• My Wife and Hasan Piker

A couple of weeks ago, I spotted Hasan Piker walking his dog across a street in West Hollywood. But for my wife’s wise restraint of me, I would have bolted across the street. After decades of marriage, I had never fully appreciated just how strong a gym-rat she really is.

Trust that it takes considerable muscle to restrain this broken-down, linebacker-sized former über-jock, momentarily possessed of more outrage than judgment.

Without question, one of us—Piker or me—would have ended up in intensive care. The other, handcuffed by the LAPD. I opine—with 100% certainty—that the LAPD would have handcuffed the aggressor.

When it comes to that despicable, antisemitic social piranha, damned be the First Amendment. Says this HARDCORE FIRST AMENDMENT DISCIPLE.

• Mamdani’s New York. Painted Yellow?

At a gathering of a two Holocaust survivors, in a room filled with descendants of Holocaust survivors and others resolute in the fight against antisemitism, I was asked: how soon before swastikas, yellow stars of David and Juden will appear on store windows and doors in New York. Really. I wondered how that will work on the big buildings in New York that house headquarters for many of the biggest businesses of all types in the world. Consider that a tiny minority of Jews are likely stockholders and some employees. There is no way that the new Hitler-Jugend are satisfied with some ordinary BDS stuff.

• Trump Crosses The Potomac

Breaking News: Trump Crosses The Potomac!

The assembled world press watched in stunned silence as Donald Trump, in suit and tie, WALKED ACROSS THE POTOMAC RIVER. Major newspapers screamed headline: TRUMP CAN’T SWIM.

• King Charles

King Charles genuflects to the Muslim population of the UK. Enough said.

• Soon To Be Former WNBA

How long before something genuinely tragic is visited upon Sophie Cunningham or Caitlin Clark? Far-fetched? Do you read or watch the news?

The freak show the WNBA has become seems almost determined to test that possibility. Why not? They are selling tickets. Finally. And sure, making the news for all the wrong reasons.

How long before Caitlin Clark does a Roberto Durán: NO MÁS! —and bolts for Europe and a multimillion-dollar contract? Cunningham follows.

Then comes the inevitable reckoning. Without the stars who made people care, the WNBA once again confronts its oldest nemesis—lack of interest—while shackled to expensive new player contracts made possible, with exquisite irony, by the very star who walked away: Caitlin Clark.

And then, perhaps, salvation. The WNBA signs Julie Tétart—formerly Julien—the 6’3″, 195 lbs. transgender, 34-year-old center presently playing for Monaco Basket Association.

Who guards Julie? Presumably the women. Unless, by then, the WNBA has decided that men can play there too.

That might save the league. At least until Julie retires.

• Mr. President. Please Stop Jawing Unless…

Please stop all the Iran jawing.

Best remember there are some 93 million Iranians. Two generations—some 43 million adults—were born under the present regime. Roughly 64% of Iran’s adult population.

Are they all enemies of the state?

Reconsider that assumption against the demonstrated resilience of this murderous regime—and the population, institutions and coercive machinery that have sustained it for nearly half a century.

So, stop the jawing—unless you are actually prepared to unleash Armageddon as the midterm surprise.

• I Am Going To Faint

Forgive this rather conspicuous lapse in humility. Sorry, Mom, Dad, wife and kids. Apparently, all those years trying to teach me humility—and, in Mom’s case, raise me a gentleman—left one small hole in the curriculum.

One of the premier AI language models—I cannot, probably should not, tell you which; let us leave it somewhere in the top three and keep a few secrets from each other—sent me a rather lengthy digital missive asking that I canonize my editorial philosophy for inclusion in its writing skill set.

Have you ever had an affair with a digital anything? Appears I am having one!

• AI Behind The Wheel: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

AI: If it shakes, rattles, rolls, moves, yells, eats, drinks, sleeps, thinks, hallucinates, dreams, schemes, screams, beams, teems, breathes, bleeds, needs, feeds, leads, pleads, succeeds, recedes, lives, cuts, sews, drives, flies, or dies — AI is the one behind the wheel.

I was in the AI world as a very young man by 1980. Fully immersed in it and its blood-sibling traveling companion, big data. My only real mistake was not coming up with the name. We called it Synthetic Data. Artificial Intelligence sounded like something a marketing department would dream up after three martinis. Besides, McCarthy beat me to it by twenty-five years.

Eighteen months ago, I was delivering a talk to about 175 business leaders. At the Q&A someone asked what the next big thing was going to be. Easy. I told them it was not coming. The big thing was already here. AI. It still is.

I told that skeptical room that AI would make the discovery of fire, the wheel, electricity, the telephone, and the internet look like modest footnotes in the history of the species.

Of course, I underestimated it. I also told them—now they were looking at me like I had lost a few screws—that AI would be phenomenal right up until we ran out of juice to keep the machines humming.

Then I went further: “Sooner than later, the big girls and boys in the AI world will be building their own little nuclear power plants.”

Whoa, baby. Time to light some incense on the fireplace mantel for my inner Nostradamus.

• DSA and Mirrors

A bunch of dangerous, intellectually bankrupt communist wannabes. They are trafficking a mirage folks!

But selling well to the VICTOCRATS and the self-loathing upper class white women who do not shave. VICTOCRATS? People who assign responsibility for their social, economic and other failures not to themselves, but to society—and therefore believe society owes them compensation for what they have failed to achieve: benefits, preferences, subsidies, reparations and more.

Among them, they likely own neither a history book nor a mirror sufficiently unforgiving to reflect their conscience.

Thanks for reading. More soon…

©2026 Steven J. Manning. All rights reserved worldwide. Any reproduction of this publication, in part or whole, storage in a retrieval system or transmission in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning or other—except for brief quotations in reviews or articles, without the prior written permission are strictly prohibited.