DEVELOPING: Plane crashes in Philadelphia, igniting inferno near homes and mall.
BREAKING NEWS: Reports that a plane has crashed striking a mall in Philadelphia just moments ago #BreakingNews pic.twitter.com/oLMlqLBCwK
— Bret Baier (@BretBaier) February 1, 2025
ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Nazi Killer Robots — Fact or Fiction? New video from Mark Felton:
FORMER FEDERAL RESERVE ADVISER ARRESTED FOR PASSING TRADE SECRETS TO CHINA, JUSTICE DEPARTMENT SAYS:
A former senior advisor to the Federal Reserve, John Harold Rogers, was arrested on charges he conspired to steal Fed trade secrets for the benefit of the People’s Republic of China, the Justice Department announced Friday.
Rogers, who worked as a senior adviser in the Fed’s division of international finance from 2010 until 2021, allegedly shared confidential information with Chinese co-conspirators. He is charged with conspiracy to commit economic espionage and with making false statements.
And from two weeks ago: Chinese hackers accessed Yellen’s computer in US Treasury breach, Bloomberg News reports.
THE CRITICAL DRINKER ON DISNEY’S UPCOMING SNOW WHITE REBOOT: The Most Hated Movie Ever? (Video.)
The Drinker is referring to Disney’s full length trailer, which dropped on December 3rd, and by the following day, had the following number of downvotes:
As of shortly before this post was published, it is indeed over 1,000,000 downvotes on YouTube:
The teaser trailer, which has been online since August 9th has even worse numbers:
The teaser trailer screencap was from mid-December. As of now, it has gained a thousand more likes (to 101K), but the downvotes are apparently capped at 1.4 million. Does Google limit the number of downvotes something can receive? Did they anticipate this sort of visceral hatred to a woke remake of a beloved classic animated film?
CHUCK TODD EXITING NBC NEWS AFTER NEARLY 20 YEARS AS TRUMP STARTS SECOND TERM.
The NBC chief political analyst and former “Meet The Press” moderator announced the news in a memo shared with staff Friday. The exit comes amid broad shifts in the TV news landscape as President Donald Trump begins his second term. In the memo to fellow NBC staffers, Todd teased his next chapter.
“There’s never a perfect time to leave a place that’s been a professional home for so long, but I’m pretty excited about a few new projects that are on the cusp of going from ‘pie in the sky’ to ‘near reality.’ So I’m grateful for the chance to get a jump start on my next chapter during this important moment,” Todd said in the memo obtained Friday by USA TODAY.
And so, as he flies the Blue Lady of the Skies into the sunset, we say “aloha” Five o’clock F. Chuck Todd, and return to our duties. Let me remind you, the Weblog is open twenty-four hours for your dining and dancing pleasure.
UPDATE: Oceania has always been at war with disinformation:
Chuck Todd has left NBC News. Here's a good video to remember his news career by. pic.twitter.com/u1GAxsRSFA
— MAZE (@mazemoore) January 31, 2025
OH, MAN: Oscar-nominated Emilia Perez star Karla Sofía Gascón issues apology over historic [sic–Ed] tweets.
In a statement to Variety, Gascón said: “I want to acknowledge the conversation around my past social media posts that have caused hurt. As someone in a marginalised community, I know this suffering all too well and I am deeply sorry to those I have caused pain. All my life I have fought for a better world. I believe light will always triumph over darkness.”
In one post from 2020, she wrote: “I’m sorry, Is it just my impression or is there more muslims in Spain? Every time I go to pick up my daughter from school there are more women with their hair covered and their skirts down to their heels. Next year instead of English we’ll have to teach Arabic.”
Another post from 2020 said: “I really think that very few people ever cared about George Floyd, a drug addict swindler, but his death has served to once again demonstrate that there are people who still consider black people to be monkeys without rights and consider policemen to be assassins. They’re all wrong.”
Gascón is the first transgender actress to receive an Oscar nomination, and Emilia Perez secured the most nods this year with 13, including best picture. She is also a Bafta nominee for best actress.
At least two tweets from Gascon referencing Hitler have surfaced:
Google translates the second tweet as saying, “Hitler believed that his people were divine and belonged to a superior race. They all wiped him out, now the swastika can’t even reproduce itself. The church, Islam, etc., etc. have caused millions more deaths throughout the history of humanity and they are still there. It makes you think.”
Earlier: John Podhoretz on Emilia Perez:
The title character is El Chapo with his male machinery removed—and once El Chapo becomes a she, they become social justice warriors for the poor and oppressed.
No, I am not kidding. No, this is not a comedy. But it is a musical (again, no I’m not kidding), mostly in Spanish but a little in English, featuring an immortal exchange in recitative between El Chapo’s lawyer and a doctor in a clinic in Thailand:
Lawyer: Hello, very nice to meet you, I’d like to know about a sex change operation.
Doctor: Man to woman or woman to man?
Lawyer: Man to woman.
Doctor: Penis to vagina!
You would know this yourself. You could. You almost certainly have a Netflix subscription and Emilia Perez has been available on Netflix for months. You might even have watched some of it. Many people have. The thing is, I haven’t met a single person who has made it past the 60-minute mark of this two-hour movie because (with the exception of Zoe Saldana, the blockbuster franchise actress who does a wonderful job playing the lawyer) its awfulness doesn’t even rise to the level of “this is a camp classic, I just gotta see how bad this is going to get the longer it goes on.” Rather, everybody shuts Emilia Perez off and then goes and takes a shower. Or puts on a real estate flipping show.
Why did it get 13 Oscar nominations? Guess why. You know why. It’s the same reason the movie nobody has seen about Donald Trump got Oscar nominations for the guy playing Trump and the guy playing Roy Cohn. Hollywood is trying to tell us things again. Emilia Perez got the same number of nominations as All About Eve because it’s about the wonders of sex change operations and how they will solve all the problems of our planet. The person playing Emilia Chapo, Karla Sofia Gascón, is nominated for Best Actress. If she wins, in part by defeating Mikey Madison, it will be a scandal—but hey, if actresses in Hollywood don’t have the courage to complain about their awards being taken away by biological males, then those awards should be taken away by biological males. It’ll serve them right.
March 2nd could be a night to remember for Hollywood — in every sense of the phrase.
ED MORRISSEY: DNC: Learn a Lesson? Nous?
If diversity is their greatest strength, then why did that argument lose to a presidential candidate whom the electorate had never ever viewed with a net-favorable rating before the election? They ran explicitly on that message, and practically no other positive argument for Harris. The Democrats’ main message was that Trump was a Nazifasciststinkybottom and his supporters were “garbage,” and that as a black woman, Harris was owed support from the voters.
Maybe they should have run a Native American instead? Is that the argument here?
No one is “demonizing diversity” either, which is the same kind of strawman argument that also failed in the election. No one opposes diversity, but they are opposed to making diversity the top priority and only criterion. Americans have grown tired of being called racists and bigots for prioritizing merit and accomplishment, and of being told that they can only atone by electing Democrats — and even then, atonement is impossible. Americans elected Barack Obama twice, and yet the same raaaaaacisssst argument persists when Democrats lose.
Lest readers consider that an exaggeration, here’s how ‘journalist’ Jonathan Capehart framed it at the DNC meeting:
So the DNC plans to double down on the “you’re a racist/misogynist/transphobe unless you vote for us” marketing campaign. No other reason for Harris’ defeat comes to mind among DNC members and meeting attendees — not her lack of visibility in the media, her refusal to discuss policy, or her incoherent word salads that clearly demonstrated just how far out of her depth Harris was as VP and nominee.
And that’s the easy lesson. Democrats can jettison Harris easily, and likely will, as a terrible candidate, because she so clearly is. That would allow for a rationalization that their policies were not the problem. They can’t claim that both the candidate and the policies were good, though, because then how did Trump get elected and win all of the swing states with a net-negative favorability?
Fortunately, the Democrats’ cool, rational response to the reelection of Donald Trump should allow them to quickly snap back from their current morass:
And:
It will be interesting to see how much Trump calling out Jeffries both amplifies the story and causes the DNC-MSM to reflexively back his call for violence in the era of BLM and Luigi Mangione.
As Jon Gabriel wrote last year: Welcome to protest season, where the cause changes but the tactics stay the same. “One year, statues are toppled and the next, Jews are bullied, but it’s amazing how the far-left treats such wildly diverse issues with the same small toolbox. It has ever been thus. As one radical wrote for a Students for a Democratic Society publication in the 1960s, ‘The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.’”
OLD AND BUSTED: BBC Announcers Uniformly Speaking in the Received Pronunciation Accent.
The New Hotness? BBC Webpages in Pidgin English! Wetin dey happen? The BBC’s Pidgin news site is a huge deal.
It’s real and spectacular:
THIS IS THE WAY: Sean Trende of Real Clear Politics writes, “what you’re increasingly seeing is a frontal assault on the institutions that buttress the left:
So in Trump’s first term, using a (pretty shaky, imo) interpretation of the 1st Amendment, we established you can’t kick a reporter out for his bias. The Right’s response now is “ok, fine, we’ll just flood the press corps with new right-of-center podcasters and bloggers. Give your statue of liberty speech in a room full of Alex Berensons and catturds and see how it goes over.”
You saw trickles of it with academia with moves on tenure in WI, but it’s a war in FL. “You won’t voluntarily diversify your faculty ideologically? We’ll do it for you, and in a far more severe way in the other direction.”
“And the diversity apparatus that we think is a cloak for hiring a bunch of far-left professors? That’s simply gone.”
“We can’t fire unfriendly civil servants? Fine, but we’re not going to roll over either. We’re going to make life as miserable for them as possible and give them every possible incentive to leave.”
Much more like this, please.
ARMOND WHITE: Review: The Day of the Locust — a Prophecy of Hollywood’s Conflagration.
Today’s burning of Los Angeles has been met without a sense of fatalism. (At least Public Enemy’s jocular 1990 rap — “Burn, Hollywood, Burn!” — parodied the disingenuous civil rights movie Mississippi Burning.) Contemporary Hollywood progressives believe that “climate change” explains and excuses everything, so there’s never a need for political remorse. This attitude reflects and degrades West’s vision. The climax of Schlesinger’s film depicts a Hollywood red-carpet, klieg-light movie premiere that turns apocalyptic. It looks like a prediction of Millennial self-sacrifice — a Left Coast version of J6-style as if deliberately manufactured by TMZ, the tabloid TV show that dabbles in performative political commentary.
[Nathanael] West’s hellfire-and-locust symbolism parodied biblical judgment, but such shame no longer applies to current secular permissiveness or the progressive ideology in Marxist writer Mike Davis’s City of Quartz (1990), famous for its subversive condemnation of Los Angeles’s capitalist elitism. Schlesinger’s The Day of the Locust doesn’t do justice to West’s paranoia, yet its remoteness captures the liberal Hollywood apathy that no longer identifies with American domesticity and sees its own working class as existing merely to perpetuate ruling-class superiority. Schlesinger’s joke about the doomed, obsolete 13-letter Hollywoodland sign hints at the self-hatred that now pervades the Anglosphere and suggests that the immolation starts from the inside.
Come for the leftist self-hatred, stay for Donald Sutherland as – and I’m not joking – Homer Simpson!
CALIFORNIA CONTINUES TO BE BATTERED BY GLOBAL WARMING: La Jolla, Mission Valley and Rancho Bernardo fires started in homeless encampments.
TRUMP’S 5-D CHESS: How Mass Firings Are Freezing the Deep State.
Astonishingly, Trump’s mass firings of top-level commissioners from the NLRB, the Privacy Board, and the EEOC, were thought to be illegal and impossible. But even more historic and astonishing, Trump has fired so many it leaves those agencies without quora. They are dead in the water. These now-paralyzed agencies literally cannot undermine Trump’s agenda, even if they wanted to, for the practical reason that there simply aren’t enough commissioners left to vote on anything. They’re frozen.
Strikingly, none of the “abruptly fired” officials have yet sued the federal government—even though Trump is trampling on all sorts of precedents, customs, and statutes. Ms. Fong merely staged a bizarre mini-protest rather than assert her legal rights. All this legal restraint is especially strange considering that in at least one agency, the NLRB, federal law expressly limits the President’s ability to fire commissioners except in very limited circumstances.
The Times and the fired officials smelled a Trump trap.
“The prospect of getting dragged into court,” an alarmed Times observed, “may be exactly what Mr. Trump’s lawyers are hoping for.” What terrified and dismayed the far-left Times and its progressive allies was the ghastly prospect that “any rulings in the president’s favor would establish precedents that would expand presidential power to control the federal government.”
Read the whole thing.
ANDY NGO: Killing of border patrol agent appears linked to ‘Zizian’ radical leftist trans cult.
Authorities say the gun Youngblut used in the border patrol attack was bought by Michelle Jacqueline Zajko — the trans nonbinary adult child of Rita and Richard Zajko, who were found killed in mysterious and unsolved circumstances in Delaware County, Pa. in early 2023. Zajko, whose blog shows connections to the Ziz cult, has not been charged with a crime.
That group, the “Zizians,” are highly-educated trans vegan “rationalists” who hold fringe, esoteric ideological beliefs about transhumanism and animal rights.
Their leader, Jack “Ziz” LaSota, is a biological male who identifies as a woman. He also used the name Andrea Phelps, and is accused of influencing followers to kill. LaSota’s archived prolific blog writings ramble about the use of violence and radical anarchist tactics to achieve various ends.
LaSota has a warrant for an arrest in Delaware County, Pa. after skipping out on court hearings on an open criminal case. His supporters say he died in 2022, but that appears to be based on a fake online obituary to try to escape the law.
If you missed it yesterday, Freddie De Boer wrote: I Told You: Chaos is Coming.
I acknowledge upfront that the “Zizians” and the grimy-but-fascinating story of their alleged violence is not a big deal, in any real sense. They’re a group of former computer scientists and financial market types who appear to have latched onto the effective altruism/rationalist movement and taken the AI risk, veganism, and animal rights parts to a certain extreme; the group has been implicated in at least eight murders. But there appears to be only a handful of them, and they’re a fringe of a fringe. I don’t have any interest in implicating the rest of the rationalist sphere in this, though I do think David Z. Morris is fundamentally correct that the culture of “existential AI risk” obviously has the potential to inspire violence and extremism. As he says, “Apocalyptic predictions, asserted with a confidence buttressed by weaponized misuse of ‘Bayesian’ logic, is driving young people insane by convincing them that they must take extreme steps to halt an imagined doom.” But one shouldn’t nutpick, and anyway I’m not really interested in this group’s ideology. I’m interested in them as a test case of what I’ve been saying for some time: that violence is coming, and that people will find a way to package it with meaning. They want to. They need to. They have to believe that it comes from something other than themselves.
As Glenn wrote linking to De Boer’s Substack post, “There’s always ‘chaos’ when the left is unhappy. I don’t believe that it will be as easy for them this time as in the past.”
JOHN NOLTE ON NPR TDS: Astronauts Were ‘Stranded’ Until Trump Asks Elon to Rescue Them.
Along with the publication dates, here are the four previous NPR headlines, all of which use the word “stranded”:
August 8, 2024: After two months, astronauts stranded at the ISS may have a way back home
For two astronauts, an eight day mission to the International Space Station has stretched into two months due to vehicle issues. Now, NASA says it’s considering bringing them back in a SpaceX capsule.
August 24, 2024: NASA will bring stranded astronauts back on SpaceX — not Boeing’s Starliner
In early June, astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita “Suni” Williams blasted off in Starliner on a trip to the station that was supposed to last about eight days–but now it will be eight months.
September 13, 2024: Stranded NASA astronauts say being stuck in space is just part of the job
The NASA astronauts who were left stranded on the International Space Station because of technical issues with their spacecraft are keeping in good spirits — even planning to vote in November — the pair revealed in a space to Earth call with the media on Friday.
September 29, 2024: SpaceX crew arrives at the ISS, with plans to bring back 2 stranded astronauts
The stranded pair, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, flew to the ISS aboard Boeing’s Starliner capsule on June 5 on what was supposed to be an eight-day test mission. But the two have remained there due to concerns about the safety of Boeing’s capsule. NASA made the “tough decision” to return Starliner to Earth without the crew earlier this month.
Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams launched what was supposed to be an eight-day mission in June of last year.
Now they have been up there for close to eight months. But according to NPR, through the simple act of calling on them to be rescued, Donald Trump has saved them! Don’t you see? They are no longer stranded. Oh, they are still up there, but they are no longer stranded up there. They are just up there.
Look at this:
January 29, 2025: Trump asks SpaceX to ‘go get’ two stranded ISS astronauts. They’re not stranded
“I have just asked Elon Musk and SpaceX to “go get” the 2 brave astronauts who have been virtually abandoned in space by the Biden Administration,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Good luck Elon!!!”
Oceania has never been at war with the International Space Station.
LITTLE MAN BIG MAD: Buttigieg Furious After Trump Calls Him a ‘Disaster’ With a ‘Line of Bull’ During Crash Press Conference.
“On behalf of the First Lady, myself, and 340 million Americans, our hearts are shattered alongside yours. And our prayers are with you now and in the days to come.”
It wasn’t long, however, before the president pointed out the disastrous previous leadership at the Department of Transportation.
Trump thoroughly dismantled Buttigieg’s tenure at the DOT on a national stage without regard for anybody’s personal feelings. The former Transportation Secretary is a legitimate target of criticism, especially when you consider the numerous near-miss aviation disasters that took place during his time in that role.
“The FAA, which is overseen by Secretary Pete Buttigieg – That guy’s a real winner,” President Trump said.
“Do you know how badly everything’s run since he’s run the Department of Transportation?” he asked. “He’s a disaster. He was a disaster as a mayor. He ran his city into the ground. And he’s a disaster now. He’s just got a good line of bulls**t.”
“He’s run it right into the ground with his diversity.”
He then opted to forgo the moral high ground by blaming Trump in return for the air disaster.
“President Trump now oversees the military and the FAA. One of his first acts was to fire and suspend some of the key personnel who helped keep our skies safe,” he said. “Time for the President to show actual leadership and explain what he will do to prevent this from happening again.”
It’s rich to see the man who was Transportation Secretary for four years suggest that the president who has been in office for just nine days is more responsible for chaos at the FAA than he is. Not to mention, he then criticized the fact that one of Trump’s first moves was to root out the incompetence left behind by Buttigieg’s hiring practices.
He’s cleaning up your mess, fella.
Trump clearly doesn’t understand what Wired magazine dubbed in 2023 — apparently non-ironically — Buttigieg’s “Cathedral Mind” and his self-described vision of his tenure as transportation secretary:
In an exit interview with Politico, Buttigieg blames this not on administrative failures, bureaucratic backlog, or voters’ prioritizing other things but rather on that pesky time-space continuum. “The nature of good policy and being politically rewarded for good policy is it doesn’t tend to happen — in the same way that an artist is not necessarily appreciated in their lifetime, a policy is rarely appreciated in the same political cycle where it happens, especially a good one.” Buttigieg implies Biden shares his frustration — but will also share in his ultimate vindication.
Buttigieg’s remarks are just one sign that he intends to stick around politics for as much of what comes next politically as he can manage. Aside from Politico, he is making the rounds elsewhere. He gives every indication that he intends to continue seeking relevance with the same shamelessness by which he vaulted himself from mayor of Indiana’s fourth-largest city to a presidential contender and then secretary of transportation.
Yesterday’s plane crash may have ended his future prospects, however. Prior to it, Buttigieg was weighing a U.S. Senate or gubernatorial run from Michigan: Surprise: Pete Buttigieg Might Prefer Senate Grandstanding to Being Michigan Governor.
Related:
1 year ago 11 Republican Attorneys General wrote a letter to the Biden administration, expressing their frustration with the new DEI practices affecting the Federal Aviation Administration.
Nothing was ever done about their concerns by the Biden administration. pic.twitter.com/9O2UD1WXxS
— Insurrection Barbie (@DefiyantlyFree) January 30, 2025
UPDATE: Buttigieg ditches pronouns:
DISPATCHES FROM THE ECO EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Just Stop Oil activist accused of defacing Stonehenge asks judge not to hold trial during her exams.
Oxford student and Just Stop Oil activist Niamh Lynch, 22, faces charges of damaging an ancient monument and intentionally causing a public nuisance.
Appearing at Salisbury Crown Court alongside a fellow eco-protester, Rajan Naidu, 74, the student pleaded not guilty to the charges.
Video footage showed members of the public trying to intervene with the Just Stop Oil protestors as they allegedly sprayed the powder across the stones in June 2024.
A spokesperson for English Heritage described the incident as “extremely upsetting.”
During proceedings to determine a trial date on Thursday, Audrey Mogan, defending Lynch, pleaded with the court to avoid hearings in May or June – pointing to the importance of the student’s academic commitments.
“Niamh Lynch is an ornithology student at the University of Oxford. She requests that the trial not be held during May or June as that is when her exams are,” Mogan said.
Wait, I thought the world was coming to an end, which is why defacing paintings and monuments is suddenly perfectly acceptable. But studying for exams means that she’s planning to stick around for several more decades – and by extension, so will planet Earth.
Related:
Watching Tulsi’s hearing today. I’ve supported her for confirmation not because I agree with everything she’s ever said—I emphatically don’t—but because the Intelligence Community desperately needs (1) a skeptic temperamentally hostile to its groupthink and, even more… pic.twitter.com/RbunVnkjXm
— David Reaboi, Late Republic Nonsense (@davereaboi) January 30, 2025
After seeing her colleague Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) get owned by Patel a short time earlier, Klobuchar thought she could trap Patel with gotcha questions designed to potentially sink his nomination.
“Do you know under Chris Wray’s leadership, he took over at a very difficult time…During his tenure, applications to the FBI have tripled. Do you think that people would be applying to those agencies if, in fact, it was so corrupt?” she queried.
After Patel refused to bite and reminded Klobuchar that confidence in the FBI was at an all-time low, she tried again with a different question.
“Did you say that the FBI headquarters should be shut down and reopened as a Museum of the Deep State?” she queried.
At that point, Patel had enough of Klobuchar’s nonsense and dropped this massive truth bomb.
“Simply this: if the best attacks on me are going to be false accusations and grotesque mischaracterizations, the only thing this body is doing is defeating the credibility of the men and women at the FBI,” Patel fired back. “I STOOD with them, here in this country, in every theater of war we have – I was on the ground in service.”
“And any accusations that I would put political bias before the Constitution are grotesquely unfair, and I will have you reminded I have been endorsed by over 300,000 law enforcement officers to become the next director of the FBI,” he added. “Let’s ask them.”
Related: What is it with leftist women having repeated meltdowns over the past couple of weeks?
Finally, America’s Newspaper of Record for the win:
GREAT MOMENTS IN JOURNALISTIC PRIORITIES: Washington Post’s Above-the-Fold ‘Priorities’ After Aviation Disaster Spark Outrage, Questions.
Likely some editor/paginator/page designer (do they still do all that locally??) didn’t want to mess with the original design of the package at the top. My former publisher would have me in his office as soon as I walked in the next day wanting to know why I buried that info.
It would have been easy enough to move the entire top package down and add the crash at the top. Not that difficult.
This is exactly the type of story for which the old newspaper cliche of “tear up the front page” was invented for. But evidently, the Post would rather be something akin to a leftist political magazine like the New Republic or the Nation instead of an actual newspaper.
DEVELOPING: All flights halted at Reagan National Airport due to plane crash. “DC Fire and EMS say, on Wednesday night a small plane went down near the airport landing in the Potomac River. All flights at Reagan National have been halted as rescue crews work to find victims from the plane. At this time it is unclear what caused the plane to go down.”
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