December 14, 2025

DECLINE IS A CHOICE: The Blue Zones Are 38% Ruined: but next week it’ll be 39%. “There’s a lot ruin in a blue zone. People in neighborhoods work at the preservation of order while they vote for disorder. Ordinary lives keep the squalor sort of more or less at bay, even when government stops bothering. Blue Model governance is a metastasizing disaster, caring for nothing and going broke while doing it. If you gave Gavin Newsom a dozen bright red roses, I suspect the bouquet would die in his hands before he could put it down. The man is the angel of death. But California isn’t dying; California is sort of okay, because many people sort of still try. The implication is that the decaying places could be turned around pretty easily, even after years of appalling government failure.”

Well, we saw that in NYC under Giuliani.

Posted at 2:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

WELL, STAY TUNED:

Posted at 2:26 pm by Glenn Reynolds

ROBERT SPENCER: Australia Discovers What It Means to ‘Globalize the Intifada.’

What exactly would it mean to “globalize the intifada”? What would a globalized intifada even look like? At least twelve people are dead and 29 injured on Australia’s Bondi Beach Sunday, as two Muslims opened fire upon a Hanukkah celebration. And so now the world has yet another example of what looks like when an intifada is globalized.

“Intifada” means “shaking off” or “rebellion,” and refers to armed struggle against Israel, including Israeli civilians. The Jerusalem Post noted back in 2021, when there was a good deal of globalization of the intifada that went largely unnoticed, that “during the Second Intifada from 2000-2005, Palestinian terrorist groups, including Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and some affiliated with Fatah, carried out hundreds of terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians and security personnel, killing more than 1,000.”

And so it is clear: globalizing the intifada means doing violence to Jews the world over. When New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani refuses to condemn the term, he is tacitly admitting that he has no problem with violence against Jews who are not members of the IDF, not fighting in Gaza, but just going about their business on Bondi Beach and elsewhere.

Australia welcomed in the killers who decided to globalize the intifada on Bondi Beach. It welcomed them as “asylum seekers” and “refugees,” but they were actually Islamic jihadis, or became Islamic jihadis once in Australia. (Either way, it’s not a good advertisement for Australia’s immigration policy, which is essentially the same as immigration policies all over Europe and North America.) One of the mass murderers is named Naveed Akram. He is from Pakistan. The other is Khaled al-Nabulsi, who hails from Lebanon and pledged allegiance to the Islamic State (ISIS). Police said that they were “aware” of one of these grateful asylum seekers before he made the decision to murder Jews in large numbers in order to gain the favor of Allah. They did not, obviously, do anything to stop him.

Related:

UPDATE:

Posted at 2:18 pm by Ed Driscoll

MEGAN MCARDLE: Why does anyone want to buy Warner Brothers, anyway?

Break out the popcorn and a jumbo box of Raisinets, because just when we thought the Warner Bros. Discovery drama was over, it turned out we had barely gotten started. The suspense over the company’s pending sale is mounting, and new questions are developing faster than writers can resolve old ones. Which suitor will shareholders choose? Will regulators block the deal? Will any of these characters find happily ever after?

If you remember last week’s episode, Netflix beat out Comcast and David Ellison’s Paramount Skydance to buy WBD — or at least its studio and streaming business, which are the bits everyone really wants. If you kept following the show, you’ve seen the action heat up: Ellison has launched a hostile bid for WBD, arguing that its shareholders would do better by taking $30 per share from him to buy the whole company, including its cable television stations — CNN, TNT, TBS and lifestyle outlets such as HGTV — than by getting $27.75 per share from Netflix for just the studio and streaming.

Spoiler alert: Cord-cutting is decimating the cable business so rapidly that this is a reasonable argument, even though the cable stations currently generate higher revenue and gross margins than streaming or studio. Between WBD’s debt and declining cable subscribers, there’s just not much future value left in those assets.

So stay tuned for more twists and turns! Eventually writers might resolve the biggest mystery: Why does anyone want to buy this company, anyway?

Fortunately, one august institution is dedicated to saving Warner Brothers from its ignoble fate: British cinemas demand Labour intervene against Netflix’s Hollywood takeover.

Cinemas have urged Labour to intervene in the planned takeover of Warner Bros by Netflix, warning that the deal would result in a “much thinner” selection of films for audiences.

Industry bosses have written to media minister Ian Murray to raise concerns about the streaming giant’s $83bn acquisition of the Hollywood studio behind major franchises such as Harry Potter, arguing that it could result in fewer films being released in cinemas.

In the letter sent to MPs on both the culture select committee and business and trade committee, Phil Clapp, the chief executive of the UK Cinema Association, said the takeover would be a “significant blow” to the industry – which is still struggling to recover from the pandemic.

Mr Clapp warned that audiences would be the biggest losers from the proposed deal, adding that it would also lead to significant job losses.

The trade group urged Mr Murray to take an active interest in the takeover and called on both committees to launch an inquiry.

Yes, launch an inquiry – write some really stern letters, England. That ought to do the job! But as John Podhoretz noted last week, we could be witnessing the “end of moviegoing” as we used to know it:

And in a thread Twitter/X McArdle explained why she didn’t bother going into details in her Washington Post article about Ellison’s goal of acquiring CNN along with Warner Brothers, as aging viewers and declining numbers mean that technology is also reaching its twilight years as destination viewing:

 

Posted at 12:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

THE RISE OF GERMAN NATIONALISM EXPOSES WASHINGTON’S DELUSIONS:

The recent electoral surge of the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which secured 20.8 percent in February’s snap election and won state elections in Thuringia last year, has predictably triggered alarm bells throughout Washington’s foreign policy establishment. The usual suspects are warning of a new Nazi threat, the collapse of the transatlantic alliance, and the end of Western civilization as we know it. But beneath the hyperbole lies a more complex reality that American policymakers would be wise to understand rather than reflexively condemn.

Let’s be clear about what’s happening. The AfD’s rise is not some inexplicable resurgence of fascism but rather a predictable political backlash against decades of failed policies—economic stagnation in eastern Germany, botched immigration policies, and Berlin’s costly entanglement in the Ukraine conflict. When the mainstream parties offered voters more of the same, voters looked elsewhere.

Washington’s foreign policy blob has responded with its standard playbook: demonize, isolate, and lecture. Yet this approach fundamentally misunderstands both German politics and American interests. The same establishment that assured us NATO expansion posed no threat to Russia, that the Iraq War would be a cakewalk, and that Afghanistan could be turned into a democracy now wants us to believe that AfD supporters are crypto-Nazis rather than ordinary Germans fed up with bearing the costs of extreme liberalism and America’s geopolitical adventures.

Politico (whose parent company is based in Berlin) is getting the vapors that much of Europe is turning “hard right and far-right:”

But then, the left see “far right” as being everywhere these days:

If only there was a way to slow the rise of the “far right” in both Europe and America:

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll

AUSTRALIA’S BONDI BEACH SHOOTING: What we know so far about Hanukkah attack.

Twelve people have died — including one gunman — following a shooting at Australia’s Bondi Beach which targeted the Jewish community on the first day of Hanukkah.

According to police, 29 others were taken to hospital and two officers were shot during the incident, which has since been declared a terror attack by officials. The surviving gunman is in a critical condition.

More than 1,000 people were attending an event on the beach celebrating Hanukkah.

Chris Minns, the premier of New South Wales, said: “Our heart bleeds for Australia’s Jewish community tonight.

“I can only imagine the pain that they’re feeling right now to see their loved ones killed as they celebrate this ancient holiday”.

Its origin and purpose, still a total mystery:

UPDATE: From last December: How Australia went from ‘goldene medina’ to ‘vitriol and vilification’ of Jews.

Posted at 10:54 am by Ed Driscoll

WELL, THIS IS THE 21st CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Orbital Data Centers Will “Bypass Earth-Based” Constraints.

Last week, readers were briefed on the emerging theme of data centers in low Earth orbit, a concept now openly discussed by Elon Musk, Jensen Huang, Jeff Bezos, and Sam Altman, as energy availability and infrastructure constraints on land increasingly emerge as major bottlenecks to data center buildouts through the end of this decade and well into the 2030s.

Nvidia-backed startup Starcloud has released a white paper outlining a case for operating a constellation of artificial intelligence data centers in space as a practical solution to Earth’s looming power crunch, cooling woes, and permitting land constraints.

Terrestrial data center projects will reach capacity limits as AI workloads scale to multi-gigawatt levels, while electricity demand and grid bottlenecks worsen over the next several years. Orbital data centers aim to bypass these constraints by using near-continuous, high-intensity solar power, passive radiative cooling to deep space, and modular designs that scale quickly, launched into orbit via SpaceX rockets.

“Orbital data centers can leverage lower cooling costs using passive radiative cooling in space to directly achieve low coolant temperatures. Perhaps most importantly, they can be scaled almost indefinitely without the physical or permitting constraints faced on Earth, using modularity to deploy them rapidly,” Starcloud wrote in the report.

Starcloud continued, “With new, reusable, cost-effective heavy-lift launch vehicles set to enter service, combined with the proliferation of in-orbit networking, the timing for this opportunity is ideal.”

No word yet how SID is holding up these days.

Posted at 10:45 am by Ed Driscoll

CARLSON GOES FULL CANDACE OWENS: Appealing to low-IQ credulous conspiracy theorists is a sure way to destroy a political movement, and Tucker seems to be giving it the old college try. Here’s the background: The communist anti-American government in Venezuela naturally hates Israel, while the opposition leadership is friendly. This is hardly a secret. The Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom has a story about this. A nutty anti-Israel leftist posted an excerpt from the story, with the caption, “Israeli