July 7, 2026

FORGET IT, MARK — SHE’S ROLLING:

Posted at 5:06 pm by Stephen Green

OOF:

Posted at 4:35 pm by Stephen Green

MAYBE THE YOUTH VOTE NEEDS TO, YOU KNOW, GET OUT AND VOTE:

Posted at 4:04 pm by Stephen Green

DISPATCHES FROM THE BLUE ZONES: Drugged Transients Overrun Austin Library. “She brings up how the Austin City Council under Mayor Adler repealed the ‘camping’ ordinance, in effect telling drug addicted transients to come party in Austin. And come they did.”

Posted at 3:49 pm by Stephen Green

FACTS ARE RACIST OR SOMETHING:

Posted at 3:34 pm by Stephen Green

THIS KEEPS HAPPENING:

Posted at 3:02 pm by Stephen Green

SPACE: ‘Once-in-a-millennium’ asteroid flyby will be visible to much of the world in 2029.

Three years before the skyscraper-size asteroid Apophis makes its very close (but safe) flyby of Earth, scientists have already begun charting exactly when and where billions of people can watch it sweep across the sky.

Speaking at an “Apophis T-3 Years” workshop held earlier this month at the University of Padua in Italy, retired cartographer Michael Zeiler and astronomer Rick Fienberg shared detailed visibility maps charting the asteroid’s passage across Earth’s skies.

According to their calculations, roughly 90% of the world’s population — about 7.6 billion people — lives in regions where Apophis could, in principle, be seen with the naked eye on April 13, 2029. The actual viewing success will depend more on earthly considerations, however, including cloud cover and the extent of light pollution.

Known formally as 99942 Apophis, the space rock will not resemble a blazing meteor tearing through the sky. Instead, scientists say it will appear as a point-like speck of light gliding steadily across, which, at its closest approach, will appear to move by about the apparent width of the full moon every minute.

Maybe we should try taking a once-in-a-millennium opportunity to practice diverting a large asteroid.

Posted at 2:47 pm by Stephen Green

TO BOLDLY GO WHERE GIULIANI WENT 30 YEARS AGO: Viral Video Shows Woman Learning the Hard Way That BART’s New Fare Gates Are a Real Pain in the Butt.

No, if and or butts: you have to pay the fare, according to San Francisco authorities who are taking a rare logical step in trying to slow the radical decline that has befallen the City by the Bay. It all went down last Wednesday, according to the local outlet SFist:

A woman who was clearly attempting to evade paying a fare became stuck under a BART entry gate at a San Francisco station last week, and a BART agent took some video of the situation that has since gone viral.

“This is terrible,” says the woman filming what is now a viral video clip, who it seems is a BART employee.

“We can’t even open it without harming you [now],” she adds.

Another agent can be heard telling the woman, “You could have just asked us,” suggesting they might have taken pity on her and let her through if she didn’t have money for the fare.

What a bum trip.

* * * * * * * * *

Who would have thunk?

Well, actually, the folks who came up with the “Broken Windows” theory, which asserts that overlooking small crimes inevitably leads to lawlessness. The concept was used successfully to tackle crime in New York City in the 1990s under then-Police Commissioner William Bratton, who served under former Mayor Rudy Giuliani, but California lawmakers have found it to be too big a pain in the butt to apply in the Golden State.

Although this lady’s plans may have gotten rear-ended, she also just proved that San Francisco may just be making sense for once.

Why did it take California leftists three decades to stumble onto the idea that stopping fare jumpers will lower the crime rates on your subways?

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

SPOILER: IT DID NOT AGE WELL.

Plus this from Stephen L. Miller: “If journalists actually cared about their reputations and credibility, Jodie Kantor would be fired and out of a job this morning.”

Another spoiler: The only thing they care about is their diminishing ability to establish and maintain lefty narratives.

Posted at 2:32 pm by Stephen Green

DISPATCHES FROM M-SNOW:

Morning Joe, huh?

“Start your tape right now,” [MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough] continued, “because I’m about to tell you the truth. And eff you if you can’t handle the truth. This version of Biden, intellectually, analytically, is the best Biden ever. Not a close second, and I’ve known him for years. The Brzezinskis have known him for 50 years. If it weren’t the truth, I wouldn’t say it.”

—Scarborough Goes Full Nutcase Defending Biden’s Mental Acuity, Matt Margolis, PJ Media.com, March 6th, 2024.

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

ANALYSIS: TRUE.

Posted at 1:59 pm by Stephen Green

THE LEFT’S NAZI PROBLEM IS MUCH BIGGER THAN PLATNER: The New Brownshirts? “Antisemitic rhetoric on the far left increasingly echoes the propaganda of Nazi Germany.”

Posted at 1:45 pm by Stephen Green

OLD AND BUSTED: The Bears Are Who We Thought They Were!

The New Hotness? The Nazi Tattoo Guy Is Exactly Who You Thought He Was.

The term “gaslighting” gets thrown around way too frequently in our political culture; sometimes it’s effectively used as a synonym for lying.  But this . . . this felt like an unprecedented, large-scale gaslighting effort. A lot of the mainstream media coverage of Platner felt like a weird, coordinated effort to convince the people of Maine that the scuzziest guy the Democratic Party could find was as solid and reliable as the Brawny Paper Towel Man.

Jon Favreau, one of the Pod Save America hosts, told his followers at the end of April, “Graham Platner isn’t just our best and only chance to beat Susan Collins, he’s a good, decent man who’s struggled and grown and is always trying to do better. I hope everyone with reservations takes a little time to get to know the real-life version of him, not what the algorithm throws in our faces.” I refer you to My Cousin Vinny.

On Monday night, Favreau was singing a dramatically different tune. “Platner needs to drop out ASAP — these are awful, credible allegations. Said on the pod after the (also credible) June NYT story that his biggest problem going forward would be credibility. It’s now abundantly clear that he just hasn’t been honest about his past and can’t be trusted as a candidate for office.”

Why did people trust Platner, Favreau? Because you told them he was a good and decent man!

This morning, New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg concedes she was completely fooled by the hype around Platner:

Last October, when stories about Platner’s tattoo and Reddit posts first broke, I went to Maine to write about him. I tried to convey what I saw: a campaign that was electrifying angry Maine voters. But I deeply regret that, impressed by Platner’s political charisma, I wrote that he was “nothing like the edgelord caricature I encountered online.” If anything, he seems to be significantly worse.

I do not say this lightly: If Platner fooled you, maybe you should find something to do with your life besides writing columns about politics. Because the U.S. political landscape is full of creeps, cretins, con artists, crooks, and cads of every kind, and it always will be. If the media has any useful role to play in our system, it is to look beyond the spin and the campaign-crafted image and to tell the world who these candidates really are, warts and all, so the electorate can make an informed choice.

F. A. Hayek figured this out decades ago, and Lord Acton long before him. Power does not just attract “good” people. Lots of bad people want to be elected to high office, because they want all the things that come with power.

To believe Platner, you have to believe that he accidentally got a Nazi tattoo, and didn’t notice for 18 years, and his political director made up a story about him warning her of a controversial tattoo, and no one he sexted on Kik was underage, and his exes are making up the worst possible accusations about him. You must believe that Platner, who’s already been caught in several lies about his past, is telling the truth, and that a whole bunch of people who knew him well for many years are telling vicious lies about him, at great risk to their reputations.

Mitchell and Webb, the British comedy team who wrote and starred in the viral “Are we the baddies?!” sketch, are wearing Totenkopfs on their hats. Including in the video’s title card:

Meanwhile, at America’s Newspaper of Record:

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

BROWNWASHING:

Posted at 1:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds