July 13, 2026

July 12, 2026

OPEN THREAD: They heard the call and they comment on the wall, and you and me we understood.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

COCAINE MITCH LIVES! McConnell says a fall led to his hospitalization, breaking weeks of silence about health condition.

Sen. Mitch McConnell on Sunday revealed for the first time that a fall led to his hospitalization, breaking the silence about his condition after weeks of mounting speculation about the Kentucky Republican’s health.

McConnell, 84, said in a statement that he has undergone a battery of tests as doctors try to determine what led to his fall. He explained the long silence about his condition by saying that “folks of my generation often hesitate to share the vulnerability that comes with growing older.”

“Even in the public eye, I feel that same instinct — I can’t help it,” he said.

McConnell said he is now in a rehabilitation center and will not be returning to the Senate “quite yet.” He said he continues to work with his staff on Senate business in the meantime.

The statement included a smiling picture of the senator with his wife Elaine Chao, a tacit response to speculation online that McConnell had died or was incapacitated.

Here’s the photo:

ChatGPT and Google’s AI both believe the photo is real, though as ChatGPT notes, “Elaine Chao appears exceptionally polished compared with the hospital setting. Her makeup, hair, and crisp white blouse could make the image look ‘too perfect,’ but that’s completely plausible if she dressed up before visiting. The image has the smooth, smartphone-style processing that modern iPhones and Android phones apply automatically. Computational photography can sometimes resemble AI enhancement.” (Bold text in original.)

Posted at 6:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

THREAD:

Posted at 6:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

GOODER AND HARDER, CALIFORNIA: Paramount weighs leaving California over Warner Bros. rift.

As California tries to derail Paramount’s $110 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount CEO David Ellison’s friends and advisers have been pushing the media executive to consider shifting his business out of the state.

Ellison’s confidantes have pushed him to consider moving its corporate headquarters and reallocating much of its $30 billion in planned spending outside the state if California Attorney General Rob Bonta were to sue to stop the merger, according to people familiar with the discussions.

No decisions have been made, these people said, and the considerations may just be a show of brinkmanship, given so much of the industry’s production takes place outside of Hollywood already. Under the current deal, Paramount has committed to keeping both companies’ lots operational if it remains in California.

But Paramount would not be the first major company to decamp from California in recent years due to tussles with state regulators: Chevron relocated its corporate headquarters from San Ramon to Texas two years ago, while Oracle and Tesla have made similar moves to the Lone Star State.

Paramount does have at least one short-term option: The company last year signed a lease in Bayonne, New Jersey, for nearly 300,000 square feet of studio space and could expand operations there.

To revise and extend the remarks by the late P.J. O’Rourke, you can’t get good Chinese takeout in China, Cuban cigars are rationed in Cuba, and you can’t make movies in Hollywood. That’s all you need to know about communism.

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

“FEW THINGS WILL RADICALIZE YOU MORE THAN SEEING WHAT THE WORLD LOOKED LIKE 30 YEARS AGO:”

Tweet concludes, “They instinctively know something’s off, and things aren’t how they’re supposed to be, because there’s so much evidence of us having lived in a completely different society only a moment before them.”

To be fair, the above commercial isn’t “what the world looked like 30 years ago,” it’s a series of tiny vignettes constructed to sell disposable razor blades to men, in much the same way that 1980s American car manufacturers lit and filmed cheaply-made disposable cars to look like they were tearing through nighttime scenes from Miami Vice: 

In July of 2024, James Lileks wrote:

I seem to recall a story about a Pizza Hut that recently redid itself in the old style, and how people loved it. There’s a subreddit devoted to 80s fast food, and the commercials seem as if they’re from a different civilization. We made fun of them at the time — all that ridiculous cheer — and no one really believed that a trip to McDonald’s would be full of such ecstatic gustatory experiences, but now we would like to be there thank you very much and we promise we will be grateful, because we know it all had something, and we miss it. I mean, we’ll survive. But we miss it.

Similarly, at least that iteration of Gillette didn’t publicly look down on its customer base with a sneer. Or as Don Surber wrote in October of 2024: Gillette, Bud Light, Kamala: Calling an entire sex toxic is no way to sell blades, beer or candidates.

Posted at 4:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

AS ANDY WARHOL SAID, NOTHING IS MORE BOURGEOIS THAN TO BE AFRAID TO LOOK BOURGEOIS:

Posted at 4:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

SWISS SOCCER HOOLIGANS ESCALATE TO NEXT-LEVEL VIOLENCE: “Severe riots in Switzerland after being eliminated.”

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

TRAPPED IN THE GULAG OF TDS:

Posted at 2:55 pm by Ed Driscoll