November 30, 2025

JOHN PODHORETZ: Tom Stoppard, 1937-2025.

[A]ccording to his official biographer Hermione Lee, he read a novel by a Croatian writer named Dasa Drndic called Trieste. A character in the novel, writes Lee, “lacerates real historical figures whom she describes as ‘bystanders’ or ‘blind observers.’ They include Herbert von Karajan, Madeleine Albright, and Tom Stoppard: people who discover their family history, but turn a blind eye to it. Her ‘blind observers’ are ‘ordinary people’ who “play it safe. They live their lives unimpeded.’”

This hit Stoppard hard. Writes Lee: “He thought: yes, actually, she’s right. He felt that Drndic was justifiably blaming him for excluding from this ‘charmed life’ all those others who had ‘disappeared.’ He took it as an intelligible rebuke. He felt regret and guilt….He went back over his family history, and his Jewishness. It began to seem to him that he had been in denial about his own past. He increasingly felt that he should have been rueing his good fortune in escaping from those events, rather than congratulating himself. As a playwright, he needed to inhabit those lives he never lived, in his imagination. He started to think about a play which would answer the rebuke.”

That play is Leopoldstadt, and in every way, it is a miracle. It is the greatest play of our time, and the greatest play Stoppard ever wrote, and perhaps the greatest literary work written by an octogenarian. It is set not in Czechoslovakia but in an apartment in Vienna we see at four moments in time—1899, 1924, 1938, and 1955. Over the course of the first three scenes we meet 20 members of the extended Marz-Jacobowicz family. In the final scene, only three remain; all the others are dead, either directly or indirectly, due to the Holocaust. One of them is Stoppard’s stand-in, a young British writer who has no memory of his youth in Vienna from which he was removed by his widowed mother’s fiancee until he is reminded of a scar on his hand. He cut it as a little boy and had it stitched up by a now-dead uncle in that very apartment. He dissolves into tears. His cousin, a survivor of the camps, says to him, “You live as if without history, as if you throw no shadow behind you.”

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 10:45 am by Ed Driscoll

GOOD AND HARD, FUN CITY: The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Your New ‘Red-Green’ City.

You’re no idiot, of course. You know how to navigate the subway (mostly), find the best dollar slice, and avoid eye contact on the L train. But when it comes to the “seismic shift” in your city’s government, you might feel a little out of your depth. Who are these new people? Why does the Mayor want to “decolonize” your landlord? And what exactly is a “Red-Green” alliance?

Don’t panic! The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Your New ‘Red-Green’ City is here to help you understand how your vote for cheaper rent accidentally bought you a ticket to a “civilizational jihad.”

Part 1: The “Trojan Horse” (It’s Not Just a Gift!)

You thought you were voting for “bread and butter” issues like affordable housing. But surprise! You actually voted for a “Trojan Horse” filled with revolutionaries.

Chapter 1: Meet Your New Mayor (He’s Cool, He’s Hip, He’s … a Tribalist?)

Zohran Mamdani might look like your average progressive who enjoys a good cold brew, but experts say he’s actually a “Muslim Tribalist.” While he certainly doesn’t act like a hardline cleric from Tehran—he is way too cool for that—his goals are far more specific. He views New York City not as a bustling metropolis, but as a “colonial outpost” that needs to be “decolonized.” Consequently, his strategy involves using the Mayor’s office as a “forward operating base” for a global war.

Idiot’s Definition: “Affordability Agenda” This is a clever disguise used to hide a network of Islamists and socialists who want to dismantle Western civilization while you’re distracted by the promise of lower rent.

Part 2: Going Green (And We Don’t Mean Recycling)

In this administration, “Green” stands for the Global Islamist Movement. Meet the new folks in charge of your community organizing!

It’s satire — but it really isn’t.

Posted at 10:14 am by Ed Driscoll

SCOTT JENNINGS TRIES TO GET MORE INFO ON LIB PUNDITS’ TRUMP-SUPPORTING FRIENDS WHO REGRET THEIR VOTES:

Gosh, who over the last decade knew that Trump was such a hardliner on immigration laws? (And by hardliner, I mean someone who has a mid-1990s to early 2010s-era Democrat’s view on illegal immigration.)

Posted at 8:45 am by Ed Driscoll

REMEMBER APOLLO 8? That was the December 1968, mission that saw astronauts Frank Borman, William Anders and James Lovell become the first men in history to orbit the Moon. Something else memorable happened on Christmas Eve during that mission that may well say something about why to this day America is the only nation to succeed in such a mission.

Posted at 8:36 am by Mark Tapscott

HE TOLD THEM WHAT THEY WANTED TO HEAR. OR MAYBE PROVIDED COVER FOR WHAT THEY WANTED TO DO. Why Was Lawrence Summers So In Demand to Begin With?

George Will describes it as “presentism” whereby modern views on morality are imposed on past actions. Will’s crucial point is that if we continue down this path of judging the past through a present-tense lens, eventually those judging and canceling will find themselves being judged and canceled.

It’s just a comment that whatever the underlying truth about economist Lawrence Summers’s present-day expressions of “shame” about the past, the fact that his past actions elicited no outrage from left, right or in between calls into question his present-day cancelation. Isn’t the societal point to constantly learn from the past, and improve on it?

What’s arguably more notable about Summers given their more globalized impact are his views on the economy. We find in his cancelation that the allegedly brilliant Summers was very much in demand on the speaking circuit, by elected officials, hedge funds mining his supposedly deep insights into economic matters, not to mention his newspaper columns in influential newspapers like the Washington Post and the New York Times. Unknown is why.

Is it really unknown?

Posted at 8:30 am by Glenn Reynolds

THANK FRAUD ALMIGHTY: Liftoff achieved!

I would like to say “we have achieved liftoff” in drawing national attention to the massive public-program frauds committed by a large cast of Minnesota Somalis. But “we” would be misleading. Attention has been drawn by Ryan Thorpe and Christopher Rufo in their City Journal column “The Largest Funder of Al-Shabaab Is the Minnesota Taxpayer” (the headline is a quotation).

They first drew President Trump’s attention in a big way. Now comes the New York Times in Ernest Londoño’s long story “How Fraud Swamped Minnesota’s Social Services System on Tim Walz’s Watch” (“Prosecutors say members of the Somali diaspora, a group with growing political power, were largely responsible. President Trump has drawn national attention to the scandal amid his crackdown on immigration”). The story has clearly been in the works for a while, but Trump’s attention has intensified its newsworthiness.

As Steve Guest, the former political communications adviser for Ted Cruz, tweets:

Evergreen:

Related: Great moments in vetting:

Posted at 8:14 am by Ed Driscoll

QUESTION ASKED AND (POSSIBLY) ANSWERED: Hey, Why Was the DC National Guard Shooter Naked Except for a Pair of Socks?

Why had he taken off his clothes after shooting people? The simplest and most obvious answer is the same reason for why Mohamed Atta intended to change into a fancy suit: to meet the virgins. Atta wanted to look sharp; Al Issa wanted to get right down to business.

So also, apparently, did Rahmanullah Lakanwal. Yet neither the establishment media nor law enforcement authorities have made any mention of this. After all, it would only highlight Lakanwal’s identity as an Islamic jihadi, when every public official and mainstream journalist knows that the Islamic character of jihad violence must be denied or obscured at all costs. And so we have the curious phenomenon of the media reporting that this murderer was naked, yet never even attempting to explain why. All in a day’s work for today’s media propagandists.

Related:

 

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll

OH, CANADA: ‘Not going to happen’: First Nations threaten to end Carney’s pipe dream.

The Canadian PM’s breakthrough oil deal with Alberta cost him a cabinet minister and will still face stiff opposition
Fri 28 Nov 2025 09.30 EST

When the people of the Haida nation won a decades-long battle for recognition that an archipelago off the coast of British Columbia in Canada was rightfully theirs, it was a long overdue victory.

The unprecedented deal with the provincial and the federal governments meant the Haida no longer had to prove that they had Aboriginal title to the land of Xhaaidlagha Gwaayaai, “the islands at the boundary of the world.”

Now, both governments will have to face what that might mean.

On Thursday, the Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, and the Alberta premier, Danielle Smith, agreed an energy deal centred on plans for a new heavy oil pipeline reaching from the province’s oil sands to the Pacific coast.

Heralded as a major political breakthrough between deadlocked parties, the deal lays the groundwork for an oil duct that could carry more than a million barrels each day from the oil sands to the Pacific. With new legislative powers, Carney’s government could also slash permitting and approval delays.

But the response from politically powerful nations, such as the Haida – whose consent the government needs – was both quick and simple: “This project is not going to happen.”

Gaagwiis, the president of the Haida nation, said the federal government had a duty to “uphold the honour of the crown” when working with his community.

“Trying to ram through a project puts that ‘honour’ in jeopardy,” he said. “This is an opportunity for the government of Canada and the prime minister, to look in the mirror and see what kind of country he wants to lead and what kind of country he wants Canada to be.”

Despite Carney’s pledge to obtain the full consent of First Nations – and to share any windfall – on any possible pipeline project, Gaagwiis said there was nothing federal or provincial leaders could say to move his nation.

How about: Your subsidies will end if we don’t get this? Somebody’s dickering here. But if this fails it’s just another reason for Alberta to secede.

Posted at 7:30 am by Glenn Reynolds

RICH LOWRY: Europe Has Made Itself an Afterthought.

The late conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer maintained of the U.S., “Decline is a choice.”

This isn’t quite right with regard to Europe, whose great powers were kneecapped by the cataclysms of the early 20th century. France bore the brunt of World War I, suffering 1.4 million dead and 4.3 million wounded and a ruinous economic cost.

As for Britain, stretched to the max, it got steadily eclipsed in power and influence by the United States as World War II progressed.

The less said about Germany’s role in all this, of course, the better.

And then the European colonial empires inevitably dissolved.

So, Europe was going to be diminished compared to its glory days. Its current fecklessness, though, has indeed been a choice, born of strategic fantasy and economic incompetence.

Strong militaries were deemed a thing of the past, or something unnecessary as long as Uncle Sam was around. The Brits, for instance, are hard-pressed to maintain a 73,000-strong military, and the size of their once-storied surface fleet is at a historic low.

Europe imagined itself “a diplomatic superpower” but has learned to its regret that “soft power” not backed up by hard power is of limited utility. Both the Nobel Committee and Amnesty International have considerable soft power, too, but no one pays attention to them regarding high-level geopolitical questions.

Economically, the EU “regulatory superpower” has hobbled growth — over the last 30 years Western European labor productivity declined from 95 percent of the U.S. level to 80 percent — while Europe’s commitment to “net zero” greenhouse emissions has driven insane energy priorities.

With painful consequences, back in the real world:

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll

FROM NATHAN BRINDLE:  I’m The Beautiful But Evil Space Princess Who Rules A Galactic Empire But Really Wants To Leave People Ruthlessly Alone!

Alice is the Imperial Princess Regnant of the Galactic Empire. At 22, she has been thrust into power after her father (the Emperor) and her two older brothers have all died in various ways. Her Imperial Chancellor, Lord Rupert, does everything he can to support her, but has somewhat different ideas about how the Empire should be run than did his late Emperor.

Alice has one major problem: She cannot be crowned Empress Regnant until she marries and produces an heir.

But Alice, being kept busy three days a week by interminable audiences with petitioners, and the rest of the week with what she terms “mostly busy work”, has no real way to meet young men — well, reasonably eligible young men, anyway, and of her own age — with whom she might eventually take up and form a household. And she chafes at the necessity of trying to rule, hands-on, an Empire so huge it cannot be truly ruled by any one person to begin with.

Posted at 7:04 am by Sarah Hoyt

IT’S DIFFERENT WHEN THEY DO IT:

Posted at 7:00 am by Glenn Reynolds

THIS CAUGHT MY ATTENTION AND MADE ME WONDER SOMETHING:  What we don’t know about mother’s milk. (It’s a TED talk)

What it made me wonder: apparently Mother’s Milk is not the same for everyone. It’s not a “formula” as is implicated by what we call artificial baby food, as though there were a single, scientific formulation.
America had problems with obesity and chronic illness earlier (the rest of the world has caught up about a generation later, tbf. It’s not super-visible yet because those people haven’t hit older years in numbers) and I wonder how much of it is because such a massive number of my generation was bottle fed by “scientifically designed” formula.  I don’t have the means or ability to test it, but it might be worth looking at.

Posted at 3:33 am by Sarah Hoyt