December 14, 2025

MEGAN MCARDLE: Why does anyone want to buy Warner Brothers, anyway?

Break out the popcorn and a jumbo box of Raisinets, because just when we thought the Warner Bros. Discovery drama was over, it turned out we had barely gotten started. The suspense over the company’s pending sale is mounting, and new questions are developing faster than writers can resolve old ones. Which suitor will shareholders choose? Will regulators block the deal? Will any of these characters find happily ever after?

If you remember last week’s episode, Netflix beat out Comcast and David Ellison’s Paramount Skydance to buy WBD — or at least its studio and streaming business, which are the bits everyone really wants. If you kept following the show, you’ve seen the action heat up: Ellison has launched a hostile bid for WBD, arguing that its shareholders would do better by taking $30 per share from him to buy the whole company, including its cable television stations — CNN, TNT, TBS and lifestyle outlets such as HGTV — than by getting $27.75 per share from Netflix for just the studio and streaming.

Spoiler alert: Cord-cutting is decimating the cable business so rapidly that this is a reasonable argument, even though the cable stations currently generate higher revenue and gross margins than streaming or studio. Between WBD’s debt and declining cable subscribers, there’s just not much future value left in those assets.

So stay tuned for more twists and turns! Eventually writers might resolve the biggest mystery: Why does anyone want to buy this company, anyway?

Fortunately, one august institution is dedicated to saving Warner Brothers from its ignoble fate: British cinemas demand Labour intervene against Netflix’s Hollywood takeover.

Cinemas have urged Labour to intervene in the planned takeover of Warner Bros by Netflix, warning that the deal would result in a “much thinner” selection of films for audiences.

Industry bosses have written to media minister Ian Murray to raise concerns about the streaming giant’s $83bn acquisition of the Hollywood studio behind major franchises such as Harry Potter, arguing that it could result in fewer films being released in cinemas.

In the letter sent to MPs on both the culture select committee and business and trade committee, Phil Clapp, the chief executive of the UK Cinema Association, said the takeover would be a “significant blow” to the industry – which is still struggling to recover from the pandemic.

Mr Clapp warned that audiences would be the biggest losers from the proposed deal, adding that it would also lead to significant job losses.

The trade group urged Mr Murray to take an active interest in the takeover and called on both committees to launch an inquiry.

Yes, launch an inquiry – write some really stern letters, England. That ought to do the job! But as John Podhoretz noted last week, we could be witnessing the “end of moviegoing” as we used to know it:

And in a thread Twitter/X McArdle explained why she didn’t bother going into details in her Washington Post article about Ellison’s goal of acquiring CNN along with Warner Brothers, as aging viewers and declining numbers mean that technology is also reaching its twilight years as destination viewing:

 

Posted at 12:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

THE RISE OF GERMAN NATIONALISM EXPOSES WASHINGTON’S DELUSIONS:

The recent electoral surge of the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which secured 20.8 percent in February’s snap election and won state elections in Thuringia last year, has predictably triggered alarm bells throughout Washington’s foreign policy establishment. The usual suspects are warning of a new Nazi threat, the collapse of the transatlantic alliance, and the end of Western civilization as we know it. But beneath the hyperbole lies a more complex reality that American policymakers would be wise to understand rather than reflexively condemn.

Let’s be clear about what’s happening. The AfD’s rise is not some inexplicable resurgence of fascism but rather a predictable political backlash against decades of failed policies—economic stagnation in eastern Germany, botched immigration policies, and Berlin’s costly entanglement in the Ukraine conflict. When the mainstream parties offered voters more of the same, voters looked elsewhere.

Washington’s foreign policy blob has responded with its standard playbook: demonize, isolate, and lecture. Yet this approach fundamentally misunderstands both German politics and American interests. The same establishment that assured us NATO expansion posed no threat to Russia, that the Iraq War would be a cakewalk, and that Afghanistan could be turned into a democracy now wants us to believe that AfD supporters are crypto-Nazis rather than ordinary Germans fed up with bearing the costs of extreme liberalism and America’s geopolitical adventures.

Politico (whose parent company is based in Berlin) is getting the vapors that much of Europe is turning “hard right and far-right:”

But then, the left see “far right” as being everywhere these days:

If only there was a way to slow the rise of the “far right” in both Europe and America:

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll

AUSTRALIA’S BONDI BEACH SHOOTING: What we know so far about Hanukkah attack.

Twelve people have died — including one gunman — following a shooting at Australia’s Bondi Beach which targeted the Jewish community on the first day of Hanukkah.

According to police, 29 others were taken to hospital and two officers were shot during the incident, which has since been declared a terror attack by officials. The surviving gunman is in a critical condition.

More than 1,000 people were attending an event on the beach celebrating Hanukkah.

Chris Minns, the premier of New South Wales, said: “Our heart bleeds for Australia’s Jewish community tonight.

“I can only imagine the pain that they’re feeling right now to see their loved ones killed as they celebrate this ancient holiday”.

Its origin and purpose, still a total mystery:

UPDATE: From last December: How Australia went from ‘goldene medina’ to ‘vitriol and vilification’ of Jews.

Posted at 10:54 am by Ed Driscoll

WELL, THIS IS THE 21st CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Orbital Data Centers Will “Bypass Earth-Based” Constraints.

Last week, readers were briefed on the emerging theme of data centers in low Earth orbit, a concept now openly discussed by Elon Musk, Jensen Huang, Jeff Bezos, and Sam Altman, as energy availability and infrastructure constraints on land increasingly emerge as major bottlenecks to data center buildouts through the end of this decade and well into the 2030s.

Nvidia-backed startup Starcloud has released a white paper outlining a case for operating a constellation of artificial intelligence data centers in space as a practical solution to Earth’s looming power crunch, cooling woes, and permitting land constraints.

Terrestrial data center projects will reach capacity limits as AI workloads scale to multi-gigawatt levels, while electricity demand and grid bottlenecks worsen over the next several years. Orbital data centers aim to bypass these constraints by using near-continuous, high-intensity solar power, passive radiative cooling to deep space, and modular designs that scale quickly, launched into orbit via SpaceX rockets.

“Orbital data centers can leverage lower cooling costs using passive radiative cooling in space to directly achieve low coolant temperatures. Perhaps most importantly, they can be scaled almost indefinitely without the physical or permitting constraints faced on Earth, using modularity to deploy them rapidly,” Starcloud wrote in the report.

Starcloud continued, “With new, reusable, cost-effective heavy-lift launch vehicles set to enter service, combined with the proliferation of in-orbit networking, the timing for this opportunity is ideal.”

No word yet how SID is holding up these days.

Posted at 10:45 am by Ed Driscoll

CARLSON GOES FULL CANDACE OWENS: Appealing to low-IQ credulous conspiracy theorists is a sure way to destroy a political movement, and Tucker seems to be giving it the old college try. Here’s the background: The communist anti-American government in Venezuela naturally hates Israel, while the opposition leadership is friendly. This is hardly a secret. The Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom has a story about this. A nutty anti-Israel leftist posted an excerpt from the story, with the caption, “Israeli publication, Israel Hayom, says it was ISRAEL that pushed Trump to bring about regime change in Venezuela.” Except that the story does not say anything remotely like that. Which didn’t stop Tucker from going into his “just asking questions mode,” to provide more oxygen for this non-story.

Posted at 10:09 am by David Bernstein

YEP.

Posted at 8:33 am by Glenn Reynolds

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU ASK AND HOW: There are gotcha questions, silly questions, rhetorical questions and pointed questions. That’s just for starters. Michael Foster, an Ohio pastor handed a Sunday bullhorn by Rod Martin, uses that momentous question posed by Satan to Eve to launch an incisive analysis of the modern weaponization of the question.

Posted at 8:21 am by Mark Tapscott

I MISS SOME THINGS ABOUT 1995, BUT NOT THE MEDIA ENVIRONMENT:

Posted at 8:00 am by Glenn Reynolds

THE LEFT WOULD DO THIS HERE IF IT COULD:

UPDATE:

Posted at 7:30 am by Glenn Reynolds

December 13, 2025

LOTS OF UNANSWERED QUESTIONS ON THE BROWN SHOOTINGS:

Posted at 10:49 pm by Glenn Reynolds

WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY: Animal Farm review: Director Andy Serkis softens George Orwell classic for family animation. “Originally conceived by George Orwell as a satirical allegory for the Russian Revolution and the subsequent struggles of the USSR under the rule of Joseph Stalin, Animal Farm’s political ire is redirected in this lively CG-animated adaptation directed by Andy Serkis. Rather than Stalinism, Serkis takes aim at greed, rapacious consumerism and corporate corruption and malfeasance. There’s also a timely dig at populist political movements.”

This isn’t the first attempt at a mirror universe Animal Farm; Roger Waters did the same thing nearly 50 years ago on Pink Floyd’s Animals: “Whereas the novella focuses on Stalinism, the album is a critique of capitalism and differs again in that the sheep eventually rise up to overpower the dogs.”

(Via, appropriately enough, Small Dead Animals.)

UPDATE:

“Has anyone considered the possibility that the real issue why theaters are shutting down nationally is that no one in Hollywood outside of Tom Cruise has made an entertaining movie in like oh… I don’t know… ten years at least?” Speaking of movies ten years ago, that’s when it all started to go wrong, but few knew it at the time: 

 

Posted at 10:45 pm by Ed Driscoll