WE SHOULD OWN OUR OWN STUFF: Verizon’s request to lock phones supported by police, opposed by users.
Archive for 2025
July 10, 2025
INSURRECTION, STRAIGHT UP:
🚨 INBOX: Democrats are fundraising to stalk ICE agents in real-time while they have seen a 700% increase in targeted violence.
They have already raised $200K through ActBlue. pic.twitter.com/Dvod660q3l
— Dustin Grage (@GrageDustin) July 10, 2025
RISE OF THE MACHINES: Robotic surgery hits ‘milestone’ with autonomous gallbladder removal.
PRIME DAY DEAL: Levi’s Men’s 501 Original Fit Jeans. #CommissionEarned
OLD AND BUSTED: “Don’t Be Evil.”
The New Hotness? Evil:
@Google: It Is Time to Restore
a Blog — and its 14,000 Posts —
That You Have Harbored Without
Problems for Over Two Decades1/2
It has now been two weeks, @Blogger (not "a few days"), since you unceremoniously locked, banned, removed, and cancelled the blog No Pasarán,… pic.twitter.com/Q9RT21KwCK— ¡No Pasarán! (@nopasa) June 11, 2025
In the early 2000s, Blogspot, which Google had then only recently acquired, was a great platform to get started on; the original version of Instapundit was on Blogspot, which encouraged both Steve and I to launch our first blogs there. It took only a few minutes to get a new blog uploaded, and then it was off to the races. But any blog that’s remotely controversial is runs the risk of angering Google’s rapacious censorship department, and then it’s down the memory hole.
NOT SO HARMLESS: ‘Harmless’ virus might trigger Parkinson’s disease, researchers say.
SHE’S RIGHT:
It’s not the working class or even the middle class that’s boosting Zohran, it’s the activist upper middle class. Not the guys making 400k+, they also didn’t go for him. It’s the second tier Ivy League “best and brightest” who committed to being part of the activist “movement” in… https://t.co/htmjt9Evo3
— Inez Stepman ⚪️🔴⚪️ (@InezFeltscher) July 9, 2025
Kenneth Anderson had some thoughts on this quite a while ago:
In social theory, OWS is best understood not as a populist movement against the bankers, but instead as the breakdown of the New Class into its two increasingly disconnected parts. The upper tier, the bankers-government bankers-super credentialed elites. But also the lower tier, those who saw themselves entitled to a white collar job in the Virtue Industries of government and non-profits — the helping professions, the culture industry, the virtueocracies, the industries of therapeutic social control, as Christopher Lasch pointed out in his final book, The Revolt of the Elites. The two tiers of the New Class have always had different sources of rents, however. . . . The OWS protestors are a revolt — a shrill, cri-de-coeur wail at the betrayal of class solidarity — of the lower tier New Class against the upper tier New Class. It was, after all, the upper tier New Class, the private-public finance consortium, that created the student loan business and inflated the bubble in which these lower tier would-be professionals borrowed the money. It’s a securitization machine, not so very different from the subprime mortgage machine. The asset bubble pops, but the upper tier New Class, having insulated itself and, as with subprime, having taken its cut upfront and passed the risk along, is still doing pretty well. It’s not populism versus the bankers so much as internecine warfare between two tiers of elites. The downward mobility is real, however, in both income and status. The Cal graduate started out wanting to do ‘sustainable conservation.’ She is now engaged in something closer to subsistence farming.
It’s easy to have a comfortable life now, but people have been raised to crave distinction.
YES: What does it mean to be a good man? Boys need fathers — or male mentors.
One in five children grows up without a father at home, she notes. Fatherlessness especially disadvantages boys.
Black boys, who are the most likely to be raised by a single mother, “do better in neighborhoods where there are more fathers around, even if not their own,” research has shown.
Even when disadvantaged children are matched with mentors, a majority are women, writes Miller. Mentoring groups find it hard to recruit enough men to meet the demand.
Sports, Scouts and church are the primary places where boys without involved fathers find male mentors. It makes a difference, young men told the Times.
Boys need dads. So do girls.
QUESTION: How’s Jeff Bezos’ intervention at the Washington Post coming along? Answer: Not fast enough:
At Outkick the Coverage, Matt Riegle writes: Woke Clown Offended That People Use ‘Clown’ As An Insult.
If you didn’t think it was possible for clowns to be any less funny than they already are, buckle up.
On Thursday, The Washington Post published an opinion piece the likes of which I’ve never seen before titled, “I’m a clown. Donald Trump is not one of us.”
I was not prepared for a blistering hot take like this courtesy of the wokest clown I’ve ever heard of, Tim Cunningham, the board president of Clowns Without Borders.
That’s not a joke. That’s a real group that performs clown shows for communities facing hardship, which is great, but when I’ve faced hardship, my first thought was never, “I wish someone was here to shock me with a joy buzzer and spray me in the face with seltzer from a flower on the lapel,” but we all process grief differently.
Anyway, the piece opens by discussing the way “clown” or “clown show” has become a common way for people to describe President Trump and the Trump administration.
However, Cunningham’s problem wasn’t that it’s a lazy insult that typically misses the mark; he doesn’t like the pejorative use of the word “clown,” which I think has been going on since around the time the word came into existence.
“Clown, capital C, is a valuable and varied art form; pantomimes, acrobats, magicians, dancers, stand-up comedians, vaudeville artists and jugglers are all examples of artists who incorporate Clown into their work,” Cunningham writes.
Other than, eventually, embarrassment, nothing will happen to Cunningham. Unlike the clown who dared mock the president in 2013, earning the wrath of the entire DNC-MSM, including CNN: After Obama-mocking rodeo clown, Missouri fair requires ‘sensitivity training.’
A state fair’s response to the uproar over a rodeo clown’s mockery of President Obama is creating an uproar of its own.
From now on, the Missouri State Fair won’t allow any rodeo cowboys or clowns from the state’s association to take part unless they all undergo “sensitivity training.”
And that’s just part of the fallout from the Saturday incident in which a clown wearing an Obama mask held a broom descending from his backside while a voice said, “Hey, I know I’m a clown. He’s just running around acting like one. Doesn’t know he is one.”
Mark Ficken, president of the Missouri Rodeo Cowboy Association, has resigned.
Rodeo clown Tuffy Gessling has apologized. He told Missouri news outlet digitalburg.com that he was the one whose voice was heard at the event, and that he never meant to offend.
“It was a colleague of mine that was dressed up. I am the rodeo clown making jokes,” he said.
“Dog the Wag,” James Taranto quipped at the time at the Wall Street Journal:
In “Beyond Good and Evil,” Nietzsche observed that “a man’s maturity consists in having found again the seriousness one had as a child at play.” Such might be the credo of the professional clown.
Yes, the professional clown. If it never occurred to you to think of clowning as a full-blown “profession,” that makes two of us. Reader, prepare to be educated.
The occasion for the lesson is the kerfuffle over the Missouri rodeo clown who became this week’s Emmanuel Goldstein of the left when he performed a skit while wearing a mask of President Obama. For his offense against the Dear Leader, he has been banned for life from the Missouri State Fair–in effect excommunicated from the clown community.
As an Insta-commenter wrote back then, “If Obama were a classy guy, he’d ask the folks that run the rodeo to un-fire the clown. He’d say, Hey, I can take a joke.” But of course, we all knew at the time that neither he nor his operatives with bylines could.
YES, I VOTED FOR THIS: Kennedy’s HHS Bans Illegal Alien Beneficiaries.
JIM TREACHER: Grok Goes Goosestepper? Wie peinlich!
There’s no law against starting your own party, of course. Nobody is forcing anybody to vote for a Republican or a Democrat. But maybe Elon should’ve asked his robot Grok about Ross Perot’s vanity campaign in 1992. The old coot ended up costing George Bush a second term, not to mention inflicting the Clintons on us for the rest of their lives. Is that really what Elon wants?
Then again, maybe Grok isn’t the most reliable source of information. The same day he announced his new party, he made another announcement:
How’s that working out?
Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok praised Adolf Hitler, referred to itself as “MechaHitler,” and posted vile antisemitic hate, such as calling for people with “certain surnames” to be rounded up, stripped of their rights and eliminated.
The X chatbot, which answers prompts from users, went on a sickening pro-Nazi tirade Tuesday night, after Musk posted that he had “improved Grok significantly” in an update over the weekend…
After users began pointing out the vile posts, Musk’s AI firm xAI deleted some of them, and the chatbot was restricted to generating images rather than text replies.
See for yourself:
And yes, it really did start referring to itself as “MechaHitler”:
And the self-described “MechaHitler” is going mobile! Grok AI to be available in Tesla vehicles next week, Musk says.
Grok AI will be available in Tesla vehicles next week “at the latest”, the EV maker’s CEO, Elon Musk, said in a post on X on Thursday.
Musk’s AI startup xAI launched Grok 4, its latest flagship AI model, on Wednesday. While Musk had earlier said Tesla vehicles would be equipped with Grok, the billionaire CEO had not shared a timeline.
In accordance with the prophecy:
THEN DON’T COME HERE ILLEGALLY: Families and immigrant detainees allege ‘horrible’ conditions at ‘Alligator Alcatraz.’
Vladimir Miranda, a migrant from Cuba who has been at the facility since Sunday, said that “right now the generators apparently can’t cope and the electricity is going out,” he told Telemundo 51 via telephone call. When the electricity goes out there’s no water and the phones and air conditioners don’t work, “and we’re here sweating” profusely, Miranda said in his native Spanish.
His girlfriend, Eveling Ortiz told NBC 6 that Miranda crossed the U.S.-Mexico border and, like many Cuban migrants, was given the I-220A form that documents that a migrant has been released into the U.S. by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“He had the final hearing two weeks ago,” she said.
But days later, Miranda, 32, was detained by immigration officials at his job in Orlando and moved to the Everglades facility.
“The conditions they’re going through, they’re horrible,” Ortiz alleged. “They don’t have water, they can’t use the bathroom properly. They’re not taking a bath.”
Seems to me like self-deportation might be preferable to all that.
SCHUMER’S TANTRUM: One Purple Crayon Away from a Shutdown. “The Senate majority leader is stomping around in diapered outrage, threatening a full-blown government shutdown because House Republicans dared to introduce a rescissions package that trims a fraction of a percent from the federal budget. Not 5%. Not 1%.”
READER FAVORITE: Toniiq NAD+ Supplement 1500mg. #CommissionEarned
THIS IS CORRECT:
Many people misunderstand the logic of focusing on Harvard. I don’t think this is random or petty. It has important societal consequences:
1. Harvard had been a bastion of insiders educating and placing the next generation of insiders in the economy and government. But if you… pic.twitter.com/PflwMIxxdB
— Chamath Palihapitiya (@chamath) July 10, 2025
CHANGE: Boeing delivers most airplanes since late 2023 after ramping up 737 Max output.
Boeing delivered 60 airplanes last month, the most since December 2023, as the plane maker seeks to raise production of its bestselling 737 Max jets after a series of manufacturing and safety problems.
The tally was the highest since before a door plug from one of its new 737 Max 9 planes blew out midair in January 2024, sparking a new crisis for the company and slowing production and deliveries of aircraft. Of the monthly total, 42 were 737 Maxes, going to customers including Southwest Airlines, Alaska Airlines and United Airlines.
CEO Kelly Ortberg, who took the top job at Boeing last August, has said the company has made progress in improving production rates and quality on its factory lines.
For the three months ended June 30, Boeing handed over 150 airplanes, its best second quarter since 2018, before two crashes of Max planes five months apart grounded the jets and sparked a multiyear crisis at the top U.S. exporter. That was also the last year Boeing posted an annual profit. Its problems also gave rival Airbus a bigger lead over Boeing.
Boeing isn’t out of the woods, and the company’s space business appears at least partly defunct with Starliner still grounded and SLS on the chopping block. But for airliner deliveries and quality control, the lines are at least moving in the right direction.
WE’VE BEEN TOLD YOU NEVER NEED TO TAKE THE FIFTH IF YOU’RE INNOCENT: Did Joe Biden’s Doctor Just Confirm a Cover-Up of His Health?
PRIME DAY SALE: Oura Ring 4 Smart Ring. #CommissionEarned Glenn bought one of these and it tracks sleep quality, heart rate and exercise and even stress levels. He loves it and feels that it helps him stay on track. You do have to find out your size but most people wear a size larger than their ring size or you can get a sizing kit.
U OF WYOMING RENAMES ‘SCHOOL OF CULTURE, GENDER, & SOCIAL JUSTICE’ TO ‘DEPARTMENT OF AMERICAN CULTURAL STUDIES.’ Oh, well, that should solve the problem.
ANALYSIS: TRUE.
We are watching the slow motion collaboration of the American press corps and political left pushing fringe progressives towards murder all while claiming, falsely, Trump is getting people killed. And it is a press + political left collaboration towards murder.
— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) July 9, 2025
And they know exactly what they’re doing.