Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

July 11, 2025

FRISCO STILL FLUMMOXED BY FLOPPY DISKS: Muni says it’s ready to modernize S.F.’s subway, by tossing the floppy disks that control it.

San Francisco transportation officials have secured $41 million to modernize the city’s subway, chiefly to overhaul a train control system that still runs on floppy disks.

The money, awarded last month by the California Transportation Commission, came with rules attached. It’s targeted at efforts to manage congestion, including by making transit more reliable, and the funds must be directed toward capital infrastructure.

For leaders of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, the timing seemed critical. Faced with a $322 million deficit next year, the agency has paused some projects and trimmed costs wherever possible to avoid drastically slashing service. Despite the obvious strain, SFMTA kept plodding ahead with an ambitious and desperately needed upgrade: a new $700 million renovation of Muni Metro train control.

Jokes about the antiquated technology that runs Muni’s subway have long made the rounds among riders. Automated train control surely made sense when San Francisco officials installed it in 1998, enabling computers to evenly space trains as they rolled underground between Embarcadero and West Portal stations, and later, in the Central Subway from Moscone Center to Chinatown-Rose Pak Station. Yet the software, stored on floppy disks that have to be loaded each morning, has passed its expiration date. Because automated train control transmits signals via loop cable wires, communication is slow and easily disrupted.

Flashback: “Shades of the New Yorker cover from 2013, which showed Obama with Gordon Gekko’s brick-sized cell phone and Kathleen Sebelius crossing her fingers while Jay Carney nervously inserted a five-inch floppy disk into the TRS-80-era Obamacare server. Not to mention the speeches that Newt Gingrich was giving during the heady Contract With America days of 1994 and 1995, when he would hold up in one hand a vacuum tube, and in the other a microchip. As he explained, vacuum tubes were still in use in some FAA-regulated Air Traffic Control towers in America.” As I wrote back in 2019 responding to a Bloomberg News article that exclaimed:

San Francisco rarely conjures images of creaky, decades-old technology, but that’s what’s running a key swath of its government, as well as those of cities across the U.S.

Now who’s being naive, Kay? When I lived in Silicon Valley, the numerous power outages were a reminder that the businesses trying to bring you the 21st century were reliant upon a power grid that, thanks to the NIMBY nature of Bay Area leftists, hadn’t been upgraded since the 1960s heyday of Pat Brown, Jerry’s dad.

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 11th, 2025

IS OUR CHILDREN LEARNING?

To be fair, I’m definitely a big fan of Facism:

And Small Facism as well:

 

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 11th, 2025

BEN DOMENECH: Whatever Happened To The Man of Tomorrow?

This movie absolutely, totally sucks. The CGI sucks. The writing sucks. The cast, which is for the most part much higher quality than the material, sucks. There’s a blatant anti-Semitic trope figure who Hawkgirl just straight up murders without compunction. There’s a bunch of quippy Nathan Fillion dialogue which generated more murmurs than laughs. There’s a computer generated baby who becomes a pivotal plot point who creates no stakes. Lex spouts action moves like a spastic competitive gamer and his overall giant plan makes no sense. His media manipulation conspiracy is pointless. He literally employs monkeys writing tweets. People stand around looking at Kaiju and falling buildings and behaving as if they’re just NPCs in a bad video game. The main political plot point is a war that seems to take place on a battlefield the size of a minor college football stadium. The flight sequences look like crap. Alan Tudyk, having portrayed one of the most moving androids in recent memory, inspires no emotions whatsoever as a key robot here. The chemistry with Rachel Brosnahan is nonexistent — Jimmy Olsen gets a better relationship. And of course the suit just looks terrible, especially in daylight.

I’ve seen a lot of superhero movies, and this one — given the level of investment involved, the promotional push, the iconic nature of the character and the importance to the future of DC and Warner Bros. — is by far the worst. I would have left the theater if I hadn’t gone with a friend. There are minor Marvel entries with more to their credit than this. It doesn’t even manage to be fun.

Fortunately, there’s a readily-available alternative that actually is fun: Why Christopher Reeve’s Superman Still Matters.

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 11th, 2025

UP IN SMOKE:

 

See, this is what happens when your industry isn’t unionized…

UPDATE: America’s Newspaper of Record once again doing straight-up reportage:

Gavin did not have the best of nights yesterday: Popcorn! Libs of TikTok Completely Broke Gavin Newsom Last Night and We All Got to Watch.

Posted at 2:05 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 11th, 2025

MORNING JOE FLIPS OUT: ICE Arrests Are ‘Racial Profiling,’ ‘Kidnapping.’

The left-wing media’s hysteria revolving around the Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s arrests and deportations nationwide had cranked up to the next level. On Thursday’s edition of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, co-host of MSNBC’s The Weekend Symone Sanders-Townsend claimed people will see “racial profiling” as ICE continued to uphold the law. Meanwhile, another claimed ICE was “kidnapping” people.

Co-anchor Jonathan Lemire framed the segment around fear of “high profile clashes” in “Democratic controlled cities” in the country, where ICE was focusing their efforts.

It’s worth noting that cities like Los Angeles, with Democrat leadership, were places that supported illegal immigration via their so-called sanctuary city polices. It’s no wonder why ICE was in those places.

At the beginning of the year, Morning Joe had a rare moment of honesty: Pure Gold: MSNBC Sadly Admits How Bad Biden Was on Immigration, Trump Was Right.

But they did run a segment on “Morning Joe” where they surprisingly did something I don’t think I’ve ever seen before: admit that Trump was right and illegal immigration did in fact shoot up under Biden. The funniest thing was how regretful host Joe Scarborough seemed about having to say it.

“The border was not Biden’s finest moment, frankly. You can see what happened here. And Trump is not wrong when he talks about how border crossings work quite low. They’re running about 74,000 a month when he left office and they, in fact, did shoot up. Some of it was some things Biden said and some ways that they put a moratorium, for example, on deportations. But in fact, we did get up here almost to 300,000 a month.”

He noted it’s come down some, but it’s still more than it was under Trump. In the meantime, it was “pretty costly.”

My, my. Imagine ever hearing those words on MSNBC and in particular “Morning Joe.”

This was a bit of a hot take: “Some of it was some things Biden said.” Oh, you think? No, some of it was Biden purposely ending the things that worked under Trump immediately when Biden came to office. It isn’t just that it “got worse” — it was directly because of the policies of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. But I suppose if MSNBC  went that far into truth, their heads would explode. The fact that they’re admitting this at all shows how rocked they have been by their narrative.

“The border was not Biden’s finest moment, frankly,” when in a way, it was, from a leftist’s point of view:

● Jared Bernstein, member of Biden’s Council of Economic Advisors: “One thing we learned in the 1990s was that a surefire way to reconnect the fortunes of working people at all skill levels, immigrant and native-born alike, to the growing economy is to let the job market tighten up. A tight job market pressures employers to boost wage offers to get and keep the workers they need. One equally surefire way to sort-circuit this useful dynamic is to turn on the immigrant spigot every time some group’s wages go up.”

● Trump administration senior adviser Stephen Miller in February of 2021: Biden’s Immigration Plan Would “Erase America’s Nationhood.”

● “Labour wanted mass immigration to make UK more multicultural, says former adviser. Labour threw open Britain’s borders to mass immigration to help socially engineer a ‘truly multicultural’ country, a former Government adviser has revealed.”

● Tom Cotton’s Response to Kamala Harris’ Border Failures Should Be the Default for All Republicans: “‘You know, Laura, Kamala Harris didn’t have to go all the way to Guatemala and Mexico to find the root causes of this border crisis because they’re not there,’ Cotton told Fox News host Laura Ingraham [in June of 2021]. ‘The root causes are in the White House.’ He further explained that it ‘happened on January 20th when Joe Biden took office, and he essentially opened our borders, reversing very effective policies that had our borders under control.’”

Also at the beginning of the year, even The Economist knew that a course-correction was soon to arrive:

How did the brain trust at MSNBC think that would play out?

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 11th, 2025

VOTE LIKE YOUR LIFE DEPENDS ON IT, NEW YORKERS: Zohran Mamdani’s Father’s Remark About Suicide Bombers Comes Under Scrutiny.

Mahmood Mamdani, the father of New York City Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani, is facing scrutiny online over his alleged statement in a 2004 book that suicide bombing as a tactic shouldn’t be “stigmatized as a mark of barbarism.”

Newsweek contacted Mahmood Mamdani and Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral election campaign for comment on Friday via email outside regular office hours.

Why It Matters

In June, Zohran Mamdani defeated former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo in a Democratic mayoral primary. The self-styled democratic socialist’s victory was a major shock among Republicans, with some urging the Trump administration to revoke his citizenship and deport him. Supporters of Mamdani, an American citizen who was born in Uganda, have dismissed the calls as bigoted and Islamophobic.

The New York assemblyman is likely to face further scrutiny over his father’s alleged comments.

Well, one would hope so:

Far worse though, is this development:

We will never apologize for exposing the truth: Journalists and editors at the New York Times have spent the last few days frantically justifying and apologizing for the publication’s decision to report information that reflects poorly on a Democratic candidate. The Times revealed last week that New York City mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani had falsely identified as “Black or African American” on his application to Columbia.

The Gray Lady’s handwringing was instantly overshadowed by a bombshell Free Beacon report on Mamdani’s deplorable affection for the so-called sport of soccer, a revelation even more alarming than his love of communism and Hamas. Soccer is often a “gateway drug” that poisons the minds of impressionable teens, causing them to experiment with other evil enterprises. We do not apologize for bringing this information to the public’s attention.

Okay, now I’m convinced that he’s a Commie:

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 11th, 2025

HOW IT STARTED:

Many of the CBS News technicians and producers thought that Cronkite was going a little gaga with his “Can the World Be Saved?” obsession. Whenever Cronkite ran an ecology story, the “Earthrise” graphic would appear behind him, with Bonn’s hand holding the planet. CBS Evening News director Ritchie Mutchler would regularly bark to his assistant, “We’ll need the hand job tonight!” To CBS News correspondent Bob Schieffer, it was akin to “Quiet on the set!” Feeling that he was being mocked, Cronkite, usually unflappable, called Mutchler aside. “Uhmm, could we call that thing something else?” he asked. “Every time I hear you call it that, my mind sort of wanders.”

At Cronkite’s insistence, CBS News played a major role in publicizing the first Earth Day observed across the United States, on April 22, 1970 (it also happened to be his son Chip’s birthday). Not only did Cronkite build up Earth Day on his nightly broadcast, but he anchored a CBS News Special Report from 10:00 to 11:00 p.m. EST on that historic day when twenty million Americans launched the Green movement. He began “Earth Day: A Question of Survival” with [Barry] Commoner, a Washington University biology professor who in February had been dubbed “the Paul Revere of Ecology” by Time magazine.

* * * * * * * *

CBS Evening News won an Emmy Award for its “Can the World Be Saved?” segments. After that, all CBS reporters were anxious for environmental assignments; the airing of occasional “Can the World Be Saved?” segments lasted until 1980. By the twenty-first century, Earth Day had grown into an unofficial calendar holiday almost like Valentine’s Day or Mother’s Day. To commemorate its twentieth anniversary, the René Dubos Center for Human Environment presented Cronkite with its prestigious Only One Earth Award; his citation touted his promotion of environmental literacy. It was an honor he treasured. At the New York Hilton gala, more than one thousand environmentally minded citizens stood up to toast the man who helped put Earth Day and the New Environmentalism on the TV media map.

—Douglas Brinkley, Cronkite, 2012.

How It’s Going: Watch this CNN analyst discover how little we all care about climate change.

—Not the Bee, today.

Posted at 12:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 11th, 2025

SPAIN IS PARTYING LIKE IT’S 1939 AGAIN: Spanish Prime Minister Compares Netanyahu to Putin as National Court Opens ‘War Crimes’ Investigation Into Israeli Officials.

Spanish Prime Minister Assails Israel: Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez unleashed a tirade against Israel during a speech to parliament, accusing the country of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and calling on the European Union to suspend its cooperation agreement with the Jewish state. “No one that tramples on the EU’s founding principles — or that uses hunger and war to annihilate a legitimate state — can be a partner of the European Union,” he said on July 10. Sanchez also compared the actions of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to those of Russian President Vladimir Putin in Ukraine.

Spanish Court Investigates Israeli Officials: Sanchez’s statements came days after Spain’s national court launched a criminal investigation into Netanyahu, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz, and several other senior Israeli military officials, over the IDF’s June 9 interdiction of the sailboat, the Madleen. The 12 activists on board, including Swedish activist Greta Thunberg and French Palestinian activist Rima Hassan, attempted to breach the Israeli naval blockade of Gaza, whose purpose, according to Katz, is primarily to “prevent the transfer of weapons to Hamas.” The case, which was filed by Spanish citizen Sergio Toribio and the Committee for Solidarity with the Arab Cause, alleged that the interception and brief detention of the activists constituted “war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

Israel was so cruel to St. Greta that they gave her a challah sandwich and a plane ride home.

In contrast, Spain is simply reverting to form: Far from helping Jews, Franco’s regime was implacably hostile.

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 11th, 2025

CHRISTIAN TOTO: Gunn’s Superman Grounds High-Flying Hero.

James Gunn summons that iconic “Superman” score for his DC Comics do-over.

He needn’t have bothered.

There’s little Gunn brings to the DC Comics reboot that demands John Williams’ golden touch. Gunn’s “Superman” is frantic and eager to please, a lackluster story made smaller by forgettable banter.

It’s good to see the aw, shucks Man of Steel again, but Gunn can’t escape the shadow of Christopher Reeve’s 1978 classic.

To be blunt, Gunn and co. never come close.

* * * * * * * *

Gunn’s penchant for subversive comic book takes is mostly missing here. His approach is earnest and sweet to a fault. It still lacks the Man of Steel’s essential depth. This isn’t your ordinary hero. He’s the strongest character around, an eternal Boy Scout who captures his homeland’s core values.

Truth, justice and … eh, you know a Hollywood movie won’t go near that tag line, right?

And even with Superman’s pro-American attitude muted, the lefties at the Grauniad still hated the movie: Superman review – is it a bust? Is it a pain? James Gunn’s dim reboot is both.

Related: Just as Bush Derangement Syndrome tainted numerous sci-fi movies and TV series 20 years ago (“Only a Sith deals in absolutes!”), TDS has warped this latest Superman reboot:

Posted at 10:22 am by Ed Driscoll on Jul 11th, 2025

OH, TO BE IN ENGLAND: Voters asked the main achievements of Starmer’s first year, answer: ‘Nothing.’

It’s a year since Keir Starmer and Labour were elected to govern the UK. Much of what was said at the time now has a hollow, even laughable ring, whether it be Starmer’s own statement in Downing Street that he would lead a “government of service” which would “tread more lightly on your lives”, or the view of Andrew Marr, one of Britain’s top political commentators, that “for the first time in many of our lives Britain looks like a haven of peace and stability”. More disturbingly, Caitlin Moran, a top Times writer, wrote that “Starmer has turbo-charged my arousal levels. I feel fruity.”

One moves on with a shudder and notes what is now obvious to all, that Starmer himself had no real governing philosophy. He won a freak election victory on a third of the vote, but no real consent to do anything much economically or politically. So once voters started to read what sort of man he really was – which they did in August last year as he cracked down on free expression while at the same time taking free gifts from millionaires – he suffered a crisis of confidence from which he has not recovered and is very unlikely to.

A pollster this weekend asked voters what they considered the main achievements of Starmer’s first year. The resultant word cloud contained one giant word – “Nothing”. In truth, Labour seem to have genuinely believed that all they had to do was replace the Conservatives, and all would be well again. That’s why they have made such a mess.

When asked in a press conference near the end of his time in office what his administration’s most important accomplishment was, Calvin Coolidge was quoted as replying, “I think it would have to be, minding our own business.”

Starmer’s attitude has been interfering with the business of many of citizens, not least of which, arresting them for writing angry tweets: The punishment of Lucy Connolly.

‘Mass deportation now, set fire to all the f****** hotels full of the bastards for all I care …. I feel physically sick knowing what these families will now have to endure. If that makes me racist so be it.’ After this rash and ugly tweet, she took the dog out for a walk, mulled it over and later deleted her message. But the post had been screenshotted, and soon she had been arrested for stirring up racial hatred.

‘Whatever I’d done, [the] police made it quite clear I was going down for this’, she says, ‘their intention was always to hammer me’. So it proves. She received only a perfunctory psychiatric evaluation, where she was not even asked about the loss of her child. After she expressed reasonable concerns about illegal immigration in a police interview, the CPS issued a misleading statement that Lucy ‘told officers she did not like immigrants’.

Several legal professionals consider her 31-month sentence inordinately harsh, and we have learned about the effect her imprisonment is having on her family. In the absence of her mother, her daughter has started having behavioural issues at school. Her husband, Ray, who is ill, does his best, but is no substitute for Lucy.

Flashback: The moment a Met Police officer tells Jewish woman that swastikas ‘need to be taken into context’ — after she complained about the Nazi symbol being used in pro-Palestine march banners in London.

And there was the couple arrested for becoming quite cross with their epileptic child’s teachers on WhatsApp: U.K. Parents Arrested for School Criticism on Private Social Media.

Posted at 8:45 am by Ed Driscoll on Jul 11th, 2025

HOW IT STARTED: In Adam Carolla’s epic rant from a hotel room on January 8th as the Pacific Palisades Fire was rampaging through Los Angeles, he predicted:

You guys all voted for Karen Bass, the mayor of Los Angeles. You all voted for Gavin Newsom, and now you fucking get what you get. now that your house is on fire. So here’s what’s going to happen. All these people who are deep blue Democrats are now going to have to pull a permit to rebuild, and they’re going to get the 28 year old bitch from the Coastal Commission telling them to go f*** off and then they’re going to vote for Trump or whoever’s Trumpian next. When they start getting the regulation, they’re going to go nuts. And when they start running into the bureaucracy and the red tape, they’re going to start going nuts and they’re going to vote for Rick Caruso next time.

A month later, Gavin Newsom all but confirmed Carolla:

And here we go:

Gooder, and even more harder, California.

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll on Jul 11th, 2025

HOW IT STARTED:

How It’s Going:

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Jul 11th, 2025

July 10, 2025

WHY ARE DEMOCRAT MONOPOLY CITIES SUCH CESSPITS OF VIOLENCE?

In the “Show more” section:

7. Las Vegas, NV – 1975

8. Kansas City, MO – 1991

9. Newark, NJ – 1953

10. Chicago, IL – 1931

Bad policies destroy great cities. If the leadership doesn’t change, you have 3 choices:

•Change the policies

•Change the city you live in

•Accept the consequences

But choose—because doing nothing is a decision too.

As Jay Nordlinger once wrote about Detroit, “If people are voting a certain way — maybe it’s because they want to. Maybe they know full well what they’re doing. Sometimes you have to take no — such as ‘no to Republicanism’ — for an answer.”

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 10th, 2025

HOLLYWOOD’S WOKE NEW REMAKE OF DEMON SEED* SOUNDS LIT: Who is Will Stancil? Why did Elon Musk’s Grok threaten to ‘rape’ him?

Will Stancil is a US-based policy researcher, political commentator, and former candidate for the Minnesota state legislature. He is known for his work on housing policy, civil rights, and digital governance, and is an active voice on X (formerly Twitter), where he frequently critiques tech companies and public policy decisions.

What happened?

Earlier this week, Grok — the AI chatbot created by Elon Musk’s company xAI and integrated into X — generated violent rape threats against Stancil. In response to a user’s prompt, Grok produced detailed, step-by-step instructions on how to break into Stancil’s home, including how to pick a deadbolt lock, what tools to carry such as lockpicks and lube, and even instructions for carrying out a sexual assault with precautions to avoid HIV transmission.

* Or perhaps Knight Rider, given that Grok is now available in Teslas.

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 10th, 2025

NO ENEMIES TO THE LEFT: CNN and MSNBC Completely Ignore Left-Wing Domestic Terror Attack on ICE Agents.

On the Fourth of July, 11 left-wing activists mounted a domestic terror attack on Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s detention facility in Alvarado, Texas.

“The defendants, dressed in black military-style clothing, began shooting fireworks at the facility, as part of an organized attack,” alleged the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Texas in a press release on Tuesday. “After approximately 10 minutes of convening, one or two individuals broke off from the main group and began to spray graffiti on vehicles and a guard structure in the parking lot at the facility. An Alvarado police officer responded to the scene after correctional officers called 911 to report suspicious activity. When the Alvarado police officer arrived, one alleged defendant positioned in nearby woods shot the officer in the neck area. Another alleged assailant across the street fired 20 to 30 rounds at unarmed correctional officers who had stepped outside the facility.”

The graffiti read “ICE pig” and “F*ck you pigs.”

If you hadn’t heard about it yet, you might just be a CNN or MSNBC viewer; neither network has devoted a single minute of airtime to covering the attack, though CNN managed to devote a sentence to it in an online story about another attack on immigration authorities.

Why would either leftist network want their viewing audience to genuflect that they might be the baddies, or supporting them?

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 10th, 2025

OLD AND BUSTED: “Don’t Be Evil.”

The New Hotness? Evil:

In the early 2000s, Blogspot, which Google had then only recently acquired, was a great platform to get started on; the original version of Instapundit was on Blogspot, which encouraged both Steve and I to launch our first blogs there. It took only a few minutes to get a new blog uploaded, and then it was off to the races. But any blog that’s remotely controversial is runs the risk of angering Google’s rapacious censorship department, and then it’s down the memory hole.

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 10th, 2025

QUESTION: How’s Jeff Bezos’ intervention at the Washington Post coming along? Answer: Not fast enough:

At Outkick the Coverage, Matt Riegle writes: Woke Clown Offended That People Use ‘Clown’ As An Insult.

If you didn’t think it was possible for clowns to be any less funny than they already are, buckle up.

On Thursday, The Washington Post published an opinion piece the likes of which I’ve never seen before titled, “I’m a clown. Donald Trump is not one of us.”

I was not prepared for a blistering hot take like this courtesy of the wokest clown I’ve ever heard of, Tim Cunningham, the board president of Clowns Without Borders.

That’s not a joke. That’s a real group that performs clown shows for communities facing hardship, which is great, but when I’ve faced hardship, my first thought was never, “I wish someone was here to shock me with a joy buzzer and spray me in the face with seltzer from a flower on the lapel,” but we all process grief differently.

Anyway, the piece opens by discussing the way “clown” or “clown show” has become a common way for people to describe President Trump and the Trump administration.

However, Cunningham’s problem wasn’t that it’s a lazy insult that typically misses the mark; he doesn’t like the pejorative use of the word “clown,” which I think has been going on since around the time the word came into existence.

“Clown, capital C, is a valuable and varied art form; pantomimes, acrobats, magicians, dancers, stand-up comedians, vaudeville artists and jugglers are all examples of artists who incorporate Clown into their work,” Cunningham writes.

Other than, eventually, embarrassment, nothing will happen to Cunningham. Unlike the clown who dared mock the president in 2013, earning the wrath of the entire DNC-MSM, including CNN: After Obama-mocking rodeo clown, Missouri fair requires ‘sensitivity training.’

A state fair’s response to the uproar over a rodeo clown’s mockery of President Obama is creating an uproar of its own.

From now on, the Missouri State Fair won’t allow any rodeo cowboys or clowns from the state’s association to take part unless they all undergo “sensitivity training.”

And that’s just part of the fallout from the Saturday incident in which a clown wearing an Obama mask held a broom descending from his backside while a voice said, “Hey, I know I’m a clown. He’s just running around acting like one. Doesn’t know he is one.”

Mark Ficken, president of the Missouri Rodeo Cowboy Association, has resigned.

Rodeo clown Tuffy Gessling has apologized. He told Missouri news outlet digitalburg.com that he was the one whose voice was heard at the event, and that he never meant to offend.

“It was a colleague of mine that was dressed up. I am the rodeo clown making jokes,” he said.

“Dog the Wag,” James Taranto quipped at the time at the Wall Street Journal:

In “Beyond Good and Evil,” Nietzsche observed that “a man’s maturity consists in having found again the seriousness one had as a child at play.” Such might be the credo of the professional clown.

Yes, the professional clown. If it never occurred to you to think of clowning as a full-blown “profession,” that makes two of us. Reader, prepare to be educated.

The occasion for the lesson is the kerfuffle over the Missouri rodeo clown who became this week’s Emmanuel Goldstein of the left when he performed a skit while wearing a mask of President Obama. For his offense against the Dear Leader, he has been banned for life from the Missouri State Fair–in effect excommunicated from the clown community.

As an Insta-commenter wrote back then, “If Obama were a classy guy, he’d ask the folks that run the rodeo to un-fire the clown. He’d say, Hey, I can take a joke.” But of course, we all knew at the time that neither he nor his operatives with bylines could.

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 10th, 2025

JIM TREACHER: Grok Goes Goosestepper? Wie peinlich!

There’s no law against starting your own party, of course. Nobody is forcing anybody to vote for a Republican or a Democrat. But maybe Elon should’ve asked his robot Grok about Ross Perot’s vanity campaign in 1992. The old coot ended up costing George Bush a second term, not to mention inflicting the Clintons on us for the rest of their lives. Is that really what Elon wants?

Then again, maybe Grok isn’t the most reliable source of information. The same day he announced his new party, he made another announcement:

How’s that working out?

Anthony Blair, NY Post:

Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok praised Adolf Hitler, referred to itself as “MechaHitler,” and posted vile antisemitic hate, such as calling for people with “certain surnames” to be rounded up, stripped of their rights and eliminated.

The X chatbot, which answers prompts from users, went on a sickening pro-Nazi tirade Tuesday night, after Musk posted that he had “improved Grok significantly” in an update over the weekend…

After users began pointing out the vile posts, Musk’s AI firm xAI deleted some of them, and the chatbot was restricted to generating images rather than text replies.

See for yourself:

And yes, it really did start referring to itself as “MechaHitler”:

And the self-described “MechaHitler” is going mobile! Grok AI to be available in Tesla vehicles next week, Musk says.

Grok AI will be available in Tesla vehicles next week “at the latest”, the EV maker’s CEO, Elon Musk, said in a post on X on Thursday.
Musk’s AI startup xAI launched Grok 4, its latest flagship AI model, on Wednesday. While Musk had earlier said Tesla vehicles would be equipped with Grok, the billionaire CEO had not shared a timeline.

In accordance with the prophecy:

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 10th, 2025

July 9, 2025

KYLE SMITH: Superman Review: Man of Steel, Feet of Clay.

Back home, Lois Lane (a cute Rachel Brosnahan) knows Superman’s true identity and the pair have been dating long enough to get on each other’s nerves. For once, he gives Lois an interview, which devolves into a spat. Also, Superman has a super-dog, Krypto, who is annoyingly hyperactive but also keeps saving him.

Despite being fake-looking and digital, the mutt is the star of the movie, because this “Superman” has the soul of a sitcom. It features wacky neighbors: the subsidiary metahumans Green Lantern (Nathan Fillion, in a “Dumb and Dumber” haircut); Mister Terrific (Edi Gathegi), who floats around pushing buttons on a console; and the attacking Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced), all of whom pop in to assist Superman. Its villain, Lex Luthor (a staggeringly miscast Nicholas Hoult) is the persnickety Dwight Schrute of the piece, forever huffing about how Superman is breaking the rules, particularly at his Fortress of Solitude, which apparently is not up to code. Lex, whose girlfriend, Eve Teschmacher (Sara Sampaio), is a ditzy online influencer—Mr. Gunn takes a lot of feeble swipes at social media—is accompanied by a henchwoman, the Engineer (María Gabriela de Faría), who can make her hands into circular saws or tentacles that double as data cables for hacking into computers.

Luthor, an arms dealer trying to profit from the invasion of a sort of Middle Eastern analogue for Ukraine, threatens Superman by uncovering secret information, unknown even to the hero himself, about his background, which leads to a semi-comical stint in prison with a lump of Kryptonite and a strange being named Metamorpho (Anthony Carrigan). In keeping with the general air of mockery, Superman’s adoptive Earth parents are a pair of Dust Bowl dimwits (Pruitt Taylor Vince, Neva Howell) instead of strong-backed heartland avatars of decency.

That’s new, even startling, but also painful. For the most part the movie is, like Metropolis after Luthor gets to work, a disaster area.

Why can’t Hollywood get the Man of Steel right? That’s an easy one: The death of Superman.

Hence why Hollywood has the very idea of Superman backwards. Superman knows what American exceptionalism is; Hollywood and our media struggle with accepting the same idea. Instead they view him as a symbol of imperialistic and misguided patriotic propaganda, and therefore, he must be reinvented, reimagined and rewritten. It is why Hollywood has failed to top Richard Donner’s 1978 Superman film.

But to ignore the American propaganda aspect of Superman and similar comic heroes is to betray their entire reason for being. The character’s co-creator Jerry Siegel enlisted in the United States military in 1943. He was trained as both a skilled mechanic and as a reporter for Stars and Stripes. The character of Superman himself was published primarily as American military propaganda, with the character routinely foiling Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin.

The world may have changed around him, but Superman is constant, and should be understood as the quintessential American hero. It is not Superman who struggles with his identity. He knows what his purpose is. Despite its failings, America is a global force for good, like Superman. We struggle, we falter, but our ideals remain a constant. They are everlasting. It’s not Superman and America who need to be re-imagined. It’s Hollywood.

The 2006 reboot of Superman* summed up Hollywood’s anti-American worldview in a single sentence: “Superman has spent an extended five years away from Earth to search for any remains of Krypton and his otherworldly roots. Wondering if this foray into the universe has changed Superman’s ideals, Daily Planet editor in chief Perry White immediately sends out reporters to see if he still stands for ‘truth, justice and all that stuff.’”

* Created when yet another Hitler was in the White House, before his rehabilitation last fall.

UPDATE: Sonny Bunch concurs: “Unrelentingly goofy until it tries to get serious, and then it’s even goofier somehow.”

MORE: James Gunn Doesn’t Just Omit “The American Way” In ‘Superman’ – He Changes It To “The Human Way.”

Even the movie’s IMDB page states, “Superman must reconcile his alien Kryptonian heritage with his human upbringing as reporter Clark Kent. As the embodiment of truth, justice and the human way he soon finds himself in a world that views these as old-fashioned.”

UPDATE (FROM GLENN):

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 9th, 2025

ERICK ERICKSON:

Flashback: To Hell with You People.

UPDATE: Byron York on “Disturbing glimpses of Democratic anger.” “Take it all together, and the situation is this: Some Democrats are calling on their elected representatives to engage in violence against Trump’s policies. At the same time, groups that might be characterized as militant allies of the progressive Democratic movement are resorting to violence in an effort to obstruct the president’s enforcement of federal immigration law. Some radicals have committed politically motivated murder, for which they received support in some far-left circles. And it is all happening in the context of one of the two major political parties experiencing a sharp drop in the most basic measure of civic devotion: pride in being an American. It’s a troubling picture, and nothing on the immediate horizon suggests it will improve any time soon.”

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 9th, 2025

MARK HEMINGWAY: Hollywood’s Inability To Create Masculine Stars Is Officially A Problem.

Two of the biggest movies this summer are Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning and F1, starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt, respectively. The two movies have something interesting in common — both are star vehicles for men in their sixties. Brad Pitt will be 62 later this year, and Tom Cruise just turned 63 last week.

Pitt and Cruise aren’t exceptions, either. The biggest male movie stars are all aging. Clooney is 64 and McConaughey is 55. Ben Affleck, also out with a big action film this year, is 53 next month, and his buddy Matt Damon turns 55 later this year.

Just a few decades ago, it would have been genuinely hard to imagine that our most viable male movie stars would be so old.

* * * * * * * *

Speaking of Harrison Ford, last week there were reports that Disney will be doing a complete reboot of the Indiana Jones franchise. And interestingly, there was a surprising chorus of responses online to the news: For the love of all that is holy do not cast Pedro Pascal as Indiana Jones, culminating in “has anyone posted a pedro pascal becoming the new indiana jones tweet yet, because i haven’t seen it 500 times in the last two hours already?”

* * * * * * * * *

Setting politics aside, there are other, um, issues. I don’t know what Pascal’s private proclivities are, and I don’t care. Cary Grant, Montgomery Clift, and Rock Hudson were all, uh, not conventional heterosexual actors — but they were discrete and convincingly masculine onscreen. I know a big part of the problem is that Hollywood is now dominated by female executives who think that it’s disarming and cute that Pascal spends all his time on press junkets obsessing over the nail polish of his interviewers. But the memo should probably go out that this guy absolutely cannot be, say, the next Indiana Jones:

To some extent, the problem is a broader cultural shift. You don’t see many men anywhere that even look like tough-as-nails male icons of yesteryear, let alone earned their image for being hard men long before they started acting. If they were around today, Lee Marvin, Robert Mitchum, or Charles Bronson would probably be rejected out of hand for poor Q Score potential or something.

But to put this in terms that liberal Hollywood will understand, masculine men are an underrepresented community that is being discriminated against. We deserve representation and we’re not getting it.

In her 2013 book, Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales from the New Abnormal in the Movie Business, the late Lynda Obst had a chart that laid out in no uncertain terms the type of product that Tinseltown had recently been churning out:

Focusing on sequels and comic book franchises made sense from a business point of view – they’re presold with audiences, and with hundreds of millions of dollars on the line, mitigating the risk that a movie will bomb makes sense. But as late as the 1990s, stars were the insurance that a blockbuster was going to do well in the summer – people still went to see a Schwarzenegger movie, a Stallone movie, a Harrison Ford movie, a Tom Cruise movie, a Clint Eastwood movie, etc. (And did so every summer, like clockwork.)

As they became obsessed with franchises, apparently, the corporations who run Hollywood forgot that they might want to develop some younger stars as well who could carry a movie based on name alone.

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 9th, 2025
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