THE NEW SPACE RACE: China kicks off Guowang megaconstellation with Long March 5B launch.
Archive for 2024
December 16, 2024
KAROL MARKOWICZ: OnlyFans model’s sex-marathon stunt reveals the desperate loneliness of men.
“I’m Lily Phillips and today I’m getting ran through by 100 guys.”
So begins the YouTube documentary about OnlyFans star Phillips, 23, and her bid to have sex with 101 men in a single day.
Yes, eww.
She did it for the money and the weird glory — but what about the other part of the equation: the men?
While other porn performers have completed similar stunts, the Phillips story went viral because the film she made about the experience put its tearful aftermath on public display, inspiring near-universal disgust.
But setting aside the revulsion, this is a story about broken people. Phillips, certainly, most observers realize — but far fewer care to extend the same compassion toward the men.
* * * * * * * * *
It’s rare for the internet to come to an overwhelming consensus, yet few if any voices are defending Phillips or arguing that what she did was positive. The mass recoil came because we got to see the repercussions of our “every choice is valid” culture up close.
And indeed, many critics sought — and found — a villain: the men.
“Any man involved in the torture of this woman should be locked up,” Julie Bindel, founder of The Lesbian Project, posted on X. Suddenly the old feminist cries of “my body, my choice” didn’t matter.
The men did this to her, went this strain of online discourse. The woman who planned it, set it up, participated in it willingly and profited from it bore no blame — no, those 101 men should have refused to join her.
But why the belief that women are the only ones who are damaged from soulless interactions like this? And why do only men have agency here?
Like Evel Knievel in the 1970s, trapped into a never-ending routine of dreaming up bigger and more dangerous stunts for the public’s consumption, Phillips is doubling down on her pneumatic lifestyle: Lily Phillips Says She’s Ready to Sleep With 1,000 Men in 1 Day.
But mum and dad and totally onboard: OnlyFans’ Lily Phillips Reveals What Her Parents Really Think of Her Sleeping With 100 Men in 1 Day.
“My parents knew straight from the start what I was doing,” Phillips, 23, said in the YouTube documentary I Slept With 100 Men in One Day via The Mirror. “I was very upfront about it. Obviously, at the start, they were a bit apprehensive because they wanted me to be safe and they wanted me to make good decisions and stuff like that. I just think I can’t hold myself back because I’m scared of what other people might think.”
Earlier this year, Phillips completed her challenge to sleep with 100 men in 24 hours. Her new goal for January 2025 is to have sex with 1,000 guys in one day.
“They don’t need to know the logistics,” Phillips said, referring to her parents’ knowledge of her activities. “I do feel a little bit embarrassed. … I guess because it’s not what my parents would have chosen for me to do. Doesn’t mean my parents are going to disown me or hate me or anything like that. I just don’t want them to think less of me.”
With that last quote, Peter Hitchens’ next update to the Abolition of Britain continues to write itself.
MEANWHILE, UP NORTH: Even Trudeau loyalists are fleeing to escape deficit disaster.
OLD AND BUSTED: Build That Wall.
The New Hotness? Build that presidential library! Watch CNN, MSNBC Repeatedly Air The Same Defamatory Phrase That Cost ABC $15 Million.
ABC News agreed to fork over $15 million for falsely claiming that President Donald Trump had been found “liable for rape” of E. Jean Carroll, it was revealed in a settlement agreement publicized on Saturday.
“Donald Trump has been found liable for rape by a jury. Donald Trump has been found liable for defaming the victim of that rape by a jury,” ABC host George Stephanopoulos falsely claimed in an interview with Rep. Nancy Mace in March. He was referring to a case in which writer E. Jean Carroll accused Trump of assaulting her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room, made loads of money selling a book about it, and then sued Trump for defamation when he insisted on his innocence.
In the civil lawsuit, for which the standard of proof is “more likely than not,” the jurors explicitly found that Trump had not raped Carroll but punished him for “sexual abuse.” Carroll herself has publicly declined to use the word “rape,” and told The Hollywood Reporter that it would be “disrespectful to the women who are down on the border who are being raped around the clock” to press rape charges against Trump.
Stephanopoulos had no such reservations about the term, and ABC is paying a pretty penny to the Trump presidential library for it. But he’s not the only one who used the defamatory phrase on-air. Here are three times CNN hosts and guests aired the same phrase, and five times it happened on MSNBC.
As Jeffrey Blehar wrote at NRO yesterday:
As God is my witness: I didn’t even know ABC was being sued by Donald Trump.
Did you? I missed the story completely in late March. I went back to check on what I was doing then, and the answer was writing about “Bloodbathgate,” so I don’t have much of an excuse. (To recall that trifling fake-news kerfuffle from the early campaign is to remind ourselves of how much this election cycle has spiritually aged us.) But, yes, Trump sued ABC News for defamation on March 19, and just yesterday ABC News announced a shockingly large settlement agreement: They will pay him a whopping $15 million — though as a face-saving gesture they are being allowed to pay it to his presidential library as opposed to Trump himself.
It’s all the more hilarious of a victory because I never saw it coming: Trump just got ABC News to agree to being one of the single largest corporate donors to the eventual Official Museum of MAGA Studies. They’re building his library!
If the Stephanopoulos standard holds in additional lawsuits, Trump’s presidential library could see itself entirely funded by the DNC-MSM (which somehow seems uniquely appropriate.)
TIME TO BATGIRL THIS WRECK: John Nolte: Disney’s Woke Snow White Trailer Nears 1.4 Million Downvotes.
Gee, for some reason a Snow White remake that wants to gaslight us into believing Rachel “The Unibrow” Zegler is more attractive than Gal Gadot is finding itself downvoted by more than ten-to-one.
The Disney Grooming Syndicate’s live-action remake of Snow White is scheduled to dead-cat-bounce into theaters this March. The teaser trailer for this much-delayed boondoggle has now been viewed 11 million times. Still, only 100,000 have upvoted it, while 1.4 million — million — have downvoted it.
Gotta keep pumping that quantity of downvotes up. Those are rookie numbers in this racket, to paraphrase Matthew McConaughey in The Wolf on Wall Street:
Nolte adds:
We’ve already gone over all the dumb and smug things Snow White star Rachel Zegler has said to undermine her own $350 million movie. No need to do that again. Still, Zegler and the movie have another problem: Rachel Zegler is neither likable nor appealing. She has a smug face when Snow White should be the picture of innocence, someone we root for, worry over and care about. Zegler is so busy girlbossing, there’s nothing vulnerable about her, and it’s Snow White’s vulnerability that should pull us into the story and gives it its stakes.
And since it was seven years ago yesterday when Disney released Star Wars: The Last Jedi, here’s a look back at one of their earlier efforts at shoehorning maximum woke into a genre: The Last Jedi: A Masterpiece of Esoteric Art.
Detractors of The Last Jedi reproach him with having “killed Star Wars“. But a thoughtful analysis such as we have undertaken makes it plain that if he did, it was quite deliberately. The main target of Johnson’s demolitions is J.J. Abrams’s vision for Star Wars. All of the plot threads introduced in The Force Awakens are ruthlessly torn apart: Snoke is dead, Rey’s mysterious parents are useless, Finn reverts to impotent cowardice, and the Resistance itself is utterly destroyed. Even Leia’s coma can be seen as a rebuke of her implicit inaction while the First Order was establishing itself in the interbellum decades. What remains in the aftermath of The Last Jedi is so shattered as to positively require that future installments cannot merely repeat what has come before.
In ye olden days, a director handed a sequel, such as Irvin Kershner being tasked by George Lucas to direct The Empire Strikes Back, Nicholas Meyer by Paramount to make Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn, or even the myriad of James Bond directors in the pre-Daniel Craig days, went out of their way to understand what made the original great and preserve that essence, while stamping their own unique talent on the new film at hand. But Disney’s creatives invariably seem absolutely determined to destroy the legacy of whatever product they’ve been given tens of millions to create, whether it was George Lucas’ or even J.J. Abrams’ vision of Star Wars, or Walt Disney’s beloved original Snow White of 1937.
As Ed Morrissey wrote last month after Zegler first muttered “May Trump supporters and Trump voters and Trump himself never know peace,” and then issued a Disney-ordered walkback, “I doubt this apology will do much to ameliorate it, which raises the question of whether Disney will release Snow White at all. The added costs of distribution and marketing will make this a $500M release, with almost no hope of recouping much. Is it better to Batgirl it and get the insurance payout?”
FASTER, PLEASE: Rise in Antimatter Research Could Push Us Closer to The Ultimate Space Engine. The problem is that antimatter is to some degree an energy-storage medium. It releases colossal amount of energy when it combines with normal matter, but it takes colossal amounts of energy to create. Yes, the annihilation creates more than it takes to make the antimatter, but not that much more . . . .
MARTIN GURRI: A new age of politics is upon the world — as toppled leaders lose their grip on power.
This was more than a loss for the Democrats. It was the overthrow of “our democracy” — a regime that felt so virtuous and scientific that it expected to last forever.
Two days later, the German government collapsed, supposedly over disagreements about the budget but really because the principals couldn’t stand each other.
The German economy is flatlining and, other than quarreling, the political class has no clue what to do about it. Nevertheless, elections will be held early next year.
On Dec. 3, the president of South Korea, locked in a political struggle with the opposition majority in parliament, tried to gain the upper hand by the clever expedient of declaring martial law. His opponents, he insisted, were really a bunch of Commie stooges of Kim Jong Un — and since they were elected officials, it was best to dispense with this democracy thing.
It didn’t work. Within 24 hours, martial law was undeclared by the legislature and the sitting president abruptly found he had a lot of explaining to do.
Hardly democracy
Two days later, the French government collapsed because — you probably guessed this — it failed to come up with a budget that didn’t incite car-burning riots in the streets of Paris.
The French have already had their election. In an unusual twist on democracy, President Emmanuel Macron asked all the losers to form a government and kept the winners out.
Four days later, in another interesting interpretation of how democracy should work, Romania’s Constitutional Court canceled the presidential election because a “far right” populist appeared certain to win.
The world has the worst ruling class in a long time.
HE CAME IN LIKE A BUM, HE GOVERNED LIKE A BUM, AND NOW HE’S GOING OUT LIKE A BUM’S BUM:
HE LITERALLY JUST PARDONED HIS SON FOR GUN CRIMES! https://t.co/IpGvieaSAI
— Mark Hemingway (@Heminator) December 16, 2024
NO VERY DEEP THOUGHTS THOUGH: Dogs Can Talk? Study Confirms Dogs Intentionally Use Soundboards To Communicate.
WHO’S THE PRESIDENT, ANYWAY?
SHOCKING UNDERCOVER VIDEO: ‘Joe Biden is Dead;’ National Security Council Advisor Inside the White House Details Biden "Can't Say a Sentence."
Henry Appel, a former spy who currently works at the Intelligence Programs Directorate for the NSC, reveals: 'We’re concerned about… pic.twitter.com/jLjifP0jm1
— James O'Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) December 16, 2024
Not exactly shocking after what we saw at the Trump-Biden debate but still deeply disturbing.
Exit Question: What’s this talker doing anywhere near national security?
FILE THIS ONE AWAY FOR FUTURE USE:
Flashbacks:
● “Is the New York Times a Liberal Newspaper? of Course It Is.”
—Then-NYT ombudsman Daniel Okrent, July 25, 2004.
● “Journalism naturally draws liberals; we like to change the world. I’ll bet that most Post journalists voted for Obama. I did. There are centrists at The Post as well. But the conservatives I know here feel so outnumbered that they don’t even want to be quoted by name in a memo.”
— Then-WaPo ombudswoman Deborah Howell, November 16th, 2008.
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“IRELAND MAYBE BE ABOUT TO BUD LIGHT ITSELF:” Ireland has brought a diplomatic disaster on itself.
As everybody knows, the Irish Times is about as close as it gets to being the house journal of official Ireland, which makes this paragraph of its breaking news story this afternoon about the Israeli decision to close the Dublin Embassy particularly hilarious:
“To date, Israel has not applied similar measures to other countries, including Egypt, Spain, and Mexico, which also joined the petition accusing Israel of genocide..”
The subtext is obvious: The perfidious Israelis have unfairly singled out little old Ireland again. Why, we’ve been unfairly treated!
In reality, the reasons why Ireland would be treated differently to those three countries are obvious and self-evident to anybody with a working brain.
In the case of Egypt, the public hostility of the Egyptian dictatorship towards Israel is matched only by its private determination to work with the Israelis towards shared goals. Egypt is the only other country on earth to share a border with the Gaza Strip, and has assiduously kept that border sealed for years, including via the construction of a massive wall. Egypt might protest in public to keep the Arab street quiet, but throughout the current war it has persistently refused to allow its territory to be used as an escape valve by Hamas. It knows – though Ireland does not – that the people who run Gaza are as much a threat to Egypt as they are to Israel.
Then there’s Spain: Spain undoubtedly has a Government that is hostile to Israel. But that Government, the most left-wing since the civil war, is unpopular. It is likely to be replaced in time by a Government of the Spanish right, which will take a very different approach to relations with Israel. The Israelis are happy to wait out the natural course of democracy. In Ireland, by contrast, the hysterical hostility to Israel is so great that at a recent debate every single political party committed itself to sanctions on Israel. We might also mention here that Spain is larger and more geopolitically relevant.
And Mexico? Like Spain, it has just elected a radical leftist as President. But like Spain, there is a wide network of opinion in Mexico that is much more friendly to Jerusalem. There is value to a diplomatic outpost there, in the long term.
In Ireland, the Israelis have clearly decided that there is no value whatsoever to maintaining a diplomatic presence. Further, they have decided that there is value in publicly denouncing Ireland and severing diplomatic relations. These decisions are not emotional, but logical and a direct response to the policy choices of the Irish state. The Israelis know what too many people in Ireland appear to have been willfully blind to: That we have much more to lose from this than they do.
Found via William Jacobsen of the Legal Insurrection blog, who adds:
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:
Clarence The Angel Takes Gavin Newsom To Florida To Show Him What California Would Look Like If He'd Never Been Born https://t.co/8rZmdcYSLl pic.twitter.com/G0OzZxt0uu
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) December 16, 2024
I’m old enough to remember when the California Dream was the American Dream but better — because it was in California.
But like a lot of people, it’s departed for places like Florida and Texas.
TWILIGHT OF EMPIRE: Russian military has begun large-scale withdrawal from Syria, US and Western officials say. “Without a Libyan port, and if they are forced to abandon Tartus in Syria, the Russians would be left without a Mediterranean sea port to project power on NATO’s southern flank, the official said. The loss of Tartus, even temporarily, will also make it harder for Russia to move illicit materials between Russia and Africa, the defense official said.”
HMM.
POLICE CHIEF: Deceased victims are a teenage student and a teacher
"We're not releasing the age or gender of the shooter." pic.twitter.com/BLNyc2fbiB
— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) December 16, 2024
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JAMES LILEKS: What, exactly, is a “Christmas Movie?”
Let’s meet next week at Nakatomi Plaza to discuss!
THIS IS MORE LIKE THE 21ST CENTURY I WAS PROMISED: ULA pitches ‘space interceptor’ role for Vulcan rocket’s upper stage.
ULA CEO Tory Bruno discussed this vision at the Spacepower Conference, positioning the Vulcan Centaur not just as a launch vehicle but as a potential orbital deterrent against adversaries targeting Space Force assets.
“Our vision is the ability to have a platform that is lightning fast, long range, and, if necessary, very lethal,” Bruno said Dec. 12. “What I’ve been working on is essentially a rocket that operates in space.”
Bruno has long advocated expanded capabilities for the Centaur upper stage. In 2020, he outlined plans for an enhanced Centaur V featuring increased energy, thrust, and duration capabilities to enable complex trajectories and ambitious future missions. More recently, he has promoted a “high-performance, long-duration” version that could operate for days or weeks in support of U.S. military operations.
Related: The US military is now talking openly about going on the attack in space.
SILENCED ON YOUR DIME: Wait, the Government Spent HOW MUCH to Censor Americans?
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