July 26, 2026

RESTORE CURSIVE INSTRUCTION: Yes, I am a Boomer and “back in the good ole days” we all learned cursive writing skills in elementary school. Even as late as 2010, every state in the union either required or strongly encouraged teaching cursive writing skills.

But then during the Obama administration, that changed in the Common Core Standards and by 2016, only 14 states maintained the cursive element. Thankfully, and for whatever reasons, sanity is returning and today 27 states recognize that cursive writing skills improve cognitive and other key skills in youngsters. Here’s why I think we need to get all 50 states back in the cursive arena.

Posted at 7:18 pm by Mark Tapscott

RAND PAUL RELEASES DOCUMENTS ON INTERCEPTED COVID RESEARCH MATERIALS:

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., has released another batch of documents related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The latest records show that U.S. officials intercepted undeclared biological materials tied to a U.S.–China coronavirus research network as early as 2018, likely in an attempt to avoid international tensions and regulatory scrutiny, Paul said.

The documents, which include a Department of Homeland Security intelligence report, primarily focus on a network centered around University of Minnesota virologist Fang Li.

The released documents also include pages from “Tony’s Diary:”

As Jim Geraghty writes, “For the entirety of 2020 and long after, the ‘it started in a wet market’ view was the respectable one. Believing that somebody at the Wuhan Institute of Virology hadn’t been careful one day and had gotten accidentally infected with a virus that had gained a function or two during its time in the lab made you a crazy conspiracy theorist. In fact, the lab leak theory was evidence of your racism. And now — in July 2026! — we learn that Fauci himself had dismissed the wet market as a potential source at the end of January 2020.”

Then there’s an incredible juxtaposition by Fauci of new deaths and new WaPo profiles:

Alyssa Farah, now an employee of ABC News, makes an appearance in “Tony’s Diary:”

 

Posted at 2:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

AND AGAIN: Terror Attack in Berlin.  “Fifteen people were injured, with one having died so far. German police are investigating whether the attack was terror-related, but I am not sure what there is to investigate. The perpetrator drove a car into a gay crowd at a high rate of speed, and then attacked people with a knife. There’s your investigation. I assume the terrorist was a Muslim, but it is possible he was some other kind of extremist. We will find out soon.”

UPDATE: Its origin and purpose, still a total mystery.

MORE: Suspect in Berlin Pride attack identified as ‘Islamist.’ “‘Based on the investigators’ initial findings, we have already identified a suspected perpetrator,’ Florian Nath, a spokesman for Berlin police, said, adding that the force’s search for the suspect was ‘proceeding at full speed’. ‘He is known to us as a member of Islamic circles here in Berlin … we still have no information whatsoever regarding his specific motives, the exact sequence of events, or his role in the crime itself.’”

UPDATE (11:14 am): Abdul Ballout: Berlin Pride suspect tried to join Islamic State. Around 2,000 police officers searching for 21-year-old German citizen who is of Lebanese descent.

UPDATE (12:44 pm): Ballout “was convicted and sentenced for terrorism offences in May 2026 but released on time served. By July 2026 he was back on the streets. German authorities told him to attend de-radicalisation counselling sessions. He responded by carrying out a jihadist terrorist attack on a pride parade.”

UPDATE (1:50 PM): Suspect in deadly Berlin Pride attack is killed in a confrontation with police.

Posted at 1:50 pm by Ed Driscoll

ROGER KIMBALL: Odysseus Visits the Smithsonian.

I said that the best entertainment I enjoyed last week was the cross-examination—not to say the thorough exposure and humiliation—of Anthea Hartig. And the best of the best, I thought, was the brilliant surgical evisceration conducted by freshman representative Brandon Gill (R-TX). In under 5 minutes, he performed an elegant posterior sagittal anorectoplasty on Hartig’s long tenure at the National Museum of American History. And he did it by the simple, revelatory expedient of confronting her with the Smithsonian’s own public educational materials. “Are you a white supremacist?” he asked. “Oh no, no,” replied Hartig, smiling weakly. “Do you think we all have implicit biases?” asked Gill. “If so, what are yours?” Oh dear. “Do you think it is important to be polite?” Gill wondered. “Oh yes,” quoth Hartig, perhaps thinking that if she said she approved of politeness, Gill would be polite to her. No such luck.

Politeness, you see, is one of the many bourgeois virtues that literature distributed by the Smithsonian has identified as a symptom of white supremacy. Other behaviors and attitudes that raise the alarm about lurking white supremacist tendencies are hard work, rational thinking, respect for private property, delayed gratification, and rugged individualism.

You think that I am making this up, but I am not. It’s all there in an official NMAH brochure called “Aspects and Assumptions of Whiteness and White Culture in the United States.” File it under “Things are always worse than you think.” Here’s a thought experiment: What if these habits and behaviors really were signs of “whiteness” or “white supremacy”? What then? Or to put it another way, how much of a racist would you have to be to promulgate a brochure like “Aspects and Assumptions of Whiteness and White Culture in the United States”? (It would be interesting to know whether most of the authors of that odious document were themselves white. I’d wager most of them were liberal white women.)

Thanks to Proposition 65, Sacramento requires labels on just about everything warning about a possible cancer risk. (Or as Consumer Reports quips, “Why California Thinks Your Couch Will Give You Cancer.”) Should the Smithsonian have warning labels about its ideological capture?

Incidentally, here’s the excerpt from the page at the Smithsonian that sorta kinda insinuates that Franklin’s research assistants for his electrical experiments may have been “an indentured servant or an enslaved person, although he never mentioned them in reports of his work:”

Posted at 1:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

I LIKE GROK:

I use three LLMs — Grok, ChatGPT, and Claude — because each has its own strengths and weaknesses. But Grok is easily the most fun, and since it uses X for training, is also the most up-to-date.

Posted at 12:50 pm by Stephen Green

THE MERGER ISN’T KILLING HOLLYWOOD. HOLLYWOOD ALREADY DID THAT:

Far from “thriving,” theaters sold roughly 770 million tickets last year — down 37% from 2019 and less than half the 1.57 billion sold at the 2002 peak. The share of adults who see a movie at least monthly has fallen by more than half. Receipts hold up only because the average ticket now runs north of $13. Charging ever more to ever fewer people is not a thriving business; it is a shrinking one, repriced. And moviegoers will tell you why they stopped coming: nearly 2 in 5 adults who attend less often say there is simply not a good enough variety of new films worth the trip.

Much of the rest of the case comes down to jobs. The Teamsters call the deal a “direct threat to film and television workers nationwide”; one producer predicted 10,000 job losses, without any data behind the figure. Yet the merger’s own critics have noted that Los Angeles County lost more than 42,000 motion picture jobs between 2022 and 2024 — years before this deal existed. Entertainment employment has fallen roughly 30% in four years, Los Angeles on-location filming is down more than 40% since 2022, and production employment sits at a 30-year low. Hollywood is not losing its audience to consolidation. It is losing its audience to itself.

Nor would blocking the deal freeze some healthy status quo in place. Warner Bros. Discovery was for sale because its trajectory was unsustainable. Its revenues slid from $41.3 billion in 2023 to $37.3 billion last year, after a $9.1 billion write-down in 2024 — the company’s own reappraisal of its worth. Stopping the deal does not change the market.

Opponents of the merger fail to consider the impact the deal could have on long-term employment across the wider creative economy, where the meaningful driver is production volume. Film and television support 2.01 million American jobs, pay $202 billion in wages, and sustain more than 162,000 businesses, 93% of which employ fewer than 10 people. A single-location shoot injects roughly $1.3 million a day into a local economy. The only question that matters is whether this merger means more movies or fewer.

The answer is on paper. Paramount has committed to maintaining both studios, releasing at least 30 theatrical films a year, and guaranteeing a 45-day theatrical window before video-on-demand. And since Skydance took over last August, Paramount has nearly doubled its slate from eight films to 15. These commitments mean more production days, more crews, more stages booked, more location spending — precisely what the unions say they want protected, and the only real medicine for what ails Hollywood: too few movies worth leaving the house for.

The success of Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey might be a pyrrhic victory for Hollywood, cementing audiences’ post-Covid habit to go to the movies a couple of times a year to see the blockbuster that has the most hype, rather than going nearly every weekend:

Posted at 12:07 pm by Ed Driscoll