July 31, 2026

WE CAN BE MERCIFUL BECAUSE AS A SOCIETY WE’RE RICH BEYOND THE DREAMS OF AVARICE:  A Costly Indulgence.

Posted at 12:36 am by Sarah Hoyt

July 30, 2026

OPEN THREAD: Happy Thursday.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

FIRST OBAMA’S CHEF, NOW THIS:

Posted at 9:23 pm by Glenn Reynolds

IT’S COME TO THIS: Boy George Drops Out of London Jesus Christ Superstar Production After Stirring Controversy With AI-Generated Pro-Israel Song.

Boy George is dropping out of a London production of Jesus Christ Superstar, the “Karma Chameleon” singer’s manager said on Instagram on Thursday, days after he stirred controversy after releasing his AI-generated, pro-Israel song “We Will Dance Again.”

“The decision has been made with the utmost respect for the producers, the creative team and the entire company,” manager Paul Kemsley wrote on Thursday. Boy George was set to play King Herod starting in August. Kemsley didn’t specify why George was leaving but wrote that the singer “has never been afraid to stand by his personal convictions, and I have always respected him for that.”

“Equally, I believe it is my responsibility to make decisions that are in the best interests of my artist while also showing respect to others,” Kemsley said. “In this instance, I felt it was right to step aside, allowing the production to remain the focus, while ensuring everyone involved can move forward with mutual respect and goodwill.”

Yeah, you don’t someone who’s too pro-Jewish to be in a production of Jesus Christ Superstar…

Posted at 9:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

AARON HANSCOM: Elon Musk Was Right: Pedro Sánchez Is a Traitor.

Search for “traitor” on X this week, and one man will flood your timeline: Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez.

The reason? Shocking images of thousands of migrants from Morocco crossing the border and flooding into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta. The head of the association that represents Spain’s Civil Guard officers in Ceuta told the Associated Press that the border had “totally collapsed.” After watching video footage of migrants breaking through fences to get into the city, one would be justified in using the word “invasion” to describe what’s happening. Indeed, Santiago Abascal, the leader of the rising populist/conservative Vox party, called it just that and wrote that “Pedro Sánchez is its main promoter and guilty of all its consequences.”

The migrants don’t disagree. Video footage captured some of the arrivals chanting, “Viva Pedro Sánchez!” or “Long live Pedro Sánchez!”

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Old and busted: Can Greeks Become Germans?

—Thomas L. Friedman, the New York Times, July 19th, 2011.

The New Hotness? Spain has become France:

Posted at 8:55 pm by Ed Driscoll

SPAIN IS BEING INVADED RIGHT NOW; UPDATE: Georgia Meloni Responds, Threatens to Cut Off Spain.

Most people don’t know that there is Spanish sovereign territory on the African continent.

I sure didn’t. But it turns out that there are bits and pieces in what you think is Morocco that are, in fact, part of Spain, including islands and cities in what you probably think is Morocco.

Ceuta is one such tiny bit of Spain on the African continent. It is literally Spanish territory, similar to the little spur of Minnesota that looks like it should be part of Canada because it is not connected and is embedded in Canada, or the Kaliningrad Oblast, which is Russia, but entirely surrounded by Lithuania and Poland.

Weird, I know. But there it is.

Right now, today, the City of Ceuta is being invaded by Moroccans (and likely people from other countries) through that border. They are not coming in boats. They are storming the border, and in some cases, border guards have opened the gates to let them stream in.

Ceuta is a city of only 65,000, and at this rate, the invaders will outnumber the population of the city. It is a crisis so great that the city government is begging the Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez to declare a State of Emergency, which so far he has declined to do.

In April, Theodore Dalrymple warned: We Shall Not Fight on the Beaches.

In 1973, Jean Raspail, who died aged 94 in 2020, published his dystopian novel The Camp of the Saints, for which he is now mostly remembered (certainly outside of France, though he was the author of many other well-considered novels and travelogues, and narrowly missed election to the Académie française). The Camp of the Saints is a book that refuses to lie down, so to speak, despite attempts to render it invisible or make it go away.

* * * * * * * *

Immigrants are not just immigrants. What they bring with them is as important as what they are offered by the host country. If what they bring with them is an evangelizing religion that claims, however fatuously, to be the answer to all of mankind’s little problems, a religion moreover that has a very strong hold over them and that is maintained by an effective system of social ostracism in the event of dissent, they will obviously have more difficulty integrating than if they have no such religion.

Raspail’s flawed novel is an illustration of an elementary political principle. For a liberal democracy to work, there must be a demos; for there to be a demos, there must be something more in common among them than living geographically cheek-by-jowl (without at the same time demanding an absolute uniformity). To import huge numbers of people who do not share, and indeed are resistant to sharing, the minimum that holds a demos together is inimical to liberal democracy.

As Spain is about to find out, the hard way (again):

Tweet below reads, “THIS IS VERY SERIOUS. I’m receiving these images of how Moroccan authorities are emptying trucks full of young people near the border with Ceuta. Anyone who doesn’t want to see that this is a perfectly orchestrated operation by the regime is simply blind.”

Tweet below says, “But when we go on vacation – fingerprints, facial scanners, advanced biometrics, baggage scanners…:”

In English, the tweet below reads, “It won’t be shown on television: this is how the beaches of Ceuta are right now.”

Posted at 8:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

JAMES MIEGS: A Covid Conspiracy in Plain Sight.

I’m no fan of conspiracy theories. In fact, I’ve spent two decades challenging the pernicious lies of the 9/11 Truther crowd. But sometimes conspiracies do happen. I think the actions of Dr. Fauci, as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, constituted a type of conspiracy. I’m not saying the Covid outbreak was some kind of deliberate “plandemic.” But the disclosures reveal how Dr. Fauci organized his colleagues to obscure his agency’s connections to the suspect Chinese lab.

We now know U.S. scientists collaborated with their Chinese counterparts on controversial gain-of-function experiments and that grants from NIAID flowed to the Wuhan lab through various channels. It’s highly likely that U.S. researchers provided the skills and our government offered some funding that allowed Chinese researchers to continue independently tinkering with deadly viruses until one accidentally escaped the lab. From the start, the NIAID head used his enormous bureaucratic clout to make sure no one explored that relationship. While Dr. Fauci repeatedly told the media that the Covid lab-leak scenario was “just conspiracy theories,” he was conspiring to quash questions about his agency’s possible role.

Things got rolling on Feb. 1, 2020, when Dr. Fauci organized a conference call involving a dozen of the world’s top virologists and health officials. Within weeks, four of those scientists were listed as authors of a letter titled “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2” published in the journal Nature Medicine. The authors confidently asserted that “we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible”; the virus must have jumped to humans from some animal species. At the time, many experts believed that leap happened at Wuhan’s messy “wet market.”

The “proximal origin” paper seemed to give scientific clout to Dr. Fauci’s oft-repeated dismissal of the lab-leak idea. Other scientists dropped the question like a hot fireplace poker. The press doubled down, portraying the lab-leak theory as “debunked bunkum,” in the words of MSNBC’s Joy Reid. Social media sites downgraded the topic as “misinformation.”

But this supposed scientific consensus was entirely manufactured. The newly released documents, along with earlier disclosures, show that many scientists in the NIAID leader’s orbit believed the virus had been deliberately modified and then accidentally leaked. In fact, Dr. Fauci’s own diary notes show that most of the researchers on that Feb. 1 call “felt that deliberate insertion was possible.” The entry also mentions that the lab’s famous virologist Shi Zhengli had “been working for years” on gain-of-function modifications that would help certain viruses be more transmissible to humans. Recently released messages reveal that even the scientists who signed the “proximal origin” paper continued to suspect a lab leak; “we can’t rule it out,” one admitted.

He’s the Wuhanian Candidate:

Related: Don’t Forget the Role the ‘Scarf Queen’ Played in the Fauci Cabal:

In her memoir Silent Invasion, Birx painted herself as a heroine for what she framed as balancing Trump administration skepticism over COVID-19, politics, media narratives, the need to treat millions of Americans, and the effort to prevent or mitigate the spread of the virus.

In that book, Birx admitted that she was integral to the effort to extend the initial lockdowns beyond the “15 days to slow the spread.”

No sooner had we convinced the Trump administration to implement our version of a two-week shutdown than I was trying to figure out how to extend it. Fifteen Days to Slow the Spread was a start, but I knew it would be just that. I didn’t have the numbers in front of me yet to make the case for extending it longer, but I had two weeks to get them, she wrote.

Technically, Birx was a Trump insider. He relied on her, Fauci and their team to give him the advice he relied upon to make critical national decisions. But as we’ve seen with Fauci, who clearly worked against Trump and his administration, Birx was more discreet but still a kindred spirit.

As Glenn wrote at the end of 2021: We must make public health authorities accountable for their COVID lies.

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

AN EMPIRE OF LIES:

Posted at 7:53 pm by Glenn Reynolds

THE CRITICAL DRINKER ON CLARKSON’S FARM: “Life, it seems, is not without a sense of irony. Take Amazon Studios for example. They’ve pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into producing prestige triple-A sludge like Rings of Power. And yet, the show that gets consistently higher viewership, critical acclaim, and audience support is a low-budget reality TV show about two idiots messing around on a farm in England. The thing is though, you only need to watch a single episode of Clarkson’s Farm to understand exactly why.”

UPDATE:

Posted at 5:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

MILE MARKERS ON THE ROAD TO TRUMP: Couric Admits She, Democrat Producer Worked In an ‘Artful Way’ To Undermine Palin.

Former CBS anchor Katie Couric joined Merit America co-founder Connor Diemand-Yauman on his Is This Working?! podcast on Wednesday, where she recalled her 2008 interview with GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin. Couric admitted to working with her producer Brian Goldsmith, who is now a Democratic candidate for California State Senate, to construct the questions in a “very artful way” to expose her.

Couric explained her motivations, “So, I think there was just this moment, and she was sort of this—people were fascinated, and she was so magnetic, but nobody knew if there was any there there. So, I think I was the first interview that really exposed her lack of substance and understanding of critical issues.”

According to Couric, those “critical issues” included trying to drive a wedge between her and John McCain on ANWR oil drilling, pestering her on the morning-after pill, and demanding to know which newspapers and magazines she read. It was also this interview that spawned the Saturday Night Live skit with Tina Fey that led many liberals to falsely believe that Palin actually said she could see Russia from her house. Her interview with Joe Biden was very different.

To the point where she ignored a gaffe from a pre-Trunalimunumaprzure-era Biden that would have played on a loop on the 6:30 news if a Republican had said it:

The DNC-MSM’s pummeling of McCain, Palin, and in 2012 Mitt Romney, who all just sat there and took it, did much to propel Trump to the forefront during the 2016 election cycle. Or as Glenn wrote at the time in USA Today: Liberals have chosen The Donald as their ‘Destructor.’

Posted at 5:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

THE 21st CENTURY ISN’T TURNING OUT AS I HAD HOPED: eBay agreed to pay nearly $50 million to couple sent cockroaches, bloody pig mask.

The settlement resolves more than six years of criminal and civil proceedings stemming from the harassment campaign. In their 2021 lawsuit filed in Boston federal court, the Steiners said that the company engaged in a conspiracy to “intimidate, threaten to kill, torture, terrorize, stalk and silence them” in order to “stifle their reporting on eBay.” The Natick residents, who report on the e-commerce industry in their newsletter, said they were subjected to cyberstalking, death threats and in-person surveillance by former eBay workers.

Ina Steiner said the campaign began with threatening direct messages on social media before escalating into anonymous deliveries of live cockroaches and spiders, a funeral wreath, a bloody pig Halloween mask and a book about surviving the death of a spouse. The employees also sent pornographic magazines with David Steiner’s name to a neighbor’s home and planned to install a GPS device on the couple’s car.

She said she did not initially know who was behind it or why.

“I could not conceive that a company I had been covering for the past two decades had tried to terrorize us into stopping our reporting,” she said.

When the lawsuit was filed, the company said “the misconduct of these former employees was wrong,” and that it would “do what is fair and appropriate to try to address what the Steiners went through.”

eBay reiterated its apology Tuesday, saying, “What the Steiners were subjected to by former eBay employees in 2019 was wrong, reprehensible and should never have happened.” The company also acknowledged “the unprofessional tone in internal communications” by former CEO Devin Wenig, former Chief Communications Officer Steve Wymer and former Senior Vice President Wendy Jones.

The company said the conduct “is not representative of eBay’s culture” and said it has since changed leadership and strengthened its policies, procedures and ethics training.

The Steiners’ “home address was also posted online, with public invitations for adult activities, as well as threats being made against them on Twitter (now known as X) and other social media platforms.” Did eBay’s employees not have the common sense to know that this was going to end very badly for them?

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

THIS SEEMS LIKE A NO-BRAINER: White House eyes reopening oil refineries amid high gasoline prices.

The Trump administration is looking to reopen closed oil refineries, including an embattled one in the Virgin Islands, amid high gasoline prices spurred by the Iran war.
A White House official confirmed to The Hill in an email Thursday that the Trump administration “would like to see refineries across the country reopen, especially the St. Croix refinery.”

The official said this refinery is of particular interest because it was built to refine Venezuelan oil and because of its “strategic” location.

Cool. Then do California.

Posted at 5:10 pm by Stephen Green

DISPATCHES FROM THE BLUE ZONE: Agitators in Madison Use Boards With Nails to Defend Their BLM Encampment, and the City Is Helping.

Well, now Madison, Wisconsin, has CRAZ: the Corey Ruiz Autonomous Zone. In case you missed it, Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and other communists are trying to make Ruiz the next George Floyd. Ruiz was shot and killed by Madison police after he pulled a knife and stabbed an officer while being apprehended. As we’ve reported, activists have set up bicycle barricades around the intersection of Williamson Street (Willy Street) and South Baldwin Street, where Ruiz, a career criminal with a long rap sheet, was shot.

Laura Schulte, a reporter with The Journal Sentinel, has been on the scene and notes that agitators have now placed boards with nails in them around the intersection where a memorial site has been set up. Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong set down a candle herself the night of Ruiz’s shooting, declaring it an “execution.”

Worse yet, Schulte reports that the city itself, which is as woke as it gets, has lent its assistance in setting up barriers.

If that isn’t insurrection, what is it?

Posted at 4:53 pm by Stephen Green

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Joyce Carol Oates Defends The Odyssey and Slams Translator for Scathing Review: ‘Speaks in the Crude Language of MAGA Folks.’

Author Joyce Carol Oates came to the defense of Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” after translator Emily Wilson wrote a viral review attacking the film.

“Rather than disagreeing with interpretations of Homer in a collegial manner, this person, who has benefited enormously from Nolan’s film, speaks in the crude language of MAGA folks attacking someone with ideas that differ from hers,” Carol wrote on X. “One would expect a translator, of all people, beholden to a text, in service to a text, to be just a wee bit more thoughtful & respectful of others who are acting in good faith just as (she would claim) she is.”

Advantage Frank J. Fleming!

I finally saw The Odyssey last night; brilliant cinematography and production design, and the nearly three hour film moves at a surprisingly brisk pace to pack all its locales and subplots in. The colorblind casting, and the small role by Elliot (nee Ellen) Page were only distracting because of how obsessed Twitter had been over them, and the resulting backlash to the backlash likely drove ticket sales, just as Nolan knew it would.

The dialogue is awfully clunky at times, but there have been previous epic films where the dialogue was off-putting, but not enough to detract from the knockout visuals. For two examples, the deliberately minimalist dialogue in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 A Space Something or Other, and George Lucas’ original Star Wars from 1977, which had loads of what even Alec Guinness called “dialogue [that] was pretty ropey,” which didn’t stop it from becoming an epoch-defining movie. (As Joseph Kahn wrote on Monday in a Hollywood Reporter article memorably headlined, “Bring Back the Hollywood Asshole!”, the movie executive’s job “is to make money. Real money. Marvel money. The kind of money Hollywood made when it threw muscular white guys named Chris into rubber suits and raked in billions in tickets, billions in toys, billions in theme parks. So much money the studio could dig another five levels down for more parking spaces.” 1977-era Star Wars money.)

In contrast, The Odyssey seems more like a throwback to the earnest biblical epics that Hollywood endlessly churned out in the 1950s through the mid-1960s. Nolan himself said its style was inspired by Martin Scorsese’s controversial 1988 film The Last Temptation of Christ, which was made on a low budget for a biblical-era film, and where everyone (except for David Bowie’s Pontius Pilate) speaks in colloquial American accents, including Harvey Keitel’s “dees and does” Brooklyn-accented Judas.) “As for the other film Nolan privately screened for his cast and crew, Tom Holland recently revealed that he called Sony chief Tom Rothman to arrange a 70mm screening of ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ for the cast of ‘The Odyssey’ during pre-production,” World of Reel reported a couple of weeks ago. Nolan could have definitely benefited from Robert Bolt‘s crisp screenwriting.

Posted at 4:39 pm by Ed Driscoll

UNIVERSITIES MUST POLICE FOREIGN INFLUENCE. Maybe, but you know what would be even more effective? Having a diversity of views on the faculty and among students. If everyone has to actually defend their arguments and has the change to be exposed to counterarguments, the policing happens automatically. Wild, I know.

Posted at 4:38 pm by Robert Shibley

CHECKS OUT:

Posted at 4:36 pm by Stephen Green