KINSLEY GAFFE: World Economic Forum speaker (accidentally) makes the case against digital government currency.

“We are at the cusp of physical currency essentially disappearing,” the economist said at the WEF event. “If you think about the benefits of digital money, there are huge potential gains…It’s not just about digital forms of digital currency; you can have programmability — units of central bank currency with expiry dates.”

By this, Prasad means that your money could be “programmed” so that you must spend it by a certain date or it disappears. The government could also exercise this control over what you can buy with your money, too.

“You could have […] a potentially better — or some people might say a darker world — where the government decides that units of central bank money can be used to purchase some things, but not other things that it deems less desirable like say ammunition, or drugs, or pornography,” Prasad said, “And that is very powerful in terms of the use of a CBDC, and I think also extremely dangerous to central banks.”

This is the major danger of a CBDC. With a cash-based system, while the government ultimately creates the currency, it cannot control how people use it once it’s out there. However, with a CBDC, politicians could quite literally block you from spending money on “undesirable” things. And, rest assured, when political elites have power at their disposal, they always find a reason to exercise it.

It could be the “climate emergency” that justifies them blocking you from purchasing more than an allotted amount of gasoline. It could be the threat of “extremism” that justifies them from blocking you from purchasing certain books with “dangerous” ideas. And so on.

And having enjoyed a banner year in 2020, many politicians won’t need much of an excuse for another round of lockdowns and bans: Coming soon: Climate lockdowns?

BEGUN, THE NAPOLEONIC WARS HAVE: Napoleon heralds the return of the man’s movie.

It is a stereotype to suggest that all a male viewer wants to watch at his local cinema is bloodshed. Yet there is going to be an enormous amount of that on offer during the rest of 2023 (although Oppenheimer, bizarrely, is promising extended scenes of nudity and sex from its stars Florence Pugh and Cillian Murphy instead; whatever floats your boat). The return of such maestros as David Fincher, Martin Scorsese and Scott to cinemas is welcome — even if all their pictures had to be funded by streaming services — but it is also a reminder of how few younger filmmakers are emerging with this kind of picture.

We shall see whether Napoleon is another [Ridley] Scott classic, or a disappointment, but its early marketing suggests that the now eighty-five-year-old director has returned with a big, manly epic, full of swagger and panache. When it emerges this Thanksgiving, cinemas will be awash with viscera and blood — metaphorically speaking — and if it proves a critical and commercial hit (Scorsese’s picture has already won rave reviews at Cannes) then we can tentatively look forward to a renaissance in male-oriented pictures. I’m still holding out for a Lord Nelson biopic, but there’s Gladiator 2 on its way next year, with persistent rumors of a Russell Crowe cameo. Who knows: if enough men have films aimed at them again, they might even start going to the cinema in considerable numbers instead of snoozing in front of Netflix in their underwear. And if you build it — and do it well — they will, let’s hope, come.

Meanwhile, there is another Napoleonic project in the works: Steven Spielberg “Mounting A Big Production” For Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Napoleon’; Project Is Set As Seven-Part Limited Series For HBO.

One of Stanley Kubrick’s lost projects, a large-scale biopic of Napoleon Bonaparte, has been in the works for HBO for the last seven years.

Steven Spielberg, who has been involved for at least ten years, now says he is “mounting a big production” and the project will become a seven-part series for the premium cable network.

Deadline understands that the project is still in the development stages but it is nearing a series order.

Speaking at the Berlin Film Festival, The Fabelmans director said, “With the co-operation of Christiane Kubrick and Jan Harlan, we’re mounting a large production for HBO on based on Stanley’s original script Napoloeon. We are working on Napoleon as a seven-part limited series,” he said.

Kubrick himself would likely be quite happy with the miniseries format for Napoleon. In an interview discussing his brilliant 1975 film Barry Lyndon (which grew out of the research he had begun for the stillborn Napoleon project) with his biographer, French film critic Michel Ciment, Kubrick said, “I have had a complete set of Thackeray sitting on my bookshelf at home for years, and I had to read several of his novels before reading Barry Lyndon. At one time, Vanity Fair interested me as a possible film but, in the end, I decided the story could not be successfully compressed into the relatively short time-span of a feature film. This problem of length, by the way, is now wonderfully accommodated for by the television miniseries which, with its ten- to twelve-hour length, pressed on consecutive nights, has created a completely different dramatic form.”

JEEZ, WHERE YA BEEN, HOMER? THE WHOLE STEEL INDUSTRY’S GAY: Is America Going Queer?

(Classical reference in headline.)

JACK SHAFER: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Real Motive.

Kennedy’s candidacy has broadened the platform for his previously banned-by-Facebook-and-Instagram outré ideas about vaccines, not to mention his views on his father’s assassination, gender dysphoria and chemicals, antidepressants and school shootings, the CIA, and the “stolen” 2004 election. That adds to the considerable platform he has already built on his podcasts and his bestselling screed The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health. The current campaign has and will continue to expand his exposure until he concedes the nomination to Biden.

Kennedy may have spent his career as an environmental activist and litigator on the political sidelines, but he’s well aware of the dividends that can be earned from running a long-shot presidential campaign. As laid out in a recent Insider article, the typical dark horse candidacy is mostly about climbing the rungs of power. Would former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg be the secretary of Transportation today if he hadn’t run in 2020? Would Kamala Harris, who polled below Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders for almost the entire 2020 primary campaign, and frequently did worse than Buttigieg, have been tapped as Biden’s running mate if she had not run? Would Sanders possess his current clout if not for his two unexpectedly strong forays? Failed candidacies have produced book contracts, cable TV deals, paid speaking engagements, lobbying gigs and proximity to power.

There is a flip side though. As Glenn noted last night, “incumbents who face a serious primary challenge generally lose. RFK Jr. is polling around 20%. Compare to Eugene McCarthy in 1968.” And Ronald Reagan versus Jerry Ford in 1976, Teddy Kennedy versus Jimmy Carter in 1980, and Pat Buchanan versus George H.W. Bush in 1992.

OLD AND BUSTED: Defund the Police.

The New Hotness? Disable the security cameras!

HEADLINE OF THE DAY: Las Vegas police: New York man fights one-legged man, strips naked, dances on top of poker table.

What happens in Vegas stays is often pretty frickin’ weird, to be honest.

MOVE ALONG, NOTHING TO SEE HERE: DOJ Announces Slew Of Charges Against Gal Luft, ‘Missing Witness’ Of Alleged Biden Corruption.

UPDATE:

(Updated and bumped.)

MARK JUDGE: Oppo the Justices: The Stasi Left is Using the Avenatti Playbook.

It’s 2023 now, and leftists are indeed using the exact same tactics they used against Kavanaugh and me to assail the Supreme Court itself. I’ve hammered home again and again how they were going to deploy it. Many of the same conservatives who kept telling me to move on are now expressing shock about what’s happening. Welcome to the party, guys.

As was the case with us, the left’s plan has just four steps for crushing constitutionalist justices and hijacking the Court:

• Do opposition research. Dig up some apparent dirt on the justices, even if it is not convincing or relevant.
• Feed it to the media, who will shout it through a bullhorn.
• Call for subpoenas — even of the Chief Justice himself, if he won’t play ball. Haul them up and humiliate them in the (Democrat-run) Senate.
• Impeach the conservative justice, or pack the court with new, compliant members.

Yes, they are really trying this. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez just gave a speech demanding that Congress subpoena Justice John Roberts.

Read the whole thing.

THIS IS CNN:

Dana Bash claims that Joe Biden shunning his grandkid is "disturbing on so many levels" not because that's what the President is doing, but because "Republicans are using it."
She says it goes against "the brand and the kind of person that we all know and believe Joe Biden to be" pic.twitter.com/oM8vsXzUdb

— Nicholas Fondacaro (@NickFondacaro) July 10, 2023

Evergreen:

BIG CITY DREAMS: Gayle Chong Kwan is a Brit who is expressing her “political and ecological positioning through [a] fine art practice,” according to the London Observer, which is also allowing Kwan to complain about how expensive a city can be for artists like herself.

As David Thompson adds, “At which point, readers may suspect that the imperative is not so much being creative, but being creative in London, a notoriously expensive city, but in which one can draw attention to the fact that one lives and works in London, a notoriously expensive city. Thereby glowing with a kind of location status.” Thompson also adds that the Observer fails to mention the exciting new artistic medium that Kwan works within. That medium is, err, piles of milk bottles, which she has photographed on her Website, such as these:

More from Thompson:

Given the aesthetic uplift conjured into being via piles of plastic milk cartons, it is of course astounding that Ms Kwan and her equally high-minded peers, all doubtless schooled in political “positioning,” aren’t feeling sufficiently rewarded.

“It is like a hostile environment now,” says Ms Kwan. A sentiment that may conceivably be shared by those members of the general public who venture to art venues in search of aesthetics and objects of wonderment, but who find only unattractive tat, ponderous press releases, and piles of plastic milk cartons.

If the basic thrust of the Observer article sounds familiar – the need to be seen being creative in a suitably happening city, while living above one’s means – you may be thinking of this Guardian article. In which, a self-exalting novelist named Brigid Delaney tells us that creative people, people much like herself, must live in locales befitting their potential and importance, not their budget. And hence the imperative for public subsidy.

You, taxpayer, come hither. And bring your wallet.

As Tom Wolfe wrote about the deep-seated desire of the American artist to move to Manhattan in The Painted Word:

By 1900 and the era of Picasso, Braque & Co., the modern game of Success in Art was pretty well set. As a painter or sculptor the artist would do work that baffled or subverted the cozy bourgeois vision of reality. As an individual—well, that was a bit more complex. As a bohemian, the artist had now left the salons of the upper classes—but he had not left their world. For getting away from the bourgeoisie there’s nothing like packing up your paints and easel and heading for Tahiti, or even Brittany, which was Gauguin’s first stop. But who else even got as far as Brittany? Nobody. The rest got no farther than the heights of Montmartre and Montparnasse, which are what?—perhaps two miles from the Champs Elysées. Likewise in the United States: believe me, you can get all the tubes of Winsor & Newton paint you want in Cincinnati, but the artists keep migrating to New York all the same … You can see them six days a week … hot off the Carey airport bus, lined up in front of the real-estate office on Broome Street in their identical blue jeans, gum boots, and quilted Long March jackets … looking, of course, for the inevitable Loft…

I’m no expert on all things British, but I’ll take a chance and go waaaaay out on a limb and say that you can all of the milk bottles you want outside of London, as well.

I NEED TO BORROW SARAH’S SHOCKED FACE: Biden and Other Obama Officials Sought to ‘Torpedo’ Incoming Trump Admin, Docs Show.

CHRISTIAN TOTO: Five Shocking Reasons Media Savaged Sound of Freedom.

Storytelling Is For Liberals, Dummy

Hollywood, and its various off-shoots, is almost exclusively for left-leaning artists. Outlets like The Daily Wire and indie projects like “That Show Tonight” are the exceptions that prove the rule. Liberal journalists don’t take kindly to right-leaning art invading their space. It’s why they demean or ignore right-leaning success stories like Fox News’ “Gutfeld!” and The Daily Wire’s “What Is a Woman?”

When an indie hit like “Sound of Freedom” comes along, these journalists decry a subversive story within their progressive landscape. And they act (out) accordingly.

‘Freedom’ Exposes Groomers, Inc.

Conservatives have been attacking the Left for its alleged grooming tactics. Drag Queen Story Hours. Pride parades where sexually-charged acts are performed for all-ages crowds. Kiddie content featuring mature themes like non-binary characters and trans-related issues.

So-called gender-affirming surgery on minors.

No matter where one stands on these issues, the Right says it’s protecting children while the Left vehemently disagrees. That narrative plays into “Sound of Freedom” through no direct fault of the filmmakers or product. “Freedom” was completed five years ago and sat on the proverbial shelf until now.

Disney sat on anti-grooming film for five years and it took another distributor to buy them out and release it? That doesn’t fit the narrative at all!

Related: At Ace of Spades: The Media Campaigns Hard To Defend Child Exploiters.

DINERS, DIVES, AND THE DONALD: Liberals Lose Their Minds After Guy Fieri Meets With Donald Trump at UFC.

GOODER AND HARDER, SAN FRAN: Honduran Drug Dealers Say They’ve Flocked to San Francisco Because of Sanctuary Laws.

JUST NBC THE SCHIZOPHRENIA!

Shot: COVID-19 and obesity: Doctors studying link between excess weight and severe disease.

—NBC News, September 8th, 2020.

Chaser:

To be fair, my local gym definitely fits the new modern diverse requirements of white supremacy:

White Supremacy is more diverse than Harvard. pic.twitter.com/9fkra4Gi6N

— Noam Blum (@neontaster) July 7, 2023

Related: Eating three meals a day is white supremacy as well!

Dietician tells followers to eat whatever they want whenever they want because eating 3 meals a day is rooted in white supremacy pic.twitter.com/HOcUlomsYX

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) July 10, 2023

IT IS A RIDDLE, WRAPPED IN A MYSTERY, INSIDE AN ENIGMA; BUT PERHAPS THERE IS A KEY. THAT KEY IS RUSSIAN NATIONAL INTEREST: Putin met with Yevgeny Prigozhin after coup attempt.

I am genuinely curious to see how this all plays out, and not only for the obvious reason that what happens in Russia is a matter of world-historical importance. The stakes have risen very high with the war in Ukraine and the possibility of a collapse of the Russian government, so of course I want to know the details.

But frankly, I am just super curious about the bizarre goings-on. The story involves a hot dog vendor who becomes a warlord, a KGB agent who murders his opponents with Polonium, Russian windows that are also portals to the great beyond, threats of nuclear war, wigs, novelty mugs, and what appears to be the plot of a Mission Impossible movie.

I want to know what happens next, and if Tom Cruise is somehow involved.

Seriously, the strange turn of events makes it pretty clear that few, if any, have a clear idea of what is actually happening and why. Does Prighozin have a nuke stashed somewhere? Why would Putin meet with Prighozin, offer him more work, and then proceed to raid his home but not have him killed?

I can’t wait to see the movie.

Flashback: The Wagner ‘Coup’ Was Staged by Putin—and the West Fell for It. “Think about it: An army invades Russia, race right up to Moscow, and no one gets hurt? With just a few thousand men, it achieved what Hitler with almost a million men wasn’t able to? And Putin holds his military back? And then, with Moscow supposedly within his grasp, Prigozhin decides, ‘Oh well, never mind’ and heads to Belarus?”

RAGE, RAGE AGAINST THE DYING OF THE TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE: Biden reportedly fumes and spews curses at staff in private: ‘No one is safe.’

Even the left have finally noticed Sundown Joe’s lifelong anger issues: Biden the Angry: NY Mag Puff Piece Inadvertently Reveals He’s Actually Pretty Nasty.

But some die-hard socialists are prepared to explain it all away: Who they really are: Lefties go there cheering Biden for bullying his staff because they had it coming.

UPDATE: Of course, Biden had anger and entitlement issues (and issues with lying) long before entering his late-onset Trunalimunumaprzure phase:

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Satan Miraculously Turns Water Into Bud Light.

I DON’T WANT TO HEAR ANOTHER WORD ABOUT GLENN REYNOLDS’ CARBON FOOTPRINT:

https://twitter.com/BernieSpofforth/status/1678367707962523651

TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE!

King Charles wondering what the heck Biden is staring at before ushering him across the lawn. pic.twitter.com/xeTYneUjg0

— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) July 10, 2023

GIRLS WILL BE BOYS AND BOYS WILL BE GIRLS. IT’S A MIXED UP, MUDDLED UP, SHOOK UP WORLD, EXCEPT FOR LOLA: Congratulations, a Man Just Won Miss Netherlands.

TYLER O’NEIL: Nick Sandmann’s Attorney Joins Lawsuit Against SPLC.

UPDATE NEWSPEAK DICTIONARIES ACCORDINGLY, COMRADES: Vagina rebranded as ‘bonus hole’ by cervical cancer charity.

GOODER AND HARDER, SAN FRAN: Driverless Cars Hit By ‘Coning’ Incidents As San Francisco Group Rebels.

A San Francisco group that stands for “car-free spaces, transit equity, and the end of car dominance” is behind a wave of “coning” driverless cars owned by Waymo and Cruise.

Members of the Safe Street Rebels, a group that states cars are “polluting, dangerous & murderous,” are coning driverless cars across the city, which disables the vehicle and forces it to stop.

Here is some of the footage of coning incidents:

"Coning" a driverless car forces some of them to have to be hard reset. It's done as a form of protest against the autonomous vehicles.

So now people are gonna start bullying robots? That’s how it all starts … 🤔 pic.twitter.com/BIbst8CbKO

— Wall Street Silver (@WallStreetSilv) July 9, 2023

Why is the 21st century left such a cesspit of Luddism?

THE CRITICAL DRINKER RECOMMENDS: Sound of Freedom (Video).

Related: Past performance is no guarantee of future results: