SHOCKED, SHOCKED, SHOCKED:  Hollywood’s Beloved ‘Gender Rights’ Nonprofit Time’s Up Closes After Years Of Siding With Alleged Democrat Abusers.

IT’S LIKE THEY NEVER CRACKED AN HISTORY BOOK:  California Politicos Proposing New ‘Wealth Tax’ for Super-Rich, ‘Exit Tax’ for Those Who Leave.

GUARDRAILS, IS IT?  Facebook, Instagram Will Reinstate Trump’s Accounts With ‘Guardrails’.

WELL, OF COURSE THEY DO:  The Usual Suspects Use Pence Classified Docs Story to Absolve Joe Biden, but Not Trump.

And we still don’t give two rotten figs for their opinions.

IT’S ALL MARXISTS SEIZING ON GROUPS FOR RELEVANCY:  Terf War.

WE HAVE HAD FRIENDS RECOVER FROM CANCER, THEN HAVE ALL THE FINANCIAL ISSUES WHILE IN RECOVERY: This is a friend of a friend, not personally known to me, but my friends like her, and she seems like she could use a hand up.

ANALYSIS: TRUE.

OPEN THREAD: Enjoy yourselves.

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Pfizer Introduces New Mascot ‘Clotty.’

ARMOND WHITE: What Is the Worst Film of 2022?

She Said depends on lame emotionality while also absolving the media of its impact on public consciousness — supporting the elite-professional-class position on business, politics, and male–female relations is the only option. Those of us appalled that the front page of the Times has turned into Pravda are unlikely to root for Twohey-Rosen’s crusade.

She Said never takes us inside Hollywood practices — how agents intercede to negotiate an actor’s employment terms. Instead, personal, transactional, careerist behavior is elided, replaced by nightmare scenarios that contradict the age-old, consensual, casting-couch tradition.

Film producer and former Variety editor Peter Bart went outside the highly politicized trade media to IndieWire to complain about She Said’s clumsy narrative structure. Bart challenged the sentimentality that neglected Weinstein’s side of the media witch hunt and failed to provide a full, hiss-boo characterization of the villain. But he forgot that She Saidwas never intended to be art portraying a bad guy’s human side. A professional of Bart’s experience surely knows that Millennial Hollywood has turned into a partisan machine that dismisses equal justice the same way the Pelosi Congress has denied the J6 prisoners their due process.

As lame, weepy, and presumptuous as She Said is, its predictableness is actually tyrannical. The filmmakers figured that moviegoers would submit to the force of its biases, as with traditional media’s other outwardly political calumnies. So what if our social, cultural, and political experience is ruined by gaslighting?

In She Said the media no longer accurately report facts about contemporary issues or their own practices. Consider the TV-trite casting of Patricia Clarkson and Andre Braugher as Times executives — an appeal to the same bureaucratic fantasies in such network programs as All Rise, The Good Wife, The Good Fight, Veep, and The West Wing, all of which encourage viewer docility through the normalization of the power elite.

Pitt and friends disregard the New York Times’ political fetishization — the same partisanship you can see on any Sunday-morning chat show. Clarkson’s editrix Rebecca Corbett patronizes her cub reporters; she’s a mother-hen type evoking former Times exec Jill Abramson, who boasted about carrying an Obama doll in her purse. Braugher’s typage implausibly represents executive editor Dean Baquet’s biracial Creole power position, as if Braugher, the dark-skinned impersonator, could actually rise through the Gray Lady’s long-time white-collar, white-male echelon; it falsifies how upward mobility works in the privileged professions (an aberration of what Harvey Weinstein himself identified as “the Obama Effect”).

No wonder the public resisted She Said; it deprived us of seeing long-denied justice prevail; that used to be the hallmark of social-justice filmmaking. She Said could have been an enlightening screwball comedy, like He Said, She Said, the ’90s lark about internecine relations among journalists. (Kevin Bacon and Elizabeth Perkins played politically opposed reporters who fall in love. Mulligan and Kazan fall in love with white-girl vengeance.) So She Said deserved to flop.

Hollywood “inside baseball”-type movies have long flopped at the box office. Few people want to watch a film that feels like homework — there’s a reason why All the President’s Men starred Redford and Hoffman at the peak of their careers. Additionally, as I wrote in November, Hollywood and the DNC-MSM knew of Weinstein’s predatory ways, but both chose to look the other way for decades. Why would audiences reward them with a hit film?

WAIT, I THOUGHT THE OZONE HOLE WAS ALL BECAUSE OF MY DEODORANT: Hunga Tonga undersea volcano eruption likely to make ozone hole larger in coming years.

AUDIT THE FED: Republicans introduce bill to audit THIS rogue government agency.

NIH COULDN’T KNOW WHAT KIND OF CORONAVIRUS RESEARCH IT WAS FUNDING: At least that’s the case with grants given to EcoHealth Alliance, according to the Department of Health and Human Services Inspector-General. Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) says the solution is defunding. The Founders would approve.

ABSOLUTELY PERFECT: Rep. Adam Schiff takes to TikTok to cry about being kicked off the Intelligence Committee.

Lol. Upset about being kicked off the House Intelligence Committee, Schiff posts his grievances on a CCP spyware site. https://t.co/16qkti8wbW

— Chuck Ross (@ChuckRossDC) January 26, 2023

Flashback to December 15th: Senate Votes to Ban TikTok on Government Devices. “Now it’s up to the House to pass the bill, and for President Biden to sign it into law. He should heed the advice of his own Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, who said last month that TikTok presents ‘legitimate national security concerns.’ It also appears that the Senate has been following the lead of several states. Texas, South Dakota, South Carolina, Maryland, Nebraska, and now Utah have banned the app on government devices within their states. Plus, the US Army has prohibited soldiers from using TikTok on government-owned devices since 2019.”

GOOGLE ISN’T JUST AFRAID OF COMPETITION FROM CHATGPT — THE GIANT IS SCARED CHATGPT WILL KILL AI:

It’s not just that ChatGPT is offering serious competition to its search engine. It’s that the technology represents everything Google was afraid artificial intelligence would become. If ChatGPT runs rampant, the search giant fears it could ruin AI adoption for everyone.

Since going viral, ChatGPT has demonstrated how generative AI can be user-friendly, practical, and productive. But it also comes with controversy: the possibility that it can be used for cheating, phishing, malware, and other bad behaviors.

If you’re looking for something even creepier than ChatGPT, Replika, an AI-driven Chatbot, has been advertising quite a bit on Facebook recently: Can Replika Really Help Ease Anxiety? I Tried the Chatbot App to Find Out.

Let’s just say that even though we’re way past 2019, the Tyrell Corporation won’t be losing much sleep over Replika.

But between ChatGPT, Replika, and Midjourney, the AI photo manipulation software, I’ve had my first taste of Tofflerian Future Shock over technology — specifically, how AI will be shaping the future.

DAVE CHAPPELLE SLAMS HYPOCRITE TRANS PROTESTERS AS THEY HUFF AND PUFF ABOUT VIOLENCE: “‘The trans [people] and their surrogates, always say that my jokes are somehow gonna be the root cause of some impending violence that they feel like is inevitable for my jokes,’ Chappelle said. ‘But I gotta tell you, as abrasive as they were, the way they were protesting, throwing eggs at people, throwing barricades, cussing and screaming, [none of my fans] beat ‘em up.’”

20 YEARS AGO ON INSTAPUNDIT: “It’s not McCarthyism to call people who are communists, communists. Communists, as devoted followers of murderous totalitarianism, deserve to be called to account every bit as much as their Nazi colleagues. And in the 21st century, they can hardly pretend to be ignorant of their ideology’s true nature. . . . Ed Driscoll notes that the Times story has proved James Lileks right: ‘McCarthyism’ today doesn’t mean false accusations of communism; it apparently means calling self-identified communists by their proper name.”

Plus, a message from Nelson Ascher:

A communist in America today who in his way endorses the Gulag is every bit as much an apologist for totalitarianism and genocide as any rightwing nut who denies the Holocaust. In a way, we could say he/she is even worse, because there is no Nazi extermination camp in activity anywhere, but there are Gulags in places like Cuba, North Korea or China. Thus, while a German neo-Nazi, for instance, is directly responsible at most for some immigrants killed in Europe, a communist is backing exisiting regimes that keep exterminating hundreds of thousands as we discuss.

Then, his idea that they or some of them may have been justified because of “their passionate commitment to social justice” is rather hard to defend. We could even say that at least the Nazis were sincere (though nobody would take them at their word in time) while the communists gave even hypocrisy a bad name. Murdering in the name of lofty ideals is, for me, an extra perversion once, besides the human corpses, they littered the discourse with the corpses of the ideas and ideals they’ve instrumentalised and debased. That, by the way, is exactly what many in the left are doing nowadays when they use terms like “peace” and “human rights” to promote Saddam’s dictatorship or the cold blooded massacre of Israelis. And what was exactly the kind of social justice they actually preached? Hunger for all, except for party members.

It’s because there are people trying to show that, well, the worst the left did wasn’t as bad as the worst the right did, that our European friends keep denying that leftist synagogue burning is anti-Semitic. What’s the next step? Looking for the righteous roots of Islamicist anger? The Muslims too have their own ideas about social justice, right?

When, during the Russian civil war, the Finnish whites were threatening to intervene against the Bolsheviks, Lenin warned Mannenheim that the distance from Henlsinki to Petrograd was the same as the distance from Petrograd to Helsinki. Thus, “the gulf that separates America from Europe” because of “simplistic” American anti-Communism isn’t smaller than the gulf that separates Europe from America because of simplistic European apology of communist crimes.

The Western European communists backed their Eastern European, Cuban, Cambodian, Vietnamese, Chinese counterparts until the bitter end and even after that. For God’s sake: the Trotskyites nowadays do back lunatic Stalinist/Maoist regimes such as that in North Korea! They’ve also backed the fascistic military in Argentine during the Falklands war as well as the Talibans.

And from me: “Yes, the only unifying thread I can find is opposition to America if possible, and, failing that, opposition to Western ideas of freedom. To call such an ideology evil is no exaggeration. To defend it is to defend, well, evil.”

OH, PLEASE: Latest Change to The Doomsday Clock Brings Us Closer to Midnight Than Ever. If they were honest, then the clock, which was introduced back during the Cold War when things were vastly more dangerous, would now be set at something like 9AM. But it’s just a PR gadget and has no actual connection with reality.

UPDATE: From the comments: “The Doomsday Clock is closer to midnight than any time in history? That means it wasn’t as close to midnight under Donald Trump! Or in other words, the Doomsday Clock folks are unintentionally endorsing Donald Trump for 2024!”

Heh. Plus: “A Doomsday Clock that has been going on for about 75 years seems to be a little unclear on the concept.”

UPDATE (From Ed): America’s Newspaper of Record reports: Billions Dead As Doomsday Clock Springs Forward For Daylight Saving Time.

HAHA: Hillary Clinton Boasts Of Having No Classified Documents From Her Time As President.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. COVID-19 Is No Longer a Public Health Emergency.

BREAKING: Meta to Allow Trump Back on Facebook.

THIS ARTICLE TAKES THE “ASIAN HATE” ANGLE, BUT IT WAS ASIANS DOING THE SHOOTING: ‘No safe spaces’: For Asian Americans, California shootings add to growing mental health crisis.

Anyway, the fear-mongering news media should take some (most of) the blame for the stress and anxiety here.

VIRTUALLY THE ENTIRE MEDIA APPARATUS IS DEVOTED TO KEEPING WOMEN STRESSED, WORRIED, AND SAD SO I’M NOT TAKING ANY BLAME HERE: U.S. ranks behind Latvia and China on Women’s Health Index—with women more stressed, worried, angry, and sad than they were at any point in the past decade.

AMAZING STORY: Navy Pilot Who Secretly Killed Four MiGs On One Mission Finally Recognized. “Capt. E. Royce Williams shot down four Soviet MiG-15 jets in a single mission over Korea, but his achievement was obscured for decades.”

TOP SELLER: Coofandy Men’s Hawaiian Floral Beach Shirts. #CommissionEarned