January 1, 2026

OCEAN INFINITY RESUMES HUNT FOR MH370 IN REMOTE INDIAN OCEAN:

More than a decade after Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 vanished with 239 people aboard, a renewed search effort has officially begun in one of the world’s most remote maritime regions, raising hopes of finally solving aviation’s greatest mystery.

The Singapore-flagged multipurpose vessel Armada 86 05 departed Kwinana anchorage, Australia, on December 23 and has been sailing westward into the Indian Ocean at around 10.5 knots, according to ship tracking data from MarineTraffic. The 86-meter vessel is equipped with advanced sonar systems capable of operating at depths of several thousand meters, with the mission focusing on areas not fully covered during earlier search efforts.

No word yet if black holes will be examined as well for the missing aircraft: CNN’s Don Lemon Asks If a Black Hole Could’ve Swallowed the Missing Plane.

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

SHOT:

CHASER:

Posted at 2:17 pm by Glenn Reynolds

RIDE THE FRAUD-FILLED MÖBIUS LOOP!

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

GRADUALLY, THEN SUDDENLY: Maureen Callahan: The year Hollywood died. 2025 started with the LA fires… ended with the savage Reiner slayings… and finally exposed a shameless, sickening lie.

Say goodbye to Hollywood.

This was the year Los Angeles burned to the ground: Literally, economically, culturally, spiritually.

What was once one of our greatest exports — movies, movie stars, a glittering celebrity industrial complex reflective of American supremacy itself — is no more.

That’s a good thing. A great thing. Healthy, even.

We began this year with horror as wildfires tore through LA, burning for nearly the entire month of January.

The response, needless to say, lacked urgency.

Mayor Karen Bass, upon finally flying home from a presidential inauguration in Ghana, was speechless as a reporter peppered her with questions about where she had been, why she had ever left, and how it was that LA was so woefully underprepared.

‘Both sides botched it,’ she said vaguely, at the end of this month. LA will doubtless re-elect this abject failure.

Read the whole thing. As Christian Toto asks: Is Hollywood Finally Getting What It Voted For? Pro-Newsom, Anti-Trump town tripped over woke, DEI and progressive pols.

Consider a second, sobering expose tied to La La Land. Compact Magazine’s recent feature by Jacob Savage, dubbed “The Lost Generation,” explores how the Left’s DEI obsession prevented many talented straight white males from entering the entertainment industry.

In the fall of 2014, the Oscars nominated only white people for acting awards, and #OscarsSoWhite was born. The New York Times ran story after story. The Academy promised reform, as did the studios—and they delivered. In 2015, Matt was looking for a follow-up job as a staff writer or story editor. “I couldn’t crack anything,” he recalled. “It was like, almost immediate… There was a real disillusionment because I thought it was just kind of me for a while.”

It wasn’t. Hollywood was in the midst of a revolution. As #OscarsSoWhite bled into #MeToo, the mandates only intensified.

Turns out the discriminatory tales told by comedian Tyler Fischer, author James Patterson and others were the tip of the un-American iceberg.

And just like that, Peak TV came to a close. Coincidence? Either way, Hollywood progressives have gotten what they demanded time and again:

  • DEI policies
  • Democratic leaders
  • Soft-on-crime legislation
  • Open borders

Closer to L.A., Democratic leaders fiddled while the Palisades fires burned earlier this year. Mayor Karen Bass was literally in a foreign country when the blaze began.

In “Movies as Weapons of Spiritual Warfare,” published on Monday, “George MF Washington” wrote:

One of the reasons why American men, from Generation X in particular, keep coming back to movies like “Ghostbusters”, “Master and Commander”, “Gladiator”, “Braveheart” “The Great Escape”, “The Lord of the Rings”, and even “Die Hard” and “Predator”, is precisely because, as Men of the West, we are hard-wired to fantasize about how we will meet our own confrontations with “The Big Evil”, when and if those confrontations come. Modern American culture tends to look down upon this uniquely male instinct with ill-humor, if not outright derision. These kinds of male-coded sentiments are considered old fashioned at best, explicitly toxic at worst. Which is a shame, because the big studio movies we once made to cater to this male instinct for adventure, risk-taking and the instinctual defiance of Evil remain some of the greatest and most compulsively rewatchable films ever made.

To build on what “Washington” alluded to above, the worldview of woke Hollywood leftists prevents them from creating product that resonates with the public:

Which is why, the Critical Drinker noted early last month, we’re witnessing “The Beginning of the End:”

But then, we have been for some time, perhaps without realizing it:

(Classical reference in headline.)

Posted at 1:24 pm by Ed Driscoll

DEMOCRATIC PARTY OPERATIVE WITH BYLINE SUFFERS MASSIVE CASE OF AMNESIA:

[In the early 1960s, Jimmy Breslin of the New York Herald-Tribune] made a revolutionary discovery. He made the discovery that it was feasible for a columnist to leave the building, go outside and do reporting on his own, actual legwork. Breslin would go up to the city editor and ask what stories and assignments were coming up, choose one, go out, leave the building, cover the story as a reporter, and write about it in his column. If the story were big enough, his column would start on page one instead of inside.

— “The Birth of ‘The New Journalism’; Eyewitness Report by Tom Wolfe,” New York magazine, February 14th, 1972.

But you look at these tanned, blow-dried gym bunnies like Brian Williams, NBC’s next anchor—all they do is read off a teleprompter, and no one has a problem calling them journalists. In the end I really don’t care what I’m called, as long as it’s not blogger. As Roger Ailes told me early on, you don’t need a license to report. You need a license to do hair.

—Matt Drudge, Radar magazine, June 2003.

Many putative First Amendment voluptuaries defend their position against the most absurd hypotheticals. My favorite example (as some readers may recall) comes from the columnist Michael Kinsley. A “very distinguished New York Times writer” once told Kinsley that “if the Times ballet critic, heading home after assessing the day’s offering of plies and glissades, happens to witness a murder on her way to the Times Square subway, she has a First Amendment right and obligation to refuse to testify about what she saw.” Why? Because she’s a member of the priestly caste.

Other than the obvious problems – that the First Amendment is not a blanket protection to conceal crimes, that nowhere in case law or in the Constitution itself has such a right been established – there’s a sticky public policy problem. Who gets to be a journalist? That question is why federal shield laws are the camel’s nose under the tent of journalism licenses. If everybody can be a journalist simply by pecking away at a keyboard, then tens of millions of bloggers, newsletter writers and coupon-clipper weekly editors are journalists. If that’s the case, then such a sweeping right is unenforceable and dangerous. If, on the other hand, only some people get to be called “journalists,” then we’ve got the makings of a trade guild here.

There’s been some interesting economic research in recent years on the role of guilds (i.e., professional associations, including some unions, that work with the state to require licensing for people seeking similar occupations). Morris Kleiner, a University of Minnesota economist and visiting scholar at the Minneapolis Federal Reserve, recently summarized some of his findings in The Wall Street Journal. Apparently, even though guilds don’t lead to better or safer service, they’re on the rise. Why? Well, one reason is that guilds have been very successful at persuading the public they’re better for the consumer even though much of the time they’re really better only for the members of the guild themselves. In states where a license is required to become, say, a hairdresser, salaries are higher by some 10 to 20 percent. This is partly because the licensing – the fees, the extra training, etc. – becomes a barrier to entry to others seeking employment. In states where strict state licensing isn’t required, job growth is 20 percent higher.

The same dynamic would surely play out if elite journalists got their way. The resentment and vitriol aimed at bloggers and the “New Media” is palpable at journalism school symposiums and panel discussions. Is there any doubt that the key masters of any new state-sanctioned journalism guild would translate that animosity into higher wages for themselves and fewer opportunities for the untrained masses nipping at their heels?

This illuminates the fundamental problem with the “enlightened” media’s fashionable pose on the First Amendment: It’s anti-free speech for anyone without keys to the clubhouse. They want special rights for “real journalists.” Well, special rights for some mean weaker rights for others. The editors of The New York Times rightly demand untrammeled opportunities to criticize politicians, but they want complex rules and regulations for everyone else – including other politicians! They think the First Amendment offers blanket protection to strippers “expressing” themselves, but citizens eager to criticize a candidate by taking out an ad can be muzzled if they want to take out that ad when it will be most effective – i.e., near election day.

The First Amendment was intended to keep political speech free; everything else was open to debate. Today, the leaders of the First Amendment industry see it exactly the other way around.

—Jonah Goldberg, “The Press’s Superman Complex,” NRO, October 26th, 2005.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Somebody should write a book on that.

UPDATE (From Ed):

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

INDEED:

Posted at 12:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

#JOURNALISM:

Posted at 9:36 am by Glenn Reynolds

WEREN’T TARIFFS SUPPOSED TO DO THE EXACT OPPOSITE?

Posted at 9:00 am by Glenn Reynolds

#JOURNALISM:

They hate the idea that just anyone with an iPhone can do what they do, and usually better.

Somebody should write a book on that.

Posted at 8:56 am by Glenn Reynolds

HAPPY NEW YEAR: Who is Planning for War, and Who is Preparing for the Next POM Cycle? “Fear and shame are great motivators. Fear the power in the Western Pacific that we helped build. Have shame at our lack of leadership and vision at the very highest levels from both political parties as this happened. As a result, this is what we will order our Navy to engage should the fight come west of the international dateline. Get angry. Get motivated. Demand action.”

Posted at 8:30 am by Glenn Reynolds

SPECIAL NEW YEAR’S MORNING OPEN THREAD: How was your night? How are your hangovers?

Posted at 8:27 am by Glenn Reynolds

SCAMS ALL THE WAY DOWN:

Check out Catholic Charities and Lutheran Social Services as conduits for taxpayer money spent on allegedly “compassionate” programs that often aren’t.

Posted at 8:00 am by Glenn Reynolds

IT’S THE DEMOGRAPHY, STUPID:

(Classical reference in headline.)

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll

HE’S NOT WRONG:

Posted at 7:30 am by Glenn Reynolds

DISPATCHES FROM THE LOST GENERATION:

(Classical reference in headline.)

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll