March 2, 2026

LEFTIST ALWAYS MAKE ACCUSATIONS ABOUT WHAT THEY THEMSELVES ARE DOING:

Posted at 1:08 pm by Glenn Reynolds

WHY DO THEY ALWAYS LOOK LIKE THIS?

Posted at 12:51 pm by Glenn Reynolds

RICK MCGINNIS AT STEYN ONLINE: Wow Finish: Stanley Kramer brings down the curtain in On the Beach.

“Every man who worked on this thing told you what would happen,” Julian [Fred Astaire] argues. “The scientists signed petition after petition. But nobody listened. There was a choice. It was build the bombs and use them. Or risk the United States and the Soviet Union and the rest of us would find some way to go on living.” In any case the radiation level in the room they’re in is nine times higher than it was a year ago.

“We’re doomed, you know,” Julian tells them. “The whole silly, drunken pathetic lot of us. Doomed by the air we’re about to breathe. We haven’t got a chance.”

The whole terrible scene reduces Mary to tears and inspires Moira [Ava Gardner] to get drunker and, later that night when the party is over, try to get Towers to explain to her what happened and why. He can’t explain it any better than anyone else – the film is far vaguer than [Nevil] Shute’s book with a geopolitical scenario for global nuclear war – but it’s the beginning of a simmering flirtation that was inevitable once Kramer put [Gregory] Peck and Gardner in the same frame.

[Anthony] Perkins, Gardner and Astaire all play Australians but while Perkins and Astaire attempt a spotty accent in early scenes it’s gone long before the end of the picture and Gardner doesn’t even bother. It probably didn’t matter much to American audiences at the time, but what did bother Shute was the changes Kramer made to the budding romance between Moira and Towers.

In adapting the story with screenwriter John Paxton, John Osborne became Julian Osborn and was aged up from a man in his late twenties to the spry but senior Astaire. Moira was also aged up from a petite blonde in her twenties to the curvaceous brunette Gardner, attractive but showing every bit of her hard-lived thirty-six years, and still able to draw the stares of a shipful of sailors on the aircraft carrier HMAS Melbourne as she walks down the dock to the Sawfish. This all makes On the Beach a movie artifact of a world of adults, glimpsed just before youthful demographics would banish that world to ancient history.

* * * * * * * * *

 On the Beach is such a famous, relentless downer that it’s no surprise, with or without the efforts of the USIA, the State Department, the OCDM and the Pentagon, the film flopped at the box office. Eisenhower needn’t have worried. And as if confirming the old adage about “first time as tragedy, second as comedy”, five years later Stanley Kubrick would tell a nuclear war story as essentially bleak and hopeless with Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

In sharp contrast to the grim slog of On the Beach, at least Kubrick, his cast, and the movie’s viewers had plenty of fun before the world blew up. As Kubrick later told an interviewer, “I started work on the screenplay with every intention of making the film a serious treatment of the problem of accidental nuclear war. As I kept trying to imagine the way in which things would really happen, ideas kept coming to me which I would discard because they were so ludicrous. I kept saying to myself: ‘I can’t do this. People will laugh.’”

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

DEMOCRATS LESS PRO-AMERICAN, LESS PRO-SECURITY THAN EUROPE? FIGURES:

Posted at 12:20 pm by Stephen Green

ANDREW STILES: Rest in Pieces: Ali Khamenei, Demure Progressive Stalwart and ‘Black Lives Matter’ Ally Who Inspired Democrats and Academics, Bombed to Death at 86.

Ali Khamenei, the “Black Lives Matter” advocate and long-serving supreme leader of Iran, was a guiding light to Democratic lawmakers, Ivy League professors, and other progressive ideologues who endorsed his intellectual appraisal of America’s evil and the treachery of Jews.

In darkness they must now persist.

The ayatollah died like a dog Saturday when his “secure” compound in central Tehran was caved in by several dozen of the biggest, most beautiful bombs ever made. Khamenei’s body, so austere and worldly, torn to shreds. His mangled face adorned with one of history’s most distinguished beards. His agile mind—inquisitive and playful—literally blown amidst the ashes of scholarly texts and quirky beach reads. A name crossed off the top of Uncle Sam’s list. The emphatic ring of Mother Freedom’s bell. It must have felt as if the whole wide world was raining down. Because it was.

“Khamenei, one of the most evil people in History, is dead,” President Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social. He was 86.

The Iranian people cheered a tyrant’s demise and hoped for what could be. You could tell their joy was real and not the Kamala Harris kind. The ayatollah’s left-wing comrades sobbed like sloppy seventh graders. They shook their fists at mushroom clouds and wept for what had been. The revolution. The hostages. The oil nonsense. Decades of degenerate behavior and the targeting of American soldiers. The homespun hipster in his button-down shirt (also killed). The slow death of the Iranian economy, which even the Obama nuclear shake-down couldn’t stop.

They had to hand it to the supreme leader.* Fans commended him for dying honorably—on his own terms, mid-resistance, cowering in a bunker, surrounded by his closest friends and military commanders. They touted his progressive bona fides—he understood that decolonization was more than vibes and essays. In May 2020, he penned an eloquent clapback against white supremacy after the death of George Floyd. He never took Trump’s calls or laughed at a misogynistic joke, which in some ways made him even more of a winner than the USA men’s hockey team. He inspired a generation of Ivy League losers to hate Jews even more than they hate themselves.

* Not necessarily:

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll

STAND BY: Trump tells CNN the ‘big wave’ is yet to come in war with Iran.

“We’re knocking the crap out of them,” Trump told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “I think it’s going very well. It’s very powerful. We’ve got the greatest military in the world and we’re using it.”

Trump addressed a wide range of topics in the interview, including the expected length of the conflict, his surprise at Iran’s widespread retaliation and the country’s expected succession plan.

On how long the war might last, the president said, “I don’t want to see it go on too long. I always thought it would be four weeks. And we’re a little ahead of schedule.”

Asked if the US is doing more beyond the military assault to help the Iranian people regain control of their country from the regime, Trump said, “Yes.”

“We are indeed. But right now we want everyone staying inside. It’s not safe out there.”

And it’s about to get even less safe, the president said.

“We haven’t even started hitting them hard. The big wave hasn’t even happened. The big one is coming soon.”

More to come… much more.

Posted at 11:40 am by Stephen Green

“IT’S ALL GLOBAL GEOSTRATEGY TO COUNTER CHINA:”

Posted at 10:48 am by Ed Driscoll

MORE GOVERNMENT, HIGHER PRICES: We Didn’t Just Get Expensive Electricity. We Built a System That Makes It Inevitable.

When one looks inside the electricity system, the experience is less like analyzing an immense machine than being fed into one, resembling the immortal scene in “Modern Times” where Charlie Chaplin’s factory worker is swallowed by the equipment he’s working on.

The American electricity market is not guided by an “invisible hand” of supply and demand, but an accumulation of misaligned rules laid down over decades. Layer upon layer of regulation, subsidy, mandate, and accounting rules to a point where the system became fixed in an upward, inflationary tilt, impervious to efforts to change.

There are at least a half-dozen federal environmental regulations that have more to do with rising electricity prices than tariffs or the data-center buildout, and a good example to start with is called Construction Work in Progress (CWIP).

As a new issue brief makes clear, it helped change who pays for America’s infrastructure.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 10:38 am by Stephen Green

NEXT! Iranian VP takes over during wartime, raising questions about Pezeshkian’s status.

Iranian Vice President Mohammad Reza Aref informed officials of plans to have him take charge of the nation during wartime, according to a report from the Iranian Students’ News Agency (ISNA) published on social media late Saturday night.

There was no explicit note of President Masoud Pezeshkian’s ability to carry out presidential duties.

Earlier on Saturday, security forces blocked roads in the Tehran area that is home to Pezeshkian’s offices, witnesses said.

Keep this up, and maybe nobody will want the job.

Posted at 9:36 am by Stephen Green

ICYMI, MY LATEST SUBSTACK: Trump Cuts Off The Snake’s Head.

As always, if you like these essays, please take out a paid subscription. I appreciate your support very much.

Posted at 9:18 am by Glenn Reynolds

THE LEFT’S FAKE HISTORY:

Posted at 9:16 am by Glenn Reynolds

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: The United Freaking States of America. Heck Yeah! “Since January 3, it’s felt less like a news cycle and more like a nonstop adrenaline rush. I don’t think I’ve ever loved this country more, and I am fairly certain I was waving a little U.S. flag the moment my toddler’s hands could hold one.”

Sarah Anderson is filling in for Kruiser today as he recovers from a birthday well spent.

Posted at 9:05 am by Stephen Green