June 25, 2026

IT MEANS “NO PLACE”:  Utopia.

Posted at 12:22 am by Sarah Hoyt

June 24, 2026

AMERICA IS THE ANTITHESIS OF LEFTISM, SO LEFTISM MUST ALWAYS END IN HATING AMERICA:

Posted at 10:25 pm by Glenn Reynolds

CLASS: Brits visiting US for first time during World Cup are apologizing to Americans: ‘We were wrong’. I think — and I believe I first heard this from John Ringo’s wife Miriam, who’s super-smart — that the difference between the attitudes toward flyover America from the World Cup crowd and from the European laptop class is class. The soccer fans aren’t as posh as the ones who come for the Olympics, and they are seeing parts of America that are — like them — middle- and working-class and they’re thinking that wow, it’s a lot better to be middle- and working-class in America than in Britain or Europe. Whereas for the laptop class, not so much.

Posted at 9:40 pm by Glenn Reynolds

OPEN THREAD: It’s perfection and grace. It’s the smile on my face.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: John Fetterman blasts Larry David for being embarrassed to be an American after the White House UFC fight.

Look, I get that you might not like that there was an awesome UFC fight at the White House. But a “travesty” that made you “embarrassed to be an American”?

The smartest Democrat had thoughts:

The TMZ reporter not getting the reference to Warren Oates’ legendary line in Stripes? As Ben “Hamas” Rhodes, the failed novelist turned Obama’s Middle Eastern policy “expert” (in)famously told the New York Times a decade ago, “The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”

Posted at 8:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

STRONG MAGNITUDE 7.1 EARTHQUAKE SHOOK VENEZUELA AND WAS FELT IN COLOMBIA:

An earthquake that particularly shook Caracas occurred this Wednesday, June 24, and was also felt in several cities in Colombia such as Bogota and Bucaramanga. In the Venezuelan capital, scenes of panic unfolded, and social media was flooded with videos of the destruction caused by the seismic movement.

As of Wednesday evening, Venezuelan authorities had not provided an assessment of the damage or the possible victims left by the earthquake. In some videos, collapsed buildings can be seen in Caracas, along with witnesses claiming that people are trapped. Chaos took hold of the city.

One of the locations affected was Maiquetia International Airport, where people were running to reach safety. A tsunami alert was also declared for some Caribbean islands.

As the caption to the video from the aforementioned airport reads in English, “They’ve sent me this video of Maiquetia Airport. My God…:”

UPDATE: Venezuela rocked by strongest earthquakes in over a century, as USGS fears up to 100K deaths.

Posted at 8:40 pm by Ed Driscoll

QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED:

Sometimes they do. Near the end of editing 1990’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, after it had underwhelmed preview audiences, director Brian De Palma went to an industry trade screening of the movie. As Julie Salamon wrote in The Devil’s Candy, her brilliant 1991 inside look at the disastrous production of the film, in a chapter titled, “You’ve Got to Be a Genius to Make a Movie This Bad:”

Two days before the party it had hit De Palma for the first time: he might have directed a disaster. It wasn’t a good sign that the New York Times’s preview piece the day before, on Sunday, didn’t run on the front page of the “Arts & Leisure” section but way back on page 42. But that still left open the possibility that the picture would be considered controversial, that it would probably get mixed reviews. He’d always expected that. On Monday, however, when he read the trades – the industry papers whose reviews measured a film both artistically and by its box office promise – he couldn’t avoid the possibility. “The Bonfire fire of the Vanities” could be a disaster! That thought – disaster – began to sink in faster than the words he was reading.

The daily Variety review began:

NEW YORK – Brian De Palma’s take on Tom Wolfe’s “The Bonfire of the Vanities” is a misfire of a thousand inanities. A strained social farce in which the gap between intent and achievement is yawningly apparent, parent, ultralavish production has the money, cast and bestseller name value to attract a crowd initially, but downbeat reviews and word-of-mouth mouth will surely put a damper on b.o. [box office] prospects of Warner Bros.’ $45 million-plus project.

De Palma had read enough of that one. He turned to the Hollywood Reporter:

Brian De Palma douses Tom Wolfe’s “The Bonfire of the Vanities” with enough incendiary cinematic devices to keep 50 toxic dumps in perpetual petual fiery rage. While De Palma has stoked a broad and billowing comedy – one which coughs up a lot of belly laughs – it’s one that will leave fans of Wolfe’s scathing social satire choking and heaving with disapproval. “Bonfire” will be quickly extinguished at the box office.

And on and on it goes, as the negative reviews thunder in from all sides. A few pages later, Salamon quotes one of Bonfire’s film editors:

The editor David Ray was still in shock from the entire experience a few weeks after the movie opened. He had gotten his first inkling that something terrible was about to happen the night they screened the film for the journalists on the press junket. Afterward he’d heard a woman say,

“Well, that was one big zero.”

“`One big zero’!” Ray said. “I was so upset.”

“`One big zero’!” he repeated sadly.

“Even if you didn’t like the film, it wasn’t one big zero. You couldn’t just write it off like that.”

“It’s very depressing to me,” he said, sitting in the spacious apartment off Central Park West he’d bought just as “Bonfire” started filming. “We tried to make a film about society and where it’s going. I don’t think `Bonfire’ the film attempted that to the extent the novel did, but it was an interesting film and very badly treated.

“The attitude of a lot of reviewers was that we were assholes for making this film.” The thin man in the tortoise-shell glasses sat up and shook his head. “But that’s exactly what we weren’t. We were adventurous. I’m not saying the film wasn’t flawed. It was flawed. But we weren’t assholes.”

Just neutered by political correctness, a Marxist phrase that had then only begun to enter the American vocabulary. As will this latest effort to adopt Wolfe’s decade defining novel: David E. Kelley to Develop Bonfire of the Vanities Series at Apple TV, Matt Reeves to Direct.

In her tenth anniversary reissue of The Devil’s Candy, Salamon added an extra chapter in which she reported on Kirkus running an outlying positive review of Bonfire, yet with an eerily prophetic metaphor:

On September 15, 1991, the first evaluation of The Devil’s Candy appeared in Kirkus Reviews. It was complimentary and concluded with a catchy non sequitur: “Like watching a World Trade Center tower topple ple onto Wall Street.”

That throwaway line would seem absolutely chilling almost exactly ten years later, when the World Trade Center towers were destroyed by terrorists and the world abruptly became a different place. My meeting ing with De Palma took place two weeks after that, as the celebrity “news” that had dominated the culture for years was replaced by reports ports of U.S. military exploits in Afghanistan and domestic fears of bioterrorism. The movie industry was flummoxed, as producers and studio executives tried to imagine what kind of entertainment would sell in this altered atmosphere.

Incidentally, I wonder when this director realized he had a dog on his hands:

 

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

DEPOPULATION: The World’s Biggest Population Fear Has Flipped – and It Could Change Everything. “Since the 1960s, public debate has often focused on the dangers of overpopulation. Those concerns have not disappeared, especially in discussions linked to immigration, but attention has increasingly turned toward shrinking populations and the economic and national security challenges they may bring.”

Posted at 7:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

DEI IS MAKE-WORK EMPLOYMENT FOR OTHERWISE UNEMPLOYABLE NEUROTICS AND ANTI-SOCIAL TYPES:

To be fair, she won’t be evaluating any interns this summer.

Update:

If A players hire other A players, and B players hire C and D players, who hired her?

Posted at 5:11 pm by Stephen Green

CLIMATE ALARMISM AS A RELIGION, EXHIBIT #1,000,006:

Posted at 4:52 pm by Stephen Green