LIVE FROM BEIJING, IT’S THE NOT READY FOR SKYNET PLAYERS! China’s first robot marathon runners trip, emit smoke, fall apart.
Author Archive: Ed Driscoll
April 20, 2025
BRENDAN O’NEILL: The Hilarious Meltdown of Men Who Think They’re Women:
I’ve found my soundtrack for spring: the caterwauling of fellas in dresses following yesterday’s [UK] Supreme Court ruling. It’s delicious. They’re raging about the ‘fascism’ of no longer being allowed to get their knobs out in the women’s changing room. They’re agonising over where they’re supposed to take a shit now. Their Adam’s apples are getting a mighty fine workout as they wail into the void about being ‘erased’ by ‘transphobes’. It’s the sound of men being stripped of their entitlements by women who’ve had enough of their crap, and I am so here for it.
No sooner had the Supreme Court said what even the Neanderthals knew – that men are men and women are women – than these blokes were fuming. First out of the traps was thin-lipped loon India Willoughby. He branded the court’s decision ‘evil’. Yes, it is apparently wicked and immoral to say that if you have a todger you’re a fella. Willoughby spent the day furiously doubling down on his delusions of womanhood. ‘I have always been a woman’, he said. Tell that to the jizz you sired your kid with.
It’s a ‘grim day’, they cry. The ruling threatens trans people’s ‘safety’, they say. That’s big talk from a movement that expects female prisoners to live cheek by jowl with rapists and girls to share changing rooms with hulking blokes in ill-fitting bikinis. There are dark mutterings about ‘fascism’. Munroe Bergdorf shared a post saying: ‘There is no trans debate. There are trans people and there are fascists who wish to dominate and eliminate trans people.’ Dude, it’s not fascism to say women should be free to seek rape counselling without fearing there’ll be a weirdo in a boob tube listening in.
Julie Burchill adds, “The march of the trans mob is over.”
Now the much-maligned and ever-bolshy women of ‘TERF Island’ have seen the fruits of their labour come to bloom with the decision of this country’s top judges that the legal definition of a woman is based on biological sex. What will the (very) cross-dressing army do now?
Regarding the murderous threats they’ve made to the most visible of us – for laydees, lots of them seem very keen on old-fashioned, traditional rape – they appear to have an awful lot of time and energy on their shovel-sized hands. We can expect many an ‘opinion’ column in the sillier sort of newspaper telling us that we’re living in literally Nazi Germany; a bit of performative blubbering; quite a few threats to leave the country. There will be a legal crowdfunder or two in order to overturn the verdict of the Supreme Court. And the rest of us will have a good laugh at the whole lot of them.
If these men really were women – and political ones at that, as they like to pretend – they’d put their defeat to one side, suck it up and simply get stuck in to fighting for women’s issues to demonstrate their determination to keep faith with the second sex. There’s certainly a fair amount to protest about. The pandemic of sexual violence. The over-representation of females who have committed non-violent crime in prisons. The restriction of abortion everywhere from Trump’s USA to Communist Nicaragua. But they won’t be getting involved in any of these issues, as none of the goals would involve pushing women out of their own spaces and then trampling all over them with their man-size feet. Instead, they’ll sulk, shout and stomp around, ceaselessly thirsty for media attention.
We expect the continuation of standard hysteria from this lot – gradually ‘petering out’ hopefully – and from their noisiest allies the ‘Black Pampers’, those young incels who dress up their standard sex-starved woman-hatred as something rad.
There is hope though! Corvallis Oregon is poised to be a Mecca for the British trans mob: West Coast, Messed Coast™ City to Become ‘Sanctuary’ for Men Who Dress as Women. With a population of 51,110, Corvallis is not exactly swinging London, but as Burchill wrote above, “What will the (very) cross-dressing army do now?”
UPDATE: David Thomson: How To Invalidate Your Own Vocation. “In this Yes, You Are Napoleon school of psychotherapy, where the unwell must always be told whatever they want to hear. Possibly before being steered towards irreversible mutilation and lifelong pain. That gender-affirming care.”
EVE BARLOW: Jumping the Shark.
Yesterday at Coachella, one of the biggest music festivals in the world, a white Irish band who “rap”, called Kneecap, celebrated the terrorists Hamas who murdered 380 people at a music festival in Israel on October 7. Kneecap, from Ireland, a country riddled with a shameful history of violence and oppression of women, who rap, and who are white, took to the stage of a music festival and used it as a platform for encouragement and incitement to murder, rape, and destroy innocent people. They wore keffiyehs (they also rap and are white after all), and spoke about the bombings that Palestinian people have to live under.
(To be clear: I don’t usually take issue with white people who rap, I’m just highlighting the pandemic of hypocrisy and idiocy that is sweeping the West right now).
Ireland, eh?
● The truth about Ireland’s hatred for Israel.
● Antisemitism has made life in Ireland unbearable, say Israelis.
● Ireland Goes Fascist: “Urgency to pass the anti-free speech bill increased after a Muslim immigrant stabbed three children in Dublin, and fed-up working-class Irishmen rioted.”
● And of course, most terrifyingly: Rosie O’Donnell Confirms Move to Ireland, Will Return to U.S. ‘When It’s Safe for All Citizens to Have Equal Rights.’
Curiously, I don’t think Rosie cares much about equal rights for all citizens of her new safe haven from the Bad Orange Man.
JIM CLYBURN’S TAKE ON WHY DEMS ARE SO UNPOPULAR JUST MIGHT MAKE YOU LAUGH OUT LOUD:
“If we have The Washington Post, for instance,” Clyburn continued to whine, “caving to this wannabe dictator and we’ve got other media entities that seem to rather push a narrative that will bring eyes to their newspapers or to their television sets and not really give a fair hearing or reporting to what we’re doing.”
The Democratic lawmaker said he plans to hold a series of town halls outside his district in an effort to share his party’s message directly with voters. “It’s going to be very coherent,” he said.
Then he really capped it off, saying he likes MSNBC because they offered substance over spin, and that his party unfortunately “[doesn’t] have a stomach for just lying”:
“That’s what’s killing us as Democrats,” he said.
“We don’t have a stomach for just lying.”
Forgive me for a moment while I laugh my head off. The load of lies from both MSNBC and the Democrats could probably build a mountain to the moon. It’s one of the major reasons that the American people no longer trust them.
The New York Post adds: Democrat Rep. Jim Clyburn blames mainstream media for party’s cratering support.
The veteran lawmaker reserved praise for uber left-leaning MSNBC and [Ali] Velshi’s coverage, calling it one of the few platforms offering substance over spin.
“That’s why I like coming on your shows on the weekends,” he said.
With his boundless amounts of TDS, Clyburn has also been quoted on numerous occasions comparing the Bad Orange Man to Hitler. Why would a dictator continue to let this channel exist?
April 18, 2025
UNEXPECTEDLY: Member of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s administration allegedly caused $20K in damage while vandalizing Teslas: report.
An employee of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz was reportedly busted for allegedly causing approximately $20,000 in damage while vandalizing Teslas — just weeks after his failed vice presidential candidate boss mocked the electric car company’s falling stock.
Dylan Bryan Adams, 33, a fiscal policy analyst for the state run by the failed vice presidential candidate, was arrested after he was caught on vehicle surveillance dragging his keys across several Teslas, causing approximately $20,000 worth of damage as he stripped the paint off the electric cars, according to a Minnesota-based crime watch account.
Formal charges are reportedly pending.
Flashback: Did Tim Walz ‘Let Minneapolis Burn?’
There is one point on which everyone I spoke to seemed to agree: The destruction was orchestrated largely by agitators, not local protesters. Some of them were militant anarchists, and some were far-right groups like the Proud Boys, the Boogaloo Bois, and the “Aryan Cowboys.”
“People there with a First Amendment right to protest were being used as cover, whether wittingly or unwittingly, for the destruction,” said one officer, who asked to remain anonymous.
[Minneapolis police lieutenant Kim Voss], who went undercover decades ago to investigate Antifa, told me that “this is what trained activists do. They found a crowd that was really ripe for it. A lot of the looters were local people—ones that got caught up in it. But they were puppets. The activists were the puppeteers.”
More than anyone, though, Voss blames Walz. She recalled once hearing Walz use the line, “We don’t abandon our folks,” referring to Democrats who were calling for Biden to exit the presidential race.
“I thought, You’re so full of shit,” she said. “You did. You left us all behind.”
Related: Tim Walz’s Wife Gwen Kept Windows Open During BLM Riots to ‘Smell the Burning Tires.’ “I kept the windows open as long as I could because I felt like that was such a touchstone of what was — what was happening.”
RADICAL CHIC, THE BOY BAND ERA: Luigi Mangione and the left’s warped choice of heroes.
Meanwhile the resistance was gearing up to back Mahmoud Khalil in a street fight, but Abrego Garcia’s story took precedence. Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen made a big show of flying down to Central America to accomplish nothing, something I used to do in the 1990s when I wanted to boogie board and take drugs. Meanwhile, the US government was releasing information that made sure to label Garcia as the ultimate “bad hombre.”
The framing is absolutely horrible for the Democrats. I have serious doubts as to whether the Trump Administration’s policies will make Americans wealthier and safer. But at least they’re paying lip service to the problems that ordinary people in ordinary situations face. Meanwhile, the Democrats look like they’re mostly concerned about defending alleged assassins and gang members. Not ideal.
These aren’t obscure strategies, either. James Carville, the quotable Crypt-Keeper of Democratic messaging strategy, has said that they need to double down on the Abrego Garcia case. To him, it’s a winner, even if it’s obviously a big loser. These fellows will bear the standard for a long while.
We’ve never seen anything like this, in our political lifetime or any political lifetime. Imagine if the Democrats had thrown their 1972 lot in with Charles Manson. What if Bill Clinton had insisted we “free The Unabomber”? The optics are that disastrous, that ridiculous.
Regarding Manson, according to Jann Wenner’s biographer Joe Hagen in his 2017 book, Sticky Fingers:
As the 1960s kept ending, the next installment was the arrest of Charles Manson and four of his followers for the horrific murder of five people, including actress Sharon Tate, wife of Roman Polanski, at a luxury mansion north of Beverly Hills. When Manson’s trial began in 1970, Wenner leaped at the story with an idea for the headline: “Charles Manson Is Innocent!”
Wenner’s headline was less insane than it sounds to modern ears. Manson was already an object of media obsession, a former Haight-Ashbury denizen who drifted to L.A. and collected hippie acolytes for LSD orgies and quasi-biblical prophecies. While the straight world viewed him as a monster, much of Wenner’s audience saw him, at least hypothetically, as one of their own. The underground press of Los Angeles, including the Free Press, cast him as the victim of a hippie-hating media. Manson was a rock-and-roll hanger-on. Wenner was convinced of Manson’s innocence by his own writer David Dalton, who had lived for a time with Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys, a Manson believer. “I’d go out driving in the desert with Dennis, and he’d say things to me like ‘Charlie’s really cosmic, man.’”
And of course, Weather Underground member-turned-Obama booster Bernadine Dohrn famously said of Manson and his followers:
Dig it! First they killed those pigs. Then they ate dinner in the same room with them. Then they even shoved a fork into the victim’s stomach! Wild!
As Ed Morrissey wrote on Monday after Taylor Lorenz and CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan each gushed over Luigi Mangione:
Mangione is nothing new. The Left has always turned violent psychopaths into cultural icons as long as they ostensibly supported the Left’s causes. Che Guevara got transformed into a literal fashion icon for decades, despite his bloodthirsty march through 20th century history in support of some of the worst regimes and terrorist groups of his era. My friend Nick Gillespie reminded everyone more than a decade ago of Guevara’s nature:
Born in 1928 and gunned down in 1967 by drunken Bolivian soldiers, Che rarely missed an opportunity to make life miserable for those who opposed him. During the fight against the Batista regime, Che ordered the summary executions of dozens of real and suspected enemies, becoming the very thing he said revolutionaries must be: a “cold-blooded killing machine.” As a leader in post-Revolution Cuba, Che became known as the “butcher of La Cabaña” prison, where he oversaw hundreds of murders of political prisoners and “counter-revolutionaries.”
When he became the effective czar of the Cuban economy and attempted to create a “new man and woman,” or workers fueled by revolutionary ideals rather than conventional workplace incentives, his plans failed catastrophically and helped make Cuba the economic basket case it remains to this day. Along the way, Che did more than his share to help ban rock and jazz music as “imperialist” forms of expression. Such actions mark Che less as the youthful idealist portrayed in the acclaimed film version of his own Motorcycle Diaries and more as a repressive, murderous thug, a Caribbean version of the Taliban.
By the mid-1960s, Che left Cuba to export armed revolution to Africa and South America, all without success. If his violent death at 39 secured his romantic martyrdom to a cause that now thankfully flourishes only in Cuba and North Korea, it is his iconic, beret-bedecked image from a 1960 photo that persists everywhere in popular culture, from Mike Tyson’s torso (the boxer sports a tattoo of Mao along with Che) to beer and booze labels to belt buckles to the T-shirts worn around the world.
Flash-forward several decades and Rolling Stone’s infamous 2013 radical chic hot take on Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev looking totally cool and dreamy on their cover has its roots both in the magazine’s founding days, and the left’s ongoing obsession with those who kill for their approved causes.
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Sewell Chan Says He Was Fired From CJR After ‘Pointed’ Interaction With Writer ‘Devoted’ to Gaza.
Sewell Chan on Friday said he was fired as the executive editor of the Columbia Journalism Review after staffers complained about several recent “pointed interactions.”
One of those interactions, Chan said in a statement shared with TheWrap and posted on X, was with a writer who was “passionately devoted to the cause of the Gaza protests” who had covered the “recent detention of a Palestinian graduate for an online publication he had just written about, positively” for CJR.
“I told him there was a significant ethical problem with writing for an outlet he had just covered,” Chan said.
The other recent interactions that spurred his firing, Chan said, included a conversation with a reporter working on a “sensitive #MeToo investigation” against a “prominent investigative reporter.” Chan said he reluctantly gave her more time to work on the story, which remains unpublished, after urging her to “move expeditiously” towards publishing it. The third “pointed” interaction was with a staffer who refused to come into the office or write at least one story per week, Chan said; that writer received several months’ paid leave to look for a new job from Columbia, he said.
Chan said Jelani Cobb, the dean of Columbia’s journalism school, confronted him about recent staff complaints about those interactions on Monday.
“While I disagreed with these complaints, I offered to meet with the staff members involved and requested a coach who could help me navigate a charged higher education environment. Instead I was fired,” Chan said.
“These are normal workplace interactions and I did exactly what I was hired to do, which was to provide rigorous, fair, careful editorial oversight and raise the metabolism and impact of a publication that’s supposed to monitor the media,” the former editor maintained.
In 2006, Hugh Hewitt wrote about the Columbia School of Journalism for the late, and sometimes lamented Weekly Standard: The Media’s Ancien Régime.
[Nicholas] Lemann also recommends to me the 1920 Walter Lippmann essay “Liberty and the News,” but curiously not Lippmann’s better known 1922 opus, Public Opinion, which opens this way:
There is an island in the ocean where in 1914 a few Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Germans lived. No cable reaches that island, and the British mail steamer comes but once in sixty days. In September it had not yet come, and the islanders were still talking about the latest newspaper which told about the approaching trial of Madame Caillaux for the shooting of Gaston Calmette. It was, therefore, with more than usual eagerness that the whole colony assembled at the quay on a day in mid-September to hear from the captain what the verdict had been. They learned that for over six weeks now those of them who were English and those of them who were French had been fighting in behalf of the sanctity of treaties against those of them who were Germans. For six strange weeks they had acted as if they were friends, when in fact they were enemies.
You can put Lippmann’s book down after page one, his 1920 essay, and Pulitzer’s vision statement for his school as well. Lippmann’s world, Pulitzer’s world, even Nicholas Lemann’s world of the Harvard Crimson from 1972 to 1976–they are all gone. Every conversation with one of the old guard citing the old proof texts comes down to this point: There is too much expertise, all of it almost instantly available now, for the traditional idea of journalism to last much longer. In the past, almost every bit of information was difficult and expensive to acquire and was therefore mediated by journalists whom readers and viewers were usually in no position to second-guess. Authority has drained from journalism for a reason. Too many of its practitioners have been easily exposed as poseurs.
Lemann understands completely what has happened. I think he regrets it. He is certainly trying to salvage the situation. And there is simply no way he can succeed.
In multiple newsrooms in 2020, but most prominently in the New York Times, young scribes fresh out of J-school thought they should be running the asylums, not their editors. The even younger wannabe-scribes at CJR are simply speeding up the process even before they get their first real jobs.
IT’S A GOOD START: NPR: Trump’s Plotting to Cut All of Our Funding.
EVERGREEN HEADLINE: Democrats are doing themselves no favors on El Salvador.
The political battle over the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador, where he is imprisoned based on a belief that he is a member of MS-13, has taken over the conversation in Washington for weeks. Several Democratic members of the House and Senate have already announced plans to follow Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland on trips to El Salvador – where he met with Garcia.
* * * * * * * *
In the immediate aftermath of the 2024 election in November, some smart Democratic voices in media and consulting acknowledged that border issues and soft-on-crime policies were things that needed to change in order to become a majority party again – along with getting away from the craziest claims of the trans and DEI agendas. Lo and behold, not even six months later, Democrats are still dug in on all these areas. And with the hottest name in Democratic politics right now being Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her surging political tour, it looks like none of these lessons are going to survive. The progressive left is still in charge, and they’re still stuck on crazy.
The Chyron on CNN as I was leaving the gym today said something like “Van Hollen accuses Trump administration of wanting to change the subject on Garcia.” But I suspect they’re thrilled that he and the rest of the left are monomaniacally focused on this topic.
THE BAND NAME MAY HAVE BEEN A BIT OF A GIVEAWAY: New Pornographers Drummer Joe Seiders Arrested for Possession of Child Porn.
FAUXCAHONTAS SPEAK WITH FORKED TONGUE:
SKYNET SMILES: A Chatbot Has Passed a Critical Test For Human-Like Intelligence. Now What?
There have been several headlines over the past week about an AI chatbot officially passing the Turing test.
These news reports are based on a recent preprint study by two researchers at the University of California San Diego in which four large language models (LLMs) were put through the Turing test. One model – OpenAI’s GPT-4.5 – was deemed indistinguishable from a human more than 70% of the time.
The Turing test has been popularised as the ultimate indicator of machine intelligence. However, there is disagreement about the validity of this test. In fact, it has a contentious history which calls into question how effective it really is at measuring machine intelligence.
As Glenn has noted, “The AI to really be afraid of is the one that deliberately fails the Turing Test.”
Kevin Williamson, call your office: Bernie’s Strange Brew of Nationalism and Socialism.
You too, Chris Matthews! Chris Matthews compares Bernie’s likely victory in Nevada to the Nazis conquering France in 1940.
GREAT MOMENTS IN ASTROTURF: LeBron James Endorsed Kamala Harris. Then She Paid His Company $50K.
The campaign paid tens of millions of dollars to celebrities who appeared at campaign rallies on her behalf. Harris’s team paid $165,000 to the production company of Beyoncé Knowles, who spoke for four minutes in support of Harris at a rally in Houston in October. The campaign paid the production company of Oprah Winfrey at least $1 million for a sit-down interview in Chicago, and nearly $100,000 to the shell company of Barack and Michelle Obama, who appeared at several campaign events for Harris.
Team Harris gave $58,000 to rapper Cardi B, who spoke at a rally for Harris in Milwaukee on Nov. 1. Cardi B shot down allegations at the time that she was paid for the stump speech.
“I didn’t get paid a dollar,” said the rapper. “I actually came out of pocket for glam and travel because it’s somewhere I wanted to be.”
The Harris campaign donated more than $5 million to liberal activist groups, including $500,000 to the nonprofit of MSNBC host Al Sharpton. The controversial preacher interviewed Harris weeks after the donation without disclosing it to MSNBC viewers, the Washington Free Beacon reported.
Campaign disclosures do not describe what James’s company did in exchange for the $50,000 payment. And it is unclear why the payment was made so long after the election. Campaign disclosures show Harris’s campaign also paid actress Jennifer Garner $35,000 for “campaign event production and travel” on Jan. 16. Garner, the ex-wife of Ben Affleck, appeared at several campaign events alongside Harris.
Still though, it was all worth it for the cornbread stuffing, if nothing else:
Flashback: Kamala Harris Campaign Aides Suggest Campaign Was Just Doomed.
JIM TREACHER: America’s Greatest Astronaut: Gayle King.
The United States is the first and only country in the world to put human beings on the Moon. And until this week, it was America’s finest achievement in space.
Then came the six bravest women in the history of astronautation: Katy Perry, Jeff Bezos’ girlfriend, and… I dunno, a few other gals with the same hairstyle. Not to mention the most important person who has ever lived: Gayle King.
Move over, Neil Armstrong. Bad bitches in the house, by which I mean space!
“It is my pleasure to tell you, you’ve passed. Does that make you feel confident? Does that make you feel good?”
“It’s not about going to space. It’s about what we bring back.”
Finally, somebody remembered the real reason for all this.
If you’re a stupid man who hasn’t done the right thing and gone trans yet, you probably still think space exploration is about “science” and “adventure” and “expanding our knowledge of the universe” and other rhetoric of the patriarchy.
Wait, what is this “space” exploration you speak of?
Candace Owens has completely lost the plot, calls out Matt Walsh for thinking space is real. She says that space is completely fake and that humans have never been to space, and that NASA was invented to promote the “Antichrist belief” in science over faith.
“You must come to… pic.twitter.com/JF1shBI9OX
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) April 18, 2025
Just add it to the list from last year:
Or as America’s Newspaper of Record reported: Kanye West Starting To Think Candace Owens Might Be A Little Crazy.
GRAUNIAD MUCH MAD AT MUTTS: Was This Written By Cats? The Guardian Hisses Dogs Are An ‘Insidious’ Climate Threat.
First it was the cow farts. Now it’s dog “shit.” Moral of the story: eco crazies will never be satisfied until people start seeing climate change threats in their soup.
Leftist newspaper The Guardian published an April 9 story that reeked of being desperate for attention, even if that meant making its writers look like cats that have been overdosing on catnip. “Pet dogs have ‘extensive and multifarious’ impact on environment, new research finds,” read the headline coughed up like a hairball from science writer Donna Lu.
The syntax read like a Babylon Bee special, “An Australian review of existing studies has argued that ‘the environmental impact of owned dogs is far greater, more insidious, and more concerning than is generally recognised.”
The equally nutty outlet Mother Jones reposted Lu’s story and made dogs out to be the antagonists of the supposed climate war in its re-written headline: “Bad News for Man’s Best Friend: Dogs Are Environmental Villains.”
And they’re right. Just look at all of the climate chaos that the four-legged beasts have caused over the years!
● “A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020.”
—The Grauniad, February 21, 2004.
● UN scientists warn time is running out to tackle global warming.
—The Grauniad, May 4th, 2007.
● President ‘has four years to save Earth.’
—The Grauniad, January 27, 2009.
● The Grauniad was particularly dogged in its eco-apocalyptic fear in 2019: ‘Pathetic alarmism:’ The Guardian ramps up ‘climate emergency’ reporting guidelines.
● Artists must confront the climate crisis – we must write as if these are the last days.
—Headline, the Grauniad, November 12th, 2021.
Incidentally, The “Siberian” climate was predicted just four years after the London Independent assured its readers that “Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past.”
(Doggone it.)
CHANGE:
BREAKING: The Trump Administration has overhauled the https://t.co/pNDONQDetL website into a massive lab leak data center displaying scientific proof that COVID was man-made in Wuhan, China.
The official site now names Dr. Fauci as the criminal who covered-up COVID origins: pic.twitter.com/RF9fNzGOeG
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) April 18, 2025
This must be playing well at NPR:
April 17, 2025
AND AGAIN: Puerto Rico plunged into darkness again as island-wide blackout hits.
Related: “Why is Puerto Rico’s power grid in such bad shape?”
For decades, Puerto Rico’s Electric Power Authority did not carry out the maintenance and investments the grid required.
It began crumbling over the years, and then on Sept. 20, 2017, Hurricane Maria hit the U.S. territory as a powerful Category 4 storm. It snapped power lines, toppled transmission towers and broke flimsy wooden light posts, leaving some people without power for nearly a year.
In the months that followed, crews focused on emergency repairs. It wasn’t until a couple years after the hurricane that actual reconstruction began.
In June 2021, the Electric Power Authority contracted Luma as it struggled to restructure its more than $9 billion debt, with negotiations still ongoing.
In January 2023, the authority contracted Genera PR to oversee power generation on the island as part of another public-private partnership.
Puerto Rico has been plagued by chronic power outages since Maria, with photographs and videos of transmission lines on fire becoming increasingly common.
González has said that providing consistent energy is a priority and distanced herself from renewable energy goals set by the previous governor. Her administration recently extended the operations of Puerto Rico’s lone coal-fired plant.
Curiously, despite at least five visits to the island, the previous administration’s energy secretary accomplished little in modernizing its electrical grid: Energy Secretary Granholm Takes Fifth Trip to Puerto Rico After Republicans Question Travel Spending.
DROUGHT LEFT BRITAIN TOO HOT TO HANDLE FOR THE ROMANS:
The researchers also expanded their climate-conflict analysis to the entire Roman Empire for the period 350 to 476 AD.
They reconstructed the climate conditions immediately before and after 106 battles, finding that a statistically significant number of battles were fought following dry years.
Tatiana Bebchuk, also from Cambridge’s Department of Geography, said: “The relationship between climate and conflict is becoming increasingly clear in our own time so these findings aren’t just important for historians.
“Extreme climate conditions lead to hunger, which can lead to societal challenges, which eventually lead to outright conflict.”
I blame the massive horsepower of hemi-powered Roman SUVs.
DISNEY ACTORS SURE MAKE AUDIENCES WANT TO FLOCK TO THE BIG SCREEN THESE DAYS: Kelly Marie Tran on How Wedding Banquet Empowered Her to Come Out as Queer and Why Star Wars Racism Is a ‘Microcosm for the Social Climate.’
A lot has changed for Tran since “Star Wars.” But as she looks back on her experience with that fandom, she knows that the racism she faced was symptomatic of a larger, continuing issue. When considering what she wants to see change for actors of color who might not receive the support they need when they appear in major franchises, she replies: “The world?!”
“It’s interesting how it seems to be happening pretty consistently to actors of color who find themselves in these spaces,” Tran explains. “And I think these occurrences are a microcosm for the social climate that we’re living in. And it’s really unfortunate.”
Tran points out that people of color are often at “the forefront of storytelling” now and that audiences could perhaps begin to evolve, too. “The hope is that people who are not afforded the ability, maybe, to have access to these communities of queer people or people of color, are able to see through the art that people of color and queer people are also human, and they have hopes and dreams,” she says.
“We live in a world where those identities have been weaponized so that people are not able to see the bigger picture,” Tran continues. “I really just want people to recognize, it’s the system that’s the problem. Stop scapegoating people of color or queer people or anyone who’s different.”
Evergreen: The Critical Drinker: Why Modern Movies Suck — They Hate Their Own Fans (Video; NSFW language):
CALIFORNIA: It’s Detroits All the Way Down.
● Shot: San Francisco Does Detroit.
—The Discovery Institute, May 6th, 2023.
● Chaser: Why Silicon Valley could become tomorrow’s Detroit.
—The Politico, December 18th, 2020.
● Hangover: Hollywood At Risk of Becoming the “Next Detroit Auto.” L.A. Production Insiders Voice Alarm.
The specter of Los Angeles becoming another Detroit, a city built on a specific industry that became a shell of its former self when that business moved out, loomed over a compelling film and TV industry town hall that tackled not only the calamitous drop in production in Hollywood and California, but also the fight to get the state to increase its entertainment production tax incentive.
The event on Monday night drilled down into a later stage of the entertainment production pipeline that is also currently in crisis: scoring and postproduction.
“This is not hyperbole to say that if we don’t act, the California film and TV industry will become the next Detroit auto,” said Noelle Stehman, a member of the “Stay in LA” campaign who spoke at the event.
The push for a proposed increase in tax incentives is hitting a critical phase in the legislative process, and California State Senator Ben Allen and State Assemblyman Rick Zbur were on hand to make an effort to get the necessary votes in.
—The Hollywood Reporter, Tuesday.
How odd — Joe Biden, until last summer the favorite of all Hollywood leftists, said in 2008 that paying higher taxes is a patriotic act. But then, as Conquest’s first Law of Politics states, “Everybody is conservative about what he knows best.”
WATCH: From Trees to White Women, Everything Is Racist in These PBS Documentaries.
The 2022 Independent Lens flick Racist Trees, for example, chronicles a black neighborhood in the overwhelmingly liberal “LGBTQ haven” of Palm Springs, Calif. The neighborhood’s residents feel that a “wall of trees” that lines a nearby golf course was “intentionally planted to exclude and segregate” the neighborhood, and want the trees removed.
“They say that these trees are not racially motivated, that they were not racially planted there,” one interviewee says in the film. “They can prove that by one simple act. Remove the trees.”*
Other Independent Lens documentaries similarly center on claims of racism, misogyny, and homophobia. There’s Our League, the story of a transgender woman who “comes out to her old-school Ohio bowling league.” There’s also Ferguson Rises, a documentary in which PBS shadows the father of Michael Brown. And in Breaking the News, PBS documents the “women and LGBTQ+ journalists” who launched nonprofit newsroom The 19th to “buck a broken news media system.” One interviewee in the film argues that it’s easier for a white woman “to vote in space than it is for a black woman to vote in Philadelphia.”
Straight out of Redneck Nation, and more recently, Ryan Long’s “When Wokes and Racists Actually Agree on Everything” video:
* Remove the trees, bomb the Teslas. Fly the private planes and suborbital pleasure flights. As Glenn likes to say, I’ll believe global warming is a crisis when the people who tell me it’s a crisis start to act like it’s a crisis themselves.
Biden’s intelligence community zeroed in on firearms — specifically “ghost guns,” “high-capacity magazines” and “assault weapons,” the documents show.
“Rein in the proliferation of ‘ghost guns’; encourage state adoption of extreme risk protection orders; and drive other executive and legislative action, including banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines,” the strategy detailed under a section about “long-term contributors to domestic terrorism.” (RELATED: DOJ And ATF Repeal Biden’s ‘Zero Tolerance Policy,’ Delivering Win For Gun Owners)
Biden’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) cracked down on “ghost guns,” or un-serialized, privately made firearms.
The Second Amendment group Gun Owners of America slammed the document, deeming it “Biden’s secret plan to eliminate the Second Amendment in the name of ‘counterterrorism.’”
🚨 BREAKING🚨
Tulsi Gabbard declassifies President Biden’s secret plan to eliminate the Second Amendment in the name of “counterterrorism.” https://t.co/MYeIPX9K4W pic.twitter.com/g6Jv75esiS
— Gun Owners of America (@GunOwners) April 17, 2025
After his infamous bitter clingers Kinsley gaffe, in 2008, Obama lied promised, “I believe in the Second Amendment. I believe in people’s lawful right to bear arms. I will not take your shotgun away. I will not take your rifle away. I won’t take your handgun away.”
As Jim Geraghty liked to say, all of Obama’s promises came with expiration dates.
Especially during his third term.