SNACK SMART: Smartfood Popcorn, White Cheddar, 0.625 Ounce. #CommissionEarned

WELL, GOOD: Targeting lost pleasure lifts depression and anxiety more than standard therapy, new study finds.

REQUIRED READING:

Please read this important post.

This is a report from Tehran by an Iranian who lives there. Decado is blowing through expensive VPNs to stay connected during the blackout. He's depicting life beyond the propaganda.

Stand with the real Iran.

Listen to REAL Iranian voices. https://t.co/3Ks1nl6h7v pic.twitter.com/xuVuC5qEn2

— 𝐍𝐢𝐨𝐡 𝐁𝐞𝐫𝐠 🇮🇷 ✡︎ (@NiohBerg) April 25, 2026

This is from Part 2: “Some still find VPN access, but only through expensive, unstable, dangerous scraps. Three to eight dollars per gigabyte for a window to the world, with legal risk hanging over anyone who helps others connect.”

“Legal risk” is a polite way of saying, “Abducted, jailed, beaten, killed.”

FOR THE CHILDREN™ WAS NEVER ANYTHING OTHER THE MARKETING HYPE FOR THE GULLIBLE:

The fact that ICE found HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of migrant children in 2025, many of whom were in forced labor on a farms, is somehow NOT the biggest story in America…

…tells you everything you need to know about the media

It's totally insane. pic.twitter.com/aowEAbiYF1

— Matt Van Swol (@mattvanswol) April 25, 2026

THE EV BUBBLE CONTINUES TO DEFLATE: GM Has Delayed Its Next-Gen Full-Size EV Trucks and SUVs.

STAY HEALTHY: Cubii JR1, Under Desk Elliptical, Under Desk Bike Pedal Exerciser. #CommissionEarned

JOHN PODHORETZ: Michael — The Michael Jackson biopic gives new meaning to the word ‘sanitizing.’

The movie concludes with Michael having liberated himself from Joseph’s tyranny and, now free to be truly himself, burning down the joint as he performs “Bad” at a concert in London in 1988. But this was not the original ending, according to the peerless Hollywood reporter Matt Belloni. As filmed, the last third of Michael centered on the child-molestation and rape accusations against Jackson that dominated the 1990s—but not in a way intended to complicate or deepen the movie’s portrait of its subject.

Rather, Michael was designed to exculpate Jackson and thereby fulfill the purpose that the Jackson estate wants it to fulfill—to wash away the controversies surrounding him even now, 17 years after his death, and elevate the most talented and successful pop performer of his generation to the historical pantheon of great-souled and flawless human beings. To that end, the original cut featured harsh portrayals of his accusers and their families as money-grubbing charlatans and Jackson himself as entirely innocent of the charges.

Belloni discovered that, in the enthusiasm for getting the project off the ground, someone on the production team forgot to do due diligence. It turned out that a key element of the gigantic cash settlement between Jackson and one of his accusers was that Jackson (or his estate) was enjoined from making any effort to offer any kind of portrayal of the case whatsoever—otherwise the agreement would be considered breached and the case opened anew. So they had to rejigger the ending.

And lucky for them—for producer Graham King, for screenwriter John Logan, and for director Antoine Fuqua—that they did so. Had they made the original version, people under the age of 30 largely unaware of Jackson’s almost unimaginably repugnant behavior would have had to confront some aspect, any aspect, of Jackson’s life that might have discomfited them.

Sonny Bunch adds: Michael Review — Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Saint MJ.

Confronted with an unreleasable nine-figure investment, producers Graham King (Bohemian Rhapsody) and John Branca (MJ’s real-life lawyer), along with director Antoine Fuqua (Training Day), scrambled to salvage the movie, and the resulting picture is . . . odd. What we’re left with is a biopic that has been stripped of nearly all dramatic tension, a chronicle of a, perhaps the, pop star’s rise . . . and rise . . . and rise. One that is rinsed in a beatific glow of childlike wonder, angel-voiced innocence. One that undeniably makes you want to dance in your seat because whatever Michael Jackson’s sins, he was a magnetic performer with an almost-unmatched back catalogue. One that almost feels as if it’s trolling those who hope a picture like this might honestly examine some of the thornier sides of Jackson’s life.

Rather than the sexual abuse investigation, Michael is now bookended by a performance of “Bad” in London. In between, we see the aforementioned endless rise. As the youngest member of the Jackson 5, Michael (played as a child by Juliano Valdi) is both obviously the best singer and the best dancer. And yet, he is treated horribly by his father, Joseph (Colman Domingo), constantly beaten with belts and made to sing long past the point of exhaustion. The hard work pays off and soon the boys are at Motown, where Berry Gordy (Larenz Tate) is a sort of surrogate father figure for Michael, indulging his questions about production and mixing, telling him he has the best voice he’s ever heard.

The Jackson 5 surge to the top of the charts and we see and hear them play a bunch of of their best numbers, like “ABC.” The songs, the hits: This is the part of the movie that’s easy as 123, do-re-mi. It’s why, frankly, producer King needed the help of Branca and the Jackson family: Without the hits, there’s no movie. What’s the point of a Michael Jackson biopic if you’re not going to have an older Michael (played as an adult by Jaafar Jackson, MJ’s nephew via his brother, Jermaine) singing “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough” and “Beat It” and “Thriller” and “Billie Jean”?

This is why, for most filmgoers, it will not matter that the film is completely lacking in dramatic tension, that the only thing we are left wondering is why anyone, anywhere, denies Michael a single thing. Fuqua, an accomplished action director who has made, among other films, the Equalizer series, Olympus Has Fallen, and Tears of the Sun, leans on his music-video roots here, shooting Jaafar with an eye for the kineticism that was key to MJ’s success. Michael’s movements were like a magic trick: Even if you’re not a student of dance (and Lord knows, I am not), you can’t help but gawk. MJ’s nephew does a more-than-serviceable job of mimicking his fluidity, and whatever studio magic they’ve used to recreate Jackson’s vocal stylings works.

As Julie Burchill writes with a tongue-in-cheek headline, “Don’t whitewash Michael Jackson.”

Now, a new film, Michael, starring Jackson’s nephew Jaafar (which seems non-specifically slightly creepy), backed by the Jackson estate and using Jackson’s original vocals, seeks to further this process; in the Times of London, Kevin Maher writes of it that: “Future cultural historians will look back on this Michael Jackson biopic as a watershed moment for the genre. It will be known as that infamous film in which the subject became completely untethered from reality and the film delivered instead two hours of pure and unadulterated bullshit. That’s as defined by the American philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt in his essay On Bullshit, as speech intended to persuade without any regard for truth.”

It does sound dreadful. Jackson is portrayed as a cross between St Francis of Assisi and Princess Diana, told by his mother as a child that the Lord has blessed him with a “special light.” Galvanized by seeing a young fan in a wheelchair, he’s soon haunting children’s hospitals, which with hindsight seems more Jimmy Savile than Diana Spencer. The producer claims that it aims to “humanize but not sanitize” Jackson, but conveniently it stops in 1988, before the accusations of child abuse started. Maher concludes: “The music scenes nonetheless are quite brilliant and thrilling …Jackson was a once-in-a-generation genius and his musical legacy is quite safe, his sales spiked by 10 percent during the Leaving Neverland controversy. In the end he probably deserved more, for better and worse, than this.”

Conveniently, my relationship with Jackson’s oeuvre is rather like the film’s; I stopped being a fan as he grew paler and frailer and utterly bereft of the exuberance which he had as a youngster. As he became more famous, the more he wore the Emperor’s New Clothes in my eyes; at his best, he could serve up a decent slice of pop-soul, but that was largely because he had the supreme producer Quincy Jones to work his magic. Done up like Liberace auditioning for the Black And White Minstrels, yelping and jerking and grabbing at his genitalia in a way that seemed to signify alarm rather than arousal, it all looked weirdly like the male equivalent of a little girl in her mother’s high heels.

But I’m not sure if any of that matters for the filmmakers — who likely have a hit on their hands, what between the theatrical release, its coming endless stay on streaming platforms, and like many rock and pop films, the soundtrack sales. Bunch concludes that Michael “is a rather straightforward celebration of Michael Jackson’s music, one designed to get people dancing in the aisles and singing along with the script. I have no doubt it will be an enormous hit: The paying audience I saw it with loved it from start to finish.”

“Michael” comes from the “Super Mario” school of filmmaking. The property has fans. You deliver them the stuff they like (the songs, perfect recreations of classic music videos), and they will like the movie, even if the movie is bad in conventional terms.

Fans don’t want to… https://t.co/NfUGlxzDSy

— Daniel Friedman (@DanFriedman81) April 24, 2026

Exit quote: “Most movies about musicians follow an artist’s rise, fall and eventual redemption. ‘Michael’ is all rise — the ascension of a holy being to the top of the universe. The movie ends in 1988 with Jackson’s triumphant solo ‘Bad’ tour, which is kind of like ending an O.J. Simpson biopic with him winning the Heisman Trophy.”

UPDATE:

I guess the question is what’s the point of film criticism. If it’s to let you know whether you’d like to see a movie, it’s pretty useless now for the average person. If it’s an esoteric exercise, then it’s fine.

One of the most useful features these days is the RottenTomatoes… https://t.co/E3c8QkURUV

— Frank J. Fleming (@IMAO_) April 25, 2026

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Being a Not-A-Gun-Person Means Relying on Someone Else to Be There When You Need Help the Most.

THE SPLC’S DEADLY GRIFT?

“Heather Heyer, 32, was murdered that day in Charlottesville when a bigot drove his car into a counterprotest. Today, we must ask whether she could still be alive if the SPLC not been funding her killer’s organization.” https://t.co/VK52wIUvTz

— David Marcus (@BlueBoxDave) April 25, 2026

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RICH LOWRY: Hasan Piker’s ‘cool crimes’ chatter exposes the left’s toxic rage.

Is robbing the Louvre a good idea?

Left-wing influencer Hasan Piker and New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino did a much-discussed video interview with the New York Times this week on the ethics of theft, and came out four-square in favor of stealing things, including artwork from the Louvre.

They consider larceny an appropriate response to the inherent corruption and injustice of the American capitalist system.

The merits of this position aside, it’s not clear why it justifies stealing paintings or sculptures from a museum owned and operated by the government of France.

When asked about the propriety of hitting up the Louvre, Tolentino heartily endorsed it.

Piker explained, “Yeah, I think it’s cool. We gotta get back to cool crimes like that. Bank robberies. Stealing priceless artifacts, things of that nature.”

Yes, who wouldn’t love to see someone make off with the Venus de Milo, chop it up into pieces and sell them on the black market?

What Piker and Tolentino are doing, at bottom, is romanticizing violence for its own sake — wrapping nihilism in the rhetoric of social justice.

It is radical chic for 21st century opinion-makers, and one can only rue that Tom Wolfe isn’t still with us to lampoon it.

Piker’s riff about “cool crimes” is even older than Wolfe’s seminal 1970 article. As Piker’s fellow lefty Rick Perlstein said of 1967’s Bonnie and Clyde, which kickstarted the “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls” era of filmmaking that lasted until Jaws and Star Wars righted the industry’s coffers for decades:

My theory is that Bonnie and Clyde was the most important text of the New Left, much more important than anything written by Paul Goodman or C. Wright Mills or Regis Debray. It made an argument about vitality and virtue vs. staidness and morality that was completely new, that resonated with young people in a way that made no sense to old people. Just the idea that the outlaws were the good guys and the bourgeois householders were the bad guys—you cannot underestimate [sic] how strange and fresh that was.

And how shopworn and moth-ridden it feels still being trotted out 60 years later.

Related:

In fairness, Piker self-weaponized. The right noticed.

Promoting political assassination, car theft, shoplifting. Hardly benign speech.

I suppose, given the SPLC indictment, we now have to consider the possibility that Piker is a conservative op. But I doubt it. He's just… https://t.co/oEEMfYuBEa

— Northern Barbarian (@xnoesbueno) April 25, 2026

PROBABLY BECAUSE MOST ELECTRIC VEHICLES ARE EXPENSIVE AND MOSTLY SUITABLE AS SECOND CARS? Most electric vehicle owners are those with higher incomes and higher levels of education.

UPDATE ON THAT UCLA LAW DISRUPTION:

I have friends on the UCLA Law faculty, it may be the worst-governed elite US law school right now, the lunatics are running the asylum with the acquiescence of Dean Michael Waterstone. https://t.co/grpusDKWA5

— David Bernstein (@ProfDBernstein) April 24, 2026

WE CONTROL MATTER BECAUSE WE CONTROL THE MIND. REALITY IS INSIDE THE SKULL: Reality is what the left wants to believe it is.

See, the problem for the left is that they’ve already decided that everything is subjective, which allows them to look at clear evidence and simply assume that it means whatever is most convenient. In this case, a white family of dedicated leftists is in the right when they assaulted a woman of Filipino and Mexican descent simply because, in this case, the “woman of color” holds the wrong opinions.

Reality means whatever they want it to mean.

Think about how much information discredited the Russian collusion hoax, or the Steele dossier, yet leftists still go on and on about it as if it’s an indisputable fact.

Climate change research has produced countless models and just as many warnings of how awful things would be a decade later, only for literally none of them to turn out. They pushed “global cooling” years ago, which never came to pass, either, and they just shifted gears a bit.

Paul Erlich pushed his overpopulation myth for decades, and no one on the left had the balls to call BS on him…or they simply accepted it as true because they wanted it to be true.

January 6th was an insurrection, despite it being made up of the most heavily armed group in America, yet not a single firearm was evident.

This isn’t spin. This isn’t them knowing the truth and trying to reframe it so that it doesn’t make them look bad.

No, this is them being unable to accept reality simply because it works against the narrative, so they delude themselves into seeing things that simply don’t exist.

Read the whole thing.

Flashback: Liberal Amnesia is a Super Power.

(Classical reference in headline.)

THE MEMES HAVE DROPPED. HAPPY WEEKEND:  Laissez Faire, Laissez Memer.

STOP CODDLING THE MENTALLY ILL: Trans substitute teacher, 19, allegedly plotted chilling ‘murder spree’ at a Virginia school.

21ST CENTURY PROBLEMS: How 15 Stolen Crop-Spraying Drones Could Become a New Kind of Bioterrorism.

GUILTY AS CHARGED:

People out here acting like 80s and 90s kids regularly watched movies from the 50s and 60s. https://t.co/mx7EvrA5aL

— Upstate Federalist (@upstatefederlst) April 25, 2026

Prior to the rise of 24/7 cable news channels, and late night infomercials, local television in the 1970s and ‘80s was awash with old programming. In the 1970s, “the late show” didn’t mean David Letterman or Stephen Colbert, it meant old movies from the 1940s and ‘50s. The James Bond movies of the ‘60s, much of Alfred Hitchcock’s oeuvre from the ‘40s through the ‘60s, Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove and (less frequently) 2001: A Space Odyssey were regularly shown on local TV. Casablanca frequently aired. Christmas meant 1947’s Miracle on 34th Street. New Year’s Eve meant 1946’s It’s a Wonderful Life. Easter meant The Wizard of Oz and Ben-Hur. And then came VCR rentals in the early 1980s, which meant many of these titles were being rented as well.

THIS WON’T BE GOOD FOR RECRUITING: No sex please, we’re on Mars! Inside the simulated red planet mission.

I dunno, it’s 3 reasonably attractive men and 3 reasonably attractive women confined for an extended time. There’s privacy in the bedrooms…

THE SOUTHERN POVERTY REICHSTAG FIRE?

Makes me wonder if the SPLC fire bombed their own office in 1983. https://t.co/f1B4QdSRRL

— Dr. Interracial 🇺🇸 (@billysandytodd) April 25, 2026

Flashback: Tina Fey Warns: Prepare for Nazi America Under a Donald Trump Presidency.

—NewsBusters, December 7th, 2016.

Well, we certainly saw lots of Nazis, both real and imagined, emerge from the woodwork. This week, we found out why:

The reality is that stoking hate was incredibly lucrative for the SPLC.

That’s why they did it. Incentives explain outcomes. https://t.co/TjF1Ml1iRd

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 25, 2026

HMM: Could the Oldest Human Story Really Be 100,000 Years Old?

AS ONE OF MY DOCTOR FRIENDS SAYS, “IF YOU THINK YOU’RE HEALTHY, YOU HAVEN’T HAD ENOUGH TESTS.” The Modern Well-Being Paradox: How Much Data is Too Much Data?

YES. NEXT QUESTION?

So … the SPLC revived a dead neo-Nazi group? https://t.co/3InO7813a9

— T. Becket Adams (@BecketAdams) April 24, 2026

UPDATE (From Ed): The SPLC allegedly made bank at Charlottesville:

SPLC got better returns than Nancy Pelosi and inverse Cramer combined! https://t.co/4AcSXEWLuo

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 25, 2026

THEY SAY HISTORY REPEATS, BUT C’MON — THAT’S A LITTLE TOO ON THE NOSE: Russia’s Communist leader warns a 1917-style revolution may be on the way.

IT’S ALWAYS OKAY TO MOCK GRIFTERS:

Speaking as a woman who had to start over at ~60 and is only occasionally mocked, I'd say the #1 difference is I didn't go to the NYT and suggest that American taxpayers owed me $272,000 per year to save me from my plight. https://t.co/zW7UGjT5ZT

— Ann Bauer (@annbauerwriter) April 24, 2026

And this time mockery is her getting off light:

Kate Puzey was murdered in 2009 after she reported that a Beninese teacher contracting with the Peace Corps was raping his students.

Cowan, the Peace Corps director in Benin at the time, failed to preserve her anonymity.

I don't feel sorry for her for a variety of reasons. https://t.co/bMn3FjXNZY

— Longshot (@ngprecision) April 24, 2026

ABC News: Parents of Slain Volunteer Say Peace Corps Error Led to Murder.