A NICE STORY ABOUT A 98-YEAR-OLD BARBER in Knoxville who’s still cutting hair. Perhaps an up-and-coming Salena Zito here.
Archive for 2025
June 26, 2025
A SOUPED UP GIANT SUV? 2026 Nissan Armada NISMO First Look: 460 HP and a Ton of Badging? Sign Us Up.
RESHORING:
🚨 BREAKING: General Electric Appliances invests $500 MILLION to move production from China to KENTUCKY, USA.
Manufacturing continues to return home. pic.twitter.com/YyMdXx2fLv
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) June 26, 2025
THAT GUY, YES:
this guy? https://t.co/RrcE8SZjiw pic.twitter.com/BrI3vSbsB1
— Chuck Ross (@ChuckRossDC) June 26, 2025
The White House needs to revoke a bunch more clearances.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): A knowledgeable friend writes:
Somebody got to Panetta. After he spoken the unspeakable, that Trump bombing Iran was the right thing to do. Which suggests his boss, Obama, did everything wrong. Someone called up the 86-year-old former SecDef and CIA director, said he needed to make things right. He was making the boss, and the party, look bad.
And that is not permissible.
Never.
IT’S MY THURSDAY ESSAY FOR VIP SUBSCRIBERS: Sunday’s ‘Midnight Hammer’ Operation Launched in 1941.
“On Sunday, when those jets returned to Whiteman, their families were there — flags flying and tears flowing.” —U.S. Air Force Gen. Dan “Razin” Caine, on the B-2 Spirit bomber crews who conducted their part of Operation Midnight Hammer.
The dead-sexy B-2 Spirit bombers and their highly trained crews got all the attention in the days following Operation Midnight Hammer, but there was so much more to the mission than a half-dozen or so stealth jets carrying massive bunker-buster bombs.
How much more? The story begins 15 years ago, when the Pentagon first looked at how to bomb facilities like Iran’s Fordow nuclear facility, buried deep under a mountain. Actually, it began in the 1980s with the development of our first stealth bomber — or no, wait, that’s not quite right either. To tell the full story of Midnight Hammer, I need to take you back to 1941 and a U.S. Army effort to maximize its ability to “reach out and touch someone” with maximum lethality.
Much more at the link.
ENJOY SUMMER: Crocs Unisex Adult Classic Clog. #CommissionEarned
HMM: Netanyahu agreed to end Gaza war within two weeks after US strike on Iran. “According to the outlet, Trump and Netanyahu agreed in a phone call that the war in Gaza would end within two weeks. Four Arab states, including the UAE and Egypt, would jointly govern the Gaza Strip in place of Hamas. The terror group’s leadership would be exiled, and all hostages would be released.”
That’s nice. Did Hamas agree to exile? Or will the IDF have to keep rooting them out for as long as it takes?
PROBLEM: COMMIES AREN’T HOT. Wall Street Girds Its Loins For a ‘Hot Commie Summer.’
BE COMFORTABLE IN JEANS: Carhartt Men’s Relaxed Fit 5-Pocket Jean. #CommissionEarned
SANDY FROM THE BLOCK: AOC’s tough girl from the Bronx image is destroyed by yearbook photo from well-to-do high school. “The truth is AOC is Sandy Cortez who went to Yorktown High School and lived at the corner of Friends Road and Longvue Street.”
YOU F***ED UP; YOU TRUSTED US:
● Shot: World fertility rates in ‘unprecedented decline’, UN says.
—The BBC, June 6th.
● Chaser: Population: Cauldron of Contention.
The city of Bucharest was hit last week by a population explosion and a heat wave that turned the ordinarily tranquil, temperate Rumanian capital into a cauldron of international contention. Gathered in Bucharest were 1,100 delegates from 141 countries for the United Nations World Population Conference. It was the largest intergovernmental meeting in history, convoked to devise ways of remedying the soaring overpopulation that is straining declining world food reserves. Yet in spite of the gravity of the issue, the sweltering delegates in Bucharest’s airless, ovenlike Palace of the Republic seemed motivated more by national pride and ideology than concern for the hunger that already blights many poor nations.
The heated arguments at Bucharest came as a surprise to the conference planners. Several preliminary U.N. meetings had been held to work out a detailed draft of a “plan of action.” The plan called for a reduction of birth rates that would be proportionate to a country’s population. This would slow down the present 2%-per-year growth rate that experts believe will double the present 3.9 billion world population by the year 2009. The plan also proposed that governments should provide the education, information and means for family planning, if the families so desire. The plan seemed tame enough.
U.S. Delegate Christian A. Herter Jr. warned that North American food reserves available for emergencies are now down to 27 days of world consumption. “Meanwhile,” said Herter, “200,000 more people are born each day and have to be fed.” Clearly, a catastrophic famine could some day occur, and Herter’s warnings appeared to be merely stating the obvious.
—Time magazine, September 9th, 1974, which the UN had designated as “World Population Year.” The Nixon Administration concurred:
Now, therefore, I, Richard Nixon, President of the United States of America, do hereby designate and proclaim the year 1974 as World Population Year in the United States. I call upon the Congress and officials of our Federal, State and local governments, educational institutions, religious bodies, private organizations, the information media, and the people of the United States generally to join this year in promoting a better understanding of the magnitude and consequences of world population growth and its relation to the quality of human life and in renewing our commitment to human dignity and social justice.
But then, as a possibly apocryphal story about Nixon goes, he once said, “Of course the world is overpopulated. Everywhere I go, I see huge crowds.”
CATHERINE SALGADO: Another Reason to Reinstate FBI Whistleblowers.
CREATIVE DESTRUCTION? Anthropic destroyed millions of print books to build its AI models: Company hired Google’s book-scanning chief to cut up and digitize “all the books in the world.”
This was a plot device in, I think, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. Or was it one of his others?
UPDATE: I think I’m wrong about Stephenson. Was it Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End?
ANOTHER UPDATE: Grok says that’s it. “In Vernor Vinge’s novel Rainbows End (2006), set in a near-future 2025, there is a depiction of a major corporation engaging in a destructive book-scanning process as part of the ‘Librareome Project.’ This project involves digitizing vast collections of books by shredding them and scanning the pieces, a process that is portrayed as highly efficient but controversial due to its destruction of physical books. This is described in a darkly comedic scene where the physical books are fed into a shredder-like machine, with cameras capturing the fragments to reassemble the content digitally.”
Rainbows End seems to be coming true right on schedule. Here’s the podcast interview Helen and I did with him back in 2006.
SEND THIS TO YOUR GOP SENATOR:
Please repeat after me, three times:
Cutting fraud, waste and abuse from a federal program is not the same thing as cutting benefits under that program.
Cutting fraud, waste and abuse from a federal program is not the same thing as cutting benefits under that program.
CUTTING…
— Cynical Publius (@CynicalPublius) June 26, 2025
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:
Democrats Discover Innovative Strategy Of Promising Free Stuff To Stupid People https://t.co/KPKwzlTmId pic.twitter.com/Tx4k4WBssI
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) June 26, 2025
CNN IS IN THE MIDST OF ABOUT THE WORST WEEK OF REPORTING A LONE OUTLET CAN HAVE:
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has been so incensed over the faulty coverage that he called a press conference this morning specifically to deliver a scalding rebuke of the media. It can be debated whether this is a worthy use of his time, but at the same time, he said a few things about the press that were more than valid. Clearly, Hegseth is enraged that internal forces are still in place, working with the press and against the intentions of the DoD.
Natasha Bertrand has shown herself over the years to be a dutiful tool for the activists inside the Pentagon, her career being what it is because she is a willing mynah bird for their talking points. From the Steele dossier and Russian collusion stories, to decrying the Hunter Biden laptop and serving as the initial source of the farcical intelligence letter with 51 operatives calling the computer a Russian psy-op campaign, she is their willful plant in the press. She was the source they used to say that the Chinese spy balloon was no big deal by insisting no real intelligence had been gathered, while at the same time declaring they had no way of knowing what had been gathered. She is simply that inept of a loyal mouthpiece.
* * * * * * * * *
This network has been generating so many unforced errors in a matter of days. There was Kaitlan Collins disputing the White House claims of a ceasefire, only to be immediately shamed with a breaking report mid-sentence confirming it to be true. Brian Stelter was flummoxed as to why a secret classified mission has not delivered telegenic video clips for the press. Erin Burnett tried to sell the concept that Iranians chanted “death to America” in a warm and friendly manner.
Things are so bad for CNN right now that they should just back down and run Hollywood fluff pieces for a few days until they get their feet back underneath them.
To be fair, Bertrand has one friend left in the media: Colbert Dances After CNN Article Casts Doubt On Success Of Iran Strikes.
Colbert responded by referencing the CNN article, “Okay, that’s one less problem in the world. Except for one small problem: today we learned that U.S. intelligence has determined Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium was not destroyed, and their centrifuges are largely intact. Oopsa nukey. So, less Operation Midnight Hammer and more Operation MC Hammer. In that Iran’s nuclear scientists just sent this message about their centrifuges.”
After brief snippet of MC Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This” music video, Colbert copied the dance.
Given that network late night shows have for the past decade leaned hard on leftist politics to hang onto what’s left of an increasingly atomized audience, we’ve long referred to their hosts as the “palace guard media.” But I wasn’t expecting Colbert to be a member of the Khamenei Palace Guard. (It’s a particularly unexpected flex during Pride Month.)
But then, as Glenn wrote during the president’s first term, “Trump’s greatest gift is getting various institutions to make clear in obvious ways that they’re as corrupt as he says they are.”
Finally, talk about a weapon of mass destruction — MOAB simultaneously takes out Iran’s nuclear program, Natasha Bertrand, and Stephen Colbert!
🚨 UPDATE: CNN is backtracking BIG TIME as they air that Trump was RIGHT – the Iran strikes were effective, the leaked intel report was WRONG.
"It WORKED. It seems to have worked flawlessly!"
"The 20,000 centrifuges…they are all COMPLETELY DESTROYED!"pic.twitter.com/tzPf9PJ1bh
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) June 26, 2025
AND COLLARDS AREN’T IN THE FOOD PYRAMID: Jamaal Bowman Just Went Bat Poop Crazy on CNN.
STAY DRY: Repel Umbrella – Windproof Travel Umbrellas for Rain. #CommissionEarned
“WHERE’S WALDO?” ISLAMIC THEOCRACY EDITION: In Iran, Mass Arrests, Executions, and Everyone Is Wondering: Where Is Supreme Leader Khamenei?
NOT FOR LONG WITH RFK, JR. ON THE JOB: Study: 1 in 5 U.S. food, drink products contain synthetic dyes.
CHANGE: Eric Adams suddenly finds ‘overwhelming support’ from NYC’s desperate business elites.
Some of former Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s biggest backers hinted in fluid, panicked conversations Wednesday that they’ll put their money behind Adams, who was elected in 2021 as a tough-but-fair ex-cop, and now, after a federal corruption indictment and the removal of his inner circle, is running on his policy successes and frankly fun personality.
Adams’ popularity stood at an all-time low of 20% in a poll last month. The business community was largely neutral on Adams, who they saw as a welcome if occasionally tiring return to moderation after the left-leaning, rich-baiting de Blasio era; they remain nostalgic for Mike Bloomberg’s three terms.
“There is going to be overwhelming support in the business community to rally around Adams,” said Richard Farley, a partner at Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel LLP who said he’s organizing a fundraiser for the mayor and has been speaking with some of Cuomo’s biggest donors. “This will be a street fight all the way to November.”
Adams’ path is “narrow,” acknowledged one adviser.
“There’s always a choice!,” the wise man wrote. “This one is a choice between ‘bad’ and ‘worse,’ which is a difference much more poignant than that between ‘good’ and ‘better.’”
CONSERVING CONSERVATISM MOST CONSERVATIVELY: Matt Walsh’s Honest NYC Post Enrages Bulwarker Tim Miller So Much He Starts Screaming Racial Slurs at Him.
Flashback to last week: “Zohran Mamdani, a leading candidate in next Tuesday’s New York City mayoral primary, refused to condemn calls to ‘globalize the intifada’ during a new podcast interview with The Bulwark released on Tuesday, arguing the phrase is an expression of Palestinian rights.”