JOHN NOLTE: Disney Flop The Acolyte Cost Nearly Quarter of a Billion Dollars.

The Acolyte is — er, was; it’s already been canceled — the latest Disney+ Star Wars-raping streaming series. This one was all about how lesbian witches created everything or something.

Anyway, the groomers told us the eight-episode series cost only $180 million. But now, thanks to the fact the United Kingdom does not allow studios to fudge or hide their numbers, we know The Acolyte $231 million.

That Park Place:

United Kingdom tax documents filed by the Walt Disney Company’s UK branch reveal that Lucasfilm and The Walt Disney Company spent over 172 million GBP (231 million USD) on the production of The Acolyte, a prequel series set in the Disney Star Wars universe.

In an interview with Vanity Fair, The Acolyte series creator Leslye Headland publicly claimed the show cost “180 million,” which was assumed by several to be stated in US dollars. It is evident that if Headland had knowledge of the series financials that she was more likely referring the the amount in Great British Pounds. Accounting for exchange rates at the time of this article, this means that The Acolyte cost almost $230 million US dollars.

That works out to about $29 million per episode.

Industrial Light and Magic certainly knows how to make spaceships explode in a spectacular fashion. But nobody sets money itself ablaze on the small and big screen like Kathleen Kennedy. Not to mention, nobody knows how to either permanently or temporarily derail the career aspirations of the actresses she casts:

But Kennedy isn’t the only producer at Disney who can set money on fire, Ace writes: Disney Is Making “Brutal” Payroll Cuts, Again. Plus: All the Woke Entertainment News I’ve Skipped for a Month.

HAHA:

My city my people 😂🇮🇱 Tel Aviv

“Yalla ya Nasrallah,
We will f*ck you Inshallah,
We will return you to Allah,
With the entire Hezbollah” pic.twitter.com/bMa6VuQwXH

— Emily Schrader – אמילי שריידר امیلی شریدر (@emilykschrader) September 27, 2024

The Devil hates to be mocked. Also blown up.

UPDATE: Yep. Compare and contrast.

While Israel uses brains, peerless ingenuity, and fearlessness to fight its enemies, the American military wastes far too much on the DEI bull#%€> of meaningless racial and sexual politics. Let the reality of Israel be a wake up call.

— Eli Steele (@Hebro_Steele) September 27, 2024

DISPATCHES FROM FUN CITY: Eric Adams’s Turkey trot.

“Brooklyn is the Istanbul of America,”* now-Mayor Eric Adams told a pair of Turks on camera after they asked him for political favors in a cameo he made in a Turkish romcom. Now, in real life, Adams is accused of doing just that, following a sweeping indictment unsealed by prosecutors in Manhattan who allege that he fraudulently obtained $10 million in public campaign funds and accepted over $100,000 in bribes in order to facilitate a new Turkish consulate.

“In 2014, Eric Adams, the defendant, became Brooklyn borough president. Thereafter, for nearly a decade, Adams sought and accepted improper valuable benefits, such as luxury international travel, including from wealthy foreign businesspeople and at least one Turkish government official seeking to gain influence over him,” the fifty-seven-page indictment reads; it marks the first time a sitting mayor of New York City has been indicted.

The indictment includes multiple outright absurd allegations, including that Adams changed his iPhone password, only to claim he forgot “the password he had just set, and thus was unable to provide the FBI with a password that would unlock the phone” and that his staff asked a businessman to lie to the feds about obvious straw donations his employees made in return for him securing a city sponsorship for events.

For his part, Adams, who has called the charges “false,” has suggested that they are politically motivated, and based off of his opposition to the Biden administration’s open borders policies. They come after multiple members of his inner circle had their homes searched.

The hours leading up to and following the indictment saw a series of strange comments from Adams allies and enemies bubble up. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, herself a potential mayoral candidate down the road, called on him to resign — even before the indictments were unsealed. On the other hand, Liel Liebovitz took to the pages of Tablet magazine to argue that “Jewish New Yorkers have an obligation to stand up against a corrupt Democratic Party lawfare campaign that is targeting the mayor who stood up for us.”

If New Yorkers thought the de Blasio years were bad, just make AOC mayor. But then again, even she might be slightly better than Adams’ possible direct successor, Jumaane Williams.

* “We call New York City the Port-Au-Prince of America,” Adams tweeted in March in regards to the Haitian immigrant crisis, if we’re keeping track of crazy pandering stuff that only Adams says about New York.

21st CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: RFK Jr. and star journalist Olivia Nuzzi had ‘incredible’ FaceTime sex, said they loved each other: sources.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. West Point Needs a Reset. “The U.S. Military Academy was the nation’s first engineering school, and rightly so, because engineering is a crucial skill on the battlefield. Soldiers must plan and build fortifications, bridges and other infrastructure as well as find ways to destroy them. But over the last few decades, the Academy has become more of a Liberal Arts College, offering battlefield-irrelevant course materials in such areas as Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, Critical Race Theory and Gender Studies. West Point now offers a minor in Diversity & Inclusion Studies. . . . Each cadet company now has cadet ‘Respect Officers’ reminiscent of Soviet Political Commissars, to ensure that all bow to the Academy’s now-woke culture. Admissions and advancement are now governed by race and gender over merit. The school’s Diversity and Inclusion Department has been renamed (for political reasons) but still exists. None of the speakers at last year’s Office of Diversity, Inclusion and Equal Opportunity Leadership Conference expressed any divergent views regarding DEI. Boxing, a warrior’s sport if ever there was one, no longer is on the intramural schedule.”

LOTS OF RAIN AROUND HERE: Dozens airlifted from Tennessee hospital roof amid flooding.

Related: Cocke County, Newport evacuations ordered after false alarm over ‘catastrophic’ dam failure.

Tennessee town flooded due to dam failure after Hurricane Helene.

BRADLEY THOMPSON: Commerce and the Birth of a Free Society.

Post-Founding Americans embraced commerce and a free-market economy like no other people in history. In 1795, Phineas Hedges exuberantly sang the praises of commerce: “In a free government, commerce expands her sails; Prompted by a spirit of enterprize and a desire of gain, men venture the dangers of a boisterous ocean in pursuit of new commodities. With wider acquaintance of man the elements of the monk and the barbarian dissolve into the sympathizing heart of a citizen of civilized life.” Likewise, Republican congressman Edward Livingston toasted America’s rising glory this way: “The Colossus of American Freedom,” he exclaimed, “may it bestride the commerce of the world.” Commercial expansion in America’s nineteenth-century liberal society was rapid and mostly unregulated as America’s new-model man embraced hard work, competition, and the spirit of enterprise.

Jeffersonian republicans came to view commerce as more than just the economic transactions of businessmen via money in the pursuit of profits. In 1811, Jefferson translated and had published in America A Commentary and Review of Montesquieu’s Spirit of Laws by the French Idéologue, Comte Destutt de Tracy. Tracy and his American students took a latitudinarian view of commerce as consisting of all forms of exchange. All exchanges, wrote Tracy via Jefferson, “are acts of commerce, and the whole of human life is occupied by a series of exchanges and reciprocal services.” In other words, commerce is what brings discrete individuals together in a harmonious relationship of give and take. The exchange of both material and spiritual values is, according to Tracy, “not only the foundation and basis of society, but . . . it is in effect the fabric itself; for society is nothing more than a continual exchange of mutual succours, which occasion the concurrence of the powers of all for the more effectual gratification of the wants of each.” Jefferson’s translation of Destutt de Tracy was one way for the former president to explain his political philosophy to his fellow Americans.

Now it’s different, and we’re less free in many respects.

IF SO, IT WAS SUICIDE, NOT MURDER: Is Higher Education Doomed?

RAZIB KHAN: All together now: did human joiners outcompete rugged Neanderthal individualists? Humans are pack animals.

But in light of the theory that Neanderthals were so enamored of modern humans that we apparently seduced them into extinction, perhaps those greater social skills gave us irresistible rizz.

FLORIDA, MAN:

🌀This is how we roll in Florida for hurricane preparedness.
▪️DeSantis has literal ‘cities’ of linemen ready to restore power as soon as Helene passes.
⛑️These Linemen are literally the first responders after the storm and we are so grateful for all they do. pic.twitter.com/HuIIwovLBn

— Still🏝️Roaming (@roaming_rn) September 26, 2024

Competence shouldn’t be this hard to find.

READER FAVORITE: Apple iPad (9th Generation): with A13 Bionic chip. #CommissionEarned

HEART-BREAKING VIDEO: Millions of U.S. tax dollars continue to flow from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to labs in China that conduct research experiments involving things like severing the spines of Beagle puppies. The White Coat Waste Project (WCW) report that includes a video of a Beagle dragging itself around a lab with useless rear legs. Even if you aren’t a “dog person,” this video ought to make your blood boil.

MUST-FLEE TV: How (Not) to Study Hitler.

There are good reasons for students to learn about the madmen of history. The vices of such men contrast sharply with the heroes whose virtues we hope our citizens and statesmen might emulate; they serve as reminders of the cruelties that a flawed human nature can produce; and they can serve as warnings for where politics can occasionally descend should the better angels of our nature fail on a mass scale. Students today rightly study Adolf Hitler and the Nazis for all three reasons. This is as it should be. Indeed, conditions today are such that the need for the third reason is particularly heightened: antisemitism is growing at alarming rates; fringe fascist-sympathizers have a large following online; and the value of liberal democracy is being openly questioned all around. In such times, Hitler’s Germany can serve as a sobering reminder of just how badly things can go if we lose our heads.

To fulfill this mandate to educate, the creators of the Netflix documentary series, Hitler and the Nazis: Evil on Trial, needed only to tell the story again, to let the narrative speak for itself. In certain respects, they do this, deploying a mix of real footage from the Nazi era, choreographed scenes with actors to fill in the gaps, and historical commentary that conveys the story of Hitler’s life and how one man directed a respectable country towards evil. But the series is handicapped by crucial flaws. Chief among these is its attempts to compare the Weimar Republic and its chief villain to contemporary American politics. Its loud dog whistles equating Adolf Hitler and Donald Trump betray a desperation of the creators that goes beyond the limits of acceptable bias in such a way as to undermine the aim of the entire project.

In some cases, the references are far too obvious to actually be considered dog whistles:

BENJAMIN CARTER HETT, Author, The Death of Democracy:

Outside of Berlin, large numbers of Germans are living in small communities, rural communities where the artistic experimentation, the innovation, the sexual experimentation of Weimar Berlin is utterly foreign to them. And indeed, they are somewhat hostile to it.

ANNE BERG, Professor, University of Pennsylvania:

It’s a group of people who feel shunned. So, if we want to make a contemporary analogy, we can see the sort of forgotten people in America, there is a sense that the system has dealt them a bad hand, and Hitler kind of taps into a fundamental disillusionment with the Weimar Republic. And this is the concept that he will return to repeatedly, even after he is in power.

As the New York Times noted:

Hitler’s project: “Making Germany great again.” The Nazis’ characterization of criticism from the media: “Fake news.” Hitler’s mountain retreat in Berchtesgaden: “It’s sort of like Hitler’s Mar-a-Lago, if you will.”

Donald Trump’s name is not mentioned in the six episodes of “Hitler and the Nazis: Evil on Trial,” a new historical documentary series on Netflix. But it dances just beneath the surface, and occasionally, as in the examples above, the production’s cadre of scholars, popular historians and biographers can barely stop themselves from giving the game away.

Egged on by the documentary makers, of course.

HMM: Is This How Democrats Are Hoping to Steal Arizona in November?

NO THANKS, I’M STILL SOCIAL DISTANCING: Danielle Pletka: Meet the President of Iran.

[Masoud] Pezeshkian is a trade up from [the extremely deceased Ebrahim] Raisi: Smarter, smoother, less ranty, and more approachable. And I want especially to emphasize the heart of his messaging, because you will recognize in it the heart of the New York Times, Financial Times, and other elite intellectual bastions’ messaging on Israel. First, he didn’t waste time with the antisemitism, and uttered the word “Zionist” once, more than an hour in. He had tested his approach with his Washington friends in private meetings (yes, we know who sees Team Tehran one-on-one), and he wasn’t going to waste points with college-level trolling. Second, he wanted us to know something: Iran does not want war. Iran hates violence. If the Palestinians want to make nice with Israel, that is their call.

Israel, you should know, wanted the hardliner to win the Iranian elections, so it could tell the world it was right about Iranian intransigence. But they didn’t get their wish, and Mr. Softie, Uncle Masoud, was the victor. He is well aware Iran needs reform, and he is the man to reform it.

Israel wants to drag Iran into a wider war, but the pacifists that run Iran are too committed to their healing message: No one wins in a war. If there is a peace to be had, Iran will do nothing to risk it. So, yes, Israel killed the top Hamas terror master in Tehran, and tested the Ayatollahs. But they were strong, they did not take the bait.

Iran does not want nuclear weapons. Iran just wants to give voice to the voiceless. Iran wants only dignity. Iran would even come back to dialogue with the United States. Sure, the Supreme Leader is very, very angry about bad, bad Donald Trump pulling out of the JCPOA, but Pezeshkian believes only in dialogue. He will fight to make peace, even with the Supreme Leader.

Other stuff you didn’t know: Iran is “diverse.” Iran is committed to reform. There are Sunnis and Kurds in senior government positions. Together, this DEI meets intersectionality meets kumbaya mix wants to overcome challenges in Iran. It’s beautiful.

Why is Iran in an axis with China and Russia? Because it must survive. Why is Iran arming Russia against Ukraine? (The nutty professor answered this one for Pezeshkian.) Because NATO has trapped the Russians with its expansionist aims.

This was true alt-world stuff, uttered with complete conviction, more in sorrow than in anger. Zarif often stared lovingly at Pezeshkian, and rightly so. This guy is Mr. Smooth in addition to being Mr. Softie. I couldn’t believe they didn’t give me a stuffed Ayatollah as swag to take home.

Tucker Carlson’s guest booker must be scrambling to arrange an interview with Pezeshkian ASAP.

Related: Why Are Iran’s Thugs Free to Walk the Streets of New York?

REPORT FROM THE BLUE ZONES: “Only in Hawaii would prosecutors arrest an armed homeowner who stopped a violent neighbor who had just rammed several cars with a front-end loader, shot and killed three women, wounded two others, and posed an immediate threat to shoot more.”

WELL, HE’S RIGHT: Netanyahu calls Mideast conflicts choice between ‘blessing or a curse,’ warns about Israel’s ‘long arm.’ “Netanyahu framed the issue as a choice between ‘a blessing or a curse,’ with Iran’s “unremitting aggression” as the ‘curse’ against the ‘blessing’ of reconciliation between Arab nations and Israel.”

Reminder: Team Biden chose to boost Iran and let Trump’s Israel-Arab nations Abraham Accords whither.

INDEED:

Regardless whether Nasrallah is dead, what a glorious fu*k you that was by the tiny Jewish state to the rest of the world!

They all wanted us to stop, to appease these jihadi bastards. But Netanyahu went to UN, slammed that cesspool, then got off podium & calmly gave the order.… pic.twitter.com/c6qmImsFcc

— Arsen Ostrovsky 🎗️ (@Ostrov_A) September 27, 2024

IT’S TIME FOR VICTORIA TAFT’S West Coast, Messed Coast™: ‘It’s the Economy, Stupid’ Edition.

HEH: I Say, This ‘Diddy’ Fellow Seems Like A Bit Of A Scoundrel. “This is a moment for celebration. For so long, P. Diddy has gotten away with heinous crimes that tons of people knew about, from car bombs to assaults to sex crimes. It’s like P. Diddy was going for some kind of high score, trying to catch every possible crime like a Pokemon.”

“That tons of people knew about.”

“Everybody knew” about Epstein, too.

WOW. LOOKS LIKE THEY CAME IN WITH THE FULL INVENTORY:

These are JDAMs using either BLU-95 500 lb (230 kg) (FAE-II) BLU-96 2,000 lb (910 kg) thermobaric warheads.

The double slap sounds and the jet plumes of orange tinted smoke out of the impacts signify an underground tunnel network being 'serviced' by thermobaric munitions. https://t.co/sZZQ1ngaXA

— Trent Telenko (@TrentTelenko) September 27, 2024

At least five senior Hezbollah leaders are believed to have been killed but the fate of Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah isn’t yet known.

QUESTION ASKED: Say, Has Kamala Ever Led a Prosecution?

OLD AND BUSTED: “Mile Markers on the Road to Detroit.”

The New Hotness? Mile Markers on the Road to Mad Max! Coyote-fearing locals are putting vests with spikes on their tiny dogs in San Francisco.

FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY [VIP]: She Punched Out a Gator to Save Her Dog.

YES:

If you want to fix a broken system, you have to pull money OUT, not put more money IN.
If you put more money IN, the system interprets it as a reward and uses the money to become even more broken.
We get this for businesses. We forget it for nonprofits and governments. 🤔

— Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 (@pmarca) September 26, 2024