Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

March 24, 2026

HOW WELL DID ICE PERFORM REPLACING TSA AT AIRPORTS? THIS WELL:

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Mar 24th, 2026

March 23, 2026

DEVELOPING: Port Arthur, TX: Authorities on scene of possible explosion at Valero refinery, shelter-in-place issued. “Sheriff Zena Stephens tells FOX Beaumont the explosion was likely caused by an industrial heater. Officials also told FOX Beaumont that there are no reported injuries.”

UPDATE:

Posted at 9:55 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 23rd, 2026

PARTYING LIKE IT’S 1989: Arsenio Hall lifts the lid on wild late-night era: TV host’s strip club trips with Prince, his showdown with OJ Simpson, and how he got Bill Clinton to play his sax on air.

The new book paints a picture of a chaotic era in television where the line between on-screen success and off-screen excess was often blurred.

The Arsenio Hall Show ran for five years between 1989 and 1994 and featured hundreds of celebrities in what Hall hoped would be a house party on TV every night.

Hall made his show the home of hip-hop and helped break rappers like Snoop Dogg, Tupac and Ice Cube while musical guests included James Brown, Whitney Houston, and Luther Vandross.

The show would win two Emmys and lead Hall to star in hit movies like 1988 comedy, Coming to America, alongside Murphy.

It was an astonishing achievement for the son of a single mother from Cleveland, Ohio, who idolized the talk show host Johnny Carson as a child and began his show business career aged five doing magic shows in the basement of his building.

A switch to comedy and a move to Los Angeles paved the way for Hall to be offered a guest spot hosting The Late Show on Fox after Joan Rivers, the original host, bombed.

Impressed Paramount executives offered Hall his own show, making him the first black, syndicated late night host.

Arsenio was young, hip and cool, and consequently made Johnny Carson look very dated by comparison, and allowed Lorne Michaels, the producer of Saturday Night Love, who had no love lost between him Carson, deliver the kill shot:

“Was it a coincidence that Johnny Carson stepped down as host of the Tonight Show after 29 years just three days after this segment aired on Saturday Night Live? Perhaps. Perhaps not. But this even making the airwaves on Carson’s own NBC network was a bit shocking. I was only 15 years old when this very funny SNL skit played and I even understood what it meant. Johnny Carson was going to be very pissed off by what he saw.”

Posted at 8:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 23rd, 2026

VDH: Why today’s immigrants to America are so hostile to their new country.

I grew up in rural California surrounded by hard-working immigrant farm families from Armenia, India, Japan and Mexico. Their work ethic, love of America and productive farms were models for US non-immigrants.

My own Swedish grandfather, disabled by poison gas while fighting on the Western Front in World War I, loved all things Swedish, but not nearly as much as his beloved America.

Four Hansons fought on the front lines of World Wars I and II. One was disabled, and another was killed. And all felt blessed that their parents and grandparents had gotten to America.

But something has gone terribly wrong with immigration — an open border, of course, but also a change in legal immigration as well as student visitors.

While America is at war with Iran, crowds of immigrants, visitors and foreign students scream anti-American slogans as they cheer our enemies.

Read the whole thing.

 

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 23rd, 2026

KERMIT GOSNELL, ‘HOUSE OF HORRORS’ DOCTOR FOUND GUILTY OF KILLING BABIES, DIES, AGE 85.

In all, Gosnell was found guilty of 237 crimes, including three counts of first-degree murder for the deaths of three babies, as well as involuntary manslaughter for the overdose death of a patient.

During Gosnell’s trial, prosecutors said he regularly performed late-term abortions on babies older than 24 weeks — the cutoff age in Pennsylvania.

Prosecutors also said that Gosnell delivered the babies alive during abortion procedures and then killed them by snipping their spinal cords with scissors.

The former doctor was ultimately sentenced to multiple life sentences, avoiding the death penalty.

What was horrific in 2011 became an unexpectedly routine talking point for Ralph Northam in 2019:

Posted at 8:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 23rd, 2026

IT’S A MERCY KILLING: Divisive Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Canceled After Two Seasons.

So much for Paramount+‘s Gen Z Star Trek show.

The streamer has decided to end Star Trek: Starfleet Academy after season two.

Starfleet Academy had recently finished airing its debut season. Paramount+ had (rather optimistically, as it turned out) already ordered a second season, which recently wrapped production.

Starfleet Academy has been a polarizing entry in the Trek canon. Many critics have celebrated the show for focusing on a younger generation and its coming-of-age themes. On social media, the show has been a frequent target of mockery from those who claim the show is too “woke.”

On Rotten Tomatoes, the show had an 87 percent positive critics score, but a dismal 51 percent audience score.

The show also never managed to chart among Nielsen’s weekly top 10 streaming lists for viewership.

Funny, ten days ago, Engadget ran with the hottest of hot takes about the show: Starfleet Academy is the best first season of a Star Trek show ever.

The first season of a TV show is a tricky thing. It has to convince people to watch it and justify the show’s existence to the network (or streaming service) execs. It has to deal with actors and writers who may not have fully dialed into the characters and world yet. There are some shows with absolutely stellar first seasons — Stranger Things, Veronica Mars and Ted Lasso are a few — but many other hit shows stumbled out of the gate, like The Office and Supernatural.

Star Trek is not immune to this phenomenon. The Original Series had a decent first season, with classic episodes like “The City on the Edge of Forever.” But the next four shows all have rather weak beginnings, with even fan-favorite The Next Generation stumbling badly with episodes like “Code of Honor.” That show picked up in season three, beginning a trend called “Growing the Beard,” in reference to how Commander Riker’s new beard coincided with the uptick in quality.

“The Original Series had a decent first season.” What a way to dismiss all of the worldbuilding by Gene Roddenberry and Gene Coon that set the stage for everything that followed over the next sixty years: The giant faster-than-light starship performing gunboat diplomacy at the edge of the known galaxy. The heroic young captain modeled after Horatio Hornblower. The stoic half-human, half-alien science officer. The crusty doctor and chief engineer. Once Gene Coon joined midseason, he fleshed out the series’ backstory, creating the “United Federation of Planets” as a futuristic substitute for the USA, and crafted the show’s most-popular bad guys, the Klingons. Heck, even Ricardo Montalban showed up in the first season, a decade and a half before replaying his role as the big baddy in the movie that saved the franchise, and gave Star Trek a new lease on life for the next four decades.

But hey, it’s no Starfleet Academy.

Exit quote:

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 23rd, 2026

CBS REPORTER WHO RESIGNED OVER BARI WEISS JOINS LEFT-WING PROPAGANDA OUTLET:

As you can see, MacFarlane has found his natural home after leaving CBS. He can now rest assured that no one in top management will influence his reporting by demanding that he shape his political reporting.

See? Bari Weiss really IS destroying CBS News. Without nonpartisan, totally fair and unbiased reporting from excellent journalists like Scott MacFarlane, how will CBS News viewers learn about how Donald Trump is Adolf Hitler?

Or Barry Goldwater.

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 23rd, 2026

THE DESIRE NAMED STREETCAR:

From the leftist politicians’ point of view, it really was money well spent. As I wrote last year, when the DC streetcar was first announced as being phased out, why didn’t DC simply program a bus route right from the start? Because of the enormous amount of graft that a streetcar system can generate compared to busses: “A transit agency that expands its bus fleet gets the support of the transit operators union. But an agency that builds a rail line gets the support of construction companies, construction unions, banks and bond dealers, railcar manufacturers, electric power companies (if the railcars are electric powered), downtown property owners, and other real estate interests. Rail may be a negative-sum game for the region as a whole, but those concentrated interests stand to gain a lot at a relatively small expense to everyone else.”

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 23rd, 2026

COVID SIX YEARS AGO TODAY: Boris Johnson orders UK lockdown to be enforced by police.

Boris Johnson will order police to enforce a strict coronavirus lockdown, with a ban on gatherings of more than two people and strict limits on exercise, as he told the British public: “You must stay at home.”

The prime minister ratcheted up Britain’s response with an address to the nation on Monday evening, warning that people would only be allowed outside to buy food or medication, exercise alone once a day, or to travel to work if absolutely necessary.

All non-essential shops will close with immediate effect, as will playgrounds and libraries, he said in the address from Downing Street.

After days of being accused of sending mixed messages about what the public should do, Johnson significantly escalated his language as he urged people to comply with the more stringent measures.

“You should not be meeting friends. If your friends ask you to meet, you should say no. You should not be meeting family members who do not live in your home. You should not be going shopping except for essentials like food and medicine – and you should do this as little as you can,” he said.

“If you don’t follow the rules, the police will have the powers to enforce them, including through fines and dispersing gatherings.”

“You should not be meeting friends. If your friends ask you to meet, you should say no.” Some found that order rather difficult to follow, not least of whom was “Professor Lockdown” himself: What Neil Ferguson’s booty call tells us about modern politics.

The conspiratorial left, convinced the world is run by secret cabals of bankers and cigar-chomping media moguls, thinks the Neil Ferguson story is a ‘dead cat’. In other words, they think the Daily Telegraph – Evil Tory Rag – revealed that Ferguson carried on bonking his mistress in defiance of a lockdown that he himself bears much responsibility for in order to distract attention from Britain overtaking Italy with the highest Covid death toll in Europe. A ‘dead cat’ strategy is when a sensationalist story is introduced to the mix to divert attention from a far more serious political crisis. Ferguson’s sexual antics are the Tory regime’s dead cat to Britain’s corona death toll, apparently.

This sums up the political infantilism of the left. It is actually incredibly important news that Ferguson, the Imperial College modeller who said it was possible 500,000 Brits would die if we didn’t lock down, defied the lockdown. It deserves the frontpage treatment it is getting today. For Ferguson’s booty call with his married lover actually reveals a great deal about the 21st-century elites and how they view their relationship with the masses. It’s one rule for them and another for us. They can carry on enjoying sneaky freedoms because their lives and jobs are important; we can’t because we are mere little people, whose silly work lives can casually be disrupted, whose love lives can be turned upside down, and whose families can be ripped apart. The Ferguson affair provides an illuminating insight into the new elitism.

As does the person with whom Ferguson hooked up with on said booty call:

On at least two occasions, Antonia Staats, 38, traveled across London from her home in the south of the capital to spend time with the government scientist, nicknamed Professor Lockdown,” reported the Telegraph.

Staats, we later learn, lives with her husband and two children in a £1.9 million home in south London. She’s a “left-wing campaigner” who is reportedly in an open marriage. According to the Telegraph, “She has told friends about her relationship with Prof Ferguson, but does not believe their actions to be hypocritical because she considers the households to be one.”

Ah yes, the old our-households-are-one-because-I’m-in-an-open-marriage argument. Never mind that a week before Ferguson and Staats’ first meeting, Britain’s Health Secretary had said even couples not living together must stay apart during the lockdown.

* * * * * * * * *

One rule for the poor people, another rule for us elites. And they wonder how they got Brexit.

But “Professor Lockdown” and his paramour weren’t the only high-ranking brits to violate Boris Johnson’s strict lockdown orders. There was also some chap called…Boris Johnson: U.K. “Partygate” probe reveals details of illegal, booze-fueled parties at PM Boris Johnson’s house during COVID lockdown.

Some of the 16 events under investigation were held at 10 Downing Street — Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s official home and office — and the Cabinet Office, and should not have been allowed to take place, investigator Sue Gray concluded in her 37-page report, adding that “other events should not have been allowed to develop as they did.”

In April, Johnson was for attending his birthday party, making him the first British prime minister ever found to have broken the law while in office.

“What took place at many of these gatherings and the way in which they developed was not in line with COVID guidance at the time,” Gray said.

The report included 10 redacted photographs, including four that show Johnson himself attending a birthday party in his honor in June 2020, and four others that show him raising a glass at another event. Both events were held at his Downing Street office.

Or to put it another way: Boris Johnson Missed His Churchill Moment. The pandemic was Boris’s biggest test. He failed.

The entire world had surrendered to the People’s Republic of China, adopting its totalitarian disease-control strategy, and unlike France or Poland in World War II, we surrendered without a shot being fired. If any man in the world was well-positioned to stand against this, it was the garrulous British renegade, Boris Johnson. Instead, the United Kingdom became a police state.

Well, not the entire world: How Sweden proved the world wrong about lockdowns: The evidence is clear: authoritarian restrictions did not save more lives.

As for Boris’ future, Theodore Dalrymple reviews his autobiography at City Journal and concludes:

How will history—that is to say, those who write history—judge Boris Johnson, and what of his own future? Will he be seen just as a mountebank and an opportunist, who rode a wave of discontent to assuage his own demanding, not to say imperious, ego? To return to the question: Behind the frivolous facade, were there just layers of frivolity ad infinitum, or was there a bedrock of serious intent?

I find it difficult to answer. Again, it is hard to be too damning of a man whom one has met and liked. That was, after all, why George Orwell did not want to meet the authors of the books he reviewed. At the same time, I understand those who splutter at the mention of his name.

As to Boris’s future, I think it would be a mistake to write him off. Public memory is short, and at the next election, in 2028, he will be only 64, by which time, if he continues his present trajectory, Keir Starmer will be the most reviled man in recent British history. Boris will be able to pose again as the only way through an impasse: I got Brexit done; now, I will remove Starmer!

Just pay no attention to what I did during 2020 and 2021…

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll on Mar 23rd, 2026

March 22, 2026

HIROO ONODA BELIEVED IN HIS CAUSE. For Tay-Tay, it’s just performance art:

 

Posted at 9:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 22nd, 2026

GREAT MOMENTS IN OMNIPOTENT TOURIST SYNDROME: Left-Wing Activists Descend on Crisis-Stricken Cuba, Enjoy Luxury Hotels, Ride AC Buses.

The convoy includes a mix of activists, political figures, and organizations from across the global Left. Among them is leftist streamer Hasan Piker, who broadcast from Havana to his large social media following while promising to produce additional “content” from the trip.

Other participants include international political figures such as Jeremy Corbyn and representatives from leftist parties across Latin America and Europe.

Some of the groups involved, such as The People’s Forum and Code Pink, have previously drawn scrutiny from U.S. officials over alleged ties to foreign influence networks.

The effort has also been linked to Mariela Castro, daughter of former Cuban leader Raúl Castro, underscoring the close coordination between activists and the Cuban government. Organizers say the convoy delivered solar panels, food, and medical supplies, including cancer treatments, to help alleviate the island’s crisis.

Cuba has also received aid shipments from countries including Mexico, Brazil, and China in recent weeks, as concerns grow over a potential humanitarian emergency. Still, questions remain about how the convoy’s aid will be distributed, and whether it will reach ordinary Cubans or be funneled through government-controlled channels.

Such efforts often double as political theater, bolstering the regime’s narrative while doing little to address systemic issues. The images coming out of Havana this weekend highlight a jarring divide: foreign activists documenting their “solidarity” tour with reliable electricity, comfortable transport, and direct access to top officials. Meanwhile, millions of Cubans live through daily blackouts, food shortages, and a collapsing economy.

Reliable electricity, comfortable transport, direct access to top officials, and an Internet connection to the outside world for me, but not for thee:

UPDATE:

(Classical reference in headline.)

Posted at 8:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 22nd, 2026

OLD AND BUSTED:

The Moo Hotness? The Cowgorithm!

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 22nd, 2026

COLUMBUS RISES AGAIN: Toppled Statue Now Reborn at the White House.

On Sunday, a new statue of Christopher Columbus was installed on the White House grounds, as part of the run-up to this summer’s 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The best part? The new statue incorporates parts of another Christopher Columbus statue damaged by rioters in the 2020 “Summer of Love” riots.

A new statue of Christopher Columbus went up on the White House grounds Sunday that was built using pieces from a monument to the Italian explorer that protesters destroyed six years ago. 

The 13-foot, one-ton replica of a Columbus statue toppled in Baltimore in 2020 – then dumped into the city’s inner harbor – was commissioned by the Conference of Presidents of Major Italian American Organizations and is part of the White House’s celebration of America’s 250th anniversary.

The statue has been placed outside the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.

Artists retrieved shards of marble belonging to the wrecked statue from the harbor that were used in the recreation – and reached out to the White House after officials in Baltimore refused to put the new monument up, according to the organization.

More here: White House installs Christopher Columbus statue made from remains of toppled sculpture. “President Trump signed a proclamation last year hailing Columbus as an American hero. ‘Columbus Day — we’re back, Italians,’ Trump declared after signing the proclamation. ‘We love the Italians.’”

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 22nd, 2026

NOT THE BABYLON BEE: 

UPDATE:

Posted at 6:55 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 22nd, 2026

GIVE ‘EM HELL, HAIRY: Truman Begets Roseannadanna.

A great president in many ways, Truman befouled American rhetoric by his casual use of the word “fascist.” In the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, “fascism” referred to a specific mostly-European political/economic philosophy. The term was sometimes applied to Americans who, by and large, were actual fans of actual fascism (e.g., Father Charles Coughlin, the German-American Bund). But in 1948, Truman bleached the meaning out of the word in order to make it an all-purpose left-of-center term for “people we don’t like.” Just before that year’s presidential election, the New York Times ran a headline:

“PRESIDENT LIKENS DEWEY TO HITLER AS FASCISTS’ TOOL … DICTATORSHIP STRESSED … REPUBLICAN VICTORY WILL THREATEN U.S. LIBERTY.”

Tom Dewey had been a hard-hitting prosecutor and bane of organized crime, but by 1948, he was a bland, inoffensive, Eastern Establishment Liberal Republican. His greatest contribution to American politics was engineering the 1952 Republican candidacy of Dwight Eisenhower—whom Truman had attempted to recruit for the Democratic nomination in 1948. Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter, Alice, labeled the mustachioed Dewey as “the little man on the wedding cake.” Post-election, the Louisville Courier-Journal wrote:

“No presidential candidate in the future will be so inept that four of his major speeches can be boiled down to these historic four sentences: Agriculture is important. Our rivers are full of fish. You cannot have freedom without liberty. Our future lies ahead.”

Such was the existential threat of Truman’s fevered diatribe.

Truman’s invective simultaneously immortalized the insult and stripped it of meaning. Shamefully, he called Dewey a fascist while the corpses of those slaughtered by actual Fascists and their Nazi allies were still rotting in mass graves. But, with the precedent set, Truman’s successors applied the fascist label to, among many others, Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump. (Truman narrowly won over Dewey, so perhaps the fascist ploy worked for him.)

Read the whole thing. This clip of Angela Davis in 1972, employing massive amounts of vocal frrrrrryyyyyy, imagines Richard Nixon’s first term as the twilight of Weimar Germany, rhetoric that would be repeated by Kamala Harris in 2024 and early 2025, while simultaneously seeking the endorsement of two previous Hitlers, Dick Cheney, and the aforementioned Dubya: (Davis was and is a big of fan of totalitarian international socialism, of course.)

Posted at 5:48 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 22nd, 2026

GREAT MOMENTS IN OBJECTIVITY:

How far left is The Nation? This far: 

The magazine was also supportive of the new Soviet Union. It published a eulogy of Soviet state founder Vladimir Lenin by Russian writer Maxim Gorki, who called the Soviet leader “the hero of a legend, a man who had torn the burning heart out of his breast in order to light up for mankind the path which shall lead it out of the shameful chaos of the present.”5

During the Cold War, the magazine became a home for some Soviet apologists. In 1946, Walter Duranty, the New York Times Moscow bureau chief who won the Pulitzer Prize but later became infamous for having covered up the famine in Ukraine orchestrated by Joseph Stalin, praised Stalin’s purges in the pages of The Nation. He called them “a general cleaning out of the cobwebs and mess which accumulate in any house when its occupants are so deeply preoccupied with something else that they have no time to keep it in order.”6

The magazine praised Stalin when he died in 1953.6 The magazine also contributed to efforts to exculpate Alger Hiss, a State Department official convicted of perjury related to his activities as an agent of the Soviet Union. Even after the declassification and publication of decrypted intercepts that proved Hiss spied for the Soviets, then-Nation publisher Victor Navasky continued to assert Hiss’s innocence.7

The Soviet Union was not the only communist state for which The Nation offered cover. Its pages covered up the crimes of Chinese dictator Mao Zedong and his new People’s Republic of China. An editor, Maxwell Stewart, was the chairman of a communist Chinese front group.6

During the Greek Civil War, The Nation’s editor, Freda Kirchwey, praised the Greek communist guerillas. During her tenure, The Nation also endorsed friendship with the Soviet Union and opposed the Cold War.6

But it was not until the 1970s that The Nation published its most infamous example of “whataboutism”—dismissing Communist crimes by claiming American misdeeds–of a communist regime. In 1977, it published “Distortions at Fourth Hand” by Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman. In the article, both men denied that a genocide was taking place in Khmer Rouge-controlled Cambodia even as evidence from refugees was indicating killings on a mass scale.8 Estimates of the death toll from the genocide exceed 1.5 million people.9 The United Nations would ultimately conclude that the Khmer Rouge regime had committed genocide, and a joint UN-Cambodian tribunal would sentence three surviving Khmer Rouge officials to life imprisonment.10

“Unexpectedly,” The Nation is also Dan Rather-approved: Dan Rather to Headline $200-a-Person Fundraiser for The Nation Magazine.

UPDATE:

Posted at 5:16 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 22nd, 2026

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Schools Named for César Chavez Face Renaming Debates After Assault Allegations.

Education Week on Wednesday contacted a dozen districts and charter school networks with schools named for Chavez. None had a firm position on renaming, but many acknowledged that conversations were already taking place in their communities.

States including California, Colorado, Minnesota, Texas, Utah, and Washington recognize César Chavez day on the leader’s March 31 birthday. By Thursday, some had already committed to renaming the holiday. Several districts that have the day off said it’s too late to change their calendars. Others that planned commemorations during the school day have canceled their plans.

The San Francisco school district, which has an elementary school named for Chavez, said it “shares in the community’s concerns” regarding the allegations. The San Francisco school board faced pushback when it voted to rename 44 of its 117 schools in 2021 because of concerns their namesakes were tied to racism and oppression. Schools flagged under the plan, which the district later abandoned, included those named for George Washington, Paul Revere, and former U.S. Senator Diane Feinstein.

Elsewhere in California: San Bernardino school moves to remove Cesar Chavez’s name amid sexual abuse allegations.

A San Bernardino middle school named after Cesar Chavez is taking steps to remove the labor leader’s name after bombshell sexual abuse allegations surfaced this week.

In a statement posted on its website, the San Bernardino City Unified School District said it is “taking initial measures” while they continue to gather information and assess next steps.

The school, currently known as Cesar E. Chavez Middle School, opened in 2005 and was named to “honor the enduring contributions to the farmworkers’ labor movement.”

“Effective immediately, the district will begin removing or covering external signage bearing the school’s name and will pause the use of the name and logo across official district and school platforms, including websites, social media and printed materials,” the district said.

During the interim period, the school will be referred to as Middle School #318.

A couple of years before Jerry Orbach passed away in 2004, the veteran actor was “named a ‘Living Landmark’ by the New York Landmarks Conservancy, along with his Law & Order co-star Sam Waterston. Orbach quipped that the honor meant ‘that they can’t tear me down.’”

But as we found out in 2020, they can tear you down – and in a frighteningly quick fashion, to boot.

Speaking of actors, there’s a remarkably simple solution to California’s current dilemma:

Posted at 2:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 22nd, 2026

IT’S COME TO THIS:

 

After declaring “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him,” Nietzsche wrote that Europe wasn’t going to like what comes next. “Alas, the time of the most despicable man is coming,” Nietzsche warned Europe in 1885′s Also sprach Zarathustra, “he that is no longer able to despise himself. Behold, I show you the last man…The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes everything small. His race is as ineradicable as the flea-beetle; the last man lives longest.”

Posted at 1:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 22nd, 2026

WALTER DURANTY CALLED, AND SAID YOU MIGHT WANT TO DIAL THE DECADENCE BACK A BIT:

UPDATE:

And all in service to the Omnicause:

(Classical allusion in headline.)

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 22nd, 2026

INSECT-IFYING HUMANITY: The Paul Ehrlich Legacy.

Far from suffering rising death rates, the world is healthier than ever before. By the reckoning of the U.N. Population Division, global life expectancy has leapt since 1968: from under 56 years to over 73 years. Indeed, worldwide life expectancy today is roughly three years higher than was America’s when The Population Bomb came out.

But then again, Ehrlich wasn’t great at forecasting the American future, either: Among his more memorable howlers was a 1969 conjecture that overuse of pesticides might drive down U.S. life expectancy at birth to just 42 years by 1980.

One of the reasons worldwide life expectancy has been rising over the postwar era is that food is becoming steadily more plentiful—so plentiful, in fact, that overnutrition is displacing undernutrition as the globe’s principal dietary problem. By 2021, indeed, more women of childbearing age in India were measured as overweight than underweight.

For its part, the marked rise in worldwide caloric availability per capita has been facilitated by dramatic long-term declines in the cost of food. By 2024, the inflation-adjusted prices of the main cereals—corn, rice, and wheat—were less than half as high as when The Population Bomb came out. This means that food is actually less scarce today than when our planetary population was four and a half billion smaller.

Ehrlich was never able to understand this paradox—or why his constant prognostications about the human future were so unfailingly erroneous. But the reason is really very simple. Professor Ehrlich was a genuine expert in population: It’s just that he studied butterflies.

As Tom Wolfe wrote in his 2000 essay, “In the Land of the Rococo Marxists,” “An intellectual is a person knowledgeable in one field who speaks out only in others.”

In “Paul Ehrlich’s Unexploded Ordnance,” James Lileks begins with a flashback to the doomsday-obsessed 1970s before concluding:

The subhead of Ehrlich’s New York Times obituary was amusing: “His best-selling 1968 book, which forecast global famines, made him a leader of the environmental movement. But he faced criticism when his predictions proved premature.” Premature. As in, “It’ll surely happen eventually, and we hope so because people are a pestilence and Mother Earth weeps every time a baby is born.” Optimism, of course, is for fools who just don’t know how bad things are — and who can actually close their eyes at night without thinking about microplastics.

As populations crash all over the world, the specter of numberless hordes clashing over the last pack of peanuts no longer haunts the leftist imagination. It might occur to them that societies could suffer from population decline, particularly in places where the system is set up to extract money from one small group and give it a much larger one. Well, if it comes to that, we can just turn to incompatible cultures and import grand quantities of sullen dudes who are disinclined to adapt. If they vote correctly, what’s the downside? Okay, well, some of them might blow themselves up at a Christmas celebration, but that’s the price you gotta pay. The metaphorical Population Bomb was horrible! The literal population bomb, well, we can work with that.

Governor Walz and Mayor Mamdani chuckle and shrug their shoulders.

Posted at 1:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 22nd, 2026

NOT ANTI-WAR, JUST ON THE OTHER SIDE:

Related: Julia Ioffe, who in 2018 said that Trump was radicalizing more people than ISIS, was asking “Is Trump Headed for an Iran Quagmire?” on March 2nd, the day after the first US and Israeli bombs and missiles were launched.

And as a result:

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 22nd, 2026

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT:

Veteran airline pilots are always welcome to take up the craft of acting as a second career, however:

 

Posted at 10:44 am by Ed Driscoll on Mar 22nd, 2026
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