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Archive for 2025
February 11, 2025
STUDDED TIRES FOR THE WIN: Audi RS E-Tron GT Performance with Studded Tires Proves 912 HP Isn’t Too Much for Winter.
THE LEFT THINKS WE STILL LIVE IN A WORLD WHERE THE MEDIA CAN PROTECT THEIR REPUTATIONS FROM ANY SELF-INFLICTED HARM:
The American Bar Association destroyed its remaining credibility to be treated as an honest entity when it acted like Joe Biden could tweet the Equal Rights Amendment into law. This is a partisan organization the media pretends is nonpartisan in order to attack Republicans. https://t.co/hFdQJkLDJH
— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) February 10, 2025
But since the dinosaur legacy media is held in lower regard than almost any other institution, lefty reputations are crumbling all around them.
HOW WE GOT HERE:
To be clear, the Exec Branch does not have the right to ignore court orders.
The President is bound by the Constitution. If you think he's violating it, you sue in a district court, then to an appellate court, then to SCOTUS. That's the system.
But the sanctimony is gross.
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) February 11, 2025
BECAUSE IT WAS ALWAYS A BS SLOGAN FOR A BS PARTISAN RAG. NEXT QUESTION? If ‘Democracy Dies in Darkness,’ Why Is It Banking in Secret?
BODY POSITIVITY’S BIG FAT LIE:
[Tristan Justice and Gina Bontempo, the authors of Fat And Unhappy: How “Body Positivity” Is Killing Us (and How to Save Yourself)] discuss politics very little, but the unspoken context of their book is the growing politicization of fitness. “Getting fit is great—but it could turn you into a rightwing jerk,” read the title of a June piece published by a Guardian columnist. Kennedy’s endorsement of President Donald Trump brought an entire army of crunchy moms over to the Republican side—no small thing, if a recent report from the New York Times is to be believed. The health of future generations seems like something the left and the right can come together to support, but the food industry and pharmaceutical industry seem to find ways to coopt this vision nearly every time.
Justice and Bontempo are far from the first authors to point out what’s wrong with nutrition in America. They cite research from Nina Teicholz, author of The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet; Robert H. Lustig, author of Metabolical: The Lure and the Lies of Processed Food, Nutrition, and Modern Medicine; and Gary Taubes, author of Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It. Where they start to tread new ground is their reporting on “toxic” body positivity, defining it as a movement that “seeks to eliminate the emotional toll of obesity by demanding the rest of the country normalize and even glorify excess weight.” Justice was even denied a press pass to attend Philly FatCon, a 2023 gathering of pro-fat activists including Joy Cox, author of Fat Girls in Black Bodies, and Sonalee Rashatwar, known online as “The Fat Sex Therapist.”
“The point of the conference was the promotion of far-left activism on social justice, and the organizers placed obesity at the center of it…. None of the conference speakers on the all-women lineup built their profiles by raising the red flag on obesity. They all made money on raising the white one,” Justice and Bontempo write.
So who’s funding the body positivity movement? All it takes is a little digging to realize that when skincare brand Dove launches a “Campaign for Size Freedom,” it’s actually acting in the interest of parent company Unilever, one of the top ice cream manufacturers in the United States. Companies like Dove act in tandem with fat-positive activists like Virgie Tovar to get the stamp of approval from this new social justice spinoff. Unfortunately, average Americans using social media unknowingly encounter this propaganda. They’re bombarded with videos from dietitians funded by the food industry who recommend soda and packaged snacks but never restricting unhealthy foods. In fact, some of the influencers who dole out health “advice” online refuse to even classify foods as “good” or “bad” because “diet culture, fatphobia, and systems of oppression have created false hierarchies of food” (yes, this is a direct quote from a so-called nutritionist cited by Justice and Bontempo).
The schizophrenia during and immediately after the coronavirus pandemic was pretty astonishing, particularly from sources who should (and do) know better:
Shot: Why Are People with Obesity More Vulnerable to COVID?
–Scientific American, June 24th, 2021.
Chaser: Scientific American looks at the racist stigmatization of black women’s bodies and obesity.
—Twitchy and your humble narrator, December 28th, 2022:
TRUMP 47 IS SO MUCH BETTER PREPARED THAN TRUMP 45 WAS:
I’m beginning to think that Trump 2.0 was counting on them to pick this fight https://t.co/ZpnAneOxIh
— Kurt Schlichter (@KurtSchlichter) February 11, 2025
Team Trump is doing Simone Biles routines inside the Left’s OODA loop.
THEY WON’T STAY STUPID FOREVER: Liberal Analyst: Dems Who Go All-In to Defend USAID Are Committing ‘Political Suicide.’
LIGHTNING DEAL: Cordless Vacuum Cleaner. #CommissionEarned
ANALYSIS: TRUE.
Libs need to feel morally and intellectually superior to you at all times and if they’re not able to they get a little schizo.
It’s very sad. They’re fragile narcissists. Very difficult way to go through life. They’re very fragile.
— Coddled affluent professional (@feelsdesperate) February 11, 2025
For proof, you don’t have to look any further than all the “lamentations of their women” stories recently posted here on Instapundit.
SYSTEMS UPGRADE COMPLETE:
Lloyd Austin wore five face masks and skipped out on his job without telling anyone.
Pete Hegseth works out with the men he's tasked with leading. pic.twitter.com/hSpTQa4ZW4
— Media Research Center (@theMRC) February 11, 2025
Not least of whom, Throk:
Either Hamas releases the rest of the hostages or SecDef is just going to send Throk over there with a spiked club and a get-out-of-war-crimes-free card pic.twitter.com/mEKsZeGNxt
— Oilfield Rando (@Oilfield_Rando) February 11, 2025
Flashback: Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s Hospitalization Saga Just Got Worse. “Is anyone else in the presidential line of succession in the hospital? If there were, we would never know. Who is talking to whom in this administration, and why is it that the easy, most simple things are disregarded or outright ignored?”
As Glenn noted at the start of last year, mercifully, team Biden’s last year in office, “It’s totally normal for senior officials to disappear for days.”
It is if they’re Democrats; the DNC-MSM was happy to look the other way at these issues, in contrast to how they report on a Republican president — and even his first lady: CNN’s Brian Stelter Accidentally Stumbles Upon One of the Biggest Issues of Joe Biden’s Presidency.
Another Twitter/X user responded with another inconvenient point.
“I don’t think you’ve gone 2 minutes without thinking about Trump in the past 9 years.”
Ouch.
But beyond the dunks, it was interesting to see Stelter suggest that not seeing the president for long stretches of time was actually a good thing, when that was one of the core problems with Biden’s presidency: That he was an absentee president, wasn’t present half the time, and even when he was, he didn’t appear to be all there – which is when his handlers stepped in.
Stelter’s .02 is especially fascinating when one considers his fretting over First Lady Melania Trump allegedly going missing at one point during Trump’s first term:
Sooo… to recap: Democrat presidents laying low is a good thing, Republican First Ladies being out of the spotlight for more than a couple of days is problematic, and Republican presidents being out front and center to let the people know they are there and leading is going overboard.
Got it (I think!).
WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: How 3D-printed parts changed the NASCAR Cup Series.
WAIT, WHICH WNBA TEAM DOES HE PLAY FOR? Breaking: Russia Releases Marc Fogel to Trump Envoy.
THEY’RE ALWAYS IN THE LAST PLACE YOU LOOK: Students discover a new protein while investigating Streptococcus infection.
BUT HONESTLY, DIDN’T WE ALREADY KNOW? Democrat Insiders Knew Joe Biden Was Getting Doped Up Before Public Events.
GET’EM SKEERED AND KEEP THE SKEER ON’EM: Democrats in Disarray as Trump Pushes Through Agenda.
The first weeks of the Trump administration have brought the reality of Democrats’ situation into a harsh light, according to conversations with more than 20 operatives and elected officials. Party members and officials fall broadly into two camps, said those familiar with such discussions. One camp has wanted to take a cautious approach, and the other has wanted to be more aggressive. But both are vexed.
About 10 days ago, Schumer was on a private call with governors, who urged him to unify senators in fighting back against Trump’s nominees. The fact that some of Trump’s cabinet nominees received Democratic votes angered many in the party.
In an interview, Schumer said the governors wanted senators to vote “no” on all nominees.
“Some of my caucus didn’t want to do that, but basically I agreed with [the governors] and said, I’m going to urge people to vote no on every nominee, and we’re going to work hard,” he said, adding that Democrats did unanimously oppose Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought.
For all the good it did them, practically. Politically, Democrat obstructionism on another popular issue again puts them on the wrong side of an easy 80/20, as Mary Katharine Ham pointed out.
More:
Complicating the conversation are conflicting views about how to interpret Democratic losses in November. Some argue that losing the White House and both chambers of Congress, as well as Trump’s dominance with white working-class voters and improvement with Black and Latino voters should be a wake-up call for a party overhaul. Others contend that the Democrats ran close races in key battlegrounds and only narrowly lost the House and there is no need for alarm.
Keep thinking that, please.
VANCE SHOWS WHY AMERICA IS LEAVING EUROPE IN THE DUST ON AI. At Spectator World, Matthew Lynn writes:
They won’t have liked the message or the messenger. With characteristic bluntness, Vice President J.D. Vance tore into the European Union’s smothering regulation of artificial intelligence today.
Still, Europe’s leaders should listen. Vance happens to be absolutely right.
When President Macron convened an AI summit in Paris this week, he was probably hoping for the usual platitudes from world leaders about “transformative technologies” and “empowering change” — along with a few billion euros for some data hubs in France. Unfortunately, no one told Vance how these things are meant to work. In his speech he spoke his mind, and tore into his hosts.
“We believe that excessive regulation of the AI sector could kill a transformative industry,” he told the CEOs and heads of state in the hall. “We feel very strongly that AI must remain free from ideological bias and that American AI will not be co-opted into a tool for authoritarian censorship.”
Ouch. It probably made for uncomfortable listening for the EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen and the other assembled dignitaries. They won’t have liked the veiled threat: that tariffs might be a consequence of over-regulating America’s tech giants. Nor will they have appreciated the criticism of Europe’s approach to the sector.
Related: “You can tell this speech is native to him and that it wasn’t written by committee. These are not ideas that he hasn’t wrestled with. That’s why it’s phenomenal, and why it’s so different than all the meaningless slop most politicians deliver.”
A note on this kind of speech— it’s not written by a speechwriter, where the speaker has no knowledge of the subject. It’s not full of filler words that carry no meaning. It has a clear argument, and a surprising one for the audience he’s addressing.
One of the problems with AI…
— Katherine Boyle (@KTmBoyle) February 11, 2025
Earlier: How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms.
[Ross Douthat of the New York Times]: Just to zero in: When you say, “kill A.I.,” what does that mean? Because the Biden administration obviously would not say that it intends to kill A.I. It would say that it wants to make America the world leader in A.I. while regulating it in a way that prevents our enemies around the world from obtaining potentially world-altering technology.
That would be the narrative, right? So why is that wrong?
[Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen]: [Laughs.] What you just said would be great compared to what we actually got. So again, the precondition we got with crypto was to just flat out try to kill it. This whole debanking thing — they just debanked an entire generation of founders.
They debank their families. They really destroyed people’s lives. They just killed companies left, right and center, just debanking, destroying companies.
They did regulation through enforcement. They would never define what the rules were. They would just arbitrarily sue people when they didn’t think they could sue people and win, then they’d issue these things called Wells notices, which is basically a public announcement that the government is going to sue you in the future, which is basically a death sentence for a company, right?
So we saw this exercise of raw authoritarian administrative power levied against crypto. Basically we saw the beginnings of what we thought was going to be applied to A.I.
So A.I. needs to be very carefully controlled by the government or by adjuncts of the government to make sure that there’s no hate speech or misinformation, which is to say it has to be completely politically controlled. We were trying to keep our heads down, just trying to build start-ups. Then Ben and I went to Washington in May of 2024. We couldn’t meet with Biden because, as it turns out, at the time, nobody could meet with Biden.
We were able to meet with senior staff. So we met with very senior people in the White House, in the inner core.
We basically relayed our concerns about A.I., and their response to us was, “Yes, the national agenda on A.I. We will implement it in the Biden administration and in the second term. We are going to make sure that A.I. is going to be a function of two or three large companies. We will directly regulate and control those companies. There will be no start-ups. This whole thing where you guys think you can just start companies and write code and release code on the internet — those days are over. That’s not happening.”
We were shocked that it was even worse than we thought. We said, “Well, that seems really radical.” We said, “Honestly, we don’t understand how you’re going to control and ban open-source A.I., because it’s just math and code on the internet. How are you possibly going to control it?” And the response was, “We classified entire areas of physics during the Cold War. If we need to do that for math or A.I. going forward, we’ll do that, too.”
Douthat: But that is a national security argument. That is an argument about China, right?
Andreessen: Yeah, but national security is also the death of democracy. Maybe I’ll give the devil his due here. I believe, in their view, they really think they’re defending democracy. I mean, they’re trying to strangle it to death in the name of defending it, but I think they literally believe it when they say Trump is Hitler.
By the way, it appears Obama doesn’t believe Trump is Hitler anymore, because he was joking around with him at Jimmy Carter’s funeral.
A lot of these guys, the fire’s in the eyes. And look, it’s not even just the U.S. It’s the rise of UKIP. Brexit was an equally shocking, alarming thing. The rise of Nigel Farage. The German party AfD, it’s obviously the Nazi Party 2.0. And so this superheated rhetoric and actions between 2021 and 2024 just went completely bananas.
So we came in on May ’24, at the very height of that, and we said, “Oh, my God, they’re going to kill us. They’re going to kill our companies. They’re going to kill open source.” By the way if you kill open-source A.I., you also kill all academic research, so the universities are going to be completely cut out of the loop.
Douthat: I feel like we would have to do a separate show about the future and risks of A.I., but my perception is there is a large constituency not just in Washington, D.C., but in Silicon Valley as well that regards some form of A.I. as potentially dangerous to human civilization or U.S. national defense as nuclear weapons. And during the Cold War, we obviously did not allow random start-ups to manufacture nuclear weapons in the nuclear corridor in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.
Andreessen: Not only did we ban them from making nuclear weapons; we also banned them from making nuclear power, which we now regret. But anyway —
Douthat: No, absolutely. No, I’m by no means arguing that this theory is correct. I’m just saying my sense is that there is presumably some version of A.I. that you would wish to see regulated by the federal government, right?
Andreessen: It depends. This is a longer conversation we need to have. But I would just tell you the national security part was not the motivator here. And by the way, the national security stuff, those arguments are still going to play out. Those arguments aren’t over. That’s still going to play out.
The political dimension of it, overwhelmingly. I mean, it was just crystal clear. You can see it in the eyes. You can see it in the words. You can hear it in the words. You can see it in the behavior. We have a lot of Democratic friends of good standing who are major donors in both the
Biden campaign and even the Kamala Harris campaign. They came back with the same reports. It’s completely consistent, which is that social media was a catastrophic mistake for political reasons.
Because it is literally killing democracy and literally leading to the rearrival of Hitler. And A.I. is going to be even worse, and we need to take it right now. This is why I took you through the long preamble earlier, because at this point, we are no longer dealing with rational people. We’re no longer dealing with people we can deal with.
And that’s the day we walked out and stood in the parking lot of the West Wing and took one look at each other, and we’re like, “Yep, we’re for Trump.”
In contrast, as Lynn writes at the first link, “the EU has killed its AI industry stone dead. The AI Act created rules that were too stringent too quickly. It pushed costs so high that most entrepreneurs went elsewhere. Its only real impact has been that giants such as Apple are switching off AI functions in Europe.”
Unexpectedly! The late Steven Den Beste was writing about Europe’s high tech malaise almost a quarter of a century ago. “Where is Europe’s Intel? Where is Europe’s Microsoft? Where is their IBM? Their Dell? Their Applied Material?”
J.D. IS A SMART GUY:
A Yale law professor says JD Vance is right: the federal judge who blocked DOGE from exposing wasteful spending by the Treasury Department violated the Constitution.https://t.co/2cCjdf2aXC
— Media Research Center (@theMRC) February 11, 2025
ELON, WHAT IS BEST IN LIFE?
Elon Musk changed his name to Harry Bolz on Twitter and now @cnn is covering it as news. Watch this clip. The legacy media is totally dead, they primarily exist now to be mocked online by everyone with a functional brain: pic.twitter.com/er5N5XQ938
— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) February 11, 2025
Earlier: Who Let the DOGEs Out?
I fear though, that Musk may be taking Saul Alinksy’s sixth rule for radicals a bit too literally: “A good tactic is one your people enjoy. If your people aren’t having a ball doing it, there is something very wrong with the tactic.”
Having big Harry Bolz!
MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Another Biden Timebomb Just Blew Up. “Put simply: much of the spending in the Biden Cabal’s signature legislative wins was backloaded into what they hoped would be his second term, his reelection guaranteed by phony jobs numbers and oodles of debt dressed up like a drag queen named Ro Busty Growth.”
LEADERSHIP:
Lloyd Austin wore five face masks and skipped out on his job without telling anyone.
Pete Hegseth works out with the men he's tasked with leading. pic.twitter.com/hSpTQa4ZW4
— Media Research Center (@theMRC) February 11, 2025
Here’s that famous and oh-so-mockable flashback:
Maybe Sec. Lloyd Austin was in the hospital for several days to have his tremendous face shield and mask removed surgically? pic.twitter.com/vKeN1OWrrs
— RP 🇺🇲 (@RealRPinNYC) January 7, 2024