July 30, 2026

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

CAN WE BUILD A WALL AROUND CONGRESS?

Posted at 4:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

TONY WOODLIEF: ‘Restorative Justice’ Brings Violent Schools.

The Education Department will no longer count racial disparities in K-12 school suspension rates as proof of discrimination, it announced on July 23. This is a welcome change, but it won’t automatically restore order in the thousands of schools pressured by the Obama and Biden administrations into adopting “alternative discipline” methods whose chief objective is race equity. Many such programs have come at the cost of student safety and education.

These methods go by many names, like “restorative practices,” “social-emotional learning” and, most telling, “restorative justice.” In lieu of suspensions, administrators invite offenders to reflect in a soothing place on the feelings and trauma that led them, say, to hit another student or disobey a teacher. Students may also be invited into a “restorative circle” with school staff and other students, where they can share their feelings, and others in the circle can talk with them about how peace in the community might be restored.

Reality often falls short of this vision. Concerns about restorative justice emerged soon after the Obama administration began pushing it. Public schools in Philadelphia that implemented it experienced “skyrocketing truancy, serious misbehavior, and declining achievement,” Manhattan Institute researchers observed in 2017. Other cities experienced similar results.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 2:49 pm by Stephen Green

CATCHING UP WITH 1998: CENTCOM Just Noticing Troop Cell Phones Are a Problem. “This full-blown drooling idiot soldier has a video of the entire inside of his command hut, makes sure he gets shots of all the desks and monitors as he’s swinging on his protective gear at a run. With sirens blaring, he throws open the door to charge outside into the darkness and proceeds to show anyone watching how to get to the bunker and how it, too, is protected from incoming. And this soldier, of the tiny, TINY brain, thought this was a good thing to load to social media for the world to see.”

Posted at 2:39 pm by Glenn Reynolds

IT USED TO BE MY FAVORITE, MUST-READ MAGAZINE…:

…but that was 20 years ago or longer.

Posted at 2:34 pm by Stephen Green