August 4, 2026

WE KNOW IT ENDS BADLY:

Posted at 2:32 pm by Stephen Green

TROLL LEVEL: POTUS DJT.

Do the writers and editors really think this AMC clip is “beloved?” When I saw The Odyssey last week, Kidman’s ad was just more padding in a half-hour block of terrible trailers, product commercials(!) and more self-promotional slop from AMC to make the wait before the movie began even more excruciating.

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

BATTLESWARM: Pipers At The Exit Gates Of The Democrat Party. “Now, I realize that in the year of our Lord 2026, saying, ‘Oh, the Democrats are crazy. The Democrats are mental,’ is not actually terribly incisive political commentary. However, it’s always different when you’re on the outside compared to when you’re on the inside. And getting the inside story is actually more revealing, because of course from the outside there are a bunch of things about the situation we just weren’t aware of that it’s nice to be aware of.”

Posted at 1:45 pm by Stephen Green

LOOK FOR THIS FAMILY IN FIVE YEARS…:

…and they’ll almost certainly be doing great.

Posted at 1:29 pm by Stephen Green

NO. NEXT QUESTION? Will mortarboards roll after the Jason Arday allegations?

I am reminded of two examples of showing the threat to the university’s core tenets. One involves a famous little book by philosopher Harry Frankfurt, entitled On Bullshit. There he explored the idea that more harmful than liars to the intellectual health of a nation, or its subdivisions, are ‘those who are almost entirely unconcerned with the truth’. Liars are at least actively aware that the truth exists and are trying to conceal its whereabouts. Bullshitters just don’t care.

Everyone loved that little book and knew exactly the sort of thing Frankfurt was talking about. Yet like intellectual knotweed, this indifference to the truth has proved not only resilient but anti-fragile. It has a few dauntless foes, but from every bloody stump of neck, two or three new heads seem to spring every day.

The second is a quote from 2022 attributed to Katherine Maher, the CEO of NPR and former head of the Wikimedia Foundation: ‘Our reverence for the truth might be a distraction that’s getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done.’ I say attributed to – I saw her say it and you can, too. It’s from her TED Talk and she seems to be in no hurry to distance herself from it. She might, of course, argue that the context was important, and she was not talking about the criteria by which we appoint professors to one of the great seats of learning in the history of the world. And maybe she’s right. But honestly, why should I care?

Stay focussed. Demand action in our universities. If not heads, then mortarboards at least must surely roll. And if that suggests an impossibility, given their geometrical properties – well, then I think we know just the man for the job.

As Gareth Roberts writes at the London Spectator on “Why progressives were desperate to believe Jason Arday,” “Such scandals can often be mistaken optimistically for an end to the whole shebang of progressive nonsense – for who could ever take them seriously again? But the roots of progressivism are too deeply embedded in the soil of public life. These hilarious exposures – see also Jussie Smollett – are not strong enough to dislodge them. The daring young man on the flying trapeze may fall to the ground with a splat, but the progressive circus is so big that it just moves on.”

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

HE’S A PLAGIARIST AND A FABULIST, AND NEEDS TO BE FIRED. END OF DISCUSSION:

Either academia is for academics, or it’s a DEI jobs program for the otherwise untrustworthy and unemployable. But it can’t be both.

Posted at 12:27 pm by Stephen Green

TRUMP’S WORST ENEMY – HIMSELF: This by Patriot Post’s Nate Jackson captures the why using two very recent illustrations.

Posted at 12:13 pm by Mark Tapscott

SPACE: NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, launching on a Falcon Heavy on 30 August 2026, carries a mirror the size of Hubble’s but sees a patch of sky about a hundred times wider.

Two big questions drive the mission. The first is dark energy, the name given to whatever is causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate. Roman will survey something on the order of a billion galaxies, measuring how they are distributed and subtly distorted, to trace how that expansion has changed across the history of the universe. It is not designed to explain dark energy so much as to measure its effects far more precisely than we can now.

The second is planets. Roman will stare at the crowded star fields toward the centre of our galaxy and watch for gravitational microlensing, the brief brightening that happens when one star, and any planets around it, passes in front of another and bends its light. Monitoring something like 200 million stars, it is expected to find well over a thousand planets this way, including cold, distant worlds far from their stars that other techniques tend to miss.

But have patience: “After the 30 August launch, Roman faces the same outbound trip as Webb did, out to the second Lagrange point about 1.5 million kilometres from Earth, followed by months of commissioning before any science begins in earnest.”

Posted at 11:41 am by Stephen Green

SPEAKING POWER TO TRUTH OR SOMETHING:

Posted at 11:25 am by Stephen Green

THE LEFT IS NOT ONLY MORE ABSURD THAN YOU IMAGINE, IT IS MORE ABSURD THAN YOU CAN IMAGINE:

Kafka today reads like a news report, back when you could still trust news reports.

Posted at 10:54 am by Stephen Green

HOOKERS AND BLOW AIN’T CHEAP, FOLKS: From Influence Peddler to Starving Artist: Hunter Biden Claims Family is Broke in Defaulting on $17 Million Bill.

In a deposition in ongoing litigation with the law firm Winston Taylor, Hunter claimed an inability to pay the $17 million he owes his lawyers for representing him in criminal prosecutions, congressional investigations, and civil lawsuits.

Hunter claimed under oath that “I don’t own anything of any value other than — and I don’t know the value of it — my paintings which I painted myself. So that’s it. And I don’t even have any other assets at all, stocks, bonds, anything like that, savings accounts.” He also added, “My family doesn’t have any money, and it’s not their debt anyway.”

The statement about his family is curious, since Joe and Jill Biden recently received numerous book contracts and were thought to be worth millions. However, the Wall Street Journal recently reported that Joe Biden is struggling with $800,000 in debt and, ironically, increased property taxes in his blue state of Delaware on his $2.7 million home. (Moving to Florida like many fleeing blue state taxes is not a viable option for the Bidens).

Worse yet, no one wants Biden to do speeches and appearances, cutting off a lucrative post-presidency income. Not only is Biden obviously diminished in his ability to give a speech, but many Democrats blame him for the reelection of Trump by clinging to power despite his obvious deteriorating mental and physical condition.

That’s a sad state of affairs for Joe Biden, but it’s also an accurate reflection of what his cabal did to the nation.

Posted at 10:39 am by Stephen Green