July 30, 2026

DISPATCHES FROM THE BLUE ZONE: Agitators in Madison Use Boards With Nails to Defend Their BLM Encampment, and the City Is Helping.

Well, now Madison, Wisconsin, has CRAZ: the Corey Ruiz Autonomous Zone. In case you missed it, Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and other communists are trying to make Ruiz the next George Floyd. Ruiz was shot and killed by Madison police after he pulled a knife and stabbed an officer while being apprehended. As we’ve reported, activists have set up bicycle barricades around the intersection of Williamson Street (Willy Street) and South Baldwin Street, where Ruiz, a career criminal with a long rap sheet, was shot.

Laura Schulte, a reporter with The Journal Sentinel, has been on the scene and notes that agitators have now placed boards with nails in them around the intersection where a memorial site has been set up. Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong set down a candle herself the night of Ruiz’s shooting, declaring it an “execution.”

Worse yet, Schulte reports that the city itself, which is as woke as it gets, has lent its assistance in setting up barriers.

If that isn’t insurrection, what is it?

Posted at 4:53 pm by Stephen Green

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Joyce Carol Oates Defends The Odyssey and Slams Translator for Scathing Review: ‘Speaks in the Crude Language of MAGA Folks.’

Author Joyce Carol Oates came to the defense of Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” after translator Emily Wilson wrote a viral review attacking the film.

“Rather than disagreeing with interpretations of Homer in a collegial manner, this person, who has benefited enormously from Nolan’s film, speaks in the crude language of MAGA folks attacking someone with ideas that differ from hers,” Carol wrote on X. “One would expect a translator, of all people, beholden to a text, in service to a text, to be just a wee bit more thoughtful & respectful of others who are acting in good faith just as (she would claim) she is.”

Advantage Frank J. Fleming!

I finally saw The Odyssey last night; brilliant cinematography and production design, and the nearly three hour film moves at a surprisingly brisk pace to pack all its locales and subplots in. The colorblind casting, and the small role by Elliot (nee Ellen) Page were only distracting because of how obsessed Twitter had been over them, and the resulting backlash to the backlash likely drove ticket sales, just as Nolan knew it would.

The dialogue is awfully clunky at times, but there have been previous epic films where the dialogue was off-putting, but not enough to detract from the knockout visuals. For two examples, the deliberately minimalist dialogue in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 A Space Something or Other, and George Lucas’ original Star Wars from 1977, which had loads of what even Alec Guinness called “dialogue [that] was pretty ropey,” which didn’t stop it from becoming an epoch-defining movie. (As Joseph Kahn wrote on Monday in a Hollywood Reporter article memorably headlined, “Bring Back the Hollywood Asshole!”, the movie executive’s job “is to make money. Real money. Marvel money. The kind of money Hollywood made when it threw muscular white guys named Chris into rubber suits and raked in billions in tickets, billions in toys, billions in theme parks. So much money the studio could dig another five levels down for more parking spaces.” 1977-era Star Wars money.)

In contrast, The Odyssey seems more like a throwback to the earnest biblical epics that Hollywood endlessly churned out in the 1950s through the mid-1960s. Nolan himself said its style was inspired by Martin Scorsese’s controversial 1988 film The Last Temptation of Christ, which was made on a low budget for a biblical-era film, and where everyone (except for David Bowie’s Pontius Pilate) speaks in colloquial American accents, including Harvey Keitel’s “dees and does” Brooklyn-accented Judas.) “As for the other film Nolan privately screened for his cast and crew, Tom Holland recently revealed that he called Sony chief Tom Rothman to arrange a 70mm screening of ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ for the cast of ‘The Odyssey’ during pre-production,” World of Reel reported a couple of weeks ago. Nolan could have definitely benefited from Robert Bolt‘s crisp screenwriting.

Posted at 4:39 pm by Ed Driscoll

UNIVERSITIES MUST POLICE FOREIGN INFLUENCE. Maybe, but you know what would be even more effective? Having a diversity of views on the faculty and among students. If everyone has to actually defend their arguments and has the change to be exposed to counterarguments, the policing happens automatically. Wild, I know.

Posted at 4:38 pm by Robert Shibley

CHECKS OUT:

Posted at 4:36 pm by Stephen Green

CAN WE BUILD A WALL AROUND CONGRESS?

Posted at 4:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

TONY WOODLIEF: ‘Restorative Justice’ Brings Violent Schools.

The Education Department will no longer count racial disparities in K-12 school suspension rates as proof of discrimination, it announced on July 23. This is a welcome change, but it won’t automatically restore order in the thousands of schools pressured by the Obama and Biden administrations into adopting “alternative discipline” methods whose chief objective is race equity. Many such programs have come at the cost of student safety and education.

These methods go by many names, like “restorative practices,” “social-emotional learning” and, most telling, “restorative justice.” In lieu of suspensions, administrators invite offenders to reflect in a soothing place on the feelings and trauma that led them, say, to hit another student or disobey a teacher. Students may also be invited into a “restorative circle” with school staff and other students, where they can share their feelings, and others in the circle can talk with them about how peace in the community might be restored.

Reality often falls short of this vision. Concerns about restorative justice emerged soon after the Obama administration began pushing it. Public schools in Philadelphia that implemented it experienced “skyrocketing truancy, serious misbehavior, and declining achievement,” Manhattan Institute researchers observed in 2017. Other cities experienced similar results.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 2:49 pm by Stephen Green

CATCHING UP WITH 1998: CENTCOM Just Noticing Troop Cell Phones Are a Problem. “This full-blown drooling idiot soldier has a video of the entire inside of his command hut, makes sure he gets shots of all the desks and monitors as he’s swinging on his protective gear at a run. With sirens blaring, he throws open the door to charge outside into the darkness and proceeds to show anyone watching how to get to the bunker and how it, too, is protected from incoming. And this soldier, of the tiny, TINY brain, thought this was a good thing to load to social media for the world to see.”

Posted at 2:39 pm by Glenn Reynolds

IT USED TO BE MY FAVORITE, MUST-READ MAGAZINE…:

…but that was 20 years ago or longer.

Posted at 2:34 pm by Stephen Green

DECLINE IS A CHOICE: California’s Impending Energy Disaster Nobody Talks About. “When and if the world’s fourth-largest economy implodes, you’ll be able to say, ‘I told you so,’ thanks to a chilling report today from two experts in oil refining and energy production.”

Posted at 2:18 pm by Stephen Green

FLASHBACK:

Posted at 2:02 pm by Stephen Green

THE NEW SPACE RACE: SpaceX Gets $1.6 Billion US Space Force Order for 18 Falcon 9 Launches.

The 18 missions were assigned to SpaceX ‌across two task orders under ‌the U.S. Space Force’s flagship launch procurement program, in which SpaceX, United Launch Alliance, Blue ⁠Origin and ⁠other U.S. launch firms inducted into the program jockey for lucrative mission ​assignments.

SpaceX has bagged at least $7 billion worth of Pentagon contracts this year as the Trump administration has laid groundwork for its Golden Dome missile defense shield, a roughly $185 billion multi-year endeavor heavily featuring Elon ​Musk’s launch and satellite company.

SpaceX in May won $6.5 billion worth of satellite contracts from the ⁠U.S. ⁠Space Force. That included $4.16 billion ⁠for a ​network of airborne moving target indicator satellites and $2.29 billion three days later for communications satellites ​that can pass data between ⁠missile warning and tracking sensors to interceptors in near real time.

The SpaceX award announced on Wednesday was part of an “unprecedented two-month acquisition timeline,” Space Force acquisition official Eric Zarybnisky said in a news release. For years, the service has sought to ramp up the pace with which ⁠it buys spacecraft and rocket launches from the private sector.

For perspective, that’s a little under $90 million per launch — which sits at the low end for military launches, and well below typical ULA or Blue Origin prices.

And 18 launches is only six or seven weeks worth of Falcon 9 launches at the current cadence.

Incredible.

Posted at 1:47 pm by Stephen Green

OCEANIA HAS ALWAYS BEEN IN FAVOR OF LOCKDOWNS:

In case you don’t, here’s how fast the narrative flipped: Kern County doctors use disputed data to suggest Stay Home orders be lifted.

But at the same time, some doctors say the death rate of COVID-19 isn’t nearly as high as officials are leading the public to believe, and are now calling for the stay home orders to end, and the economy to be reopened.

“There are widespread cases, and a small amount of death,” said Dr. Dan Erickson of Accelerated Urgent Care in Kern County. “It’s similar to the flu, as a matter of fact.”

Dr. Erickson, along with colleague Dr. Artin Massihi, held a news conference earlier this week that is now going viral. They even take shots at Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

“We’re actually seeing the patients,” said Dr. Massihi. “Dr. Fauci hasn’t seen a patient in 20 years.”

YouTube has since removed the video, saying in a statement that they “quickly remove flagged content that violate our community guidelines, including content that explicitly disputes the efficacy of local healthy authority recommended guidance on social distancing that may lead others to act against that guidance.”

—L.A.’s ABC7, April 29th, 2020.

Fast-forward to the beginning of June 2020: The Apex of the Pivot.


UPDATE: Suddenly, Public Health Officials Say Social Justice Matters More Than Social Distance. For months, health experts told Americans to stay home. Now, many are encouraging the public to join mass protests.

—Politico, June 4th, 2020.

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

SCENES FROM THE COUNTER-RECONQUISTA:

Portugal is doing much better, but it also isn’t governed by socialists.

Posted at 1:32 pm by Stephen Green