JK Rowling is furious. And who can blame her? The recently published Cass Review has proven what she has been saying – and demonised for – for years. On Wednesday, the author and philanthropist posted on X to suggest that she wouldn’t forgive the actors-cum-activists she made famous for turning on her.
Harry Potter stars Daniel Radcliffe (who played Harry in the blockbuster films) and Emma Watson (Hermione Granger) have both previously condemned the franchise’s creator for daring to point out the dangers of gender ideology. Now, in light of Dr Hilary Cass’s damning report, Rowling has said: ‘Celebs who cosied up to a movement intent on eroding women’s hard-won rights and who used their platforms to cheer on the transitioning of minors can save their apologies for traumatised detransitioners and vulnerable women reliant on single-sex spaces.’
Unfortunately, it seems unlikely that Watson or Radcliffe will be apologising to anyone. The pair have been committed to pushing gender ideology ever since they publicly broke with Rowling in 2020, issuing robotic soundbites in support of trans rights.
Last year, Glenn wrote on his Substack that Leftist politics “is something that the manipulative old sell to the gullible young. Hence leftists’ nonstop efforts to produce more gullible young people…Modern society has extended adolescence well into the 20s for many people and, I want to stress, that’s not by accident. Separation of young people from the larger society helps create a captive cadre of voters, protesters, campaign workers, etc. There are, of course, other forces promoting this separation besides left-politics (companies like to market to young people for the same reasons of hive-mindedness and gullibility) but it’s worth keeping in mind what’s going on here, and why.”
Much of that applies to the trans movement as well, which is yet another subset of leftist identity politics.
Rowling, in having a significant say over the casting of the first Harry Potter film, which gave numerous young actors either a start, or a tremendous boost in their careers. Perhaps they should have heeded her thoughts on other issues as well.
Given that, if the point of polling Latino voters is to gauge their views on people coming illegally to the U.S. from Latin countries, that’s not the way things are today. These days, illegal crossers are entering the U.S. from everywhere. Perhaps that is contributing to the changing views of Latino Americans toward border security.
In any event, Latino Americans are an important voting bloc, and in the 2024 presidential election, it appears they are moving more toward Trump than Biden.
What are you doing that an AI couldn’t do? Type “10 Ways Calvin and Hobbes Has Aged Poorly” into an AI text generator and it will spit out an article similar to yours in seconds…
When you write such a lazy and opportunistic piece, you’re also conditioning readers to expect that sort of prose. You’re conditioning them to expect the kind of regurgitated pablum that a text generator could produce on demand. You’re contributing to your own redundancy, Lukas, and to the redundancy of what we love to do… If you want an image of a future we should try to avoid, imagine a text generator producing mirthless moralistic listicles — forever.
Not to mention, getting into territory where the Babylon Bee has probably gone before:
21st CENTURY HEADLINES: Asking AI Life’s Big Questions. How much milk should I buy? What should I do with my gun? Can I do cocaine with God?
You They’re telling me I’m going to meet God now! I am so excited!
ChatGPT
As an AI language model, I’m not equipped to offer any specific information about the afterlife or whether there is a god. The nature of the afterlife, if it exists, is a topic of much debate and speculation among different cultures and belief systems. Some believe in an afterlife as a continuation of the individual’s consciousness or soul, while others believe in a more abstract concept of spiritual energy or reincarnation. Ultimately, it is up to your own beliefs and interpretations.
You God is shorter than I imagined.
ChatGPT
It’s important to remember that our preconceived notions of what God looks like are often shaped by cultural and religious influences. In reality, God may not have a physical form at all. The idea of God is often represented as an omnipotent, omniscient being beyond human understanding. So, if you’re experiencing a meeting with God in your afterlife, it’s possible that it’s in a form that you may not expect.
You He’s offering me cocaine. Is that legal in the afterlife?
ChatGPT
As an AI language model, I cannot give legal advice on the afterlife. However, in many cultures and belief systems, drug use is not considered acceptable behavior, even in the afterlife. Additionally, it’s important to consider the potential consequences of drug use, even in the afterlife, as it may have negative effects on your spiritual journey or experience. Ultimately, the decision is up to you.
You So you’re saying it’s okay to do lines with God?
ChatGPT
As an AI language model, I don’t have personal beliefs or opinions, but it’s important to remember that drug use can have negative consequences, even in the afterlife. Additionally, it’s not clear what the rules and norms of the afterlife are, as it is a subject of much speculation and debate. Ultimately, it’s up to you to make your own choices and evaluate the potential consequences.
Consider one bit of good news here — AI isn’t implying that it’s God.
The US Air Force has 140 of its biggest warplanes – its heavy bombers – in active service: 76 Boeing B-52Hs, 44 Boeing B-1Bs and 20 B-2 stealth bombers built by Northrop Grumman.
But the Air Force has funding for 141 bombers. Its inventory dropped to 140 in 2022, when a B-1 suffered an engine fire at Dyess Air Force Base in Texas – and burned to the ground. The B-1 is sometimes known as “Bone” (from B-one).
Any other air force might content itself with 140 bombers and redistribute the lost bomber’s operating budget. But the US Air Force is counting on the B-1 to play a lead role in a possible air war over the Taiwan Strait. It’s such a high priority that the service is spending millions of dollars recovering, from long-term storage, a surplus B-1 nicknamed “Lancelot” that’s been sitting in desert storage, aka “the Boneyard”, for three years.
This is an operation the Air Force has done just three times in recent decades. Besides the B-1, the service returned to flying status two stored B-52s – one in 2020 and another in 2015 – in order to replace bombers that it lost to accidents.
Recovering from storage a machine as complex as a bomber is hard, expensive and time-consuming work. It can take hundreds of people working thousands of hours over a span of years and at a cost of millions of dollars.
That the Air Force is willing to make the investment speaks to the importance of the big, lumbering warplanes as the service positions itself to, among other contingencies, defend Taiwan from a Chinese invasion fleet.
The Mississippi House of Representatives and Senate passed a bill dubbed as the “Women’s Bill of Rights,” protecting women and girls from males seeking to enter female-only spaces and competitions by identifying as transgender.
Mississippi HB 1607 ties the words “man,” “woman,” “boy,” “girl,” “male,” and “female” to sex. It deals with athletics, shelters, and prisons, and was passed by the Mississippi Senate on Wednesday after the House passed the bill.
Independent Women’s Forum spokeswoman Paula Scanlan said that the bill also helps victims of domestic violence.
“There are places like shelters and women’s prisons,” said Scanlan. “We’re hearing stories across the country of women going to women-only shelters after being abused and their abuser is able to follow them because they show up to the shelter and say they identify (as) a woman. And there’s nothing in law to prevent someone who thinks that they are a woman from entering that space, and that puts victims of domestic violence into very dangerous situations.”
I wonder how many lefties will speak out against this, and reveal themselves as anti-woman.
The actress has been married to TV writer and director Brad Falchuk since 2018. But before that, she dated a who’s who of Hollywood leading men. Over the years, Paltrow has been linked to Brad Pitt, Ben Affleck and Luke Wilson. She was also married to Coldplay singer Chris Martin for 13 years.
But Paltrow is making it clear that none of these relationships overlapped.
During an “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) Q&A on her Instagram Story last week, the 51-year-old was asked, “Have you ever considered a poly relationship?”
“No thanks!” Paltrow responded. “Not for me but have no judgment. I’m a one man kinda gal.”
Think of polyamory as an open relationship — one where all parties involved mutually agree to have multiple sexual or romantic partners.
As a happily married woman, I’m with Gwyneth on this one. It’s a firm hell no from me. But apparently, it’s just because we’re old.
OK, I’m not really old — I’m in my 30s. But dating looks a whole lot different now than it did even 10 or 15 years ago.
As Glenn wrote in January, linking to an article headlined “Against Polyamory,” “I’ve been around this stuff since I was a kid in the sixties. I know a few people who make it work. The vast majority crash and burn.”
“Defectors from the Soviet Union used to talk about the ‘French paradox’, meaning that if you surprised a Frenchman with a mistress, telling him, ‘We’ve caught you red-handed with a 22-year-old called Tatyana, work for us or we’ll tell your wife’, it didn’t work. That was because he would generally say, ‘Go ahead, show her, she’ll understand’ or ‘She already knows’.”
Heh, indeed. (But however you’d spell that in French.)
“The office district is empty, with boarded up towers, copper thieves, and failing retail,” reports the Wall Street Journal of Democrat-run St. Louis, Missouri. “[E]ven the Panera outlet shut down. The city is desperately trying to reverse the ‘doom loop.’”
Let’s look at the mayoral history of the doom-looping St. Louis, shall we?
Oh, look, there hasn’t been a Republican mayor in St. Louis since — not a typo — 1949. For 75 years, the people of St. Louis have voted for More of the Same, so excuse me if I don’t whip out a violin over all this unavoidable doom looping.
“Cities such as San Francisco and Chicago are trying to save their downtown office districts from spiraling into a doom loop,” writes the Wall Street Journal. “St. Louis is already trapped in one.”
As offices sit empty, shops and restaurants close and abandoned buildings become voids that suck the life out of the streets around them. Locals often find boarded-up buildings depressing and empty sidewalks scary. So even fewer people commute downtown.
This self-reinforcing cycle accelerated in recent years as the pandemic emptied offices. St. Louis’s central business district had the steepest drop in foot traffic of 66 major North American cities between the start of the pandemic and last summer, according to the University of Toronto’s School of Cities. Traffic has improved some in the past 12 months, but at a slower rate than many Midwestern cities.
In the immortal words of Jerry Seinfeld: Yeah, that’s a shame.
As NRO’s Jay Nordlinger wrote in 2010 when Detroit was making headlines and photo spreads thanks to its Hiroshima-like bombed out landscape, “If people are voting a certain way — maybe it’s because they want to. Maybe they know full well what they’re doing. Sometimes you have to take no — such as ‘no to Republicanism’ — for an answer.”
How on earth could we have seen St. Louis’ collapse coming?
It is time to stop blaming “Covid” for breaking the economy, destroying businesses and livelihoods, and wreaking untold havoc upon families. It was not “Covid” that did this. It was not even the Chinese. It was our government. The government has conditioned us to blame the impersonal “Covid” for the destruction it wrought upon our businesses and families. We need to change the discussion by using the proper language to fix the blame where it belongs. . . .
Covid did not make the insane decision to close down gyms while leaving liquor stores open; the government did. Covid did not prevent us from going to worship at the church of our choice; the government did. Covid did not chase down and try to arrest bikers, surfers, joggers, and others engaged in outdoor exercise; the government did. Covid did not prevent families from holding and comforting their parents and grandparents during their final hours of life; the government did. Covid did not shut down our schools; the government did (aided and abetted by Randi Weingarten and the teachers’ unions). Covid did not set arbitrary limits on how far apart we should stand everywhere from in grocery stores to national parks, how many people should attend Thanksgiving dinner or other family gatherings in our own homes, while either remaining silent or actively encouraging mass Black Lives Matter demonstrations; the government health bureaucracy and little totalitarians, such as Anthony Fauci and the ‘Scarf Lady,’ Deborah Birx, did.
There was a wild scene at the home of UC Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and his wife Professor Catherine Fisk on April 9.
* * * * * * * *
But this is Berkeley and George Washington law professor Jonathan Turley has a great comment on that.
We now have a culture of disruption that has been consistently fostered by academics and administrators on our campuses. When asked “why the home of a dean?,” these students would likely shrug and answer “why not?”
In that sense, this is the ultimate example of the chickens literally coming home to roost. These students have been enabled for years into believing that such acts of disruption are commendable and that others must yield in the cancellation of events. For weeks, they demanded that these dinners be halted despite other students wanting to attend. In that sense, the appearance in an actual home is alarming, but hardly unexpected in our current environment.
That’s exactly right. They may realize now how out of hand it’s gotten but it’s a bit late.
Saul Alinsky wrote Rules for Radicals in 1971 with, in part, Dem-on-Dem confrontations between the New Left of the 1960s and the aging FDR-era New Dealers in mind. No one should be surprised to see his tactics still being used for similar left-on-left attacks, especially Chemerinsky. Or as Iowahawk quips:
"I can't believe the leopards ate my face," says man who hosted back yard Face-Eating Leopard mixer https://t.co/EpPksnOj2y
If you lived through it, and I did, “spectacle” is the most generous term you could use to describe the media environment around the trial. It was the moment the entire media, seeing the ratings and attention tabloid shows were garnering, went all-in on the trash-exploitation and racial tropes that dominate news media today. Lead Simpson attorney Johnnie Cochran shamelessly made the trial about the LAPD versus another poor black man — and upon Simpson’s acquittal, was covered by television shows on Court TV and was an invited guest to Bill Clinton’s inauguration.
As Cochran stoked racial fires only a few short years after the Rodney King riots, Christopher Darden, a prosecutor during the trial, and a black man, was labeled a race traitor and an Uncle Tom.
Simpson’s legal team was dubbed “the Dream Team,” a label also attached to the 1992 Men’s Olympic basketball team. Sports and politics merged in a way that would later be seen in a way similar to Colin Kaepernick kneeling on the NFL sidelines. Jay Leno’s Tonight Show featured several dancing Asian men in black robes in a comedy segment he labeled “The Dancing Itos,” a reference to the judge of the trial.
Simpson attorney Robert Kardashian’s family later became national celebrities in their own right, with his wife Kris Jenner and her daughters cashing in millions on sex tapes and television shows, music albums, merchandise, perfumes and clothing lines.
In the middle of the trial, National Enquirer published leaked nude photos of lead prosecutor Marcia Clark, sold to them by an ex-husband. Everyone became a punchline, and a character, and a celebrity, due to and because of the guiding hand of the national media. Lost in all of it was the fact that two people had been brutally murdered.
On the menu today: It almost always feels like the scourge of cancer targets those who deserve it the least. I say almost, because yesterday, cancer ended the life of O. J. Simpson. You can make a strong argument that Simpson turned into one of the most terribly influential Americans of the last quarter of the 20th century — terrible both in the scale of his influence and in the moral dimension of his influence.
The Myth of the ‘Juice’
O. J. Simpson passed away from cancer Thursday. The instant meme was an image of the late Norm McDonald declaring, “Finally, O.J. can rest, knowing that his wife’s killer is dead.”
Kids, you may not believe this, but in 1994, it seemed absurd that somebody who was rich and famous would be the kind of person capable of murdering two people. There was just this blanket assumption that anyone living a lifestyle of “champagne wishes and caviar dreams,” as Robin Leach described it, would be happy.
This was before Phil Spector, before Robert Blake, before Oscar Pistorius, before Aaron Hernandez.
This was before TMZ, before cell-phone cameras showcased every celebrity meltdown, tantrum, and other outburst. The rich and famous people in Hollywood, and their handlers and agents and consultants, exercised a lot more control over their images. This was also before #MeToo, and it was a few years before the country realized it had elected men who saw the White House interns as their own personal sex kittens — not just in 1992, but also in 1960.
You could say it was a more innocent time, but it is likely more accurate to say it was a more naïve time.
When O. J. Simpson was mentioned “as the focus of the investigation” on June 14, 1994, the initial overwhelming attitude among the public, white and black, was that it was unthinkable that the famous face could have committed such a bloody and heinous crime.
A large part of what made O.J. “unthinkable” as a murderer was the byproduct of being an NFL superstar. Pete Rozelle became commissioner of the league in 1960, and with the help of NFL Films, its omnipresent in-house propaganda machine, created a myth of hard-hitting warriors on the gridiron who were unassailable gentlemen off of it. Even after the O.J. trial, even after Rozelle stepped down from his perch in 1989, this myth soldiered on remarkably well until Colin Kaepernick and Rozelle’s successor finished it off for good in 2016: Roger Goodell Killed the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg.
In the 1960s, American culture was fracturing along a fault line, with the common man on one side and scorn against his mores and values on the other. The league’s commissioner at the time, Pete Rozelle, chose to take the side of ordinary Americans in the raging culture war, because they were his natural audience. The league sent star players to visit troops in Vietnam and issued rules requiring players to stand upright during the playing of the National Anthem.
In 1967, the NFL produced a film that combined sideline and game footage titled, “They Call It Pro Football.” The film was unapologetically hokey. It was crew cuts and high tops and lots of chain smoking into sideline telephones. With a non-rock, non-folk, non-“what’s happening now” soundtrack, heavy on trumpets and kettle drums. John Facenda, who would come to be called “The Voice of God” for his work with NFL Films, provided the vaulting narration. The production began with the words, “It starts with a whistle and ends with a gun.” There was nothing Radical Chic about it.
The NFL surpassed baseball as America’s pastime with careful branding that conformed to the tastes and sensibilities of middle-class Americans – Nixon’s silent majority. A half century later, Roger Goodell would kill the goose that laid the golden egg.
In August 2016, America was experiencing a polarizing presidential election. San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick sat during the playing of the national anthem, to protest injustice. It was a politically divisive act directed at fans who regard the national anthem as something sacred. The league did not lift a finger to stop him.
Most employers don’t let their workers make controversial political statements to their customers. It is why you do not know your UPS driver’s views on the expansion of NATO. The Constitution does not prohibit private businesses from regulating speech during work.
A savvier commissioner would have reminded Kaepernick that he is being paid millions to wear the logo of the NFL, and the league does not permit players to use its brand to flaunt their personal politics. Instead, Roger Goodell permitted the pregame ceremonies to become the focus of intense political scrutiny, as the media lined up to catalog whether players stood, sat or knelt during the national anthem.
In retrospect, as somebody who had bought into Rozelle’s myth wholeheartedly, I’m glad that Kaepernick and Goodell finally buried it. That it could survive someone as heinous as O.J. Simpson is a testament to its strength, the gullibility of pro football’s most rabid fans — and whatever was going on this week in offices of the legacy media:
This is why The Free Press NPR piece is so important. Not a single person, journalist, editor, lawyer at THE FUCKING ASSOCIATED PRESS thought… "let's maybe not run this one?" https://t.co/O3UBixrkV8
As the 1960s kept ending, the next installment was the arrest of Charles Manson and four of his followers for the horrific murder of five people, including actress Sharon Tate, wife of Roman Polanski, at a luxury mansion north of Beverly Hills. When Manson’s trial began in 1970, Wenner [who would then have been about age 24–Ed] leaped at the story with an idea for the headline: “Charles Manson Is Innocent!”
Wenner’s headline was less insane than it sounds to modern ears. Manson was already an object of media obsession, a former Haight-Ashbury denizen who drifted to L.A. and collected hippie acolytes for LSD orgies and quasi-biblical prophecies. While the straight world viewed him as a monster, much of Wenner’s audience saw him, at least hypothetically, as one of their own. The underground press of Los Angeles, including the Free Press, cast him as the victim of a hippie-hating media. Manson was a rock-and-roll hanger-on. Wenner was convinced of Manson’s innocence by his own writer David Dalton, who had lived for a time with Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys, a Manson believer. “I’d go out driving in the desert with Dennis, and he’d say things to me like ‘Charlie’s really cosmic, man.’ ”
* * * * * * * *
Meanwhile, a lawyer in the DA’s office, believing he was doing a favor for a friend of [David] Felton’s at the Los Angeles Times and that this hippie rag from San Francisco was a benign nonentity, brought Felton [then-recently hired away from the L.A. Times by Wenner] and Dalton into the office to show them the crime scene photos of the butchered bodies of Manson victims — including a man with the word war etched in his stomach with a fork. Dalton blanched when he saw the words “Healter [sic] Skelter” painted in blood on a refrigerator, instantly recalling what Dennis Wilson told him about the coded instructions Manson heard in the Beatles songs. “It must have been the most horrifying moment of my life,” said Dalton. “It was the end of the whole hippie culture.” Jann Wenner changed the headline.
WTF: CNN Contributor suggests black people identified with OJ because he k*lled white people.
“[OJ] represented something for the black community in that moment, in that trial, particularly because there were two white people who had been k*lled.”
Mr. Biden suggests that a $60 billion supplemental means the difference between victory and defeat in a major war between Russia and Ukraine. That is also wrong. $60 billion is a fraction of what it would take to turn the tide in Ukraine’s favor. But this is not just a matter of dollars. Fundamentally, we lack the capacity to manufacture the amount of weapons Ukraine needs us to supply to win the war.
Consider our ability to produce 155-millimeter artillery shells. Last year, Ukraine’s then defense minister assessed that their base line requirement for these shells is over four million per year, but said they could fire up to seven million if that many were available. Since the start of the conflict, the United States has gone to great lengths to ramp up production of 155-millimeter shells. We’ve roughly doubled our capacity and can now produce 360,000 per year — less than a tenth of what Ukraine says it needs. The administration’s goal is to get this to 1.2 million — 30 percent of what’s needed — by the end of 2025. This would cost the American taxpayers dearly while yielding an unpleasantly familiar result: failure abroad. . . .
Proponents of American aid to Ukraine have argued that our approach has been a boon to our own economy, creating jobs here in the factories that manufacture weapons. But our national security interests can be — and often are — separate from our economic interests. The notion that we should prolong a bloody and gruesome war because it’s been good for American business is grotesque. We can and should rebuild our industrial base without shipping its products to a foreign conflict.
The story is the same when we look at other munitions. Take the Patriot missile system — our premier air defense weapon. It’s of such importance in this war that Ukraine’s foreign minister has specifically demanded them. That’s because in March alone, Russia reportedly launched over 3,000 guided aerial bombs, 600 drones and 400 missiles at Ukraine. To fend off these attacks, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, and others have indicated they need thousands of Patriot interceptors per year. The problem is this: The United States only manufactures 550 every year. If we pass the supplemental aid package currently being considered in Congress, we could potentially increase annual production to 650, but that’s still less than a third of what Ukraine requires.
These weapons are not only needed by Ukraine. If China were to set its sights on Taiwan, the Patriot missile system would be critical to its defense. In fact, the United States has promised to send Taiwan nearly $900 million worth of Patriot missiles, but delivery of those weapons and other essential resources has been severely delayed, partly because of shortages caused by the war.
Way back in How To Make War, Jim Dunnigan and Austin Bay noted that no one was ready for the sheer expense and production demands of modern warfare. We’re seeing that here and this isn’t even a real superpower war.
Vance is right, I think, that Ukraine’s only real option is to stand on the defensive. And that should be what the U.S. wants, too, because the chief upside of this war from our perspective is that it pins Putin into an expensive conflict that will drain his ability to cause trouble elsewhere.
A DEFEAT FOR FREEDOM: House Passes 2-Year Surveillance Law Extension Without Warrant Requirement. “Speaker Mike Johnson scaled back the measure to two years from five after Donald J. Trump had urged Republicans to ‘kill’ it. An effort to require warrants to search for Americans’ messages failed on a tie.”
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