August 25, 2026

WINNING IS GOOD:

Posted at 5:54 pm by Stephen Green

ONE NIGHT IN BANGKOK:

Posted at 5:43 pm by Ed Driscoll

IT’S NOT JUST FOR MELONVILLE AND THE TRI-CITY AREA ANYMORE:

I’m looking forward to seeing broadcasting from 3CP1, Russian Television, once again:

Posted at 5:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

FLASHBACK: Dolly Parton represents all that’s best about America.

She has, for 25 years, run a literacy programme for children, sending books to different parts of the world without fanfare. The daughter of an illiterate but intelligent father, she set up the Imagination Library, rather than, more obviously, a support for the performing arts. She understands that few people are going to have her route out of grinding poverty but that many who learn to love to read will make a success of their lives.

She has been a supporter of gay, lesbian and trans rights for decades; she stays out of party politics, very wisely not condemning what much of her audience will passionately believe. She is, in short, a living embodiment of the American trust in the transformative effect of hard work and talent. She has done it without losing an iota of her good humour or charm, and never giving the slightest hint of the usual American sanctimoniousness; she is, as everyone agrees, a very good thing indeed.

Dolly has never complained much about the barriers she had to overcome, preferring to bring out some well-worn jokes on the subject. On her villainous collaborator in the early years, Porter Wagoner, she has said: ‘I knew he had balls when he sued me for a million dollars. He was only paying me $30 a week.’ There is no question, however, that these barriers were substantial, and defeated many others. Bobbie Gentry, a similarly determined and intelligent singer of the time, withdrew from public appearances altogether by the end of the 1970s. Dolly has often put these problems down to her sex, and the difficulties of being a woman in a man’s world. I’m not so sure. That is part of it, but the worst humiliations she faced sprang, surely, from something Americans find very hard to discuss: class.

Dolly was, from the start, perfectly sincere in her spectacular look — hair on a scale not glimpsed since Mme de Pompadour, rhinestones, glitter and an unforgettable silhouette which surgery may have contributed to. When the scientists in 1996 succeeded in cloning a sheep with cells taken from the mammary gland, the result was always going to be called ‘Dolly’. We love all these things about her now, of course, but they threw a lot of commentators into a class-driven frenzy that had little to do with her sex. In a television interview in 1977, Barbara Walters thought herself entitled to ask Dolly when she experienced puberty, whether her husband felt obliged to be faithful, and whether her breasts were real. She even submitted her guest to the indignity of standing up and inviting the audience to inspect her body. Would Walters have ever done this to Meryl Streep or Meg Ryan? It was sheer class hostility, and no doubt much more of it took place in private, and in boardrooms.

—Philip Hensher, The Spectator, January 14th, 2021.

UPDATE: This story dropped just one day ago, so presumably some sort of holographic or “Digital Dolly” will be touring concert halls at some point in the near future: Dolly Parton Is Exploring Avatar Concerts So Fans Could See Her Perform Long Into the Future.

Posted at 5:23 pm by Ed Driscoll

SPACE: NASA Sets Coverage for Roman Space Telescope Launch from Florida.

Named for NASA’s first chief astronomer, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will pair sharp infrared vision with a field of view at least 100 times larger than the agency’s Hubble Space Telescope. Its crisp, sweeping surveys will help scientists investigate dark energy and dark matter, discover and characterize exoplanets, map billions of galaxies, study black holes, and explore objects from our own solar system to the edge of the observable universe.

After launch and separation from the rocket, Roman will travel to the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point, or L2, about one million miles from Earth. The mission has a five-year primary lifetime with a goal of operating for 10 years, and Roman’s science data will be publicly available after processing.

Plus: “NASA and SpaceX are targeting Roman’s liftoff for no earlier than 7:26 a.m. EDT Sunday, Aug. 30, aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Complex 39A at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Launch coverage begins at 6:20 a.m.”

Those Falcon Heavy launches are something to see, and there aren’t many of them.

The core on this launch will be expended, but SpaceX plans to recover both side boosters and the fairings.

Posted at 4:51 pm by Stephen Green

THEY WERE WARNED:

Glenn noted years ago that lefties suck at understanding second-order effects, and I’ve seen nothing to contradict that.

Posted at 4:35 pm by Stephen Green

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

WHEN SECONDS COUNT, THE POLICE ARE ONLY MINUTES AWAY: Homeowner’s Gun Works When Restraining Order Doesn’t. “Police later confirmed the obvious: the dead man had an active protective order barring him from the very address he’d chosen to invade. Paper and ink meant nothing to a genius who thought ‘restraining order’ was just a polite suggestion. Then again, a restraining order doesn’t enforce itself. Armed self-defense proved harder to ignore.”

Posted at 4:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

NIFTY: Data centers become ‘killer application’ for new power transformer tech.

Several US companies, including Amperesand, Heron Power, and DG Matrix, have collectively raised more than $280 million in funding over the past year to commercialize solid-state transformer technology.

Solid-state transformers could also greatly reduce the amount of copper and other materials needed by data center projects, while their smaller physical footprints allow data center developers to do other things with the available space, Lukic explained.

In the long run, successful commercialization of solid-state transformers could even help ease the broader supply chain shortage affecting power transformers. That would make transformers more readily available for power grid upgrades and expansions beyond data center projects.

“There are relatively few specialized companies that manufacture [conventional] transformers, while solid-state transformers are like an electronics device,” Lukic said. “It completely opens up the space for who can play in the transformer space, and also opens up where transformers can be manufactured.”

Faster, please.

Posted at 3:49 pm by Stephen Green

FREE ALBERTA!

But — oh, Canada — there’s always more:

Posted at 3:33 pm by Stephen Green

LIES, DAMN LIES AND $40 TRILLION NATIONAL DEBT: Issues&Insights nails the Mainstream Media’s attempts to blame Trump and tax cuts for the $40 Trillion national debt (that is actually $176 Trillion).

Posted at 3:15 pm by Mark Tapscott

OBAMA SAID HE’D MAKE COLLEGE MORE AFFORDABLE AND YOU CAN GUESS THE REST:

Posted at 3:02 pm by Stephen Green

SMALL-TOWN CRIME: Ungodly Doings In Godley. “In a small city of some 5,000, you would expect there to be some overlap between the city council and other institutions in town, like the volunteer fire department, the PTA, or the Kiwanis Club. One thing you wouldn’t expect city council overlap with: a prostitution ring.”

Posted at 2:47 pm by Stephen Green

THAT SEEMS RIGHT:

Related thoughts from George MF Washington:

Posted at 2:32 pm by Stephen Green

ED MORRISSEY: Today’s Deep Question: Why Is El-Sayed So Curious About Watters’ Genitalia?

Get ready for 83 seconds of pure … ick.

Actually, today’s truly deep question is what Abdul El-Sayed thought would happen when he agreed to appear on Jesse Watters’ show in the first place. The decision to do an interview on Fox News makes some sense when fighting to win a statewide election in a state Donald Trump won two years ago. Sean Hannity would probably have been the choice there, who routinely offers grace to political opponents, or maybe Bret Baier, although his calm and cool demolition of Kamala Harris deserves legendary status. The Five might have been El-Sayed’s best format.

Instead, El-Sayed chose to tangle with Watters and his naturally combative-yet-amusing style. It didn’t take long for Watters to demolish El-Sayed on the question of sex-change surgeries for minors, a question that El-Sayed thought he’d prepared for by asking about … Watters’ penis.

This will become legendary for all the best reasons:

Noah Rothman adds, “El-Sayed’s Circumcision Quip Was Too Clever by Half:”

Surely, El-Sayed’s revealed confusion over the practice of circumcision and how it is distinct from genital mutilation will do nothing to dispel the allegations of antisemitism swirling around his campaign. More damaging to him, perhaps, is the candidate’s flat-footedness on the controversial issue of youth gender transition therapies and the harm they do.

The minimally curious should by now have grappled with the medical literature that finds young people suffering from gender dysphoria do not, on balance, experience positive mental health outcomes as a result of surgical or pharmaceutical interventions. Indeed, their conditions often worsen. El-Sayed and others should be expected to have surveyed the landscape in Europe, where the public health apparatus expresses increasing uncertainty about the value of those interventions.

They should recognize, at the very least, the political peril associated with their incuriosity, especially if they’re running for office. It’s not too much to expect candidates to familiarize themselves with the public’s anxieties toward biological males playing in women’s sports or the increasing episodes of violence attributed to gender dysphoric personalities.

Noah adds, “You know that a Democrat has done or said something indefensibly asinine when the political press covers the reaction to it with more vigor than the precipitating event.”

But that’s an everyday occurrence in the DNC-MSM:

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll