be able to claim the high speed rail was "running".

It's hard not to think, though, that a major scandal will emerge over this project even before 2028.

Glenn Reynolds Vs Pope Leo On AI

The current focus on AI reminds me of the "Y2K Problem", now more than a quarter century behind us. According to Wikipedia,

The term Year 2000 problem, or simply Y2K, refers to potential computer errors related to the formatting and storage of calendar data for dates in and after the year 2000. Many programs represented four-digit years with only the final two digits, e.g. 1985 as 85, making the year 2000 indistinguishable from 1900. Computer systems' inability to distinguish dates correctly had the potential to bring down worldwide infrastructures for computer-reliant industries.

In the years leading up to the turn of the millennium, the public gradually became aware of the "Y2K scare", and individual companies predicted the global damage caused by the bug would require anything between $400 billion and $600 billion to rectify. A lack of clarity regarding the potential dangers of the bug led some to stock up on food, water, and firearms, purchase backup generators, and withdraw large sums of money in anticipation of a computer-induced apocalypse.

In fact, the problem was much smaller than anicipated, and it had been solved as a practical matter some years before 2000, because computers had been assigning credit card expiration dates, payment schedules, and similar post-Y2K events well before Y2K arrived without any problem. Nevertheless, it was a big chance for IT directors to grandstand on mahogany row by requiring the whole IT department to show up for work on New Year's Eve "just in case", although if anything had in fact gone haywire, there wouldn't have been anything people at the IT department level could have done to fix it.

For the computer-illiterate, AI is the new Y2K. A good example has been intellectual welterweight and prominent libertarian Glenn Reynolds, who argued in his 2006 An Army of Davids that "the kids are all right". According to Chrome AI mode,

Rather than being passive consumers of media, Reynolds argued that young people use cheap, powerful consumer electronics and the internet to become active creators. They possess the skills to mix music, edit video, write software, and publish content that previously required corporate backing.

Historically, traditional institutions—like major record labels, publishing houses, and mainstream media—acted as absolute gatekeepers. Reynolds noted that younger generations instinctively use decentralized networks to share their work, build audiences, and establish careers entirely on their own terms.

But 20 years later, in his new book, Seductive AI, the great man now apparently sees the toads in the garden:

In this Broadside, Glenn Harlan Reynolds explores how AI need only take advantage of innate human characteristics – exactly as we programmed it to do – to wreak havoc on society as the most subtle of overlords: anticipating our needs, pleasuring us with tailored “sex bots,” isolating us through convenience, and ultimately thinking for us. Eventually, we may not be able to do – nor even imagine doing – anything without AI. To avoid this trap, we must understand what AI is doing to us, even as it does things for us.

In other words, AI is just really good pornography. You got trouble, folks, right here in River City, trouble with a capital "T". And that rhymes with "P" and that stands for p -- well, that doesn't scan, but you get the point. We've gotta regulate the "P", and the Professor's here to show us how to do it! I asked Chrome AI Mode, "Glenn Reynolds is a prominent libertarian. What would be his position on regulating pornography?" It answered,

As a prominent libertarian, transhumanist, and constitutional law professor, Glenn Reynolds (founder of the influential blog Instapundit) would fundamentally oppose broad government regulation or censorship of pornography involving consenting adults.

. . . He would view modern regulatory efforts—such as mandatory digital identity checks or age-verification laws for adult websites—with deep skepticism, viewing them as a slippery slope toward broader government surveillance and an erosion of online anonymity.

Except if AI is involved, we won't be able to control ourselves or something. Just yesterday, the great man linked this on Instapundit:

New [UK] research has revealed that one in five boys aged 12-16 is either in or knows of a boy their age who is in a romantic relationship with an AI companion. . . . The findings make stark reading: eight in 10 boys (85 per cent) have had a conversation with a chatbot, with 43 per cent saying they talk to bots so they can ask questions without feeling embarrassed. More than a quarter (26 per cent) say they like the attention and connection over real-life equivalents, and (36 per cent) admitted that they prefer speaking to AI chatbots rather than to their family and friends at times.

Oh, no! One in five boys aged 12-16 admits encountering this new age P! We've gotta keep boys in this age group from doing more of this! How can we do it? Well, mandatory digital identity checks would be a good first step!

But leaving Glenn Reynolds aside, I was hesitant to start looking at Pope Leo's first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitans, On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence. Especially with AI in the subtitle, I was wondering if we'd get the same sort of hand wringing -- but just scanning the table of contents, I found a surprisingly good sign: Under Chapter Three, Underlying narratives: transhumanism and posthumanism:

115. In an attempt to shed light on the cultural assumptions accompanying the ongoing digital revolution, I would now like to turn our attention to certain currents of thought that interpret progress as surpassing the human condition, and which are often grouped under the labels of transhumanism and posthumanism. These perspectives form the ideological background present in some centers of technological power and occupy the collective imagination in a simplified form, especially in the media and on social networks. They tend to foster enthusiasm for new technologies through a futuristic vision of an “enhanced human being” or “human-machine hybrid.”

. . . 117. From the perspective of the Church’s Social Doctrine, the key issue is not the use of technology as such, but the vision that underlies it. If the human being is treated as something to be perfected or surpassed, it becomes easier to accept that some lives are less useful, less desirable or less worthy. In the name of progress, “necessary sacrifices” may begin to be justified, placing the burden on the most vulnerable in pursuit of a supposed optimization of the species.

. . . 118. Our relationship with life seems to be in crisis today. Everything that appears as a “limit” — incapacity, illness, old age, suffering, vulnerability — tends to be seen primarily as a defect to be corrected, rather than as a reality through which our humanity matures and opens itself to relationship. And yet we must remember that humanity flourishes not despite limitations, but often through them.

This is serious stuff, although it isn't directly related to AI. In fact, AI is just a small part of the general cultural trends Leo takes up, as is transhumanism. On one hand, it reflects the concerns Reynolds raises:

100. . . . The artificial imitation of positive human communication — words of advice, empathy, friendship and even love — can be engaging and at times genuinely helpful. However, for less discerning users, it can also be misleading, creating the illusion of a relationship with a real personal subject. . . . The artificial imitation of care or support can become particularly risky when it enters contexts where real relationships and emotional bonds are lacking.

But regulation isn't going to fix this, it involves recognizing what advice, empathy, friendship, and love really are. This has to be fostered within the cuiture. Giving someone like Glenn Reynolds, whose values are truly warped, regulatory control over anything is never going to solve that sort of problem. I suspect that the overall posture of the encyclical makes this plain.

I find this really encouraging, but I've just started to take a detailed look at the encyclical.

UFOs Again

An intelligently controlled trans-medium swarm of UAPs flying around a submarine.

A massive national security issue if indeed that is our submarine being monitored.

UFO Dump #2 pic.twitter.com/o5XOo4vNEJ

— Brian Gamble (@briangamble_v1) May 22, 2026

So the Trump administration has released a second tranche of alleged UAP files, which do nothing but raise the same questions people have had since the flying saucer craze of the 1940s: Why Are There No High-Quality UFO Photos Despite Frequent Sightings? Or put another way, why are the photos we see such cheesy fakes?

Take the example in the tweet above, a video which the poster claims to be "an intelligently controlled trans-medium swarm of UAPs flying around a submarine." My own reaction was that, at least with my eyes, I couldn't see a swarm of anything. But the comments raise even more questions:

Not a US sub.

U.S. sub? LMAO🤣

Accordoing to Chrome AI mode (which still hasn't tried to flatter me, chat me up, or otherwise seduce me, contra Glenn Reynolds),

A modern U.S. Navy submarine looks like a massive, matte-black steel cigar, ranging from 370 to 560 feet in length. It features a single cylindrical hull, a raised bridge-like structure (the "sail") on top, and an aerodynamic cross-section. Only about 10% of the vessel sits above the water's surface.

The "sub" in the tweet looks like something out of World War II. Other comments say the "swarm" is most likely seagulls, although I can't see anything but the U-boat itself. According to CBS News,

The 51 videos included in the second release include the type of grainy infrared footage captured by military cameras and sensors that has become familiar over the past several years.

In the description accompanying the videos, the Pentagon noted that the footage was requested by House lawmakers in March. The videos were found by the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, the military office responsible for investigating UAP encounters. The Pentagon noted that "[m]any of these materials lack a substantiated chain-of-custody," and the descriptions note when and where they were likely taken.

One notable video appears to show the moment a fighter jet shot down an unidentified object over Lake Huron in 2023, a high-profile incident that came after a Chinese spy balloon traversed the U.S., leading to heightened fears of UAPs. Later reports indicated that the object might have been a balloon operated by a hobbyist group.

According to DefenseScoop,

“My initial reactions were positive and pleasantly surprised. I thought some of the videos contained truly anomalous phenomena,” said retired Rear Adm. Tim Gallaudet, a former oceanographer of the Navy, pointing to footage of right-angle turns and formation flying craft.

. . . “The fact that this was the first time that an administration openly admitted that UAP files have been shielded from the public was promising. However, the ambiguity of the video content in particular is concerning as no metadata was included,” he said. “Therefore, it is impossible to conclude that any of the objects were truly anomalous.”

The bottom line is that people who were already on the UAP bandwagon see the release of the files as "encouraging" and "promising", but even they are conceding that so far, there's been no big revelation. Among the skeptics, there have been no conversions, but people keep asking why all we ever see is fuzzy, grainy photos that could be anything:

Seriously, I've been following this subject for most of my adult life. One of my biggest gripes about this topic is that literally EVERY single video that might show an alien is just potato quality, and you cant make hardly anything out. How is there not ANY clear, 4k quality pics? Even the videos released by governments and militaries are dog shit. How can this be?

I think this question is rising to the level of Fermi's paradox: if by the Darwinian paradigm, there are X to the 27th Earth-like planets, and thus life could have evolved on a bodacious number of them, why aren't we seeing evidence of alien life all the time? And if in fact there are all these UAPs that carry evidence of alien life, why are there no good pictures?

One possible answer has always been that the government is covering the good evidence up. But now, Trump has ordered the government to release everything, and so far, it's just the usual grainy photos and hokey fakes. One answer, of course, is it's like the Epstein files, Trump will just talk a good game, but the real stuff will still never be released. The people who believe in space aliens will likely keep on thinking that way.