HAVE YOU NEVER NOTICED THE SIZES OF CATHOLIC & MORMON FAMILIES? Devout religious followers have better sex lives: shocking study.
Honestly, it’s also that if your religion dictates monogamy and life-long marriage, you’re having sex with someone you absolutely trust. how can that not be better? This is only shocking for people who think Hollywood writers are in touch with reality.
THEY MIGHT CONSIDER KEEPING VIOLENT CRIMINALS IN JAIL: Adams, Hochul slam concealed-carry ruling as permit seekers skyrocket.
WHAT’S IT CALLED WHEN YOU REPEAT SOMETHING AND EXPECT A DIFFERENT RESULT? Joe Rogan’s call to ‘vote Republican’ sparks demands to boycott Spotify.
Yes, I know, but in their case, I’m starting to believe it’s just stupidity and malice.
IN BIDEN’S AMERICA THE RICH GET HIGHER QUALITY HOUSEHOLD HELP: Six figure salaries and benefits galore: Why Ivy League grads are opting for nanny gigs over finance jobs.
OPEN THREAD: Speak up. Fill the room blog with your intelligence.
JOSH BARRO: Digital Revenue Dies in Drumpfness.
According to the Times, the Post is considering layoffs and publisher Fred Ryan thinks there are substantial numbers of low performers in the newsroom who should be managed out — a plausible idea I’ll get to in a moment. I want to talk first about the strategic decisions the Post made that cemented its dependency on Donald Trump’s constant chumming of the news cycle — and the smarter ones the Times made to become more resilient.
But the Times, where I was a correspondent from 2014 to 2016, is also a lot of other things. It is a leading food and cooking publication. It owns one of the top product review websites, Wirecutter. It’s a major producer of successful podcasts. It has a market-leading team that produces graphics, interactives and visualizations — that team’s work is deployed to showcase the Times’ political and investigative reporting, yes, but it also is a driver of the Times’ general interest offerings, like the dialect quiz or this fun explanation of how “songs of the summer” came to sound so similar to each other. And the Times has the New York Times Crossword, helmed for decades by Will Shortz, as the flagship of its daily games offering.
None of those businesses, with the partial exception of the podcast business, is dependent on liberal political agita about Donald Trump. Most of them aren’t even dependent on high levels of interest in news. And even in the core news report, while there are several areas of coverage where the Times and the Post are comparable, it’s easy to identify areas remote from politics where the Times is clearly stronger — notably arts and business. It’s hard to think of any area where the Post clearly leads the Times.1
During the Trump era, the Post’s lack of diversification wasn’t a huge problem — politics was big business, liberal politics was really big business, and “Democracy Dies in Darkness” spoke to customers who wanted to stand up to Trump. Indeed, the Times reports the Post had once been planning to adjust its business for a drop in reader interest in politics — the team working on the strategy for this called it “Operation Skyfall” — but those plans were shelved in 2016 when Donald Trump unexpectedly won the presidential election and a pivot became unnecessary. But eventually the sky did fall, and the Times was ready for a post-Trump era in a way the Post wasn’t — it’s likely a lot of dual subscribers realized they could get all the political coverage they needed from one of the papers, and that the non-politics offerings from the Times were way more compelling than the Post’s.
So what should the Post do? I don’t think it has the option to become a specialist publication like the Journal or Politico.2 But it can diversify its business so it is like the Times not just in tone, but also in scope.
The Times article says the Post has been looking at acquisitions.3 If I ran the Post, and I had a budget to buy other companies, my first choice would be to buy a cooking publisher with a monetizable recipe archive — maybe America’s Test Kitchen, or maybe Conde Nast’s food magazine business. (Food is an especially logical core competency for a media company owned by Jeff Bezos because of the obvious cross-promotion opportunities with Whole Foods, Amazon.com, and Amazon Prime Video.) I would get into the games business. And more broadly, I would try to think like the Times has — about being a destination for information, not just news, which makes it possible to build a brand that might have a political valence but isn’t just about politics.4
It appears that some effort was made to create WaPo-branded television for Amazon Prime Video in earlier years, but these shows simply got swallowed up by the massive amount of flotsam and jetsam on the platform. Evidently, Bezos is content to let the Post exist as another backwater asset in his portfolio, while Amazon spends the big bucks on flashier product: Amazon’s $1bn bet on Lord of the Rings shows scale of its TV ambition.
THE CLOSER YOU GET TO THE FRONT, THE POLITER SMART OFFICERS GET: Three FSB officers walk into a bar…and get shot by drunk Russian soldiers.
THE NEW SPACE RACE: Chinese megawatt-level space nuclear reactor passes review.
‘SHOOT. ME. NOW:’ Obama Wanted To Drop ‘Condescending’ Biden, New Book Says.
Barack Obama and Joe Biden had such a “fraught relationship” that Obama wanted to drop Biden from the 2012 Democratic ticket, according to excerpts from a new book obtained by the Daily Mail.
Obama considered replacing his vice president with Hillary Clinton, leaving Biden “distraught,” according to The Long Alliance by Gabriel Debenedetti. Obama eventually stuck with Biden, though he was furious at his veep’s decision to blurt out the administration’s support for gay marriage, an announcement Obama wanted to make.
Biden’s actions were “tantamount to betrayal” and “an example of Biden trying to position himself in front of the president,” the book says, with staffers saying that “we can’t trust [Biden] to say his lines.”
For his part, Biden said he was “not going to grovel to this guy,” referring to Obama. “My manhood is not negotiable.”
There’s quite a “creepy Joe” tinge to that last line.
UPDATE: “But this doesn’t mean one should count Palin out just yet. Peltola will fill the late Rep. Don Young’s seat for the rest of the year. Both Palin and Peltola will be running to fill Alaska’s seat in the House in November.”
JOHN FETTERMAN EFFECTIVELY ADMITS HE ISN’T FIT FOR THE SENATE:
The Senate is a full-time commitment, not a brief intrusion on your afternoon. If Fetterman is not healthy enough to debate, he is not healthy enough to serve a six-year term.
Fetterman doesn’t want to debate because he doesn’t want to damage his polling lead, which has gradually dropped from 12 points when he made his first public appearance just over two weeks ago to 8 points now, according to FiveThirtyEight.
Yes, President Joe Biden showed in 2020 that candidates really could just hide from the voters. But look at how poorly that has turned out.
There’s a bit of an Trunalimunumaprzure vibe going on here:
Fetterman struggles to speak at a campaign event.
“What is wrong with demanding for an easy, safe kind of their income? A path to a safe place for them to win? Or, excuse me, to work? https://t.co/MGwNs605Y9
— Washington Free Beacon (@FreeBeacon) August 31, 2022
SCIENCE MARCHES ON: The World’s Largest Experiment Simulating Dead Bodies in Suitcases Is Underway.
I’M WORRIED THAT COMBINING IT WITH WITH THE NOMAD PROBE WAS A MISTAKE: NASA repairs issue with Voyager 1 space probe.
HERE WE GO AGAIN: Suez Canal Halted Again After Oil Tanker Runs Aground.
TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! Watch: Biden Doesn’t Know Who’s Running for What in Pennsylvania.
“Please, please elect the attorney general [Josh Shapiro] to the Senate. Elect that big ol’ boy [John Fetterman] to be governor,” Biden said.
Recent polling from The Trafalgar Group found that both Shapiro and Fetterman hold small leads over their respective Republican opponents. Shapiro currently leads Republican State Sen. Doug Mastriano by four points, while Fetterman currently holds a five-point lead over Dr. Mehmet Oz. Both GOP candidates have plenty of time to surge ahead before November.
These are two important races in a battleground state, and it’s concerning that Joe Biden doesn’t seem to know which candidate is running for which position.
Related: Oz Drops Nails a Perfect Troll After Fetterman Refuses to Debate.
UPDATE YOUR KINDLE: All-new Fire 7 tablet, 7” display, 32 GB. #CommissionEarned
UPDATE NEWSPEAK DICTIONARIES ACCORDINGLY, COMRADES: U.S. Forces Ordered to Stop Using Gender Pronouns to Improve ‘Lethality.’
A division of the U.S. Pacific Air Forces (PACAF), the branch tasked with confronting China, has ordered its senior leaders and commanders to stop using gender pronouns in written formats, saying the shift to more neutral language will help improve the fighting force’s “lethality.”
“In accordance with the Diverse PACAF priority, ‘We must embrace, promote and unleash the potential of diversity and inclusion,” states a May email sent to senior leaders and commanders at the Andersen Air Force Base in Guam, which operates under the Pacific Air Forces, according to a partial copy of the order obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
Leaders at the base are instructed, “Do not use pronouns, age, race, etc.” when writing performance reviews or other materials, such as recommendations for awards. “Competition against near-peer adversaries requires a united focus from the command, the joint team, and our international partners. Welcoming and employing varied perspectives from a foundation of mutual respect will improve our interoperability, efficiency, creativity, and lethality.”
The policy change is part of a larger effort by the Biden administration and U.S. military to foster what it says is a more culturally sensitive environment. The U.S. Navy, for instance, recently published a video instructing its sailors on proper gender pronouns. The Army also mandates gender identity training and trains officers on when to offer subordinates gender-transition surgery, the Free Beacon first reported in March. Critics of these moves say a woke cultural agenda is handicapping America’s fighting forces and distracting it from pressing global challenges, such as terrorism and China’s aggressive war moves.
As the late comedian Bill Hicks (in)famously said, “‘The esprit de corps will be affected, and we are such a mora …’ Excuse me, but aren’t you all a bunch of f***ing hired killers?”
KILL YOUR TELEVISION BEFORE IT KILLS YOU: Study: Blue light from TVs, laptops, phones may accelerate aging.
HOW IT STARTED: California will ban sales of new gasoline-powered cars by 2035.
—NPR, Thursday.
How it’s going: Californians are urged to avoid charging electric vehicles, days after state announced ban of new sales of gas-powered cars by 2035.
—The Blaze, today.
UPDATE: In accordance with the prophecy:
(Updated and bumped.)
GREAT MOMENTS IN MORAL EQUIVALENCE: Sam Harris: ‘Donald Trump Is a Worse Person than Osama bin Laden.’
“I’ve said on several occasions that I think Donald Trump is a worse person than Osama bin Laden. A statement is obviously meant to get your attention. I get that it’s surprising, but it’s not meant to be hyperbolic. I can defend every word of a statement like that. What I can’t defend are people’s misunderstandings and erroneous extrapolations of a statement like that. Perhaps I should just clarify that statement again, because it actually goes a long way to explaining my view of Trump, why I think he’s such a terrible person, but not nearly as scary as some people think he is, and not nearly as scary as many people think I think he is. I think Osama bin Laden was a more or less normal human being psychologically. He was just living in the grip of a dangerous and idiotic worldview. The moral structure he imagined he was living under and wanted to impose on the rest of the world given his beliefs was despicable, so he created immense harm and it’s very good that we killed him. But within the framework of his odious beliefs, he demonstrated many virtues. He was a man who certainly seemed to be capable of real self-sacrifice and he was committed to ideals beyond his narrow self-interest. He was by all accounts personally quite courageous. I don’t claim to know that much about him, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all if he was generally a person of real integrity and generosity and compassion in his dealings with his fellow Muslims*. None of these things can be said about Donald Trump.”
* Remembering the Muslims who were killed in the 9/11 attacks. “The victims were 28 Muslims who died in the twin towers of the World Trade Center, in addition to three Muslims who were among the passengers on two hijacked planes; one of them crashed on a Pennsylvania field before it reached its target, and the second one hit the Pentagon.”
Earlier:
DEMOCRATS, I URGE YOU TO HEED THIS MAN’S ADVICE GOING INTO THE MIDTERMS: WaPo columnist argues Democrats ‘harming the criminal justice movement,’ moving in ‘wrong direction.’
Washington Post columnist Perry Bacon Jr. argued on Wednesday that the Democrats are “harming the criminal justice movement” and “moving in the wrong direction” when it comes to their stance on policing.
“Harming the criminal justice movement to gain advantage in intraparty feuds is petty and counterproductive. But that’s what happening, even if centrist Democrats don’t admit it,” Bacon wrote.
He noted multiple instances, such as the recall of Chesa Boudin, in which the left was losing ground in terms of criminal justice reform and said the dynamics in these situations were similar. “Centrist Democrats exaggerating the increase in crime, blaming not only the crime surge but also long-standing problems like homelessness and drug abuse on progressive reforms, and implying their left-wing opponents want to immediately and drastically reduce police spending with no plan to keep people safe,” Bacon argued.
He said centrist Democrats should use a different strategy that wasn’t “misleading.”
Related: 7 Minutes of Democrats Saying Defund The Police.
FASTER, PLEASE: Texas Applies to Build Molten Salt Nuclear Reactor by 2025.
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