KATIE COURIC, SUDDEN CHAMPION OF DISPASSIONATE OBJECTIVITY: Katie Couric claims new owners of CBS, Bari Weiss are ‘compromising independent journalism.’

“These are really perilous times,” Couric said, pointing to what she described as eroding boundaries that once shielded newsrooms from business-side interference.

She recalled her early career at NBC News, where she said executives honored “an unwritten rule that there was a separation of church and state.”

Couric argued that the line has blurred as media companies face political threats, regulatory pressure and aggressive ownership changes.

“This idea that these corporations are putting pressure on their journalists is so repugnant,” she said.

Does Katie Couric not know she’s Katie Couric?

UPDATE: Bari Weiss’s Plans for CBS News: ‘I Wanna Blow This Up.’

Bari Weiss, the new editor-in-chief at CBS News, is already making waves.

The founder and editor of The Free Press and former New York Times columnist has adopted a rallying cry in meetings with colleagues, according to the Wall Street Journal.: “I wanna blow this up.”

Weiss’s plan “is working to overhaul the organization’s evening news program, counter what she sees as a left-leaning bias in legacy media and make the newsroom operate more efficiently,” reports the Journal.

Paramount Global and its new boss, Dave Ellison, recently acquired CBS in a deal that was harshly criticized by other legacy media outlets.

Katy Couric, the former anchor of the “CBS Evening News,” warned that “the whole setup with the Ellisons bringing her in and buying the Free Press is compromising independent journalism.”

Couric neglected to explain what or who was being “compromised,” but that’s par for the course. The unspoken criticism is that Weiss just isn’t left-wing enough. She’s an anti-woke crusader who wants to get legacy media to take their thumbs off the scale and report the news honestly. She’s no MAGA cheerleader, even though some media critics fear that CBS will now kowtow to Trump.

Alas, “blow this up” means return CBS News to mid-’90s Clintonian levels of liberalism. But even that worldview would likely translate into a major improvement to its news product.

MURDER IS BIG BUSINESS IN SOME PARTS OF THE WORLD: Palestinian Authority Paid Terrorists $214M This Year, Major Increase From 2024.

DISPATCHES FROM THE PERMANENT BIPARTISAN FUSION PARTY: Rachel Maddow attending Dick Cheney’s funeral sparks social media frenzy.

Liberal MS NOW host Rachel Maddow went viral Thursday after she was spotted at the funeral of former Vice President Dick Cheney.

Maddow, who once called Cheney “the maestro of terror politics,” was seen in the pews of Washington National Cathedral sitting next to Dr. Anthony Fauci. Two seats over was veteran Democratic strategist James Carville.

The image of Maddow appearing at Cheney’s memorial service caught many by surprise.

But it probably shouldn’t have:

Maddow's career as a commentator began during Bush/Cheney, when she'd frequently compare Cheney to the worst monsters in history (I was on her programs when she said it).

For so many liberals, Cheney is now rehabilitated despite regretting nothing: solely for opposing Trump: https://t.co/5ZMOg7HKHD

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) November 20, 2025

More from Ace: The Deposed Regime Gathers to Pretend to Honor Dick Cheney While Actually Making Petty Attacks to Advance Their Dying Political Careers.

(Classical reference in headline.)

THANK YOU! Huge thanks to everyone who contributed to FIRE after reading my most recent post. I hope you have a great Thanksgiving!

WHAT’S IN A NAME: Attack, defend, pursue — the Space Force’s new naming scheme foretells new era.

A for Attack: Systems, platforms, or vehicles designed to attack enemy forces or equipment.

B for Battle Management: Systems, platforms, or vehicles designed to direct and control friendly forces tactically engaged with an adversary.

C for Communications: Systems, platforms, or vehicles designed to support communication or data transport activities.

D for Defend: Systems, platforms, or vehicles that can protect friendly forces.

E for Electromagnetic Warfare: Systems, platforms, or vehicles designed to attack, protect, or exploit signals in the electromagnetic spectrum.

K for Support: Systems, platforms, or vehicles designed to ensure maintainability of space missions or payloads, including activities such as hosting, deploying, maintaining, sustaining, or servicing space vehicles or payloads while in orbit.

M for Meteorological: Systems, platforms, or vehicles designed to observe, record, or relay meteorological and oceanographic data.

N for Navigation Warfare: Systems, platforms, or vehicles that conduct navigation, positioning, and timing or navigation warfare activities.

P for Pursuit: Systems, platforms, or vehicles designed to intercept space targets in support of offensive and defensive operations.

R for Reconnaissance: Systems, platforms, or vehicles designed to perform targeted collection of intelligence and/or threat indications and warning to answer specific military questions.

S for Surveillance: Systems, platforms, or vehicles designed for persistent collection of intelligence and/or threat indications and warning on a target within a terrestrial, orbital, or cyber battlespace.

W for Warning and Tracking: Systems, platforms, or vehicles designed for the systematic observation of aerospace for the purpose of detecting, tracking, and characterizing terrestrial, air, and missile threats.

From there, things get complicated.

COLD WAR II: DOJ Arrests U.S. Citizens and Chinese Nationals for Exporting AI Tech to China.

BLACK FRIDAY SALE: Biometric Smart Gun Safe with Wireless Charging for Phone&Watch. #CommissionEarnred

THERE’LL BE SPANDEX JACKETS, ONE FOR EVERYONE: Elon Musk says that in 10 to 20 years, work will be optional and money will be irrelevant thanks to AI and robotics.

“My prediction is that work will be optional. It’ll be like playing sports or a video game or something like that,” Musk said. “If you want to work, [it’s] the same way you can go to the store and just buy some vegetables, or you can grow vegetables in your backyard. It’s much harder to grow vegetables in your backyard, and some people still do it because they like growing vegetables.”

The future of optional work will be thanks to millions of robots in the workforce able to usher in a wave of enhanced productivity, according to Musk. The tech mogul, worth about $470 billion, has made the recent push to expand Tesla beyond just electric vehicles, working on consolidating his sprawling business interests into his broader vision of an AI-fuelled, robotic-powered future. That includes his goal of having 80% of Tesla’s value come from his Optimus robots, despite continuous production delays for the humanoid bots.

I’m not holding my breath, but that does sound lovely. And maybe people would have enough free time to start having babies again.

WELL, IT’S NOT SOMETHING YOU SEE VERY OFTEN: Students line up to listen to anti-socialist speaker on campus.

RAYMOND IBRAHIM: Texas’s CAIR Ban and the Overlooked Truth Behind That EPIC Muslim City.

BLACK FRIDAY DEAL: Kiehl’s Ultra Facial Cream, Hydrating Face Moisturizer with Squalene. #CommissionEarned

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Faith and Freedom Night canceled at Stanford amid threats and high security costs.

AND HE’S THE POISON THAT PUT IT THERE: “What I get is that even Barack Obama knows that his party is on life support.”

HOME RULE WAS A MISTAKE: House Passes CLEAN DC Act to Repeal ‘Anti-Police’ Legislation.

The CLEAN Act aims to repeal the D.C. Council’s Comprehensive Policing and Justice Reform Amendment Act of 2022, which imposed sweeping restrictions on law enforcement in Washington, D.C.

Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-GA) sponsored the bill in the House, while Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) is carrying identical legislation in the Senate.

The House bill passed by a vote of 233-190, with 20 Democrats crossing the aisle to side with Republicans. The Senate version remains in the committee process.

Will Senate Dems dare filibuster?

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Let the Democrats Cook…Themselves. “I think a lot of that work involves simply letting the Dems be themselves. There’s a popular meme now that started as “Let the boy cook.” It means to let someone continue doing what they’re doing without interfering with them. The meme assumes a positive outcome, but I’ve repurposed it for the 2025 Democrats.”

THIS DOES NOT SURPRISE ME: Grand jury properly voted on James Comey’s indictment, foreman claims in blow to defense: ‘Eliminates any doubt.’

SHUT UP, THEY EXPLAINED: The conservative op-ed the Texas A&M student paper refused to publish.

Dear Anonymous Professor:

You are profoundly detached from the real issues affecting us, our families, our country, and the world today.

We are the most depressed, anxious, suicidal, obese, addicted, and indebted generation in American history, and the first to be worse off than our parents. We are forced to take pointless courses, buy outrageously expensive textbooks for information freely available online, and serve as a captive audience in a system where everyone—from publishers, administrators, and banks to professors like you—profits while we drown in debt.

The numbers don’t lie: almost 40% of students drop out, burdened by loans but no degree. Half of those who graduate end up in jobs that never required a degree in the first place. A bachelor’s degree has become a $100,000 high school diploma.

What caused this collapse, you ask?

You and your ideologies did. You are no longer educating us to build, compete, and lead. You are indoctrinating us to deconstruct, resent, and surrender.

Read the whole thing, and also this from the introduction to the op-ed:

The Battalion student newspaper at Texas A&M university does not seem to be a fan of conservative student thought. An analysis of the 60 opinion pieces focused on politics published since November 2024 found that nearly all of them — 50 — leaned liberal (35), left-leaning (5), far-left (5), and liberal satire (5).

Only 7 of the opinion political pieces were moderate or neutral, and a total of three were conservative, or a ratio of almost 17 to 1 liberal to conservative.

Nothing surprising there, I’m afraid.

TO BE FAIR, “MAINSTREAM PUNDITS” ARE MOSTLY GARBAGE: Mainstream Pundits Lavish Praise on Dick Cheney After Spending 20 Years Shrieking About How He Was Literally Darth Vader: National healing begins as CNN realizes waterboarding is cool now.

NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG:

Its seeming more and more Colorado and Dominion voting machines got caught again – Nov 4th 2025 election!

2nd tweet on this: the Sec. of State took down the El Paso County election results from their state website. Those results were up on the site a few hours ago! They are… https://t.co/1HWnGRDHUV pic.twitter.com/E5w9mtbwxE

— Peter Bernegger (@PeterBernegger) November 20, 2025

ICYMI, IT’S MY THURSDAY ESSAY FOR VIP SUBSCRIBERS: The Lost Art of Selling a Song.

VIRGINIA POSTREL: Why the Anti-Promethean Backlash? I suspect it has more to do with the betrayal of ordinary people by tech elites over the past couple of decades. When tech leaders are talking about the moral necessity of infecting people with ticks that will give them meat allergies to “save the planet,” it’s hard to be optimistic.

FOLLOWING THE SCIENCE: New Jersey high court first in US to ban Shaken Baby Syndrome testimony.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: Newest Starship booster is significantly damaged during testing early Friday.

During the pre-dawn hours in South Texas on Friday morning, SpaceX’s next-generation Starship first stage suffered some sort of major damage during pre-launch testing.

The company had only rolled the massive rocket out of the factory a day earlier, noting the beginning of its test campaign said on the social media site X: “The first operations will test the booster’s redesigned propellant systems and its structural strength.”

That testing commenced on Thursday night at the Massey’s Test Site, a couple of miles down the road from the company’s main production site at Starbase Texas. However an independent video showed the rocket’s lower half undergo an explosive (or possibly implosive) event at 4:04 am CT (10:04 UTC) Friday.

Post-incident images showed significant damage, perhaps a crumpling of sorts, to the lower half of the booster where the vehicle’s large liquid oxygen tank is housed. Neither SpaceX, nor company founder Elon Musk, had commented on the failure within a couple of hours of its occurrence on Friday morning.

The likely loss of this vehicle, “Booster 18,” is significant for SpaceX. Although the company is hardware rich—indeed it has built a massive factory in South Texas to churn out such vehicles—it nonetheless had a lot riding on this rocket. This is the first Starship Version 3, which was intended to have many design fixes and upgrades from the previous iterations of Starship vehicles to improve the reliability and performance of the massive rocket.

Better luck next time, fellas — and knowing SpaceX, that won’t be very long from now.

AT AMAZON, Shop Black Friday Week. #CommissionEarned

LEFTISM IS BEING RULED BY PEOPLE WHO HATE YOU AND YOUR CULTURE:

pic.twitter.com/qrGzwwQVp7

— 𝗠3MPH1S-B3113 (@M3mph1sB) November 20, 2025