August 1, 2026

DISPATCHES FROM THE HARRIS ADMINISTRATION:

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

TRIGGERNOMETRY INTERVIEWS THE CRITICAL DRINKER: “I define [Christopher Nolan’s] Odyssey as a hero’s journey with no hero.”

At about 7:30 into the interview, co-host Francis Foster says, “I’m just going to pick a movie year at random something like 1996 would [The Odyssey] even have been talked about as much would it have been hyped as much, would everybody be as energized or would it just simply be seen as just another big budget Hollywood movie which is all right but let’s be honest nothing special. Maxim would have given it three out of five stars.”

Funny you said 1996, because yesterday, Clifton Duncan tweeted this collage of absolutely terrific movies from the previous year:

It wasn’t the studio system of the 1940s, but I miss the reliability of assembly-line Hollywood of the 1980s and ‘90s. If only there was a way to recreate either system.

Posted at 4:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

TO BE FAIR, THE POPE IS A MAN AND HE’S NO BETTER:

Also, Cape Coast Castle is where slaves were sold. Shouldn’t Ghana be paying reparations for that?

Posted at 4:27 pm by Glenn Reynolds

MARK JUDGE: Emily Wilson’s Odyssey Review and the Snowflake Entertainment Press.

Christopher Nolan‘s new film The Odyssey is a box-office hit. But University of Pennsylvania classics scholar Emily Wilson, who published her own translation of Homer’s epic in 2017, says Nolan’s script is poorly written and lacking in emotional depth and character development. And, she adds, there are no sex scenes — and all the food looks horrible.

“We need to have a protagonist with detailed, believable motivation,” Wilson says. “[But] these desires seem stripped from Odysseus. He doesn’t seem to want food. He doesn’t seem to want sex. What does he want?”

“He’s clever … and smart and therefore a fascinating character,” Wilson says. But, she adds, “the movie gives us a version of Matt Damon as Odysseus, who is not required to be smart, instead he’s just constantly troubled by anxiety about his role in the Trojan Horse and the Trojan War. … That’s a shame.”

Nolan wrote the script for The Odyssey himself, which Wilson feels may have been a mistake: “I do think that it would have been better if Nolan had hired a scriptwriter, because that would have solved a lot of the issues.”

It’s a good film and well worth seeing on the biggest screen near you – but it could have been so much more.

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

WHAT COULD GO WRONG? Weed Is the New Booze.

Stoners these days aren’t only smoking joints in cars like in “Dazed and Confused,” though that habit certainly hasn’t disappeared. Now, it’s increasingly popular to enjoy cannabis-infused beverages, which include seltzers, teas, lemonades and mocktails with varying blends of THC and CBD depending on the desired vibe (social, relaxation, sleep, focus). Cannabis gummies are all the rage for young people, offered in fun colors and flavors reminiscent of Sour Patch Kids. Gwyneth Paltrow, Seth Rogen, Mike Tyson and other celebrities have invested in products or launched their own. Some fitness gurus promote microdosing to enhance the workout experience.

But advocates glide past the health risks. Long-term cannabis consumption is linked to reduced activation in brain regions responsible for attention, decision-making and memory. For those who start young, chronic use leads to an average permanent IQ loss of 5.5 points—and you don’t get them back when you quit. One meme criticizes pot’s popularity by suggesting that the slow-paced Middle Ages was defined by “stoner societies”—cannabis was common in some medieval European and Middle Eastern cultures. By contrast, the memesters claim, bustling Renaissance era cities were “alcoholic societies.”

Of course, binge-drinking also harms productivity. The fear is that the weed frenzy will produce a generation of bleary-eyed slackers who aren’t capable of doing more than a medieval peasant. The cannabis being consumed today is much stronger than in the past. In the 1960s through ’80s, THC content was less than 2%. Now, the cannabis industry has developed strains of marijuana with THC concentrations as high as 28%.

Flashback: Second Thoughts on Pot: “‘Yeah, they all smoke.’ ‘Well . . . other things too, right?’ ‘Sometimes. But they all smoke.’”

Posted at 2:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

FAUCI AND THE GREAT COVID COVER-UP:

But nauseating narcissism and gobsmacking greed (and using private email addresses for government business) do not in themselves cause or cover up pandemics. The far greater sin was deliberately misleading the world about the origin of Covid-19. And there in black and white on 26 January 2020 in his diary is Fauci’s line about the Wuhan seafood market, which many claimed was the origin of Covid: ‘Now we know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier.’

Yet, a week later, he convened a group of 12 scientists, most of whom thought it possible, perhaps even probable, that the virus had been engineered in a laboratory, to discuss their concerns. He then tasked four of the fairly junior ones in the meeting (a fifth author joined later), some of whom depended on grants from his agency, to write a paper, ‘The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2’. This paper outright dismissed the possibility of a lab leak as the origin of Covid. He and Jeremy Farrar, the then director of the Wellcome Trust, edited and promoted the publication of that paper. Fauci then disguised his own role in doing so, and spoke about it from the podium of the White House as if he had nothing to do with it.

Before and after they wrote the paper its authors all thought a lab leak was possible, perhaps even likely, as their private messages have repeatedly confirmed.

As James Miegs wrote at the Wall Street Journal in “A Covid Conspiracy in Plain Sight,” “This is not the way a healthy democracy responds to a disaster. After the Space Shuttle Challenger blew up in 1986, President Reagan appointed a blue-ribbon commission to investigate. NASA opened its books and answered every question. When a mysterious virus began killing thousands of Americans a week, Dr. Fauci and other public-health leaders did the opposite. They gaslit reporters, stonewalled congressional inquiries and evaded Freedom of Information Act requests. In two recently released emails, another Dr. Fauci ally urged the Wuhan lab’s Dr. Shi not to share information with a respected American virus researcher. Talk about a coverup.”

Posted at 2:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

Related:

Posted at 1:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

CHRISTOPHER NOLAN’S CLIFF NOTES: Christopher Nolan on the Flaws of Film Criticism and the Shared Philosophy of Oppenheimer and The Odyssey.

In discussing the adaptation and perspective of historical distance, Nolan says, “The main point is this 400-year-or-so gap between the events that Homer is describing and when Homer’s story was written down or first received by audiences. That’s a pretty interesting gap. For me, I don’t think I’m completely at odds with the way Homer is telling the story when you look at it from a historical perspective. The reason is—and what I became interested in as I adapted it—is that Homer is writing about an era hundreds of years earlier that his audience viewed as being more advanced than theirs. So, while they were a civilization on the rise, they were trying to get back to where they had been 400 years before.”

“That idea of a cycle—the idea of, as you say, a civilization at dusk—I think is there in the past, but it’s subtle. When you look at the history, and you see that when they would unearth these walls of old palaces that had crumbled, they called them ‘Cyclopean walls’ because they thought only a giant could have built such grand walls. They had this idea of the greatness of this past civilization. I became interested in that collapse—what they call the ‘catastrophe,’ the Bronze Age collapse—and what happens between the events of the Trojan War and Homer. From a modern perspective, that is something that is frightening, interesting, and intriguing. For me, it partly comes out of having worked on Oppenheimer before this, which is very much a film about the end of the world and the collapse of civilization. I definitely carried that sensibility into this adaptation of The Odyssey.”

Read the whole thing.

Earlier: The concluding epic in Christopher Nolan’s Death Drive trilogy.

Posted at 1:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

WHEN REALITY BITES ANTHONY FAUCI: He took the Fifth 119 times in response to questions a Senate panel about statements and actions he took from 2014 to January 2025, a period covered by the presidential pardon Anthony Fauci got from Joe Biden. But Fauci’s evasions, misrepresentations and outright lies are catching up with him, as I report on PJ Media, and that presidential pardon won’t help him if and when Florida’s Attorney General hauls Fauci into state court.

Posted at 12:48 pm by Mark Tapscott

HERE’S THE REAL REASON DEMS LOVE OBAMACARE SUBSIDIES: It’s called campaign cash and its worth hundreds of millions of dollars in contributions to Democrats in Congress by the biggest health insurance companies.

As I explain today on Substack, those subsidies, by the way, generated $27 billion in federal tax dollars going to those same companies who in turn wrote beacoup checks to their Democratic friends. Let’s see now, does such an arrangement qualify as a conflict-of-interest, a con game, or just pure political corruption?

You haven’t heard a word about this from the Mainstream Media, but, boy, are we all going to hear from now till Election day in November about how terrible are President Donald Trump and (all but four) Senate Republicans because they allowed the temporary Obamacare insurance subsidies to expire as scheduled on the last day of December 2025.

Posted at 12:36 pm by Mark Tapscott

BRENDAN O’NEILL: We should call the Ceuta border breach an invasion.

Spain was invaded yesterday. There is no other way to put it. Close to 50,000 foreigners, mostly men, swarmed into Spanish territory and laughed and jeered as they went. Every generation before ours would have called that an invasion, and we should too. The era of euphemism is over. The left’s house of lies has fallen. We can all now see with our own eyes that our nations are being overwhelmed by cocky, often hostile men from afar.

It isn’t only Spain’s sovereign integrity that lies in tatters following the storming of Ceuta – so does the tyranny of euphemism we’ve all been forced to labor under these past few years

The footage from Ceuta is extraordinary – throngs of foreigners, mostly men from Morocco, gatecrashed an enclave of the Spanish kingdom. They scaled fences, kicked down gates, colonized the beach. Some punched the air with glee, clearly delighted with their successful storming of Spanish territory. I dare the left to call this “asylum seeking.”

It isn’t only Spain’s sovereign integrity that lies in tatters following the storming of Ceuta – so does the tyranny of euphemism we’ve all been forced to labor under these past few years. Europe’s rulers have more keenly policed our language than the borders. They savaged every right-winger who used words like “invasion” or “colonization” to describe illegal immigration. Such patrician censure is surely untenable in the wake of Ceuta.

Elon Musk sounded remarkably prescient in his recent interview with a robotic Zanny Minton Beddoes of the Economist:

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

GLOBALIZE THE RECONQUISTA!

Posted at 12:05 pm by Glenn Reynolds