February 2, 2026

THE MET’S SWAN SONG? Kelly Jane Torrance: Pursuit of politics and personalities ruined the Met Opera — America’s biggest performing-arts institution.

Then, as if to prove why the company’s having trouble raising money at home, audiences savaged its just-ended run of the Bizet classic “Carmen.”

The ripped-from-the-headlines production, brought back from the 2023-2024 season, moves the action from 1820 Seville, Spain, to modern-day America.

Instead of sumptuous costumes and striking sets, star mezzo-soprano Aigul Akhmetshina traipsed across the stage in denim cutoffs and cowboy boots, while bass-baritone Christian Van Horn’s Escamillo crooned his “Toreador Song” dressed as a rodeo rider.

Carmen works not in a cigarette factory but for an arms manufacturer, and the troops were transformed, as many saw it, into ICE agents.

It wasn’t money, though, that led superstar tenor Jonas Kaufmann to declare at year’s end that he’d no longer appear at the Met.

The big box-office draw — one of the greatest singers of his generation — heavily hinted that Met leadership was behind his decision.

“I felt very bad about how they treated the chorus and orchestra in the pandemic. They didn’t get paid at all. Musicians had to move out of New York or move in with their parents. I did a livestreamed concert and asked listeners to donate. That didn’t go down well,” Kaufmann told BBC Radio’s Norman Lebrecht.

Few opera singers look their best in Daisy Dukes. And yeah, the Met was pretty awful to its worker bees. But it wasn’t so great to them before, or after.

Posted at 8:22 pm by Glenn Reynolds

WEEKEND AT BERNIE’S: How Bernie Sanders built a device to give himself ‘cosmos-shattering orgasms.’

Bernie Sanders was a follower of the ‘Father of Free Love’ in his youth and built himself a device so he could achieve ‘cosmos-shattering orgasms’, according to a new book on the senator.

He was heavily influenced by the controversial sex therapist Wilhelm Reich who believed that liberation could be achieved via enhanced climaxes.

During his 20s and while at college, Sanders became a devotee of Reich, an Austrian psychoanalyst, who believed that a universal energy called ‘orgone’ powered everything.

Reich constructed a shed-like device called an ‘Orgone Accumulator’ which supposedly collected energy to be later released in the form of explosive orgasms.

According to the upcoming book ‘Bernie for Burlington’, Sanders saw Reich’s teaching as the ‘answer’ to his own hardscrabble childhood.

Such was his devotion to Reich that he even built his own orgone orgasm device, a 5ft-long prayer mat made of copper wire with spikes on it that he slept on to channel the ‘energy’ into his body, author Dan Chiasson claims.

Chiasson, a poet and journalist who is a regular contributor to The New Yorker magazine, grew up in Burlington, the largest city in Vermont, where a the now 84-year-old Sanders became mayor before becoming a US Representative and then Senator.

The book charts Sanders’s ideological development as a democratic socialist and says that he was ‘deeply influenced’ by Reich, who ‘connected political liberation with the successful cultivation of cosmos-shattering orgasms’.

The New York Times assures me that everyday sex in the former Soviet Union was nothing but cosmos-shattering orgasms.

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

ACE OF SPADES: Major British Labour Politician Pressured to Resign Over Epstein Payoffs; Epstein Had a Secret Baby?

Peter Mandelson is a major fixer for Labour who is responsible for the rise of Tony Blair.

There are at least two occasions on which it is alleged Epstein handed large sums of money to Lord Mandelson or his husband.

His husband.

Mandelson directly referenced one of the claims when announcing his resignation from the Labour party. Bank statements held among the Epstein files released by the US Department of Justice appear to show that in 2003 to 2004 the disgraced financier paid a total of $75,000 (£54,750) into bank accounts of which Mandelson — then a Labour MP — was believed to be a beneficiary.

The former cabinet minister had already come under pressure over the second allegation that his husband, Reinaldo Avila da Silva, had received £10,000 from Epstein about two months after the registered sex offender was released from prison in 2009.

Related: There’s no way back for Peter Mandelson.

Filed related to the paedophile financier suggest that Mandy may have received $75,000 from Epstein and also lobbied against a tax on British bankers’ bonuses. Mandelson says he has no record of the payments. Documents released by the US Department of Justice in recent days suggest that Epstein also sent £10,000 to Peter Mandelson’s partner Reinaldo Avila da Silva in 2009. Mandelson did not comment on this report and there is no suggestion Da Silva was involved in any wrongdoing. But what seems all too clear is that Mandelson’s Achilles heel – his love of associating with powerful, wealthy men – has led to his final downfall.

Mandelson’s statement last night was more graceful than some of his more defiant public pronouncements in the past. (Who can forget his Gloria Gaynor-esque statement in 2001 that “I’m a fighter, not a quitter”?) He declared that “I have been further linked this weekend to the understandable furore surrounding Jeffrey Epstein and I feel regretful and sorry about this. Allegations which I believe to be false that he made financial payments to me 20 years ago, and of which I have no record or recollection, need investigating by me.” Even allowing for the conditionals attached, he knew that the game was up, and so announced that: “While doing this I do not wish to cause further embarrassment to the Labour party and I am therefore stepping down from membership of the party.”

Mandelson was right to use a phrase that the other embattled Epstein veteran Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor seems to have been unable to utter: “I want to take this opportunity to repeat my apology to the women and girls whose voices should have been heard long before now”. But given that the one-time master of the dark arts is no longer seen in the House of Lords, his resignation from Labour means that, at the age of 72, Mandelson has now effectively quit public life.

Further thoughts from Mark Steyn: “If you’re wondering why the British political class are so indifferent to the gang-raped working-class girls of every town up and down England, well, it’s clear from a cursory glance at the Epstein files that our rulers are relaxed about the way of the world: under the new class system, there are those who are pleasured and those who do the pleasuring.”

Posted at 5:53 pm by Ed Driscoll

THE NEW SPACE RACE:

Developing…

Posted at 5:25 pm by Stephen Green

THE WRATH OF KIRK: William Shatner’s fiber commercial is on pace to get more views than the woke new Star Trek show.

This is a real ad:

[Warning: It’s a fiber commercial, so there’s PG-13 potty humor]

On X alone, Shatner’s ad has racked up 1 million views.

The premiere of the woke Star Trek show, meanwhile, only had 1300 live viewers on YouTube and was eventually pulled after only 218,000 views in nine days, with 8,000 likes and 27,000 dislikes.

Geeks & Gamers put it this way:

One man boldly going with a bowl of cereal just outperformed an entire streaming rollout. That should worry Paramount far more than any dislike counter ever could.

There are only three cast members of the original show still alive, and by far, Shatner is the biggest star, so if he wants to cash in at age 94 on the enormous goodwill he’s built up over the decades for starring in a beloved TV and movie series, he deserves every dollar he gets for such an ad. Conversely, the showrunners of the various streaming versions of Trek deserve all of the scorn they’re receiving for ruining the franchise they inherited.

As far as the actual cereal that Shatner is promoting though, let’s face it, it’s no Colon Blow:

Posted at 5:24 pm by Ed Driscoll

4 WAYS CBO TOOL IS BIASED TO GROW SPENDING: It may be an obscure, deep-in-the-woods reality but the federal budget baseline tool routinely used by the Congressional Budget Office to project federal budget trends, tax revenue and economic growth has four flaws that prompt more outlays.

Posted at 4:21 pm by Mark Tapscott

NO. NEXT QUESTION? Can AI Movie Stars Replace the Genuine Article?

Much of Hollywood, to say nothing of moviegoing audiences at large, have resigned themselves to the idea that most of what we do will soon be replaced by AI. Judging by the general tenor of the comments I receive, many of my regular readers are actively rooting for this outcome. And if the various creative guilds (WGA/DGA/SAG) decide to go on strike later this summer, you can bet that this fear of AI will be one of the primary reasons why they do so. But given that Hollywood rushed headlong into streaming without understanding how the economics would work (spoiler alert: they don’t), before we enthusiastically embrace our new AI overlords we should, at least for one brief moment, resist the tech bro impulse to “move fast and break things” and ask a few important questions… questions like “what is a movie star?”

Most of the time, if you press someone in Hollywood for an answer, the one you’ll get will not be particularly useful or practical. Often the answer will sound a bit like the famous quote from Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart who, while discussing the definition of pornography, said “I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it.”

My own personal definition of what makes a movie star has always been some version of this… “a movie star is someone who takes your breath away the first time you see them on film, even when they’re doing nothing at all.”

A machine can’t replace the million dollar charisma a legendary actor brings to his or her role. I suppose we will see AI-versions of the early Pixar movies coming out of Hollywood, where the visuals are created from a series of AI prompts, but a mixture of superstars and veteran character actors create the personas of the onscreen characters, based on the goodwill they’ve accumulated over the decades. But where AI is going to really shine is for everyday people to type in the prompts and generate the otherwise missing scenes from movies and TV series they’ve enjoyed, such as this fan-made AI Star Wars homage:

But we’ll eventually see how AI recreations of legendary actors compare when they’re intercut together: Deepfaking Orson Welles’s Mangled Masterpiece. Will an A.I. restoration of “The Magnificent Ambersons” right a historic wrong or desecrate a classic?

I hate to be a cynical, but alas, my money is on the latter. At least for the next few years.

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

AN LLM CAN’T INSTALL A FURNACE: Plumber or programmer? Trades workers close the job gap.

While AI has taken some entry-level white-collar jobs, hurting new college graduates, demand is strong for blue-collar workers.

“Mean hourly wages for plumbers, pipe fitters, electricians and boilermakers — all of which typically require apprenticeships — eclipsed the overall hourly mean wage for U.S. workers in 2023, which was about $31.50,” Telford writes. Elevator and escalator repair technicians averaged more than $48 an hour.

Education and skills still matter, says Jeff Strohl, director of Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce. The center’s “Future of Good Jobs” report predicts that 66 percent of workers with a four-year degree will be able to compete for “good” jobs — with median pay of $82,000 — in the next five years, compared to only 19 percent of workers with a vocational certificate or two-year degree.

However, schools went too far in pushing “college for all,” Strohl told Telford. “What we didn’t do was set up viable alternative pathways for students to succeed, to the detriment of the economy and the detriment of those students.”

Yes.

Posted at 2:46 pm by Stephen Green

THE WSJ HAS LOST WHATEVER NEWS MOJO IT ONCE HAD:

UPDATE (From Ed):

Posted at 2:35 pm by Glenn Reynolds

OLD AND BUSTED: “Nobody is illegal on stolen land.”

The New Hotness? Let’s celebrate America stealing some land!

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll