August 1, 2026

OPEN THREAD: Do that comment voodoo that you do so well.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

STACY MCCAIN: “Family Demands Answers.” “Say hello to Bryan Axel Ramirez Gomez and, while you’re at it, go ahead and say good-bye, because young Mr. Gomez shuffled off this mortal coil in February, after deciding to start a shootout with police in Elkhart, Indiana, which lasted only three seconds. . . . In this case, despite Gomez having the tactical advantage of firing the first shot, the two cops between them fired 10 shots in three seconds, and scored three hits. The officers were justified, and as for the ‘family demands answer,’ well, they got their answer — not the one they wanted. There won’t be any wrongful death lawsuit. Ben Crump won’t be showing up.”

Plus: “Superior marksmanship by cops may seem like an unfair advantage to criminals who lose shootouts, but it’s not brutality.”

Posted at 9:25 pm by Glenn Reynolds

WHY IS HE GOING WOBBLY?

UPDATE:

Posted at 8:58 pm by Glenn Reynolds

THEY’RE REALLY ANNOYING: There’s One Creature of The Deep That Can Scare Even Orcas Away. “Just the hint of a squeal from a pod of long-finned pilot whales (Globicephala melas) can send orcas packing. And the best part is that nobody really knows why.”

You hear that squeal and they’ll be up in your grill trying to sell you a time-share before you know it.

Posted at 8:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

WHEN THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE MEETS THE RELIGION OF PEACE:

Evergreen:

Posted at 6:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

DISPATCHES FROM THE HARRIS ADMINISTRATION:

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

TRIGGERNOMETRY INTERVIEWS THE CRITICAL DRINKER: “I define [Christopher Nolan’s] Odyssey as a hero’s journey with no hero.”

At about 7:30 into the interview, co-host Francis Foster says, “I’m just going to pick a movie year at random something like 1996 would [The Odyssey] even have been talked about as much would it have been hyped as much, would everybody be as energized or would it just simply be seen as just another big budget Hollywood movie which is all right but let’s be honest nothing special. Maxim would have given it three out of five stars.”

Funny you said 1996, because yesterday, Clifton Duncan tweeted this collage of absolutely terrific movies from the previous year:

It wasn’t the studio system of the 1940s, but I miss the reliability of assembly-line Hollywood of the 1980s and ‘90s. If only there was a way to recreate either system.

Posted at 4:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

TO BE FAIR, THE POPE IS A MAN AND HE’S NO BETTER:

Also, Cape Coast Castle is where slaves were sold. Shouldn’t Ghana be paying reparations for that?

Posted at 4:27 pm by Glenn Reynolds

MARK JUDGE: Emily Wilson’s Odyssey Review and the Snowflake Entertainment Press.

Christopher Nolan‘s new film The Odyssey is a box-office hit. But University of Pennsylvania classics scholar Emily Wilson, who published her own translation of Homer’s epic in 2017, says Nolan’s script is poorly written and lacking in emotional depth and character development. And, she adds, there are no sex scenes — and all the food looks horrible.

“We need to have a protagonist with detailed, believable motivation,” Wilson says. “[But] these desires seem stripped from Odysseus. He doesn’t seem to want food. He doesn’t seem to want sex. What does he want?”

“He’s clever … and smart and therefore a fascinating character,” Wilson says. But, she adds, “the movie gives us a version of Matt Damon as Odysseus, who is not required to be smart, instead he’s just constantly troubled by anxiety about his role in the Trojan Horse and the Trojan War. … That’s a shame.”

Nolan wrote the script for The Odyssey himself, which Wilson feels may have been a mistake: “I do think that it would have been better if Nolan had hired a scriptwriter, because that would have solved a lot of the issues.”

It’s a good film and well worth seeing on the biggest screen near you – but it could have been so much more.

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

WHAT COULD GO WRONG? Weed Is the New Booze.

Stoners these days aren’t only smoking joints in cars like in “Dazed and Confused,” though that habit certainly hasn’t disappeared. Now, it’s increasingly popular to enjoy cannabis-infused beverages, which include seltzers, teas, lemonades and mocktails with varying blends of THC and CBD depending on the desired vibe (social, relaxation, sleep, focus). Cannabis gummies are all the rage for young people, offered in fun colors and flavors reminiscent of Sour Patch Kids. Gwyneth Paltrow, Seth Rogen, Mike Tyson and other celebrities have invested in products or launched their own. Some fitness gurus promote microdosing to enhance the workout experience.

But advocates glide past the health risks. Long-term cannabis consumption is linked to reduced activation in brain regions responsible for attention, decision-making and memory. For those who start young, chronic use leads to an average permanent IQ loss of 5.5 points—and you don’t get them back when you quit. One meme criticizes pot’s popularity by suggesting that the slow-paced Middle Ages was defined by “stoner societies”—cannabis was common in some medieval European and Middle Eastern cultures. By contrast, the memesters claim, bustling Renaissance era cities were “alcoholic societies.”

Of course, binge-drinking also harms productivity. The fear is that the weed frenzy will produce a generation of bleary-eyed slackers who aren’t capable of doing more than a medieval peasant. The cannabis being consumed today is much stronger than in the past. In the 1960s through ’80s, THC content was less than 2%. Now, the cannabis industry has developed strains of marijuana with THC concentrations as high as 28%.

Flashback: Second Thoughts on Pot: “‘Yeah, they all smoke.’ ‘Well . . . other things too, right?’ ‘Sometimes. But they all smoke.’”

Posted at 2:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

FAUCI AND THE GREAT COVID COVER-UP:

But nauseating narcissism and gobsmacking greed (and using private email addresses for government business) do not in themselves cause or cover up pandemics. The far greater sin was deliberately misleading the world about the origin of Covid-19. And there in black and white on 26 January 2020 in his diary is Fauci’s line about the Wuhan seafood market, which many claimed was the origin of Covid: ‘Now we know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier.’

Yet, a week later, he convened a group of 12 scientists, most of whom thought it possible, perhaps even probable, that the virus had been engineered in a laboratory, to discuss their concerns. He then tasked four of the fairly junior ones in the meeting (a fifth author joined later), some of whom depended on grants from his agency, to write a paper, ‘The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2’. This paper outright dismissed the possibility of a lab leak as the origin of Covid. He and Jeremy Farrar, the then director of the Wellcome Trust, edited and promoted the publication of that paper. Fauci then disguised his own role in doing so, and spoke about it from the podium of the White House as if he had nothing to do with it.

Before and after they wrote the paper its authors all thought a lab leak was possible, perhaps even likely, as their private messages have repeatedly confirmed.

As James Miegs wrote at the Wall Street Journal in “A Covid Conspiracy in Plain Sight,” “This is not the way a healthy democracy responds to a disaster. After the Space Shuttle Challenger blew up in 1986, President Reagan appointed a blue-ribbon commission to investigate. NASA opened its books and answered every question. When a mysterious virus began killing thousands of Americans a week, Dr. Fauci and other public-health leaders did the opposite. They gaslit reporters, stonewalled congressional inquiries and evaded Freedom of Information Act requests. In two recently released emails, another Dr. Fauci ally urged the Wuhan lab’s Dr. Shi not to share information with a respected American virus researcher. Talk about a coverup.”

Posted at 2:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

Related:

Posted at 1:45 pm by Ed Driscoll