March 2, 2026

THEY DON’T LIKE AMERICANS:

Posted at 3:58 pm by Stephen Green

INSURANCE MARKETS ARE AS IMPORTANT AS THE BOND MARKETS:

Posted at 2:58 pm by Glenn Reynolds

SEVENTH CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS:

This may be more like what the Ayatollah be receiving:

Or perhaps this:

UPDATE:

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

SIGN OF THE TIMES:

Posted at 2:29 pm by Stephen Green

IT’S COME TO THIS:

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

NEO-FEUDALISM: In California, About the Only Way to Get a House Is to Inherit One.

Inheritance is one of the last reliable ways for younger Californians to own their first home.

About 18% of all property transfers in the state last year, representing nearly 60,000 homes, were made through inheritance, according to a recent analysis by real-estate data firm Cotality.

That share is a record for California in data going back to 1995, up from 12% in 2019. It is also roughly double the national share of 8.8% last year.

Cheryl Norris, a 76-year-old who works as an independent antique dealer, has owned a pair of homes in Northern California for decades. Her two children in their 30s don’t see a clear path toward buying a home there themselves. California’s home prices rank among the highest in the U.S., reaching a median single-family sales price of nearly $900,000 last year.

When Norris dies, she plans to leave her Santa Rosa property, with its low-pitched roof and large picture window, and her more expansive three-bedroom retreat set on more than 2 acres in San Rafael to her daughter and son.

“Even though my kids work as hard as I did, it’s sad that inheritance is their best shot at homeownership here,” she said.

I wonder how she and her adult kids vote.

Posted at 1:44 pm by Stephen Green

JEREMY CLARKSON: I wish I’d been there for the Bafta Tourette’s moment.

To recap: the critically acclaimed movie I Swear is based on the true story of a Tourette’s syndrome sufferer called John Davidson, who was at the awards ceremony to watch the guy who played him in the film pick up a best actor award. All lovely so far.

But in the course of the proceedings John shouted out the n-word when two black guys were on the stage. And all of a sudden things were not so lovely any more. And they were especially not lovely, I should imagine, in the BBC edit suite when the show was over and they had two hours to prepare it for transmission.

I would give my entire nutsack to have been in there with them, not to contribute to the debate, but to watch a room full of luvvies tie themselves in knots. They should make a movie about it one day. It could be called “When Bandwagons Collide”. It’d probably win a Bafta.

Obviously, they nipped out a clip where one of the winners said “Free Palestine’, because after the Glastonbury debacle when that performer — I forget his name … Jizzy Biscuit? Something like that — encouraged the crowd to kill Israeli conscripts, there was something of a brouhaha.

But what to do about this n-word business? The whole point of the very excellent movie I Swear is to highlight the plight of those with Tourette’s. And by including the tic, which is what it was, the BBC would be doing just that. However, it was a racist tic. So is it acceptable to broadcast a white man using the n-word, even when he can’t help it?

Think of the hand-wringing and the mental anguish such a conundrum creates. It’s never easy being a lefty; there’s always someone or something to worry about. You can imagine them all, in a tiny little room, with two things to worry about at the same time and only two hours to sort it out. If they left it in they’d be broadcasting the worst kind of racism. If they took it out? That would be disablist. It’d be like pixelating someone’s wheelchair. Only one thing is for certain. Whether they left it in, or took it out, they would have to apologise to someone.

In the end, they left it in. And the following morning apologised to all the black people they’d upset. And then there were apologies to all the Tourette’s syndrome people, for the apology. And the last time I looked they were apologising for positioning a microphone close to where Mr Davidson was sitting. But what if they had moved the mic and he’d seen them doing it? They’d have to say, “We are moving this because some people might be offended by your disability.” What a nightmare world the left has created.

Welcome to the intersectional Olympics. As Georgina Mumford of Spiked writes, “Cancelling a man with Tourette’s is a new low for the woke elite:” “After years of telling the rest of us to platform marginalised voices, to defer to ‘lived experience’, to generally ‘do better’, they have proven to be themselves shockingly ignorant of a condition that causes genuine hardship. There is no awareness that they themselves are ‘exclusionary’. Those who bristle about having to be in close proximity with disabled people will not stop to wonder if they, themselves, are the bigots. ‘The best at hate are those who preach love’, Charles Bukowski once said. Perhaps, too, those most quick to tell the rest of us to ‘educate yourself’ are the ones most in need of taking their own advice.”

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

PRIORITIES:

Posted at 1:28 pm by Stephen Green

LEFTIST ALWAYS MAKE ACCUSATIONS ABOUT WHAT THEY THEMSELVES ARE DOING:

Posted at 1:08 pm by Glenn Reynolds

WHY DO THEY ALWAYS LOOK LIKE THIS?

Posted at 12:51 pm by Glenn Reynolds

RICK MCGINNIS AT STEYN ONLINE: Wow Finish: Stanley Kramer brings down the curtain in On the Beach.

“Every man who worked on this thing told you what would happen,” Julian [Fred Astaire] argues. “The scientists signed petition after petition. But nobody listened. There was a choice. It was build the bombs and use them. Or risk the United States and the Soviet Union and the rest of us would find some way to go on living.” In any case the radiation level in the room they’re in is nine times higher than it was a year ago.

“We’re doomed, you know,” Julian tells them. “The whole silly, drunken pathetic lot of us. Doomed by the air we’re about to breathe. We haven’t got a chance.”

The whole terrible scene reduces Mary to tears and inspires Moira [Ava Gardner] to get drunker and, later that night when the party is over, try to get Towers to explain to her what happened and why. He can’t explain it any better than anyone else – the film is far vaguer than [Nevil] Shute’s book with a geopolitical scenario for global nuclear war – but it’s the beginning of a simmering flirtation that was inevitable once Kramer put [Gregory] Peck and Gardner in the same frame.

[Anthony] Perkins, Gardner and Astaire all play Australians but while Perkins and Astaire attempt a spotty accent in early scenes it’s gone long before the end of the picture and Gardner doesn’t even bother. It probably didn’t matter much to American audiences at the time, but what did bother Shute was the changes Kramer made to the budding romance between Moira and Towers.

In adapting the story with screenwriter John Paxton, John Osborne became Julian Osborn and was aged up from a man in his late twenties to the spry but senior Astaire. Moira was also aged up from a petite blonde in her twenties to the curvaceous brunette Gardner, attractive but showing every bit of her hard-lived thirty-six years, and still able to draw the stares of a shipful of sailors on the aircraft carrier HMAS Melbourne as she walks down the dock to the Sawfish. This all makes On the Beach a movie artifact of a world of adults, glimpsed just before youthful demographics would banish that world to ancient history.

* * * * * * * * *

 On the Beach is such a famous, relentless downer that it’s no surprise, with or without the efforts of the USIA, the State Department, the OCDM and the Pentagon, the film flopped at the box office. Eisenhower needn’t have worried. And as if confirming the old adage about “first time as tragedy, second as comedy”, five years later Stanley Kubrick would tell a nuclear war story as essentially bleak and hopeless with Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

In sharp contrast to the grim slog of On the Beach, at least Kubrick, his cast, and the movie’s viewers had plenty of fun before the world blew up. As Kubrick later told an interviewer, “I started work on the screenplay with every intention of making the film a serious treatment of the problem of accidental nuclear war. As I kept trying to imagine the way in which things would really happen, ideas kept coming to me which I would discard because they were so ludicrous. I kept saying to myself: ‘I can’t do this. People will laugh.’”

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

DEMOCRATS LESS PRO-AMERICAN, LESS PRO-SECURITY THAN EUROPE? FIGURES:

Posted at 12:20 pm by Stephen Green