November 1, 2026

WISDOM FROM JERRY POURNELLE:

Posted at 7:00 am by Glenn Reynolds

GREAT MOMENTS IN OIKOPHOBIA:

Flashback: Easy Riders, Raging Oedipal Resentment.

UPDATE: Pete Hegseth’s Dad Leveled El-Sayed, Then Came the Clips That Finished Him Off.

MORE:

Posted at 12:55 am by Ed Driscoll

October 31, 2026

OPEN THREAD: Boo!

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

CHRISTIAN TOTO: When You’ve Lost The Onion…:

The Onion had a long, rich history of hitting both sides and going wherever the funny happened to be. That occurred first in print and, later, online.

Then, over the years, The Onion got a bad case of “Saturday Night Live” fever. That show refused to mock Democrats and trained its satirical fire power on GOP targets.

Sad. The Onion followed suit, and the problem worsened when The Babylon Bee entered the chat. The upstart fake news site stole The Onion’s thunder, story by story, laugh by laugh. Sure, the Babylon Bee comes from a Christian-based, right-leaning perspective, but it’s about comedy, not partisan sniping. And the Bee often swats at President Donald Trump and/or his political allies.

That’s why a new Onion “news” article proved both welcome and shocking.

It’s not a story, per se, just a headline and a photograph. In a way, that’s all you need to say and share.

To no one’s surprise, the site’s Instagram comments are all on board with the extreme chicanery. At least its readers took a break from posting Charlie Kirk celebrations to cheer on any deception necessary.

That’s not The Onion’s fault, and the problem won’t be solved by one snappy headline. The Onion is no longer relevant to the culture at large. The Bee is, which is one reason so many fact-checkers hassle the site to see if its news articles are accurate or not.

I’m assuming that since both The Onion (owned by the Stig himself these days) and The New York Times have attacked Peltola, there’s more than a whiff that she’s a goner on Tuesday, but as no one says in Alaska, eschew all cocksuredness.

Posted at 9:25 pm by Ed Driscoll

PATRICK STEWART’S PICARD WAS LIBERALISM’S LOST PROMISE:

Patrick Stewart’s death at the age of 86 has prompted tributes to both the brilliant actor and the famous role that defined him: Star Trek’s Jean-Luc Picard. Matthew Yglesias, centrist liberalism’s inescapable pundit, today called the character “the single most compelling vision of progressive politics I am familiar with: secular, rational, compassionate, egalitarian, committed to abundance and self-improvement”. It’s an affectionate tribute with an awkward implication. Why does a television captain from the Eighties still offer a more ambitious political vision than the people governing us?

Picard ran a starship the way a certain kind of person imagines a good government should be run. He gathered his senior staff around a conference table, heard everyone out, weighed the ethics, and only then said: “Make it so.” He preferred negotiation to force, treating photon torpedoes as a last resort. With his Shakespearean quotations and patrician bearing, he embodied authority with authoritarianism apparently filtered out — intelligent, humane, cosmopolitan — and he arrived in September 1987, just in time for the end of history.

Two decades later, a good chunk of America thought it had elected a real-life version of Picard mixed with the West Wing’s Josiah Bartlet, another symbol of enlightened liberalism. Barack Obama has never hidden his Trekkie credentials. He once flashed the Vulcan salute in the Oval Office alongside Star Trek actor Nichelle Nichols. While guest-editing WIRED in 2016, he credited the show with influencing his worldview, particularly its optimism that people could overcome their differences and build a better future together. His Trek, to be fair, was the Sixties original, and pundits duly cast him as Spock, the unflappable Vulcan surrounded by hotheads.

Of course leftist pundits compared Obama to Spock, and Barry was happy to agree with the extremely flattering assessment. Back in April though, “George MF Washington” wrote: Misunderstanding Mr. Spock.

Spock is a Vulcan, an alien race which long ago physically and mentally rejected emotions, embracing stoic lives of pure logic. For the Vulcan, this lifestyle is not a choice, it is an evolutionary response to a devastating ancient war fueled by base emotions which almost destroyed the Vulcan civilization. Vulcans are, to coin a phrase, “born this way.” One way to look at this backstory is to see the Vulcan lack of emotion not as something aspirational, but as an unfortunate byproduct of civilizational trauma. In a very real sense, the Vulcan race has been fundamentally broken by its violent past.

And indeed, a recurring theme in the original series was Spock’s frustrating attempts to understand the complexity of human emotions and specifically why those emotions often seemed to give Captain Kirk an advantage in his dealings with the various “no-win” scenarios in which the crew of the Enterprise routinely found themselves. Throughout the now 60-year history of the original show, Spock understood that not being able to experience or express emotions could sometimes be a detriment to his ability to complete the mission, a realization which left him conflicted, both wanting to feel what humans feel while also being unable to allow himself to do so because of his unique ancestry. It was Spock’s stunted emotionality (Spock is actually half-human, having been born of a human mother) which often caused him to fail in scenarios where the highly-emotional Captain Kirk was able to succeed by virtue of his vital humanity.

And this, finally, is the beating heart of modern Progressives’ fundamental misunderstanding of what “Star Trek” is… Spock has never existed in the “Star Trek” universe to prove to the audience how important diversity is, or to “hold up a mirror to our society,” Spock exists to show the audience how awesome humans are by comparison. That is his purpose on the show. He is a storytelling device, there to show us through his emotional deficiencies that there is something special, something indefatigable about the innately emotional human race.

It has always struck me as darkly comedic when Progressives compare Barack Obama favorably to Mr. Spock, rejoicing in the wake of his 2008 election that finally the emotionless coldly rational science officer had replaced the cowboy Jim Kirk figure in the White House, because fans who actually know the show understand that Spock’s emotional deficiencies made him fundamentally unfit for command… the irony being that Mr. Spock himself understood this fundamental truth too, even if those who are currently in charge of the “Star Trek” universe do not.

While Obama may have been compared to Spock, while in office, he wasn’t exactly trying to transform American into Gene Roddenberry’s utopian vision of the United Federation of Planets: President Obama’s Disastrous Record on Race.

UPDATE:

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

ROLE MODEL:

Posted at 8:03 pm by Glenn Reynolds

“IT’S PROBABLY NOTHING:”

Posted at 6:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

I’M ON THE SIDE OF BACON: Bacon Wars.

Posted at 6:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

I’VE SEEN THIS MOVIE BEFORE:

As the Charlotte Business Journal wrote in 2010, “The U.S. economy actually grew 4.2% in the fourth-quarter that year and went on to enjoy a terrific decade-long run of prosperity. And we learned in hindsight that recession had actually already ended when the [September 1992 Time magazine] article was printed.” In December of 1992, Time’s leftists gloated that the economic turnaround was “Bush’s Economic Present for Clinton.”

Posted at 5:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

HALLOWEEN MEMES TO BRIGHTEN YOUR BOOS:  Memes! Boo!

Posted at 4:15 pm by Sarah Hoyt

MY, THAT’S AN AWFUL LOT OF BAD LUCK IN RECENT YEARS:

Flashback: This account shows how South Africa has decayed in just a decade, and it’s a warning to us all.

UPDATE: Really good and hard, Fun City: Mayor Mamdani: South Africa is the model for New York.

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

EUROPE KNOWS HOW TO PUT A STOP TO IT, YET THEIR ELITES REFUSE:

“Ugly? Sure…because inaction too long has let the impression be made that there is no accountability for violence and destruction.”

Posted at 3:17 pm by Stephen Green