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Archive for 2025
February 19, 2025
THEY’RE MORONS: When Anti-Gun Federal Legislators Threaten Actual Violence.
CHECKS OUT:
AOC: pic.twitter.com/dXmM3diYtF
— Eyal Yakoby (@EYakoby) February 19, 2025
It almost seems unfair to pick on a social media influencer like AOC, but she’s fair game for as long as she chooses to cosplay as a congresswoman.
SIGNAL SENT AND RECIEVED: Illegal Crossings Dropped as Soon as Trump Took Office.
READER FAVORITE: Etekcity Upgraded Smart Scale for Body Weight. #CommissionEarned
THE EV BUBBLE CONTINUES TO DEFLATE: Nikola goes bankrupt, to sell assets in latest EV market turmoil. “The development ends a challenging journey, which included several leadership changes, plummeting share values and short-seller allegations.”
ALL THIS FROM CUTTING OVERHEAD PAYMENTS TO UNIVERSITIES? ‘Uncertain, anxious, fearful.’ That’s the mood at 2025’s first big U.S. science meeting. Cutting overhead means more money for grants, not “downsizing.”
Plus:
In addition to fear for their livelihoods and public safety, scientists expressed fear for the longstanding prestige of the American scientific enterprise. Several speakers cited a post-World War II “social contract,” when scientists and government agreed that publicly funding basic research was a good idea and would eventually lead to economic and technological advances.
Was the public a party to that contract? You know, some of us warned during the Covid debacle that it was going to drastically hurt the image of science. Well, here you are.
HER RESERVOIR OF GOODWILL RAN DRY A WHILE BACK: Meghan Markle Rebrands Herself. Again. And It’s Already Not Going Well.
DISPATCHES FROM THE HOUSE OF STEPHANOPOULOS: ABC News’ Trump Headline Inspires Greg Gutfeld’s 4-Step Summary of Why Media Is Circling the Drain.
Greg Gutfeld outlined the legacy media’s four-step circle of life (or death as it were):
That ABC News headline is not unlike when the media devotes a lot of time to trying to make everybody think they’re about to die from climate change following that up with reports about all the “climate anxiety” people have.
Related: “Arrests for illegal border crossings have fallen to their lowest level since Trump’s last term. This isn’t because of non-enforcement. It’s because people aren’t coming now.”
UPDATE: Speaking of Gutfeld, it’s hard to think of a conservative getting anything approaching positive coverage in Variety until now:
IT WAS THE INSTA-DAUGHTER’S FAVORITE MOON OF JUPITER WHEN SHE WAS TWO: Jupiter’s moon Callisto is very likely an ocean world.
MANY PEOPLE WOULDN’T HAVE HELD BACK QUITE SO MUCH, BUT, YEAH:
Me to said Dept. of Education employee: Sack up, you pathetic and whiny excuse for an adult. Not respecting your personhood? Betrayal? Inhumane? Because you lost your job? Welcome to the real world, buttercup, where people often have to hunt for a job. https://t.co/WKBO42h4UB
— Physics Geek (@physicsgeek) February 19, 2025
MORE TIPS FOR BEING NON-PARTISAN IN A PARTISAN AGE: It ain’t easy, it can be exhausting, and you’re not always going to get everything right. But you have to keep trying.
JUST A BUCK, TRY YOUR LUCK: Yes, Newsweek Really DID Say That Out Loud…
Did you take the red pill of the blue pill?
If you took the red pill, you would be forced to live in the real world where things are messy, the truth is hard to swallow, and you are condemned to live in freedom with all its pains and pleasures.
If you take the blue pill, you can live in blissful ignorance of the fact that you are a slave totally manipulated by people indifferent to your well-being and your fate.
Newsweek chose the blue pill.
Ukraine is Schrödinger’s democracy. As long as we don’t measure whether Zelenskyy is democratically supported by his population, we can pretend that he is the legitimately elected leader of a democratic regime.
Zelenskyy was legitimately elected, but his term was to have expired last year. He is currently empowered by martial law to remain in power, and implicitly by the fact that the US government pays all Ukraine’s bills, including the salaries of the government, the budget for the military, the pensions, the media, the…everything. Zelenskyy is an American satrap.
I am not saying that to insult Zelenskyy. It is simply a fact. You may even think it is a good thing, and I certainly think that the current situation is at least better than having Putin own the whole damn country.
But this is not “democracy.” Any argument that it is is a joke.
To be fair, Newsweek did admit in 2023: “Ukraine Sure Doesn’t Look Like a Democracy Anymore.”
Democracies do not ban opposition parties. The fact that so many such parties ever existed says something about the level of opposition faced by the Ukrainian nationalist government that came to power after the 2014 revolution. Then in May of 2022, the Ukrainian parliament passed a law formally banning all these parties. President Volodymyr Zelensky signed the law. The list included the Opposition Platform for Life, which had held fully 10 percent of the seats in parliament. Among the 11 banned parties are the Socialist Party of Ukraine, the Progressive Socialist Party of the Ukraine, the Union of Left Forces, and the Communist Party of Ukraine.
Democracies do not ban elections, but Ukraine has put the democratic process itself on hold since declaring martial law in 2022. This hiatus was supposed to be temporary, but it has been repeatedly extended, most recently in July 2023. As a result of that vote in the Ukrainian parliament, where all opposition parties have been removed, the parliamentary elections scheduled for last month were canceled. Presidential elections were scheduled for March 2024, but under current rules they too will not be held, and Zelensky has stated that “now is not the time for elections.”
Like Ron Burgundy and the teleprompter, the editors at the zombie post-Washington Post Newsweek will seemingly run anything its writers put into WordPress.
Related: I don’t care, Volodymyr: J.D. Vance Warns Zelensky Over ‘Disgraceful’ Public Attacks on Trump, Confirms Ukrainian Elections Are Now U.S. Policy.
Elections in Ukraine are now U.S. policy, with Vance making it clear that Zelensky must submit to a democratic mandate if he wants continued legitimacy. “Certainly, that would give him the strongest position, Raheem,” Vance said when asked if elections were necessary. “And I think that it’s a little rich for some of our European friends to attack Donald Trump for suggesting that Ukraine should have elections when they say that this is a war for democracy. How can you attack elections when your entire framing for the war in Ukraine is that it’s a war for democracy? I just think it’s ridiculous. And, of course, the United States had a civil war. We had an election in, of course, at the, at the end of as scheduled. You know, Churchill found out that he lost. As I understand it, he found out that he lost the British election at Potsdam.”
Vance, fresh from his European trip, where he lectured European leaders on free speech and matters of conscience, hit them again in our exclusive interview for their hypocrisy on democracy, questioning their insistence on blocking elections.
“The idea that you cannot have elections in the midst of a war is, I think, kind of a preposterous idea. And the President has made very clear that he thinks that should happen. So, you know, that is, that is American policy. And I think it’s. It’s pretty simple and straightforward.”
Indeed.
ALL THE BEST SCIENTISTS HAVE TOLD ME THERE’S NO DIFFERENCE. Rare genetic syndrome affects male and female brains in distinct ways.
OLD AND BUSTED: Reagan-era conservatives pretending it’s still the 1950s.
The new hotness? Hollywood lefties pretending it’s still the 1950s! Clooney’s Truth-Telling Play Arrives at Terrible Time.
Now, the actor/director is bringing “Good Night, and Good Luck” to Broadway. It’s a shrewd business move and, according to the star, a chance to praise the legacy media.
Here’s what Clooney said at a New York press conference tied to the play’s arrival.
“It’s a subject matter that is very close to our hearts, which is what [the press] does. Telling the truth and holding truth to power. It’s a play we’re very excited to do.”
Most Americans understand the legacy press no longer holds one party accountable for its actions. Reporters ignored President Joe Biden’s obvious cognitive decline, for example. Journalists also refused to cover the Hunter Biden laptop scandal until months after the 2020 presidential election wrapped.
Even then, the coverage proved muted and ineffective. Some truths must be hidden, apparently.
The same, apparently, applies to Clooney.
As Joseph Campbell has written, “Murrow ‘was very late in confronting McCarthy’ and ‘did so only after other journalists had challenged the senator and his tactics for months, even years,’” creating what Campbell would call a classic “media myth” that Clooney adopted into first a movie in 2005 and now a Broadway play. That being said, everyone in the media who lives to recreate those moments could have had their equivalent over the last four years with the endless number of failures of the Biden administration (not least of which, their lack of an actual functioning president), but chose to remain silent, and take one for the team. And so did Clooney! Until Obama apparently gave him his blessings to write a New York Times column condemning Joe’s senescence in his catastrophic debate with Trump last June.
And then there’s blacklist subtext of any film or play about McCarthy. That’s a topic that should never be touched by Hollywood again, since the industry has spent the last quarter century blacklisting anyone to the right of Stalin – and even blacklisting lefties who have made anti-blacklisting movies.
Still though, Clooney’s new play is a triumph on one level:
SPOILER: THEY WON’T. Liberals, Enough With the Incessant Chants and Caterwauling!
MAKE AMERICA HEALTHY AGAIN: RFK Jr. to investigate childhood vaccine schedules, antidepression drugs.
IGNORE THE HYPE: Kurt Volker’s guide to US-Russia Ukraine peace talks in Saudi Arabia.
The Kyiv Independent: There has been a lot of panic in Ukraine and Europe about the possibility of the U.S. and Russia negotiating a peace agreement over their heads — is this justified?
Ambassador Kurt Volker: People were upset about (being excluded from the table) and I have to keep telling people there isn’t a table.
There is (U.S.) President Trump picking up the phone, calling Putin, calling Zelensky, people having meetings at NATO, people having meetings in Munich. It’s going to be like that. It’s going to be a lot of consultation, a lot of conversations, but there’s no single negotiation going on.
In fact, we don’t even know if it’s going to be possible with Russia.
I think there are several things going on and a lot of it is being misread, but there are some things to be watching as well. First off, as we knew, President Trump was going to reach out to Putin in order to try to urge him to end the war, and he’s followed that up now by sending a team to meet with the Russians in Saudi Arabia.
I think there was a lot of media excitement over different comments that different people said in the past week, and I think some of them were maybe just not careful enough and the media ran with it.
For example, when (U.S. Defense Secretary) Pete Hegseth at the NATO meeting said that it’s not realistic for Ukraine to take its territory back (to the 2014 borders), that’s not that different from what President Zelensky was saying in January about not being able to take the territory back militarily, but having to pursue that by other means, provided there were security guarantees for the rest of Ukraine. That’s not that different.
Similarly with NATO, (Trump) said it’s not realistic to think that NATO membership would be a result of these negotiations, which I think is absolutely right, because Russia would not agree to that, and we shouldn’t even be talking to Russia about that. That’s none of their business.
I think those comments were blown out of proportion a bit.
“A bit” was Volker’s way of being …diplomatic… about the hype.
SETH BARRETT TILLMAN: Are you now, or have you ever been, a federal prosecutor?
JIM TREACHER: It’s Okay Not to Get Mad at Every Little Thing.
I didn’t watch the whole SNL 50th anniversary deal last weekend, because I forgot it was on. The only time I pay attention to the show anymore is when one of the past guest hosts has shot somebody, or when Hollywood makes an embarrassing movie about the show’s premiere back in 1975*. I don’t hate the show. I just don’t care anymore.
So I didn’t see this sketch until today, after a bunch of people complained about it:
Huh. Well, that was pretty funny. Eddie Murphy does a great impression of Tracy Morgan, and I’ll take their word for it that black people don’t tend to watch SNL. The whole thing is self-deprecating humor. I ain’t mad at it.
Apparently, though, I’m supposed to be angry because Tom Hanks showed up at the end, playing a country-ass white fella in a MAGA hat who thinks a black man is threatening him instead of just wanting to shake his hand. Even the audience seemed taken aback by that one.
Outrage!
* * * * * * * * *
I’ll never understand sore winners. MAGA has been getting exactly what they wanted for a solid month now, and it’s still not enough. They have to bitch and moan about an SNL sketch, of all things. They’re more like the libs they hate than they care to admit.
The sketch worked perfectly in one sense. For almost 20 years now, SNL has existed only to provide Sunday column fodder for Beltway journalists. As John Hinderaker wrote in 2017 at Power Line, political reporters and wire services love to recap SNL episodes, because it allows them to get their biases in print while still maintaining a thin veneer of objectivity. “‘Respectable’ news outlets like the AP can’t publish absurd comedy skits ripping President Trump, much as they might like to,” Hinderaker wrote. “But by covering Saturday Night Live, they turn such meaningless attacks into fake ‘news.’”
Similarly, this week, SNL has gotten a ton of free press from outraged red staters who haven’t watched the show in decades, but took the bait and generated plenty of, to coin a phrase, outrage! over a sketch attacking someone wearing a MAGA hat. Whether it’s via the DNC-MSM or from outraged conservatives, generating plenty of ink has kept the show on the air long after its freshness rating (and real TV ratings) expired. At age 80, Lorne Michaels has to be laughing about chalking up yet another win.
* From your humble narrator last month: Live From New York, It’s ‘Saturday Night’ Member Berries!
CHRIS BRAY: A Shameless, Aggressive, and Dangerous Descent Into Obvious Evil. “Margaret Brennan’s bizarre response to JD Vance’s speech in Munich — free speech? but that’s the weapon the Nazis used to commit the Holocaust! — wasn’t mere ignorance or accident. It’s a maneuver. You’re going to see more of it, in an urgent wave of moral inversion.”
Plus:
Read the piece in the New Republic, and look closely at Michael Tomasky’s language, which is full of Stasi-adjacent framing: “The Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) has been declared a ‘suspected extremist’ organization by the German domestic intelligence agency.”
The security agencies have spoken! This political party is declaratively engaged in crimethink, and must therefore be shunned and suppressed!
Do people authentically arguing against fascism present the declarations of the state security apparatus as the final word that ends political debate?
There’s a lot of Stasi envy on the left.
Also: “Michael Tomasky is evil, full stop. Clumsy and stupid, yes, but casually and cheerfully evil. This is societal poison. The argument that freedom is fascism is exceptionally dangerous. Fight this. Be rude about it.”
MOST UNIVERSITY ADMINISTRATORS AREN’T PARTICULARLY BRIGHT. BUT OHIO NORTHERN UNIVERSITY IS IN A CLASS BY ITSELF: With Jury Trial Pending In Termination Of Tenured Law Prof, University Sues Over His WSJ Op-Ed And Lawyer’s Press Release. “After terminating Scott Gerber without telling him why, Ohio Northern University filed a lawsuit to shut him up.”
That’s good. This will certainly keep people from talking about Ohio Northern University and the morons who run it.
A friend writes:
Gotta love the deposition of the Vice-Chair of the Ohio Northern Board of Trustees:
1. Would it concern you if the university was hiring based on race? “I don’t know.”
2. Would it concern you if you found that the university was choosing to hire only white applicants? “I don’t know.”
3. Would it concern you if you found out the school is only hiring men? “I don’t know.”
4. Would it concern you if you found out that the school is excluding LGBTQ individuals from its hiring process? “I don’t know.”
5. Would it concern you if the dean refused to hire people based on their race? “I do not know.”
6. What would you do, Mr. Keyes, if you learned the law school was refusing to hire white applicants? “I don’t know.”
7. If Dean (Charles) Rose had been dishonest during a deposition, would that concern you as vice chair of the board? “I don’t know if the dean was dishonest.” If he had been dishonest, would that concern you? “I don’t know.”
They don’t know much. And it shows.
HMMM: This Might Be the Best Idea for DOGE Yet.
Man, I’m not sure about this. Would it increase inflation? Does it increase the money supply more than the spending would? But it would have the effect of starving the beast. And politically it seems like a winner coming into 2026.