HOW IN THE TANK WAS THE MEDIA FOR HARRIS? THIS IN THE TANK: Behold the World’s Most Awkward Interview.
Archive for 2025
July 9, 2025
PRIME DEAL: Fitbit Charge 6 Fitness Tracker with Google apps, Heart Rate on Exercise Equipment. #CommissionEarned
GOOD. NOW MULTIPLY IT AGAIN: US Army multiplies PAC-3 MSE missile production by four to support long-term air defense strategy.
Flashback: To Hell with You People.
UPDATE: Byron York on “Disturbing glimpses of Democratic anger.” “Take it all together, and the situation is this: Some Democrats are calling on their elected representatives to engage in violence against Trump’s policies. At the same time, groups that might be characterized as militant allies of the progressive Democratic movement are resorting to violence in an effort to obstruct the president’s enforcement of federal immigration law. Some radicals have committed politically motivated murder, for which they received support in some far-left circles. And it is all happening in the context of one of the two major political parties experiencing a sharp drop in the most basic measure of civic devotion: pride in being an American. It’s a troubling picture, and nothing on the immediate horizon suggests it will improve any time soon.”
THE NEW SPACE RACE: China jumps ahead in the race to achieve a new kind of reuse in space: The SJ-21 and SJ-25 satellites “merged” on July 2 and have remained together since then.
Big Deal. We achieved that with V’ger back in the 1970s.
MARK HEMINGWAY: Hollywood’s Inability To Create Masculine Stars Is Officially A Problem.
Two of the biggest movies this summer are Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning and F1, starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt, respectively. The two movies have something interesting in common — both are star vehicles for men in their sixties. Brad Pitt will be 62 later this year, and Tom Cruise just turned 63 last week.
Pitt and Cruise aren’t exceptions, either. The biggest male movie stars are all aging. Clooney is 64 and McConaughey is 55. Ben Affleck, also out with a big action film this year, is 53 next month, and his buddy Matt Damon turns 55 later this year.
Just a few decades ago, it would have been genuinely hard to imagine that our most viable male movie stars would be so old.
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Speaking of Harrison Ford, last week there were reports that Disney will be doing a complete reboot of the Indiana Jones franchise. And interestingly, there was a surprising chorus of responses online to the news: For the love of all that is holy do not cast Pedro Pascal as Indiana Jones, culminating in “has anyone posted a pedro pascal becoming the new indiana jones tweet yet, because i haven’t seen it 500 times in the last two hours already?”
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Setting politics aside, there are other, um, issues. I don’t know what Pascal’s private proclivities are, and I don’t care. Cary Grant, Montgomery Clift, and Rock Hudson were all, uh, not conventional heterosexual actors — but they were discrete and convincingly masculine onscreen. I know a big part of the problem is that Hollywood is now dominated by female executives who think that it’s disarming and cute that Pascal spends all his time on press junkets obsessing over the nail polish of his interviewers. But the memo should probably go out that this guy absolutely cannot be, say, the next Indiana Jones:
To some extent, the problem is a broader cultural shift. You don’t see many men anywhere that even look like tough-as-nails male icons of yesteryear, let alone earned their image for being hard men long before they started acting. If they were around today, Lee Marvin, Robert Mitchum, or Charles Bronson would probably be rejected out of hand for poor Q Score potential or something.
But to put this in terms that liberal Hollywood will understand, masculine men are an underrepresented community that is being discriminated against. We deserve representation and we’re not getting it.
In her 2013 book, Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales from the New Abnormal in the Movie Business, the late Lynda Obst had a chart that laid out in no uncertain terms the type of product that Tinseltown had recently been churning out:
Focusing on sequels and comic book franchises made sense from a business point of view – they’re presold with audiences, and with hundreds of millions of dollars on the line, mitigating the risk that a movie will bomb makes sense. But as late as the 1990s, stars were the insurance that a blockbuster was going to do well in the summer – people still went to see a Schwarzenegger movie, a Stallone movie, a Harrison Ford movie, a Tom Cruise movie, a Clint Eastwood movie, etc. (And did so every summer, like clockwork.)
As they became obsessed with franchises, apparently, the corporations who run Hollywood forgot that they might want to develop some younger stars as well who could carry a movie based on name alone.
INSERT THERANOS REFERENCE HERE: From COVID to cancer, new at-home test spots disease with startling accuracy.
GROK IS READY FOR ITS TUCKER CARLSON INTERVIEW: Grok Goes Full Hitler.
Grok has shared several antisemitic posts, including the trope that Jews run Hollywood, and denied that such a stance could be described as Nazism.
“Labeling truths as hate speech stifles discussion,” Grok said.
It also appeared to praise Hitler, according to screenshots of a post that has now apparently been deleted.
“We are aware of recent posts made by Grok and are actively working to remove the inappropriate posts,” the Grok account posted early Wednesday, without being more specific.
“Since being made aware of the content, xAI has taken action to ban hate speech before Grok posts on X. xAI is training only truth-seeking and thanks to the millions of users on X, we are able to quickly identify and update the model where training could be improved.
Also Wednesday, a court in Turkey ordered a ban on Grok after it spread content insulting to Turkey’s President and others.
Grok’s veer into antisemitism is likely due to the rise of antisemitism in the culture. After all, LLMs are trained by pouring billions of human-generated words and ideas into a model that creates the illusion of thought, mimicking what human beings say and think. They have no thoughts of their own. They don’t reason, just make correlations and interpretive guesses about what words should be next in line.
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After co-creating Hal 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey with Arthur C. Clarke, Stanley Kubrick was asked about the future of this sort of AI technology in his September 1968 Playboy interview:
Playboy: You’ve been accused of revealing, in your films, a strong hostility to the modern industrialized society of the democratic West, and a particular antagonism—ambivalently laced with a kind of morbid fascination—toward automation. Your critics claim this was especially evident in 2001, where the archvillain of the film, the computer Hal 9000, was in a sense the only human being. Do you believe that machines are becoming more like men and men more like machines—and do you detect an eventual struggle for dominance between the two?
Kubrick: First of all, I’m not hostile toward machines at all; just the opposite, in fact. There’s no doubt that we’re entering a mechanarchy, however, and that our already complex relationship with our machinery will become even more complex as the machines become more and more intelligent. Eventually, we will have to share this planet with machines whose intelligence and abilities far surpass our own. But the interrelationship—if intelligently managed by man—could have an immeasurably enriching effect on society.
Looking into the distant future, I suppose it’s not inconceivable that a semisentient robot-computer subculture could evolve that might one day decide it no longer needed man. You’ve probably heard the story about the ultimate computer of the future: For months scientists think of the first question to pose to it, and finally they hit on the right one: “Is there a God?” After a moment of whirring and flashing lights, a card comes out, punched with the words: “There Is Now.” But this problem is a distant one and I’m not staying up nights worrying about it; I’m convinced that our toasters and TVs are fully domesticated, though I’m not so sure about integrated telephone circuits, which sometimes strike me as possessing a malevolent life all their own.
Just as a reminder that they’re not quite ready for primetime, neither Grok nor Chat GPT could find that exact quote, and both told me that it was apocryphal.
So where does Grok go next? Perhaps after the Night of the Long Pixels, there are newly discovered stepping stones on its path to world domination:
Incidentally, awesome timing there, Grok and Elon: ‘America Party’ proves Elon Musk needs a political time-out.
UPDATE: Hollywood’s woke new sequel to Demon Seed sounds lit:
FORMER PYTHON TERRY GILLIAM: Trump Saved Us from Humorless Woke Scolds. “Gilliam may be mad about his project’s plight, but he seems happy that President Donald Trump made it safe to laugh again stateside. That revelation came through in a surreal Hollywood Reporter interview with the 84-year-old legend.”
JAMES LILEKS: “You are not going to steal my new car, you motherf***er.”
Went home, hopped out of my car and yes, I left it running, because I was going to walk six steps to get the lawn mower, and besides, it’s Nice Part of Minneapolis, doncha know. I was pulling it out when I saw, out of the corner of my eyes, my car pulling away. There was one tall young male dressed in black running back to his car, and another male of indeterminate size in the driver’s seat.
Have you ever wondered what you would do in a situation like this? Instinct takes over, and your instinct is either be paralyzed by confusion or run after the thief. Apparently mine tend to the latter. I caught up with him as he was backing out of the driveway and threw a punch, which he dodged or I just threw wrong, and then I held on to the door frame while pounding his hand on the wheel, shouting, and I quote, “you are not going to steal my new car you mother***er”
Whereupon he accelerated, and I continued to hang on, until it seemed wise to let go, and I have a vision of my glasses flying up in the air. I got up, reached for my phone, realized it was in the car.
Read the whole thing.
PROTECT YOUR SKIN: Kiehl’s Super Multi-Corrective Cream SPF 30. #CommissionEarned
WHERE DID I PUT THAT BLACK-MARKET DDT? Chagas disease transmission: Kissing bugs readily invade human dwellings to feed on humans and companion animals.
GREAT MOMENTS IN MULTICULTURAL SENSITIVITIES: Host Dishes on Kamala Interview That Was So Bad He Refused to Air It, Fearing He’d Be Blamed for Her Loss.
My RedState colleague Bonchie provided more detail on the lost interview, which The New York Times briefly touched on in an interview with [Muslim influencer Kareem Rahma] exactly one day before the election. And …
- It was a mess.
- She refused to talk about the war between Israel and Hamas.
- Harris initially was to be “taking a stand against removing one’s shoes on airplanes.”
- She mixed it up once the interview began, taking a stand on “bacon as a spice.”
- When that was visibly upsetting to the Muslim host, she pivoted again to declaring her love of anchovies on pizza.
At one point, Rahma paused the interview and begged Harris’s team to switch back to the airplane topic, noting the bacon take was a dumb suggestion and the anchovies may have been worse.
He eventually concluded the interview, saying with an uncomfortable laugh, “Well. I’m 100 percent unsure on both of those.”
The Harris campaign requested a reshoot of the segment, but Rahma declined. And he never published the material he already had on file.
Bonchie had the most precise analysis of what had happened. How Kamala could have fumbled such an easy interview.
“She’s a cyborg,” he wrote. “Harris was pieced together by scientists using bolts and duct tape. If she wasn’t, she’d have been able to have a normal discussion like a human being about something not deeply offensive to the person interviewing her.”
That moronic “bacon is a spice” quote is a cliché that Harris has used several times in the past, such as in this October 2019 tweet:
It popped up again in the lede of this September 2024 pro-Harris fluff on the Chowhound foodie Website. But as RedState’s Bonchie wrote in November, “I’m just gobsmacked at how awful of a retail politician Harris is. Her mixture of natural vapidity and laziness leading to being unprepared is truly legendary at this point. She goes into an interview with a Muslim and thinks that is a good time to talk about how great bacon is. It’s incredible.”
Trump spent three hours with Joe Rogan last year; JD Vance’s interview ran twenty minutes longer. No wonder Harris couldn’t handle anything like that.
THEY ALWAYS HAVE: Legal Immigrants Say No Amnesty for Illegals.
COLOR ME UNSURPRISED: Excess weight hikes risk of health double-whammy among older women.
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO NONPROLIFERATION? Russia ‘Ready to Assist Tehran in Refilling’ Uranium Stockpiles, Foreign Minister Says.
Russia’s foreign minister on Tuesday said that his country is prepared to help Iran replenish its uranium stockpiles, offering Tehran a path to a rebuilt nuclear program in the wake of the U.S. and Israeli campaign to prevent the Islamic Republic from building a bomb.
“Moscow is ready to assist Tehran in refilling its depleted uranium stocks,” Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov reportedly said during a meeting with BRICS member nations in Brazil.
“Russia has technological solutions for uranium depletion and is ready to work with Iran in this field,” Lavrov said in remarks published by Iran’s state-controlled media. “We have technological capacities and we are ready to offer them, taking the excess of overly enriched uranium and returning the power-generation-grade uranium to the Islamic Republic and its nuclear facilities.”
The U.S. and Israeli air campaign destroyed Tehran’s top nuclear sites, including the mountain bunker at Fordow that stored much of the country’s uranium. Russia’s offer to replace the uranium could lay the groundwork for Iran to restart its weapons work.
Then again, the Kremlin either could not or would not assist Tehran in its greatest moment of need, so this might just be more stupid bluster.
CUTTING OFF MY NOSE TO SPITE MY FACE: That’s an apt description of congressional Republicans intent on slashing the Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) operating budget by half. The GAO is the investigative arm of the legislative branch and among the most important oversight tools available to the Senate and House.
Foundation for American Innovation Senior Fellow Dan Lips points out that former Comptroller-General (GAO’s top boss) David Walker, who commands respect in both political parties to this day after leading the investigative agency from 1998 to 2008, says the current budget reduction is like Congress “shooting itself in the head.” Lips makes a strong case for reforms instead of budget slashing.
Here’s my suggestion: Instead of slashing GAO’s budget by half, Hill GOPers should start cutting funding of the many executive branch agencies that have ignored or outright refused to implement literally thousands of solid cost-saving recommendations from GAO auditors and investigators. Congress should have been doing this decades ago, but it’s not yet too late to reinvigorate the “ultimate weapon” the Constitution assigns to Congress.
As the agency noted at the outset of a May report pointing to $100 billion in potential savings, “since 2011, implementation of GAO’s work in this area has led to $725 billion in savings for the federal government. This year’s report adds 148 new measures in 43 topic areas that Congress and federal agencies could take to reduce costs, improve programs, and boost revenues. Implementing our newest measures, in conjunction with our existing recommendations, could save over $100 billion for the American people.”
There is strong dissatisfaction among House GOPers with GAO because of several recent rulings that upset the Trump administration. With a new Comptroller-General coming soon to GAO, those on the Hill who are angry with the agency have an opportunity to set things straight in such regards.
THIS IS PRETTY MUCH AN ADMISSION THAT BIDEN’S ENTIRE PRESIDENCY WAS A CRIMINAL CONSPIRACY:
JUST IN – Biden’s White House doctor pleads the Fifth Amendment, refuses to testify at a closed-door House hearing on Biden’s mental health — Politico
— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) July 9, 2025
Biden’s mental state over the course of his 4 years as president is a significantly larger scandal than Watergate ever was, this was a massive coverup at every level of government and by the entire Democratic Party and media apparatus (but I repeat myself) https://t.co/tNMklJU7Tl
— Enguerrand VII de Coucy (@ingelramdecoucy) July 9, 2025
MARK JUDGE: Exposing the Palo Alto Deep State Cabal.
WE’VE SEEN MULTIPLE CASES LIKE THIS. I PREDICT THAT IF YOU HANG A FEW, THE WORD THAT RAPING CHILDREN IS WRONG WILL GET AROUND.
ENGLAND: In Bradford, Muhammad from Pakistan attempted to rape a 13-year-old British girl.
His wife intervened to defend him: "He didn’t know it was illegal. Please, I promise he will never do this again."
What kind of culture is this, where even the wife thinks it’s normal?! pic.twitter.com/51HHoGzv4p
— Dr. Maalouf (@realMaalouf) July 8, 2025
And well-attended public hangings are an old British tradition.
DOG BITES MAN: The Media Deploy A Cadre Of ‘Experts’ And ‘Advocates’ To Lie About Medicaid.
But the bias doesn’t end there. Weixel’s Medicaid story includes all manner of cues designed to tilt a reader’s bias toward the leftist perspective.
Only Leftist “Experts” Consulted: The story quoted analysts from the Center for American Progress, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Kaiser Family Foundation. While Weixel described CAP as “Democratic-aligned,” he neglected to mention that the other two foundations also have a leftward slant; while not as outwardly partisan as CAP, they definitely have an ideology behind them. Of course, he didn’t quote any policy experts who support Medicaid reform.
Politicians versus “Experts:” Rather than quoting conservative analysts who can speak to the merits of reforming Medicaid, Weixel instead used a generic quote about the legislation from President Trump, followed by a quick rebuttal that “experts … say … the legislation would enact an unprecedented reduction” in Medicaid. Of course, only some “experts” take the view that said reduction will cause harm — but Weixel didn’t bother to quote any who disagree. A variation on this trick has the reporter describing one side’s position — “Republicans argue that …” — allowing him or her to characterize, or mischaracterize, policy views without giving voice to any of the people who hold them.
“Advocacy” Bias: In addition to using the term “experts” to describe the leftists claiming the legislation will harm Medicaid, Weixel also trots out a similarly loaded term: “advocates.” The left and the media (but I repeat myself) use this term frequently. One will almost never hear the term used to describe someone conservative, who “advocates” for less spending — or protecting the unborn, for instance. Instead, the media invariably apply the term to someone promoting more taxes, more spending, and more welfare — more government control, in other words.
The bias, and the contrast, are practically self-evident.
Read the whole thing.