July 14, 2026

ELECTIONS HAVE CONSEQUENCES:

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

NICE WORK, INEZ:

Posted at 2:32 pm by Stephen Green

VIKING CONQUESTS CONTINUE: Hundreds of Peruvians are naming their babies after Norwegian soccer star Erling Haaland. “Apparently, the people of Peru (which is in South America) are obsessed with the Viking giant. As of Monday, some 500 new babies have been named after Erling Haaland, and you can expect that number to grow.”

Even Old Blighty isn’t safe:

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Turns Out, Big Brother Is Actually a Matronly Euro-Scold. “We need to set the age at which they can, the children can, legally access social media,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said this week, which translates into American (via bad Japanese translation) as “All your screen are belong to us.”

Posted at 2:16 pm by Stephen Green

DISPATCHES FROM THE OCCUPIED ZONES:

Dhimmis are forbidden from repairing old churches and synagogues, and from building new ones.

Posted at 1:59 pm by Stephen Green

THE NEW SPACE RACE: SpaceX targets July 16 for Starship Flight 13, reveals what went wrong on previous launch.

According to a new SpaceX analysis, a sequence change in Ship’s engines, which ignite before the two rocket halves physically detach in a maneuver known as “hot staging,” led to a 90-degree error in Super Heavy’s orientation after separation. Super Heavy’s boostback burn was also cut short when five of its 33 engines failed to relight. SpaceX says it has introduced a modified startup sequence for Ship and hardware updates to Super Heavy to address the orientation anomaly and ignition issues, respectively, “along with updates to engine alarms and aborts to match the conditions seen in the multi-engine flight environment.”

Ship ran into a bit of trouble during Flight 12 but also managed to pull off some firsts. One of the spacecraft’s three vacuum-optimized Raptors was lost 40 seconds after stage separation, but it still reached its designated suborbital trajectory, demonstrating its “engine out” capabilities, according to the SpaceX update. The loss did, however, prevent Ship’s in-space engine relight attempt. SpaceX traced the failure to “interconnected causes” and has introduced a number of fixes for the upcoming Flight 13, “with additional reliability improvements planned in upcoming versions of the Raptor engine.”

Godspeed, Flight 13.

Posted at 1:45 pm by Stephen Green

ANALYSIS: Wes Moore’s Bronze Star was a political rescue mission.

Most veterans who were wrongly denied a military award do not get a three-star general to personally intervene for them.

They do not get direct access to the Secretary of the Army.

They do not get a U.S. senator from a state they don’t live in to sponsor the award.

They do not get a politically damaging controversy transformed into a retroactive military honor, almost without question, nearly 20 years later.

And they do not get it done from start to finish in seven days.

But Maryland Gov. Wes Moore did.

Spotlight on Maryland has learned that Moore’s pursuit of the Bronze Star medal in 2024 relied heavily on political favors, special access, inaccurate information about his Afghanistan deployment and involved the deliberate concealment of key facts regarding Moore’s end-of-deployment awards in 2006.

These revelations raise serious questions about the process used to obtain the Bronze Star presented to Moore in 2024 and whether it violated federal law.

Related: Wes Moore Attacks Local Newspaper for Deigning To Report on His Record.

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

YOU DON’T SAY:

Bless the New York Post for never running out of lame excuses to run photos of attractive women.

Posted at 1:29 pm by Stephen Green

YES, IT’S TIME FOR A CRACKDOWN ON INSURRECTIONISTS AND SEDITIONISTS:

Posted at 1:29 pm by Glenn Reynolds

LITTLE HOUSE ON THE SERVER FARM: Little House On The Prairie Goes Woke.

Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “bootstrapping mythology” in her original works does not “square” with audiences. George Tann is a black man. Young Reboot Laura becomes friends with an Indigenous girl named Good Eagle. Good Eagle’s family befriends the Ingalls family who snaked their logs to build their home. This nice, Ingalls family stole their timber and their land but, they are gracious enough to forgive but never let them forget it. Then, there’s the reboot of the Oleson’s:

Netflix’s Ingalls family are good people, even by 2026 standards, and you can see it in contrast with the Jameses. The Jameses are town-dwelling rich folk who don’t appear in the Little House books but seem to be an adaptation of the Oleson family … The Jameses’ vision for Independence — hierarchy, respectability, a church, a school — first seduces, then repels, the more gentle-minded Ingallses, Ma and Mary. The James matriarch, Jemma, played by Mary Holland, brings a welcome comedic hateability to this sunny show.”-Rebecca Onion, Slate

Got it. The Olesons are the token MAGA family. And they’re there for comedic relief. Sounds like Rebecca Sonneshine is a bit of a passive-aggressive Nelly Oleson, don’t cha think?

That development plays surprisingly well in Ireland:

Naturally, the show runner is playing the “I don’t even know what ‘woke’ means” card to defend herself:

TV writer Rebecca Sonnenshine, who came up with the reboot of the show has this to say about the recent woke criticisms:

“I’m not even sure what ‘woke’ means to people anymore, to be honest. I know what I think it means, which is the definition of it being aware and alert to social injustice and prejudice, in particular racial prejudice. So, when people say, ‘I hope it’s not woke,’ I think, ‘Really? Oh, that’s interesting.’ But I don’t think people are using it in that manner; I think it’s just become a catch-all word for things that I don’t quite understand. If I had to sum it up, what people are afraid of is that something from their childhood will be portrayed in a way that scares them.”-Rebecca Sonneshine.

Maybe it’s for the best she didn’t bother reading the source material:

On the other hand, it’s a surprisingly diverse cast, a series perfectly made for, as the Critical Drinker would say with 100 gallons of reverb on his voice, “modern audiences:”

But will there be a season two?

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

AMY CURTIS: With Extreme Poverty at All-Time Lows, Democratic Socialists Hope to Reverse the Trend.

Capitalism is the world’s great equalizer, and it has done more to raise people out of poverty than any other economic system on the planet. That, of course, is why the communists and their socialist cousins hate it. Under the ideal communist regime, there are only two classes: the wealthy, which consists of the politicians and those who are adequate bootlickers, and the poor.

Communism has to be that way. A robust middle class negates the need for centralized planning and massive government control over every aspect of our lives, from the cradle to the mass grave. That’s why the commies have to destroy anything and everything that builds up the middle class: culture, religion, and especially the nuclear family.

Socialism isn’t just about “the equal sharing of miseries.” It’s also about creating misery where there isn’t any — about the only thing it creates in abundance.

Posted at 12:58 pm by Stephen Green

VW CEO TAKING SOME VICIOUS LUMPS ON HIS FAHRVERGNOGGEN:

Oliver Blume took over the Volkswagen Group in 2022, after spending years in the company’s other divisions. For example, he started as a planner for paint and body shop operations at Audi when he was 28, and then, from 2015 until this promotion, he had been the CEO of VW subsidiary Porsche. Obviously, a capable guy who grew up within the unique VW system.

That is both a good and bad thing, considering the harrowing times the company faces right now.

Three weeks ago I told you all how an internal memo had surfaced detailing the company’s plans to do some drastic cutbacks – up to 100,000 layoffs, shuttering up to four plants, and going through their extensive business portfolio to see what they could offload for some upfront operating cash.

German labor unions went berserk – no surprise there.

Well, last Thursday, the turnaround plans were officially confirmed when Blume presented them to Volkswagen’s supervisory board in Wolfsburg for approval.

The plans were just as quickly shot out of the water – ‘torpedoed,’ as Bloomberg describes it – and in doing so offered a kind of horrifying look into what is strangling Germany’s former industry giant as it struggles to right its sinking ship.

Make sure you pay particular attention to that third paragraph concerning the make-up of the board that just told its CEO ‘nein.’ This would be a state of affairs inconceivable to an American.

In his 2007 book Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg wrote, “Democratic, and most Republican, health-care plans don’t call for expropriating the private property of doctors and pharmaceutical companies or even for the cessation of employer-provided health care. Rather, they want to use corporations for government by proxy. There’s a reason liberal economists joke that General Motors is a health-care provider that makes cars as an industrial by-product.” In its dotage, “The People’s Car” manufacturer has descended into a similar state. Similarly, in 2024, Germany’s radical environmentalists began implementing a self-imposed update of America’s WWII-era Morgenthau Plan to deindustrialize das Vaterland. It looks like those plans are continuing apace.

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

SPOILER: NO ONE AT NETFLIX READ THE SOURCE MATERIAL. OR AT LEAST CARED:

Not sure anyone is looking forward to The Vampire Diariafication of Little House.

Posted at 12:27 pm by Stephen Green

AGREED:

Posted at 11:56 am by Stephen Green

UNEXPECTEDLY! Khanna reveals the billionaire tax is just the beginning.

Last week, Khanna confirmed that the “billionaire tax” is just the start and that they will go on to target the wealth of other citizens as an untapped resource of new revenue.

For years, some of us have warned that the billionaire tax was a ruse. Sponsors like Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Khanna were using billionaires as an easy political target, but they were unlikely to stop there.
…
That is precisely what Khanna finally admitted last week in a Substack post, arguing that “the tax should not stop at billionaires; it must reach centimillionaires. The tax has to reach all fortunes $50 million and up.”
…
If they can pack the Court and greenlight a billionaire tax, there would be no limit to then moving the threshold wealth level downward. Once that Rubicon is crossed, Democrats would suddenly be able to tax trillions in the property and possessions of citizens.

And then it’s all over. Nobody owns anything, except by someone else’s favor.

Vote as though your life, liberty, and property depend upon it — because they do.

Posted at 11:41 am by Stephen Green