October 13, 2026

THIS JUST FEELS WRONG:

Posted at 3:33 pm by Stephen Green

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD ONCE AGAIN DOING STRAIGHT UP REPORTAGE:

Posted at 2:56 pm by Ed Driscoll

AGING: Dementia cases are set to double by 2050 — as doctor calls it an ‘accelerating epidemic crisis.’

Researchers from UNSW Sydney’s Center for Healthy Brain Aging analyzed data from 22 studies and found that there were 11.4 million new dementia cases in 2023 — a number that’s projected to more than double to 24.7 million by 2050.

This means that every year, the equivalent of the population of Australia will develop dementia, according to geriatrician Dr. Liron Sinvani, the director of research and innovation for the Northwell Institute for Healthy Aging

“In terms of the scale, obviously, this number of new dementia cases is staggering,” Sinvani told The Post. “This is not a future problem. It’s an accelerating epidemic crisis that demands immediate attention.”

The new study focused on incidence — the rate at which people develop dementia or new cases per year — instead of prevalence, or the total number of people living with the condition at a given time.

The rapidly rising numbers are due to aging populations, with Sinvani noting that about 1 in 9 people have dementia after 65, “but after 85, it could be almost 1 in 3.”

Until there’s a treatment, we’ll need to invest heavily in android caretakers because there just won’t bet enough young people to go around.

Posted at 2:47 pm by Stephen Green

CHRISTIAN TOTO: Lorne Michaels Has Second Chance to Do the Right Thing.

Now is the time for Michaels to take a public stand for both [Shane] Gillis and comedy. Michaels’ cultural gravitas remains sky high. He’s won the Mark Twain Prize for American humor and is beloved within Hollywood circles. His tentacles are stretched across the industry, from feature films to TV beyond “SNL.”

Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers both became stars under his tutelage and are key players in the late-night landscape.

So will Michaels do the right thing? Remember how Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos stood up for Dave Chappelle when his controversial special, “The Closer,” nearly got him cancelled?

Michaels did no such thing.

Why does it matter? Woke 2.0 is revving up and ready to go. Just ask the arts worker fired for wearing cornrows at the Burning Man festival. Or the sports announcer canned for Tweets he posted when he was 15. Or the BBC cancelling classic comedy sketches for being “problematic.”

If no one stands up to the woke bullies, it’ll only get worse. Did we not learn anything from the last decade?

It matters. But will the second time be the charm for Michaels? The Vegas odds suggest otherwise.

Indeed. In their 1986 history of Saturday Night Live’s first decade, Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad wrote that when Chevy Chase began to head for the exits with the goal of making bank near the end of SNL’s blazing first season, Michaels used a sports analogy to try to convince him to stay onboard:

[Michaels’] theory was that it took three years’ exposure to make a superstar on TV. Saturday Night was a big hit in the industry, but the public hadn’t really caught on yet. He told Chevy he was like a great pitcher for a championship baseball team. If he left, the team would lose a few games, but they’d keep winning. “Think how rare it is to play with a championship team,” Lorne said. “You think it’s going to happen all the time, especially when you’re young, but it doesn’t happen that often.… Play another season, then decide.”

To use another sports analogy, Michaels at this point is the equivalent of an aging NFL coach with some enormous past successes, but the game is rapidly passing him by. Think Chuck Noll and Tom Landry in the 1980s or Don Shula in the 1990s. The minute Michaels retires from NBC, SNL’s terrible past quarter century will quickly be forgotten, and he will only be remembered for the show’s first five years, and its late ‘80s comeback when he somehow reassembled a funny cast with great chemistry. Why publicly stick his neck out now?

Posted at 2:36 pm by Ed Driscoll

BATTLESWARM: County-By-County Soros Invasion Plans. “Call me a stickler for due process, but I don’t think immigration policy should be taken from the federal government and given to random businesses.”

Posted at 1:45 pm by Stephen Green

WHEN THE CENSORSHIP STATE TURNS ON YOU: “Even if you can’t find any constitutional, ethical or moral reason to avoid building censorship regimes, your own self-interest should guide you away from it: it will be fun when you get to forcibly silence (or even imprison) your political enemies, but far less fun when that machine is controlled by those political enemies and, as is inevitable, then turned against you.”

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

TOM CRUISE DIGS HIMSELF A HOLE: The botched conclusion to a star’s 20-year campaign to restore his image.

Two words: viral video.

Mr. Cruise had the misfortune of having these back-to-back incidents occur at the exact moment when video-sharing sites came online. Instead of moments confined to a single broadcast and then to memory, his antics became immortalized on the internet, where the world could watch them on a loop. He went “viral,” back when the term was new, for all the wrong reasons.

It nearly killed his career.

This would have been the end for a lesser celebrity. But just as the Lord has blessed Mr. Cruise with undeniable talent, He has also blessed him with smarts and patience.

Since 2005, Mr. Cruise has followed a plodding, single-minded strategy to rebuild his image: mostly safe roles and a wide berth around the riskier material that once earned him Oscar nominations.

The plan has worked. He is still a major box-office draw. The plan has also meant that, with the exception of playing a U.S. senator, a rockstar, and an unforgettable bit part as a scumbag Hollywood mogul, his résumé has looked like this for the past 20 years: a spy (2006), a military officer (2008), a spy (2010), a spy (2011), a veteran (2012), an astronaut (2013), a military officer (2014), a spy (2015), a veteran (2016), a soldier (2017), an aviator (2017), a spy (2018), an aviator (2022), a spy (2023), and a spy (2025).

It’s a far cry from the five years before Mr. Cruise’s public meltdown when he took on audacious projects: “Eyes Wide Shut,” “Magnolia,” “Vanilla Sky” and the near-perfect “Collateral,” in which he played against type as a villain.

But now we have “Digger,” which Mr. Cruise chose as the conclusion of his long charm offensive. In his partnership with Mr. Iñárritu—the director whose 2015 epic “The Revenant” won Leonardo DiCaprio his long-overdue Oscar—Mr. Cruise surely hoped the movie would be his own ticket to the elusive Best Actor statuette and a return to a steady diet of more serious work.

“Digger” will almost certainly accomplish neither. On the contrary, its weird and off-putting press tour has already undone some of what the past two decades had accomplished in reviving his appeal.

Curiously, after his anti-global warming movie bombed spectacularly, in order to resume his career, Cruise will once again hoist himself into the cockpits of gas guzzling fighter jets and racing cars to entice moviegoers to load the family into the SUV and truck on over to the multiplex:

● Top Gun 3 Gets Encouraging Update, Tom Cruise Wants It to ‘Beat’ Maverick.

● Anne Hathaway Joins Tom Cruise in Days of Thunder Follow-Up; Paramount Sets Release Date.

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

HEY, BIG SPENDER: Georgia Bought a $954,578 Chevy, but Officials Won’t Say What’s Inside. “Georgia paid nearly $1 million for a Chevrolet Traverse. Only $38,705.25 bought the vehicle. The rest went to equipment officials won’t identify publicly, even as state lawmakers question whether a child-welfare agency should have technology normally associated with criminal investigations.”

Posted at 1:14 pm by Stephen Green

UNEXPECTEDLY: Greta Thunberg joins Paris student protests.

Greta Thunberg has travelled to Paris to join the student protests sweeping France.

The Swedish climate activist, 23, joined pupils outside the Paul-Éluard lycée in Saint-Denis, where about 20 lawyers in robes formed a human chain to protect the teenagers from alleged police brutality.

“Our future is being robbed away from us,” Ms Thunberg said, condemning what she described as an “extremely violent” police response.

“They should know that all over the world we are following these developments. We are inspired by the young people who are demanding their basic rights,” she told reporters.

“Whether it’s not funding schools enough, or the climate crisis, or social injustice crises… it’s about time that young people are stepping up and reclaiming that future.”

Curiously, the former eco-zealot turned antizionist is backing a lot of global warming and a huge carbon footprint: Fire Destroyed the Oldest Food Market in Paris This Morning.

Related: Greta Thunberg is a protest addict.

She is, in fact, clearly a protest obsessive, a perpetual joiner-in and turner-up to any rabble. It doesn’t matter what the putative topic of the rumble is. In fact, her focus is getting more prosaic as she ages; first climate change was going to destroy the world, then it became merely Palestine and the Middle East, and now it’s the poor standard of the upholstery in French schools. It makes you wonder what demo-crazy Greta will turn her attention to next in her quest for a high – potholes in upstate New York?

Never happen – that would be a cause that the masses would actually rally behind.

More:

Didn’t mommy tell her as a kid not to play with matches and lighters?

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

OH: China increases border security over Russian plague. “Officials in the Chinese border city of Manzhouli said it was important to strengthen surveillance in partnership with port and customs authorities, to prevent the potential spread of disease as people and cargo travelled from Russia.”

Posted at 11:41 am by Stephen Green

THE WHOLE PURPOSE OF DEI IS TO REDUCE A HIGH-TRUST AND RESILIENT SOCIETY INTO SOMETHING LESS RESISTANT TO BEING CONTROLLED:

“‘Diversity is our strength’ became a DEI dogma rather than a testable claim. Demographic diversity by itself rarely improves outcomes and can reduce trust, cohesion, and performance. What sometimes helps decision-making is intellectual and political diversity: clashing ideas expose blind spots, challenge groupthink, and force better arguments.”

Posted at 11:25 am by Stephen Green