Not every idea is a good idea…
Bullet Points:
** Ben suggests that we give it a shot – pick a city. The idea has merit. Call it a triage center and figure out what the waystrels need. Most will need to be deloused first, given meds, and warrants served, with a trip to court. Dry out the druggies and see what you have left. Illegals can be routed to ICE. A lot of them are mentally ill and can go into a treatment center (asylum) somewhere.
** Could China and Russia attack Starlink with impunity? (h/t Claudio) The short answer is ‘no,’ and the longer answer is here.
** Iran has claimed to have captured 178 Delta Force operators. The truth is that Iran couldn’t capture a social disease in an Israeli cat house. They’d have their hands full with 178 Girl Scouts laden with cookies. 178 Delta operators are enough to complete regime change in Iran.
** Defending US Airbases at home is a larger problem than defending them abroad because civilian housing and businesses often abut the base perimeter fences. Missiles fired toward threats that miss will land somewhere, as will bullets in flight to destroy drones. More here (h/t Claudio).
** Inventorying the Sheriff of Baghdad’s go-bag.
The A.I. Beggars’ Summit
(h/t Ken) At the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Beijing, leaders from 29 countries assembled and promoted a new vision of “global AI cooperation.” But Chinese internet users mocked it as an “AI beggars’ summit.” Why?
Many participating countries are poor developing nations in Africa and Central Asia, lack advanced computing infrastructure, cannot easily access Nvidia’s most powerful chips, and have never been major markets for American AI systems. That makes them perfect customers for China. Beijing has poured money into AI data centers, but an estimated 70% are unfinished or underutilized. China now needs foreign markets to absorb its excess servers, cloud capacity, surveillance systems, and low-cost AI models. This is the same playbook China used in solar panels, steel, and electric vehicles: Subsidize production. Create excess capacity. Cut prices. Dump the surplus overseas.
China’s AI firms, including DeepSeek, Moonshot, Qwen, and MiniMax, have been accused of “distilling”, i.e., creating algorithms — not to train their models the hard way (as American firms are doing) — but to run massive numbers of bots on the American firms in order to shortcut that exercise. E.g., https://www.forbes.com/sites/craigsmith/2026/06/25/distillation-the-new-uschina-ai-fight/
But AI is not simply another manufacturing industry, and America’s investment advantage is enormous. According to YCC Macro Research, in 2025, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Meta spent approximately $408.7 billion in capital expenditure, potentially rising to $725 billion in 2026. China’s four largest technology companies spent only around $56.7 billion in 2025 and roughly $109 billion this year.
America is not slightly ahead. It is operating at several times China’s scale. That means larger GPU clusters, more advanced data centers, deeper cloud capacity, and faster model deployment.
Now, Chinese AI is indeed improving and competing aggressively on price. Some Chinese models reportedly charge around one-tenth as much as leading American services. But cheap usage is not the same as a profitable ecosystem. One Chinese platform reportedly increased its share of U.S. token usage from below 1% to 17%, while its revenue share remained around 1%. That perfectly captures China’s AI dilemma: More users. More infrastructure. More geopolitical influence. But very little profit. China may export cheap AI to authoritarian and developing countries. But America still controls the capital, chips, cloud infrastructure, and commercial ecosystem that will determine who actually wins the AI race.
H/T WSF
Springfield Mourns as Government Cheese Flees
The Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling clearing the way for the Trump administration to end Temporary Protected Status for Haiti wasn’t just a legal decision on paper. In Springfield, Ohio, it’s emptying out a town. Local reporters found 𝟖𝟎% 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐇𝐚𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐚𝐧 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐦𝐮𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐲 has already left the city, out of fear of deportation now that the TPS shield is gone. An estimated 12,000 to 15,000 Haitians had settled in Springfield over the past decade (NBC News). The government welfare that supported the Haitians is leaving as fast as they are leaving. Local businesses are wondering whether or not they can survive the ‘economic disaster’.
The fallout is landing on the Clark County Land Bank. Its assistant executive director told local reporters the office is now tracking “𝘢𝘣𝘰𝘶𝘵 500 𝘱𝘢𝘳𝘤𝘦𝘭𝘴 𝘪𝘯 𝘊𝘭𝘢𝘳𝘬 𝘊𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘵𝘺, 𝘱𝘳𝘪𝘮𝘢𝘳𝘪𝘭𝘺 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘤𝘪𝘵𝘺 𝘰𝘧 𝘚𝘱𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘧𝘪𝘦𝘭𝘥” — tax-foreclosed and vacant properties piling up as families move out. Temporary Protected Status was always supposed to be temporary — that’s the name. What Springfield is discovering is how much of its housing recovery and local economy got quietly built on the assumption it never would be.
Identify the Aircraft
1
2
3
End
Identify the Aircraft
1. Yak-19
2. Avia CS-199
3. Mil Mi-1 Hare
Excellent
Of note on today’s airplane ID the Czech made Avia CS-199 was made up from left over WWII parts and was the Israeli Air Force’s first airplane.
*
I laughed at the story that Iran captured 178 Delta Force. Almost like they have their own version of those junk newspapers they sell at the grocery store check out line beside the Taylor Swift collectable magazines.
Hey now, don’t be knocking TS Collectables…many of us Swifty’s out here are still ‘all a buzz’ from the ‘wedding of the century’.
[Gag, could lose my man-card if I were serious. Now, where’s my limited edition TS bobble head?]
The current Iranian propagandists (many of them met their maker since the beginning of the war, and they’re on like their fifth set) remind me of Bagdad Bob from Gulf War 1
“Bagdad Bob” is a cultural reference point that should never be allowed to fade away….
Identify the Aircraft:
1. Yakovlev Yak-19
2. Avia CS-199
3. PZL SM-2
Nailed them
> attack Starlink with impunity?
With impunity of course not, but if it came to open hostilities, what’s Starlink’s defense against the dumbest of dumb, brute-force methods? Is it the sheer number of nodes? (I don’t know what the individual satellites are called, so I am calling them nodes to keep the typing down.) Are all nodes equal, or is there a hierarchy of capability and importance? If the latter, and the number of “key/essential nodes” is limited, they’re certainly vulnerable to having a few hundred (or maybe even a few dozen) kilos of ball bearings lofted into their paths. Presumably the ephemeris of each node is known or can be determined?
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>“AI beggars’ summit.”
Haha. Had not heard of this, but it’s hardly surprising. Han look down on everyone not-Han. (Han are the second-most ethnocentric and ethno-racially arrogant people on Earth. Their only grace is that they aren’t hypocritical about it, and they leave “G-d” out of it.) Central Asians are generally despised by “real Chinese” between the crime of simply not being Han, historical grudges, and the tendency to being Muslim; the Chinese despise Islam. And of course everyone (not a liberal white) looks down on sub-Saharan Africans (fairly or not; this added to appear politically correct). So this AI Summit thing sounds like the CCP approach to “soft power” in addition to the economic imperatives you listed above.
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>America still controls the capital, chips
Chips: Does “controls” = makes? If not, then I’d argue it’s not real control. Despite being in that world, at least peripherally, for years (over 3 decades ago), I have no idea these days. But I’d argue that Hsinchu, and wherever in ROK Samsung has its fabs, are too close to the PRC. Is TSMC AZ up, and if so, what are they making, and how much?
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>government welfare that supported the Haitians is leaving as fast as they are leaving. Local businesses are wondering whether or not they can survive the ‘economic disaster’.
Sheesh. I would happily eat ramen and cheapest Aldi canned tuna every day for the rest of my life if it meant removing all the Haitians. Hell, I’d eat green bean casserole, and I hate green bean casserole, if it meant removing the Haitians AND the Somalis. Living “poor” among your own people (at least culturally, as is my case for “own”) is far better than a “rich” world with 20 varieties of diabetogenic fast food slop and cheap Chinese shoes that last less than a year, but also violent retards who have no respect for your culture and view you as prey. I seem to recall the following from a Bruce Chatwin book (probably The Songlines):
“What do the gypsies call a welfare cheque? ‘Meat’. What do they call settled people? Also ‘meat’.” (I dont’ know if this is true about gypsies; Chatwin was a hell of a writer, but not above making stuff up. That said, it sure seems to apply in our present year of grace, no?)
X2…As for Starlink ‘nodes’ (good descriptor), Musk has a set of really big ‘chopsticks’.
If the Chinese were to destroy 9000 Starlink satellites in orbit, it would look like that Sandra Bullock Space Junk movie with Clooney. None of the low-Earth-orbit Chinese satellites would survive the onslaught.
Low-Earth-Orbit. That’s the thing. Starlink is really low, orbit-wise. They are not in geosynchronous orbits. Nope, they’re almost scraping the upper atmospheres.
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And this is on purpose. First, you can get more up to a lower level orbit than you can get to a higher level orbit given the same vehicle and the same amount of fuel.
–
Second, Starlink/SpaceX/Musk freely acknowledge that the starlink satellites are of limited life expectancy and are designed to fly to their correct orbit and then ‘fall’ down and burn up when not working or reached end-of-life. So the reason there are so many satellites in the constellations is for excessive redundancy. Just in case anything goes wrong. Like the ChiComs pot-shotting starlinks. And being so low-orbit, the Earth’s gravity, air resistance and the solar winds will push/pull non-powered objects out of the orbitals.
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Then there’s ‘all those satellites.’ Well, yes, numerically, but when you toss all of them into a 3 dimensional space, there’s a lot of room between all of them, horizontally, vertically, yada yada. Causing a chain-reaction space destruction derby sounds cool, in a doomsday destruction way, but it’s harder to do than you think. Though, yeah, adding a lot of crap into the spaceways isn’t a cool thing to do. We, the US, have done anti-satellite tests, in low earth orbit, where all the debris will come down relatively quickly. It’s the Russkies/Soviets and the ChiComs who’ve trashed up the upper layers with their crap purposefully or accidentally blowing up.
Now, SpaceX’s upcoming orbital data centers will be way out there, orbit wise, which will require Starship to be working as Falcon9 can’t lift that much mass that high economically.
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But they’re going to be way out there in geosynchronous orbit, or farther. Crazy ‘out there’ distances where space really is wide open. So the chance of the ChiComs or Russkies getting frisky way out there in the darkness is low to nill, because of the same ‘launch equation’ that keeps Falcon9 from carrying data-center-sats. Neither have the mass capacity to lift stuff to ‘way the heck out there’ on their launchers.
Agreed on all points.
At the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Beijing, leaders from 29 countries assembled and promoted a new vision of “global AI cooperation.”:
And what could possibly go wrong with those 29 meeting in Beijing? I’m convinced AI is the new techy shiny object. Sure it’s cool and all, but this global dominance race thing sounds a bit of a stretch. Guessing the hype will settle out once investments in data centers is not realized as expected. Not all bad juju, I do like the AI generated answer in Google…saves time going through a bunch of links. Other than that it won’t build my house (altho, it can do a quick 3D rendering based on the design), or help me catch a rainbow with the right cast.
ProTip: When something is the constantly hyped top media story – in repeat mode – that’s a clue to not listen to the blatherer’s, who’s entire existence is to keep WTP on our heels worrying about the next disaster that we can do nothing about.
***
Ben is not wrong…it’s what “we” used to do with that grade of societal misfits. Instead, now, we have misplaced compassion driving ‘policy’. We see this front and center with that MadMommie punk (pleeease let him try to arrest Netanyahu), and others who hopped on the DSA Socialist bandwagon for attention, all suggesting we need to coddle them even more. Yeah, that’ll work…as shown with free drugs and needles, or free food stores and buses and fixed rent jacking up prices that leave properties off the market unused. These idiotic ‘new’ (aka old) ideas never work, only make things worse. In the end ‘always follow the money’, those spouting off are getting paid for their grift…often from our tax dollars…sometimes from foreign entities.
***
Government Cheese: There should only be ONE Cheese Castle…and it’s in Wisconsin. End the IRS and half a dozen other ‘agencies’ and a lot of these ‘bologna roll specials’ dry up.
Keep eye on the number of Taylor S or AOC stories per day in news feeds. As it increases the media is directing, distracting, you away from some story they are hiding. So start digging. When it drops to one or none, then don’t bother digging into the news very deeply.
Exactly.
Ben and comedians like him make a living on being right and saying what everyone else is thinking.
Carlin-esque.
>in 2025, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Meta spent approximately $408.7 billion in capital expenditure, potentially rising to $725 billion in 2026
> America is not slightly ahead. It is operating at several times China’s scale.
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Which of those four companies (entities, whatever) is NOT essentially evil? Are all those data centers (energy and water devouring centers; in a world where we are shamed for using a plastic straw, yet) for the benefit of the average American, or is it to further tighten the leash around our collective fat and cholesterol-laden necks? Just because we are fat and can lead lives of physical ease doesn’t make us not slaves. “Muh freedom” is a sham when you are not allowed to Notice anything that matters. We have no idea if a sitting US senator of considerable seniority is alive or dead. We don’t know how Lindsey Graham died. We have no idea whether Joe Biden was present for some nontrivial portion of his nominal presidency. We smugly make fun of the Brits for their lack of free speech, but we’re about 5 minutes behind. We’re expected to believe in “steel neck” and a hundred other pieces of nonsense every day.
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As many have pointed out, the AI that we proles (there’s another, more appropriate, word, but it’s “triggering”) will be allowed to access will be nothing like the AI that our owners will have. “Our” AI will be like spellcheck forcing us to say “ducking” instead of what we actually mean. Only we won’t even notice the “correction” because within a decade or two we won’t KNOW what’s actually true. And even if you do know, saying it out loud will be a literally criminal act. Welcome to your future of “Truth Denial” and “Truth Revisionism”. O Brave New World, that has such … well, you know the saying.
Mike, yer on a roll…
Musk has said that the bulk of the data centers need to operate from orbit. He makes a compelling case.
The Haitian TPS problem: I don’t think a day goes by that I don’t see a story like this: Springfield is going into deep financial trouble and it’s all due to industries that sprang up to help the illegals. The story I saw an hour before that was RFK Jr saying hospices without a single patient got away with $100 Billion in fraud.
~~
I think if there was no corruption, we’d be running budget surpluses instead of deficits. Maybe just not pay taxes at all.
X2 – We can make it on tariffs alone if we can eliminate the bulk of the fraud and stupid spending.
Ordered a Stuv zero clearance woodburner fireplace unit for the new hovel – German company with a plant/warehouse in Canada to service the US. $704 tariff tacked on because dopey Canadian leadership won’t deal with PDJT but would rather work with China, as if that will work out (fox-hen house scenario). Steel prices are insane due to importing instead of Bethleham Steel et al operating…which I’m guessing that will happen under Trump. In the meantime WTP take it in the shorts because of prior Administrations messing with Free Enterprise and bad Trade deals that hamstrung American producers.
Sorry you had to pay the tariff on your fireplace insert. I went with a small Kuma insert from northern Idaho and have had no problems at all. Of course, in today’s market place shipping costs are also part of the purchase equation and sometimes shipping is more expensive than the part. Enjoy your fireplace and may you have many winters of fun and warmth with it.
Thanks…shipping in our case was $450 or so, not bad considering fuel prices. The root problem is in the past 25 years the EPA bravo sierra regs for particulate output, testing, and approvals have gotten insane, and more ridiculous…no more open fire viewing allowed on woodburners, as if some bureaucracy should have any say. Yours is a good brand…we picked the Stuv because of styling and allows open fire viewing if I custom make a screen (I will), altho one of their other models uses a guillotine door verses a swing style, cool design but seriously pricier. A plain fireplace was an option but figured for a bit more a woodburner does double duty.
Martin XB-51
I went on a trip with Liberty Belle B-17 to Duxford, UK in 2008. We took a WW2 veteran B-17 pilot, Ken Hoddinot, who was in his 90s at the time, yet sharp as a tack.
He had worked for Martin after the war as an engineer on the XB-51 project as a junior engineer responsible for the rear mounts for the engines. On an early ground test one of the mounts failed and the engine broke loose, pivoting into the fuselage before it could be shut down. He didn’t keep that job….
He was one of those people who make a big impression…truly larger than life.
I find it somewhat funny that Ben is Canadian. I wonder if has a different act for north of the border or not?
I’ve seen his act in Canada – just the same. I’m surprised they haven’t locked him up yet.
Or offered him MAID.
X2
Go bag. Good stuff. I am curious how well his gas mask seals against his beard.
Same as with Covid maskers with beards who thought they were now immune.
The beard is charcoal impregnated and is thus a filter…..
** Defending US Airbases at home is a larger problem than defending them abroad
Consider Warren AFB Cheyenne. No aircraft but the command node for numerous ICBM silos. Within line of sight is/was a Chinese backed cryptocurrency miming facility. Supposedly sold in 2024 to an “American” company due to pressure from the Biden missadministration.