May 11, 2026

PASSING TUCKER OFF AS A CON TO OWN THE CONS:

I miss Norm.

Posted at 3:48 pm by Stephen Green

HOW THE SBC GOT PLAYED: That’s “SBC” as in the Southern Baptist Convention, America’s largest Protestant denomination. You may recall events from 2019 during which the SBC was convulsed and damaged by multiple allegations of sexual abuse of women.

The story you heard on the MSM and elsewhere was the SBC was guilty, tried to coverup its guilt and ultimately only conceded when so many victims  came forward there was no other choice. Now, seven years and multiple revelations of what actually happened as opposed to incessant claims of reform advocates, the whole truth is out.

What the whole truth is ain’t pretty, for the Left or the powers-that-be of the SBC. What it is is a detailed description of the Left’s five-phase strategy for taking over and emasculating a Christian denomination. The SBC wasn’t the first to endure this strategy applied, so you’d think they would have been better prepared. They weren’t. Check out “How the SBC Got Played.”

Posted at 2:47 pm by Mark Tapscott

KEIR STARMER: I want 10 years in No 10 and will fight my challengers.

Keir Starmer has said he wants a decade in Downing Street and will fight anyone who challenges him for the Labour leadership.

The prime minister described his government as a “10-year project of renewal”. Asked whether he would definitely lead his party into the next general election and serve a full second term, he said: “Yes, I will.”

Unfortunately for Britain, it’s these ten years that he has in mind: Starmer wants to revolutionise Labour by taking Britain back to the 1970s.

Ironically for a man attempting to find a new vision for the future, Sir Keir’s approach looks set to haul the nation back 50 years.

We’ve been here before when it comes to Europe. The UK formally joined the European Communities in 1973, after being rebuffed twice by Charles de Gaulle, the French president. A referendum was then held in 1975 to decide if Britain should continue to be a member, with the “Yes” campaign emerging victorious.

Sir Keir insisted that he wanted to take a “big leap forward” at this summer’s UK-EU summit, bringing Britain closer to the bloc “on trade, the economy, defence and security”.

Importantly, the Prime Minister did not rule out joining the single market or customs union, which Labour previously considered red lines.

He said he would “turn our back on the arguments of the past, not open old grievances, but look forward together to how we make this country stronger and fairer”.

He is not the only one who thinks this way.

Andrew Bailey has signalled his support for the idea of closer ties with the Continent, insisting last week: “We’re an open economy, we do need allies. I think seeking to rebuild trade relations with Europe is a sensible thing to do.”

Rachel Reeves has suggested she would be happy to copy and paste EU rules into UK law, effectively ceding sovereignty to Brussels.

Yet, despite this recent enthusiasm, there is no guarantee it would work in spurring growth. Entwining Britain’s economic fortunes with the Continent 50 years ago did not trigger an immediate economic boom.

What actually happened was that the UK fell into recession shortly after, during the 1973 oil crisis when Arab oil producers imposed an embargo on countries led by the United States over their support for Israel during the Yom Kippur War.

Or as Labour — and much of the American left — looks at the 1970s, “the good old days.”

Earlier: Scenes From The Labour Party Wipe Out.

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

I HAVE A LIST OF CANDIDATES:

Posted at 2:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

THE NEW SPACE RACE REALLY IS SPACEX VS THE WORLD:

Posted at 2:29 pm by Stephen Green

GEORGE MF WASHINGTON: Chasing Immortality in Hollywood.

The indie financier graveyards are full to the brim with the corpses of wealthy entrepreneurs, Texas oilmen and Bay Area tech bros mostly, who thought they could find immortality by beating the house in the movie business.

The movie business has always attracted the world’s biggest dreamers, and certainly no one ever comes to Los Angeles hoping to “make it average”… we come here to make it Big. But if we are going to spend our lives chasing immortality to the exclusion of all else, the question of whether or not the movie business can actually deliver that immortality becomes an important one.

Certainly Tom Cruise has achieved immortality, right? And what about Michael Jackson, who has a blockbuster movie about his life in theaters right now… surely MJ achieved immortality?

Well, maybe.

Bing Crosby was once a massive crossover star in both the movies and in popular music, just as Michael Jackson was… so much so that he was even caricatured in a 1950 Bugs Bunny cartoon aimed at kids. But ask someone under the age of 25 who Bing Crosby was and the best case scenario is that they maybe kinda mighta sorta recognize his name from the Christmas songs they hear on the radio once a year. As with Bing Crosby, it’s entirely possible that there will come a time when “Tom Cruise” and “Michael Jackson” will be names future generations may have heard before, but which no longer carry much meaning for them.

And of course the Cruises and MJs of the world make up the 1% of the 1% of the 1% of the 1%… most of us here in Tinseltown are not Movie Stars or Pop Legends, and the list of executives, producers and agents whose names are remembered long after they march off to the great movie premiere in the sky is a very short one indeed.

The business of Hollywood is, as Jerry Maguire once said, “an up-at-dawn pride swallowing siege.” It is a 24/7/365 business in which agents and managers get calls (and texts) from their clients late into the night and then again first thing in the morning long before most Americans’ alarms have even thought about going off. It is a business where American studio movies shoot in Budapest and Bratislava, where night shoots go from dusk-till-dawn and production craftsmen don’t see their own beds for months at a time. And where studio executives stay up into the wee hours pouring through scripts in a futile effort to stay one step ahead of the development flood. And in all this mania and mayhem, there is often very little time, to say nothing of headspace, to chase the one kind of immortality that is actually real and measurable.

As Kyle Smith wrote in his 2019 article, “The Great Forgetting:”

These days, in a cultural sense, the only two pre-1960 singers who still linger in the memory are Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley. Bing Crosby, as Terry Teachout recently pointed out in Commentary, has more or less disappeared. A case could be made that, in addition to being one of his era’s most popular singers, Crosby is the single most popular movie star in Hollywood history. Certainly he is in the top ten. Today he survives in the memory of specialists and historians and suchlike boffins. To the broader populace, the words “Bing Crosby” no longer have meaning.

Looking back on his four decades as a movie critic, John Podhoretz points out that even if you go back only to the 1980s, hardly anything survives. People still talk about Back to the Future and Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Princess Bride (but not E.T., the biggest hit of the decade). Rain Man not only swept the Academy Awards in 1988 but was the biggest hit of that year, selling the equivalent of $380 million in tickets in today’s dollars. Bring up that movie in a classroom today and I suspect the reaction will be the same as if you brought up Mickey Rooney or Shirley Temple. Step forward, 1990s movies, and report to the vaporization facility. You’ve got a few years left, but only a few.

Ironically, modern-day Hollywood seems like one of the worst places to chase immortality. And in any case, Mark Manson wrote in his 2016 book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, “when our immortality projects fail, when the meaning is lost, when the prospect of our conceptual self outliving our physical self no longer seems possible or likely, death terror—that horrible, depressing anxiety—creeps back into our mind. Trauma can cause this, as can shame and social ridicule. As can, as [Ernest Becker, the author of The Denial of Death] points out, mental illness. If you haven’t figured it out yet, our immortality projects are our values. They are the barometers of meaning and worth in our life. And when our values fail, so do we, psychologically speaking. What Becker is saying, in essence, is that we’re all driven by fear to give way too many f*cks about something, because giving a f*ck about something is the only thing that distracts us from the reality and inevitability of our own death. And to truly not give a single f*ck is to achieve a quasi-spiritual state of embracing the impermanence of one’s own existence. In that state, one is far less likely to get caught up in various forms of entitlement.”

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

CHANGE INCENTIVES, CHANGE BEHAVIOR:

Posted at 1:28 pm by Stephen Green

ONE OF THE WAYS YOU CAN TELL THAT LEFTISM IS A RELIGION IS ITS RELIANCE ON SHUNNING APOSTATES:

As Glenn noted in the very early days of Instapundit, “As the old saying has it, the left looks for heretics and the right looks for converts, and both find what they’re looking for. The effect is no doubt subliminal, but people who treat you like crap are, over time, less persuasive than people who don’t. If people on the Left are so unhappy about how many former allies are changing their views, perhaps they should examine how those allies are treated.”

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

THE EVIDENCE IS PRETTY SOLID IN FAVOR: Is testosterone therapy safe and effective? What we know. I love this:

Testosterone’s reputation has had its ups and downs since the hormone was first synthesized in the 1930s. After an initial golden period, in which it was described as “one of the most potent drugs recently introduced to medicine,” the therapy fell out of favour for fear that it could cause cancer. This idea originated from the work of urologist Charles Huggins who, in 1941, found that prostate cancer depends on testosterone and that lowering the hormone levels caused tumours to shrink. It was a groundbreaking discovery for which he was awarded a share in the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1966.

Morgentaler says that when he was training as a urologist in the 1980s, there was a widespread belief, based on Huggins’s findings, that testosterone therapy could promote prostate cancer. Despite the presumed risks, he says he still thought that the hormone could help some of his patients who had low testosterone and sexual problems. So, he started treating them while monitoring them closely.

They didn’t get cancer, Morgentaler says, and they benefited from the treatment greatly. Some of his clinical findings — along with the revelation that Huggins’s most dire warnings about the hormone causing cancer were based on observations of a single person — helped to clear the way for renewed interest in testosterone therapy.

Sample size: One. So much received medical wisdom comes from this sort of thing.

Posted at 1:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

TECH REVOLUTION?

Posted at 12:45 pm by Glenn Reynolds

CHANGE: Trump budget targets ‘valley of death’ with new military contractor accountability model.

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth told the House Armed Services Committee that funding alone will not solve the problem – the procurement system itself must change.

“The historic, generational, and transformational changes we implement will move us from the current prime contractor-dominated system defined by limited competition, vendor lock, cost-plus contracts, stressed budgets and frustrating protests – to a future powered by a dynamic vendor space that accelerates production,” Hegseth said.

At the center of that shift is a new multi-year procurement model – contracts lasting up to seven years for critical munitions – designed to give manufacturers the certainty needed to build new facilities rather than add shifts to existing ones. Under the model, contractors fund their own capital expenditures up front and face financial penalties if they fail to meet agreed-upon production ramp rates.

Jules “Jay” Hurst III, performing the duties of Under Secretary of War Comptroller, said the previous approach, in which the government financed capacity expansion, had produced marginal results.

“We’re making them put skin in the game,” Hurst said at an April 21 Pentagon budget briefing. “We’re giving them a multi-year order, and we expect them to meet the ramp rates that they agree to, and if they don’t, there’ll be penalties for them.”

Accountability in procurement would be a helluva legacy.

Posted at 12:42 pm by Stephen Green

THOMAS HAZLETT: Ted Turner, Entrepreneur of His Age.

In 1970, cable TV service was essentially outlawed in 90 percent of American households. The powerful VHF stations, dominated by the NBC-CBS-ABC triopoly, ruled the world. Weak UHF stations were virtually worthless, given their stunted reception under FCC rules, though cable operators wanted to retransmit their signals to homes in crystal clarity.

Turner’s simple vision was to think of a world with such stupid rules gone. Then a nothingburger outlet in Charlotte could be delivered via cable, ending its “UHF discount.” Then a losing proposition like WTBS could bounce its product to 30,000 communities via satellite, produce its own popular programs, and compete head-to-head—against the choice set of My Mother the Car, Hello Larry, or SuperTrain—in households everywhere.

Turner picked just the right time. What the TV insiders (and Malcolm Gladwell) decried as a sop to Turner was officially labeled the “deregulation of cable TV” at the Carter-era FCC. As The New York Times softly described them, these 1980 rulings “reversed 15 years of emphasis placed by the commission on protecting broadcast stations from significant inroads by the cable companies. They opened the possibility that broadcasters and cable TV outlets would be able to compete more equally for viewers and advertisers.”

Gladwell finished his exposé by condemning Ted Turner as a business simpleton. “Turner has played embattled entrepreneur, television savior, right-wing point man, and—for his own whims—communications peacemaker. What he really wants to do is make a lot of money.”

Yes. That’s the beauty of the system.

In his sweeping 1980 book The Third Wave, Alvin Toffler predicted the coming world of “The De-massified Media:”

All these different developments have one thing in common: they slice the mass television public into segments, and each slice not only increases our cultural diversity, it cuts deeply into the power of the networks that have until now so completely dominated our imagery. John O’Connor, the perceptive critic of The New York Times, sums it up simply. “One thing is certain,” he writes. “Commercial television will no longer be able to dictate either what is watched or when it is watched.”

What appears on the surface to be a set of unrelated events turns out to be a wave of closely interrelated changes sweeping across the media horizon from newspapers and radio at one end to magazines and television at the other. The mass media are under attack. New, de-massified media are proliferating, challenging—and sometimes even replacing—the mass media that were so dominant in all Second Wave societies.

The Third Wave thus begins a truly new era—the age of the de-massified media. A new info-sphere is emerging alongside the new techno-sphere. And this will have a far-reaching impact on the most important sphere of all, the one inside our skulls. For taken together, these changes revolutionize our images of the world and our ability to make sense of it.

Ted Turner, with all of his manic energy and his goofy and contradictory political views got there early and created the media world of the 1980s. And helped preserve the media world of the past, to boot:

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

MORE DETAILS: Scenes From The Labour Party Wipe Out.

Nigel Farage’s Reform went from two council seats to 1,453. Labour, by contrast, lost 1,446 seats. But the conservative also lost council seats, 563 of them, which now puts them behind the Liberal Democrats, something that hasn’t happened since, well, ever.

Indeed, as this Sky News video notes, this is the first time since they started keeping track in the 1970s that the combined Labour/Tory share of these seats fell below 50%, and is now down to 35%.

Well, Britain’s establishment parties haven’t done very well by Britons in recent decades.

Posted at 11:40 am by Stephen Green