February 8, 2026

I THINK THAT’S BEEN THE CASE FOR A WHILE:

Posted at 6:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

HALFTIME S***SHOW: Even NFL Players Have No Idea Who Bad Bunny Is (Just Like the Rest of Us).

One of the biggest cultural gaslights from the left over the past few months leading up to today’s Super Bowl has been that we should all know how great halftime performer Bad Bunny is. And, of course, if we don’t know, we’re are (say it with us), ‘RAAAAAYYYCCCIIIISSSS!’

The truth is that before Jay-Z forced this irrelevant artist on the NFL and the nation, most of America had never heard of him. Since his selection, however, the leftist media has been trying to turn him into the biggest thing in music since The Rolling Stones. The Grammys heaped awards on him, the media has hilariously and falsely claimed that Americans are learning Spanish ahead of his performance, and everyone on the left is pretending that they’ve always been big fans.

As a part of Generation X (which still has the best music and always will), this writer thought that maybe it’s just a matter of being out of touch with the younger generations. Turns out, not so much.

Over the weekend, one reporter decided to ask the NFL players themselves (who are all pretty young) what their favorite Bad Bunny banger was. The responses they gave were nothing short of hilarious. Watch:

https://twitter.com/iAnonPatriot/status/2019831743327662508

Back in 2014, Mark Steyn explored “The Holes We Dig:”

I see that today is Courtney Love’s 50th birthday. She’s not my bag musically, but I treasure her for one brief exchange about a decade and a half ago.

Circa 1998, Miss Love, lead singer of the popular beat combo Hole, was at a Democrat fundraiser in Hollywood when the party’s presumptive presidential nominee, Al Gore, approached her. “I’m a really big fan,” gushed the Vice-President.

“Yeah, right,” scoffed Courtney. “Name a song.”

The panicked Vice-Panderer floundered helplessly for a few moments until his Secret Service detail moved in and rescued him. As first promulgated by Denis Healey, Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, the politician’s First Rule of Holes is: When you’re in one, stop digging. Al introduced us to a Second Rule: When you’re with one, stop pretending to dig her.

Hole has since disbanded, but I thank Courtney Love for my favorite social intercourse between a popular singer and a politician since Sinatra sang at the 1956 Democratic convention. At the end of the number, the Speaker of the House, Sam Rayburn, went up and put his arm around him, as politicians are wont to do. “Hands off the threads, creep,” snarled Frank, to the second most powerful man in Washington.

If you said “Name a song” to Obama, the pitiful thing is he’d probably be able to. But I would love to hear Jay-Z say “Hands off the threads, creep” to him.

In 1998, Al Gore would have been 50 years old himself, and it’s understandable that, despite his attempts at pandering, a man of his age wouldn’t be expected to know a young rock star’s oeuvre. But of course, far from saying “hands of the threads, creep,” Jay-Z friendship with Obama are the reason why the NFL is placed itself in a position where it’s having a Super Bowl halftime featuring a performer that a 20-something NFL players have never heard of:

Posted at 5:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

FETTERMAN CALLS FOR VOTER ID:

In accordance with the prophecy:

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

SNOWFALLS ARE NOW JUST A THING OF THE PAST: Climate Scientist Who Predicted End Of “Heavy Frost and Snow” Now Refuses Media Inquiries.

More than two decades ago, renowned climate scientist Mojib Latif of Germany’s Max Planck Instiute for Meterology, based in Hamburg, warned the climate-ambulance chasing Der Spiegel that, due to global warming, Germany would likely no longer experience harsh winters with heavy frost and snow as it had in previous decades.

Spiegel reported climate scientist’s prediction of harsh winters disappearing due to man’s activities. Image cropped here. 

In light of the current severe winter weather in Germany, Latif’s statements are facing renewed scrutiny. An article appearing in the Berliner Zeitung here notes that Latif’s prophecy has “aged poorly” and he appears to want to have nothing to do with them.

Hiding from the media

According to the Berliner Zeitung, the former Max Planck Institute scientist has recently stopped responding to media inquiries regarding his past claims. Critics argue that such drastic predictions damage the credibility of climate science, while others point out that extreme weather events—including intense cold snaps—can still occur within the broader context of climate change.

In the days of TV and print media, it was easy to run shock stories about global cooling/global warming. But the Internet makes it much easier to look up old stories and verify if the forecasts made have come true. Or if the scientists have played both sides of apocalyptic rhetoric over the decades:

(Classical reference in headline.)

Posted at 2:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

A GOOD SONG FOR THIS TIME OF YEAR: A Hazy Shade of Winter.

Posted at 2:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

QUESTION ASKED: Are You Ready for Some Football? A Review of Football by Chuck Klosterman.

Three weeks ago, my beloved San Francisco 49ers were unceremoniously dispatched from the NFL playoffs by the Seattle Seahawks, who are vying for their second Super Bowl championship today. The result didn’t surprise many; the Niners were hobbled by injuries to many of their best players and, frankly, enjoyed more than a bit of luck in getting as far as they did this past season. But every year, the Grim Reaper comes for all but one team, and my guys could not evade his grip.

More alarmingly, in his new book, the writer Chuck Klosterman predicts the Reaper will soon come for all of football, despite its wild popularity. “Football is doomed,” writes Klosterman, a self-described huge fan of the sport, and, in the future, people “are going to misunderstand why it once mattered as much as it did.” So as you mash your guacamole, ice your beers, and broil your wings in preparation for the big event, be forewarned: America’s favorite game is in trouble.

* * * * * * * * *

 But the crux of the matter remains the game’s future, or lack thereof. Klosterman surveys the data on CTE, a degenerative brain disease linked to the micro-concussions football players suffer, and discerns therein the roots of the game’s undoing. “Should strangers be allowed to do very dangerous, very popular things?” he wonders. And while he answers the question in the affirmative, he’s uncertain suburban moms in the future will feel the same when it comes to their own kids. Coupling the withering of Pop Warner and high school football with the rapid deterioration of the college game—the proliferation of name, image, and likeness contracts; the destruction of traditional conferences; a transfer portal undermining team integrity—Klosterman foresees a sport whose future talent pool will soon be circling the drain, sinking the game’s culture along with it. “It will become obvious,” he predicts, “that football’s century of supremacy, originally built off the game’s ability to reflect and simulate society, had sustained itself through illusory means.”

Much like the game itself, Football isn’t for everyone. Klosterman’s discursive style is extremely idiosyncratic, which makes for lively but occasionally frustrating reading. But his fresh perspectives on the game and its future, delivered with his characteristic wit and verve, provide thoughtful grist alongside your bratwursts and nachos on this glorious day. As Klosterman asserts, “This is an expository obituary, published before the subject has died, delivered by someone who wants to explain why the victim mattered so much to so many.” Here’s hoping he’s wrong: As you watch the Seahawks battle the New England Patriots, keep in mind what you love about the game—and how it can be preserved.

The NFL is a financial powerhouse, and as we’ve seen with the recent changes to how kickoffs are played, and the virtual elimination of the onside kick as a viable comeback tool late in games, the league will continue to alter its rules ad infinitum to keep the money flowing in and pay at least a cursory nod to player safety. But those rule changes will continue to make the game look increasingly unrecognizable to how it was played in the league’s glory years.

Posted at 2:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

PEGGY NOONAN: A Lament for the Washington Post.

The diminishment of the Washington Post hits hard because it feels like another demoralizing thing in our national life. Our public life as a nation—how we are together, how we talk to each other, the sound of us—isn’t what it was. It’s gone down and we all feel this, all the grown-ups.

The Post was a pillar. The sweeping layoffs and narrowing of coverage announced this week followed years of buyouts and shrinking sections. None of this feels like the restructuring of a paper or a rearranging of priorities, but like the doing-in of a paper, a great one, a thing of journalistic grandeur from some point in the 1960s through some point in the 2020s. I feel it damaged itself when, under the pressure of the pandemic, George Floyd and huge technological and journalistic changes, it wobbled—and not in the opinion section but on the news side. But I kept my subscription because that is a way of trusting, of giving a great paper time to steady itself. (And there would always be an important David Ignatius column, or a great scoop on some governmental scandal that made it worth the cost.)

But the Post’s diminishment, which looks like its demise, isn’t just a “media story.” Reaction shouldn’t break down along ideological lines, in which the left feels journalism is its precinct and is sad, and the right feels journalism is its hulking enemy and isn’t sad. Treat it that way and we’ll fail to see the story for its true significance. The capital of the most powerful nation on earth appears to be without a vital, fully functioning newspaper to cover it. That isn’t the occasion of jokes, it’s a disaster.

I fear sometimes that few people really care about journalism, but we are dead without it. Someday something bad will happen, something terrible on a national scale, and the thing we’ll need most, literally to survive, is information. Reliable information—a way to get it, and then to get it to the public. That is what journalism is, getting the information.

But as Mary Katharine Ham writes, something bad did happen on a national scale, and we can measure how newspapers like the Post met the moment:

The Post went full Alinsky-style “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it” on Eric Clapton in 2021, because he was a prominent celebrity (who makes his living playing music in sold-out hockey arenas) who disagreed with the official lockdown policy to fight covid, and dared disclose he had a bad reaction to his vaccination shot.

The following year, the Post repeated the same tactics on the Canadian truckers: Washington Post seeks to dox and shame donors to Canadian freedom protesters.

Of course, some protestors were just fine — they were radical and surprisingly chic!

As with the medical profession, the DNC-MSM ability to turn on a dime from “we all must lockdown to slow the spread to Covid,” to “we all need to be taking it to the streets, maaaan” — and then back again, when it suited their worldview — was yet another nail in their reputational coffin:

Related, from last August: Washington Post “Fact Checker” Was “Completely Wrong” on Wuhan Lab-Leak Headline, He Says.

From that a tweet embedded in that last link, it’s obvious why Noonan feigns having no memory of how the WaPo covered 2020:

Also in Noonan’s article, CTL-F “Biden” “unexpectedly” brings back zero results.

UPDATE:

Posted at 1:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Infamous School Board Trains Staff To Fight ‘Terrorist’ Parents Angry About Trans Bathroom Policy.

The Loudoun County School Board in January hosted a training to teach staff and board members how to fight off “terrorist” parents, according to eyewitnesses.

The closed-door meeting was meant to respond to “terrorist activity” at school board meetings and included dozens of hired actors playing the role of Loudoun County parents, according to 7News. Sources who were present at the meeting told the outlet the actors simulated parents bringing guns into the meeting, and staff were instructed on the same measures students are taught to use in the event of an active shooter situation: “run, hide, and fight.”

Board chair April Chandler referred to the actors as “disruptors” and “agitators,” and mentioned past meetings where parents voiced concerns over some of the district’s actions.

Loudoun County became infamous in 2021 after being exposed for allegedly attempting to cover up a sexual assault in a school bathroom perpetrated by a male student who claimed a transgender identity. The victim’s father was later arrested at a board meeting after he demanded that the board admit they covered up his daughter’s attack.

Ironically, if they really were terrorists, based upon what we saw in schools after October 7th, the school board would likely be thrilled to meet them. As Stephen Jukes, global news editor for Reuters infamously instructed his contributors after September 11th, “We all know that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter and that Reuters upholds the principle that we do not use the word terrorist. To be frank, it adds little to call the attack on the World Trade Center a terrorist attack.”

Posted at 1:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

THIS IS HOW THE NFL SCANS ALL OF ITS OLD FILM:

The Instagram account, @mrcelluloid, is run by independent filmmaker Alex Grant who brings fans behind the scenes as he manages NFL’s massive film vault. There is a staggering amount of film in there: over 100 million feet — it would take 13 years to watch it all.

Using “state-of-the-art” scanners, Grant digitizes 8mm, 16mm, and 35mm film. “Methods of transferring film have varied over time, with older machines using a same similar principle of taking individual photos of every single frame,” he writes in one post.

Grant, who scans about 50,000 feet of film per day, says the vast majority of the NFL Films archives is on 16mm, but there’s plenty of 35mm, too. 8mm is relatively rare. The earliest films are from the 1920s and film was still being used as late as 2014.

“To keep up with the volume of film, we have four machines running almost all day,” says Grant, while adding each scanner costs $300,000. “It has a big camera lens inside, which takes a high-quality photo of every single frame. It even has a built-in fan to blow off any excess dirt/dust.”

I grew up in South Jersey, about 20 minutes from the NFL Film’s office in Mt. Laurel, and once interviewed the legendary Steve Sabol for Videomaker magazine, so I’m thrilled that the league is digitizing its archives. But how much will be available for public viewership? To watch old NFL Films product is to watch a worldview and a respect for its core audience that no longer exists among its management, and hasn’t for a decade:

In the 1960s, American culture was fracturing along a fault line, with the common man on one side and scorn against his mores and values on the other. The league’s commissioner at the time, Pete Rozelle, chose to take the side of ordinary Americans in the raging culture war, because they were his natural audience. The league sent star players to visit troops in Vietnam and issued rules requiring players to stand upright during the playing of the National Anthem.

In 1967, the NFL produced a film that combined sideline and game footage titled, “They Call It Pro Football.” The film was unapologetically hokey. It was crew cuts and high tops and lots of chain smoking into sideline telephones. With a non-rock, non-folk, non-“what’s happening now” soundtrack, heavy on trumpets and kettle drums. John Facenda, who would come to be called “The Voice of God” for his work with NFL Films, provided the vaulting narration. The production began with the words, “It starts with a whistle and ends with a gun.” There was nothing Radical Chic about it.

The NFL surpassed baseball as America’s pastime with careful branding that conformed to the tastes and sensibilities of middle-class Americans – Nixon’s silent majority. A half century later, Roger Goodell would kill the goose that laid the golden egg.

In August 2016, America was experiencing a polarizing presidential election. San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick sat during the playing of the national anthem, to protest injustice. It was a politically divisive act directed at fans who regard the national anthem as something sacred. The league did not lift a finger to stop him.

Most employers don’t let their workers make controversial political statements to their customers. It is why you do not know your UPS driver’s views on the expansion of NATO. The Constitution does not prohibit private businesses from regulating speech during work.

A savvier commissioner would have reminded Kaepernick that he is being paid millions to wear the logo of the NFL, and the league does not permit players to use its brand to flaunt their personal politics. Instead, Roger Goodell permitted the pregame ceremonies to become the focus of intense political scrutiny, as the media lined up to catalog whether players stood, sat or knelt during the national anthem.

As Iowahawk famously tweeted back then:

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

FOLLOW THE SCIENCE (CONT’D):

Posted at 12:23 pm by Glenn Reynolds

BEZOS HASN’T GUTTED THE POST ENOUGH YET: Colin Kaepernick Washington Post story on Super Bowl Sunday draws social media backlash.

Former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick was top of mind for The Washington Post ahead of Super Bowl LX on Sunday.

Kaepernick was described in the story as Super Bowl LX’s “most relevant” figure despite the 49ers not making it and the subject of the story being out of football for nearly 10 years.

“The game will be played in his former home stadium, in the place where his protest made him a national lightning rod and a global symbol,” Adam Kilgore wrote of Kaepernick. “The social issues swirling around America’s largest sporting spectacle carry distinct echoes of what prompted his actions and what led to his exile. And yet he remains outside the conversation and invisible within the confines of the NFL.”

The story continued to assess Kaepernick’s legacy after he launched a kneeling protest against social injustice in the U.S. and wondered about his voice amid outrage against the Trump administration’s policy on illegal immigration after two deadly incidents involving federal agents in Minnesota.

The story garnered immense reaction on X.

 

Exit quote: “Kaepernick has maintained that he’s staying ready for another NFL shot. He will be 39 in November.”

Tom Brady, Blaine Gabbert, and the ghost of George Blanda smile.

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll