DISPATCHES FROM THE CHEESECAKE FACTORY:

That guy is hilarious.

Seriously, between Bessant, Rubio, Hegseth, RFK Jr., and of course our crazy orange president himself, has there ever been a cabinet or an administration that on a daily basis makes you laugh out loud like these guys do?

While seeing to the people’s… https://t.co/ntl5qqOKoq

— Northern Barbarian (@xnoesbueno) October 27, 2026

BECAUSE OF COURSE: Barcelona Burns, and Spain’s Left Blames Israel.

EXCELLENT WORK! FASTER, PLEASE:  Japanese Researchers Have Reportedly Found a Way to Destroy Cancer Cells.

A LOT OF LEFTY SCHEMES TURN OUT THAT WAY: Medicare for All Is Popular—Until People Find Out How It Would Work.

THE STRANGE, LONELY LIVES OF CLIMATE SCIENTISTS:  Penguins, man.

PRESTIGE WAS NEVER A CERTIFICATE OF COMPETENCY:  The Establishment Gave Extremism Its Credentials. How prestigious institutions lent credibility to a defender of Hamas, raising questions about their judgement and accountability.

Elite schools have been hiring for ideology — left — for almost a century. They’ve finally reached the point where they’re communist in all but name, and on top that they are fountains of ignorance. The later is the natural result of hiring for any reason but competence. Remember that. It’s important.

OF COURSE HE DOES; IT’S ONE MORE REASON TO NOT ELECT HIM:  Gavin Newsom Calls DSA ‘Mainstream Democratic Movement’ Heading Into 2028 Presidential Election.

I’m sorry, I want to say something about selling your cloak and buying a sword, but with helicopters, in preparation for 2028. Yes, it is an evil thought. It was “half my fault, and half the atmosphere.”

THE MAYOR BLAMES THE JOOS:  NYC Comptroller Sounds Alarm After 30,000 Private-Sector Jobs Left the City in Just Two Months.

IT’S TIME TO DISBAND THE TEACHERS’ UNION, RAZE AND SALT EDUCATION SCHOOLS, AND CONSIDER THE WAY WE TRAIN AND RECRUIT TEACHERS:  Exclusive. “The United States Government must fall.” Earlier today, members of the Chicago Teachers Union collaborated with activist students and teachers in France. On that call, they explicitly called for violence, destruction, killing, and the fall of the United States Government.

I know of what I speak.  Education schools are evil Marxist cesspools. It must be done to them as onto Carthage. It is in fact grossly overdue, if we want to keep civilization. And this evil twunt must be fired and barred from speaking to a kid ever, even across the street. (Okay, yes, that’s over the top, but argh.)

THAT’S ALL? LOOK HARDER:  Trump administration asks Washington to set aside ballots from 400 voters it says may be noncitizens.

Do the dead and imaginary still get to stay in?

I DON’T THINK THE SHENANIGAN IS FROM THE RIGHT. NOT THAT THEY’RE THAT HONEST, BUT THEY’RE THAT STUPID:  A Little Local Political Shenanigan.

I just think right now, the left is dumber and thought this brochure, explaining how kids can trans without their parents’ knowledge would benefit the left. Kind of like they thought disclosing the late Lindsey Graham was gay would help them (we were fine with him being gay; we just thought he should have come out of the closet and stopped being blackmailed to fall in line with the left. Lands’ sake. We don’t want to sleep with our representatives — ew — but we don’t want them to be compromised either.) Or their newest allegations about Trump, which apparently waited till now to come out. (Rolls eyes.) We’re in a race to the bottom of the IQ pile, and the left is somehow managing to win.

LOOK, WE CAN HOPE, BUT THEY SHOULD HAVE PASSED THE SAVE ACT:  Inside House GOP’s far-reaching push to monitor midterm elections and prepare for legal fights. Committee on House Administration’s program could pave the way for recounts and lawsuits if improprieties found.

SPEAKING OF OBAMA, LET’S REVISIT THE WAR ON THE WORKING POOR THAT WAS CASH FOR CLUNKERS:  For anyone curious about what it actually looked like to kill a generation of functioning cars, here’s an actual video from 2009 and brief explanation: The dealer first replaces the oil with sodium silicate solution. It’s a clear-ish liquid that crystallizes under extreme heat. As the engine warms up the solution begins to form small abrasive crystals in the oil system that shred the bearing and score the cylinder walls. Within seconds of starting the car you can see smoke billowing from the exhaust, this is the crystals scratching the cylinder walls and leaving small grooves for oil and solution to leak past into the combustion chamber and ignite/evaporate, producing the white smoke.

At the time, both my husband and I drove cars that were considerably older than the supposed “clunkers” so they didn’t qualify (not that we’d do that. We buy them used, take care of them, and drive them till their natural death.) This orgy of destruction made it hard for our kids to afford their first cars and made life difficult for the young and poor (which are often the same.) For … no reason. Except vague “green” feels and a president’s hatred of everyone not rich.

I NEVER UNDERSTOOD THE MINDS THAT HELD TOBACCO AS THE WORST THING EVER, AND POT AS GOOD FOR YOU:  Marijuana legalization linked to troubling health trend in landmark new study.

Keep in mind, I still think it’s governmental overreach to regulate what adults can consume. But the hypocrisy of demonizing one and practically encouraging the other has long boggled me.

OH, SWEET SUMMER CHILDREN, HEAR ME OUT, THAT’S EXACTLY HOW WE THOUGHT OF LEFTISTS IN OUR DAY*:  The generational difference in how young right wingers see the left.

When we think of Leftists, we do not think of Barack Obama or Ezra Klein. Yes, these guys are on the Left, but younger Millennials and Zoomers on the Right do not think of Leftists in their own age bracket as polished technocrats.

Polished what? Children, they are exactly like current leftists:

When we think of Leftists, the first thing that pops into our head are a bunch of disgusting, depraved, spiteful mutants who want to destroy everything around them as payback for the crime of being born.

And, in Obama’s case, the vile, disgusting, depraved, spiteful mutant who is not quite a year older than I wants to destroy America, because his interestingly exotic father abandoned him, and it must be all our fault. (Spits.)

The left has been evil and destructive for a long time. Now they’re not even doing the modicum of hiding Obama did.

AND IS — I SPEAK ADVISEDLY — ONE OF THE DUMBEST THINGS THE LEFT HAS EVER DONE:  “This alliance between Islamist and left-wing forces is known in France as islamo-gauchisme“.

I COME NEITHER TO BURY AI NOR TO PRAISE IT:  It’s Human, But Is It Art?

OPEN THREAD: Monday, Monday.

BRAZIL’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

After Late-Night Ballot Drop, Joe Biden Wins Brazilian Presidency With 81 Million Votes https://t.co/4aO9Rnuaih

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) October 26, 2026

THE NEW SPACE RACE: Elon Musk just delivered spectacular news for SpaceX stock investors.

NETFLIX’S NARNIA PROBLEM: You Can’t Modernize C.S. Lewis Without Losing Him.

Start with the lion. Lewis did not consider Aslan an allegory. He called him “an invention giving an imaginary answer to the question, ‘What might Christ become like if there really were a world like Narnia.’” In other words, within the story Aslan is Christ, and Lewis gave him the title to match: the son of the Emperor-beyond-the-Sea. That makes the voice a theological decision, not a casting one. For Lewis, masculine and feminine were woven into the structure of reality, prior to biology and above it. In Perelandra he wrote, “Gender is a reality, and a more fundamental reality than sex.” And in That Hideous Strength he went furthest of all: the male we could escape, because it exists only on the biological level, “but the masculine none of us can escape. What is above and beyond all things is so masculine that we are all feminine in relation to it.” To invert that order is not to update Lewis. It is to take a crowbar to his metaphysics. The masculine none of us can escape, and Netflix may be about to find that out when it reads its box office receipts.

Defenders say the voice will be deep. A person who has seen the film told Relevant that “Aslan is clearly male,” and NarniaWeb reports that [Meryl] Streep gives the lion a deep, gravelly voice. Maybe so. But surely the best place to look for a gravelly masculine voice is a gravelly masculine actor. Hollywood isn’t short of them, but it seems short of the will to cast one. When you have to retune a woman’s voice so it sounds like a man’s, you’ve conceded the point and then hired a sound engineer to hide the concession. Lewis told us Aslan is not a tame lion, but Netflix seems determined to make him a lame one.

Things are looking dicey for a film based on religious-themed source material with the combination of “Stairway to Heaven” in the trailer (see Page, Jimmy and his interest in the occult, at least while Zeppelin was still a working band) and this headline: Greta Gerwig’s Narnia: Why the Director finds ‘Jesus is Lord’ statements ‘creepy.’

The Critical Drinker adds (via YouTube’s transcription, which was cleaned up by ChatGPT):

Casting a woman in an iconically male role like this, based around the central male figure of Christianity, was definitely a bold move on Gerwig’s part. I’ll say that much. And her justification left people with more questions than answers.

Quote: “I wanted someone who was profound but not pretentious, who had gravitas but not morose self-seriousness. Someone who could communicate depth and pathos as well as joy and delight. I wanted someone who was older than 70, so there was a wisdom of experience, but who also had the capacity for fresh wonder like a child, and also to be one of the greatest actors to ever do it. That list is not a long one.”

Oh, really?

That’s funny, because I can think of plenty of male actors off the top of my head who would tick all of those boxes, like Ian McKellen, Anthony Hopkins, Patrick Stewart, Charles Dance, Jeremy Irons, Ben Kingsley.

I don’t know, man. Maybe if you’d just been honest and said you really wanted to work with Meryl Streep and this was a good opportunity to do it, people might have been a bit more receptive. As it stands, it sounds like you’re arrogantly dismissing way more appropriate actors with a pretty flimsy excuse because you’d already made up your mind who you wanted to play Aslan.

And there’s no getting away from this one: considering Gerwig’s history with subversive feminist film projects, the inevitable assumption was that she wanted to put a subversive feminist spin on a traditional male-led fantasy series with Christian undertones. Maybe she did, maybe she didn’t, but optics and perception are everything in this business. And it feels like she walked straight into a major controversy before the film even started shooting.

And for what? To get Meryl Streep on the credits? I don’t know, man. It doesn’t seem worth it to me.

We’ll find out in February, which as the Drinker goes on to note, is usually a dumping ground for movies Hollywood didn’t consider good enough to succeed in the much more lucrative (and thus much more competitive) summer and Christmas release seasons.

OVERUSE? Scientists May Have Discovered Why Men’s Prostates Enlarge With Age.

I WONDER HOW THIS WOULD AFFECT ME? I GUESS WE’LL NEVER KNOW. Just Two Days on a Vegan Diet Triggered Unexpected Changes in the Liver.

BRAZIL WENT FULL COMMIE:

BREAKING:

Flávio Bolsonaro has been summoned by the Federal Police to hand over his passport within 24 hours by order of Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes.

The Supreme Court Justice argues that there is a risk that Bolsonaro could flee abroad to avoid prosecution. pic.twitter.com/dfL55NPTlF

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) October 26, 2026

A flight risk — from WHAT?

NOT BARCELONA TOO! Barcelona Burns, and Spain’s Left Blames Israel.