March 29, 2025

OPEN THREAD: Party on.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds 1643

THE MISSING MEN: “I realized that there is something like a touch of the tragic about many of the lives of the young men on my street in a small town in southwestern Ohio. It’s a homey town in a fast-developing and affluent county, not far from Cincinnati, with a good school district, close to opportunity in many ways. But there’s something quietly amiss, something about the men. I think of them as good men—often sensitive, often kind. But it’s like the train left and they are still here waiting.”

Posted at 6:35 pm by Glenn Reynolds 206

I THINK THEY’RE DRAWING FROM A POISONED POOL: Columbia’s new prez called Congress hearings on antisemitism ‘Capitol Hill nonsense.’

Also a shallow pool: “Claire Shipman, a former CNN White House correspondent married to former Obama Administration press secretary Jay Carney, served as co-chair of the University’s board of trustees before she was appointed Friday night to replace interim school president Katrina Armstrong.”

Posted at 6:17 pm by Glenn Reynolds 175

ANOTHER PIC BY THE INSTAWIFE, WHO WAS ON A REAL NEWSGATHERING BINGE TODAY:

This was the Knox County convention, and former state rep. Martin Daniel was elected county chair. I think that is an excellent choice, and that he’s got the right ideas.

Posted at 4:41 pm by Glenn Reynolds 39

AFFLUENT WHITE FEMALE LIBERALS ARE AWFL: Woman whose MAGA hat meltdown, subway wipeout went viral is an ‘extremely liberal’ luxury-brand specialist. “Testanero has gone off the deep end when it comes to politics, a former colleague claimed. ‘She and I stopped being friends a while ago, as she became extremely liberal and very agitated,’ the one-time coworker told The Post.”

Mentally disturbed women who think they can do anything with impunity are a problem.

Posted at 4:07 pm by Glenn Reynolds 219

UP IN SMOKE: Instead of Improving Movies, Variety Wants to Allow Pot and Texting in Theaters.

Can you imagine spending $65 for tickets, popcorn, and soda to suffer through three hours in a room filled with the stench of something called the skunk weed (for good reason) and idiots texting? Plus, Variety thinks movie theaters should become pot dispensaries.

“Imagine how much better Barbie or Deadpool & Wolverine would be if you could see it” while smoking a joint, asks Variety rhetorically. “Selling weed could bring fresh revenue and new customers to theaters.”

What?

Both of those movies were monster hits, the top grossers of their respective years. Who in their right mind believes allowing pot smoking and texting in the theater would have improved their box office?

Granted, Variety’s idea is to have exclusive screenings for potheads and texters. Nevertheless, the entire theater will still stink of that crap.

Here’s Variety lobbying for texting: “Although cinephiles might object, if movie theaters want to attract younger audiences who refuse to give up their devices during the two-hour running time of most films, they might need to stop banning phones.”

Meanwhile, the New York Post suggests booze and/or pickleball will do the trick: Movie theaters are trying everything to bring audiences back — from pickleball to cocktail bars.

One owner of a smaller Midwest chain isn’t waiting around for the crowds to magically reappear.

“The pandemic made us realize that we need to diversify,” says Bob Bagby, CEO of family-owned B&B Theaters. “We can’t just depend on studios to provide us with what we need to drive our business.”

That means pickleball games and cocktails in the lobby, even bowling — all designed to get people to see the theaters as more than just a place to screen the latest flicks.

People now refer to seeing movies on the big screen as essentially annual events. “Yeah, I saw Oppenheimer that year.” “I watched Top Gun: Maverick in the theater.” “I saw the big Spider-Man multiverse movie Christmastime 2021.” It’s hard to believe that people once went to the movies weekly — and that Hollywood created watchable product to fill that demand instead of hectoring its audiences to have politically correct opinions and utter the latest bespoke pronouns.

Related: A Twitter thread on J.R.R. Tolkien versus Disney concludes:

Posted at 2:14 pm by Ed Driscoll 236

I TWEETED THIS EARLIER, BUT THE INSTAWIFE TOOK THE PICS. Pro-Elon/Pro-Tesla/Pro-JD Vance demonstrators at Knoxville’s Tesla dealership.

UPDATE: Compare and contrast. It’s nice to live in a civilized city.

Posted at 1:23 pm by Glenn Reynolds 66

WATCH: Scott Jennings Humiliates Another CNN Talking Head.

On Friday evening, Lulu Garcia-Navarro made the laughable attempt to convince viewers that this situation was somehow worse than Secretary Lloyd Austin’s catastrophic failures—such as the one that left 13 American service members dead, or the time he went AWOL while his deputy lounged on vacation, cocktail in hand. With a straight face, she actually suggested that if this had happened under the Biden administration, someone would have been held accountable.

“If this was a Democrat or a democratic administration who had foolishly, unconscionably created a group chat to have discussion about a military operation that was top secret, I think, Scott, you would have been the first person to call for those people’s resignation,” Garcia-Navarro argued.

She then insisted that accountability should not be a partisan issue. “Accountability is actually something that normally happens in a well-functioning administration,” she said. “This isn’t, you know, cowboys and Indians and calling for scalps. This is actually what most people would think was, if someone has behaved in a way that puts American lives at risk, they should be held accountable for it.”

“You don’t have to make up hypotheticals, Lulu, about if this happened in a democratic administration,” Jennings countered. “Let me take you back in time. In a Democratic administration, the secretary of defense oversaw a disastrous military operation in which 13 servicemen died in Afghanistan. Then to try to make up for it, they vaporized like seven children in a drone strike. Then later, the secretary of defense went AWOL and didn’t even tell the commander-in-chief.”

Garcia-Navarro quickly interrupted. “This is a completely different thing,” she insisted.

Now, let’s get real for a moment. She’s right; they are different situations. What happened under Lloyd Austin’s watch was so much worse. The incompetence of the Biden administration not only resulted in the deaths of 13 U.S. servicemembers, but also the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban, who now had access to billions of dollars of U.S. military equipment that was left behind by Joe Biden.

Related: My theory about who’s really behind the war plans leak that could trigger a White House coup.

Posted at 1:14 pm by Ed Driscoll 134

HMM: Heart problems tied to brain shrinkage in new study. “Heart disease might contribute to the sort of brain shrinkage seen in dementia, a new study says. People with early signs of heart problems are more likely to have brain changes associated with dementia, researchers reported Wednesday in the journal Neurology.”

Posted at 1:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds 23

BENJAMIN KERSTEIN: Rise of the ‘anti-Nazi’ Nazis.

The progressive left believes that it owns anti-Nazism. Literally owns it. Anti-Nazism is progressivism’s personal property, and no one else has any right to it. As such, progressivism can wield anti-Nazism as a weapon against anyone and anything it finds distasteful with total impunity.

Today, with campus antisemites stating at every possible opportunity that their goal is a second genocide of the Jews and engaging in the racist hate crimes necessary to prove it, we are faced with an irony that is world-historical in scope: Progressives use anti-Nazism to defend people who are very much like Nazis. Progressives then go even further and claim that these people are victims of Nazism.

* * * * * * * *

The reason is that, whatever their pretensions otherwise, progressives do not own anti-Nazism. In fact, they have no claim to anti-Nazism whatsoever. Genuine anti-Nazism can only lie with those who oppose genocidal antisemitism, because if Nazism is not genocidally antisemitic, then it is not Nazism. You cannot be anti-Nazi while defending genocidal antisemites. It is impossible.

Moreover, by claiming that antisemites are somehow victims of Nazism, progressives are engaging in an act of monstrous blasphemy. They are defaming the millions of Jews who died at antisemitism’s hands and appropriating the generational trauma of those who survived.

Historically, this is par for the course. Antisemites have always been happy to appropriate whatever they wish from the Jews and then spit in our faces. But it is no less disgraceful for its great age.

This is offensive enough, but progressives dig the hole even deeper: They claim that the Jews are Nazis. This blood libel is a staple of progressive rhetoric and wildly popular among the campus antisemites. In many ways, it has become part of “legitimate” discourse in academia. Nonetheless, it is difficult to fully convey the depth of the sadism and cruelty inherent in it.

Related: The World After Gaza: turning the Holocaust against Israel.

Posted at 12:45 pm by Ed Driscoll 103