Archive for 2026

January 9, 2026

IT’S FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY [VIP]: That’s a Gun in His Bra AND He’s Happy to See You. “It’s time for your much-needed break from the serious news, and this week, we’ll learn everything wrong about cross-dressing, everything right about helping kids at Christmas, and everything Texas puts in its smoothies.”

Posted at 3:21 pm by Stephen Green on Jan 9th, 2026

UK LAWMAKER CITES REPORTS ON RUSSIAN FLIGHTS TO IRAN, GOLD AIRLIFT:

British lawmaker Tom Tugendhat told parliament on Thursday that there were reports of Russian cargo aircraft landing in Tehran and quantities of gold leaving the country.

“We’re also seeing Russian cargo aircraft coming and landing in Tehran, presumably carrying weapons and ammunition, and we’re hearing reports of large amounts of gold leaving Iran,” Tugendhat said. It was unclear what reports he was referencing.

Anti-government protests have gripped Iran since Dec. 28 in one of the biggest challenges yet to the near 50-year rule of the Islamic Republic.

US-based rights group HRANA reported that 34 protestors and 2 members of the security forces have been killed.

Tugendhat asked the government to comment on the information that he said could indicate preparations “for life after the fall.”

Responding to the remarks, UK Minister for the Middle East and North Africa Hamish Falconer said he was “not in a position to give a detailed update” on the assertions.

Britain, Hamish added, believed freedom of assembly and the right to protest were “inalienable rights of the Iranian people” and should be respected by the Iranian authorities.

Tugendhat had earlier suggested senior figures in Iran’s government may already be reaching out to foreign intelligence services and trading secrets in search of protection if the government falls.

Exit question: Iran on the brink? Danielle Pletka of AEI is “Talking through the options.” “It tickles me to think that if the regime does collapse, it all began on October 7, 2023. Cosmic justice….”

UPDATE:

 

Posted at 2:55 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 9th, 2026

GEORGE MF WASHINGTON: New Year Observations and Predictions for Hollywood’s Near Future.

First things first… Happy 2026… I guess.

If you look around the media these days, particularly conservative media where no love has been lost for Hollywood, you’ll see that the prevailing wisdom is that the movies as we have always known them are a dead man walking… that the zombie of theatrical motion pictures will shamble on for a while, maybe even for years. But that it will eventually fall over dead, unable to generate enough power even to keep its own legs moving one foot after the other for want of a single fan willing to leave their house and pay to enter a theater.

Not me – I want to click on a Website showing which movies are playing in nearby cities and be overwhelmed with choices that I can’t wait to see on a big screen. But that hasn’t been the case since Covid shut down the moviegoing experience, and afterwards, Hollywood decided to roll over and DEI rather than churn out watchable content for mass audiences. Will that ever happen again? Read the whole thing.

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 9th, 2026

SHOOTING NEWS: A Tale of Two Home Invasions: Unarmed and Beaten to Death vs. Armed and Safe. “In one, an unarmed Raleigh, North Carolina school teacher was attacked and beaten to death in her own home by an intruder while she was on the phone with 911 waiting for police to arrive. In the second case, from New Mexico, an armed home owner used his gun to stop a guns a-blazing home invader, killing the violent thug dead right there.”

When seconds count… you know the rest.

Posted at 1:48 pm by Stephen Green on Jan 9th, 2026

STARMER WOULD USE ANY EXCUSE TO BAN X:

Indeed, ever since the Labour government came to power in July 2024, X and Musk have been a constant thorn in its side. Freed from the tight censorship of the old Twitter, British and international X users have been free to vent their frustrations about a whole host of thorny issues that Labour would prefer not to talk about, from multiculturalism to trans ideology.

Take the grooming-gangs scandal, interest in which was revived in January 2025, seemingly after Musk learned about it for the first time and began tweeting about it relentlessly. News that Labour’s safeguarding minister, Jess Phillips, had refused to hold a national inquiry into the rape gangs may have passed under the radar were it not for the fury expressed on X. Starmer’s immediate response was to accuse anyone demanding justice for these evil crimes of jumping on Musk’s ‘far-right bandwagon’. Six months later, the PM would be forced, shamelessly, to order a national inquiry. The scale of the abuse, rape and torture endured by thousands of working-class girls by predominantly Pakistani men became impossible to deny.

Or take the trans debate. Before Musk’s takeover of Twitter, it was a bannable offence to refer to a ‘transwoman’ as a man. In 2025, the UK Supreme Court clarified that, under the Equality Act at least, a man who claims to be a woman really is a man. The gender-critical movement that struck this blow for women’s rights would have had to struggle even harder to reassert this basic truth without a platform like X, where users are free to ‘misgender’ as they please.

Totalitarians hate free speech:

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 9th, 2026

OLD AND BUSTED: The Summer of Love.

Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan showed no sense of urgency to end the anarchy in her city during an interview with CNN’s Chris Cuomo Thursday evening, being shockingly cavalier when asked how long it will continue.

“How long do you think Seattle and those few blocks look like this?” Cuomo asked.

“I don’t know. We could have a Summer of Love!” Durkan replied with a smile. Durken was referencing the 1967 convergence of hippies on San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood.

Cuomo didn’t seem to buy her response. “Well, tell that to the police who are supposed to be in that precinct, though. But I understand your sentiment, Mayor.”

—“Facepalm: Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan Says Anarchy in City Could Be ‘a Summer of Love,'” Matt Margolis, PJ Media, June 12th, 2020.

The New Coldness? The Winter of Love!

Curiously, they’re building a wall to keep the unwanted out of their “autonomous zone:”

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 9th, 2026

THAT’S CONCLUSIVE:

What unpleasant people.

Posted at 1:02 pm by Stephen Green on Jan 9th, 2026

NOW THAT’S MY KIND OF PHILANTHROPY: Former Google CEO plans to singlehandedly fund a Hubble telescope replacement. “Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and his wife, Wendy, announced a major investment in not just one telescope project, but four. Each of these new telescopes brings a novel capability online; however, the most intriguing new instrument is a space-based telescope named Lazuli. This spacecraft, if successfully launched and deployed, would offer astronomers a more capable and modern version of the Hubble Space Telescope, which is now three decades old.”

Posted at 12:46 pm by Stephen Green on Jan 9th, 2026

DISPATCHES FROM THE MEMORY HOLE:

Earlier:

Curiously, some of her fellow true believers to the cause are having trouble worshiping a fallen kamikaze:

Tweet continues: “It’s just like that soldier who set himself on fire for Gaza and then Leftists began tweeting about how their own followers ‘better not celebrate a white man who wore a uniform’. Never before has an ideology demanded total obedience and sacrifice to the point of offering up your own life while simultaneously treating its own adherents as subhuman. We are dealing with a level of psychological derangement that will bewilder future generations for as long as records of this era exist.”

 

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 9th, 2026

EVIL ON PARADE:

Posted at 12:02 pm by Glenn Reynolds on Jan 9th, 2026
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