Archive for 2025

OH, MAN: Why is Glamour honoring men as its Women of the Year?

At Spiked, Georgina Mumford writes:

Beneath a shot of the ‘dolls’ artfully arranged in the sunlight in their short skirts – and, in one case, what appears to be a pair of belted leather underwear – Faye claims that transwomen are subjected to ‘misogynistic violence’. Yet the ensuing interviews suggest it is the trans ‘community’ that has a misogyny problem.

‘I would like to turn on a TV programme and not be blindsided with a trans joke’, muses musician and dj Mya Mehmi, before going on to make fun of actual women – or ‘bitches’, as he prefers to call them:

‘I think people just need to understand, not only are we human, most of us are badder than everyone else. Put some respect on it, bitch! I look better than you. I dress better than you. I smell better than you. Please learn that and understand that.’

One of the most galling comments was made by Bel Priestley, who claims ‘transphobia is really accepted… people in the public eye make comments about trans people all the time and no one really calls them out on it.’ What he really means by ‘transphobia’ here is the denial that men can become women at will – an opinion that ordinary British women (the type who aren’t invited to do cover shoots for high-fashion magazines) have had to go all the way to the Supreme Court to defend. Don’t these women deserve more credit than trans activists – who, let’s face it, are campaigning against women’s rights?

As Julie Burchill wrote in May: ‘Protect the Dolls’ is trans activism at its creepiest.

The ‘Protect the Dolls’ campaign is certainly creepy. But it’s also great for opponents of the trans madness. In the Guardian piece, the ‘Protect the Dolls’ t-shirt designer, Conner Ives, scores a hilarious own goal while trying to big himself up. Reflecting on the use of his slogan at the trans-activist protest in London against the Supreme Court ruling on the definition of sex, he claims that Trans Lifeline co-director Myles Markham said that with ‘Protect the Dolls’, trans activists ‘finally have a message’.

‘Black is beautiful’, ‘Votes for women’, ‘Out and proud’ – these were important political messages. They were to the point and not one bit creepy. They certainly didn’t compare oppressed black people, women or homosexuals to toys.

The Weimar Republic called and told the 21st century left that it really needs to dial the craziness back a notch or twenty.

NON-ASSIMILATION:

Colonialism, straight up.

JIM GERAGHTY: The Left’s Disingenuous Pile-On of Karine Jean-Pierre.

We know darn well what’s going on here. First, as Megyn Kelly emphasized yesterday, Karine Jean-Pierre is no longer useful to the Democratic Party, so no one is interested in protecting her.

But secondly, Jean-Pierre is embarrassing Democrats by continuing to say things that were supposed to be memory-holed. On her book tour, she’s reiterating what a whole lot of Democrats believed, said, and defended right up until the night of Joe Biden’s debate.

In the past few weeks, Jean-Pierre has insisted that even as an octogenarian, Joe Biden could have served another four years and ably performed his duties. (Again, the man who turns 83 years old next month is getting radiation therapy for prostate cancer.) She’s insisted the Biden administration had no scandals, and that Biden had done a great job.

Now, a whole lot of people in the Democratic Party and mainstream media were insisting the same things, right up until shortly after 9 p.m. Eastern on June 27, 2024.

Sure, Jean-Pierre is completely wrong when she insists that the Democratic Party’s leadership acted wrongly, unethically, or immorally when they pushed Biden out as their nominee in the summer of 2024. But you can’t begrudge her feeling some whiplash in a world where Delaware Senator Chris Coons was attacking other Democrats for expressing the same doubts about Biden’s abilities that he had himself.

To be a Democrat in 2024 meant believing, and publicly insisting, that Biden was fine for another four years, and then, just about immediately after the debate, completely reversing yourself and insisting that Biden had to be replaced with Kamala Harris. Jean-Pierre’s cardinal sin is that she still believes all the things she was supposed to believe on the afternoon of June 27 and publicly says so. She’s still insisting that the emperor is wearing clothing, and a whole lot of Democrats want everyone to forget that they, too, spent a lot of time insisting the emperor’s new clothes looked fabulous.

As with Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s Original Sin, the media are tearing into KJP now in the hopes that the public will forget how they protected Biden and hid his mental and physical decline from 2019 until the June 2024 debate with Trump made their coverup impossible. Assuming Biden was in office today, or early in 2025, had handed to baton to Kamala Harris, the DNC-MSM would still be just as fawning to her as they were last year.

SEXISM IS EVERYWHERE: Study finds women get more benefits from exercise than men.. “With the same amount of exercise, women experience a three-fold reduction in their risk of death from heart disease compared to men, researchers reported Monday in Nature Cardiovascular Research.”

YOU GOTTA PUMP THOSE NUMBERS UP, THOSE ARE ROOKIE NUMBERS: ICE Buses 100 Illegal Aliens from Indiana to Texas for Deportation Processing. “The more than 100 illegal aliens being bused from Illinois to Texas this week for removal processing will add to the more than 527,000 who have already been deported under the new administration’s aggressive removal policies. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials announced on October 27, that more than two million illegal aliens have left the country. This includes 1.6 million who used the CBP Home app for self deportation.”

‘BLOOD BATH:’ CBS Parent Company Announces Mass Layoffs, Slashes ‘Race and Culture’ Unit.

CBS News parent company Paramount on Wednesday announced around 2,000 layoffs—including nearly 100 in the newsroom—and eliminated the outlet’s “Race and Culture” unit in an effort to crack down on ideological bias.

As part of the cuts, the network will cancel its streaming shows CBS Mornings Plus and CBS Evening News Plus, shutter its South Africa bureau, and revamp its Saturday morning program, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing a source familiar with the changes. Guardian reporter Jeremy Barr also reported on the cuts, posting on X that CBS “gutted” its Race and Culture unit. CBS had tasked that unit with overseeing “news stories about race, culture and injustice, ensuring they have the proper context and tone,” according to a 2020 profile of executive producer Alvin Patrick.

Paramount CEO David Ellison, who has vowed to root out ideological bias at CBS and “right-size” the failing network, announced the moves in an internal memo.

“In some areas, we are addressing redundancies that have emerged across the organization,” Ellison wrote. “In others, we are phasing out roles that are no longer aligned with our evolving priorities and the new structure designed to strengthen our focus on growth. Ultimately, these steps are necessary to position Paramount for long-term success.”

Ellison’s announcement has sent the CBS newsroom into a tailspin, according to the Guardian. One staffer described the layoffs as “nerve-racking” and said, “Seems no one is safe,” while another called the cuts a “blood bath.”

The first radio networks in American began in the 1920s. We’re in a similar inflection point as the mid-to-late 1950s, when the executives who commanded those networks began to realize that thanks to television’s rapid growth after WWII, their media was virtually extinct as a product consumed in the home, and started to retool into something less ubiquitous, to be background noise while in the car, and altered their programming accordingly. The original big three television networks are finally grappling with the notion that the Internet, social media, smart phones, and streaming devices have similarly rendered them a legacy media.

As always, be very careful when around those still consume these analog-era outlets:

Earlier: Columbia Broadcasting Struggle Session Concludes.

UPDATE:

PEOPLE TEND TO TAKE POSITIVE NOTICE OF THIS KIND OF OPENNESS:

EAST GERMANY ON THE POTOMAC:

In early 2009, the Washington Post, through its then-sister publication Newsweek informed its readers “We Are All Socialists Now.” Curiously, they left out the fact that the model of socialism that Beltway elites had chosen was East Germany.

THE DEMOCRATS ARE ALMOST BEYOND PARODY:

But only almost.

SPACE: Now in 3D, maps begin to bring exoplanets into focus.

Astronomers have generated the first three-dimensional map of a planet orbiting another star, revealing an atmosphere with distinct temperature zones – one so scorching that it breaks down water vapor, a team co-led by a Cornell expert reports in new research.

The temperature map of WASP-18b – a gas giant known as an “ultra-hot Jupiter,” located 400 light years from Earth – is the first applying a technique called 3D eclipse mapping, or spectroscopic eclipse mapping. The effort builds on a 2D model that members of the same team published in 2023, which demonstrated eclipse mapping’s potential to leverage highly sensitive observations by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

The researchers say that for many similar types of exoplanets observable by JWST, they can now begin mapping atmospheric variations just as, for example, Earth-based telescopes long ago observed Jupiter’s Great Red Spot and banded cloud structure.

“Eclipse mapping allows us to image exoplanets that we can’t see directly, because their host stars are too bright,” said Ryan Challener, a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Astronomy in the College of Arts and Sciences. “With this telescope and this new technique, we can start to understand exoplanets along the same lines as our solar system neighbors.”

Exciting stuff, and JWST is just getting started.

IT’S THE FEEL-GOOD STORY OF THE WEEK: ICE Rioters Had a Very, Very Bad, ‘Find Out’ Kind of Day. “It may come as a surprise to the lofos on the left, but barricading roads, throwing rocks at officers, and shooting at the feds is not protected First Amendment activity.”

OUR RECEPTIONIST, THE BEAUTIFUL JENNIFER MARLOWE, IS A RESULT OF THE MOST CUNNINGLY SUCCESSFUL SEX-CHANGE OPERATION IN MEDICAL HISTORY: Don Lemon: Megyn Kelly Looks Trans.

I’m starting to think Don Lemon doesn’t like women. I know that’s shocking but hear me out. Lemon hosted a podcast on his You Tube channel featuring two guys who I think work for him, John Cotter and Chris Miglioranzi. They call it the Clip Famers Podcast and I guess the idea is that Lemon is reacting to things online with a couple of guys who are 30+ years younger than he is.

Most of the 30-minute show was just the two young guys mocking right-wing people in various ways and Lemon chiming in and agreeing with them. Lemon’s YouTube channel has just under a million subscribers and after three days this podcast has nearly 13k views.

In any case, at the end of this clip one of the guys is trying on Lemon’s glasses (it’s riveting content) and he makes a joke saying “I’m Don Lemon, hey Megyn Kelly.” Lemon laughs and asks him where that is coming from. The the other guy says he has a real question. “Is Megyn Kelly chopped?” Chopped is slang for unattractive. That leads to this exchange:

Why, it’s as if,  “Don’s been quite the voice on the trans movement. Speaking of Don on trans topics, let’s not forget when Don blamed the biological female for ending up in a boxing ring with Imane Khelif, who was mad at having to take a mandatory genetic sex test. You might also remember during Don’s CNN career when he determined that Nikki Haley was ‘not in her prime.’ One could argue that Don has a problem with women. Anyone arguing he doesn’t?”

It doesn’t help matters that Sirius-XM just announced that Kelly recently was given a multi-year deal to lead her own channel on SiriusXM. In contrast, Lemon crashed and burned when Elon Musk offered him the same sort of podcast setup that Tucker Carlson (for better and more recently for worse) ran with after being fired by Fox News. Flashback: Don Lemon demanded Tesla Cybertruck, $5M advance, equity in X before Elon Musk canned him: sources.

Classical reference (with the setup starting at about the four minute mark) in headline.

THE ASSASSINATION FAN BASE:

The wounded Reagan quipped to the lead doctor on his trauma team, “I hope you’re all Republican.” What made the quip amusing is that both Reagan and the team knew it mattered not in the least whether its members were Republican. The doctor, a Democrat, amusingly but perhaps a bit solemnly replied, “Today, we’re all Republicans.”

I think most Americans would like to live in a world where such an exchange is still possible. I’m not sure it is.

A significant number of Americans took to Bluesky, TikTok, Reddit, and the streets to express their regret that Trump’s would-be assassins had been unsuccessful and to praise the assassins of Charlie Kirk and UnitedHealthcare’s Thompson. In the case of the latter two, many asked or offered their opinion on who should be next. (I won’t cite any examples. If you are at all online, you have seen them in abundance, and if not, you may want to spare yourself.)

At present, the assassination fan base is pretty much a left-wing subculture. So far, it has applauded attempts on the lives of a former president, a conservative activist, a corporate CEO, and a conservative Supreme Court justice. The closest thing on the right is the online coterie claiming that Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, did nothing wrong, either because they were let in or were duped into entering by a government plot. But to speak up on behalf of J6 defendants, even to the point of alleging conspiracies, is not the same as celebrating the assassinations of Kirk and Thompson and lamenting the misses on Trump. I hope no comparable figure on the left becomes a target that thereby allows us to ascertain whether there is a comparable fan base for assassination on the right.

We should also note that even “lone gunmen, acting alone” have to get their ideas about whom to target from somewhere. They, too, have social networks, which likely traffic in in-group suggestions about who in the out-group are the worst of the worst. So we are now living in a political culture in which a potential would-be assassin can count on a social network for inspiration and an outpouring of public support after the fact. This is fertile ground for evil, perhaps because assassins always believe they are doing good. And we may be cultivating more and more of them.

As Elon Musk tells Joe Rogan, “after years of attacks from mainstream media, I know exactly what they’re doing — They’re making it sound like if you kill me, you’re a hero. That’s not journalism. That’s evil.”

Earlier:

WHATEVER YOU DO, DO NOT SHARE THIS POST WITH LEFTIES: Romina Boccia and Tyler Thurman of the Cato Institute make an excellent point about one of the inherent flaws of a centralized welfare system:

“The fact that a program that provides food assistance to millions of Americans can be brought to the edge of a cliff because of partisan gridlock illustrates the perils of allowing the welfare apparatus to become increasingly centralized in Washington. Devolving welfare programs like SNAP to the states would align spending authority with accountability and insulate food aid from federal dysfunction,” they write.

Read the whole column because that’s just one of multiple interesting observations.

THANKS, CHUCK: CBO: Shutdown to Shave Up to $14B From US Economy.

In a letter to House Budget Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington, R-Texas, CBO Director Phillip Swagel said most of the decline in GDP will eventually be recovered once the shutdown ends; however, between $7 billion and $14 billion will not be.

The CBO also estimated that the government shutdown will reduce annualized real GDP growth in the fourth quarter by 1 to 2 percentage points.

The agency prepared estimates of the shutdown’s effects under four-week, six-week, and eight-week scenarios, according to the letter.

“In all three scenarios that the agency analyzed, the shutdown leads to a temporary economic slowdown,” Swagel wrote. “Real GDP is lower in the fourth quarter of 2025 than it otherwise would have been … The rebound in federal spending for employee compensation, the purchases of goods and services, and SNAP [Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program] benefits that occurs after the shutdown ends reverses most of the reduction in economic activity.”

Schumer could end this today, if he wanted to, or at any time these last four weeks.

Also, heh:

Margot is only joking… but not really.

THE RAGE OF A PRIVILEGED CLASS: