Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) has gotten (more or less) married four times:

• Most recently to white political consultant Tim Mynett

• The third and first times to Ahmed Hirsi, the Somali father of her three children … although Rep. Omar claims the first time she married Hirsi in an Islamic ceremony in Minnesota when she was 18, they didn’t complete getting a Minnesota marriage license and Minnesota has not had common law marriage since 1941, so that wasn’t official (and thus her second marriage was not bigamous).

• And the second time to the world’s gayest Somali man, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, who is widely (although vaguely) rumored to be her brother. Everybody who looks into it comes up with them having the same father, Colonel Nur Said Elmi, but whether or not they had the same mother remains unclear. Still, absolutely nobody has ever come up with a plausible explanation of why she might have been so smitten with heterosexual lust for the immensely effeminate Elmi that she would abandon the father of her children, but still live with Hirsi and get pregnant by him a third time while nominally married to Elmi.

The New York Times news section reports this week:

Federal agents in Minnesota opened an investigation [in 2016], according to several people familiar with the matter. They found evidence suggesting that Mr. Elmi and Ms. Omar were siblings, according to the six former and current officials familiar with the case. But, because prosecutors did not pursue the matter, the agents had limited investigative tools, the officials said.

Mr. Elmi had obtained a provisional two-year green card based on the marriage, two former officials said. But when he sought to make that status permanent, immigration officials requested additional evidence about the validity of the marriage. Instead of responding, Mr. Elmi left the United States and abandoned his green card petition, the officials said.

Obviously, engaging in a sham marriage to aid in immigration fraud is against federal law, even in Minnesota. Marrying your sibling or half-sibling is also illegal in Minnesota under Minnesota Statutes § 517.03. You can’t even marry your first cousin there. The closest relatives you can legally marry in Minnesota are first cousins once removed and second cousins.

The Congresswoman and her brother were legally married from 2009-2017, although during these years she had a third child with her first/third husband and those two filed taxes together a couple of times. She appears to have continued living with her first husband, but moved her brother/husband in with them, much to the disgust of her real man.

After trying for a couple of years to persuade U.S. immigration authorities that his marriage to the future Representative was legit, Mr. Elmi gave up his quest for an American green card and went back to Britain, where he advertises himself as a “dirty dandy,” (which sounds like a gay gigolo, but he may just be an amateur enthusiast).

It’s striking how often Somalis get away with fraud despite little evidence that they are terribly adept at it. For example, presumably one reason why government bureaucrats didn’t believe that Elmi and Omar were really man and wife is because Elmi is a massive flamer.

Meanwhile, Elmi is lately looking for a career, so he is attempting to become Jason Argay.

From the Wits Centre for Diversity Studies in South Africa:

Note that this refers to Mr. Elmi as a “they.”

On the other hand, his webpage at U. of Bristol in the UK refers to him as a “he:”

Mr Ahmed Elmi

Doctor of Philosophy, School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies

Member, Bristol Doctoral College …

Research interests

Ahmed Elmi is an ESRC-funded PhD researcher in Political Science at the School of Sociology, Politics, and International Studies (SPAIS), University of Bristol. He was previously a visiting doctoral scholar at the Wits Centre for Diversity Studies (WiCDS), University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg, South Africa; and an affiliate researcher at the British Institute in Eastern Africa (BIEA), in Nairobi, Kenya. In 2025, he served on the programming and curatorial team for GALA Queer Archive’s ‘Margins for Error’ exhibition on queer African art, film, and publishing; also in Johannesburg, South Africa. He is currently completing his doctoral thesis, provisionally titled: ‘Bravery amidst Brutality: A Queer Resistance to Violence and Criminalisation in Contemporary Kenya.’

Grounded in queer African epistemologies and standpoint methodology, his research examines violence against queer people in Kenya, interrogating the intersections of sexuality, politics, and structural marginalisation. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in four urban centres: Eldoret, Kisumu, Mombasa and Nairobi, his work analyses vulnerability and resistance within postcolonial queer politics, contributing to debates on anti-LGBTQ+ moral panics, mediated queerphobia, legitimised violence, decolonial praxis, digitality, futurity, and the reimagining of Africa’s social and political landscape for queer communities. Previously, as a Graduate Teacher at the University of Bristol, he led undergraduate seminars on political theory, focusing on contemporary global politics.

Ahmed is also interested in state politics and political party systems across Africa, having conducted research with the Political Parties Database Project (PPDP), and the Political Parties in Africa Project (PPA), at the University of Bristol, as well as the Democratic Accountability and Linkages Project (DALP) at Duke University, in the United States. Through these works, he has collected quantitative data on elections, party organisation, and political leadership in Malawi, Uganda, and Zambia, and produced comparative country-specific dossiers on Angola, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, and Zambia.

He holds an MSc in Social Science Research Methods (Politics) from the University of Bristol, and an MA in Global Media and Communication from the University of Leicester. For both programmes, he was the top-ranked student in his cohort, and on both occasions was awarded the Prize for Best Overall Performance, which is conferred upon the graduating student with the highest overall grade-average. In 2022, Ahmed was awarded a full PhD scholarship from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). He is a member of the Royal African Society, the African Studies Association of the United Kingdom, the British International Studies Association, and the Political Studies Association.

Follow Ahmed’s research on his Substack and LinkedIn.

Here’s his one Substack post:

Here’s his one academic journal article:

Out in the Field: Notes on Researching Queer Violence in Kenya

Ahmed Elmi

Abstract

This essay reflects on the ethical, emotional, and methodological complexities of conducting ethnographic research on queerphobic violence in Kenya. Drawing on nine months of fieldwork across urban centres, it argues that research in contexts where queerness is criminalised cannot be adequately understood through institutional ethics alone. Instead, the field is conceptualised as a relational and embodied space shaped by shifting power dynamics, positionality, and emotional labour. Using standpoint theory and queer African epistemological approaches, the essay demonstrates how knowledge is co-produced through ongoing negotiation, care, and accountability. It highlights the researcher’s fluid insider-outsider positioning, the limits of procedural ethics, and the emotional toll of engaging with trauma and risk. By centring lived experiences and community practices, the essay contributes to decolonising methodologies, challenging Euro-American research frameworks. Ultimately, it positions fieldwork as a process grounded in reflexivity, solidarity, and a commitment to resisting the conditions that sustain queer violence in Kenya.

Journal TOR: The Open Review for the Social Sciences

Publication status Published - 27 Aug 2026

Lately, lots of black writers have been caught using AI.

So … Here’s Pangram’s analysis of Elmi’s 154-word abstract:

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Baseball franchise owners were hoping the L.A. Dodgers would win their third straight World Series so they’d have proof that it was unfair to expect small market teams to compete without a salary cap, which is vastly lucrative to franchise owners. But the Dodgers, despite their giant metropolis and being the second winningest team, got swept by the Rust Belt Brewers.

Some people are noticing that retired slugging shortstop Alex Rodriguez, the former boyfriend of Anne Wojcicki, founder of genetic testing firm 23andMe, is a really good baseball commentator:

A-Rod loves baseball.

As I wrote in 2017:

A Tale of Two Sisters

Steve Sailer

August 30, 2017

Much of the mania of the moment stems from a growing crisis of faith among elites over how much longer they can expect the ideological dogmas under which they have prospered so mightily to withstand the onrushing findings of genetic science.

No family illustrates this tension more ironically than the Wojcicki sisters, Susan (the former landlady of Google guys Larry Page and Sergey Brin) and Anne (the former wife of Sergey).

Susan Wojcicki (pronounced Wo-jit-skee) now heads Google’s subsidiary YouTube. This month she has taken the lead in corporate America’s march toward censorship of genetic explanations for sex and race differences, getting Google engineer James Damore fired and installing a system for neutering the impact of politically incorrect videos.

Meanwhile, Anne Wojcicki is the cofounder and CEO of 23andMe, a well-known genetic testing service for quantifying your racial past and what your genes might portend for your future.

The Wojcicki sisters enjoyed the ideal nature and nurture for fabulous Silicon Valley careers. Their father was chairman of the Stanford physics department, their mother an energetic teacher at Palo Alto High School, and they grew up in faculty housing on the Stanford campus, surrounded by brilliant scientists.

The Wojcicki sisters’ father was the gentile Polish chairman of the Stanford physics department and their mother was a famous Jewish teacher at Palo Alto high school. Actor James Franco was one of their mom’s best-known students … before he got cancelled.

And the Wojcicki sisters were in the right place at the right time to meet the right people.

As you’ll recall, the Internet was initially hyped as a breakthrough that would eliminate the tyranny of location: You could work from anywhere in the world! But, it turned out, where you live matters not less but even more in the Internet Age.

After completing her UCLA M.B.A. in 1998, Susan and her husband bought a five-bedroom house (with help from her parents) in Menlo Park near Stanford for about $600,000. They rented the garage to grad students Larry and Sergey to use as an office. Soon the landlady was working for nascent Google as a marketer and introducing Sergey to her sister.

This month, Susan won the power struggle within Google over software engineer James Damore documenting some of the biological science behind Google’s hiring patterns. (Paradoxically, Damore was fired for defending the hiring practices of Google executives, such as Susan Wojcicki.)

And Susan has now had YouTube enforce, in cooperation with the Anti-Defamation League, a policy of soft censorship of heterodox videos, such as journalist Jared Taylor’s “Race Differences in Intelligence.”

You can’t watch it on Youtube anymore, but you can see it at:

https://altcensored.com/watch?v=MlQBWdGjH4U

Heretics are currently being allowed to keep their videos up on YouTube’s near-monopoly service to deny them martyrdom. But most functionality, such as comments, advertising, and sharing, is being stripped away.

As Susan asked in an op-ed condemning Damore’s impudence:

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And, indeed, that is pretty much what happened.

If you look at David Rozado’s graphs of mainstream news media use of hot button words like “sexism” and “racism,” you will see they bottomed out in 2011, when Obama had non-Woke issues like Obamacare and killing Osama to run for re-election upon.

But even before the 2012 election, you started to witness premonitions of the Great Awokening that arrived in 2013, such as the Trayvon Martin brouhaha, that “Life of Julia” ad that revived feminist energies dormant since the embarrassing Bill Clinton-Paula Jones scandal of 1998, and the Obama Administration’s “Dear Colleague” letter that set off another round of campus rape hoaxes.

In the run-up to the 2026 election, the media have good non-Woke issues like the price of gasoline to run upon against the GOP and Trump.

But as we’ve seen with the Cornell “rape” whoop-tee-doo, The Establishment appears to be gearing up for another War on White Men after the election. They are just too consumed with hate to help themselves.

Who are the next Evil White Male Rapists being teed up for a Woke moral panic following Ivy League fraternity boys? (That the Cornell Seven aren’t all that white has been mentioned in virtually zero of the countless articles in the mainstream media. You’d think that journalists looking for a slightly fresh angle on this beaten-to-death story might write about how diversity has come to fraternity row. But, no, that’s not going to be part of the Narrative.)

One possibility is that we might have a Reckoning for the surviving aged 1960s rock stars like Sir Paul McCartney, Sir Mick Jagger, and Stevie Wonder. Does anybody believe they never had sex once with a slightly underage groupie while touring across dozens of different jurisdictions, each with their own age of consent laws?

Long ago, I read a history of The Beatles that included a fascinating digression in which the normally just-the-facts author paused to speculate statistically on how many babies the Fab Four fathered during their June 1964 concert tour of Australia. In their defense, the Beatles told their road manager Mal Evans not to allow backstage any girls under age 20. But teenage girls have been known to lie about their age.

My guess is: Thankfully, no, we are not going to have giant witch hunt of elderly rock stars. They will be allowed to die in peace.

Why? The marketing department at the New York Times would go berserk if anybody on the editorial side brought up the idea of going after Sixties heroes. The NYT’s 13 million paying customers, who aren’t getting any younger, are not subscribing to see Paul and Ringo, Mick and Keef, Pete and Roger, Stevie and Smokey, Paul and Art, etc. treated like Cornell frat boys in the pages of the NYT.

So, who else is white (or white adjacent) enough and male enough to be targeted for a lengthy campaign against toxic masculinity?

Professional golfers? Air traffic controllers? Firemen? Miners? Olympic skiers? Farmers? Tech founders?

Well, today, I think I discovered what’s next on the agenda. Substack being how I make my living, I’m putting my discovery after the paywall:

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So, in search of something new to say about current politics, let’s take a look at the dogs that aren’t barking in 2026.

The New York Times editorial board just published a 2000 word diatribe calling upon readers to elect Democratic Senators and Representatives in order to restrain Donald Trump.

Trump Has Failed. Hold Him to Account.

Oct. 27, 2026

By The Editorial Board

What’s fascinating to me is how much of Trump’s record the NYT editorial board doesn’t dare mention in its 2000 words of complaints. For example, its brief mentions of his immigration policy mostly involve allusions to deportations, rather than attacks on his successful cutbacks on newcomers.

And there is zero mention of Trump’s war on affirmative action. Nada.

DEI, systemic racism, police brutality, and transgender rights are also down the NYT’s memoryhole.

Words (and their variants) not mentioned in the new editorial include diversity, equity, inclusion, race, Black, white, supremacist, refugees, undocumented, police brutality, police shootings, transgender, etc.

To give some historical perspective, let’s take a look at some of the then hot issues of 2020 that the NYT touched on in its editorials endorsing Joe Biden and denouncing Donald Trump six years ago:

Elect Joe Biden, America

The former vice president is the leader our nation needs now.

By The Editorial Board

… He would work to address systemic injustices. He would not court foreign autocrats or give comfort to white supremacists. …

He recognizes the fateful threat of climate change and has put forward an ambitious, $2 trillion plan to slash carbon emissions, invest in a green economy and combat environmental racism.

Mr. Biden will not be morphing into an ideological maximalist any time soon, but he has acknowledged that the current trifecta of crises — a lethal pandemic, an economic meltdown and racial unrest — calls for an expanded governing vision. … In midsummer, he rolled out an economic recovery plan, dubbed “Build Back Better,” with proposals to bolster American manufacturing, spur innovation, build a “clean-energy economy,” advance racial equity and support caregivers and educators. …

Mr. Biden has a long and distinguished record of accomplishment, including, as a senator, sponsoring the landmark Violence Against Women Act of 1994 and, as vice president, overseeing the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, passed in response to the Great Recession. In a 2012 interview on “Meet the Press,” his remarks in support of gay marriage — which blindsided the Obama White House and caused a public kerfuffle — proved a watershed moment for the cause of equality. In 1996, Mr. Biden had voted as a senator in favor of the Defense of Marriage Act, which prohibited federal recognition of same-sex marriages, making his evolution on the issue particularly resonant. …

He is also offering a glimpse of the Democratic Party’s future in his choice of running mate, Senator Kamala Harris of California. Ms. Harris would become a number of firsts — a woman, a Black person and an Asian-American — as vice president, adding history-making excitement to the ticket. … the party’s next generation of leaders. Ms. Harris is a promising step in that direction.

… People respond to that, across lines of race and class — ever more so in this time of uncertainty. The father of the police-shooting victim Jacob Blake described his phone conversation with Mr. Biden as full of “love, admiration, caring,” in one of many recent examples of the former vice president’s hard-earned empathy.

Knife-wielder Jacob Blake’s dad hotep-pilled Joe on the Light Bulb Question. Shortly after talking to the elder Blake, Biden announced in riot-torn Kenosha:

A black man invented the light bulb, not a white guy named Edison.

(I’m a rare American who found Biden hilarious. Unfortunately, Joe was seldom in on his own jokes.)

Back to the NYT’s 2020 endorsement of Ol’ Joe:

… When they go to the polls this year, voters aren’t just choosing a leader. .... They’re deciding whether … they believe that racism should be treated as a public policy problem.

And then 10 days later on October 16, 2020, the NYT editorialized about how much they hate Donald Trump, citing numerous issues that they don’t dare bring up in 2026:

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Is artificial intelligence going to progress so rapidly that the world is destroyed by anarchic attacks on cybersecurity?

Or will the robots take over the world and enslave us all?

Or will it prove a wet firecracker like the 1980s superconductivity 9-days-wonder?

Or will it crash the economy like the Housing Bubble did in 2008?

Or will it usher in an age of prosperity?

Or some combination of all of the above?

From the New York Times oped page:

This Boom Looks a Lot Like the Housing Bubble

Opinion

Guest Essay

Oct. 25, 2026

By Jen Harris

Ms. Harris was an economic official in the Biden White House.

Artificial intelligence is fast becoming the largest investment in U.S. history. As the money pours in, the companies involved are resurrecting bad old habits eerily reminiscent of the shenanigans deployed in the run-up to the financial crisis.

There are already signs that much of this investment may go bad. If it does, the consequences could rival what happened in 2008.

We know far too little about the financial plumbing propping up this surge. What little we do know looks remarkably like the tactics once employed by Wall Street firms like Lehman Brothers, the storied 158-year-old bank that collapsed in 2008, setting off a panic that ultimately cost taxpayers nearly $700 billion in bailouts in today’s dollars and nearly nine million Americans their jobs. Now as then, companies are hiding large amounts of debt off public balance sheets. Firms responsible for protecting our pensions and our insurance are again risking our money by snapping up complicated financial products backstopped by assets of uncertain value. A small group of companies are buying and selling large amounts of a hot product to one another, inflating demand for the product and obscuring the risks of the system in a web of complexity. The accountants and credit-rating firms that analyze the situation — and that are financially beholden to the debtors — are deploying shaky excuses to declare it all fine.

There are a few differences. With more U.S. funds in A.I.-heavy stocks than in homes, a crash could destroy more wealth than the 2008 financial crisis did. And the Trump administration, reportedly eager to prevent a bust, is making changes that inject new opacity and more risk into the situation.

There are already signs the nascent A.I. industry may not soon generate the trillions of dollars required to pay off all the huge debts it is incurring. Earlier this month, The Financial Times reported that the projected annual revenue at A.I. lab OpenAI was about $50 billion at the end of September, 28 percent lower than had previously been believed. Figures reported by The Wall Street Journal this month suggested that revenue growth at Anthropic, OpenAI’s chief rival, was softening. Markets are getting nervous, with the tech-laden Nasdaq falling over 5 percent over the last two weeks.

Anthropic and OpenAI are already so entangled in our economy (and in our national security) that if they sink, Washington will need a plan. Done right, any rescue would come with real safety guardrails, real insurance that we won’t cede control of the technology to China and real service to the public interest.

All three at once? Really?

Lehman Brothers was born in 1850 as a cotton brokerage in antebellum Alabama. The A.I. chipmaker Nvidia was born in 1993 in a booth at a Denny’s in San Jose, Calif., and Meta in a Harvard dorm in 2004. And yet the financial circumstances surrounding those companies share an uncanny resemblance.

Start with hidden loans. A Wall Street Journal analysis in August concluded that the nine largest tech firms, Nvidia and Meta included, have managed to accrue $3 trillion of debt, or roughly 10 percent of the entire U.S. economy, off their balance sheets. Keeping the debt off the books (and away from the figures investors and regulators watch most closely) makes it easier for those companies to spend enormous sums constructing the data centers that drive A.I. — centers they believe will both improve the technology and satisfy an expected takeoff in demand.

Back in 2008, Lehman, too, accumulated lots of debt, primarily from buying subprime mortgages; those loans, which were targeted to home buyers with thin or imperfect credit histories, were the hot product of its day.

OK, but if the hot product of the day in 2008 was sub-prime mortgages in rapidly Hispanicizing Sand State exurbs, while the hot product in 2026 is AI, a colossal technological breakthrough that science fiction writers have been extolling for us/alarming us about for 60 years, is this analogy perfect?

It’s 18 years later and very few people are yet aware of the central mechanism behind the Housing Bubble/Bust, which doesn’t seem at all like our current situation involving AI. As I wrote on the 10th anniversary in 2008:

… Republicans don’t like blaming businessmen or Republican politicians. Democrats don’t like blaming pro-diversity initiatives. Thus, the whole sorry history has gone down the memory hole.

The GOP was in the White House when the Housing Bubble was brewed up in 2002–2005. President George W. Bush strongly pushed the finance industry to lend more to nonwhites at his Oct. 15, 2002, White House Conference on Increasing Minority Homeownership. There he told his federal regulators not to worry so much about traditional credit standards regarding down payments and documentation of income because he wanted to see 5.5 million more minority homeowners by 2010.

Republicans often do a pretty good job of keeping an eye on Democrats trying to hand out rewards to their supporters. But GOP skepticism breaks down when it’s a GOP president calling for easier money for blacks and Hispanics, especially when it’s not tax dollars but mortgages handed out by profit-seeking businesses.

Republican-allied economists have been largely stumped in figuring out how to blame the Bubble and Bust on Democrats.

They focused for a while on the Democratic-sponsored Community Reinvestment Act that was intended to encourage lending in minority neighborhoods. But it was implausible that the government had forced lenders to give out hundreds of billions in what they knew were bad mortgages, especially since most of the lenders had seemed wildly enthusiastic during the Bubble. Moreover, bankers who realized how bad the loans would be could simply have sat out the craziness.

But there is a way that the Community Reinvestment Act groomed the culture of lending over the decades to be overoptimistic about minority borrowers. The CRA acted as a Darwinian filter on which banks got to buy other banks. Banks that didn’t promise to play ball with lending activists could get their acquisitions held up by regulators. Over time, the optimists about minority lending were encouraged to grow bigger while the pessimists were not, so banking came to be dominated by unrealistic enthusiasm.

Consider Washington Mutual of Seattle, which became, via 29 acquisitions, the sixth-biggest bank in the country before it went under in 2008.

CEO Kerry Killinger liked to outbid rival banks for mergers not just in cash but also in CRA pledges. For example, when WaMu competed with Home Savings in 1997 to buy Great Western, Killinger topped Home’s CRA pledge of lending $70 billion to minority and lower-income borrowers by offering $75 billion.

The next year WaMu bought Home Savings itself, and won regulatory approval in part by signing a $120 billion CRA pledge with various leftist front organizations such as the Greenlining Institute.

In 2001 WaMu bought Dime Bank and pledged $375 billion in CRA mortgages.

The informative 2011 book The Lost Bank by Kirsten Grind shows no evidence that Killinger ever thought the government was holding a gun to his head to make these pledges. He felt that WaMu was going to come into Southern California and make a fortune lending to Hispanics. Those local lenders he’d outbid hadn’t been as optimistic about their neighbors’ prospects of repaying their loans as he was because they were prejudiced. They just didn’t understand that diversity is our strength.

Similarly, another central figure in the mortgage meltdown, Angelo Mozilo, CEO of Countrywide Financial, was another diversity enthusiast.

Mozilo wanted to boost Countrywide’s share of the national mortgage market from 10 percent to 30 percent. He believed he could safely do that by increasing lending to marginal customers, especially Hispanics. As an Italian-American who had felt himself the object of WASP disdain, Mozilo believed that lenders traditionally underestimated Latinos’ ability to pay back mortgages due to their bigotry.

In 2003, Mozilo, citing Bush’s push for minority home ownership, pledged to a Harvard audience that Countrywide would lend $600 billion to minority and lower-income borrowers by 2010. In 2005, he boosted that promise to one trillion dollars.

But a trillion here, a trillion there, pretty soon you are talking about real money. Countrywide went under in 2008.

Bush had a not-implausible political plan in mind behind his “ownership society”: By giving the green light to lenders to take more risks with nontraditional borrowers, he hoped to attract Hispanics to vote Republican.

And indeed, the 2004 economic boom among Hispanics in construction and Spanish-language mortgage lending jobs probably helped Bush up his share of the Latino vote from about 35 percent in 2000 to about 40 percent in 2004.

If Bush had cynically put the brakes on immediately after winning reelection, the housing bubble wouldn’t have metastasized the way it did in 2005–2007. Unfortunately, the president actually believed diversity is our strength.

One reason Bush failed to see what was going so disastrously wrong with the housing market in the “Sand States” of California, Arizona, Nevada, and Florida was that in his home state of Texas, where local regulators rapidly approve new home construction, increases in demand are quickly met by increases in supply, so prices don’t rise for very long. The Bush Bubble barely inflated in Texas.

But in California, unexpected demand sets off a regulatory endurance struggle, causing prices to rise through the roof in the meantime. (The other three Sand States are in-between California and Texas in time to construction.)

Eventually by 2007–2008, massive new subdivisions were on the horizon in the Sand States, just as the lending industry discovered that there had actually been perfectly rational reasons why those evil old racist bankers had been reluctant to lend to blacks and, especially, Hispanics.

But ten years later, right- (and left-) thinking Americans remain in thrall to the dogma of diversity. Hence, it’s been difficult for people to grasp the mounting academic research showing the various ways diversity helped set off the landslide that began with the U.S. mortgage market.

For example, a 2015 paper by Lin, Liu, and Xie found that in a sample of 18,000 households:

The difference in the mortgage delinquency rates between immigrants (15.7%) and natives (4.4%) is significant.

That’s more than 3.5 times the native rate.

Similarly, a 2013 paper by Luea, Reichenberger, and Turner revealed 2009 default rates for whites of 3.4 percent, blacks 11.3 percent (3.3 times the white rate), and Hispanics 16 percent (4.7 times the white rate). When the economists adjusted for every available personal statistic, blacks still defaulted at 1.44 times the white rate and Hispanics at 1.88, suggesting that some ethnic prejudice was justified.

A 2013 paper by Reid featuring data from the fifty largest metro areas for mortgages originated just in 2005 shows that foreclosure rates by 2009 were twice as bad for blacks as whites and almost three times as bad for Hispanics as whites. By 2010, 10.5 percent of Hispanics were in foreclosure versus 4 percent of whites.

Blacks weren’t much to blame for 2008 because their mortgages tended to be small because black neighborhoods have low housing prices. Not many immigrants were clamoring to move to Detroit.

But Hispanics tend to live in expensive states such as California, where immigration drives up prices.

According to Zillow, Hispanic neighborhoods nationally exploded in price by 280 percent from 2000 to 2006 versus about 160 percent for white neighborhoods. Remarkably, by the peak of the Bubble, the median home in a Hispanic neighborhood was worth almost a hundred thousand dollars more than the median home in a white neighborhood.

Not surprisingly, the decline in home value from peak to trough was almost twice as severe in Hispanic neighborhoods as in white neighborhoods.

In summary, immigration was seen as a vast boon to the housing market until it turned out that Hispanics tended not to be able to afford the huge mortgages they had been given. At that point in 2008, housing prices in several high-priced Hispanic-heavy states, such as California and Florida, plummeted, taking down financial institutions like Lehman Brothers, Washington Mutual, and Countrywide Financial. This carnage set off a national recession even in places without a Housing Bubble.

Santayana famously said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” But what if you haven’t forgotten it because you never had a clue in the first place?

Instead, the more obvious analogy for the risks we are running with betting so heavily on AI is the Pets.com/9-11 recession of the early 2000s that followed the good times of the first Internet Bubble. The Internet really was a big deal, but investors got carried away, as is only human nature. Here’s what happened to the NASDAQ composite index:

On the other hand, here’s the entire NASDAQ chart:

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In recent decades, there has been much interest in “redshirting” your son, such as by having him repeat kindergarten so that he is a year older than his classmates and thus enjoys athletic, academic, and social advantages over them.

Similarly, the lengthy traditional American higher education schedules — four years for a BA, four years for an MD, three for a JD, two for an MBA, and five to seven years for a Ph.D. — are designed for young men who need a few years to mature.

For example, I mentioned recently that most elite colleges don’t offer majors in business administration. Instead, you are expected to major in, say, economics, then return to a university at age 27 for a two year MBA program. By the time you are 30, you will probably know what career and perhaps what metropolis will be yours for the middle decades of your life.

Charles Murray wrote a book on education policy in which he was about to praise majoring in accounting because in just four years you could be launched on a professional career … only to find out that now you had to spend five years in higher education to become a CPA.

If you graduate from college at 22 and immediately begin a Ph.D. program, your best case scenario for winning tenure (5 years for Ph.D. and 6 years on the tenure track) is age 33. If your doctorate takes 7 years and it takes you 14 to win tenure, you’ll be 43.

Making partner at a law firm might take 8 to 13 years, so if you go straight from college to law school to a Big Law firm, you’ll have made partner somewhere from age 33 to age 38.

All this time-killing isn’t that detrimental for men’s lives because … so what if it delays their fathering children to age 35 or 45? They’ve got plenty of time, right?

Except that evolving cultural norms have been trending toward demonizing men who marry women who went to school more than a year or two later than them. One reason that the only thing everybody can agree upon is that “pedophilia” is the worst thing ever is that a lot of 37 year old women want to socially bully well-paid 37 year old men into marrying 37 year old women, such as, to pick a random example, themselves, rather than marrying 27 year old women, which is downright pedophilia by 2026 standards.

But now females make up the majority of higher education students. So are we so sure that educational traditions invented in the Age of Patriarchy are ideal for women?

Perhaps we should be thinking more about rearranging traditional schedules to help women get finished faster with education and launched on a career so they will have time to have babies before their clock ticks down.

I’m focusing here on the right quartile or so of the bell curve, the kids who can absorb academic material faster than average and have hopes of advanced degrees.

From Today’s Hospitalist:

Sacrifices female physicians make to have children

When researchers asked women about regrets, about half said they wished they had started a family earlier.

August 2023

A NEW STUDY that looks at how female physicians juggle having and raising children while maintaining their careers found that two-thirds delayed starting a family by about five years—and that about half wish they hadn’t waited so long.

The research in JAMA Network Open looked at a group of just over 1,000 women across various stages of training. …

When researchers asked female physicians what they wished they had done differently, nearly half (45.7%) said they wished that they had conceived earlier. Looking back, 45% said they wished that they had cut their work hours, 39% said they wished that they had taken an extended leave, and 29% said they wished that they had pursued oocyte cryopreservation. …

The study pointed out that the strategies used by women “suggest that fertility and family-building concerns among women in medicine may contribute to ongoing gender disparities and attrition and represent a potentially critical area for policy reform and future change.”

The decision for women to put off childbearing by five years may help explain another major finding of the study: Just over one-third (36.8%) of respondents said they had experienced infertility.

Researchers said that the infertility rate of female physicians was alarming, particularly when compared to infertility rates of nonphysicians, which range from 6% to 19%. While the study found that delayed childbearing is likely associated with lower fertility rates among female physicians, researchers also acknowledged that lifestyle factors such as shift work and poor sleep quality may have some impact on fertility.

The study also found that 11.5% of respondents underwent oocyte or embryo cryopreservation. Less than 10% said insurance covered the procedure.

You can think about speeding up your daughter’s education in term of A) What society would have to do and B) What you can do.

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For example, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is pushing ahead with its plans to de-emphasize Dead White Male Artists that led the Ahmanson Foundation, which had bought 99 works of art for $130 million for LACMA over the decades, to break off relations with LACMA and instead devote more of its generosity to acquisitions for the ultra-WASPy Huntington Gardens museum in San Marino, CA.

LACMA supremo Michael Govan knocked down the four-story Ahmanson Building and three others, a total of 393,000 square feet, and replaced them with the one-story 348,000 square foot David Geffen Galleries that sweeps across Wilshire Blvd. It was considered very important for Woke ideological reasons that the new Geffen museum building have only one story so that no art could be displayed higher or lower than any other art.

Seriously.

You see, traditionally, two-story art museums put their lobby, ticket desk, coat check, gift shop, auditorium, and maybe some ho-hum displays of photographs, textiles, etc. on the lower floor, while the best paintings go on the second floor (a.k.a., “first floor” in many countries), where the paintings benefit from skylights, plus greater security. Second-floors can’t be looted by mobs of high school students protesting budget cuts for school supplies as easily as can ground floors.

It takes skilled “second-story men” to rob the second floor of the Louvre.

But by not building a racist second floor, even with extending the museum over Wilshire Boulevard, the redesign of LACMA shrank display space by 1/8th. Along with the acquisitions of more multicultural objets d’art, that means that among the Old Masters that were on display in the now demolished Ahmanson Building that are no longer on view is LACMA’s only Titian. Also out of sight are now all its Watteaus and Canalettos. LACMA currently only has room to put one of its two Rembrandts on view.

Serves those Dead White Men right for painting all those paintings that are more beautiful than what anybody else painted!

But even the Washington Post’s lefty art critic unloads on the new David Geffen Galleries spanning Wilshire Boulevard at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (next to the La Brea tar pits):

A new $724 million museum is a visually stunning train wreck

Decontextualization has made a mess of one of this country’s great art collections.

Today at 6:00 a.m. EDT

Review by Philip Kennicott

LOS ANGELES — Seen from the air, the new David Geffen Galleries at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art look like an amoeba, or one of the soft-edged, biomorphic forms in a painting by Joan Miró. The concrete floor and ceiling plates curve and twist over Wilshire Boulevard, narrowing and expanding to create an amorphous sculptural form that seems to levitate some 30 feet above the noise, bustle and traffic of the city’s Miracle Mile and Hancock Park neighborhood.

Inside, unfortunately, the curators have indulged the contemporary ideological delusion that art can be experienced without reference to history, culture, context or ideas, and the results are also amorphous — in the worst possible way. No museum I’ve visited is as relentlessly hostile to curiosity, exhausting and ultimately depressing. I went twice one day in September, and a third time to visit with LACMA Director Michael Govan, who has made the building the defining legacy of his tenure at the largest encyclopedic museum on the nation’s West Coast.

He has achieved what many curators, scholars and museum professionals dream of: A museum that decontextualizes art, mixes it all up in a giant cauldron of visual distraction and isolates it from history and culture. But why? How could this happen to one of the country’s great art collections? And why are so many seemingly smart museum leaders loyal to an ideology that is ostensibly democratic — open and nonhierarchical — but leads inevitably to museums that express contempt for the visitor?

Named for the billionaire entertainment mogul David Geffen, who contributed $150 million to the project,

Geffen is a gay man without heirs, so in his old age he has been having buildings named after himself in return for generous donations.

the new structure was designed by the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor. The official price tag from LACMA is $724 million, though critics argue that the real cost is likely much higher. Zumthor, a Pritzker Prize laureate revered for projects that make the materials and clean lines of modern architecture feel ancient and earthy, was tasked with a building that displays art on a single level, with a fluid nonlinear arrangement of galleries that can be continually reprogrammed. …

Once inside the galleries, however, the horizontal field of chaos is far less effective.

“The horizontal single-level design eliminates traditional cultural hierarchies, placing all works of art on the same plane,” reads LACMA’s official explanation of the design. “No single path through the spaces is prescribed by the architecture.”

No single path is prescribed, but the architecture is almost dictatorial in the patterns of motion it forces upon the visitor. The only way to get your bearings in this giant space, parceled into 24 small, boxlike galleries connected by what the museum calls open “plazas,” is to constantly return to the half-mile-long glass perimeter of the building, where there is full daylight and some sense of the basic geometry. The visitor becomes a spelunker, poking into the cave-like interior, emerging for a little fresh air, over and over again.

This isn’t just disorienting, it puts the art in constant competition with exterior city views; it makes it difficult for the eyes to adjust to the darker spaces where photographs, paintings and delicate works on paper are on view; and it interrupts the experience of escape and immersion. Bright light leaks into the inner galleries, glaring off the surface of a Dutch painting from the golden age. And in the more dimly lit plazas, many of LACMA’s most treasured paintings feel inert and indecipherable. One never feels settled, transfixed or arrested by beauty.

The art is displayed with minimal labels that give only the name and national or ethnic identity of the artist, the materials, the date and the donor — and the donor listing overwhelms any other information on offer. If you want to know more about the art or object, say what a hacha is (a sculptural carving associated with an ancient Mesoamerican ballgame), you can try using a QR code that links to the online gallery guide, but I couldn’t get it to work while in the building and found it counterintuitive and confusing once outside.

The basic organization is conceptually clever, but creates a confused, jarring experience. Rather than arrange work chronologically, or by schools or national traditions, or by large ethnic groupings, genera or materials, the galleries are thematically grouped by oceans and seas. The Pacific galleries include Mexico, Peru, Japan, Polynesia and Henri Matisse;

See, it’s racist to group cultures by continents. Instead, we should emphasize how the ancient cultures of Mexico and Japan influenced each other due to their constant peaceful voyages of cultural exchange back and forth across the Pacific. ….

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Fukuyama tries to explain:

Personally, I’m struck by how ethnocentric English language pop music is and how uninterested in world music are most Americans.

For example, how many Americans can name four Brazilian songs? “Well, there’s ‘Girl from Ipanema,’ and then there’s that one Rod Stewart plagiarized, and uh …” I suspect that Brazilian music would have caught on here in the 1960s except it suddenly got plowed under by the British Invasion (i.e., American-style music played by British teens obsessed with America).

But consider countries with indisputably strong national musical traditions, such as Italy and Germany. Yet, how similar did Vivaldi and Verdi sound? How close in style were Bach:

and Beethoven:

Just before the mid-point of the 18th Century, there was a huge change in European musical taste from baroque polyphony to classical homophony. Most popular appreciation memory of J.S. Bach more or less vanished upon his death in 1750. The wealthy and tasteful Mendelssohn family paid to keep Bach’s memory slightly alive. But the public had almost completely forgotten about him until Felix Mendelssohn conducted a triumphant Bach concert in Berlin 1829.

So no strong musical tradition is stylistically stagnant.

I would suggest the American musical tradition is basically an offshoot of English music, which is an offshoot of continental European music. But American music ended up world-conquering over the last century because it blended in two styles — Celtic and African — that in combination turned out to be what chocolate and peanut butter are to candy.

You can see this combination of Celtic and black influences in the first massive name in American pop music, Stephen Foster.

He composed the first big American pop hit, “Oh, Susanna,” 100,000 copies of the sheet music sold (sadly, most of them not by the composer) in 1847 at the high point of American national luck. Just as the U.S. defeats Mexico and conquers California … gold is discovered at Sutter’s Farm.

“Oh, Susanna” becomes the anthem of the Forty-Niners, and even spreads around the world.

Foster went on to compose other classics, but the copyright law of the time didn’t protect his intellectual property. When he died in 1864 at age 37, he had $0.38 in his pocket.

The well-known travails of this national hero eventually contributed to American copyright reform, which is extremely generous financially to songwriters.

In tradeoff, however, American IP law gives songwriters few …

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FILM REVIEW: ‘You Can See Everything’

A Millennial skeptic and a Zoomer mystic usher in the era of “Elevated Reality TV”

Conrad Flynn

There’s a classic Jack Handey joke that goes:

“Broken promises don’t upset me. I just think, why did they believe me?”

And I thought about that joke a few times after Nathan Fielder/Lance Oppenheim’s You Can See Everything. If you dumbed down that Handey “Deep Thoughts” line to something like, “It’s strange how people think a movie is truthful when it’s called a ‘documentary,’” you’ve got something close to the joke and spirit of their film.

That being said, You Can See Everything is a really entertaining movie.

It’s extremely well made, but also a bit of a nothingburger. It’s kind of a machine for boring viewers into conjuring up Deep Thoughts about what it must actually be about.

It’s just not as deep as people want it to be (thankfully).

Distributed by A24, which had a reputation for excelling in a pseudogenre called “elevated horror” (the horror movie equivalent of earlier genres coined by marketing teams such as “prestige TV” and “art rock”) You Can See Everything might have just popularized a new category of movie we might someday call “Elevated Reality TV” or “Reality Cinema.”

Remodeling a trashy Hollywood genre with Criterion Collection visual aesthetics is admittedly funny, and does well with hipster-comedy audiences. …

Everything stars Nathan Fielder as he begins a straightforward documentary (scare quotes I leave to reader discretion throughout this post) about soon-to-be-imprisoned Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes, who (along with her fiancée Billy Evans, who is the father of her young children) wanted A24 to make a movie about her before she goes to jail for wire fraud. (Among Theranos’ indirect crimes, which the movie doesn’t disclose, was also giving people false cancer diagnoses and triggering the suicide of a Theranos scientist who would’ve had to have either lied under oath or ruined the company.)

The story is that Fielder and Oppenheim heard a rumor while together at the Magic Castle

The Hollywood home for magicians and other illusionists.

that Holmes wanted an A24 doc to reveal “the real” version of herself,

The real version of Elizabeth Holmes is exactly what you can assume from reading John Carreyrou’s 2018 bestseller Bad Blood.

and the two men then acted quickly to secure the directing job (though Holmes should’ve known she’d be spoofed if Fielder was involved creatively). That backstory, like so much of the film, is intentionally murky. …

I’d love to know what documentary purists make of some of the film’s techniques, as the movie strikes me as openly dishonest about its methods (a friend half-joked it is closer to The Hills or Laguna Beach than to a Frederick Wiseman doc), but it’s all the more entertaining for taking liberties and being evasive.

The bottom line is that Fielder and Oppenheim had the opportunity to make a cinematic reality-television film with one of the biggest scammers of our generation (if financial scale and the power of the men she deceived is the metric), and they made a truly memorable movie with it.

Ultimately, it’s just funny to watch the filmmakers mess with Holmes and her fiancée, then make a meta-movie with the actress who already satirized Holmes in a comedy, and then show the two women the footage of the other one,

Amanda Seyfried, who has similar big blue eyes, is a really good movie starlet who just hasn’t quite been in a good movie since Mean Girls 22 years ago. She has been outstanding in prestigious productions like playing William Randolph Hearst’s mistress Marion Davies in David Fincher’s biopic Mank about the screenwriter of Citizen Kane, but the rest of the production didn’t live up to her performance.

This will likely be her most famous role.

and it’s also amusing to watch Holmes and Billy’s ultimately failed attempts to manipulate Nathan Fielder and A24.

Ostensibly, the theme of You Can See Everything is Fielder philosophizing about “What is ‘truth?’ Can a ‘documentary’ really be ‘true’?”

But when Holmes’s boyfriend Billy demands to be paid to let A24’s camera crew invade his home during his last 34 days with his (more or less) wife and the mother of his two children, Fielder suddenly switches to epistemological absolutism: Paying you for your participation would compromise the integrity of this documentary. This is a documentary movie!

But then A24 and Fielder decide to pay Billy (but not Elizabeth, who owes hundreds of millions in restitution that she’d have to cough up to Rupert Murdoch et al). But over the course of making the movie, they bully Billy into foregoing his money.

With Fielder and Holmes as essentially the two leads, the film also ends up contrasting two Millennial archetypes that first clashed online at the end of the 2000s: the dark-humored male nerd (Fielder) sensibility that was handed down from the ironic Gen X-era internet, and the ruthlessly ambitious yet cloyingly earnest “This is my personal brand. There are many like it, but this one is mine”

Millennial con-trepreneur shtick that would do well in the pivot-to-video age of Obama and “Hope & Change.”

So we have, in Fielder, spiritually the cleverest SomethingAwful poster of all time, outmaneuvering Holmes, the ultimate TED Talk-core inspirational CEO or NGO-head Millennials had to hear speak platitudes on their college campuses when the iPhones first came out.

It’s a silent online culture war from 2009 finally going hot.

Lots of the smart white male bloggers from the first decade of this millennium are highly amused by Fielder taking down the kind of woman who dominated the second decade of this century.

But they aren’t allowed to mention that.

… Not since Sasha Baron Cohen in the 2000s and Louis C.K. in the 2010s have we had a comedian who was this popular and critically revered. Given what happened to those two comics, I’m a bit worried that Nathan will have some terrible fall from grace or fall hard out of fashion.

But if he does, he’ll only need to consult with Nathan Fielder to come up with the perfect marketing scheme to bring about his own comeback. …

Buzzfeed would take pictures like this and write …

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“How Elizabeth Holmes Tricked WIRED—and Everyone Else

Adam Rogers

October 19, 2026

WIRED was the first magazine to cover Theranos and its enticing billionaire founder. There were warning signs even then.

ELIZABETH HOLMES, THE disgraced founder of the fraud-ridden blood-test company Theranos, made her national press debut in The Wall Street Journal in 2013. The article—“A Drop of Blood, an Instant Diagnosis”—wasn’t a science story, or even a business story. It ran in the Opinion section, by a writer on the Journal’s editorial board named Joseph Rago, winner of a Pulitzer Prize for critiques of the Affordable Care Act.

He wrote that he was impressed by the prospect of individuals having more direct control of their health care; no less an eminence than former secretary of state George Shultz, a Theranos board member, had told Rago that Holmes was the next Steve Jobs or Bill Gates.

By 2014, Holmes was the youngest woman billionaire ever, and the mid-2010s were electric with tech-industry success stories—the iPhone, Tesla, Airbnb, Twitter. I was an editor at WIRED back then, and Theranos-as-presented felt very WIRED. It looked like evidence that a Silicon Valley approach to innovation would work in every industry, including medicine.” …

One of my colleagues, an editor named Caitlin Roper, saw a story in Theranos and in Holmes, but no one was sure what shape it should take. The executive editor suggested Roper just go talk to Holmes and see what was what. The result was an influential long-form Q&A headlined “One Drop, Infinite Data: How Elizabeth Holmes Built a Better Blood Test.” …

Over the next few months, other publications followed. Fortune put Holmes on the cover. The New Yorker did a profile. In October 2015, Inc. put her on the cover, calling her “the next Steve Jobs”—and a couple of weeks later, The Wall Street Journal did another article on Theranos, by the reporter John Carreyrou. The headline was deceptively humble: “Theranos Has Struggled with Blood Tests.”

Uh-oh.

The speedy and accurate blood tests were fake, the innovative tech didn’t exist, and Walgreens, a major partner, terminated its deal with Theranos. It was a grift. A new documentary film, out this week, follows Holmes in the weeks leading up to her incarceration.

Get a bunch of old WIRED editors together these days and it doesn’t take more than one drink before we start asking each other whether we enabled the worst parts of the tech world’s rise to power. Sometimes it seems like every antichrist-lecturing, panopticon-building, machine-god-bothering weirdo with $100 billion and a government contract made his debut in our pages. So, with Theranos and Holmes back in the news, the current administration at WIRED wondered what we were thinking back then.

It was a long time ago. I called Caitlin.

As always, we were looking for good stories. “I was interested in this female founder, but also the idea that her actual goal was disruption of health care, that there could be more transparency and reduced costs,” says Roper, who today is executive producer for scripted film and TV at The New York Times. …

“The conversation I remember with you, which I thought of many years later, was looking at the board of directors, her board, which was just completely batshit. It had military figures and government officials, and just seemed very odd,” Roper says. “You said there was something weird about that. It raised your suspicious hackles.”

It did—a few of us thought we saw hints of red flags. The company hadn’t published any peer-reviewed data. Colleagues had heard unconfirmable rumors of shenanigans inside the company. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t a story. …

Interview done, Roper drove back up to San Francisco, to WIRED. “It didn’t feel like there was a feature to do,” she says. The Walgreens stuff wasn’t happening yet; it was too hard to report out how the technology worked. What was hard, in retrospect, was validation. Roper and the bosses weren’t sure that investment money from bold-faced names made up for an absence of hard scientific evidence.

So Roper wrote it up as an interview—a Q&A. “It seemed more like an interesting founder story,” she says. Roper asked every hard question, and got answers. They just turned out to be lies. But Roper acknowledges some cracks in the story’s origin. “If she had not been a woman, I would have been less motivated. That was part of what compelled me,” she says. “I felt sympathetic to the idea of her outfit and her weirdness, because I related to the idea that she was passing in some way in that environment, needing to assert herself.”

It’s tempting to see in that a DEI-run-amok story. It isn’t.

And then he explains that it was a DEI-run-amok story:

All of us at WIRED were trying to wrestle with sexism in the world we covered, and at our magazine. Holmes’ board was all non–Silicon Valley types—was that because venture investors and scientists had identified her as a bad risk, or was it because Silicon Valley venture capitalists don’t support women founders?

Because Henry Kissinger was famously feminist?

Kissinger put his name to the essay Time magazine about Elizabeth Holmes for Time’s top 100 people of 2015 essay:

Elizabeth Holmes

by Henry A. Kissinger

Elizabeth Holmes’ is a story that could happen only in America. After her sophomore year she left Stanford to devote herself to a vision of health care available as a basic human right. When I was introduced to Elizabeth by George Shultz, her plan sounded like an undergraduate’s dream. I told her she had only two prospects: total failure or vast success. There would be no middle ground.

Elizabeth accepted only one option: making a difference. Striking, somewhat ethereal, iron-willed, she is on the verge of achieving her vision—through a new method of blood testing that significantly reduces costs, tests for a whole range of infections and is mobile and can therefore be easily transported to underdeveloped regions.

Striving for prevention and early detection, she is dedicated to transforming health care around the world. She manages an expanding global business by the refusal to be daunted by any obstacle.

Elizabeth is in the process of turning an undergraduate’s vision into a global reality. That she combines fierce and single-minded dedication with great charm makes her a formidable advocate. Others will judge the technical aspects of Theranos, but the social implications are vast.

Kissinger is a former U.S. Secretary of State and a Theranos board member

DEI just made people say the dumbest things. How in the world could you believe that Theranos’s elderly, all-male, not very scientific board of directors was less prejudiced against women than Silicon Valley venture capitalists?

Here’s a …

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Box Office: ‘You Can See Everything’ Stuns With $15 Million Debut, ‘Street Fighter’ Leads With $31 Million

By Rebecca Rubin

“You Can See Everything” accomplished a true box office feat, becoming the rare must-see documentary on the big screen.

Director Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s much-hyped look at Elizabeth Holmes has generated a massive $15 million from just 855 theaters. Those ticket sales were enough for second place behind another newcomer, Paramount’s video game adaptation “Street Fighter,” which opened to $30 million from 3,575 venues. Heading into the weekend, “You Can See Everything” was aiming for $7 million to $8 million, which would have been remarkable for a documentary, especially one that doesn’t involve music or capture a wildly popular concert. Not to mention, this one runs at nearly three hours and wasn’t on anyone’s radar until two months ago.

After a surprise world premiere at Telluride Film Festival, “You Can See Everything” became a word-of-mouth sensation, bolstered by some of the best reviews of the year. A24, which produced the movie in secret over three years for roughly $7 million, reported more than 2,000 sold-out screenings as audiences rushed to theaters to avoid spoilers on the stranger-than-fiction story about the Theranos founder before she began an 11-year prison sentence for defrauding investors. People are clearly captivated by the drama surrounding Holmes, whose rise and spectacular fall from grace was depicted in the Hulu series “The Dropout,” starring Amanda Seyfried. But the turnout for “You Can See Everything” also speaks to the commercial appeal of Fielder, who has developed a flair for blending reality and fiction through works like HBO’s “The Rehearsal” and Comedy Central’s “Nathan For You.”

Fielder, who worked on a Sacha Baron Cohen TV show, is SBC’s worthy successor. His shtick has been to play Ali G/Borat, but about 12 IQ points higher. Thus his famous “Dumb Starbucks” sketch a decade ago in which he looks up “parody law” on Wikipedia and decides he can open a fake Starbucks as long as he calls it “Dumb Starbucks:”

But lately he’s gotten more philosophical and serious, so You Can See Everything is only modestly funny.

Oppenheim, his co-director, recently helmed another A24 hit, the Robert Pattinson-led “Primetime,” which has earned nearly $50 million against a $15 million budget.

Fielder is clearly the guiding light of the movie, but he also appears to be the lead actor and main writer. It’s probably fair to say that Oppenheim is the main director. Oppenheim is only 30 years old, which is extremely young for an impressive film director in 2026. He’s really good.

Around 70% of opening weekend crowds were under 35 years old, and they liked what they saw onscreen. According to exit polls, 90% of ticket buyers would “definitely recommend” the film and 80% said it was “even better than expected.” Those reactions signal a long theatrical life for the movie, which is expanding nationwide in the weeks to come.

“This is a giant weekend for the genre,” says analyst David A. Gross, who publishes the box office newsletter FranchiseRe. “Documentaries rarely receive a wide release — there’s only one every other year — and they average $3 million over their first three days.”

But … didn’t you already know that you can’t trust everything you see on-screen?

Well, I guess a large number of people didn’t appreciate that fact until this week.

So I suppose it’s a good thing that Fielder spends three hours emphasizing that rather banal point.

Personally, over the last 25 years, I’ve written hundreds of movie reviews, on and off, several hundred of them based on sourced material.

One of my basic approaches as a film critic has been to look up their source material — whether a novel or a “true story.”

Sometimes I’d already read the book the movie was based-upon, or I’d read the news articles before-hand. For example, I had read Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyou’s bestseller Bad Blood about the Holmes fraud in 2018.

Other times, I went out and bought the book (but did not read it) before going to see the film, then read it immediately after watching the movie. Or if it were “Based on a true story,” I’d then read the news coverage after watching the film.

I have a self-imposed rule that I will not read a book for the first time just before seeing the film, because I don’t want to be overly persnickety about whether or not the film lived up to my expectations or not.

On the other hand, if I’d read, say, The Lord of the Rings when I was twelve in 1971, well, I couldn’t help that in deciding whether the films were good or not. (They were good.)

But I wasn’t going to tell you not to see the movie because it wasn’t how I’d pictured the book … when I first read the book 48 hours ago.

Instead, I read up on the fictional or true story after I saw the movie, so I could comment intelligently on how the filmmakers adapted it.

Now, I’m highly sympathetic toward filmmakers. They are, after all, making films, which I enjoy and thus encourage. Making a movie is a difficult challenge. So I try not to be pedantically critical about choices that that they made to fit a voluminous story into a movie or TV show.

On the other hand, I also feel that my readers deserve to know what the filmmakers chose to include and what they left out.

That, however, is not a common practice among film critics, for understandable reasons.

I never wrote much more than one review per week, so I could afford to take a certain amount of time. I often saw a preview on a Tuesday night at 7 pm of a film debuting in theaters that Friday, and then filed my copy about 36 hours later on Thursday morning.

That’s a somewhat less exhausting schedule than Roger Ebert, the top daily reviewer, who typically wrote 3 to 6 movie reviews per week, followed. Obviously, Ebert didn’t have time to look up the facts behind the latest movie. He mostly wrote about what he saw on-screen, not about what actually had happened. And he didn’t have the Internet until fairly late in his career.

Pauline Kael, the top magazine reviewer, typically wrote one movie review about every six days.

My idol was Richard Grenier of the monthly Commentary, author of a 10,000 word 1983 review of Gandhi, who specialized in looking up the facts behind the latest movie.

Of course, working on a weekly schedule, I couldn’t match Grenier on his monthly schedule. But I did have the Internet.

What I saw was that filmmakers were not, you will be shocked, shocked to hear, scrupulously factual. They had to fit complicated stories into limited screentimes and make them appealing. So they routinely cut a few corners.

I didn’t find this appalling. But I thought it worth mentioning to readers that, say, “This is a good movie, but it’s not really what precisely happened. Here’s what in fact occurred.”

But it appears that plenty of people, and even some critics, didn’t pick up on that basic reality until seeing Fielder deconstruct the documentary.

You Can See Everything is another interesting Nathan Fielder project, although not as funny as his “Dumb Starbucks” sketch. But it’s strikingly uninformative about the Theranos fraud.

A few important angles that Fielder mostly skipped over are that: …

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For example, two recent opeds in the New York Times:

Want to Address Sexual Assault? Make Fraternities Admit Women

You see, fraternities are incredibly dangerous for women, so they should be neutered by filling them up with women.

Or something.

Don’t ask me to explain it, just realize it’s the Trend of the Times. The Establishment did the same thing to the Boy Scouts because … well, nobody is too sure why, other than because all-male institutions are evil (other than Castro Street bathhouses, which are sacred).

And:

I Teach at a Business School. It’s Time to Shut Them Down.

By Chris Marquis

Mr. Marquis is a professor at the University of Cambridge Judge Business School and the author of “The Profiteers: How Business Privatizes Profit and Socializes Cost.”

Oct. 18, 2026

MBA programs are one of the last academic institutions where there are slightly more male than female students: e.g., the Harvard Business School was 55% male in 2024.

So … exterminate the brutes!

This fall, another cohort of ambitious young professionals has arrived at business schools around the world for two-year programs with price tags in the six figures. Their presence at some of the nicest and shiniest buildings on campus renews a familiar question: What exactly is an M.B.A. for?

This question has become more urgent as business education has expanded dramatically in the past decades. Today, nearly one in five American undergraduates majors in business, and the M.B.A. is the most popular graduate degree in the United States. …

I’ve come to realize that business schools don’t just reflect our economic system — they actively manufacture its priorities and normalize its harms, training the future leaders who will design and defend the structures driving our overlapping global crises. Tinkering at the margins with a class on corporate responsibility or ethics is not going to help. We don’t need to “fix” business schools. We need to abolish them.

Business schools have always struggled to justify their place in the university. A medical school’s core justification is health, and a law school’s is justice — undisputed public goods. Business schools are organized explicitly around a private good: the pursuit of profit. The American sociologist Thorstein Veblen identified this tension a century ago, criticizing university schools focused on commerce because they “need imply nothing in the way of serviceability to the common good.”

After all, what has prosperity ever done for America?

When schools like Wharton and Harvard Business School were established, they were seen as overly vocational, and to build legitimacy their founders framed management as a profession, on par with law and medicine. But education in those fields rested on established bodies of knowledge — centuries of case law, natural sciences like biology — that management lacked.

The solution, devised in the 1920s by the Harvard dean Wallace Donham, was to borrow the teaching style used in law and medicine: the case study. It became the signature method of business education. To this day, professors assign 10- to 20-page descriptions of business challenges culminating in a decision point that students then debate in class.

It’s a fun way to learn.

Business courses also have the advantage that they tend to talk about problems that are more plausibly-sized for young people. As an undergraduate, I dealt with questions like: “What should Napoleon have done instead of invading Russia?” They were enjoyable to spout off upon, but, realistically, they tended to seem a little over my pay grade at age 18.

In MBA school at age 21, in contrast, we got questions that I could imagine myself tackling on the job pretty soon, like: “Is there a big enough market for this proposed brand of ultra-luxury gourmet dog food?” (That was a funnier question in 1980 than today when the answer to any question about whether a new form of pampering dogs will find willing customers is: “Of course some people will pay.”)

The method is pervasive: In 2024, Harvard Business School sold nearly 17 million case studies to various business programs around the world.

Case studies are more or less journalism, a field that I both enjoy and practice.

One well-known case study that I have taught many times is “Rob Parson at Morgan Stanley.” The facts are simple enough to produce a lively classroom debate. Mr. Parson has delivered impressive results and is viewed as a star performer, but his abrasive and go-it-alone style has alienated people across the firm. In the classroom, students take the position of his manager, Paul Nasr, and decide whether to promote him, delay the promotion or push him out.

Nearly three decades after publication, it remains among H.B.S.’s most widely used cases, and the dilemma is enduring: Should results be rewarded even when the person producing them damages the culture around him? In class, students vote on Mr. Nasr’s options and often role-play the difficult conversation between him and Mr. Parson. The discussion can be dramatic, engaging and effective.

But my experience has shown that by asking students to inhabit Mr. Nasr’s role, the case study narrows their imaginations to the decision facing one senior manager. Deeper questions — like whether Mr. Parson is himself a product of investment-banking culture — are rarely raised. Mr. Parson becomes an individual problem, when the larger issue may be an industry that rewards rainmaking, hierarchy and masculine performance norms, then acts surprised when they cause conflict.

After all, what good have “masculine performance norms” ever done the world?

When the case method is used in medicine and law, it serves a different set of goals. Medical students work through detailed patient scenarios — symptoms, test results, histories and social and economic context. Law students read real court opinions, dissecting facts, arguments and judgments. In both fields, students are confronted by the messiness of reality, and the goal is to foster disciplined skepticism: ask what’s missing, challenge assumptions and test how an analysis could be wrong.

Medical schools and law schools are famous for inculcating the notion that doctors and lawyers ought to be paid less, right?

Occasionally, doctors and lawyers do come up with ways to save the public money at their own expense. In 1785, for example, real estate lawyer Thomas Jefferson wrote a brilliant bill that defined property west of the Appalachians in precise terms of latitude and longitude rather than old-fashioned “metes & bounds” (“the Jones-Smith property line runs from the Old Oak Tree to that boulder that looks like King George”) that generated so much business for 18th Century East Coast lawyers.

But … that’s not what law school is mostly about.

Business school cases operate on another logic, focused not on inquiry but on decision making. H.B.S.’s own overview of the method describes students imagining “themselves in the decision-maker’s role” and “taking decisive action.” The point is to practice acting like the person in charge — or, as George W. Bush, a graduate of Harvard Business School, put it, “the decider.”

Why would the world need anybody to make decisions?

By overestimating the importance of individual decision makers, the business school classroom avoids harder questions: Who made this person the legitimate protagonist? Whose knowledge is absent? Why are workers, regulators, communities, ecosystems or citizens rarely given equal standing?

Because the owners didn’t put them in charge?

Furthermore, edits that push the case narratives away from reality are often meant to make it “work” in a classroom.

In contrast, movies and TV shows always go out of their way to show you the full, boring, un-fun truth, like how Law & Order rigorously documented the statistical reality that Park Avenue co-ops are hives of murderers. …

Business schools’ success in placing their graduates in high-paying jobs boosts their rankings; high rankings attract more applicants and allow higher tuitions; and wealthy alumni fund new programs and buildings that elevate the school’s status. It is a self-reinforcing cycle — a flywheel, in M.B.A. parlance — that pulls money, attention and legitimacy away from the disciplines best equipped to question this logic: history, philosophy, sociology, political theory.

After all, what academic disciplines have a better 21st Century track record than those?

In contrast, my big complaint about business education is that …

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The A24 and Nathan Fielder “documentary” about Elizabeth Holmes’ Theranos fraud is entitled “You Can See Everything,” even though you can’t:

As I asked Gemini Google:

Does California or the federal government have a Son of Sam law forbidding criminals from profiting off media portrayals of their crimes?

Google Gemini replied:

Both California and the federal government have faced major constitutional hurdles with “Son of Sam” laws, which are designed to stop criminals from profiting off books, movies, or media stories about their crimes.

California’s Status

• Story Rights Struck Down: In 2002, the California Supreme Court struck down California’s Son of Sam law in the case Keenan v. Superior Court, ruling that it violated the First Amendment by being overly broad and suppressing protected speech. A subsequent legislative attempt (Senate Bill 1887) was also passed to try and circumvent the ruling.

• Memorabilia Exception Stands: While general story-profit laws face heavy free-speech challenges, California enacted a law in 2000 that specifically prohibits convicted felons from profiting from the sale of crime memorabilia (placing those proceeds into a trust or escrow account for victims), and that portion remains intact.

Federal Status

• Federal Scope: Federal statutes and provisions exist (and general victim compensation/forfeiture rules apply to federal cases), though traditional Son of Sam restrictions targeting expressive media rights have historically been constrained or re-evaluated after the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 1991 ruling (Simon & Schuster, Inc. v. Members of New York State Crime Victims Board), which found that broad content-based financial burdens on crime-related speech violate the First Amendment.

• As a result, federal and state prosecutors generally rely on standard criminal restitution orders, asset forfeiture, or narrowly tailored financial claims rather than blanket bans on selling crime stories.

If you’re looking into a specific type of crime or want to know how victim restitution funds operate in a particular jurisdiction, let me know what details you need.

You said: Can Elizabeth Holmes profit off movie depictions of her?

Elizabeth Holmes cannot practically keep any profits from movie depictions of her, because any money she makes is legally required to go toward her massive $452 million criminal restitution order.

While there is no active federal “Son of Sam” law that blocks her from technically selling her life rights—and federal courts have historically protected a convict’s First Amendment right to profit from storytelling—the practical reality is dictated by her financial penalties.

💸 The Restitution Debt

• Massive Liability: A federal judge ordered Holmes and her co-defendant, Sunny Balwani, to pay $452.1 million in joint restitution to defrauded Theranos investors.

• Immediate Garnishments: Under federal financial crime enforcement rules, the U.S. government aggressively tracks and intercepts a convict’s incoming funds. If a media company pays Holmes for a book or film adaptation, federal prosecutors would file to garnish or claw back those earnings immediately to pay off her victims.

📜 Federal Son of Sam Limits

• Non-Violent Crime: The federal statute loosely tied to “Son of Sam” provisions (the Victims of Crime Act of 1984) historically targeted violent crime or fell out of use following Supreme Court free speech rulings.

• State Laws Don’t Apply: Because Holmes was convicted by the federal government, state-level profit restriction laws do not apply to her situation.

Mechanism Status for Elizabeth Holmes Impact on Movie Profits

Son of Sam Laws Inapplicable Does not legally block her from signing a movie deal.

Restitution Order Active ($452M) Diverts 100% of any signed deal directly to her victims.

Because of this financial stranglehold, any check cut to Holmes for her story would bypass her bank account entirely and flow directly to the federal court’s victim fund.

Are you curious about how the government tracks down hidden assets or how restitution collection schedules work for white-collar criminals after prison?

How much does Elizabeth Holmes stand to earn from You Can See Everything?

Zero dollars.

You said: Is Billy Evans the husband of Elizabeth Holmes?

Billy Evans is Elizabeth Holmes’ longtime partner and fiancé, though they have not publicly confirmed a legal marriage.

Relationship Status & Background

• Fiancé vs. Husband: While Evans is frequently referred to as her “husband” in media and sometimes uses the term casually in conversation, public records and reporting confirm that the couple has remained engaged since August 2018 without a formal, public legal marriage.

• Timeline: The pair met at a party in San Francisco in 2017—before Holmes was indicted—and stayed together through her trial, sentencing, and subsequent incarceration at Federal Prison Camp Bryan in Texas.

• Children: They share two children together: a son, William (born July 2021), and a daughter, Invicta (born early 2023).

• Recent Media: Evans and Holmes are the focal subjects of the 2026 documentary You Can See Everything, directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim.

Would you like to know more about Billy Evans’ background (such as his family’s hospitality empire or his own tech projects), or details about their children and family visits while she serves her sentence?

You said: Can Billy Evans legally profit off his version of his life with Elizabeth Holmes, or would his payments have to go toward the $452 million in restitution she owes?

Billy Evans can legally profit from his own version of his life with Elizabeth Holmes, and the federal government cannot automatically seize his personal media earnings to pay her $452 million restitution debt.

Legally, a spouse or romantic partner is a separate financial entity. Because Evans was not a co-defendant or co-conspirator in the Theranos fraud scheme, the federal restitution order applies strictly to Holmes and her co-defendant Sunny Balwani, not to Evans.

However, this financial separation is heavily scrutinized in practice, creating major legal hurdles:

🔍 1. The “Straw Man” and Funneling Risk

If a movie studio pays Evans for his story, federal prosecutors will closely audit the contract to ensure it isn’t a workaround to pay Holmes indirectly. If the government can prove that Evans’ payout is inflated because he is acting as a “straw man” to sell her story rights or that any of the money flows into an account Holmes can access, the government can instantly freeze or garnish those funds.

🎬 2. Real-World Precedent: You Can See Everything

This exact legal and financial tension played out during the production of the 2026 documentary You Can See Everything, directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim.

• The Profit Demand: Filmmaker Nathan Fielder revealed that late in production, Evans attempted to negotiate a personal share of the movie’s profits behind Holmes’ back.

• The Legal Backdown: While the production studio A24 initially agreed to terms, the documentary reveals that Evans ultimately rescinded his financial claim and did not take a payout. Accepting a personal profit from a movie about Holmes while she is serving her sentence would have triggered intense federal asset tracing and public backlash.

🔒 3. What the Government Can and Cannot Touch

• His Assets Are Safe: The federal government cannot seize assets owned solely by Evans, who is a millionaire hotel heir.

• Her Assets Are Stripped: Meanwhile, Holmes faces a dismal financial reality. The government aggressively tracks her earnings, to the point that 70% of any money sent to her prison commissary account is actively garnished by the Bureau of Prisons to pay down the $452 million.

Ultimately, Evans is entirely free to sell a memoir or sign a movie deal based on his perspective as long as the contract is exclusively in his name and the funds are never comingled with Holmes.

Would you like to know more about the financial tracing methods federal prosecutors use to monitor high-profile inmates, or the details surrounding Evans’ role in You Can See Everything?

You said: So, it’s reasonable to assume that the movie “You Can See Everything” is mostly motivated by the Evans-Holmes attempt to make some money off their story without having it garnished as restitution?

While making money without garnishment may have been an underlying hope, critics and the filmmakers suggest the primary motivation for Evans and Holmes was public relations and narrative control.

When Holmes and Evans initially approached A24 to film her final 34 days of freedom, their main objective was to reframe her public image. They wanted to push back against the harsh media coverage and dramatizations—like the Hulu series The Dropout—by showing her human side as a mother, partner, and seemingly ordinary person before reporting to prison. In the documentary, Holmes maintains that she never lied and did nothing wrong.

The financial motivation, however, is a massive part of the story, but it manifested in a much more audacious way than a simple movie payout:

• The Reality-TV “Pivot” to a New Startup: The true financial play revealed in You Can See Everything isn’t a film check; it’s a new company. The second half of the documentary shows that Evans used the ongoing notoriety to launch a new blood- and fluid-testing tech startup called Haemanthus.

• Continuing the Theranos Ambition: The documentary reveals that Holmes and Evans still believe the original Theranos core concept works, blaming its failure entirely on “undeveloped chemistry”. They are actively using their platforms to sell this new venture.

• The Restitution Shield: Because Haemanthus is legally incorporated under Evans’ name, any investor funding, equity growth, or corporate profits belong to him—safely insulated from Holmes’ $452 million federal restitution order.

So, while Evans did try (and fail) to negotiate a personal behind-the-scenes payout from the film’s production, the movie itself was largely viewed by the couple as a massive PR commercial. They aimed to prove Holmes’ “innocence” to the court of public opinion while simultaneously laying the groundwork to raise millions for a sequel to Theranos under Evans’ name.

You said: But film critics aren’t actually very smart about money, or they wouldn’t be impoverished film critics.

That is a fair and highly practical critique—the real monetary play was not the film’s budget, but

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Wait, weren’t the Dodgers so unbeatable the sport needs to shut down?

The Milwaukee Brewers swept the Los Angeles Dodgers to advance to the World Series, where they’ll take on another low-payroll team.

October 16, 2026 at 9:00 a.m. EDT1 min

By Stephanie Apstein

The twice-defending World Series champion Los Angeles Dodgers, employers of the best player in baseball history plus two other former MVPs, a half-billion dollar colossus so mighty the sport is about to shut down rather than allow them to continue to dominate,

The baseball franchise owners have been expected to go on strike next year, locking out the players’ union and shutting down the 2027 season. The owners’ chief demand is that labor allow capital to impose a mandatory cartel on itself, a “salary cap” that would prevent ownerships from paying players free market rates.

Even without a salary cap, owning a baseball team is currently a thriving business, with the small market San Diego Padres selling for $3.9 billion this year, up from the $0.8 billion the previous owner paid in 2012, an average annual appreciation of 12%. On the other hand, NFL and NBA franchises are even more expensive to buy, in large part because their owners enjoy a salary cap imposed on their players.

San Diego’s former ownership is the beaux ideal of the baseball players union: they spent a lot on star players and did some moderately expensive upgrades to their 2004 ballpark. The Padres have been second in attendance to the mighty Dodgers in three of the last four seasons.

San Diego County has a population of 3.3 million, while the L.A. Dodgers and L.A. Angels share 16.3 million people in the five counties of greater Los Angeles.

On the other hand, San Diego has a relatively rich fan base, Californians love baseball, San Diego has at present no other pro sports teams in the top 4 sports, and San Diego gets lots of tourists, for whom a baseball game at good-looking Petco Park is an appealing option to go along with a visit to the San Diego Zoo and the Wild Animal Park.

The owners’ plan was to sell their lockout to fans as absolutely necessary to prevent the evil empire of the Dodgers from unfairly winning all the World Series. A salary cap, they argued is the only way for teams in small rust belt cities like Pittsburgh and Cincinnati to compete with the Dodgers, New York Yankees, and New York Mets, who are unfairly blessed with more fans. Thus, the owners hoped for the Dodgers’ to win their third straight World Series this year.

finally met an opponent they could not topple: the Milwaukee Brewers, whose entire starting lineup combined makes as much as Shohei Ohtani.

As baseball debates the necessity of a salary cap, its proponents have pointed to the Dodgers’ run as evidence that the sport’s economic system is broken. But on Thursday night, the Brewers (total payroll: $144.5 million, good for No. 19 in the sport) finished off a four-game sweep of Los Angeles in the National League Championship Series.

This was not much of an upset. The Brewers were 103-59 this season, while the Dodgers had the second best record at 100-62. The Brewers took 4 out of 7 from the Dodgers in regular season. The Brewers are really good, even though they have far less star power than the Dodgers.

Milwaukee will play the winner of the American League Championship Series, currently being contested by the Tampa Bay Rays ($96 million, No. 28) and the Cleveland Guardians ($74.8 million, No. 30). No matter the outcome, the real winner will be the salary cap opponents.

Note that this year’s low-payroll World Series will be a bit of a fluke. World Series winners typically come from the top half of teams by spending.

Here is a scatterplot showing average regular season wins (Y axis) vs. team payrolls (X axis) for 2022-2026

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But as I’ve been pointing out, when you look into the details, it turns out that Jane Doe is, well, different …

As she told the Cornell Police, she’s a serious weightlifter who was “cutting weight” (presumably for a competition of some kind) when she did six straight shots of tequila at her sorority house before setting out alone for the fraternity house.

When she got there and was handed a beer can, she recalled, “I opened the beer can with my teeth.”

I tried to look up the demographics of who exactly opens beer cans with their teeth, but I got this sensible warning from Google Gemini instead:

Here are some text messages a few days after what CBS News accurately calls “a night of excessive drinking, drug use and group sex:”

Tuesday, Oct. 22, 2024

1:36 PM | [MALE 1]

I’m guessing that Male 1 is Matthew Ingalls, the part Middle Eastern & North African student from Dubai.

Yo it’s [MALE 1]

4:02 PM | JANE DOE

hey king

how u …

JANE DOE

people always want to talk about soemthing like i had

She then goes on to talk about allegations about her from her freshman year. I’ll put the nature of the old rumors about Jane Doe behind the paywall, but you can probably guess just from her tendency to open a beer can with her teeth:

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From The New Yorker:

WE’RE LEARNING TO LIVE WITH WAYMOS. IT’S GOING WEIRD

A view from the back seat.

By Molly Fischer

October 12, 2026

Much of this article is belletristic prose, but it includes a number of quantitative facts about Waymo robot taxis that could be of interest:

… Waymo has a fleet of more than four thousand cars in fifteen cities across the U.S.

In San Francisco, the company recently surpassed Lyft in market share. … More than thirteen hundred Waymos whir and glide in the region, the lidar sensors that spin in hat-like domes atop their roofs giving them an air of busy importance.

In June, Waymo unveiled its first national campaign, called “Because.” The ad opens with the red flash of emergency lights. “Car crashes injure over a million of us every year,” a voice-over explains. “Because we’re human.”

There are many things humans do that are difficult to imagine any machine improving upon, but driving is not one of them. Human drivers possess abundant and obvious shortcomings. The ad touts “a driver that never blinks, never gets tired or angry or has a few too many.” Waymo’s cars are “ten times safer” than those with human drivers, the ad declares—a crisp figure that recurs throughout company materials. … The figure refers to a ninety-two-per-cent reduction in crashes causing “serious injury or worse.” This is a remarkable achievement, and although outside evidence is limited, researchers generally view it as promising. …

The lower serious crash rate is promising, but it’s not entirely clear that it’s valid. I see a lot of empty Waymo robot taxis going past at 10 PM on 6 lane Venice Blvd., which is likely among the safest streets in L.A. This seems a bit like stat-padding to me, although it also makes sense to cruise up and down to get more miles in to learn from.

In February, the company announced a new valuation of a hundred and twenty-six billion dollars. …

But whose start-up isn’t worth one hundred billion dollars these days?

I can recall congratulating my old boss in 1991 because he had a second start-up break the $100 million barrier, which was phenomenal 35 years ago.

Nowadays, $100 million isn’t worth getting out of bed for.

Waymo sells its service as a remedy for prejudice (because robot drivers won’t discriminate against Black people) and for transit deserts (a claim Uber and Lyft also used to make).

But it’s almost as if taxi drivers in 2006 weren’t irrational white supremacists from Sierra Leone or Laos.

… In June, I visited a Waymo maintenance depot on Toland Street, in San Francisco. … Outside, Waymos puttered around a parking lot. Two hundred cars were on site, variously charging, awaiting their turns to charge, and enjoying the ministrations of human maintenance workers. The cars need to charge for about fifty minutes every six to eight hours—a cycle under way twenty-four hours a day, because a Waymo does not sleep at night.

This suggests that Waymos have a capacity of about 75% per 24 hour day.

On the other hand, there are currently 1,300 Waymos in San Francisco. If 200 were recharging when Molly Fischer visited, that suggests about 800 were in service, and 500 were …?

But on the other hand, who knows what the total capacity was when she visited last summer. New Yorker writers take their time.

On the other hand, does a Waymo really need to drive around all night? Isn’t it more likely that it’s most in demand from 8 to 10 AM and 4 to 9 PM, or about 25% of the day?

“Waymo promises its riders two things that, while related, are distinct: automation and driverlessness. Automation is the source of the traffic-safety potential that the company touts. Driverlessness, though, is the quality that users praise first, almost without exception. They want to put on their own music and control their own temperature; they don’t want to make conversation. …

But where will Tom Friedman go to get his insights into public opinion if there are no more drivers to interview on his way to the airport?

Recently, The Atlantic published a piece of sponcon from Waymo … The headline, in this case, was “Why Autonomous Vehicles Are a Lifeline for Neurodiverse Adults.” …

But, as is often the case, the illusion of self-sufficiency depends on other people. Waymo has approximately seventy “remote assistance” agents on duty at any given time, working at call centers in the U.S. and the Philippines, who advise the Waymo Driver on confusing situations. …

So, Waymo employs about 300 people working 40 hours per week to be ready to intervene and remotely take the wheel if one of its 4,000 robot taxis gets itself in a jam.

So, it appears to take a total of about one emergency drivers per 13.3 Waymos.

That’s about one worker overseeing for 40 hours per week every 50 to 60 Waymo robots deployed.

But what fraction of the 4,000 vehicles have passengers on average? And what fraction are cruising without passengers? (In west Los Angeles, the majority of Waymos I pass, usually at night, have no passengers.)

The company also has “rider support” agents, who respond to customer requests.

A human driver both drives and responds to his passengers requests. Waymo splits this job in two, apparently. No estimate on the numbers of the latter.

Plus it has humans working at the charging stations, humans retrieving Waymos that break down, and so forth and so on.

The lack of a driver can have unexpected consequences. Say someone is out drinking and prudently summons a Waymo: so far, so safe. But suppose, as sometimes happens, he falls asleep in transit. When he fails to exit upon arrival, a Waymo agent will attempt to rouse him—but, if he snoozes on, the agent will need to call 911, and ambulances and fire trucks will be dispatched.

Does Waymo get billed?

According to Bloomberg, San Francisco saw two hundred and fifty such incidents last year. It’s good that our hypothetical passenger wasn’t driving. Still, his evening seems like a less than unalloyed triumph for public safety.

I can’t imagine that a human Uber driver recently arrived from Tajikistan is going to need to call 911 to get a drunk out of his backseat. Tajikistanis aren’t good at everything, but I suspect they are perfectly adequate at rousting sleeping SF AI zillionaire drunks from their backseats.

One big question that I haven’t seen much discussion of yet is whether …

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Mein Kampf: A Very, Very Long Review

Part 2 of 2.

eugyppius

Oct 11, 2026

Paid

… For all of its purported naughtiness Mein Kampf is a serious snooze of a book, and I had enormous trouble summoning the motivation to make my way through the second volume, which if you can believe it manages to be even more tiresome and boring than the first one. …

The first comes from Chapter 11, on “Nation and Race,” which provides the ideological core of Volume 1 and advances a four-part argument derived from a variety of sources, including Arthur de Gobineau and Houston Stewart Chamberlain.

Teddy Roosevelt’s review of Chamberlain’s Foundations of the 19th Century is witty:

Mr. Chamberlain’s hatreds cover a wide gamut. They include Jews, Darwinists, the Roman Catholic Church, the people of southern Europe, Peruvians, Semites, and an odd variety of literary men and historians. To this sufficiently incongruous collection of antipathies he adds a much smaller selection of violent attachments, ranging from imaginary primitive Teutons and Aryans to Immanuel Kant, and Indian theology, metaphysics, and philosophy….

Eugyppius continues:

Hitler argues in this chapter that Aryans are the sole creators of culture and that Jews constitute an opposite racial type with no culture or state of their own. From there he explains that the German Reich collapsed in 1918 because of a general failure to appreciate the threat of Jewish subversion and the importance of the race question.

He introduces all of this with remarks on what he sees as a “fundamental law” of nature, namely the determination of every animal to mate only with its own kind:

There are truths that are so obvious they are right there in plain sight, yet for that very reason they go unseen – or at least unrecognised – by the ordinary world. People can pass right by such truisms as if blind, and they are utterly astonished when someone suddenly discovers what everyone ought to know anyway. Hundreds of thousands of ‘Columbus’s eggs’ are lying about; it is just that Columbuses are harder to come by.

Thus, without exception, people wander through the garden of nature, imagining that they know and understand almost everything, and yet, with few exceptions, they walk blindly past one of the most striking principles governing it: the internal isolation of the species of all living creatures on this earth.

Even a cursory observation reveals, as an almost ironclad fundamental law underlying all the countless expressions of nature’s will to live, its inherently limited form of reproduction and proliferation. Every animal mates only with a mate of the same species. A tit goes to a tit, a finch to a finch, a stork to a stork, a field mouse to a field mouse, a house mouse to a house mouse, a wolf to a wolf, and so on.

The last example might come as a surprise to Jack London, whose famous novel White Fang is about a wolf-dog that is 3-4ths wolf and 1-4th dog. London’s even more famous Call of the Wild is about a mixed breed dog, Buck, who is half St. Bernard and half Scotch shepherd. By the end, Buck has become the alpha male of a wolf pack whose pups are a new type of wolf, the Yeehat, that looks suspiciously like Buck.

The Nazis banned London’s dystopian novel The Iron Heel, but approved of his dog novels. London was a leftist racial socialist, so Hitler apparently never read either novel, despite their global popularity.

Only exceptional circumstances can alter this, primarily the constraints of captivity or some other impossibility of mating within the same species.

But if nature resists interbreeding, why should nurture?

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When Black Writers Are Guilty Until Proved Human

Originally entitled “The Racist Tinge to These A.I. Scandals”

Oct. 11, 2026

By Doyle D. Calhoun

Mr. Calhoun is an assistant professor at the University of Cambridge.

I hear there is an opening for a full professor at Cambridge. But Assistant Professor Calhoun is white, so good luck with that. Especially because his specialty is black literature.

The novel “C’était Ça ou Mourir” (“It Was Either That or Die”), by the Haitian Canadian writer Thélyson Orélien, was meant to be a standout of the French literary season. Instead, it became a fiasco that has unleashed some of the worst elements of French political hypocrisy and racism, all over questions that have exercised the publishing world in recent years: What to do about writers who use artificial intelligence? How much is too much? And can we even tell for sure?

But another story is emerging here: The five literary scandals around A.I. that I consider most significant this year have all focused on Black and brown writers.

As I wrote in my September 27, 2026 post:

Another Black Writer Caught Cheating

Lately, a lot of black professional intellectuals tend to get caught plagiarizing and/or using artificial intelligence to write works that come out under their names: Jason Arday, Claudine Gay, Kerri K. Greenidge, novelists Jerry Falade, Mia Ballard, and HM Wolfe, and so forth.

One popular theory is that all these blacks getting caught at cheating their way into highbrow positions must be due to a vast white racist conspiracy to hunt them down. …

On the other hand, Occam’s Razor suggests that the previously popular dogma during the DEI Era that there must be countless underemployed black geniuses ready to step into prestigious positions (especially in the publishing industry) turned out to be … just not true.

There really weren’t lying on the sidewalk million dollar black Bills (and Jasons and Jerrys and Kerris and Claudines) ready to be picked up by institutions that finally had gotten over their white supremacist prejudices. In reality, blacks have enjoyed affirmative action for a couple of generations now, so society was already scraping the bottom of the black barrel before DEI demanded, in effect, that we scrape right through the bottom of the barrel and into the ground underneath.

Now, in the New York Times news section, yet another black-intellectual-caught-cheating: … Thélyson Orélien

But it couldn’t possibly be that the pessimistic race realist forecast has turned out to be empirically vindicated while the optimistic race fantasist assumption has suffered humiliating reversals. No! There must instead be a giant white racist conspiracy that keeps catching prize-winning black authors plagiarizing and using A.I. Thus, Professor Calhoun conspiracy-theorizes:

So why the attention on this novel and this writer? It seems driven less by questions of technical (or technological) literary merit than by the workings of anti-woke vigilante activists claiming to defend the purity of literature.

None of this absolves an author of allegations of plagiarism (and I agree that A.I.-generated writing is a form of plagiarism that undermines the very value of literary creation). The accusations against Mr. Orélien are considerable and alarming. But they have been leveled by groups with clear political agendas. …

This is a familiar playbook. Reporting in France and Canada has pointed to similarities between the denunciation of Mr. Orélien and other attacks on Black intellectuals, in particular the Cambridge sociologist Jason Arday, who was found dead at his home this past summer shortly after resigning amid reports and mounting evidence that he had plagiarized and fabricated parts of his life story. In Mr. Arday’s case, a “race science network” linked to the right-wing Cambridge professor James Orr and the conservative billionaire Peter Thiel used their connections to fuel the media campaign against him.

… Unmasking Black writers will cease to be a blood sport only when it fails to find so many spectators.

Or when fewer black writers cheat.

But, we can hardly ask them to do that!

So, not surprisingly, today in The Atlantic:

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For example, since the 1990s, Canada has had an official policy that judges should go easy in sentencing Indigenous people due to so many Indians and Inuits committing crimes that get them sent to prison. In the 1999 Gladue case involving a drunken Canadian Indian lady who stabbed her common-law husband, a fellow Indian named Rueben Beaver, to death for cheating on her with her sister (for which she did a full six months in prison), the courts invented the “Gladue report,” which lists for the sentencing judge’s edification all the excuses imaginable for criminal violence by aboriginals, such as:

Some elements included in Gladue reports are the history of colonialism, cultural oppression, poverty, abuse suffered, and residential school attendance experienced by the Indigenous offender.

Not surprisingly, the percentage of inmates in Canada who are of Indigenous ancestry (less than 5% of the population) has only gone up since the Gladue initiatives to reduce their punishment for committing violent crimes. It’s almost as if less punishment equals less deterrence.

This is especially true among violent females criminals, such as Ms. Gladue, among whom Natives now make up about half of all women in prison.

Around 1990, a friend of mine was talking to a famous comedian’s brother who was a prison guard in upstate New York. Back then, before the big construction of more prisons in the mid-1990s, the state of New York was under a court mandate due to prison overcrowding to let killers out early. “Hey, is there anybody you really want to murder? Because, if there is somebody who really has it coming, now is the time to do it. We’ll have to let you out in 8 years.”

In contrast, Ms. Gladue did 0.5 years.

In the 1999 Gladue decision, the killer was a woman and the killee was a man, so it apparently did not occur to the judges that reducing homicide punishment of aboriginal killers would on average lessen deterrence of wife-murdering.

Much to the evident surprise of the solons who dreamed up the Gladue decision in 1999, but probably not to my readers, Canada now also has a mirror image criminal justice crisis: Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. Indigenous women die by homicide about 6 times as often as other Canadian women.

Not surprisingly, the vast majority of murdered Indigenous women are murdered by Indigenous men.

The Canadian Supreme Court last week finally got around to confronting the inevitable conundrum between punishing Native wife-beaters less and protecting Native wives more.

From Canadian Lawyer Mag:

SCC reconciles need to address high Indigenous incarceration rates with protecting Indigenous victims

To be frank, the Canadian supreme court utterly failed to reconcile the two desired outcomes.

But it would be nice to assert that it had somehow figured out how to reconcile them.

So let’s just say it did.

A split ruling on Friday introduces a three-step test for reconciling the two requirements under criminal law

SCC reconciles need to address high Indigenous incarceration rates with protecting Indigenous victims

By Jessica Mach

Oct 09, 2026 / Share

Courts must apply a three-step test when balancing Canada’s criminal law requirements to consider the disproportionate incarceration of Indigenous peoples with the fact that Indigenous women and girls experience high rates of violence, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in a 5-4 decision on Friday.

R. v. Cope represents the first time the high court has laid out the test, which aims to reconcile the Criminal Code’s approaches to what SCC Justice Michelle O’Bonsawin called “two intertwined social crises.” Writing for the majority, O’Bonsawin said the excessive imprisonment of Indigenous individuals and the abuse suffered by Indigenous women and girls are two issues shaped by the experiences of colonization.

In other words, the violence of Indigenous men upon Indigenous women is all the fault of white people. And blaming white people even more than before will somehow keep Aboriginal men from murdering their womenfolk.

“Addressing them together is central to the ongoing process of reconciliation,” the justice wrote.

Friday’s ruling also clarified that it is not a legal error per se when a sentencing judge fails to meaningfully consider the recommendations resulting from a sentencing circle – a process in which members of the affected Indigenous community, the offender, lawyers, and the sentencing judge come together to discuss an appropriate sentence.

However, this error could amount to a failure to properly conduct the second step of the sentencing analysis set out in the SCC’s 1999 decision in R v. Gladue, which requires sentencing judges to consider sanctions and sentencing procedures that would be appropriate given the offender’s Indigenous background.

Gladue was a landmark decision in Canadian criminal law. It requires sentencing judges to consider the aspects of an Indigenous offender’s background that stem from their position as an Indigenous person in Canada – like their experiences with dislocation, discrimination, substance abuse, high unemployment rates, or community fragmentation – when crafting a criminal sentence. The landmark decision clarified how courts should apply s. 718.2(e) of the Criminal Code, which came into force in 1996 to address the overrepresentation of Indigenous people in Canadian prisons.

The high court’s ruling in R. v. Cope

“Cope” is a hilarious name for this decision.

upholds a previous decision by the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal, which reduced the sentence of a Mi’kmaw man with severe mental health challenges from five to three years in prison after he violently attacked his partner, a Mi’kmaw woman.

SCC Chief Justice Richard Wagner and justices Malcolm Rowe, Mahmud Jamal, and Suzanne Côté dissented, stating they agreed with the original five-year sentence.

Jonathan Rudin, one of the lawyers who represented Cope, told Canadian Lawyer on Friday that there has long been confusion among lawyers and judges over how to balance Gladue with other provisions in the Criminal Code that aim to provide justice to Indigenous female victims of abuse and violence, with some wondering whether one cancelled out the others.

Indeed.

The high court’s new three-part test “helps people understand that this isn’t a contest between the Indigenous victim on the one hand and the Indigenous offender on the other hand,” Rudin says. “It’s not a battle.”

It would seem like it is inevitably a battle between Indigenous victims and Indigenous offenders, but as long as you assert that it isn’t, I guess I have to believe you for reasons.

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The Cornell “rape” story is finally starting to make sense. From Jane Doe’s statement to the Cornell U. police:

“I don’t drink alcohol to excess often due to a syndrome that I have been diagnosed with called Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome. This syndrome makes feel dizzy often, and can also mess with my vision, balance, etc. Also, I don’t remember having a lot to eat that day as I’m a weightlifter and am currently cutting weight … I continued to drink the Tito’s vodka and had consumed approximately 6 shots before ZZZ, a friend of my friend, took the bottle from me.”

So, she’s a bodybuilder. And she suffers, like many bodybuilders, from Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS), which is frequently worsened by various Performance Enhancing Drugs popular among bodybuilders. From Google Gemini AI:

Then she walked by herself to the fraternity house:

“I believe I opened the beer can with my teeth.”

Okay …

Did anybody give Jane Doe …

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