June 29, 2026

LEOPARDS EATING PEOPLE’S FACES VOTERS ARE ALWAYS THE LAST TO KNOW:

Posted at 4:34 pm by Stephen Green

I’LL TAKE HEADLINES FROM 1943, ALEX: How German trains became the shame of a nation.

When the 10pm service of Berlin’s U2 metro line failed to set off from the station, its frazzled driver finally snapped.

“Get away from the doors!” he bellowed, leaping out to berate a young woman as she pawed at the broken, flashing-red buttons on the side of the train. “Don’t touch the doors!”

Unbeknownst to the driver, who seemed to think the woman’s button-mashing had caused the breakdown, Germany’s entire rail system had just been crippled by a software glitch.

For the next two hours, hundreds of thousands of Germans were left stranded on platforms or sweltering in packed carriages as the metro, intercity and commuter networks all failed at once on Tuesday.

In some regions the delays lasted even longer, with passengers forced to seek out hotel rooms or sleep on benches in the train station.

You might think that travel chaos on this scale in Germany, a nation famed for its love of efficiency and punctuality, is unusual – but you would be sorely mistaken.

After decades of underinvestment, Germany’s crumbling rail network has become a source of national humiliation for a country that was once the gold standard in engineering.

Speaking of humiliating, Col. Hans Landa vants to know, are you are hiding any wallboxes under ze floor? Ve have ways of finding out! German State Media Campaign Against Air Conditioning as Country Faces Record Summer Heat.

Related:

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

BELIEVE THE DSA WHEN THEY TELL YOU WHO THEY REALLY ARE: And what they really are becomes more obvious with every word from their multiple mouths. Plus, they have a new platform, Issues & Insights (I&I, quoting City Journal, tells us:

“As the City Journal’s Stu Smith reported, the DSA has adopted a new platform that is, incredibly enough, even more radical than its previous one. Although it still hasn’t been published on its website, an advance version, which Smith obtained,  is straight-up Marxism, declaring “the entire global system of capital” as its enemy and promising to “build a new society from the ground up.”

Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa), who is among the last sane voices in the Democratic Party, says his party is “drifting firmly into communism.” The smart guys at I&I have it more precisely – the party is “rushing into communism.”

The reality is Marxists always promise they will build “a new society from the ground up.” What they actually and always build are Gulags, the genocidal destruction of millions of people in classes they view as irreparably part of the old society, deeply impoverished cities, towns and neighborhoods that once were not, healthcare for “all” – all of the ruling class, that is, and the complete centralization of all power in members of that same ruling class.

That is the result of every Marxist regime that has ever taken power. Orwell had it exactly right when he wrote in “1984” “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever.” And that is what every American must realize: To treat “Democratic Socialists/Marxist” as anything but enemies of truth, freedom and prosperity is to commit societal suicide.

Posted at 4:09 pm by Mark Tapscott

CORRECT:

More:

The movie is about what happens when leftists like you control the government and allow society to be ruined by the criminals you won’t capture and punish.

People like you create the psychopaths on both sides. That’s why you hate the movie.

Because the villain is YOU.

Citizen Vigilante isn’t great by any means, but it’s solid entertainment — and a big step up from anything else I’ve seen from Uwe Boll.

Posted at 3:32 pm by Stephen Green

THIS IS KIND OF A LAST WARNING:

Posted at 2:57 pm by Glenn Reynolds

HIS THINKING HAS EVOLVED, AS THEY SAY: Gavin Newsom — once a capitalist, now a socialist.

Newsom is calling for a national tax on billionaires and Americans worth more than $100 million.

He wants to end the “tax-free lifestyle loan” — a feature of the current tax code that lets the ultra-wealthy borrow against their stock portfolios while reporting no taxable income, then pass appreciated assets to their children with the gains untaxed.

He wants to rewrite inheritance rules so that the state can take another cut of the trillions that rich people want to give to others.

He wants to create a national public equity fund giving Americans a stake in gains from artificial intelligence.

In plain English, he wants Washington to tax, redistribute and socialize more of the American economy.

With Newsom sitting on top of it all, redistributing to the well-connected.

Posted at 2:46 pm by Stephen Green

THE COMPOSITE CHARACTER PRESIDENTIAL CENTER:

The Tablet sage [David Samuels] was on to it at last. Barack Obama is a fictitious character, and in 2023, he was still running the country under the hapless Joe Biden and was responsible for the disaster the nation was living through at the time. From the hideously ugly Obama Presidential Center, the Obama is doubtless hoping for Bidens all the way down—Democratic presidents that he can control moving forward. This is more like the “guided democracy” of Indonesia, where young Barry Soetoro was raised, than anything in the American tradition.

As [David] Garrow noted in Rising Star, the former president, born in Hawaii in 1961, was raised in Indonesia as the stepson of Lolo Soetoro, the Indonesian student his mother Ann Dunham married in 1965. On the other hand, the Kenyan Barack Obama, Sr., in all his writing and documents from 1958 to 1964, mentions nothing about an American wife and son. So it seems POTUS44, in preparing his book on his father, never viewed the archive at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York where Sr.’s writings are housed.

For the fictional character who became president, America was smothered in oppression and racism until he arrived on the scene.  He promptly  canceled missile defense for U.S. allies Poland and the Czech Republic. Fidel Castro was regarded by him as a “singular figure” with “enormous impact,” and the white Stalinist dictator never did anything Obama chose publicly to condemn. The Fort Hood mass murder by “soldier of Allah” Nidal Hasan was only considered “workplace violence,” not terrorism or even gun violence. And so on.

The “Affordable Care Act,” which David Garrow regarded as “in large part, a fraud,” was part of Obama’s fundamental transformation of the USA into a nation where the people get only what the government wants them to have. If the people therefore regard the Obama as the true divider-in-chief it would be hard to blame them.

As the Obama Presidential Center opens, in the run-up to the nation’s 250th birthday, prominent Democrats are panting for socialism, which has proved itself a failure. The “remarkable story” of the first fictional character president is still in progress, and that could spell disaster for the people in 2028 and beyond. So as Trump says, we’ll have to see what happens.

Related: Bill Maher calls Mamdani-backed socialist [Darializa Avila Chevalier] ‘patient zero’ of the ‘woke mind virus.’

As nutty as Chevalier’s worldview is (to the point where even CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski is calling her out), as Yoda would say, “No, there is another.”

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

IT LOOKS LIKE “UNIVERSAL” SUFFERING, YES:

Posted at 2:31 pm by Stephen Green

ROB LONG: What I Learned From Jimmy Burrows.

On my third day in show business, I went to Stage 25 on the Paramount Studios lot to get a cup of coffee and a doughnut. It was January 1990, and I had just been hired as a staff writer on the long-running hit comedy Cheers, and so far I had made two important career discoveries.

First: that every working soundstage has a table somewhere groaning with snacks and treats. It’s called the craft services table, even though it often sprawls across two or three tables, a deli-sized refrigerator, and a bank of toaster ovens. The entertainment industry is filled with nervous eaters—and no one is more nervous than a newly hired staff writer on a 10-week contract—so this area is replenished hourly with pastries and bagels and mini sandwiches, and it’s where everyone associated with the production self-medicates with sugary carbohydrates, high-fat dairy, and gossip.

The second thing I discovered was this: No one in show business will ever teach you anything, or explain what’s going on, or patiently show you the ropes. If you’re new and want to learn something, go get a cup of coffee and a doughnut at the craft services table and hide in a corner and watch. This is what I was doing on my third day in show business when I watched my boss, James Burrows, sitting at the piano on the set—You remember that, don’t you? Upstage left, in the alcove of the bar under the stairs?—and he was idly playing “I’ll Know” from Guys and Dolls. The rest of the cast and crew were on their mid-morning break, so it was just me and James Burrows—everyone called him Jimmy, but I didn’t feel like I could do that on my third day in show business—in the empty Cheers bar with a doughnut from craft services.

As Burrows himself wrote on the brilliant design of the Cheers set, “strong attention was paid to detail. More than anything else, we wanted class and warmth. We hired Richard Sylbert, an Academy Award–winning art director, to make the set look as beautiful and inviting as possible, since the characters were drinking what many in America still considered ‘devil’s brew.’ Richard was very dignified, often decked out in a safari jacket while smoking a pipe. He had never worked on a television production before. He asked for a salary of 500 dollars for every show produced, which was unheard of. I told Paramount, ‘Pay him, even if you have to take it out of our share.’”

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

REMEMBER “MODERATE JOE” RETURNING US TO NORMALCY? YEAH, ME NEITHER: ‘Fully substantiated’: Report says Biden leaders pushed ‘gender’ rule on schools despite court order.

Department spokesperson Amelia Joy told The College Fix the Biden administration showed a “complete disregard” for Title IX, and instead “continued to implement its radical gender identity agenda through what appears to be coercion and intimidation of Federal employees.”

The “clear statutory purpose of Title IX [is] to protect the rights of women and girls, and to prevent sex-based discrimination,” Joy said in a recent email.

She praised the whistleblower in the department’s Office for Civil Rights who came forward with the evidence. An Office of Special Counsel investigation substantiated the whistleblower’s allegations in a report published earlier this month.

“Based on the Department’s investigation and OSC’s substantiation, the Department is taking remedial actions to correct any abuses imposed on Department employees by prior Administration officials,” Joy told The Fix.

Those named in the investigation include Catherine Lhamon, former assistant secretary of civil rights under the Biden administration. Lhamon left the office in January 2025 and is currently the inaugural director of UC Berkeley Law’s Edley Center on Law and Democracy.

Ever notice that the Obama-Biden-University-NGO revolving-door retreads all have resumés fit for tertiary Ayn Rand villains?

Posted at 1:44 pm by Stephen Green

JOHN PODHORETZ: How the Left Abandoned the Jews.

[Jesse] Jackson ran again in 1988, in a crowded field in which he was, again, the only genuinely exciting candidate. The New York primary was in April, and the mayor of the city was Ed Koch, who had taken particular offense to Jackson’s characterization of Zionism as “a kind of poisonous weed that is choking Judaism.” In the heat of campaigning for his chosen candidate, Al Gore, the ever-unconstrained Koch declared that “Jews and other supporters of Israel would have to be crazy to vote for Jackson.”

A firestorm erupted—but this time it wasn’t about what Jackson had said but rather about what Koch had said. The columnist Richard Cohen declared, “Jews don’t ‘have to be crazy’ to vote for Jesse Jackson. They can make up their own minds on that. But they have to be crazy to listen to Ed Koch.” There were myriad such comments. According to reporter Roger Simon, Gore called Jackson every night for a week to apologize. Koch later said he had gotten “carried away,” but it was too late for him. A “Stop Koch” movement, whose purpose was to deny him a fourth term as mayor in the next election, was born out of his words—and succeeded when Koch lost to David Dinkins in the 1989 primary.

What this revealed was that, Hymietown or no Hymietown, Jackson had achieved a sacrosanct position in the Democratic firmament as the most influential and popular black political presence in the country.

Jackson’s strength derived almost entirely from his domination of the black vote—polling showed that 19 out of 20 black New Yorkers voted for him. But he had also made significant inroads with leftists, many of them Jews, whose views of Israel had turned sour after the 1967 Six-Day War. Once viewed as a righteous anti-colonial cause, Zionism was reframed by radical thinkers in the 1970s as the ideology of a colonial oppressor of stateless Palestinians—the idea that gave rise to the notorious 1975 “Zionism is racism” resolution passed by the General Assembly of the United Nations.

Conventional American politicians in both parties loathed the resolution—and under U.S. pressure in the wake of the end of the Cold War, it was rescinded in December 1991. But the animating idea behind the resolution had already gained purchase in academic journals and university departments. In 1989, UCLA professor Kimberlé Crenshaw devised the theory of “intersectionality,” according to which all political oppression stemmed from an imbalance between the powerful and powerless. Its application to the Middle East conflict was obvious: Israel was powerful, the Palestinians powerless, and therefore Israel was, by definition, an oppressor.

It became the most influential sociopolitical theory of our time. And it dovetailed nicely with the dominant book about the modern Middle East. That was Edward Said’s Orientalism, a jeremiad against the imposition of Western ideas on non-Western cultures. Said was an English professor at Columbia by day but moonlighted as an official of the Palestine National Council, and was a critic of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat from the left.

The ideas (and disciples) of Crenshaw and Said were disseminated throughout the academy in the 1990s and 2000s. They became the default view in political science and Middle Eastern studies departments and on tenure committees. Those who preached the intersectional anti-Zionist gospel had the loudest voices on campus and the greatest influence on the college-educated Americans who came their way. Even as the Clinton and Bush administrations were widely viewed as friendly to Israel, and even though the halls of Congress were populated by friends of Israel, the next generation of American political activists was being trained in darker and uglier ideas.

In the mid-2000s, campuses across the country were suddenly lit up by the “boycott, divestment, and sanctions” movement, an idea conceived in 2005 in a Palestinian document called “the BDS Call.” It sought to isolate Israel by excluding its scholars and scholarship and forbidding the use of university financial resources in any way that might be seen as aiding the Jewish state. The plan was a direct lift from the anti-apartheid movement that helped bring down the white supremacist government in South Africa in the 1980s.

The anti-apartheid cause had been a key feature of all political conversation on campuses in the 1970s and 1980s. BDS sought to duplicate its success and build on it, and it found unexpected allies in its efforts. The idea was immediately taken up by former president Jimmy Carter, who believed his 1980 defeat had been partly the result of an evildoing Zionist cabal working on behalf of Israel.

Carter published a book entitled Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid in 2006. This was, in its own way, an earthquake, not only because Carter was a former U.S. president but because he had been one of the negotiators of the Camp David Accords of 1979, the first peace deal ever struck between Israel and an Arab country (Egypt). That same year saw the release of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy by two august political-science professors who claimed that this itty-bitty country had come to control Capitol Hill by the power of Jewish money. John Mearsheimer taught at the University of Chicago. Stephen Walt was tenured at Harvard.

As Jay Nordlinger wrote in his classic 2002 “Carterpalooza” column, “No one quite realizes just how passionately anti-Israel Carter [was]. William Safire has reported that Cyrus Vance acknowledged that, if he had had a second term, Carter would have sold Israel down the river.”

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

LIFTING IS GOOD: What Happens to Your Blood Pressure When You Lift Weights Regularly. “As it turns out, lifting weights does more than build a stronger frame. It can also benefit your heart. Research shows that just 30 to 60 minutes of resistance training per week can improve cardiovascular health and lower several risk factors that lead to heart disease, including high blood pressure.”

Posted at 1:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

DISAPPOINTING: Stunner: SCOTUS Whiffs on Election Day Showdown, 5-4. “Two months ago, observers felt sure that the Supreme Court would uphold a unanimous Fifth Circuit decision ruling ballots received after Election Day invalid in federal elections. Even the New York Times sounded pessimistic that the challenge to Judge Andrew Oldham’s ruling would succeed. They noted that Justice Amy Coney Barrett sounded especially skeptical about Mississippi’s processes in ensuring the ballots had been legitimately cast on or before Election Day. . . . The NYT was right that Barrett was the key vote in this decision. They just got the direction incorrect. Barrett authored the decision overruling the Fifth Circuit, allowing ballots to be collected and counted after Election Day, in a 5-4 ruling in which Chief Justice John Roberts concurred.”

Posted at 1:29 pm by Glenn Reynolds

PRIORITIES:

Posted at 1:28 pm by Stephen Green