Are These The 50 Best Horror Movies Of The 21st Century?

By William Teach October 31, 2026 – 3:00 pm

Let’s take a look

The 50 Best Horror Movies of the 21st Century So Far, Ranked

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Every year is a great year for horror movies if you know where to look. But we’re over a quarter of the way through the 21st century, which means there are over 25 years of modern horror classics, daring cult oddities, ambitious art house freak outs and even satisfying studio scarers to sort through.

But someone has to do it, and someone else has to do it just to get as many perspectives on modern horror filmmaking as possible. Let’s take a deep dive into the scary movies that have defined the genre this century, and/or scared the hell out of audiences all over the world, and/or deserve greater recognition for their brilliance.

Let’s take a look at this list. The ones I’ve seen that I like and agree with are (below the fold)

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If All You See…

By William Teach October 31, 2026 – 1:00 pm

…is a California county that is trying to be climate responsible but Everyone Else is being troublesome, you might just be a Warmist

The blog of the day is Geller Report, with a post on “El-Sayed’s Campaign Attack Dog Hasan Piker Compares Jewish Voters to Ku Klux Klan”

Doubleshot, check out LMAO, with a post on “Straight Line of the Day: So What Exactly Is Pennsylvania’s Halloween Horror?”

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Pope Leo Has A Warning On Artificial Intelligence

By William Teach October 31, 2026 – 10:30 am

It’s actually a different type of warning

Pope Leo XIV warns about artificial intelligence: “Machines are instruments, not people”

Pope Leo XIV warned this Friday, October 30, about the risks of attributing rights or legal personality to artificial intelligence systems and called for decisions related to human life, freedom, and the use of force to always remain under human control. During an audience at the Vatican Apostolic Palace, the Pontiff also urged progress toward the prohibition of lethal autonomous weapons and the establishment of international mechanisms to ensure technological development serves the common good.

The Holy Father received participants in the meeting “The Future of AI: A Dialogue between the Vatican and the Scientific World on the Developments and Applications of Intelligent Technologies,” organized by the Pontifical Academy for Life and the Future of Life Institute. In his address, Leo XIV outlined five considerations on human responsibility regarding these technologies, drawing on the teachings of his encyclical Magnifica humanitas and recalling that technical progress cannot take precedence over the dignity of the person.

Below, we offer the full speech of Pope Leo XIV: (snip)

The Pontifical Academy for Life, which has organized this meeting, is very aware of the challenges that arise wherever human dignity is threatened. In this regard, addressing the leaders of the G7, Pope Francis described artificial intelligence as “a fascinating and tremendous instrument at the same time” and stated that the decision to take a human life should never be entrusted to a machine (cf. Address at the G7 Session on Artificial Intelligence, June 14, 2024). Those words remain more relevant than ever. In the encyclical Magnifica humanitas I have sought to address these issues in greater depth. Today I would like to offer you five considerations in particular.

He has a point: Mankind should stay in control. Mankind should be the ones putting in the blocks and giving the orders. However, in, say, a shooting war, how much autonomy is programmed in? Say a big drone strike is launched from Ukraine on Russia: how much latitude do the drones and potential controlling AI have to attack targets of opportunity?

Second, machines are instruments, not persons. “So-called artificial intelligences do not live an experience, do not possess a body, do not go through joy and pain, do not mature in relationship, do not know from within what love, work, friendship, and responsibility mean” (n. 99). Today some propose granting rights to these systems, or even legal personality. Such an approach risks obscuring human responsibility and leaving those who suffer harm to confront a faceless entity.

So far, I haven’t seen any going full moonbat and calling for granting rights, but, hell, I’ve read enough science fiction to know it will come. They’ve pushed to grant rights to animals, so, it seems as if the Pope is getting ahead of the curve of wackadoodle. But, maybe, one day in the far future, AI will truly be sentient and deserve rights. We aren’t even close right now.

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Climate Pressures Haunting Halloween Chocolate Or Something

By William Teach October 31, 2026 – 7:15 am

Do they celebrate Halloween in India, since this cult screed comes from an Indian news outlet? Actually, yes?

What’s haunting Halloween chocolate? The climate pressures behind Halloween’s sweetest tradition

Growing up, your favorite childhood memory was going trick-or-treating. You loved dressing up in your favorite scary or funny costume, and walk out to the neighbors’ doors to get Halloween candy. You were always excited to know whether it would be chocolates or gummy bears. You loved this tradition.

Now, as you are a grown-up, you are on the other side of the door. This time you have to plan which chocolate candy you want to distribute. You go to the supermarket and reach out for your favorite bag of Halloween chocolates. Then you take a look at the price, and feel at this price you would get more gummy bears or maybe you can distribute less chocolate this year.

This is your story and it is a lot different from someone who is taking the first step to get you this chocolate. You need to have a better picture os someone who is a thousands of miles away. He is a cocoa farmer with just one simple issue: Will his cocoa trees produce enough healthy pods to supply enough and buy food for his family?

Both experiences belong to the same supply chain. Climate change is adding pressure at its agricultural end. The costs, however, do not travel evenly from the farm to the trick-or-treat bowl.

Then we learn that weather actually exists and can affect agriculture, which never happened before the Industrial Revolution and fossil fuels. The weather was perfectly dependable and always the same when the Mayans discovered chocolate.

Climate adaptation offers options, although implementing them requires support. Climate Central identifies shade planting and more heat- or drought-resistant plants among possible responses. Such changes can require funding and specialist knowledge beyond smallholders’ reach.

FAO recommends investment in resilient farming and better disease management, alongside a more balanced distribution of value.

The question behind Halloween’s candy bowl extends beyond affordability: can the p ..

They can if we tax the ever lovin’ shit out of you.

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NY Times Shocked Obamacare Costs Rise Even More

By William Teach October 31, 2026 – 7:00 am

Man, if only people had warned that Obamacare was going to skyrocket healthcare, deductible, and premium costs back before the Democrats shadily passed this “big f’ing deal”

Obamacare Dealt Yet Another Blow as Premiums Rise Again

Millions of Americans who depend on Obamacare for their health insurance face another double-digit price increase next year, adding to the financial toll that has already driven millions of others to drop coverage since last year.

The price increases largely reflect higher medical costs across the country. But they also are a signal of the latest blow to Obamacare under the Trump administration, which has overseen the expiration of tax credits that helped Americans pay for coverage and has erected new barriers to enrollment in an effort to root out what it describes as widespread fraud.

The average price of health insurance in the Obamacare marketplaces will rise by 13 percent next year, according to an analysis on Friday by KFF, the health research group.

The Trump administration on Friday published new prices for 2027 in 30 states with markets managed by the federal government. Using that data and state figures, KFF calculated the increase nationwide.

I’m old enough to remember when Obama said “In an Obama administration, we’ll lower premiums by up to $2,500 for a typical family per year.” And then Dems passed it, but, set it up for implementation after the 2012 election to avoid exposing the true costs to voter.

Obama added in 2010, “as a consequence of us getting 30 million additional people health care, at the margins, that’s going to increase our costs, we knew that. We didn’t think that we were going to cover 30 million people for free, but that the long-term trend in terms of how much the average family is going to be paying for health insurance is going to be improved as a consequence of health care.”

And, yet, without massive subsidies we see the true costs of Ocare.

Across the private and public health sectors, the increases have been driven by rising hospital prices, high payments under a consumer protection law that changed how some doctors are compensated, and the growing use of artificial intelligence in doctors’ offices, according to benefits consultants and industry analysts. Several large employers also pointed to a rising bill for expensive specialty prescriptions, like cancer drugs and GLP-1 medicines.

While I’m sure they play some part, involving the government heavily in paying for healthcare will always mean the costs skyrocket. Just like ACA opponents stated.

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If All You See…

By William Teach October 30, 2026 – 1:00 pm

…are trees that will soon die from carbon pollution, you might just be a Warmist

The blog of the day is Doug Ross @ Journal, with a post on “The Democrat Plot To Shred The Constitution”

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Some In Chicago Upset Over Using AI For Shoplifting Detection

By William Teach October 30, 2026 – 10:30 am

Of course they are

AI-powered shoplifting detection expands in Chicago-area stores, but some raise concerns

Artificial intelligence is being used in about two dozen stores across the Chicago area to help identify suspected shoplifting as it happens, with supporters saying the technology improves theft prevention while critics raise concerns about surveillance and potential misuse.

Veesion, the company behind the software, says the technology works by adding AI software to existing security camera systems. According to the company, the system analyzes activity in real time and alerts store employees when it detects suspicious behavior.

“Up until now, retailors have leveraged camera systems in more of a passive manor. Identifying shoplifting if and when it’s happening, and then trying to control the problem, right,” said Hiren Mowji of Veesion. “With AI you have basically an algorithm that’s watching 24/7, right. It’s more consistent, it’s more efficient, it doesn’t get tired for example, and it’s able to alert you if and when there is suspicious activity.”

OK, but, it’s Chicago: will the cops bother doing anything when called due to far-left prosecutors not bothering to prosecute?

While some shoppers support the technology, others worry about privacy and surveillance.

“it’s slippery slope with that footage nothing can be deleted forever it could still be used to surveille regular people walking around in stores,” said Franki Flameno.

Veesion said the system does not collect facial recognition data or biometrics.

People are being surveilled regardless of AI, because some people are thieves.

“JK you do wonder if the AI can be used to target someone if they are black? Absolutely not saying that wit will be, but it could,” Merritt said. “I don’t want it to be used to discriminate against people of color.”

And there you go. Raaaaacism. Despite all those videos of “people of color” going into stores and stealing. Should be a hoot once Big Democrat Cities start using AI to recognize serious crime in the streets, to be able to respond to gunshots better than Shotspotter.

Meanwhile

As bosses push workers to use AI, a Kentucky man found a way to opt out: a federal law protecting religious beliefs

As a teenager, David Durman would read works by Enlightenment philosopher David Hume and the Stoics. Their ideas led him to adopt the Humanist faith, a nontheist system he said centers human well-being and flourishing, which he’s kept for 30 years.

Because Humanism’s emphasis is on moral responsibility for one’s choices, the now 45-year-old administrator at the University of Kentucky felt uncomfortable by the “growing normalization” of AI products and systems at work, where colleagues and leadership offered “mounting suggestions” of how to use the tools and floated the idea of going to conventions to learn more about AI. For Durman—who disables Gemini on his Google searches and generally disables as many AI features as he can—surrendering any tasks to the technology chafes against what he sees as the goals of his faith. (snip)

While the University of Kentucky doesn’t yet have an AI directive, Durman said he wanted to preempt “any work environment move towards an actual requirement.” In August, he filed an accommodation request under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act—which protects religious views and nontheistic ones—to the university to be exempt from AI usage with the help of his attorney Alexandria Huiskens, who works with the American Humanist Association.

That is novel. I know the bosses want us to use more AI for crafting texts and emails to customers, but, I do not find a lot of benefit to it. I use it for a few short things, where I copy and paste the text and then hit the AI convert button, but, in a lot of cases when I write a bigger one AI does not convert better. Sometimes it makes it look like the 80s, where it takes a happy birthday wish and includes a “come buy something” message. Nope. I simply have a ton of pre-written messages that are bigger.

Anyhow, where are all the articles of doom and gloom on AI lately? They were big just a month ago, now almost nothing.

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You Need To Smash Your Halloween Pumpkins Or ‘Climate Change’ Will Kill Us All!

By William Teach October 30, 2026 – 7:15 am

The cult really just can’t help itself

Don’t trash it, smash it: Give your Halloween pumpkin a second life

Halloween is still days away, but some jack-o’-lanterns are already looking more sad than scary. Raleigh and Wake County waste officials are asking residents to keep those pumpkins out of the trash.

Raleigh’s new free composting drop-off offers an alternative, keeping pumpkins out of a landfill where they can produce heat-trapping methane and take up increasingly scarce space. (snip)

Buried in a landfill with little oxygen, organic material is broken down by microbes that produce methane. Pound for pound, methane has roughly 80 times the warming impact of carbon dioxide over the first 20 years after its release, according to the United Nations Environment Programme.

Managed composting supplies oxygen, moisture and a balance of materials so microbes can turn pumpkins and other organic waste into a soil amendment. The process reduces landfill methane emissions and returns nutrients to the soil, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

Um, wait, they are correct about methane. But, plants have always produced methane from rotting regardless of man’s input. There was no need to write this hysteric article.

For anyone who would rather give a jack-o’-lantern a more dramatic farewell, there are options for that, too.

Botanist & Barrel in Cedar Grove is hosting its Great Pumpkin Smash Party from 4-7 p.m. Nov. 1 at 105 Persimmon Hill Lane. Admission is free. Organizers invite people to bring leftover pumpkins to smash, stomp and turn into compost.

That does sound more fun. Or, I could just chuck mine in the woods behind the house for the animals to eat.

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Feds Charge More Illegals With Voting In NC

By William Teach October 30, 2026 – 7:00 am

Obviously, the Talking Point is that it’s only 18 out of millions of voters

Feds bring 18 more charges of illegal voting by immigrants in NC

Federal prosecutors are accusing 18 people of being immigrants who illegally voted in North Carolina during past elections—charges that come less than a month after they announced similar charges for a dozen others.

Thursday’s announcement comes as the Justice Department prepares to send federal election monitors to Wake, Alamance and Mecklenburg counties on Nov. 3, prompting state election officials to clarify where those monitors will be allowed to observe voting.

“Every unlawful ballot silences the voice of a lawful voter, striking at the core of our great nation,” Ellis Boyle, the U.S. Attorney for the state’s federal Eastern District, wrote in a news release.

One of the people charged earlier this month, 71-year-old Robert Corbett, told WRAL immediately after his initial court date that he had voted for Trump and thought that he was a U.S. citizen. Prosecutors claim he’s actually Canadian.

Sure he did.

The charges against Corbett and others were all from the state’s Eastern District, which stretches from Wake County to the coast. The new charges on Thursday were spread all across the state: Nine in the Eastern District of North Carolina, five in the Middle District and four in the Western District. Prosecutors allege the defendants illegally registered to vote or cast ballots in previous elections, including the 2024 presidential election.

A prominent North Carolina voting rights attorney, Hilary Harris Klein of the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, questioned why elections officials are focusing more on the 30 cases of alleged fraud than on the thousands of ballots from legitimate voters that, she said, are likely to be tossed out due to stricter new rules on mail-in voting and voter ID.

In other words, stop looking at all those people voting illegally who are illegals, look at all the people who ballots are tossed because they aren’t capable of following simple instructions because they’re sheep and vote Democrat.

Hayes added that the state sent more names to the FBI than the 30 who have been charged so far. So it’s possible more charges are yet to come. He declined to say how many. However, earlier this year the state also sent letters to approximately 1,300 voters who had been flagged by that database as possibly being non-citizens.

Most people who register to vote in North Carolina do so at the DMV when they get their driver’s license. Hayes added that for some of the potential noncitizens on the voter lists, they didn’t try to break the law and were simply put on by mistake by DMV officials.

And that is exactly why states run by Democrats look to give illegals and non-citizens driver’s licenses. The NC law was put on the books when Democrats controlled the general assembly with a Democrat governor. Unfortunately, the Republican run GA never repealed that law when they had veto proof majorities.

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20 Years Ago We Learned That Climate Doom Will Ruin Economies Or Something

By William Teach October 29, 2026 – 3:00 pm

Does Fiona Harvey at the UK Guardian see the idiocy of the headline and article?

The climate crisis will destroy our economies – we learned this 20 years ago. When will we act?

Saving the only planet we have makes good economic sense. There is, after all, no money to be made on a dead Earth. There may be costs involved now, but they are worth paying to protect our children from certain destruction.

These propositions seem self-evident now. But two decades ago, mainstream economists had very different ideas. They had proved that the climate crisis would be a mere economic blip, easily absorbed by growing economies and therefore not worth spending money on. In their accounting, they considered ice caps and glaciers functionally worthless, that trees only add to GDP when they are cut down, and that a livable climate shouldn’t even merit a line on a spreadsheet.

What changed? Twenty years ago this week an earth-shaking report was published by Nicholas Stern, a former World Bank chief economist turned adviser to Gordon Brown. His review, The Economics of Climate Change, upended conventional wisdom among economists and dragged them into a new century. It set out, for the first time, in clear and bold terms, why investing in a low-carbon future makes economic sense.

The Stern review, in 700 dense pages full of graphs and data, is a model of transformative thinking. Using standard economic tools and methods, and in ways that other mainstream economists could understand, Stern made three key, and at the time radical, conclusions: that the costs of inaction on the climate were greater than the costs of action; that the climate crisis was a market failure; and that economic growth was compatible with cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

And 20 years later economies are kinda doing the same thing they’ve been doing. Things get bad and things get good and things get OK. It’s cyclical, but, a small uptick in global temperatures since 1850 is not doomy. You know what’s worse? Governments trying to control economies for idiotic ideas like ‘climate change’, messing things up.

But Stern stuck to his analysis, and in the 20 years since it has been found sound – if anything, he underestimated both the rapidity of heating and economic consequences, and overestimated the cost of renewable energy. Stern’s work liberated many governments: they could now justify bold climate strategies to investors, aid donors and the ever-present bond markets. Conversely, laggard administrations could be challenged at the ballot box and, increasingly, in court.

The cost of energy has skyrocketed for essentially three reasons: way more people, more intensive use energy for our modern lifestyles, and not adding reliable, dependable, affordable energy sources to the grid. Instead, government has essentially done away with building more nuclear, natural gas, and coal fired plants in favor of solar and wind. Hell, they don’t even like hydrothermal, and tear electric generating dams down.

It might seem, in 2026, as if Stern has won the argument. But traditional economic approaches to the climate refuse to go away. In 2018, even after a deluge of science showing that 3C heating would leave coastal cities under water and swathes of agricultural land as desert, Nordhaus published a paper claiming that 3C would reduce global GDP by just 2.1%, and even a 6C increase would incur just 8.5% GDP loss. However, other climate scientists have indicated that at 6C widespread famine could leave billions of people, in economic terms, suboptimally productive. Or, as the rest of us might say, dead.

Yeah yeah yeah, always prognostications of the future.

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