There are times when it seems no words can soothe the sadness following the death of a loved one. Whether you're a child just discovering grief or a fully grown adult with years of trials and tribulations behind you, grief can sneak up and feel insurmountable.Buddhist monk Thích Nhất Hạnh was a spiritual leader and Zen philosopher, whom many referred to as "the father of mindfulness." Coining the idea of "Engaged Buddhism," his aim was to turn the concept of reflection into action.From Harvard.edu: "Some observers may associate Buddhism, and especially Buddhist meditation, with turning inward away from the world. However, many argue that the Buddhist tradition, with its emphasis on seeing clearly into the nature of suffering and, thus, cultivating compassion, has a strong impetus for active involvement in the world’s struggles. This activist stream of Buddhism came to be called 'Engaged Buddhism'—Buddhism energetically engaged with social concerns." A brown buddha statue sits near a green mountain. Photo by abhijeet gourav on Unsplash Hạnh spent the entirety of his life meditating on and writing about nonviolent conflict resolution, love, death, compassion, and mindfulness—and then urging people around the world to take action to make impactful change. He connected people of all faiths through his writing, teaching engagements, and the founding of the Plum Village Monastery in the Dordogne, southern France near the city of Bordeaux. In all he did, Hạnh worked with the intent to encourage people to seek both inner and outer peace.Proving he was also a powerful poet, in an Instagram reel making the rounds, Hạnh was once asked by a child how she can "stop being sad." In the video she says, "I had a doggy. And this doggy died and I was very sad." She turns to him, "So I don't know how to be not so sad." Gently, he responds, "Suppose you look up into the sky and you see a beautiful cloud. And you like the cloud so much." See on Instagram The child looks at him intently, her eyes welling up with tears. He continues, "And suddenly the cloud is no longer there. And you think that the cloud has passed away. Where is my beloved cloud now? So if you have time to reflect, to look, you see that the cloud has not died. It has not passed away. The cloud has become the rain. And when you look at the rain, you see your cloud."Her eyes remain bright with curiosity, as he says, "And when you drink your tea, mindfully, you can see the rain in your tea and you can see your cloud in your tea. And you can say, 'Hello, my cloud. I know you have not died. You are still alive in a new form.' So the doggy is the same. And if you look very deeply, you can see doggy in its new form."The girl starts laughing and crying in what seems to be a very pure moment of understanding. "You are still alive in a new form" seemed to help transform her thoughts on change and death in just minutes.Aubert Bastiat (@aubertbastiat) posted the Instagram clip, which is a snippet from the documentary Walk with Me about Thích Nhất Hạnh's teachings. Bastiat comments, in his own words, "Love doesn’t vanish, it simply transforms." This concept is backed up in much of Hanh's work, including his book, No Death, No Fear: Comforting Wisdom for Life, in which he wrote, "Birth and death are only a door through which we go in and out. Birth and death are only a game of hide-and-seek. So smile to me and take my hand and wave good-bye. Tomorrow we shall meet again or even before." Thích Nhất Hạnh, Buddhism, death, Buddhist monk www.youtube.com, Plum Village And just under the first comment on the reel, the director of the documentary, Marc J. Francis, writes, "I shot this for my film Walk With Me…. Love seeing this scene being shared."Something about the deep need to make sense of death spawned many vulnerable comments. People shared their heartfelt stories—from those who have lost someone recently to those who are sick and facing their own mortality.And of Thích Nhất Hạnh himself, a commenter simply writes, "One of my life’s best teachers."

Think the multiverse is just for Marvel movies? Travel the world and you’ll think differently. Each country is like its own little ecosystem, with characteristics and quirks that are completely foreign to those who’ve never been there. Upworthy has covered many stories of uniquely American quirks that have caused visitors to do a double-take, but this time, were flipping the script, thanks to a Reddit user who asked: “What’s something totally normal in your country that would shock most Americans?”Take a tour around the globe with some of our favorites below:“On Saturday nights, there is a rollercoaster cart that drives around town, drifting, doing donuts, going super fast while playing music. It’s the shape of a worm so they call it 'El Gusanito.’ It picks people up like every other block and it costs 25 cents to ride. There are no limits to how many people get on per cart. I even saw a stray dog catch a ride once. It’s so unsafe but super fun.” —Ecuador - YouTube www.youtube.com “When people die, we put up little posters - printed obituaries - on the walls of buildings all around town and close to places the person liked to frequent. They have a little picture of the person, their date of birth and death, and a message of mourning from the family.”—Bulgaria “It’s totally normal to sit naked in a sauna with your coworkers after work. Anywhere else that’s an HR panic button.” —Finland Not just coworkers—family, friends, strangers, kids… media2.giphy.com “Having to pay for public restrooms.” —France Imagine having to go so badly but being out of euros. parisjetaime.com “Walking around in public in bare feet. Very common to see supermarket shoppers and such with no shoes on, and no it’s not a class thing, all kinds of people do it. Not beating the hobbit allegations I guess.” -New Zealand Anything hobbit-esque can't be wrong. Photo credit: Canva“The whole bagged milk thing seems to really freak them out.” —Canada - YouTube www.youtube.com “Our pharmacies only sell medicine, no snacks, makeup or random stuff. First time I visited the US I thought I was in the wrong store.” —Germany But what if you need pain meds AND mascara?!Photo credit: Canva“Taking your shoes off to go inside of schools.” —Japan @lindokorchi Here’s the rule for taking off your shoes in Japan. #lifeinjapan #japanlife #japantravel #japan?? #livingabroad #japanesehouse “Whole family lives together indefinitely. In a home the size that would fit a starter family in America, they have their grandparents, aunts, uncles, etc. and they all take care of each other.” —Spain Imagine how this would affect childcare.Photo credit: Canva“A man walking along a street with a massive machete is no cause for alarm and wouldn't even get an eye raise.” —Jamaica - YouTube www.youtube.com “Prisoners make food, furniture, and other goods that you can buy at ‘prison festivals’ they hold outside the prisons themselves. These festivals have a variety of attractions and are popular with families and children” —Japan @javadiscover Could this Japanese ‘prison festival’ really be an accurate representation of life behind bars? #documentary #documentaries #japan #japanese #prison #prisoner #prisonlife #prisoners #jail #incarceration #behindbars #japaneseculture #fyp #fypシ #fypシ゚viral #foryou #foryoupage #foryoupageofficiall ♬ original sound - Java Discover "Boyfriends and girlfriends (or partners) sleeping together at each other's houses from about age 14-15 yrs old. Parents would rather have this than kids sneaking around and getting into bad situations.” —DenmarkNicole Iris GIFfrom Nicole GIFs And last but not least…“Anything without rice is just a snack no matter how big the portion is.” —Philippines Honestly…where's the lie? media0.giphy.com

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Seeing them in the flesh once again. The post The classic band Mick Fleetwood needed to reform: “So many people want to see” first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

You may have seen the news Wednesday that President Trump has settled what was a $20 billion lawsuit with the parent company of CBS News over its edit of a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris for much less. From CBS’ own reporting of the settlement: Paramount will settle President Trump’s lawsuit over a “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris for $16 million, the company announced late Tuesday. CBS News’ parent company worked with a mediator to resolve the lawsuit. Under the agreement, $16 million will be allocated to Mr. Trump’s future presidential library and the plaintiffs’ fees and costs. Neither Mr. Trump nor his co-plantiff, Texas Rep. Ronny Jackson, will be directly paid as part of the settlement. The settlement did not include an apology. Paramount also agreed that “60 Minutes” will release transcripts of interviews with presidential candidates in the future, “subject to redactions as required for legal or national security concerns,” the statement said. And there was a certain modicum of embittered editorializing: Mr. Trump’s lawsuit, filed last October when he was still a candidate for president, was widely viewed as an attack on the First Amendment. He took issue with CBS News airing two different portions of Harris’ response to a question about the Middle East, one in an early excerpt on “Face the Nation” and the other on the full broadcast of “60 Minutes.” The lawsuit was filed in Amarillo, Texas, a portion of a federal district court where the sole judge is a 2019 Trump appointee, and it was based on a state consumer protection law that is intended to prevent advertisers from misleading the public about a product being sold. CBS News is not headquartered in Texas, nor did the interview take place there. And just a bit more… First Amendment scholars and constitutional experts largely viewed the lawsuit as a frivolous misapplication of the law. Geoffrey R. Stone, a First Amendment scholar and law professor at the University of Chicago, explained, “That statute is about sales — a salesperson can be held liable for stating that a product has certain positive effects when he knows it doesn’t. But CBS is not engaged in advertising here.” Constitutional law expert and Harvard professor Noah Feldman called the case an “outrageous violation of First Amendment principles.” Politicians had also spoken out about the suit, urging Paramount Global Chair Shari Redstone not to settle. The day after McMahon announced her departure, Senators Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Ron Wyden sent a letter to Redstone raising concerns that efforts to settle with Mr. Trump would amount to bribery. Redstone had recused herself from settlement talks. Were I to engage in a bit of common vernacular, I might characterize this reporting as “butthurt.” The $16 million in cash, none of which is to be paid directly to Trump or Rep. Ronny Jackson, who joined the suit as a co-plaintiff after it was filed, seems like a small amount in comparison to another Big Media settlement of recent vintage. Trump settled a suit against ABC News for $20 million arising from ABC’s Sunday news show host George Stephanopoulos’ calling him a rapist in an interview with Rep. Nancy Mace. That was one throwaway comment by Stephanopoulos. This was an entire 60 Minutes segment containing an interview with Harris cut to make her come off as sentient when the original footage, forcibly released by order of the Federal Communications Commission, clearly showed otherwise. You’d think the payout would be a little more in this case. And it turns out that it is. Somehow, the Washington Free Beacon was able to report more about the CBS News settlement than CBS News was: CBS News parent company Paramount has agreed to settle President Donald Trump’s lawsuit that accuses CBS’s flagship news program, 60 Minutes, of editing an interview last year to benefit then-presidential candidate Kamala Harris. CBS and Paramount will pay a sum that could exceed $30 million in total, according to a source familiar. Wait, what? I thought it was just $16 million. It’s $30 million? In addition to the lump sum payment, it is anticipated that CBS will air eight figures worth of advertisements, PSAs, or similar content promoting conservative causes for free, a source familiar with the negotiations and settlement deal told the Washington Free Beacon. While Paramount’s current brass has disputed that provision, the incoming management team that is expected to take over after the company’s merger with Skydance plans to honor it, the source said. Paramount did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Yeah, I can imagine they didn’t. So CBS News and the current suits at Paramount don’t want to talk about the convincers that got Trump to lay his guns down. But the beneficiaries and allies, if not outright comrades in arms, of CBS’ newsroom denizens sure are squawking about all of this, and it’s deeee-licious… Instead of standing on principle, Paramount opted for a payout. That decision now casts a long shadow over the integrity of the transaction pending before the FCC. I once again urge the FCC to bring this matter before the full Commission for a vote. ? pic.twitter.com/x6bQYI085F — Anna M. Gomez (@AGomezFCC) July 2, 2025 CBS News did nothing wrong. But its parent company still paid the price. That’s the moral of the Paramount settlement story. And it’s a story that keeps repeating itself in the Trump era. pic.twitter.com/rrLnUV9a1E — Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) July 2, 2025 SPJ is deeply disappointed by Paramount Global’s decision to settle with President Donald Trump over his lawsuit against “60 Minutes.” “This is not just a legal settlement — it’s a travesty,” said SPJ President @emdrums. Read the full statement here: https://t.co/EBcRI4WPtU pic.twitter.com/O7hbO2I2In — Society of Professional Journalists (@spj_tweets) July 2, 2025 And of course there has to be screeching by Liz Warren… This looks like bribery in plain sight. Paramount folded at the same time it needs Trump’s approval for a billion-dollar merger. I’m calling for an investigation into whether any anti-bribery laws were broken, and I’m working on a new bill to rein in this kind of corruption. https://t.co/xdkNpe75co — Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) July 2, 2025 This one might be my favorite… The following is a statement from the Writers Guild of America East regarding Paramount’s settlement with Donald Trump over a “60 Minutes” segment: pic.twitter.com/g7RgviiHJN — Writers Guild of America East (@WGAEast) July 2, 2025 Give these folks credit, they’re certainly very mindful of the fact that Paramount is desperately trying to conduct a merger with Skydance Media, the colossally well-heeled diversified film and TV production company fronted by David Ellison — he’s the son of mega-rich Oracle founder Larry Ellison. And you can detect a bit of bitterness over that merger, can’t you? Why would all these people have such disdain for Skydance acquiring Paramount? Could it be that Larry Ellison has long been one of the bigger donors to Republican candidates and causes? Yeah, could be. In fact, as we’ve discussed in this space, the Biden FCC never got past cool on the idea of Skydance gobbling up Paramount even despite David Ellison’s dropping a $900,000 money bomb on Dirty Joe’s doomed reelection campaign last year. Liz Warren didn’t call that a bribe, though it was a hell of a lot closer to one than Paramount’s surrendering to Trump for essentially his legal costs, some adoption of best-practices safeguards against future propagandistic editing of CBS News interviews, and a truckload of free avails for the MAGA movement to air messaging on Paramount’s various channels and platforms. As bribes go, this doesn’t quite register, does it? But as humiliations go, it ranks a good bit higher. Especially when the current FCC chairman, Brendan Carr, who’s quite friendly to the MAGA cause, had been making rather disgruntled noises about CBS’ broadcast license in the wake of that Harris interview edit — and that sure wasn’t a “buy” sign for the Skydance merger. The fact that Skydance’s people, who are about to take over this flaming dungheap, were happy to divulge the bit about the free spots for conservative PSAs on their unused airtime is a bit of a giveaway of what’s coming. And an indication of just how many of the denizens of that newsroom will avoid the professional Grim Reaper when the new management gets off the elevator. Margaret Brennan, call your agent. Scott Pelley, well… maybe don’t bother. They’ve already started running off execs at CBS News. Wendy McMahon, who’d been the president there, already got her pink slip. It’s not so much a question of whether the Skydance merger will flip CBS News from blue to red. With the independent media barbarians storming the gates of the legacy corporate press’ dominance of the journalistic space, the real question is whether there will even be a CBS News, at least as it’s currently understood. Or, given CBS News’ demonstrated ethics or lack thereof, whether anybody would miss them. What Skydance has proven is they’re pretty immune to the woke mind virus and they’re not all that committed to doing things the way they’ve always been done. These are the guys who up and decided to resurrect the Top Gun franchise and went out and made a billion dollars on a sequel when nobody else in Hollywood seems to be able to break even on those. Not to mention Skydance is the fountain from which the Mission: Impossible movies, which are about as conservative a set of flicks as the 21st century is capable of housing, come from. So when they say, “Sure, we’ll air $10-15 million worth of Trumpy PSA’s to help pay off that settlement,” you’re entitled to believe that could be indicative of lots more things Liz Warren won’t like. And she might be a clown, but Liz Warren is at least smart enough to recognize this fact. That’s why the Left, and what’s left of “Journalism,” old-style, are tearing their blouses over the settlement. READ MORE: The Last Shred of Colin Powell’s Relevance Is Gone, Thank God Five Quick Things: The Coming State of Being The Fourth Era Comes to the Big Rotten Apple The post %POSTLINK% appeared first on %BLOGLINK%.

When I was 13, I got my first taste of work. Not work in the abstract. Not homework, not group projects, not “life skills” seminars. I mean actual work. Hands raw, neck burnt, jeans stained with grass and dirt. I mowed lawns, trimmed hedges, painted fences, scraped gutters — anything that paid. Then I came home and put in more hours on the farm. I learned that painting a garage in July heat will humble even the cockiest teenage boy. I grew up in a modest home where, if you wanted a new pair of cleats, you had to earn them. A new bike? Pick up the phone, start knocking on doors. Offer to weed, sweep, rake, haul. My parents didn’t give speeches about hard work; they showed me. You learned fast. I didn’t need a motivational talk (maybe the odd shake at 6 a.m.). I had my iPod, a lawnmower, a rusted rake, and a client who paid in crumpled bills if the lawn was cut clean. That kind of experience is fading, and it’s fading fast. What used to be a rite of passage — your first paycheck, your first boss, your first miserable shift counting down the minutes to clock-out — is now becoming a rarity. According to the latest reports, teen unemployment is climbing. Fewer than a million summer jobs are expected to materialize for 16- to 19-year-olds this year — the lowest figure since 2010. A generation raised on the idea that hard work pays now gets ghosted with a smile. “We’ll call you,” they say, and never do. At first glance, this might seem like a minor problem. Maybe teens should just keep their heads down, focus on school, chase internships, or pad their college applications. That’s the prevailing wisdom in 2025 — why waste time flipping burgers or folding shirts when you could build a resume by the age of 15? But that way of thinking misses the mark. And the damage, while slow, is starting to show. Summer jobs did more than fill wallets. They built character. They taught punctuality, humility, basic financial literacy, and the art of swallowing pride. You learned to deal with difficult customers, lazy coworkers, and bosses who didn’t care about your “potential,” only your output. You learned that no one owes you a gold star just for showing up. That lesson is disappearing — and with it, the early inoculation against entitlement. What takes its place? Teenagers today, many of them desperate to work (yes, really), are being shut out not by laziness but by structural shifts. Automation has eliminated a range of entry-level jobs. Adults are now filling the roles once reserved for teens, often out of economic necessity. A cash-strapped father will take that McDonald’s shift over a 17-year-old any day. And employers, wary of training short-term hires, lean toward older applicants who might stay past August. We’re witnessing the slow erosion of something elemental: the connection between labor and reward. It’s one thing to be told about hard work. It’s another to feel it — sweat in your eyes, aching arms, your first $20 tip. That feeling anchored you. It tethered your wants to effort. Without it, desires float free of discipline. And that’s where resentment festers. A boy who earns his sneakers appreciates them differently than a boy who unboxes them after whining long enough. One builds pride. The other builds expectation. This is more than nostalgia. It’s sociology. Take away a job, and you take away agency. Take away agency, and you breed helplessness. Teenagers need to know the world runs on more than likes and algorithms. That someone mops the floor. That someone flips the switch. That you can be that someone, and there’s dignity in that. When teens don’t work, summer changes shape. It stops being a season of growth and turns into one of stagnation. We say kids are addicted to screens, anxious, unmotivated. Maybe the answer isn’t another mindfulness app. Maybe it’s a lawn to cut and a grumpy neighbor to win over. I still remember the first time I got paid in full for a full day’s effort. No allowance. No birthday envelope. Just cash in hand and tired limbs. It wasn’t much, but it was mine. And it meant more than anything handed to me. Now, kids send out dozens of applications and hear nothing. They’re not lazy. They’re being locked out. Trapped in a world that talks about opportunity while quietly fencing it off.  This isn’t just about jobs. It’s about who we become when they disappear. Summer work didn’t just teach tasks. It taught us to show up. To take criticism. To get better. To push through boredom. To understand effort. It wasn’t glamorous. It wasn’t always fair. But it was real, and real is what we’re losing. A society without working teenagers doesn’t just lose productivity — it loses something deeper. It forgets a simple truth: effort changes you. You’re not owed results. You earn them in the doing. But what happens when kids are never given the chance to try? You get a generation trained to curate, not to cope. To optimize, not to endure. You get boys who don’t know how to shake hands and girls who’ve never had to hold the line behind a counter. You get millions entering adulthood with no calluses, no stories, no scars. Just the quiet ache of never being tested. It’s not just jobs we’ve lost. It’s grounding. No TikTok tutorial can replace what we gave up when we stopped handing kids a rake, a rag, or a broom, and let them figure it out for themselves. READ MORE by John Mac Ghlionn: Digital Peeping Toms: The Perverts Building Your Dating Apps We Owe Brad Pitt an Apology. Seriously. He Loved You More Than Life Itself — And It Killed Him The post %POSTLINK% appeared first on %BLOGLINK%.

Of the many things the voting masses are known for, selecting the best policies has never been one of them.   The quote “[T]he American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money” is often misattributed to Alexis de Tocqueville, but the sentiment remains salient. Zohran Mamdani swept the New York City mayoral Democratic primary last Tuesday against a field of challengers, most prominently former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, on a platform “promising everything from rent control to a $30 per hour minimum wage.”  Mamdani’s hallucinatory economics have elicited concern from reasonable observers and adoration from socialists, communists, and Democratic partisans sacrificing remaining principle upon the altar of millennial turnout. Psychologist Rob K. Henderson labels Mamdani’s movement as a key example of “luxury beliefs,” proposals styled as serving the oppressed such as defunding the police that win support largely among wealthy liberals. Indeed, Mamdani’s campaign was not a primarily working-class affair; he even won Wall Street.   However, he also demonstrated remarkable strength in areas of New York where President Trump outperformed or even won. The Trump-Mamdani voter is a real archetype in the Big Apple. Mamdani’s triumph has been labeled “the death of the old Democratic Party.” Whether it is truly so important remains to be seen. After all, every leading candidate has lost a Democratic mayoral primary in New York City for generations. Andrew Cuomo’s formidableness as an opponent can be overstated, seeing as he was still tinged by sexual harassment and his oppressive handling of COVID-19.  However, what if the doomsayers are right about Mamdani ushering in a new era of the American Left? In this case, Democratic strategists learning the right lessons from the Mamdani campaign would pose a more serious challenge for Republicans going forward than the past decade of woke. James Carville, the political wizard who packaged and sold Bill Clinton to America in 1992, coined the quip “It’s the economy, stupid.” The Clinton campaign went out of their way at every turn to relate issues back to the everyday experiences of American voters.  In contrast, the centerpiece of the 2024 Democratic campaign was allegations that Republicans were fascists out to destroy American institutions. This charge was remarkable when their opponent had previously been president and not destroyed the republic. Just as importantly, it was immaterial.  Other progressive planks were simply too focused at the patronage of particular groups to go anywhere. White liberals are the group that expresses the most left-wing views on race. A supermajority of black Americans do not regard discrimination as an issue of regularity. Meanwhile, Democratic racial policies targeted at certain groups alienated white and Asian voters discriminated against by affirmative action programs. A fraction of a fraction of American adults identify as transgender. Democratic rhetoric on the group was aiming for a tiny target and members of their base for whom it was a matter of affirming another woke luxury belief. Where the Left gave discourse over a miniscule group, conservative rhetoric appealed to the masses by being about preserving everyday institutions such as bathrooms, schools, and sports. The most substantive, large-scale issue the Harris campaign dealt with often was abortion. Abortion is a moral tragedy, but it remains quite popular. Nonetheless, at its very most abortion is of direct personal relevance to half the population, and very few women will actually receive abortions. Ending unborn lives is not a kitchen table issue.  Conservatives rightfully attacked Mamdani for past extreme statements, such as the tired leftist line “queer liberation means defund the police.” However, we must give Mamdani credit for recognizing his weaknesses. His campaign was largely mum on “queer liberation” and very loud about issues that directly affected most people. Mamdani’s policies include free childcare, freezing rent, free public transit, and the properly ridiculed proposal of government owned grocery stories. These range from difficult to implement to socialistic, but they deal with people.  People have children, pay rent, take public transit, and shop for groceries every day. The very fact that Mamdani is under controversy for these, as opposed to being under national attention for fringe issues such as gender reassignment surgeries for children, is a colossal victory for his campaign. Republicans have had it easy against a Democratic Party that has, time and again, chosen to avoid issues appealing to the preponderance of Americans in favor of sectional purity tests. The wide appeals it has made have been nebulous.  In a party of minority and special interest groups, Zohran Mamdani peddled his snake oil to everyone. Even with its new degree of extremism, Mamdani’s everyman radicalism has the ability to resonate with more voters than “no kings” ever could. READ MORE from Shiv Parihar: An Afrikaner in America Laments for His Homeland Nearly Half Dead in Luxury Apartments Given to Utah Homeless New Biography Paints Rainbow Over Charles Sumner The post %POSTLINK% appeared first on %BLOGLINK%.

Did you know Pixar released a new film recently? If the answer is “no,” you’re not alone. The movie is called Elio. It’s about an awkward 11-year-old orphan boy who dreams of being abducted by aliens. Predictably enough, that’s exactly what happens when alien species at the Communiverse mistake him for earth’s leader. That all sounds like a decent premise for a kids’ sci-fi film — but apparently it wasn’t good enough to get people into theaters to watch it. Elio’s box office performance was abysmal, to put it mildly. It made just $35 million in global ticket sales, which earned it the unenviable award of “Worst Box Office Opening Ever for a Pixar Movie.” The weekend went so badly that Pixar released a rather aggressive TikTok ad a few days ago chastising audiences for complaining about Disney’s lack of original stories while staying home from theaters when those stories are hitting the box office. (READ MORE: We Owe Brad Pitt an Apology. Seriously.) @pixar Go see Pixar’s newest ORIGINAL movie Elio, in theaters NOW! ✨?️ @rebanora ♬ original sound – Pixar – Pixar Fair enough, but the problem with Elio wasn’t the audience. Not only did the set design for the alien world look like something someone might dream up while on psychedelic drugs, the plot was confusing and reviewers found the script choppy and unconvincing at key moments. That said, there was a win. The film is noticeably devoid of the kinds of woke themes we’ve come to expect in Disney and Pixar movies. This wasn’t Turning Red, where filial disobedience is encouraged, or Lightyear, in which a same-sex couple kisses on screen, or Elemental, which featured a nonbinary character. That wasn’t by accident. Elio was reportedly scrubbed of anything that might appear even a little bit woke — much to some creatives’ chagrin. After speaking to artists who had worked with on the film, the Hollywood Reporter divulged this week that the main character, Elio, was supposed to be queer-coded (there were pictures of a male crush originally featured on his bedroom wall in one scene and he was supposed to don a pink tank top made out of trash collected on a beach in another) — a move that would have made sense given that the original director, Adrian Molina, is an openly gay filmmaker. Sometime in 2023, Molina showed his nearly finished work to Pixar and Disney executives in a private screening. By all accounts, it didn’t go over particularly well. Apparently, the executives weren’t interested in producing yet another woke film audiences wouldn’t want to watch. Molina ultimately left the project in the middle of production to work on Coco 2, and a former assistant editor at Pixar told the Hollywood Reporter that there was an “[e]xodus of talent” after new co-directors Madeline Sharafian and Domee Shi took over rewriting the new non-woke version of the story. (READ MORE: How to Create a Mediocre Remake) By all accounts, the rewrite was rather drastic — so much so that a former Pixar artist who worked on the film complained that the changes had emptied the story of any meaning: “[Y]ou remove this big, key piece, which is all about identity,” the artist told the Hollywood Reporter, “and Elio just becomes about totally nothing.” It makes sense that liberal Hollywood creatives would be frustrated by Pixar’s failure to shove LGBTQ themes down audiences’ throats, and that they would then blame any subsequent failure on the scrubbing of themes. But they’re missing the point. For once, Pixar finally did the right thing: It produced a movie parents can comfortably take their kids to watch in theaters without worrying about the underlying (or sometimes, readily apparent) woke messaging. So why wasn’t the film a success? One could justifiably blame poor marketing. Maybe the obnoxious reuse of the “bean mouth” (an animation style critics don’t tend to be big fans of) really did keep audiences home. Perhaps the awkward script — seemingly the victim of the rewrite — or the rather uncreative plot made the whole film unappealing (although Elio does currently have an 83 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which isn’t as bad as you’d think, given that the film was a total flop). But while those issues likely did contribute to the film’s failure to perform (especially the meager marketing), it’s impossible to ignore the fact that, over the last decade, Pixar and its parent company Disney have been wholeheartedly participating in and promoting woke ideology. Even as recently as March, Disney released its ill-fated woke version of Snow White. At this point, no parent can be blamed for not trusting these studios with making wholesome, family-friendly movies. (READ MORE: Frederick Forsyth: The Better Craftsman) That puts executives like Bob Iger and Pete Docter in a tough spot (one they arguably put themselves in). On one hand, the market is telling them that going woke means box office failure. On the other, they have a bunch of unruly LGBTQ activists as artists, editors, and directors. Somehow, before it’s too late and their studios go under, they have to convince parents that it’s safe to take their kids to movie theaters again. That’s going to be a long uphill battle. One hopes they’re willing to wage it. The post %POSTLINK% appeared first on %BLOGLINK%.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — The latest news from the rebuilding effort following the Los Angeles wildfires confirms everything we’ve all come to believe about the nature of the state’s bureaucracies. As of July 2, Los Angeles County’s permitting progress dashboard — a clever way for residents to track the rebuilding process — showed that only one building permit has been approved in Pacific Palisades and only 46 have been approved in the Eaton unincorporated area.  That’s excruciatingly slow progress more than five months after the fires ended. It’s especially striking given that Gov. Gavin Newsom exempted via executive order reconstruction projects from the cumbersome California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) and the Coastal Act. State, city, and county officials have — to their credit — embraced every kind of streamlining reform including a self-certification process for housing projects. And, still, there’s little to show for it in terms of actual rebuilding. As the Southern California News Group opined, “In reality, California governments have built a massive bureaucratic process that impedes construction of anything — and it’s not easy to unravel even after an emergency and when top leaders are committed to doing so.” It pointed to news reports examining real-world anecdotes of people trying to navigate this labyrinth. This frustrating situation is a reminder of (Jerry) Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy, named after the scientist and science-fiction writer: “[I]n any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. … Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. … The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.”  And then there are plenty of other realities of bureaucracy, such as its risk-averse nature. If you work in a bureaucracy, you can more easily destroy your career by approving something too quickly — and rarely face any punishment for moving too slowly. There’s little accountability, too. Sadly, California was once an entrepreneurial haven, but our state has spent decades building bureaucracies that operate mainly for the benefits of those who work for them. In recent years, California’s Democrats have been trying to roll back some of these regulatory impediments, especially those that impede housing construction. It’s not that they’ve suddenly lost their interest in government, but they’ve realized that this regulatory edifice is threatening their own policy goals. The state’s high housing costs have genuinely concerned them, exacerbated the homelessness situation, and upset the voting public. As I’ve reported here for The American Spectator, CEQA is the biggest obstacle. It requires volumes of paperwork and reviews for virtually every proposed construction project. It allows basically any “stakeholder” to file or threaten a lawsuit over CEQA compliance, which delays projects, adds costs to them, and kills many others. Members of both parties in Sacramento know the depth of the problem, but there’s been insufficient effort — except on a piecemeal basis — to solve it. But just as I was about to give up for this year, Gov. Gavin Newsom decided to play hard ball and announced last week — just a few days from the budget-signing deadline — that he would hold up the entire budget unless the Legislature passed a wide-ranging (although the specifics were still evolving) CEQA reform. The ultimate measure, which was cobbled together in two separate bills, exempts nine types of projects from CEQA requirements. It tightens up the standards for filing CEQA lawsuits. Environmentalists were livid and filled the public hearing room. They issued their predictable statements. Sen. Scott Wiener — a progressive San Francisco Democrat who has nonetheless led the charge on housing reform — even berated their “melodramatic statements.” The Legislature voted overwhelmingly in favor of the reforms, with the only “no” vote coming from a senator who objected to  Newsom’s last-minute tactics. Newsom of course signed the laws. It will take time to see if these reforms will really change the way CEQA operates. As we saw in Los Angeles, even with legal changes, it’s hard to redirect bureaucracies from their organizational goals back toward their original, often-laudatory objectives. For example, CEQA has long impeded even environmentally friendly projects, so it’s hard to argue that it actually helps the environment.  The governor’s tactics also showed that, yes, the Legislature can make meaningful change. The big question is if it actually wants to do so. Steven Greenhut is Western region director for the R Street Institute. Write to him at sgreenhut@rstreet.org. The post %POSTLINK% appeared first on %BLOGLINK%.

Former Obama speechwriter David Litt has been making the media rounds for his new book, It’s Only Drowning, which he has touted as the “Hillbilly Elegy for People Who Hate JD Vance.” His media tour follows other admissions from the Left that the Democratic Party has lost touch with much of the country, and particularly young men. Democrats recently launched a $20 million project to “study young men and how Democrats can reach them,” which has been accompanied by lame attempts to cater to young men. Litt’s book chronicles his emotional journey through an early-onset midlife crisis and existential dread of COVID, which he overcomes with therapy and taking up surfing. Surfing helps him have a hobby other than “reading the news and worrying” and allows him to practice facing his fears. But surfing also positions him to develop a friendship with his vaguely conservative (but non-voting) brother-in-law, Matt, who is not a D.C. cosmopolitan but rather an electrician who runs his own company. Litt describes their differences: “He drove a Dodge Ram; I drove a Subaru. He lifted weights to death metal; I jogged to Lizzo. He was a Joe Rogan superfan; I was a Stephen Sondheim aficionado.” By no means a man’s man, Litt struggles to find common ground with Matt, but they bond through their surfing experiences. The book itself is not particularly noteworthy, although much of it is humorous and even self-aware enough to not be an oppressive read. However, whereas Vance’s book sympathetically explained how Trump’s populism appealed to Middle America, Litt’s book, as one reviewer noted, “comes across as elitist, its ideas outdated amid the current moment.” More interesting than the book itself are Litt’s conclusions about politics and the Democratic Party — because he’s drawing all the wrong ones. Still rearing from its second loss to Trump, the Left is wandering further into the wilderness. Despite his self-described lack of manly vitality, Litt believes that his surfing experiences led him to discover the key to the “manosphere” (by which he just seems to mean younger men who are generally conservative, and not necessarily alt-right egg-slonkers). When he was asked by Vanity Fair for his “insights” applicable to wider politics, he responded that “at the heart of the manosphere is the idea that you’re self-sufficient. And that no one’s telling you what to do.” Maybe the surfing community is closer to the hippie side, but Litt has utterly missed the mark on what motivates most young men. He characterizes them as if the “manosphere” is a collection of Ayn Rand–era libertarians, rather than understanding them as reacting to a political and cultural landscape decades in decline. Maybe Litt should have taken better notes from Hillbilly Elegy: the reason working-class men don’t support further Middle Eastern regime-change wars (the example he uses) is not because that involves “someone telling you what to do,” but because coastal elites have been preoccupied with wars on the other side of the world while neglecting their own country as it deteriorated. As an Obama speechwriter, Litt and those like him played an active role in this decline. Another part of the problem with Litt’s analysis is that believes he’s comprehended the lives of Middle Americans by joining what is in reality an incredibly unique and niche community. What’s more, Litt is hardly living the life of your average surfer dude; he takes surfing trips to Spain, France, Hawaii, and an artificial wave pool in Waco, Texas. Good for him that he’s had these great experiences, but the fact that he believes surfers in foreign countries and at expensive wave parks are representative of the MAGA base at large highlights how out of touch D.C. types truly are. However, Litt’s biggest takeaway from writing his memoir is that “Democrats Need More Hobbies” if they’re going to win elections. He concludes that “the great divide between [him and the voters who reelected Trump] is that I constantly think about politics and they do not.” Citing a poll on how much voters paid attention to news about the election, Litt says that Harris was favored by a majority of those who “paid a great deal of attention to politics,” whereas Trump won among those answering “none at all.” Litt’s takeaway: Democrats need to have hobbies to pander to those uninformed masses of Trump supporters. “The way we can do it is by demonstrating we have interests and lives outside of politics. Candidates talking about things they do for fun outside of work might be more important than ever,” he wrote. Again, Litt spotlights a poignant reality but displays a bewildering blindness to its implications. Yes, Trump appeals to those who don’t constantly live in the world of politics. But the reason most people don’t constantly follow politics is not because they have a bunch of hobbies, but because they have real lives and real struggles. Normal people do have hobbies, but they also have families (with kids), bills to pay, and God to worship. Rather than focusing on hobbies as the means to understand conservatives, those on the left could start by leading more meaningful lives. For example, Litt (though married) has intentionally avoided having children, just like many in coastal elite circles. During the COVID lockdowns, Litt gave an interview during which he was asked his favorite quarantine activity. His response: “Luxuriating in the fact that we have no young children.” The fact that so many of America’s ruling class choose to remain childless certainly contributes to the country’s divisions. In contrast, Litt’s solution is for Democrats to be more trivial. But as he points out, Democrats are already trying “desperately” to make politics fun and “appear relatable,” and they’re failing spectacularly. Joy was the theme of the last Democratic National Convention, and Harris could not stop trying to make “joy cometh in the morning” catch on. But Democrats’ politics are obviously not fun. Litt’s advice is that Democratic candidates need to show off more non-political hobbies, participate in more episodes of entertainment podcasts like Call Her Daddy, and “double down on … traditional celebrities such as Taylor Swift and Beyoncé, who both endorsed Harris in 2024.” If only Luke Skywalker and the Avengers had assembled to endorse Harris, she would have won! The reality is that Democrats have consistently brought their hobbies and frivolities into politics, and it’s largely been insufferably cringeworthy. Harris tried to appear normal last fall by acting as if she had an obsession with Doritos and collard greens. In 2016, Hillary Clinton claimed that she always carried hot sauce in her purse, in imitation of a Beyonce lyric. When questioned whether she was just pandering to black people, Clinton countered, “Okay. Is it working?” The great irony of the Left’s attempts to force fun into politics is that Trump (and Vance as well) excels at being fun with effortless ease. And no one would say that Trump’s golfing hobby is the reason he appeals to so many Americans. Trump is genuinely a generational comedic talent. He doesn’t need to force it. In a viral moment, Vance recently recounted a story where Trump pressed a big red button in the Oval Office during an intense phone call, “and he looks at me and goes, ‘Nuclear.’” A few minutes later, a staffer brings a can of Diet Coke. The story is humorous, but it also shows that Trump’s wit is authentic, even when the cameras aren’t present. The story reveals one other key point: Trump is so engaging not because he brings hobbies into politics, but because he’s able to have fun while dealing with serious things. READ MORE from Jonah Apel: RFK Jr. Shows Why America Needs the MAHA Agenda Five Key Takeaways From Pew Report on Trump’s Reelection What C. S. Lewis Can Tell Us About New IVF Eugenics Technology The post %POSTLINK% appeared first on %BLOGLINK%.