June 13, 2026

MY LATEST SUBSTACK ESSAY: Elon Musk is a Genius — and a Litmus Test.

“SpaceX’s IPO created 4,400 millionaires, according to the New York Times. Critics like Bernie Sanders, AOC, and Elizabeth Warren have created one each — themselves.”

Related (From Ed): Question asked and answered:

Posted at 4:52 pm by Glenn Reynolds

CHUTZPAH:

Posted at 2:24 pm by Stephen Green

TRUMP EXTENDS TAIWAN’S LIFE 30-40 YEARS: It’s not getting the measure of national media attention it deserves, but President Donald Trump’s massive aid package to Taiwan should have China’s full attention.

By making the latest available defensive strike missiles and related launch, mobility and guidance capabilities, Trump is enabling Taiwan to destroy most of a PRC invasion force before it reaches the island. According to Rod Martin, here’s why this matters tremendously:

“It matters. Taiwan is the keystone of the First Island Chain. Lose it, and China breaks into the wider Pacific, threatens Japan and the Philippines, and turns America’s forward defense line into a rescue mission. And it’s worse than that. The CCP desperately covets Taiwan: any war would be prompted by Beijing’s desire to capture that exact piece of real estate. Taiwan is not some random island. The odds of a major war with China that isn’t centered on an invasion of Taiwan are vanishingly small. (Well, unless you’re Russia.)”

More here from Martin.

Posted at 1:35 pm by Mark Tapscott

IT’S GOOD TO BE THE NOMENKLATURA:

Posted at 12:50 pm by Stephen Green

VICHY FRANCE CONQUERS ENGLAND!

This black and white 1972 BBC documentary, titled “Moving to a ‘Town of the 21st Century,'” is simultaneously dreary and hilarious as hell. It’s about a young working class couple leaving their cramped flat and moving to Thamesmead, a brutalist concrete mixed-use project with both apartments and shops. You may not recognize the name of the development, but you’ve seen it: 

Thamesmead’s style of architecture was brutalism, a concrete-oriented architecture dreamed up by France’s Le Corbusier, after WWII, to cheaply build tower apartment blocks:

The use of béton brut was pioneered by modernist architects such as Auguste Perret and Le Corbusier. Le Corbusier coined the term béton brut during the construction of Unité d’Habitation in Marseille, France, built in 1952.

As Glenn noted in his New York Post column yesterday on “Trump’s Reflecting Pool glow-up:”

“Brutalism,” as a dominant architectural style, was a choice.

Gone were soaring columns, noble statuary depicting American heroes or abstract figures like Justice or Liberty, and welcoming spaces.

Instead we got modern architecture — which, as Tom Wolfe notes in his delightful book “From Bauhaus to Our House,” was quite literally designed to promote socialism.

Modern architects blamed bourgeois values for the horrors of World War II and wanted to promote socialist values instead.

They disdained “bourgeois” adornment and designed buildings to dwarf individuals, not uplift them.

As scholar James Scott points out, the French architect Le Corbusier, noted for his huge buildings amid vast, sterile plazas, dedicated his book “The Radiant City” thus: “To Authority.”

The Radiant City was published in 1933. So, which authority was Corbusier toasting a decade later?

Mr Jarcy said that in “Plans” Le Corbusier wrote in support of Nazi anti-Semitism and in “Prelude” co-wrote “hateful editorials”.

In August 1940, the architect wrote to his mother that “money, Jews (partly responsible), Freemasonry, all will feel just law”. In October that year, he added: “Hitler can crown his life with a great work: the planned layout of Europe.”

Mr Chaslin said he had unearthed “anti-Semite sketches” by Le Corbusier, and ascertained that the French architect had spent 18 months in Vichy, where the Nazis ran a French puppet government, where he kept an office.

The Le Corbusier Foundation, which works to promote the architect’s memory and works, barely touches on this side of his life, relegating his Vichy role to an “extended stay” in the town.

Just don’t mention the war. In 1995, Theodore Dalrymple wrote of the Corbusier-inspired brutalist buildings in England:

Until quite recently, I had assumed that the extreme ugliness of the city in which I live was attributable to the Luftwaffe. I imagined that the cheap and charmless high rise buildings which so disfigure the city-scape had been erected of necessity in great gaping holes left by Heinkel bombers.

* * * * * * * * *

“A great shame about the war,” I said to the store assistant, who was of an age to remember the old days. “Look at the city now.”

“The war?” she said. “The war had nothing to do with it. It was the council.”

Embrace the healing power of and, to coin a phrase.

Regarding Francois Truffaut’s 1966 adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, James Lileks once wrote:

The only convincing dystopian movie I’ve ever seen is “1984.” Other moves look dated. They dress the set with a few Futuristic Things, change the collars on the jackets, tweak some element of society so something we take for granted is forbidden and bad. Old age is bad, or food is scarce, or overpopulation ruined everything — a particularly amusing claim for “Soylent Green,” as if you could feed a teeming population with compressed rectangles of old people. Same with Fahrenheit 451 — it appeals to an adolescent’s need for unambiguous cackling illiberal villains.

Here’s what I find interesting: whenever the sci-fi movies of the 60s and 70s wanted to set something in a horrible totalitarian world, they just shot on location at a government housing project.

Observing the families in the BBC video moving into the exterior set of A Clockwork Orange brings to mind another Lileks quote: “You realize: no one in a dystopia probably thinks they’re living in a dystopia.”

At the end of the video, Geoffrey Horsfall, one of Thamesmead‘s architects, tells the BBC, “I’ve got every confidence in the future of Thamesmead and I think that it’s something that many of us will see, but certainly you younger people, you know, you will see this finished and complete and will be able to say, ‘Well, that chap I heard talking wasn’t all that wrong.’”

He was. The appropriately named Failed Architecture Website has a page titled: Ultraviolence in Representation: The Enduring Myth of the Thamesmead Estate.

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

SAME AS IT EVER WAS:

And since I seem to be in a Churchill-quoting mood today: “Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy.”

Posted at 12:12 pm by Stephen Green

YES:

And from the replies: “I can imagine, look at Europe, in 50 years not a single great company has been created there.”

Posted at 11:22 am by Stephen Green

CLOSE ENOUGH FOR GOVERNMENT WORK: Wisconsin Democrats make udder mistake with National Dairy Month post.

Perhaps because “pouncing” and “seizing” have been used far too often, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has jumping Republicans:

Tom Tiffany, the leading Republican candidate for governor, jumped on the mistake, posting a video touting his experience growing up on a Wisconsin dairy farm.

Tiffany and other Republicans also criticized Democrats for celebrating the start of Pride Month, which recognizes LGBTQ+ communities and begins June 1 alongside National Dairy Month.

“I regret to inform [Wisconsin Democrats] that you cannot milk a bull. But considering they think men can get pregnant, I guess thinking you can milk a bull tracks too,” Tiffany wrote on X.

Tiffany also said June 1 that, if elected governor, he would no longer fly the Pride flag over the state Capitol in June – a practice started by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers in 2019.

Evers also celebrated June Dairy Month with a video message, in part criticizing President Donald Trump’s tariff policies and cuts to federal programs supporting farmers.

Evergreen:

(Via Buck Throckmorton of Ace of Spades, who adds, “Democrats are completely oblivious about agriculture. Since Democrats believe that cross-dressing men have menstrual cycles and can lactate, it is entirely consistent for Dems to believe that trans-cows (e.g. bulls) can be milked.”

Posted at 10:45 am by Ed Driscoll

THE BOLSHEVIKS ALWAYS DESTROY THE MENSHEVIKS:

See also: “An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.”

Posted at 10:36 am by Stephen Green