January 22, 2026

TIRED? CONFUSED? DESPONDENT? DON’T BE. JOIN ME IN DANCING:  The Isekai Rag.

Posted at 1:32 am by Sarah Hoyt

OH, I DID. THEY’RE FOLLOWING THE COMMIE PLAYBOOK EVERYWHERE:  I Never Saw This Coming.

They don’t seem to realize that in an era of distributed communications, the playbook is nonsense. They needed the storytellers in the news to convince people of their otherwise thin and unconvincing narrative. And they needed the approved news to be the only source of news.

Posted at 1:00 am by Sarah Hoyt

January 21, 2026

EURO POSTURING IS SO PATHETIC:

Posted at 10:47 pm by Glenn Reynolds

HAHA, THAT SHIP HAS SAILED, DUDE.

Posted at 10:22 pm by Glenn Reynolds

OPEN THREAD: Hump Day.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

NYU’S DISGRACE:

Posted at 8:57 pm by Glenn Reynolds

ADVICE FOR DOOMERS AND PANICANS FROM KURT SCHLICHTER: Being Emotionally Incontinent Does Not Help. “Normal people, queasy because law enforcement tactics employed against resisting people are aesthetically displeasing, suddenly got a good look at their future under Democrat rule. Now they understand why ICE does what ICE does.”

Posted at 8:29 pm by Glenn Reynolds

INCONCEIVABLE:

Posted at 7:37 pm by Glenn Reynolds

THE CRITICAL DRINKER: Crash and Burn — The Kathleen Kennedy Story.

As the Drinker notes, Kennedy “gambled some of the biggest franchises in Hollywood history on the modern audience. And wow, did she lose big. To paraphrase Chris Gore, she took boy brands that everyone could enjoy and turned them into girl brands that nobody enjoyed. Men felt excluded and disrespected, and women felt patronized and pandered to. The modern audience had failed to show up, and the existing audience was abandoning ship. Kennedy’s greatest gamble had failed, and inevitably it all finally caught up with her.”

I hope the destruction of both the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises was worth it for her. Gene Siskel famously said that the test of a good movie is, “Is this film more interesting than a documentary of the same actors having lunch?” For Kennedy, the amount of damage control she’ll be engaging in from here on in will be far more fun to watch than any of the product she put up on the big and small screen.

Posted at 6:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

HE’S SUPER CEREAL! Al Gore accosts Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick after Trump official’s Davos speech.

Former Vice President Al Gore briefly accosted Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick after the Trump official’s speech on the sidelines of this week’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, The Post has learned.

During a Tuesday VIP dinner hosted by billionaire BlackRock boss Larry Fink, where several hundred people were invited, Lutnick delivered a speech that was fiercely critical of European allies.

When he stepped offstage, Gore walked up to him and said, “Boo” – like he was trying to scare him, a source told The Post.

Lutnick laughed and someone at the event remarked, “What an honor to have Al Gore boo,” according to an insider.

We’ve been here before with the Goracle, haven’t we? And with equally predictable results:

And note this:

“I sat and listened to his remarks,” the avid environmentalist told The Post in a statement.

“I didn’t interrupt him in any way. It’s no secret that I think this administration’s energy policy is insane. And at the end of his speech I reacted with how I felt, and so did several others.”

What’s the problem? Al Gore tacitly declared “mission accomplished” to radical environmentalism in 2013, the moment he sold out to oil-rich Qatar:

Al has sold Current, for the magnificent sum of $500-million, $100-million of which is his alone. Not bad for a TV station with less reach and inferior programming to most billboards.

To whom did the Lord of the Upper Atmosphere sell? Why to al Jazeera — which is to say, effectively to the ruler of Qatar, a wealthy country that has nothing else to sustain it but the sale of its huge petroleum resources.

Qatar is about oil, oil and more oil. It is a global warmer’s hell.

But what a paycheck! When Al Gore emerged from his energy-guzzling mansion to address the Senate in 2007 only to refuse to take his own energy reduction pledge from An Inconvenient Truth when presented to him by Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK), Ann Coulter quipped, “I kind of respect him more, it shows he is not stupid enough to believe all this global warming nonsense. He’s trying to get us to believe. Okay, fine, he may be a hypocrite but at least he’s not a moron.”

Posted at 6:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

GOODER AND HARDER, CALIFORNIA: What Blue Zone Collapse Looks Like.

In 2019, a house started burning on Bethel Island, out at the eastern edges of the Bay Area. The East Contra Costa Fire Protection District — which no longer exists, for reasons that will be clear enough — had been eroding for years, closing one fire station after another as funding ran short. In 2019, ten firefighters (three each on three fire engines plus one battalion chief) covered 250 square miles, much of it well-populated. Bethel Island no longer had a fire station. Scroll to page two on this later report that discussed the reform of fire agencies in Contra Costa County, and you’ll find the fire department’s average response time to major emergencies on Bethel Island: a little under 14 minutes for the arrival of the first engine. So there was a house fire, which spread and turned into several house fires, and that cluster of fires was finally brought under control about three hours after the first house started burning. But the fire department existed. It didn’t collapse. In a serious emergency, an adequate response could be summoned in an hour or two.

One you start looking for this — government agencies that exist but are entirely inadequate for the performance of their basic responsibilities — you can find it everywhere.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 5:48 pm by Ed Driscoll