Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

December 13, 2025

MAYBE NEIL KINNOCK WILL CHIP IN:

Since Joe was the figurehead during Obama’s third term in office, isn’t the answer here simple? Just give Biden’s library a couple of rooms in the basement of Barry’s Death Star flak tower:

Posted at 2:44 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 13th, 2025

IT’S FRUM TO THIS: David Frum Explains Why DOJ’s Use of ‘Franklin’ Parody Is a Form of Transnational Organized Crime. “The Atlantic’s David Frum comes across like he’s just been hired as Franklin’s attorney with this assessment of what the Justice Department has done by sharing that meme…As you might have guessed, Frum’s post on the speculative legal aspects of the Trump administration’s ‘Franklin’ memes had the immediate opposite effect:”

Posted at 2:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 13th, 2025

A FACE IN THE CROWD: 

I’m so old, I can remember when Al Sharpton was the person who approved all Democratic Party presidential candidates:

An amazing thing has happened in New York, and in Democratic politics: Al Sharpton has become King. He is Mr. Big, The Man to See, the straw that stirs the drink. Nothing has made that clearer than the prelude to the New York primary, and the budding New York Senate race. They come in a steady parade to him, even if they show flutters of reluctance: Bill Bradley, Al Gore, Hillary Clinton. Everyone refers to this as “kissing his ring”; at times, Democrats seem willing to kiss even more. Not long ago, he was a demagogue, a race-baiter, a menace — and acknowledged as such, by all but a fringe. Day and night, he worked to make an always difficult city — New York — even more difficult, more tense. Now, however, he practically rules. He is a kind of Establishment. His record — as galling as any in our politics — is overlooked, excused, or shrugged off. It is to him that every (Democratic) knee must bow.

I’m also old enough to remember right around this time a year ago, when Democrats wondered why men abandoned them in droves, and sought to create a Joe Rogan-style podcast of their own: Wait, You’re Telling Me This Person Is Shifting the Overton Window?

Posted at 1:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 13th, 2025

CRISES BY DESIGN: This New York Times Story Gets Everything Hilariously Wrong About Democrats and Immigration.

There isn’t a single reason to continue giving Democrats the benefit of doubt on their destructive, anti-American policies, least of all on immigration, and yet The New York Times is here this week to do just that.

In an unnecessarily long article out Sunday, Times reporter Christopher Flavelle sought to recast the Joe Biden era’s catastrophic mess at the Southern border as a matter of misjudgment and political failure rather than what it really was — deliberate harm inflicted on the nation. “How Biden Ignored Warnings and Lost Americans’ Faith in Immigration,” reads the headline for Flavelle’s story. In it he asserts that Biden was repeatedly advised to get some kind of handle on the influx of destitute foreigners coming to America — though he never says exactly how or in what way — while also saying that Biden as president “seemed to grasp the risk,” but simply “failed to act. …”

Laughable. The day Democrats can be trusted on immigration is the day they can identify a single illegal alien they’re willing to deport. They don’t want to do that. That’s not their position. Their position is the opposite. It’s why a sitting Democrat senator this year literally flew to Central America for the explicit purpose of re-importing a professed illegal alien who had been sent back to his home country. That Democrats are the party of open borders is a matter of record.

Nevertheless, Flavelle wrote that Biden “and his closest advisers repeatedly rebuffed recommendations that could have addressed the border crisis faster” and that his administration “made two crucial errors.” (Just two!)

At the beginning of the year, Morning Joe’s Steve Rattner hilariously said, “The border was not Biden’s finest moment, frankly.” When actually, from a leftist’s point of view, it really was:

● Jared Bernstein, member of Biden’s Council of Economic Advisors: “One thing we learned in the 1990s was that a surefire way to reconnect the fortunes of working people at all skill levels, immigrant and native-born alike, to the growing economy is to let the job market tighten up. A tight job market pressures employers to boost wage offers to get and keep the workers they need. One equally surefire way to sort-circuit this useful dynamic is to turn on the immigrant spigot every time some group’s wages go up.”

● Trump administration senior adviser Stephen Miller in February of 2021: Biden’s Immigration Plan Would “Erase America’s Nationhood.”

● “Labour wanted mass immigration to make UK more multicultural, says former adviser. Labour threw open Britain’s borders to mass immigration to help socially engineer a ‘truly multicultural’ country, a former Government adviser has revealed.”

● Tom Cotton’s Response to Kamala Harris’ Border Failures Should Be the Default for All Republicans: “‘You know, Laura, Kamala Harris didn’t have to go all the way to Guatemala and Mexico to find the root causes of this border crisis because they’re not there,’ Cotton told Fox News host Laura Ingraham [in June of 2021]. ‘The root causes are in the White House.’ He further explained that it ‘happened on January 20th when Joe Biden took office, and he essentially opened our borders, reversing very effective policies that had our borders under control.’”

Posted at 12:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 13th, 2025

December 12, 2025

UGH! Oliver Sacks Was a Fraud.

Much of his life, apparently, revolved around his personal torment that derived from his shame over being a homosexual, having grown up in England at a time when it was especially frowned upon, including by his mother, who told him she wished he had never been born. In fact, his career ended over accusations that he sexually abused patients—an accusation he vigorously denied.

Sacks’ fame is based on his ability to tell stories, and he certainly told compelling ones that captivated generations of people. While his colleagues were deeply skeptical of him, the general public and, eventually, the elite who fund and set curricula for medical schools were quite impressed.

Consider the main character in Awakenings, Leonard. He is portrayed in the most sympathetic way possible, and the movie is as much a love story as a tale of medical success and ultimate tragedy.

In reality, Leonard was not the poet we were told, but a man who looked fondly back on his youth as a rapist.

In the preface to “Awakenings,” Sacks acknowledges that he changed circumstantial details to protect his patients’ privacy but preserved “what is important and essential—the real and full presence of the patients themselves.” Sacks characterizes Leonard as a solitary figure even before his illness: he was “continually buried in books, and had few or no friends, and indulged in none of the sexual, social, or other activities common to boys of his age.” But, in an autobiography that Leonard wrote after taking L-dopa, he never mentions reading or writing or being alone in those years. In fact, he notes that he spent all his time with his two best friends—“We were inseparable,” he writes. He also recalls raping several people. “We placed our cousin over a chair, pulled down her pants and inserted our penises into the crack,” he writes on the third page, in the tone of an aging man reminiscing on better days. By page 10, he is describing how, when he babysat two girls, he made one of them strip and then “leaped on her. I tossed her on her belly and pulled out my penis and placed it between her buttocks and started to screw her.”

In “Awakenings,” Sacks has cleansed his patient’s history of sexuality. He depicts him as a man of “most unusual intelligence, cultivation, and sophistication”—the “ ‘ideal’ patient.” L-dopa may have made Leonard remember his childhood in a heightened sexual register—his niece and nephew, who visited him at the hospital until his death, in 1981, told me that the drug had made him very sexual. But they said that he had been a normal child and adolescent, not a recluse who renounced human entanglement for a life of the mind.

All of Sacks’ characters were fictionalizations of himself, or rather, some aspect of himself. He put his own words in their mouths, inserted his personal history into their lives, and privately referred to The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat as a “fairy tale.”

So many “non-fiction” best-sellers turn out to have quite a bit of fiction in them, from Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood to Woodward and Bernstein’s All the President’s Men. As Greg Easterbrook tweeted in response to the news about Sacks being a fabulist, “NY publishing houses have enabled the making up of facts. It started with Alice Mayhew letting Woodstein put into quotation marks lines that could not in a million years be actual quotes.”

In 2022, historian Bonnie K. Goodman wrote: An enduring problem in academia professors also plagiarize but get away with it.

[Dorris Kearns Goodwin] was a seasoned academic writer with a doctorate from Harvard no less and never should have plagiarized mid-career; she never took responsibility and dismissed what she did. Still, it did not hinder her career, and she was celebrated afterward for another book. That it did not affect her career sends a wrong message that professionals can plagiarize, with few repercussions. Without repercussions, there are no deterrents for others to plagiarize and borrow without abandon. In 2002, Timothy Noah wrote in Slate, “How To Curb the Plagiarism Epidemic (Or, how Alice Mayhew gets her groove back).” Noah expressed, “Either instance would be considered plagiarism–and dealt with quite severely–if the perpetrator were a freshman at Harvard, where Goodwin was previously a professor of government and now serves on the board of directors.” [34]

A plagiarism scandal marred another high-profile historian in 2002. Simon & Shuster author Stephen Ambrose was accused of plagiarism in multiple books he published. Ambrose wrote over 25 books, including the World War II book Band of Brothers made in 2001 to an HBO Emmy Award-winning series. First, The Weekly Standard accused Ambrose of lifting passages of his book The Wild Blue from historian Thomas Childers’ “Wings of Morning: The Story of the Last American Bomber Shot Down over Germany in World War II,” without putting them in quotation marks, although he did cite him. Ambrose called it a “mistake,” an oversight; Ambrose would write more than a book year with his family and a team of research assistants, and his books were a mill of popular history books. After the first discovery, the speed he wrote and released books was to blame.

Ambrose responded to the accusation in The New York Times:

“I tell stories. I don’t discuss my documents. I discuss the story. It almost gets to the point where, how much is the reader going to take? I am not writing a Ph.D. dissertation. I wish I had put the quotation marks in, but I didn’t. I am not out there stealing other people’s writings. If I am writing up a passage and it is a story I want to tell and this story fits and a part of it is from other people’s writing, I just type it up that way and put it in a footnote. I just want to know where the hell it came from.” [35]

Noah found Ambrose’s statement on the scandal was “more defiant than apologetic.” [36]

Ambrose’s scandal only grew as more accusations from journalists followed, with Forbes’ Mark Lewis looking to make it a story. Lewis discovered that Ambrose’s plagiarism went back to 1975 and his book Crazy Horse and Custer. Ambrose took passages from Jay Monaghan’s 1959 book, “Custer: The Life of General George Armstrong Custer.” Lewis then discovered that Ambrose copied passages in two other of his books Citizen Soldiers (1997) and Nixon: Ruin and Recovery (1991). Ironically, the book Ambrose copied Robert Sam Anson’s “Exile: The Unquiet Oblivion of Richard M. Nixon” (1985) was also edited by Alice Mayhew; the revelation put more spotlight on his editor and Simon & Shuster. [37]Then the New York Times’s David Kirkpatrick found five more passages in The Wild Blue were plagiarized.

David Strom writes that “It is striking, as Steven Pinker notes, that The New Yorker seems unbothered by Sacks’ fabulism, or even entranced by the literary quality of his work.” And to bring things full circle: New Yorker blog confuses All The President’s Men movie with actual Watergate history.

Posted at 6:42 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 12th, 2025

THIS SOUNDS MORE LIKE THE 21ST CENTURY THAT WE WERE PROMISED:

Posted at 4:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 12th, 2025

THE CRITICAL DRINKER: Supergirl — More Superhero Slop?

Related: The new Supergirl poster is trying too hard.

I’d like to preface that the poster itself isn’t the worst (nor is it the best). Featuring a trench-coated Supergirl against a spray-painted logo background, it’s a fairly inoffensive design. With her tousled hair, sunglasses and wired headphones, it’s clear DC are going for a laidback ‘cool girl’ vibe that I feel comes across a little forced, but I can suspend my disbelief.

Well, I could. That was until I saw the new tagline: “Truth. Justice. Whatever.” A quote befitting of my teenage Tumblr blog, the attempt at an edgy tagline simply comes across as a desperate attempt to capture a young audience. It’s giving ‘how do you do, fellow kids?’ in the worst way.

It also seems like a way to goad the right into giving the film a little free extra PR, given that it reads like a callback to the 2006 Superman’s infamous slogan, “Truth, justice and . . . all that stuff,” and Gunn’s own earlier efforts to tweak Superman’s motto to be more woke: James Gunn Doesn’t Just Omit “The American Way” In ‘Superman’ – He Changes It To “The Human Way.”

As the Drinker notes, after going through all of trailer’s myriad and exhausted cliches, “the party’s over, James. It’s been over for like five years now. You’re just too wrapped up in your own PR to realize it.”

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 12th, 2025

RAVING AND DROOLING: Sharon Osbourne nearly mailed Roger Waters a box of poo for his attack on Ozzy after his death.

In the new interview with Piers Morgan, she explained that she ultimately decided not to send a similar parcel to Waters.

“Even that is a waste, to send shit to him. It’s a waste because he’s really insignificant,” she explained. “But I just thought, anybody that passes has a family… you don’t do that.”

Later in the interview, Sharon went on to say that she thought Waters’ comments on the podcast were actually aimed at her, instead of Ozzy, and alleged that they could have stemmed from anti-Semitism. Waters has previously strongly denied any accusations of being anti-Semitic, and has not yet commented publicly on the comments made by Sharon in the new interview.

And yet oddly, these reports just keep happening: Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters accused of antisemitic behavior including swastika confetti, ‘Jew food’ remarks: report.

 

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 12th, 2025

SKYNET SMILES: Europe faces Robocop-style dystopia by 2035, EU police claim.

Angry mobs of unemployed citizens riot in the streets against the hordes of service robots that have stolen their jobs. Police officers armed with “robo freezer guns” and “nano net grenades” shoot down swarms of drones deployed by terrorists to attack electricity and water supplies.

This is not the plot of a new Robocop sci-fi film but what may await Europe in the next 10 years, according to a report from the EU’s police agency.

The 48-page Europol document details how law enforcement will need to tackle robots and unmanned systems (drones, satellites and remote-controlled boats) in a dystopian vision of the future.

Experts have dismissed the predictions as fanciful but the EU believes its report outlines “plausible future scenarios”.

While the EU scares its subjects over Robocop scenarios, it’s fully prepared to implement futuristic dystopian strategies of its own: Chat Control: The EU’s Plan to Read Your Messages — All of Them.

In Europe, the controversy surrounding what is popularly known as the “Chat Control” project — proposed EU regulation officially aimed at combating child sexual abuse material — has, for months, been crystallizing massive opposition on both technical and civic fronts.

The core principles of the legislation are clear:

“Detection software would be embedded in the messaging app or the operating system to scan chat content and automatically forward any material flagged as prohibited to law enforcement agencies.”

The automatic scan of private content (texts, images, videos) sent through messaging platforms such as WhatsApp and Telegram, or prompts sent to AI platforms (e.g. ChatGPT) would take place “client-side,” before its encryption, meaning directly on your phone, tablet or computer. Welcome to 1984. In the first proposal for a Chat Control project in 2022, such scanning was mandatory. In the current proposal, it is optional — but strongly recommended.

Whenever there is a desire to expand control over European citizens, “terrorism” or pedophilia is invoked. It is a clever tactic: who would want to be perceived as supporting terrorists or sympathizing with pedophiles?

Of course, however, that does not seem to be the regulation’s true objective. The real issue appears to be the government’s desire to control, regulate, police and monitor European citizens down to their smallest gesture.

Exit quote: “I happen to be the happy father of an 18-month-old girl. For professional reasons, her mother and I do not always live together, and we constantly exchange photos of our daughter — up to ten times a day. All it would take is for an algorithm to flag a single image, just once, for us to become suspects, quietly entering countless criminal databases, justifying surveillance, official intervention, and more. Even East Germany’s Stasi never dreamed of such power.”

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 12th, 2025

SOMALI PIRATES UPDATE:

Full interview here.

I’m so old, I can remember flying with large amounts of cash was a surefire way to trigger the authorities: Carrying A Lot Of Cash Through TSA Comes With One Unpleasant Risk.

If you’re like lots of folks, paying for something means pulling out your card or phone and tapping away. Same thing goes for traveling abroad, even in countries typically overlooked by travelers in lieu of big-name destinations like Italy or Spain, cash seems to be less and less common. Nonetheless, cards aren’t universal. As a traveler, having some cash is still a good backup in case your cards stop working — just don’t carry too much. If you’ve got over $10,000 on you when you’re trying to cross country borders, you’re going to have to declare it to Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

The idea of carrying $10,000 in your wallet may seem ridiculous to plenty of people. Especially considering that a cash amount of $50 to $100 per day per person is considered generally reasonable for a vacation. But if you do have loads of cash on you for some reason, $10,000 is the United States’ threshold for declaration. Within the national borders of the U.S., like crossing from state to state, you don’t have to declare your money. However, when traveling in or out of the U.S., you do.

And: More Than $100K Seized After K-9 Officer At Dallas Love Field Airport Sniffs Out Bag.

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 12th, 2025

TIME MAGAZINE’s 2025 MAN OF THE YEAR CONTINUES TO KNOCK IT OUT OF THE PARK: Washington Post’s AI-generated podcasts rife with errors, fictional quotes.

The Washington Post’s top standards editor Thursday decried “frustrating” errors in its new AI-generated personalized podcasts, whose launch has been met with distress by its journalists.

Earlier this week, the Post announced that it was rolling out personalized AI-generated podcasts for users of the paper’s mobile app. In a release, the paper said users will be able to choose preferred topics and AI hosts, and could “shape their own briefing, select their topics, set their lengths, pick their hosts and soon even ask questions using our Ask The Post AI technology.”

But less than 48 hours since the product was released, people within the Post have flagged what four sources described as multiple mistakes in personalized podcasts. The errors have ranged from relatively minor pronunciation gaffes to significant changes to story content, like misattributing or inventing quotes and inserting commentary, such as interpreting a source’s quotes as the paper’s position on an issue.

Which means that the WaPo’s AI is currently behaving like most flesh-and-blood journalists at the WaPo. And as Glenn wrote last year after Google’s AI declared that we are all National Socialists now (classical allusion), “Of course, the thing about AI is that AI keeps getting better, while people stay about the same.  (Indeed, there’s some evidence that the average person is getting dumber, which if true will only close the gap faster.)  At a sufficiently advanced level of technology, AI will be super-effective at manipulating people, and they won’t even know they’re being manipulated.” So AI should continue to clear the gap between man and machine at the WaPo surprisingly quickly.

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 12th, 2025

December 11, 2025

KURT SCHLICHTER: There’s Nothing Funnier Than Fussy, Furious Euroweenies.

Hearing disturbingly feminine, Somali corruption-curious Minnesota governor Tim Walz complaining that, because of Donald Trump, people are driving by his house shouting “Retard!” should’ve been the funniest thing that happened over the last few news cycles, but our European friends have done it one better. Actually, they’re not our friends. They’re annoying layabouts who do nothing but whine and complain as they feed off the corpse of the civilization they inherited like cultural trust fund babies. They have gotten very upset because Donald Trump’s national security strategy accurately recognizes that Europe is unable to defend itself and is increasingly unworthy of us squandering more time, blood, and treasure to do it for them. So, they’re lashing out, threatening to be responsible for their own defense.

Yeah, that’ll show us. Throw us in that briar patch, Horst. There aren’t enough “LOLs” on the Internet for how funny it is to see you stomping your feet because we’re done picking up the check.

This is personal to me because I’ve spent a substantial part of my life doing the jobs that Europeans would not do. From November 1988 to April 1991, with a multi-month tangent to the Persian Gulf War, I was part of NATO in what was then West Germany. It’s always great to have people tell me how important NATO is when I was part of it, and they weren’t, but let’s put that aside. I was there at the end of the Cold War. We were still doing things like having REFORGER exercises and going out on alerts at 3 a.m., where we would shiver in our assembly areas knowing that if the balloon really went up, our role was to die in place so the locals could continue to consume strudel and bitch about Ronald Reagan. Then, for a year between 2004 and 2006, I left Irina with a little kid and went to Kosovo to keep those Europeans from killing each other. I got a non-Article 5 NATO medal out of that. None of this makes me some sort of hero – in Germany, I ran a heavily armed car wash, and in Kosovo, I largely shared my legal and business experience with the locals. But I was away from America and my family, cleaning up Europe’s messes for the Europeans. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect a little gratitude for my time – and the time of millions of other Americans.

Spoiler: There’s never going to be any gratitude. There can’t be. The fact that we uncouth hicks from the New World had to come back to unscrew the mess the Europeans have made of Europe was never going to get us anything like a simple danke schön. That they needed us grated on them then, and it grates at them now that big, loud Yankees were the only thing keeping their sorry butts from chaos.

British expat Charles Cooke adds: Europe Is Delusional.

Criticize a European from America and you will immediately be hit with a wall of undeservedly self-righteous disdain. This should not be mistaken for pride; rather, it is that peculiar, negative, defensive sort of hauteur that is focused less on the positive virtues of the speaker, and more on his deeply held conviction that, whatever his deficiencies, at least he’s not you. That, at root, is the contemporary European mantra — At Least We’re Not American — and, like many mantras, it is impervious to fact or repudiation. What about the massive gap in GDP that has opened up between the U.S. and Europe since 2008? At least we’re not American. What about the anemic performance of European companies relative to those in the United States? At least we’re not American. What about the gulf between GDP per capita in Europe and GDP per capita in the United States, or about the U.S.’s great advantages in biotech and energy and advanced semiconductors, or the fact that, if most European countries were to join the U.S., they’d have a lower standard of living than people do in Mississippi, or that the average European is six times more likely to die from a lack of heating or air conditioning than an American is from a gun, or that most European countries are unable to usefully project military power? At least we’re not American.

As Cooke concludes, “Why, pray, do Europeans tell themselves that? Because, if they didn’t, they might have to account for their failures, and because that would require a capacity for introspection that they simply do not possess.”

It’s been a lopsided battle for quite some time. A quarter century ago, Tom Wolfe wrote: “European labels no longer held even the slightest snob appeal except among people known as ‘intellectuals,’ whom we will visit in a moment. Our typical mechanic or tradesman took it for granted that things European were second-rate. Aside from three German luxury automobiles—the Mercedes-Benz, the BMW, and the Audi—he regarded European-manufactured goods as mediocre to shoddy. On his trips abroad, our electrician, like any American businessman, would go to superhuman lengths to avoid being treated in European hospitals, which struck him as little better than those in the Third World. He considered European hygiene so primitive that to receive an injection in a European clinic voluntarily was sheer madness.”

Posted at 9:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 11th, 2025

KAMALA REACHES STAGE FIVE OF THE KUBLER-ROSS MODEL: Did Kamala Just Admit That Her Political Career Is Over?

Instead of being unburdened by the past, as she so often exhorted us to be, Harris seems content with her place in it. “I understand the focus on ’28 and all that. But there will be a marble bust of me in Congress. I am a historic figure like any vice president of the United States ever was.”

This isn’t conceit or braggadocio. It’s a simple statement of fact. There are actually busts of all the vice presidents, from the first, John Adams, right up to “Richard B. Cheney,” in the Senate wing of the Capitol. There are no busts yet of Old Joe Biden, Mike Pence, Kamala, or JD Vance, but they’re likely on the way.

This is not precisely an honor; it’s just a list, an observation that these people held a certain office. This is clear from the fact that all the vice presidents from Adams to Cheney are included, including Spiro Agnew, even though he resigned in disgrace (and was actually a tardy addition for just that reason); Aaron Burr, even though he shot and killed Alexander Hamilton; and J. Danforth Quayle, even though he couldn’t spell “potato.”

Kamala Harris’ pointing out that her bust will one day join this illustrious company was tantamount to saying that her political career is over. And maybe it is. So even if her 2028 presidential run is already a bust, she can console herself with the fact that she’ll always have her bust.

Still though, we’ll have to thank Kamala for inadvertently giving Herbert Hoover’s long-forgotten veep some new and well-deserved recognition: Fact check: Charles Curtis holds spot as first person of color as vice president.

Posted at 8:44 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 11th, 2025

NEW DEATH STAR FLAK TOWER NEARING COMPLETION:

Sure, it looks intimidating, but it’s got to be tough enough to survive the neighborhood:

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 11th, 2025

GREAT MOMENTS IN ENVIRONMENTALISM: AOC splurged nearly $50K on pricey hotel stays, dining and renting Puerto Rico concert venue where Bad Bunny performed.

In all, the campaign forked over $15,489.77 for lodging in Puerto Rico between July 1 and Sept. 30.

At least $10,743.13 was spent on meals and catering services on Aug. 25 and Sept. 29, per the FEC filings for that period.

Elsewhere on the island, the 34-year-old Bronx and Queens Democrat danced alongside Brooklyn Rep. Nydia Velázquez at an Aug. 10 Bad Bunny concert held in San Juan as part of the anti-ICE rapper‘s “Residency tour.”

Is this some sort of On the Beach-style last minute blowout decadence while waiting for the world to come to an end? Because otherwise, based on her many doomsday pronouncements in 2019, it doesn’t sound like an environmentally friendly way to spend one’s free time. To coin an insta-phrase, I’ll believe it’s a crisis when the people who keep telling me it’s a crisis start acting like it’s a crisis. And in the meantime, I don’t want to hear another word about Glenn Reynolds’ carbon footprint.

Posted at 4:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 11th, 2025

GOODER AND HARDER, SILICON VALLEY:

To revise and extend the remarks by the late P.J. O’Rourke, you can’t get good Chinese takeout in China, Cuban cigars are rationed in Cuba, and tech employees are fleeing California. That’s all you need to know about communism.

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 11th, 2025

SKYNET SMILES: Time’s 2025 Person of the Year: The architects of AI.

Time magazine has unveiled its 2025 Person of the Year: The architects of AI.

“2025 was the year when artificial intelligence’s full potential roared into view, and when it became clear that there will be no turning back,” Time said in its announcement on Thursday morning. “For delivering the age of thinking machines, for wowing and worrying humanity, for transforming the present and transcending the possible, the Architects of AI are TIME’s 2025 Person of the Year.”

The magazine released two covers for its Person of the Year issue.

One, created by digital artist Jason Seiler, is a recreation of the “Lunch Atop a Skyscraper” photograph from 1932, replacing its ironworkers with executives at leading tech and AI companies, including Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), Lisa Su (Advanced Micro Devices), Elon Musk (xAI), Jensen Huang (Nvidia), Sam Altman (Open AI), Demis Hassabis (DeepMind Technologies), Dario Amodei (Anthropic), and Fei-Fei Li (Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute). The other, by illustrator and graphics animator Peter Crowther, features the same leaders amid construction scaffolding that surrounds the letters AI.

The magazine has bestowed its Person of the Year title annually since 1927, though it was formally called Man of the Year (or Woman of the Year) until 1999.

“Person of the Year is a powerful way to focus the world’s attention on the people that shape our lives,” Time editor in chief Sam Jacobs wrote in an essay explaining the choice. “And this year, no one had a greater impact than the individuals who imagined, designed, and built AI.”

No doubt, AI’s potential is as bottomless as the PC was when it debuted in the mid-1970s, before Time declared it the “Machine of the Year” in 1982. But as usual in the post-Henry Luce era, the magazine plays it safe, and doesn’t wish to alienate its readers on the left. Because there was a far bolder option available to them:

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 11th, 2025

CHANGE:

60 years ago, Walter Cronkite and Daniel Schorr were claiming on air that Barry Goldwater was a crypto-Nazi, so the fact that CBS can now show empathy to an actual Republican is significant progress. I hope they can continue in this fashion.

But as Steve noted yesterday, Bari’s got her work cut out for her, and large percentage of staffers who openly despise her for not being as far to the left as they are: Bari Weiss Named a New CBS News Anchor, and the Response Is the Funniest News Ever.

UPDATE: Given how painfully Cronkite leaned into his biases on the air, this is absolutely perfect:

Posted at 10:50 am by Ed Driscoll on Dec 11th, 2025
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