October 30, 2026

YEAH, MY EMPATHY FOR THAT KIND OF THING RAN OUT BEFORE I EVER HAD ANY:

Posted at 5:09 pm by Stephen Green

HOW ARE YOU GOING TO GET VOTERS TO CHOSE THE WRONG CANDIDATE IF THEY HAVE TO SHOW ID?

Posted at 4:38 pm by Stephen Green

THE GREATNESS OF PATRICK STEWART:

He was not an easy man, as he was happy to admit, and both his personal and professional lives were not free of conflict. But when he was on song, which he was often, there were few actors of his generation who could touch him.

Star Trek made him rich and famous, of course, and he dealt with the respect and adulation that his best-known role brought him with the good humor and self-effacement that many veteran actors who become successful late in life display. Even for those who were not natural sci-fi fans, his Picard – authoritative and charismatic, yes, but also winningly human – was a fine reason to watch the show, and Stewart, who reprised the role as recently as 2023, relished the opportunity to play an intergalactic version of Horatio Hornblower, and approached the part with swashbuckling zeal. It is hard to think of any actor who played a role of such longevity with such conviction and talent, and his enormous popularity at fan conventions was testament to how beloved he was.

But he never turned his back on his first love, the stage, and continued to perform well after his enviable bank balance would have led less committed actors to take it easier.

In his 1983 book Inside Prime Time, Todd Gitlin wrote:

In recent years many producers have been dismayed that the networks have not only usurped the casting of leads but have insisted that whole committees sit in on the casting of minor parts. “I think we should be involved in casting, it’s our money,” says NBC’s genial number-two programming executive, Perry Lafferty. He adds, “The key to every television program’s success—and this will get a lot of people mad, but it’s true—is casting,” Lafferty insists. “It’s who plays the lead. I can’t tell you any plots from The Rockford Files. I used to love it. I love James Garner. I loved Telly Savalas’s Kojak. That’s what the audience goes for. They go for the performer. They don’t remember the plots; you can’t write that good over a period of time. So it comes down to who do you put in there.”

Unlike most successful TV shows which start strong and slowly jump the shark, TNG was the opposite – its creation and first two years were a shambolic mess, a topic explored at length in the William Shatner-narrated 2014 documentary, Chaos on the Bridge. But for the third season, an aged and dissipated Gene Roddenberry stepped back (read: was pushed out), new writers were brought in, and the show quickly became what we remember as TNG for the rest of its run. But without Stewart’s charisma and crisp line readings, there’s no way TNG would have made it to its third season. For its first two years, he was the show.

Or as Sunny Bunch writes, “The Next Generation was always my show: It’s one of the first instances of must-see viewing I can remember, and the biggest reason was the bizarre magnetism of this wiry, bald Brit who, for some reason, had a French name. This, naturally, didn’t quite make sense (though he had a good explanation), but none of that mattered because Stewart was so damn commanding onscreen. This may have been the first time I really realized what ‘acting’ is: He just had a presence, an authority, one that transcended mere Starfleet rank. You could buy him as a leader because he had both forcefulness and empathy.”

Posted at 4:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

IT ISN’T FRIDAY UNTIL IT’S FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY [VIP]: Finally, a Genuine Man-Bites-Dog Story. “It’s time for your much-needed break from the serious news, and this week, we’ll learn once more that TikTok kills brain cells, that you still shouldn’t bring a knife to a gunfight, and what makes them say, ‘Gee, whiz!’ in Minnesota.”

Posted at 4:23 pm by Stephen Green

SOMEBODY SET UP US THE BOMB: Gatsby Police Procedural With Gender Twist In Works At NBC.

NBC is eyeing a fresh spin on a literary classic, with a partially gender-swapped police procedural take on The Great Gatsby in development, Deadline has learned.

The series, titled Gatsby, hails from writer/EPs Jake Coburn and Jason Tracey and Universal Television, a division of Universal Studio Group.

It’s billed as a modern-day police procedural about Det. Jay Gatsby, a devilishly charming investigator with a con-man’s gift for reading human behavior, and decorated New York State Police Det. Nicole “Nicky” Carraway, who was born to be a cop but dreams of becoming a writer.

The gender-swapped character here is Nicky, a female counterpart to bond salesman Nick Carraway, who as neighbor to enigmatic self-made millionaire Jay Gatsby, serves as narrator to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s tragic 1925 novel The Great Gatsby. The book finds Nick moving to the fictional Long Island neighborhood of West Egg, where he becomes drawn into the world of Gatsby amid his efforts to rekindle a romance with his cousin, Daisy Buchanan.

Go home NBC, you’re drunk – and you don’t write nearly as well as Fitzgerald did, when he was drunk.

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE:

Posted at 4:07 pm by Stephen Green

AMAZING THAT IT STILL WORKS AT ALL: Engineers inexplicably lose contact with Voyager-1 for 24 hours.

As Voyager-1 is speeding away from the solar system at about 38,000 miles per hour, its distance from Earth continues to grow. On November 18, 2026 it will finally be far enough away that it will take 24 hours for a radio signal to get to or from it, the equivalent of one light day, equivalent to 16.09 billion miles, or about four times farther from the Sun than Pluto.

It is expected that the spacecraft’s nuclear power supply will finally run out in about a year or two. The goal right now is to keep it alive until September 5, 2027, the 50th anniversary of its launch.

Incredible.

Posted at 3:52 pm by Stephen Green

THEY’RE NEVER MORE THAN ONE ELECTION AWAY FROM COMPLETING THE “FUNDAMENTAL TRANSFORMATION” BEGUN BY OBAMA:

Posted at 3:36 pm by Stephen Green

IT’S TIME FOR VICTORIA TAFT’S West Coast, Messed Coast™: Portland City Hall Declared a Brain-Free Zone. “This week, the Portland City Council declared City Hall a brain-free zone. This is for a couple of reasons, which you’ll hear about. We’ve got an election roundup. And Gavin Newsom thought Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass’s idea of burning tax dollars in a big bonfire in front of God and everybody was such a great idea that he’s doing it, too.”

Posted at 3:21 pm by Stephen Green

ANOTHER REMINDER THAT WHATEVER THE LEFT ACCUSES OTHERS OF BEING OR DOING IS EXACTLY WHAT LEFTIES ARE BEING OR DOING:

Posted at 3:05 pm by Stephen Green

COLLEGES CREATED THE AI CHEATING PROBLEM. “We’ve created an environment wherein the appearance of accomplishment can be just as rewarding as accomplishment itself.” That line’s probably going on our society’s collective tombstone.

Posted at 2:58 pm by Robert Shibley

GOOD LORD: Binance Suspends Transactions After It Is Targeted in Biggest-Ever Cyber Heist.

Binance suspended transactions Thursday as the exchange investigates the biggest cyber heist in history.

“It does look like a hack on Binance,” Changpeng Zhao, Binance’s founder, said in a post on the social-media platform X. “User funds are safe.”

Binance said late Thursday that the hack totaled around $6.3 billion.

Zhao, who no longer leads the world’s biggest crypto exchange but remains its largest shareholder, added that stablecoin providers Tether and Circle had moved quickly to freeze some $1.7 billion in stolen assets. Binance later revised that number to $3 billion across several different assets.

Cybersecurity research firms TRM Labs and Pangolin Intelligence said the heist appears to have been conducted by North Korea’s TraderTraitor hacking group, which has been behind many of the largest crypto hacks in recent memory. “This was absolutely North Korea,” said Nick Carlsen, a senior investigator on the Global Investigations team at TRM, who told the Journal he worked with Pangolin Intelligence to correlate hackers’ blockchain activity with information they gathered on other DPRK-linked attacks.

Binance said it has suspended all deposits and withdrawals as its team conducts security checks, freezes funds and works with law enforcement.

I had been assured that blockchain simply couldn’t be hacked.

Posted at 2:50 pm by Stephen Green

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

NICE WORK, FELLAS:

Posted at 2:34 pm by Stephen Green

EUROPEAN CENTRAL BANK PRESIDENT CHRISTINE LAGARDE TO STEP DOWN NEXT FEBRUARY, MONTHS BEFORE HER MANDATE ENDS:

Christine Lagarde will leave her post as president of the European Central Bank (ECB) on 7 February 2027, the central bank announced on Thursday, around nine months before her eight-year term was due to end.

The news immediately kicks off a closely watched race for one of Europe’s most powerful jobs at a time of economic stagnation and global turmoil. Her succession will be decided by the 21 countries that share the euro.

How much economic stagnation? This much: Is this the real reason Christine Lagarde is leaving the ECB?

A simmering crisis in the French bond markets threatens to explode at any time. Over the last month, the amount that France has to pay on its massive debts has been rising relentlessly. France now has to pay more to borrow money than Greece or even Italy. The ‘spread’ over German debt, the key measure of risk, has risen to levels not seen since the height of the Eurozone crisis in 2012. On the prediction markets there is now a 9 per cent chance of France defaulting on its debts by the end of 2027. If so, it will blow up the single currency. France is too big to fail. And yet it may also be too big to rescue.

That puts Lagarde in an awkward position. To start with, she is partly responsible for the crisis. By printing money on a vast scale, and by capping yields on Italian debt to keep its debts manageable, she enabled her friend President Macron to borrow on a vast scale. Without the ECB’s intervention the markets would have stopped France from borrowing so much in the first place. Next, she is French. If the central bank does have to step in with some form of rescue package for France, it would probably be best, to put it politely, if the person in charge was Dutch, Irish, Spanish or even German. A French led bailout of France may be too much for the other members of the zone. The ECB is starting to look like a sinking ship. Lagarde may well be getting out just in time – but she won’t do her reputation any good by leaving just as it is about to go down.

How perilous is it at the ECB? So bad that even the “We Are All Socialists Now” WaPo is paraphrasing Margaret Thatcher: “Europe is running out of other people’s money.” (Link safe; goes to Stephen Kruiser at PJM.)

Related: Lagarde denies getting the Harry Reid treatment on the way out: Lagarde’s bandages due to a ‘little skin cancer,’ not ‘kick-boxing in Thailand.’

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll