April 17, 2025

CALIFORNIA: It’s Detroits All the Way Down.

● Shot: San Francisco Does Detroit.

—The Discovery Institute, May 6th, 2023.

● Chaser: Why Silicon Valley could become tomorrow’s Detroit.

—The Politico, December 18th, 2020.

● Hangover: Hollywood At Risk of Becoming the “Next Detroit Auto.” L.A. Production Insiders Voice Alarm.

The specter of Los Angeles becoming another Detroit, a city built on a specific industry that became a shell of its former self when that business moved out, loomed over a compelling film and TV industry town hall that tackled not only the calamitous drop in production in Hollywood and California, but also the fight to get the state to increase its entertainment production tax incentive.

The event on Monday night drilled down into a later stage of the entertainment production pipeline that is also currently in crisis: scoring and postproduction.

“This is not hyperbole to say that if we don’t act, the California film and TV industry will become the next Detroit auto,” said Noelle Stehman, a member of the “Stay in LA” campaign who spoke at the event.

The push for a proposed increase in tax incentives is hitting a critical phase in the legislative process, and California State Senator Ben Allen and State Assemblyman Rick Zbur were on hand to make an effort to get the necessary votes in.

—The Hollywood Reporter, Tuesday.

How odd — Joe Biden, until last summer the favorite of all Hollywood leftists, said in 2008 that paying higher taxes is a patriotic act. But then, as Conquest’s first Law of Politics states, “Everybody is conservative about what he knows best.”

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll 6

WATCH: From Trees to White Women, Everything Is Racist in These PBS Documentaries.

The 2022 Independent Lens flick Racist Trees, for example, chronicles a black neighborhood in the overwhelmingly liberal “LGBTQ haven” of Palm Springs, Calif. The neighborhood’s residents feel that a “wall of trees” that lines a nearby golf course was “intentionally planted to exclude and segregate” the neighborhood, and want the trees removed.

“They say that these trees are not racially motivated, that they were not racially planted there,” one interviewee says in the film. “They can prove that by one simple act. Remove the trees.”*

Other Independent Lens documentaries similarly center on claims of racism, misogyny, and homophobia. There’s Our League, the story of a transgender woman who “comes out to her old-school Ohio bowling league.” There’s also Ferguson Rises, a documentary in which PBS shadows the father of Michael Brown. And in Breaking the News, PBS documents the “women and LGBTQ+ journalists” who launched nonprofit newsroom The 19th to “buck a broken news media system.” One interviewee in the film argues that it’s easier for a white woman “to vote in space than it is for a black woman to vote in Philadelphia.”

Straight out of Redneck Nation, and more recently, Ryan Long’s “When Wokes and Racists Actually Agree on Everything” video:

* Remove the trees, bomb the Teslas. Fly the private planes and suborbital pleasure flights. As Glenn likes to say, I’ll believe global warming is a crisis when the people who tell me it’s a crisis start to act like it’s a crisis themselves.

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll 44

HMM: Astronomers say they’ve found strongest ever ‘hints’ of life beyond our solar system.

Astronomers announced Thursday that they had detected the most promising “hints” of potential life on a planet beyond our solar system, though other scientists expressed skepticism.

There has been vigorous debate in scientific circles about whether the planet K2-18b, which is 124 light-years away in the Leo constellation, could be an ocean world capable of hosting microbial life, at least.

Using the James Webb Space Telescope, a British-US team of researchers detected signs of two chemicals in the planet’s atmosphere long considered to be “biosignatures,” indicating extraterrestrial life.

On Earth, the chemicals dimethyl sulfide (DMS) and dimethyl disulfide are produced only by life, mostly microscopic marine algae called phytoplankton.

Developing. Slowly, but developing.

Posted at 1:47 pm by Stephen Green 67

‘GHOST GUNS’ AND ‘HATE CRIME:’ Tulsi Gabbard Declassifies Biden Admin Docs Targeting ‘Domestic Terrorism.’

Biden’s intelligence community zeroed in on firearms — specifically “ghost guns,” “high-capacity magazines” and “assault weapons,” the documents show.

“Rein in the proliferation of ‘ghost guns’; encourage state adoption of extreme risk protection orders; and drive other executive and legislative action, including banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines,” the strategy detailed under a section about “long-term contributors to domestic terrorism.” (RELATED: DOJ And ATF Repeal Biden’s ‘Zero Tolerance Policy,’ Delivering Win For Gun Owners)

Biden’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) cracked down on “ghost guns,” or un-serialized, privately made firearms.

The Second Amendment group Gun Owners of America slammed the document, deeming it “Biden’s secret plan to eliminate the Second Amendment in the name of ‘counterterrorism.’”

After his infamous bitter clingers Kinsley gaffe, in 2008, Obama lied promised, “I believe in the Second Amendment. I believe in people’s lawful right to bear arms. I will not take your shotgun away. I will not take your rifle away. I won’t take your handgun away.”

As Jim Geraghty liked to say, all of Obama’s promises came with expiration dates.

Especially during his third term.

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll 74

ANN ALTHOUSE IS UNPERSUADED BY HARVARD’S DEFENDERS: “Professor Connelly sees himself and his New York Times readers as the ‘we’ who look on as Trump breaks things and hope to excite ‘the American people’ to oppose and resist Trump. But the American people have supported Trump because the American people have seen what your ‘we’ has done with its power when it has had the chance. ‘Let the Experts Handle It Again’ is not a great rallying cry these days.”

Related: The Suicide of Expertise.

Posted at 1:27 pm by Glenn Reynolds 30

EVERYONE IN THE FIELD KNOWS THIS. THEY DEMONETIZED ME OVER POLITICS, TOO.

When do I file for damages?

Posted at 1:01 pm by Glenn Reynolds 49

WHAT IS A WOMAN? JK ROWLING IS A WOMAN, A GENUINELY TOUGH WOMAN:

Posted at 12:45 pm by Stephen Green 87

BURGMENTUM, BABY: Burgum Takes the Wind Out of the Empire State’s Plans. “As much as I cracked on Doug Burgum as a presidential candidate, he is going gangbusters as Interior Secretary and is proving to be another of Trump’s inspired picks. All I can say is molto well done to him. As for the offshore waters South of Long Island, I hope the folks really enjoy them now. Things are always better savored when you realize what you almost lost.”

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll 23

IMPRESSIVE: High School Student Discovers 1.5 Million Potential New Astronomical Objects by Developing an A.I. Algorithm. “Matteo Paz from Pasadena, California, recently won the first place prize of $250,000 in the 2025 Regeneron Science Talent Search for combining machine learning with astronomy. Self-described as the nation’s ‘oldest and most prestigious science and math competition for high school seniors,’ the contest recognized Paz for developing his A.I. algorithm. The young scientist’s tool processed 200 billion data entries from NASA’s now-retired Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) telescope. His model revealed 1.5 million previously unknown potential celestial bodies.”

Posted at 11:43 am by Stephen Green 62

CHANGE? Meet the Man Who Murdered the Democratic Party. “A pair of earthshattering, history-altering, Chris Christie-sized stories broke this week, but they’ve (mostly) skated beneath the political periphery. That’s because you can’t grasp the sheer enormity of the consequences until you connect them together.”

Posted at 11:12 am by Stephen Green 202

I’VE HAD SIMILAR THOUGHTS: Is It August 1941 Again? If So Is There A Chinese Operation Z In The Works?

For many years before the United States entered World War II, tensions between the United States and Japan escalated. In the months prior to December 7, 1941, those tensions reached the breaking point. Responding to the Japanese occupation of airfields in French Indochina, the U.S. froze all Japanese assets on July 26, 1941. On August 1st, it imposed an embargo on oil and gasoline exports to Japan. Without those exports, the Japanese economy and military would grind to a halt.

The Japanese were faced with a clear choice. The sanctions imposed by the United States were a fatal blow to Japan’s economy. Tokyo could knuckle under, or it could strike first.

That didn’t work out very well.

Posted at 10:41 am by Stephen Green 368

21st CENTURY HEADLINES: James May reviews a fully driverless car (video).

The video goes on quite a bit too long, but for longtime Top Gear viewers, the punchline is a hoot.

It does make me slightly less apprehensive about riding in a self-driving car though: Lyft plans to launch robotaxi service in Dallas in 2026. “The ride-sharing company Lyft said Monday it plans to roll out a full self-driving robotaxi service in Dallas next year. The announcement comes as rival Uber plans to launch its self-driving taxi service with Google’s Waymo cars in Austin, Texas, next month.”

Posted at 10:35 am by Ed Driscoll 47