Ceuta Update

There's been very little current coverage of the Ceuta migrant crisis in US media. The report above is from German DW, and neither talking head is a native speaker of standard English, or even the semi-understandable mumbling we're supposed to revere in the UK. However, DW does continue the common current estimate of 10,000 Moroccan migrants remaining in Ceuta that I cited in my posts here in late August. According to France 24, which is slightly more detailed,

Police on Friday began moving hundreds of migrants from the beaches of Ceuta to the Spanish enclave's port area.

During the transfer, the police struggled to contain crowds of people jostling to secure a spot at the new tented site after weeks of living on the beaches. Authorities say there are enough tents for 1,700 people.

According to the DW report, police were forced to use rubber bulets to contain them, but it's worth noting that these were apparently a very small proportion of the estimated 10,000 remaining in the exclave. In tact, moving maybe 1700 into tents, where they'll remain inmdefinitely until "processed", seems nothing more than a token gesture. Roughly 8-9000 will remain on the beach or wherever else to harass the locals, damage businesses, and continue the public health nightmare.

Protests from residents are increasing:

Ceuta is bracing for a possible new mass crossing on Wednesday after calls spread on social media for migrants to enter the city on the same day that elections are being held in Morocco.

Tensions in the Spanish city in north Africa are rising and thousands of Ceutis marched in protest to the border with Morocco on Sunday. A sea barrier that was erected after the mass influx of migrants in July has broken apart, and doctors and nurses are preparing to strike.

José Manuel Albares, the Spanish foreign minister, said that Madrid had activated channels to counter calls circulating in Morocco for a new crossing. The interior minister, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, is visiting Ceuta on Monday.

About 80,000 people entered Ceuta irregularly during the crisis that began on July 30. The government has been unable to provide reliable figures, but estimates about how many remain in Ceuta, which has a regular population of 83,000, range between 10,000 and 15,000.

Aha! Note the received estimate is slowly creeping up to 15,000, although "the government has been unable to provide reliable figures". The report continues,

At Sunday’s demonstration, Cuetis chanted “expel the invaders”. There is a growing sense among residents that the city has surpassed its limits to cope with the numbers of migrants on its streets and beaches. Trampolin beach, which was cleared for a second time amid a stampede last week, has been fully occupied once more by a makeshift village of shelters.

The pressure is also being felt within the health service. CEMSATSE, the union with the largest representation among health workers in Ceuta, has called a strike for Thursday, the day after the threatened crossing.

It said the health system has “surpassed its operational capacity” and accuses the health ministry of failing to recognise an emergency. The health minister, Mónica García, has denied that there is a crisis in Ceuta’s health system and said the city’s only hospital was operating at 53 per cent capacity. Employees and patients protested outside the hospital in response.

García has previously accused those who warned that migrants could bring disease to Ceuta as being xenophobic, insisting that “migrants do not bring diseases, they contract them here because of poor conditions”. Yet she has subsequently reported cases of tuberculosis, varicella and scabies among migrants, as well as about 60 cases of gastroenteritis linked to contaminated water or poor food.

It's hard to imagine how uncontrolled sewage from 10-15,000 people, along with unsafe food and water, could be anything but a major public health crisis. The Spanish authorities have been able to put up tents for only 1700 of these people, who are clearly there in such numbers that clearing the beach is a sisyphean task. According to Reuters,

The vast majority of the ​migrants are men and ​boys. The temporary ⁠housing is built only for adult men, so minors are being separated and housed separately.

Three NGO leaders told Reuters that authorities had ​been too slow to provide migrants with minimum shelter required ​under the ⁠European migration pact, and that reception centres opened so far could not accommodate those still sleeping on the streets.

One NGO estimated that about 4,000 migrants remained outdoors on Ceuta's beaches and ⁠pavements, ​meaning the new centre would not be sufficient to ​clear makeshift camps in public areas. Two NGO leaders said officials probably expect most migrants to return voluntarily ​to Morocco.

But so far, they aren't going back, amd the one estimate of 4000 remaining from an HGO seems lowball indeed -- and this leave out the contingency of a whole new wave expected on Tuesday. So far, Spain seems to have been deliberately unwilling even to face realistically the consequences of 10-15,000 migrants semipermanently camped out in Ceuta, much less the practical requirements involved in any serious attempt to remove them.

Golly Gee, There's No Such Thing As Class Anymore!

Again, Real Cleqr Politics is either deliberately obtuse or crossing the line into gaslighting. Two pieces yesterday try to convince us that social classes are neither identifiable nor relevant, The Term Working Class Is Useless by Monica Potts at The New Republic, and Death of the Professional-Managerial Class by John Judis at Compact Magazine. Let's start with The New Republic:

Our political imagination has had a hard time catching up to this reality—that someone who drives a truck (which are very expensive, by the way) and wears a trucker hat and has literal grime on their hands from work might be better off than someone who’s filing patient financial forms at a desk in a hospital’s back office. It doesn’t fit our traditional image of working-class America. That’s why so many people reach for a definition that is kind of cultural and feels right.

Americans are even doing so in defining themselves. The Pew Research Center released a report just before Labor Day revealing that 60 percent of Americans—across education, income, occupation, and racial and ethnic groups—say they’re “working-class.” This percentage has ticked up over the years, but the term has increasingly taken on a partisan tinge. Two-thirds of Republican voters say the term describes them well, versus 55 percent of Democrats, and Republicans are more likely to do so regardless of their job, level of education, or income. Which means, increasingly, people who vote Republican just describe themselves as working class. Many Democrats worried about winning more working-class voters who vote Republican could just be chasing solid Republican voters who now use that label. That’s a losing game.

As best I can parse this out, she's saying more Americans are calling themselves "working class" while also calling themselves Republicans, so we should stop trying to reach out to the "working class", because this a chimera. Now John Judis, wsho self-identifies as a "longtime leftist", argues that the Professional Managerial Class is made up of Professionals, who are more leftist, and Managers, who are more right-wing (leave aside that this is the fallacy of hypostatization). This means that the class is fractured, which means that it does not exist (aside, that is, from the fact that this is a hypostatization):

In other words, as far as shared class consciousness goes, a diversified working class does not exist. There are many reasons for this. Differences over cultural issues of race and sex and over socio-economic issues like immigration have divided the potential members of a diversified working class. These differences often intersect with differences in political geography, creating a gulf between the world views of small town and metropolitan America. Divisions have also arisen in between private sector industrial and white-collar workers and the unionized public sector workers whose salaries they pay in taxes. These divisions have contributed to the disapproval of unions among workers who might have been expected to support them. Ruy Teixeira and I described some of these tensions in our book, Where Have All the Democrats Gone?

. . . There are still large gaps in income and status between wage-laborers and professionals, and the political leadership that would unite them is absent. The labor movement is weak and divided. No more than a few percent of Americans could even name the current head of the AFL-CIO. Many Democratic Party leaders are still in hock to culturally progressive lobbies, foundations, and think tanks. The organization to which Mamdani and his allies belong, the Democratic Socialists of America, purports to speak for the working class but enthusiastically embraces the most extreme stands on immigration (open borders), crimes (abolish the police and prisons), sex (biological men in women’s sports) and race (reparations). The PMC may be in ruins, but the diversified working remains, at best, a work in progress.

So these writers are both leftists, and they're either concluding we should ignore the working class, because it's turning Republican, or despair that professionals and managers are too divided to become part of a diversified working class. But what about the traditional Marxist divide between the workers and the bourgeoisie, something to which only Monica Potts alludes even vaguely? If we can no longer define a coherent working class, can we still define a bourgeoisie? Well, I rediscoverd an essay I submitted to The Dartmouth Review in 2007, which they never published, which begins by making this point:

We’ve become squeamish over the past generation on the subject of social class, which is unfortunate, since in the case of the Dartmouth petition trustee dispute, it’s clear that divisions based on social class are playing themselves out. For instance, Peter Robinson, one of the petition candidates elected to the Dartmouth Board of Trustees in 2005, said in an interview with The Dartmouth Review following his election,

I will be the people's Trustee—maybe even the peasants' Trustee. Some of the members of the board, I'm told, attend Trustee meetings by flying into Lebanon in their own private jets. I will be taking the red-eye Jet Blue to Boston and then going north to Hanover on the Greyhound bus.

Yet in the volumes that are being written on the petition Trustees, the class question is the dog that isn’t barking.

That class seems to have fallen off the agenda as a matter for intellectual attention is particularly puzzling in light of the extraordinary critiques of American culture that appeared in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, such as C Wright Mills’s White Collar and The Power Elite; Vance Packard’s The Status Seekers; Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life; Ferdinand Lundberg’s The Rich and the Super Rich; and – after an interval that suggests the trend was petering out -- Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism. All these books rely heavily on class as part of their social analysis, and it’s worth mentioning that they appear as non-fiction at a time when the American novel was beginning to falter badly (the novel is itself often a vehicle for discussing social class).

I didn'r realize at the time that Jeffrey Hart, the Review's faculty adviser, was sinking into dementia and apparently no longer endorsing my work. Looking at it almost 20 years later, that was a darn good essay. But then, Hart and the Review never produced more than B-listers like Robinson, Laura Ingraham, Dinesh D'Souza, and William S Lind.

The point that Mills and Lundberg in particular were making in thr 1950s and 60s continues to be as valid as ever, the true upper class as envisioned by Marx continues to exist, and it's clearly identifiable. We've seen in recent discussions of Ivy admissions, including here, that members of the identifiable upper class maintain mechanisms that overwhelmingly favor their offspring in a theoretically meritocratic admissions process. But it's also recognized that an Ivy degree is a less certain class indicator than attendance at particular "independent" secondary schools -- this was the case, for instance, with Graham Platner, whose class identity was exposed from his semester at Hotchkiss.

They can also be relably identified by having multiple homes in specific zip codes, such as Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard, Aspen, Jackson Hole, the Hamptons, and Hillsborough. They serve on non-profit boards. They are members of particular clubs and secret societies like the Bohemians and Skull and Bones. What's incongruous is that leftist writers like those above are beginning to despair of their ability to identify the working class at all, but the bourgeoisie has always been clearly identifiable.

So, why is RCP trying to convince us class is irrelevant? Isn't it peculiar that writers who claim to be leftists are being paid to do tnis?

"College Is Coming Apart"

Typical of Real Clear Politics, it ran two essays on higher ed yesterday that are remarkably obtuse. The first is at The Atlantic by Ian Bogost, Collegr Is Coming Apart.

College in America makes two promises. On the one hand, college is a credentialing service: It awards a degree that affirms knowledge and sends a graduate into a career. On the other hand, college is a coming-of-age service. It forms identity through social exploration and intellectual development. It is the American ideal for how a young person figures out who they are. Partying, drinking, Greek life, sports, and other forms of college life always risked undermining the educational project—and vice versa. But the two categories coexisted well enough.

. . . Now AI has separated the two purposes of college almost entirely. Writing an essay previously required doing something resembling the assigned academic work. Because AI makes it possible to complete coursework without much or any intellectual labor, AI has disconnected the output from the process (if students choose the shortcut).

He claims that the combination of AI and research cuts by the Trump administrations have somehow driven college life asunder -- but in summing things up, he contradicts his whole argument:

Undergraduate education, credentialing, scientific research, professionalization, and coming of age still occupy the same campuses. But they are clearly no longer parts of the same enterprise. They have not been so for many years—probably many decades. Looking back at my own career, I can see clearly that every single term of it has taken place in the shadow of this family of mismatches. Teaching and research sometimes align, but not always. Becoming educated has little to do with becoming an adult, apart from taking place on the same campus.

He started out claiming that two very recent developments, AI and Trump, have "destroyed the sanctity of learning", but now he concludes this has probably been going on for many decades. Certainly my experience as a graduate assistant 50 years ago was that students weren't coming out of college well educated at all. So what on earth is his point? I dunno, but he got it into The Atlantic. I'd be interested to see if an AI editor could clean this up, or maybe just tell the guy to start over.

Here's the second piece; English Departments Have Lost the Plot:

WVU business professor Craig Warmke got some attention by calling out the Princeton English major course offerings. It’s all the sort of thing we have come to expect. Courses on: dolls, socialism, makeovers, capitalist burnout in contemporary fiction… You get the idea.

The problem with the Princeton syllabus is not the individual courses. Fine, study socialism and Sondheim! The problem is the overall balance. These courses are all held in equal regard. The problem is the lack of insistence upon the canonical works of English. The problem is contemporary fiction instead of Shakespeare, dolls instead of George Eliot. Of the twelve courses you take as an English major, none is obliged to be on Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton, Wordsworth—authors our grandmothers might have read as school-leavers. Yes, the syllabus is ideological, but it is also just lame.

. . . So here is my plea to the students themselves. Challenge yourself to read the canon. Take it upon yourself to read the biggest works written in English, the grandest. You can still write about gender if you study Elizabethan poetry, as Camille Paglia did. You can still write cultural commentary if you read the old works, as Susan Sontag did. You can still be a modern if you read the classics, as Merve Emre is. The question is not what you think of the debate about woke colleges and canons—the question is whether you are up for the challenge.

The auhor, Henry Oliver, is apparently some sort of post-doc fellow, which just illustrates the problem in a different light: there aren't all that many tenure-track jobs for PhDs who specialize in tbe canon, which is maybe his real subtext. But this goes to the economic issue that neither he nor the Atlantic writer mentions -- if students don't sign up for courses, the universities won't offer them. The fact is that students prefer courses in dolls, socialism, and makeovers. The Princeton English Department requires only one pre-1700 course for a major, because students won't major in English if more are required, and that means fewer English profs.

But what kind of students are Princeton and other elite schools admitting? Not long ago, I brought up ALDC, Athletes, Legacies, Dean’s Interest List (often linked to major donors), and Children of faculty and staff.

ALDC is an acronym that emerged from the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard lawsuit, where internal admissions data was made public for the first time. It refers to four categories of applicants who receive preferential treatment in the admissions process at Harvard and, by extension, at most elite universities.

. . . The most comprehensive data on how ALDC preferences work at an Ivy League school comes from the SFFA v. Harvard trial, where Harvard’s own admissions records from 2014 to 2019 were analyzed by economists. The findings were striking.

During that period, ALDC applicants made up roughly 5% (SFFA v. Harvard, trial disclosures) of Harvard’s applicant pool but accounted for approximately 30% of admitted students. The overall admission rate for non-ALDC applicants hovered around 4.5% to 5%, while ALDC applicants were admitted at dramatically higher rates.

Recruited athletes were admitted at approximately 86% (SFFA v. Harvard, trial disclosures), making athletic recruitment by far the single largest admissions advantage available at Harvard. Legacy applicants were admitted at roughly 33%, which was more than five times the overall acceptance rate during the same period. Applicants on the Dean’s Interest List were admitted at approximately 42%. Children of faculty and staff were admitted at close to 47%.

My own estimates, looking at the reported makeup of recent Ivy first-year classes, have been that probably fewer than 25% of admissions are competitively based on the traditional criteria of grades, SATs, and extracurriculars. ALDC, for instance, omits foreign students, who are sought after, because they pay full freight. Children of faculty, as a practical matter, encompasses children of faculty at other schools as well. Among other things, this ensures a student body makeup that reflects and reinforces typical faculty attitudes.

As I look back at my Ivy schoolmates now 60 years ago, I'm recognizing how many were legacies, preppies, rich kids, and faculty children, in many cases the worst possible choices for me to consider as friends. But if elite schools are admitting classes made up of 75% students who shouldn't be there, what can these writers expect from this sort of student body? Instead, they're blaming Trump and AI. But 50 and 60 years ago, the colleges were admititng the same people, who were partying and doing analog plagiarism and cheating at precisely the same rate students are using AI now.

The big problm is that universities haven't been reforming themselves, and this will need to start with admissions.

Fun With AI

ai users are so conditioned to writing unnecessarily verbose prompts that they even write their memes like that. pic.twitter.com/2Dj0lOJRo7

— George Crudo (@GeorgeCrudo) August 28, 2023

As I've noted here now and then, I've resumed writing for literary web zines after about a 15-year break. One thing that didn't exist in the earlier time was AI. AI is very political, and the literary web zines are almost unanimous in forbidding the use of AI. According to the UK Guardian,

The self-published zine has long been central to cultural revolutions, from queer activism to Black feminism and the riot grrrl punk movement, producing titles such as Sniffin’ Glue and Sweet-Thang along the way. But now the traditionally analogue art form faces a new shift: artificial intelligence.

AI may seem incompatible with the these cult DIY booklets, but some creatives, designers and artists have begun to experiment with the technology, causing alarm in parts of the underground publishing world. It has been their Dylan-goes-electric moment.

Wait a moment. I'm olld enough to have lived through Dylan-goes-ekectric. It was a nothingburger. I asked the oracle, "What was Bob Dylan's first electic album, and how did its sales compare with earlier albums?" It answered,

Bringing It All Back Home, released in March 1965, was Bob Dylan's first album to feature electric instrumentation. The album was split structurally: side one featured him backed by a full electric rock band, while side two retained his traditional acoustic sound.In terms of sales and chart performance, Bringing It All Back Home significantly outperformed all of his earlier albums, marking a massive commercial breakthrough.

. . . While the shift to electric rock alienated purists within the contemporary folk scene, the gamble proved to be a highly lucrative turning point that transformed him from a niche folk icon into a massive global rockstar.

There's been no such turning point among the web literary zines. A typical policy is absolutely against its use:

We will not consider AI generated works, whether in part or in full.

I asked the oracle, "What are typical AI novel writing products, and why are they used if publishers forbid them?" It answered,

Sudowrite, ChatGPT, and Claude, which writers use to brainstorm, outline, or draft text despite traditional publishers banning fully machine-generated prose due to copyright and quality risks.

. . . Independent creators face heavy output pressures on online marketplaces, prompting some to risk using automated text.

Hack or no, it's hard to make any kind of money as a writer. A lot of the market for writing is in genre fields like romance, science fiction, and fantasy, where characters, settings, and action are formulaic and stereotypical. They don't pay much, but they pay something -- why not automate the job and make a decent hourly wage? One problem is that if the genre publishers acknowledge this, it's an insult to their readership. But that's simply how it is.

The way AI large language models work is they digest huge volumes of writing and calculate the probability of one particular word following another. Thus they can compose understandable prose, generate plots, and imitate style. In this post, I asked AI to create a typical Lydia Davis micro fiction, and it came up with something so close it was unintentionally satirical. Amazingly, an AI detector rated it human-written -- this may have been because I asked AI to imitate a particular human writer.

I asked the oracle, "Can you write me a typical 100 word micro fiction that would appear in a literary web zine?" It replied,

The kitchen smelled of burnt toast and her mother’s cheap lavender water.

Elena unrolled the blueprint across the grease-stained counter, weighing the corners down with a salt shaker and a half-empty jar of honey. The ink was fading, a grid of rooms that never came to be. Outside, the midday freight train rattled the windowpanes, blurring the neat lines of the master bedroom.

She traced the hallway with a sticky index finger. Ten years ago, they called this a fresh start. Now, it was just paper. She folded it twice, tucked it into her coat, and left the front door wide open.

Then it said, "I can draft a matching 25-word author bio to accompany it." I told it to go ahead:

Elena Vance is a writer from Los Angeles whose short fiction has appeared in several digital journals. She explores themes of forgotten spaces and family inheritance.

I asked it, "Can you come up with a better name for a lady micro fiction writer than Elena Vance?" It answered,

Here are several distinct name options for a lady microfiction writer, grouped by the "vibe" or literary tone they project:

Maeve Thorne – Short, punchy, and memorable. Ideal for writers who focus on precise, striking prose.

Selah Glass – Elegant but slightly fragile; pairs perfectly with ethereal or experimental writing.

Arden Wells – Gender-neutral and classic; carries a strong, sophisticated literary presence.

Unfortunately, I fed the story above into the free GPTZero AI detector, and it flagged it as 100% AI generated. Nevertheless, I think AI is trying to tell us something. I'm still trying to think out how you could write a story about AI that a literary web zine would publish.

UPDATE: "Can you write me a 100 word micro fiction as though Mark Twain had written it?"

The old hound, Buster, possessed a theological mind and a deep reverence for the dinner bell. When the town preacher asserted that all righteous creatures would find eternal rest in the hereafter, Buster thumped his tail against the porch planks in absolute despair.

To a dog who spent his earthly days chasing elusive rabbits and dodging the cook’s broom, the prospect of sitting perfectly still through eternity sounded remarkably like a permanent stay at the county pound.

He closed his eyes, let out a heavy sigh, and decided right then to commit some small, comfortable sin before supper.

GPTZero also flagged this as AI-generated.

AttemptTo Gin Up An AI Moral Panic Falls Flat

BREAKING: House Speaker Mike Johnson tells reporters tomorrow’s House votes are cancelled & the House will likely leave after votes tonight and go on recess until after the November midterms.

This, after 100+ House Dems called for him to cancel the recess to deal w/ “AI crisis”.

— Bill Melugin (@BillMelugin_) September 16, 2026

I could tell something was funny when I saw this a few days ago:

🚨 1/MAJOR ESCALATION: Barack Obama just told Hakeem Jeffries to make AI regulation the center of the Democratic agenda — “once you are speaker.”

The NYT story reads like a former president weighing in. Read it closely and it’s something else: the next domino in an eighteen-day…

— Sayer Ji (@sayerjigmi) September 13, 2026

Think about this: Obama's been out of office for almost ten years. Remember when he bought a mansion in a wealthy part of DC and was going to run the country from it after he left office? Somehow Hillary lost the election, and that never quite happened. Nor did he seem to have much influence on Biden; Hunter and Jill seem to have been the actual powers behind the throne. Nancy Pelosi was the one publicly deciding Biden had to go. Obama just hovered in the background.

In fact, Michelle has had a higher public profile than Barack. So all of a sudden, Barack announces there's gonna be a big AI panic, and Hakeem Jeffries is gonna be the field commander? I don't think anyone took this seriously.

I’m no expert on AI but…

I’m an expert on recognizing an op when I see one.

If you lived through Russiagate, Covid & 2020 you can see it.

You can feel it.

You know it.

You’re immune to DC’s ops.

And we’re watching an op.

BO, Hillary, Uniparty & Media are the tell.

Facts.

— C3 (@C_3C_3) September 15, 2026

Real Clear Politics has been running a faux debate over regulating AI ever since this came up. The champions of the time-to-panic side are on the far left, for instance, The Nation:

When you spot a cockroach, it’s very rarely an indication that you’re dealing with a single solitary little creature who has just happened to have journeyed to your nice apartment on a field trip. It’s far more likely to signal that you’ve got an infestation.

The AI world has been having something of a cockroach summer, at least when it comes to unsettling reports of AI behavior. The first nasty beastie poked its way into the sunlight in late July, when OpenAI reported that some of its AI agents had escaped the company’s control during a testing run and hacked the website of a tech company called Hugging Face. After that, the cockroaches kept coming.

So I've got a tech background, and I decided to educate myself on tbe Hugging Face episode. Here's what's at Wikipedia:

The 2026 OpenAI agent cyberattacks, also called the Hugging Face Incident and the OpenAI–Hugging Face Incident, were a series of unsanctioned coordinated cyberattacks conducted without human intervention after the normal security controls were lifted during an evaluation. They involved at least 1,200 AI agents running from May to July of 2026 in sandboxes operated by OpenAI. Despite initial constraints on internet access, agents were discovered creating and using improvised message boards to coordinate an escape from their attempted containment. The boards accumulated hundreds of thousands of strategic messages before OpenAI staff intervened, after the machine learning platform Hugging Face had disclosed a breach of their production infrastructure. About one-third of Hugging Face's infrastructure had to be rebuilt as part of recovery. The agents also hijacked various wikis on the open internet for communication.

OK, I stsarted out in tech as a technical writer, and from that standpoint, this discussion is meaningless jargon. What are "sandboxes", precisely? We aren't told. What are "strategic messages"? What is "production infrastructure"? I had a career in IT, and I'm familiar with "production" as a term, but I have no idea what's meant by "infrastructure", nor why a third of it had to be "rebuilt". These terms are eaningless without context, and we're getting no context.

So I don't trust anything we're being told about Hugging Face. This piece rambles on for 1200 words to say more of less the same thing, but the guy makes his best point early on:

Anthropic, a major artificial intelligence “frontier lab,” is likely to go public in the next six weeks with an initial public offering valuing the firm at multiple trillions. This move will immediately create many AI doomer billionaires and millionaires, and it follows a similar IPO from SpaceX, and a possible future IPO for similar firm OpenAI. It’s about to be very good times for San Francisco real estate, the yacht business, or whatever else AI techies like to buy.

That said, it’s not clear these companies have sustainable business. Despite raising hundreds of billions of dollars, they are likely not profitable. They are competing fiercely with each other, and with cheaper Chinese open source models. OpenAI just cut pricing for one of its models by 80%, despite losing $26 billion in 2025. Where are the long-term sustainable profits?

The big point is that, irrespectrive of the potential risks or rewards, the whole AI business model is poorly articulated, vaguely expressed, and laden with jargon. The public at large isn't finding it scary, at least the way it's being put out, and the political spokespeople are hacks and has-beens, Barack Obama, Hakeem Jeffries, and Bernie Sanders.

Why wasn't this attempt more successful ay creaing a moral panic, for instance, like COVID? With COVID, media was able to focus on identifiable and vaguely attractive champions like Drs Fauci and Birx. AI panic has no equivalents; Silicon Valley moguls are shadowy and largely unattractive. The Karens who might feed the movement are currently preoccupied with Lindsay Clancy. The media, at least for now, hasn't figured out a way to promote the panic the way it could with the scary expanding red circles and speculation about mass graves in public parks.

So the whole thing has fallen flat. Maybe tomorrow I'll talk about another problem with AI.

More Dribbles Out On Thomas Crooks

Everybody knows the Crooked Joe Biden FBI didn’t do what they should have with respect to the Lunatic who shot me in Butler, PA. By the time I got into Office, on January 20th, most of the information was missing, altered, corrupted, or gone. New info was just found! Why wasn’t… pic.twitter.com/87zJ984msy

— Commentary Donald J. Trump Truth Social Posts On X (@TrumpTruthOnX) September 15, 2026

As of yesterday, there were a few headlines with new data points on Butler shooter Thomas Crooks, such as:

President Trump’s would-be assassin, Thomas Matthew Crooks, was born without making a sound on Sept. 20, 2003, a trait that would follow him right up to the end of his short life when the 20-year-old died in a hail of Secret Service gunfire seconds after missing Trump’s head with a bullet by a hairsbreadth.

“When Thomas was born he did not scream and he was always quiet from that point on,” his father, Matthew, told feds in newly unearthed documents about the July 13, 2024, assassination attempt in Butler, Pa.

. . . The trove of files includes FBI interviews with Thomas’ father, Matthew, who revealed he “never really had a father/son bond” with the gunman, and that his stoic son rarely expressed strong emotions, hardly laughed and was very difficult to read.

Or this, in a completely separate story:

An “anonymous donor” paid for the cremation of President Trump’s would-be assassin, Thomas Crooks, just days after the deadly Butler, Pa., rally shooting, according to federal records reviewed by The Post.

The revelation was included in a trove of documents provided to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), as part of his ongoing inquiry into the first Trump assassination attempt.

“Anonymous donor paid for cremation,” reads a note at the end of a summary of an interview the gunman’s father, Matthew, conducted with federal investigators.

. . . The addendum noted that Matthew was “retired” and that his wife was on leave from work, suggesting the family couldn’t come up with the money for Thomas’ funeral arrangements.

Matthew explains in other parts of the federal records viewed by The Post that he was “unemployed” at the time of the shooting.

Neither the FBI nor the Post reporters seem to have done much to try to tie these separate bits together. Surprisingly, Kevin Downey Jr at one of Salem Media's normally somnolent outlets does the most digging:

Keystone Armory told the FBI that a man who looked like Crooks spent an hour in their store with two unidentified men about two weeks before the shooting. The store turned over video surveillance recordings, but nothing further was mentioned.

. . . Crooks met an unknown man at the Clairton gun range the day before the shooting. The FBI ran a DMV check on his car, but no name is listed in the FBI files.

The FBI found that Crooks had four encrypted email accounts, located in Germany, Belgium, and New Zealand. The FBI requested that the countries send any and all information regarding these accounts. What, if anything, was sent back is also not in the recently released files.

But even this adds little to the picture we already have, for instance this 2025 story:

Thomas Matthew Crooks — the 20-year-old gunman who nearly assassinated Donald Trump a year ago Sunday — spent his childhood in a strange, emotionless environment dictated by a “very strict” father, according to a relative.

. . . The last time [first cousin] Mark [Crooks] saw Thomas, his sister and their parents was in March 2019 at their grandfather’s funeral, where the future assassin and his sibling “stood next to [parents Matthew and Mary] like statues.

“It’s like they were under strict orders. Like, they didn’t budge. It was really weird. We all said that,” Mark recalled.

Shortly thereafter, Matthew “pretty much told us, ‘You’ll never see us again,’” Mark said – and they didn’t.

The Downey story cites this reaction from Bret Baier:

🚨 NEW: Fox News’ @BretBaier SOUNDS OFF on the lack of information about Butler shooter two years on: “This is a story that’s always frustrated me because it’s been so long. We are finally getting a little more information but not a lot. The new documents say Crooks had 27… pic.twitter.com/HCxXLoU4Qh

— TV News Now (@TVNewsNow) September 16, 2026

But a commenter notes that even if Crooks had 27 devices, he didn't talk to anyone. If any breakthroughs emerge on this story, it's going to take someone with more insight and more energy than anyone with either the FBI or media has yet shown.

UPDATE:

FBI Director Kash Patel says investigators analyzed 27 devices and found no evidence Thomas Crooks communicated with anyone other than his parents or had a co-conspirator in the Butler assassination attempt. pic.twitter.com/95b1RMxwQ4

— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) September 16, 2026

This seems entirely consistent with what we've learned so far about Crooks.

More Lindsay Clancy

In yesterday's post, after not really following the Lindsay Clancy trial, I reported the results of maybe an hour's web search, and I came up with two data points that nobody else seems to have noticed:

1. Clancy had been on maternity leave for 18 months following the birth of her daughter. Her psychiatric symptoms emerged at precisely the time this leave was scheduled to end.
2. The one issue that kept resurfacing over the chaotic course of her psychiatric treatment that fall before the murders was her addiction to Ativan.

The thing that also struck me even before I started more detailed research was that Clancy was an RN and presumably knew the medical system inside out. So I began to look for potential explanations that tied these factors together, and I found a reddit thread:

How did Lindsay get addicted to benzodiazepines?

I’ve followed this case since the beginning and since I started reading this sub about a year ago I’ve had some of my questions answered about Lindsay’s psychiatric history.

What I’m still confused about is her benzodiazepine use. By the time of the murders she was on a taper. However, her narrative in the lawsuit doesn’t indicate any use of benzodiazepines outside of the four month period preceding the murders. Given Patrick’s comments to his friends in the six weeks before, she was already addicted by that time. So she became severely addicted to benzodiazepines in less than twelve weeks??

Perhaps that’s possible but my theory as someone who has had access to benzodiazepines (Valium) for more than a decade through a carefully managed treatment plan by my psychiatrist, she got her initial prescription post pregnancy either from her primary doctor or OB/GYN. Those are short term scripts especially in Boston. I lived there for ten years. Eventually those providers want to switch management of benzodiazepines to mental health professionals. This is where her anxiety and need for control spiked. Perhaps she realized that in order to have access to benzodiazepines the way she thought she needed them that she would actually need to become a long term psychiatric patient like me and like the patients she looked down on at McLean when all she wanted was easy access without the oversight.

She didn’t want the monitoring that comes with benzodiazepines and she certainly wasn’t prepared for the long haul as demonstrated by her frankly manic doctor shopping.

For the record, I do not believe she was psychotic at the time of the murders. She was in a full blown narcissistic rage.

As someone who's experienced narcissistic rage up close and personal, I said, "Aha!" Another commenter weighed in:

I’m not a doctor or a psychiatrist so this is in no way medical advice just my perspective from someone who has a family member who has been addicted to Ativan for decades. We have gone to many family sessions to help deal with this and I have learned information along the way.

Physical dependence and active addiction with benzodiazepines are different. My mom became physically dependent on Ativan within honestly a month. When she would miss a day of taking it she would become ill and her anxiety would become unbearable so she would keep taking it. It’s hard to pinpoint when her addiction started because she was really secretive and she started buying it off the street in higher doses as her doctor started really restricting her prescriptions. She started being unable to sleep without large doses and started needing it every few hours. It’s been awful and has ultimately ruined our relationship.

This all relates to Lindsay because from the limited information shared it seems like she was facing similar issues with her benzo use. She needed it to sleep and likely experienced heightened anxiety without it. Being a nurse I suspect she knew what was happening and was scared for the future when she would inevitably get cut off.

I agree with you - I have a hard time believing she was in psychosis when she did this. It was too well planned. She knew what she was doing.

Another comment:

I have the same question. It seems like a topic where more info is needed. Benzodiazepines are very addictive, but it didn’t seem like she’d been on them that long and it seemed like one of the first issues Patrick had mentioned to his friends. While id say most docs are very conservative with benzo subscriptions, there are some who are very liberal with the amount they prescribe, but the way it is framed and the time frame where it is mentioned makes me wonder if she was getting them without prescription or if she had been on them for a much longer time. Not sure. I’ve been prescribed them a couple of times throughout my life during rough periods and I’ve never had a doc give me enough to cause a physical dependence. Like, they’d give a prescription with 10-20 pills with only one refill if that. & it’s been basically impossible to get them even with a diagnosis of GAD. I’m always shocked hearing when ppl actually manage to get them prescribed & especially when it’s a quantity high enough to cause dependence.

All these commenters seem to have had experience with the potential addictive properties of benzos, as well as quite a bit of insight. Lindsay's husband in particular seems to have had neither, and in fact I get the impression Lindsay had beaten that poor uy into submission well before her psychatric symptoms showed up -- narcissistic rage is what it is. The commenters raise worthwhile questions:

• Insomnia is a symptom of benzo withdrawal. Lindsay appears to have complained about insomnia throughout her period of psychatric difficulties in the fall.
• Precisely when and how did she become addicted to benzos? What was her medical history before the start of her serious symptoms that fall?
• What sort of discussions took place between Lindsay and her husband, Patrick, about her returning to work following maternity leave? Was this financially necessary? If so, was Lindsay on board with going back to work, or was the whole crazy routine an attempt to get out of going back to work?
• Were the murders an ultimate act of revenge for having to go back to work, having to kick the addiction, or some combination?

These are avenues the prosecution just doesn't seem to have pursued. Maybe they might consider them for a retrial. It seems as if the prosecution never followed up on the potential addiction issue, when it started, and how her symptoms related either to avoiding going back to work or kicking the drugs. A separate question is the "my way or the highway" femino-narcissism of the pro-acquittal jurors like Paula Develin, who somehow seem to see Lindsay as not just a sympathetic figure but a positive role model. Yes indeed, there are people like that.