Archive for 2025

November 29, 2025

DISPATCHES FROM THE HOUSE OF STEPHANOPOULOS:

UPDATE:

Posted at 2:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Nov 29th, 2025

QUESTION ASKED:

As Mark Steyn wrote 20 years ago, “our tolerance of our own tolerance is making us intolerant of other people’s intolerance, which is intolerable. And, unlikely as it sounds, this has now become the highest, most rarefied form of multiculturalism. So you’re nice to gays and the Inuit? Big deal. Anyone can be tolerant of fellows like that, but tolerance of intolerance gives an even more intense frisson of pleasure to the multiculti masochists.”

Related:

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Nov 29th, 2025

YES.

Posted at 12:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds on Nov 29th, 2025

HOW FEMINIST IDEOLOGY CREATES LONELINESS: Virgil Walker contends Western Civilization is shivering in the cold left by the destruction of the traditional home, thus depriving men and women of their most rewarding and satisfying roles as human beings.

Posted at 10:45 am by Mark Tapscott on Nov 29th, 2025

THE BEATLES ANTHOLOGY: The flammed together ‘new episode’ feels totally pointless.

The problem is, the new episode isn’t all-new at all. It’s essentially the bonus material from the 2003 DVD edition of Anthology padded out to 50 minutes: the three surviving Beatles being interviewed together at George Harrison’s home and at Abbey Road, loosely jamming old rock’n’roll songs – and an early McCartney effort, Thinking of Linking – on acoustic guitars and ukuleles; working on the new tracks at Paul McCartney’s home studio with producer Jeff Lynne; and sitting at a mixing desk while George Martin plays them multitrack recordings from the 60s.

Some of the footage is sweet – there’s a lovely moment where Ringo addresses his bandmates with a plaintive “I like hanging out with you guys” – and some of it is oddly telling: you could divine a lot from George Harrison’s visible exasperation as the sessions for Free as a Bird and Real Love drag on. (Off camera, he famously refused to work on a third Lennon demo, Now and Then, deeming it “fucking rubbish”. McCartney and Starr eventually finished the track in 2023, 22 years after Harrison’s death.)

To be fair, in the 1990s, the technology just wasn’t there to separate Lennon’s voice from his piano, and reduce the noise from recording demos on a pair of cassette recorders in the Dakota Building. Lennon’s “Now and Then” is a wisp of a song, but today’s track separation and audio restoration technology at least allowed McCartney, Starr and Giles Martin to mount a killer arrangement and production on top of Lennon’s demo.

But as Alexander Larman asks, regarding the new Anthology album at the Spectator: When will the Beatles bandwagon end? “I can’t help thinking – allied to the underwhelm of ‘Now and Then’ – that, for the first time, the sheer accumulation of detail and trivia runs the risk of letting daylight in upon magic, and making the Beatles seem, well, ordinary – which is something that they never were, or never could be. Perhaps McCartney and Ringo, who are both awaiting the Sam Mendes-directed films about each member of the band – expected in 2028 – might be advised to step in and say, ‘Right lads, enough is enough’, and to let the whole, magnificent enterprise rest in dignity. You might even say that it was time to let it be.”

Posted at 10:45 am by Ed Driscoll on Nov 29th, 2025

HMM:

Posted at 10:32 am by Glenn Reynolds on Nov 29th, 2025

SHE READS PHILOSOPHY, SHE JUST DOESN’T UNDERSTAND IT:

Posted at 10:29 am by Stephen Green on Nov 29th, 2025

GAMBLING GOING ON IN RICK’S CAFE: Top Zelenskiy Aide Quits Amid Ukraine Corruption Allegations.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s powerful chief of staff resigned after becoming ensnared in a corruption investigation.

Andriy Yermak has been lead negotiator in peace talks and his decision comes ahead of an expected visit by the US delegation in Kyiv in the coming days.

“There will be a reboot of the Office of the President of Ukraine*,” Zelenskiy said in a video posted on Telegram. “I am grateful to Andriy for always representing Ukraine’s position in the negotiation track exactly as it should be. It was always a patriotic position. But I want there to be no rumors or speculation.”

The move followed a search of Yermak’s apartment by anti-graft investigators early Friday. While the authorities didn’t explain the raid, it followed news of a widening probe involving several ministers and one of Zelenskiy’s former business partners. Yermak said he was cooperating fully with the investigation.

Will Yermak’s next stop be Disney World? Not exactly: Former top Zelensky aide sends The [New York] Post ominous message hours after resignation: ‘I’m going to the front.’

* No word yet when Zelensky will perform the ultimate reboot of the office of the president of Ukraine: Why hasn’t Ukraine held elections since the war began?

Posted at 10:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Nov 29th, 2025

WELL, THEY’RE NOT WRONG ABOUT THE “INVADING ARMIES” PART: German Christmas market installs ‘anti-tank’ barriers meant to stop invading armies, public media cheers ‘creative’ solution.

The German town of Külsheim is dealing with the soaring costs of terror-proofing German Christmas markets with a very festive solution: anti-tank barriers.

The German public media reporting this news does not even blink about how absurd the situation has become, but instead actually praises the “creative solution” of the anti-tank barriers. For skeptics, the anti-tank barriers may serve as a comical or tragic illustration of German Christmas markets moving beyond a mere police state and right into something resembling a militarized zone.

The Christmas market in Külsheim, which has a population of approximately 5,000 and is located in the southern state of Baden-Württemberg, has announced it is saving money by recycling anti-tank barriers for its Christmas market.

Located in the Main-Tauber district, Tageschau notes that “four disused concrete anti-tank barriers with a diameter of 1.4 meters were converted for the Christmas market.”

The barriers were painted with white and red paint, and were produced at the cost of €1,000 per anti-tank barrier when paint and working time are considered.

Flashback: Protesters call for Islamic state in Germany.

UPDATE:

MORE:

Posted at 8:45 am by Ed Driscoll on Nov 29th, 2025

KURT ON TARGET:

Posted at 8:42 am by Glenn Reynolds on Nov 29th, 2025

VDH: Can the ‘Lost Generation’ be found?

All through K-12, young men, particularly white males, have been demonized for their “toxic masculinity” that draws accusations of sexism, racism, and homophobia.

In college, the majority of students are female. In contrast, white males — 9-10 percent of admittees in recent years at elite schools like Stanford and the Ivy League — are of no interest to college admission officers.

So they are tagged not as unique individuals but as superfluous losers of the “wrong” race, gender, or sexual orientation.

Gen Z men saw themselves scapegoated by professors and society for the sins of past generations — and on the wrong side of the preposterous reductionist binary of oppressors and the oppressed.

Traditional pathways to adulthood — affordable homes, upwardly mobile and secure jobs, and safe and secure city and suburban living — had mostly vanished amid overregulation, overtaxation, and underpolicing.

Orthodox and loud student advocates on campus — climate change, DEI, the Palestinians — had little to do with getting a job, raising a family, or buying a house.

During the Biden years, white males mostly stopped enlisting in the military in their accustomed overrepresented numbers.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, they had died in frontline combat units at twice their percentages for the demographic. No matter — prior Pentagon DEI commissars still slandered them as suspects likely to form racist cabals.

Gen Z males seemed bewildered by women and sex — and often withdrew from dating.

Never has popular culture so promoted sexually provocative fashions, semi-nudity, and freewheeling lifestyles, and careers of supposedly empowered single women.

And never had the rules of dating and sexuality become more retrograde Victorian.

Casual consensual sex was flashed as cool everywhere on social media. And when it naturally proved in the real world to be selfish, callous, and empty, males were almost always exclusively blamed as if they were not proper Edwardian gentlemen.

Soon, young men feared sexual hookups and promiscuity as avenues to post facto and one-sided charges of harassment — or worse.

Happily for confused young men looking for a little sexytime, based on the ad that ran before the Thanksgiving Chiefs-Cowboys game, it’s ChatGPT to the rescue!

Posted at 8:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Nov 29th, 2025

AMITY SHLAES:  Sorkin Rounds Up the Usual Suspects.

According to [John Kenneth Galbraith], quoted approvingly as “seminal” [in Andrew Ross Sorkin’s new book, 1929], the worst day of the Great Crash — Tuesday, October 29 — was “the most devastating day in the history of the New York stock market,” and “may have been the most devastating day in the history of markets.”

The stunning story of the market’s plummet, however, also emboldened Galbraith to moot, without seeing any necessity of proving, a second thesis relating to years outside the scope of his title: that the 1930s policy applied by President Roosevelt, the New Deal, somehow made matters better, or could have, had the crash not been so violent.

The 1929 frame likewise enabled Galbraith to establish villains of speculation, and hero rescuers such as President Roosevelt. Roosevelt rated the damage of the national “fever of speculation” as so devastating that, at his inauguration in 1933, he announced that his presidency would begin a new, post-speculation era.

“The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization,” the new president proclaimed. (Yes, FDR, talking like Tucker Carlson, actually said “money changers.”) “We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths.”

By titling his book 1929, not 1929-1940, Galbraith skated past the inconvenient truth of the record of the 1930s. The New Deal honored Roosevelt’s anti-market “ancient truths.” Fueled by its own rage against Wall Street and a wrongheaded notion that Main Street would return to prosperity if it took lessons from planning boards, the Roosevelt administration never allowed either to find its footing. The result was that one in ten Americans remained jobless for a full decade. That is a level that today looks worse than inconvenient: It looks incomprehensible.

Galbraith’s primary thesis, that speculation caused the crash, was questionable. The second thesis, that the crash rendered the Depression “Great,” was spectacularly wrong.

One can make like [William F. Buckley], smile indulgently at Galbraith as a man of his time, and move on. But Sorkin is publishing in 2025, after a number of market drops that have not been followed by a depression, including the October 19, 1987, “Black Monday” drop and the Covid drop on March 16, 2020 — both statistically larger than the single-day drops of 1929.

Mark Steyn once wrote that “Lots of other places — from Britain to Australia — took a hit in 1929 but, alas, they lacked an FDR to keep it going till the end of the Thirties. That’s why in other countries they refer to it as ‘the Depression,’ but only in the U.S. is it ‘Great.’” For those who want to explore why, there’s FDR: A New Political Life, by David T. Beito, which Reason’s James Bovard dubs, “An Antidote to the FDR Cult:”

Rexford Tugwell, Wallace’s no. 2, idolized Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s collective farms, declaring in 1934: “Russia has shown that planning is practical….The success and enthusiasm of Sovietism almost guarantees an unlimited rise in Soviet standards of living.” This was after an artificial famine in Ukraine killed millions of peasants who had not surrendered their land. Tugwell also lauded fascism as “the cleanest, neatest, most efficiently operating piece of social machinery I’ve ever seen. It makes me envious.” In 1934, the top Nazi newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, hailed “Roosevelt’s adoption of National Socialist strains of thought in his economic and social policies….The president’s fundamental political course still contains democratic tendencies but is thoroughly infected by a strong national socialism.'”

Roosevelt sought to leave no vote unbought. Priming for the 1936 election, he launched the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which paid more than 4 million people in 1935. The WPA, popularly known as “We Poke Along,” aimed to hire as many people as quickly as possible for labor-intensive projects. The agency quickly gave leaf raking a bad name.

Beito highlights the WPA’s role in constructing concentration camps for Japanese-American detainees, noting that this was “perhaps the most gigantic single ‘WPA project’ of all time.” The agency’s employees built guard towers and spotlights to prevent any escapes, and they helped staff the camps. After World War II ended, the Japanese-American roundup was recognized as one of the greatest civil liberties atrocities of the 20th century. The fact that it took only a few memos to shift legions of WPA workers from leaf raking to concentration camp guards should be a red flag for future mass employment schemes.

In 2007’s Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg wrote:

Many New Deal agencies, the famous “alphabet soup,” were mostly continuations of various boards and committees set up fifteen years earlier during the war. The National Recovery Administration was explicitly modeled on the War Industries Board of World War I. The Securities and Exchange Commission was an extension of the Capital Issues Committee of the Federal Reserve Board. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation was an updated version of the War Finance Corporation. FDR’s public housing initiative was run by the architect of World War I–era housing policies. During the war, public housing had been a necessity for war laborers. Under FDR, everyone became in effect a war laborer.

Presumably it is not necessary to recount how similar all of this was to developments in Nazi Germany. But it is worth noting that for the first two years of the American and German New Deals, it was America that pursued militarism and rearmament at a breakneck pace while Germany spent relatively little on arms (though Hitler faced severe constraints on rearmament). The Public Works Administration paid for the aircraft carriers Yorktown and Enterprise as well as four cruisers, many smaller warships, and over one hundred army planes parked at fifty military airports.

As Jonah concluded, “Perhaps one reason so many people believed the New Deal ended the Depression is that the New Deal’s segue into a full-blown war economy was so seamless.”

UPDATE: More on Sorkin’s new book from John Tamny at Real Clear Markets: 

What makes 1929 relevant today isn’t Sorkin’s history, but the legislative errors that followed and that turned a major market drop into a near decade long period of economic sluggishness. It’s a long way of saying that while Sorkin’s #1 bestselling book is largely about 1929 (to be fair to the author, he covers some of the aftermath), what to this day gives life to Sorkin’s 1929 is what happened after. Put another way, barring the egregious mistakes of intervention made by Presidents Herbert Hoover and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the 1930s are a time of booming economic growth such that Sorkin has no book.

Evidence supporting the above claim can most notably be found in 1987. Stocks started to sputter earlier in the month of October, all of it leading to a monstrous, 24 percent correction on October 19, 1987. That’s the bad news, though the bad news largely ended right there.

The good news is that as 1987 closed, the DJIA ended the year largely flat. Ronald Reagan was president then, and Reagan’s favorite president was Calvin Coolidge. Like Coolidge, Reagan leaned toward non-intervention. The markets plainly preferred Reagan’s approach to that of Hoover and FDR, which means that the meaning of 1987 sadly shrinks by the year precisely because there was no brutal aftermath to a correction that varying market pundits attributed to Treasury secretary James Baker’s talking down of the dollar on the Sunday talk shows on October 18, 1987, rising protectionism within Congress (see Richard Gephardt most notably), separate legislation meant to substantially tax the M&A activity that had given equity markets so much life in the 1980s, along with the rise of “program trading.”

This review or analysis of Sorkin’s book won’t dig deeper into speculations about what may or may not have caused 1987, but the fact that 1987 doesn’t rate the ink spilled on 1929 should loom large in the minds of those reading this review, and more importantly, in the minds of the many who will read Sorkin’s book. Just as the meaning of 1987 sadly shrinks by the year, the jejune and errant meaning of 1929 sadly grows by the year, including in 2025 as stocks sit at or near all-time highs. It’s sad once again because to this day the lessons of 1929 elude most economists, historians and market pundits, and since they do, attempts to tie 1929 to 2025 invariably fail.

I remember the D-word being uttered a lot on October 19th, 1987; the fact that it didn’t happen (and that the market had spent the previous seven years making up for treading water during the inflation-ravaged 1970s) is a reminder of the failure of both Keynesian economics and FDR’s “bold persistent experimentation.”

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll on Nov 29th, 2025
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