August 13, 2026

OH SURE, BUT HAVE YOU SEEN HOW EXPENSIVE IT IS TO GET A DOORDASH BURRITO THESE DAYS?

Related: The Vibecession Comes for MAGA.

Posted at 8:22 am by Ed Driscoll

IT’S MY THURSDAY ESSAY FOR VIP SUBSCRIBERS: Fat Amy Gets No Respect.

It’s the strike fighter that launched a thousand flamewars, yet somehow keeps succeeding at one mission after another. And might be about to take on yet one more.

“But it costs too much,” they said. “It flies too slow,” which is true. “The helmet is too heavy,” which is weird and also true. “It can’t dogfight.” And my favorite, because it’s the truest: “They never should have tried to make one jet fit three branches.”

Perhaps most embarrassing of all, the pilots who fly the F-35 — officially designated the Lightning II, which I always thought was a lazy name — call it “Fat Amy.”

Yet just in the last week, Lockheed Martin announced another new role for the much-derided fighter: ballistic missile defense. I mean, can something called Fat Amy do that?

And a whole lot more at the link.

Posted at 8:06 am by Stephen Green

WE’VE DESCENDED INTO SOME SORT OF BIZARRE HELL-WORLD IN WHICH CHRIS MATTHEWS IS A VOICE OF SANITY:

But then, while Matthews was cashiered out of MSNBC in 2020 for alleged #MeToo issues, as Glenn wrote at the time, “In 2020, He’s Not Crazy Enough for Them…It’s really because he dissed Bernie. The rest is just window dressing.”

Matthews came on after Democratic strategist James Carville went on a diatribe against Sanders, and as the MSNBC host made reference to that, he invoked the historical episode when the Germans overran the Maginot Line and forced France to surrender in the middle of World War II.

“It looks like Bernie Sanders is hard to beat right now,” Matthews said. “I’m with Carville all the way in terms of the dangers of what lies ahead in November. They’re sitting on so much oppo research on Bernie.”

15 years ago, the late Charles Krauthammer wrote, “Politics is still played between the 40-yard lines.” The “American game is played between the 40-yard lines. So long as Democrats don’t repeat Obama’s drive for the red zone, Democrats will cyclically prevail, just as Republicans do.”

No wonder at least one DSA candidate really hates football:

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll

CHRISTIAN TOTO: Woke 2.0: Hollywood’s Next Act?

The box office struggled over the past five years, with many wondering if the theatrical model would go the way of the pager and 8-track tape. YouTube creators seized on woke Hollywood’s descent, mocking both the stars who read from the woke gospel to film and TV flops that suffocated on progressive groupthink.

“Lightyear”
“The Marvels”
“The Acolyte”
“Starfleet Academy”

This year, movie goers fell back in love with cinema thanks to “Spider-Man: Brand New Day,” “Michael,” “Project Hail Mary” and “Toy Story 5,” among other smashes.

Comedy roasts came roaring back, too, and attempts to shame comedians for telling the “wrong” jokes no longer lead to hostage-style apologies.

Yet Ocasio-Cortez’s “Woke 1.0” quip suggested the worst is yet to come. It’s hard to see otherwise, politically speaking. Consider the rise of the radical DSA movement within the Democratic Party.

Woke 1.0 might look quaint by comparison. Will Hollywood follow suit?

Yes… and no.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 7:35 am by Stephen Green

JOHN PODHORETZ: New York Magazine’s evil ‘Habibi City’ cover sends a message: Jews aren’t welcome in Mamdani’s NYC.

New York Magazine this week dubbed our town “Habibi City” to mark the rising prominence of Middle Easterners and Muslim immigrants united by fun, frolic — and a consuming hatred of Israel and Jews.

It’s a familiar formulation, harking back to 1966, when newly elected Mayor John Lindsay declared New York to be “Fun City.”

Yes, such fun! Lindsay’s two terms drove NYC into civil and budgetary collapse.

A crime tsunami rotted neighborhoods across the five boroughs, and feckless budgetary policies emptied the city’s coffers.

And the population of Lindsay’s “Fun City” declined by half a million people.

Facing a government that didn’t seem to care what happened to them, much of the middle class voted with their feet.

Something similar may happen in Habibi City, but this time the effort to make life unbearable for some New Yorkers is entirely intentional — and aimed at a specific minority.

Lindsay was incompetent, but he certainly didn’t want respectable taxpayers to leave.

Not so the subjects of New York Magazine’s current cover package, and their beloved Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

At The Free Press, Liel Leibovitz adds: New York Is Not ‘Habibi City.’

[Zaina] Arafat, whose book You Exist Too Much won the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Fiction, herself attempts an answer, embodied in the name of one of her favorite SWANA-ese publications: it’s called Bidoun, meaning “without,” which is a name “meant to evoke existing without the concreteness of space.” In other words, because SWANA is really a state of mind, we must make sure America becomes its forever home.

It’s a perfect manifestation of a specific grad school sensibility, light on logic and high on pretense and self-importance. But it also captures the real tragedy—and threat—at hand: For Habibi City to be born, New York City must die.

A question like “what is New York” is too complex, too weighty, and frankly too annoying to discuss in brief. But if you’re looking for a solid working definition, it goes something like this: New York is the gorgeous, impossible, maddening rock upon which dreamers from all over the world crash in the desperate, ridiculous, and absolutely sublime hope of changing their fortune by harnessing themselves to the great American engine of reinvention. It’s why the greatest movie ever made about immigrants in New York, The Godfather, begins with the battle cry that, for centuries, quickened the pulse of every newcomer to this city: “I believe in America.”

Tell that to Arian Moayed, an actor who tells Arafat, with unveiled disgust, how terrible it felt to walk around Times Square in the aftermath of September 11 and see everything, and everyone felt so. . . patriotic. Tell that to Arafat herself, whose vision of life in America consists exclusively of SWANA loyalists railing against “xenophobia, Islamophobia, and Zionism.” Or, for that matter, tell that to New York magazine, once the epitome of New York cool and sophistication and now the organ of Third World feeblemindedness masquerading as radical chic.

Which is all the more ironic, because Tom Wolfe introduced the phrase “radical chic” via a 1970 article he wrote for a very different iteration of New York magazine. Long after Wolfe moved on, I still used to like that version of New York magazine, and would pick up a copy when I lived in New Jersey and took the train into Fun City during the Ed Koch and David Dinkins era.

But that was then. Today, as Ira Stoll writes at the Washington Free Beacon, “James Murdoch just demonstrated that Rupert Murdoch sure was right to fight a protracted legal battle to prevent him from taking over the Wall Street Journal and Fox News:” Under James Murdoch, New York Magazine Tilts Toward Hamas.

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll

TURNING ON THE DSA:

Posted at 7:08 am by Glenn Reynolds

POLLS THESE DAYS ARE EQUAL PARTS INEPTITUDE AND PROPAGANDA:

Okay, maybe not equal parts.

Posted at 7:03 am by Glenn Reynolds

FROM C. CHANCY:  Pearl of Fire.

Bombs, fire, and murder….Caldera City. Stronghold and refuge, built by faith and elemental power in the heart of a volcano; surviving through magic, tactics, and a daring alliance with dragons. For Allen Helleson, Caldera was an escape from the lives ruined by his family’s hardline traditions; now he walks the streets as an Inspector for the Caldera Watch, defending the city other nations see as a pit of hell. For Shane Redstone, Caldera was the home she risked life and soul to defend as a Flame – until enemy curses blinded her, sending her away from the front lines forever.The war has come home again….Together they survive the first bomb. But Caldera’s enemies never stop with just one. Now a scarred yet deadly ex-soldier and a spirit-reading Inspector have to find and stop the bombers… before Wards fall, dragons die, and the caldera erupts in flame. One wrong move, and the city burns.

Posted at 7:00 am by Sarah Hoyt

LOOK, THERE IS A REASON FOR THIS:  FLAGRANT Racial Violence: You Still Haven’t Seen the Most Shocking Thing in the Cunningham Foul — It Is Carrington’s Flabbergasted Reaction to Being Found Guilty (Video).

American schools have been telling kids for a generation (at least) that white people are out to get black people. That whites hate blacks so much the invented slavery to attack them. And then 2020 and BLM told them that white people want to kill black people. All the time. And do it. And get away with it. All the time.  And you’re surprised that black people act insane and like they’re under siege? WHY?
It’s time to clean the education/indoctrination complex. Now.

Posted at 3:33 am by Sarah Hoyt

IT’S BECOME A DERANGED OBSESSION. THEY THINK THINK THEY CAN BUY WOMEN WITH THIS:  This is the Leftist Endgame. The Holy Sacrament of Abortion.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Feminists used to say “if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.” But it turns out that to feminists, it just is, no men required.

Posted at 2:00 am by Sarah Hoyt