LIMITED TIME DEAL: Antarctic Star Countertop Ice Maker Machine. #CommissionEarned
December 6, 2025
BUT TRUMP’S AN “AUTHORITARIAN.” Everytown’s Former ATF Agent Advocates Targeting Lawful Retailers, Putting Them Out of Business.
TREAT THE PAIN: Shoulder-Heating-Pad-Heated-Wrap. #CommissionEarned
THE SOMALI WELFARE FRAUD SCANDAL IS EVEN WORSE THAN YOU THINK: “We believe the Somali fraud operation in Minnesota is the single greatest theft of taxpayer dollars, through welfare fraud, in American history.”
FLYING HIGH: A pilot turned an old plane into a two-bedroom apartment. Jon Kotwicki jokes that converting an aluminum plane in Alaska is the “worst idea that a person could possibly have.” Ha, I guessed spray on foam insulation from the subhed and I was right.
HUGH HEWITT INTERVIEWS POWER LINE’S SCOTT JOHNSON: The first reporter on the Minnesota fraud scandal on how this iceberg of a story is being revealed.
THE NEW SPACE RACE: U.S. faces modern space race with China, Congress warns.
FINALLY: It’s Official: The Original Theatrical Cut of Star Wars Is Coming Back to Theaters.
A day Star Wars fans never thought would happen is finally happening. Lucasfilm and Disney are rereleasing the original version of Star Wars in theaters for its 50th anniversary. It’ll happen on February 17, 2027, and io9 has confirmed with Lucasfilm that it is, in fact, the original theatrical cut of the movie.
Earlier this year, the studio announced it would be bringing Star Wars, later titled Star Wars: A New Hope, back to theaters to celebrate its massive anniversary, but there was the big question of what version? Would it be the Special Edition that had become the standard over the past 30 years? The version with Greedo shooting first, Jabba the Hutt, and rings around the Death Star?
Now, we know that the answer is “No.” This will be “a newly restored version of the classic Star Wars (1977) theatrical release” that will play in theaters for a limited time. And, according to other reports, it’ll even be released in IMAX, though Lucasfilm has yet to confirm that.
Back in 1997, when George Lucas remastered and tinkered with the original trilogy with the Special Editions, those became the only versions that Lucasfilm would release. That meant in theaters, on streaming, on DVD, all that stuff. As a result, copies of the original film—with Han shooting first, no Jabba, etc.—became rather rare. Last year, though, Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy attended a screening of one of those prints, giving the event an official seal of approval. And now we know why.
As John Nolte wrote last year, “Until Star Wars is fun, masculine, cool, and sexy again (instead of prim, proper, woke, and preachy), the phenom is over. And it might be over regardless, because Kathleen Kennedy’s obsession with homosexuality and gender politics has drained the greatest franchise in Hollywood history of all its goodwill.”
Fans of the original Star Wars have been begging Disney to release the film in its original version ever since they acquired LucasFilm in 2012. Having run the franchise deeply into ground, this seems like its last gasp, no matter how much slop is yet to be released under the brand name.
MOST MICROBES ARE HARMLESS: Experts: Microbes in the air on planes and in hospitals are harmless. “The ambient air on planes and in hospitals mostly contains harmless microbes typically associated with human skin, researchers reported Wednesday in the journal Microbiome.”
SUPPORT HEALTHY SKIN: First Aid Beauty – KP Bump Eraser Body Scrub with 10% AHA. #CommissionEarned
BORDER IS CLOSED, NOW THE REAL WORK RESUMES: Saving America will be won or lost in the home. More hard truths from Virgil Walker.
STEVEN PINKER IN THE AIRSTRIP ONE LONDON TIMES: 1984 revisited: George Orwell would be relieved at how we’ve done.
When I first read Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1967 at the age of 13, I was intrigued by its implied prophecy. This futuristic novel specified the year in which it was set in its title, a year I would live to see. What would life be like in 1984? And how would the novel be received once the year had elapsed, set in a future that then would be past?
We are now more than 40 years past the time in which the book was set and almost 80 years after it was written. This raises an irresistible question: how much is the world of 2025 like the world of 1984 as imagined in 1948?
Of course, Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four not as a prophecy but as an extrapolation and a warning. As he explained: “I do not believe that the kind of society I describe necessarily will arrive. But I believe, allowing, of course, for the fact that the book is a satire, that something resembling it could arrive.”
Did it arrive? It’s instructive to assess Orwell as a prophet. For one thing, it can be a reminder of the limits of prophecy. Even the predictions of the world’s most accurate forecasters, when tested against prespecified dates and outcomes they can’t weasel out of, fall to chance levels about five years out. It would be unreasonable to expect Orwell to do much better.
Comparing 1948 with 1984 and 2025 is also a way to understand the history we’re living through beyond the short time horizon of journalism. If the news came out once every 50 years instead of every day, it surely wouldn’t cover celebrity gossip and politicians’ gaffes but rather sweeping developments we might be oblivious to as they gradually unfold. Looking back at the future is a way to see our era in historical perspective.
Given that the British police routine arrest people for posing with a shotgun in Florida, writing anti-immigration tweets, confiscating their kid’s iPad, insulting their school board on WhatsApp, or calling someone a “faggot” in a text message, while looking the other way at massive grooming scandals, I think Orwell would have some serious questions about the state of England in 2025. But there’s no doubt that economically, and especially technologically, it’s moved far beyond the immediate postwar scarcity in which Orwell wrote his novel. Which was why, in 2007’s Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg concluded:
The twentieth century gave us two visions of a dystopian future, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984. For many years it was assumed that 1984 was the more prophetic tale. But no more. The totalitarianism of 1984 was a product of the age of Stalin, Lenin, Hitler, and Mussolini, the dictators of a continent with a grand tradition of political and religious absolutism. Brave New World was a dystopia based on an American future, where Henry Ford is remembered as a messiah (it’s set in the year “632 A.F.,” after Ford) and the cult of youth that Huxley so despised defines society. Everything is easy under the World State. Everyone is happy. Indeed, the great dilemma for the reader of Brave New World is to answer the question, what’s wrong with it?
There’s a second important difference between the two dystopias: 1984 is a masculine vision of totalitarianism. Or rather, it is a vision of a masculine totalitarianism. Huxley’s totalitarianism isn’t a “boot stamping on a human face—for ever,” as described in 1984. It’s one of smiling, happy, bioengineered people chewing hormonal gum and blithely doing what they’re told. Democracy is a forgotten fad because things are so much easier when the state makes all your decisions. In short, Huxley’s totalitarianism is essentially feminine. Orwell’s was a daddy-dystopia, where the state is abusive and bullying, maintaining its authority through a permanent climate of war and the manufacture of convenient enemies. Huxley’s is a maternal misery, where man is smothered with care, not cruelty. But for all our talk these days about manliness, individualism, and even the “nanny state,” we still don’t have the vocabulary to fight off nice totalitarianism, liberal fascism.
In 2020, we could have used it.
FORGET IT, CHUCK: Fully 93 percent of congressional aides responding to the survey say the proposal to extend those Obamacare tax subsidies that send billions of tax dollars directly to healthcare insurers will not be approved by Congress and signed into law by the President. That’s virtually all of them not just those representing one party.
INSIDER THOUGHTS ON WHAT’S WRONG WITH OUR MILITARY LEADERSHIP:
RE: How the Generals and Admirals Lost Their Way⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
I’ve been thinking about our military flag officers during the GWOT and how they came to think the way they did.
I just couldn't grok how these guys who had seen it all themselves in the dirt could still sign up for…
— Cynical Publius (@CynicalPublius) December 6, 2025
WE’RE LUCKY THAT’S ALL THAT BLEW UP: The Myth That the J6 Pipe Bomber Was a ‘Trump Supporter’ Just Blew Up.