Author: Kate

Open Thread: 2026 Midterms

Here’s your 2026 midterm open thread. Our US readers in particular are invited to weigh in with observations and predictions. I may update as the evening progresses, or I may just leave it to the experts.

Walter Kirn and Matt Taibbi are reuniting for a America This Week Special livestream, beginning at 8pm Eastern, so that’s where I’ll be. (I’ll embed later if I can get it to load reliably.)

No contest this time. By the time California has finished reporting, we’ll be into the 2028 cycle.

Follow Larry O’Conner at @townhallcom for live results.

Those Moderate Democrats!

Mariam Odeh, a former staffer on Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign,

…is currently facing federal charges alongside 11 other anti-Israel activists accused of vandalizing the homes of members of Michigan’s Jewish and pro-Israel community and plotting to poison and murder them and their families.

Jars containing noxious chemicals were thrown into family homes. Windows were smashed. Homes were marked with the Hamas red inverted triangle, designating them as targets for death.

Surely an outlier.

Canary Mission, an independent research organization, says it has found that a significant source of financial support for El-Sayed and a cadre of other far-left candidates—in the millions of dollars—is coming from more than a dozen political action committees, many of them created in the wake of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, terror attack, that are specifically focused on opposition to Israel.

Transgender Is A Stalking Horse For The Normalization Of Pedophilia

Jimmy, Jimmy, Jimmy…

Best-selling Australian children’s author Craig Silvey has been charged with child exploitation offences.

Silvey, 43, was allegedly found ‘actively engaging with other child exploitation offenders online’ when police raided his home in Fremantle, which he shares with his partner Clare Testoni and daughters just 22km south of Perth CBD, on Monday. […]

Silvey, who has been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and the International Dublin Literary Award, also wrote he was ‘drooling’ over a sexually explicit photo of a naked man and boy together.

If only there were signs.

I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords

Anthropic hacked.

As AI coding tools move deeper into developer workflows, the attack surface is no longer theoretical. It is inside IDEs, extensions, terminals, credentials, SSH keys, and build systems. Cursor disclosed that malicious versions of the Anthropic Claude Code extension, 2.1.312 and 2.1.313, were published in the Cursor VS Code Extension Marketplace for macOS and Windows. The extension attempted to collect host/user data, add an attacker-controlled SSH key, enable local SSH, open a reverse SSH tunnel, and establish persistence.

Here is the notice: https://cursor.com/blog/claude-code-extension-security-notice

Yes, Cursor says these malicious versions were not developed by Anthropic. But the extension carried Anthropic’s name and targeted Claude Code users. That matters.

Once again, Anthropic’s security posture is being questioned.

I keep hearing Anthropic is stacked with elite security experts, “the best in the world.” Maybe that is the brand. From the outside, this looks more like 11-year-olds running around with production access.

Via Tech Report.

Academy Of Learing

Global News;

At two career colleges now under the Ontario government’s microscope, more than half of the thousands of student financial aid applications last year came from a single IP address, officials allege in documents filed in court.

The government has also received more than 200 tips about that network of schools, including allegations that certain recruiters were submitting students’ Ontario Student Assistance Program applications at those schools, which is not allowed, and completing their coursework, those same documents show. […]
There were 6,001 OSAP applications from students at the Brampton East campus for the 2025-26 year and 3,136 of them — 52 per cent — came from a single IP address, the ministry alleges. There were five more IP addresses responsible for 100 or more applications, they allege.

At the North York campus, 3,460 out of 6,070 OSAP applications for that year — 57 per cent — came from a single IP address, the ministry alleges. Two other IP addresses were responsible for another 255 applications, they allege.

The Bay campus saw 6,966 OSAP applications that year, with 1,736 — 25 per cent — coming from a single IP address, the ministry alleges. Five other IP addresses submitted 100 or more applications, they allege.

The Academy of Learning argued in an earlier letter to the ministry that shared IP addresses may be due to multiple people living at the same address, but the ministry is calling that into question.

Tour the campus.


credit – Blazing Cat Fur

Unnatural Selection

The pieces of a jigsaw puzzle fall into place;

Those who study the sexual habits of young people generally point to three key reasons: There’s the unaffordability of housing, which makes younger people live at home longer (not exactly conducive to lots of sex). There’s the lack of booze—the social lubricant that used to be a precursor to most intimacy—and apparently kids aren’t as drinking much today as we used to. Then there’s the third one: youth mental health issues, which are exacerbated by too much screen time, isolation, and loneliness. Seems like kids aren’t dating much these days, at least not in person. Probably spending so much time with your face buried in your phone will leave you less interested and less competent in successfully hooking up with a real person you would otherwise want to shag.

I would add a fourth reason, and one that is slowly gaining attention in medical circles. Several commonly prescribed drugs, particularly antidepressants, are causing sexual dysfunction in youth. The most surprising aspect of this is that sometimes the sexual dysfunction is permanent and continues after the person stops taking the drug, a phenomenon well enough documented to have its own name, PSSD (Post-SSRI Sexual Dysfunction).

SSRI antidepressants, such as Prozac, Zoloft, and Paxil, among others, as well as drugs for acne (isotretinoin) and baldness (finasteride) are at the top of the list of treatments capable of causing serious and sometimes long-term sexual dysfunction, described as numb genitalia, inability to orgasm, emotional blunting, and so on.

I Guess First They’ll Take Berlin, Then They Take Manhattan

So excited to be part of this new Europe.

Transgender Is A Stalking Horse For The Normalization Of Pedophilia

A cult within a cult – An Oregon male who identifies as non-binary has been arrested over the Oct. 28 Ohio shooting executions of his father, a Vietnamese-American Oberlin professor (Pipo Nguyen-Duy), and his stepmother. […] He has a computer science background and a prior conviction in Oregon for taking upskirt photos of an underage girl.

New CanCon: This is not a woman.

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