CHICKS DIG BAD BOYS: This east LA girl went on a date with a masculine guy and “felt the feminism leaving” her body. “Homegirl reverted back to factory settings in the presence of masculinity. 6 years of ‘women and gender studies’ down the drain.”

HAMAS TAKING THE WRONG LESSONS FROM M*A*S*H RERUNS: Gaza hospital chief admits to being Hamas commander, using clinic as military base.

UNEXPECTEDLY: Christopher Nolan Says Fellow Directors Have Called to Complain About His ‘Inaudible’ Sound.

“We got a lot of complaints,” Nolan said about the “Interstellar” sound design. “I actually got calls from other filmmakers who would say, ‘I just saw your film, and the dialogue is inaudible.’ Some people thought maybe the music’s too loud, but the truth was it was kind of the whole enchilada of how we had chosen to mix it.”

“It was a very, very radical mix,” the director continued. “I was a little shocked to realize how conservative people are when it comes to sound. Because you can make a film that looks like anything, you can shoot on your iPhone, no one’s going to complain. But if you mix the sound a certain way, or if you use certain sub-frequencies, people get up in arms.”

As this 2014 clip of Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan riffing on the unintelligibility of Batman and Bane in The Dark Knight Rises highlights, this isn’t exactly a new complaint about Nolan’s movies:

DISPATCHES FROM POST-WEIMAR AMERICA: Four times Jewish students were attacked on campuses in 2023.

When Iowahawk said…

…Perhaps college headmasters shouldn’t have taken him so literally that they’ve demanded students start partying like it’s 1939.

UPDATE: Jonathan Haidt on Why Antisemitism Sprouted So Quickly on Campus (post #1).

Political commentator and Atlantic author David Frum summed up the moral uniqueness of the academy in this tweet, four days after the attack:

Since then, there have been hundreds of antisemitic incidents on campuses including vandalism of Jewish sites, physical intimidation, physical assault, and death threats against Jewish students, often from other students. The response from university administrators has often been slow, weak, or entirely absent.

* * * * * * * *

The Coddling of the American Mind tells the story of how American universities lost their collective minds, beginning around 2014 when student demands for protections from speech seemed to appear out of nowhere, including calls for trigger warnings, safe spaces, bias response teams, and mandatory trainings around language use. The students were supported by some faculty members and some administrators, and their combined force pressured many university leaders to accede to their demands even though, privately, many had misgivings.2

The new morality driving these reforms was antithetical to the traditional virtues of academic life: truthfulness, free inquiry, persuasion via reasoned argument, equal opportunity, judgment by merit, and the pursuit of excellence.  A subset of students had learned this new morality in some of their courses, which trained them to view everyone as either an oppressor or a victim. Students were taught to use identity as the primary lens through which everything is to be understood, not just in their coursework but in their personal and political lives. When students are taught to use a single lens for everything, we noted, their education is harming them, rather than improving their ability to think critically.

This new morality, we argued, is what drove universities off a cliff. For a while, the descent was gradual, but at Halloween, 2015, in a courtyard at Yale, the free fall began. Students and administrators espousing the new morality demanded reforms at Yale and, over the next few months, at dozens of other schools. With a few exceptions, university leaders did not stand up to the new morality, critique its intellectual shortcomings, or say no to demands and ultimatums.

Read the whole thing.

(Updated and bumped.)

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Colorado Supreme Court Demands Jack Phillips Bake Cake To Celebrate Trump Ruling.

WELL, THAT’S THE GOAL: What if They’ve Rigged the Game to the Point That Trump CAN’T Win?

RIOTS FOR THEE, BUT NOT FOR ME: Austin Politician Who Defunded Local Police Now Wants Police To Patrol Crime-Ridden Neighborhood.

An Austin, Texas Democrat politician is demanding police step up their patrols in his neighborhood despite previously voting to defund them.

Yes, in the latest example of ‘Do as I say not as I do,’ Representative Greg Casar now says that he wants more police for at least the next week. It’s unclear why the Congressman wanted the extra police.

The Austin Police Retired Officers Association however did not hold back and called out the Congressman’s sudden change of tone.

“We want everyone in Austin to feel safe, but this seems to us as the height of hypocrisy from the congressman. Maybe he should hire private security like his fellow squad members do. Sure seems like he wants the police in his neighborhood just not yours,” the ROA tweeted out.

* * * * * * * *

In 2020, Casar couldn’t hold back how happy he was when he helped the Austin City Council reduce the Austin Police Department’s budget by over $100 million. Hell, he even included exclamation points when the announcement came down before obviously including the hashtag #blacklivesmatter...However, now suddenly when something is wrong, Congressman Casar wants that same police department to prioritize his street. What about the other hard working voters of Austin, Greg? What makes you so special that you can leverage your political standing and call on the APD as if they are your personal butlers?”

Related: “The issue is not the issue—the issue is revolution! (And a key corollary is: the more violent, the better.)”

(Classical reference in headline.)

OLD AND BUSTED:

Cable television today already reaches into 14.5 million American homes and is likely to spread with hurricane force in the early 1980’s. Industry experts expect 20 to 26 million cable subscribers by the end of 1981, with cabling available to fully 50 percent of U.S. households. Things will move even faster once the shift is made from copper wires to cheap fiber optic systems that send light pulsing through hair-thin fibers. And like short-run printing presses or Xerox copiers, cable de-massifies the audience, carving it into multiple mini-publics. Moreover, cable systems can be designed for two-way communication so that subscribers may not merely watch programs but actively call various services.

* * * * * * * *

All these different developments have one thing in common: they slice the mass television public into segments, and each slice not only increases our cultural diversity, it cuts deeply into the power of the networks that have until now so completely dominated our imagery. John O’Connor, the perceptive critic of The New York Times, sums it up simply. “One thing is certain,” he writes. “Commercial television will no longer be able to dictate either what is watched or when it is watched.”

What appears on the surface to be a set of unrelated events turns out to be a wave of closely interrelated changes sweeping across the media horizon from newspapers and radio at one end to magazines and television at the other. The mass media are under attack. New, de-massified media are proliferating, challenging—and sometimes even replacing—the mass media that were so dominant in all Second Wave societies.

The Third Wave thus begins a truly new era—the age of the de-massified media.

—Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave: The Classic Study of Tomorrow, 1980.

The new hotness? Scoop: Warner Bros. Discovery in talks to merge with Paramount Global.

Why it matters: The combination would create a news and entertainment behemoth that would likely trigger further industry consolidation.

• Zaslav also has spoken to Shari Redstone, who owns Paramount’s parent company, about a deal.
• WBD’s market value was around $29 billion as of Wednesday, while Paramount’s was just over $10 billion, so any merger would not be of equals.

Details: The meeting between Zaslav and Bakish, which sources say lasted several hours, took place at Paramount’s headquarters in Times Square.

• The duo discussed ways their companies could complement one another. For example, each company’s main streaming service — Paramount+ and Max — could merge to better rival Netflix and Disney+.
• It’s unclear whether WBD would buy Paramount Global or its parent company, National Amusements Inc. (NAI), but a source familiar with the situation says that both options are on the table.
• WBD is said to have hired bankers to explore the deal.

Between the lines: The deal could drive substantial synergies.

That’s in addition to all of the media companies that Disney owns:

Disney owns and operates various business units, including major television broadcasting and cable television networks and entertainment networks. This includes:

• American Broadcasting Company (ABC)
• Freeform
• National Geographic Channel
• ESPN (Disney owns 80% stake)
• A&E (50% equity holding with Hearst Corporation)
• The History Channel (50% equity holding with Hearst Corporation)
• Lifetime (50% equity holding with Hearst Corporation)
• Fusion TV
• NBC Universal
• Disney Junior
• Disney Radio
• Disney Channel
• ABC Family

Streaming Services Owned by Disney

Streaming TV is the latest way of watching content across many devices. There are four top streaming services and Disney owns 3 out of the top 4 streaming services that are commonly used by consumers. Its recent takeover of 21st Century Fox has given the company a significant share in several streaming services.

Disney offers direct-to-consumer streaming services through the following media:

• Disney+
• Starz+
• ESPN+
• Hulu
• Hotstar
• ABC+ and more

As old media looks for a return to the limited and monolithic days of old, it’s a reminder that on the Internet, abandoning the decentralized Blogosphere for the walled gardens of Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube was a huge mistake, particularly for conservatives. Somebody should write a book about the reasons why.

BOWLING ALONE READS LIKE A NOSTALGIC LOOK AT THE GOOD OL’ DAYS:

What [Robert] Putnam couldn’t possibly have seen at the dawn of the technological revolution is how much worse the “bowling alone” phenomenon would get with the addition of the smartphone and the internet. I was waiting tables during the portable computer revolution. In the course of just a few years people went from dining together to dining together, alone. Entire families eating together, all looking at their phones.

My Gen Z nephews look at the TV like a telephone landline. Why would they be chained to one room, at the mercy of other people’s preferences, when they can roam freely from place to place, consuming whatever content their heart desires?

There is a line in Bowling Alone that made me laugh out loud. Putnam wrote, “Some see hope in the rise of news on the Internet or the all-news cable channels. It is still too early to predict the long-run effects of these new channels,” Putnam wrote. He adds, “That said, the early returns are not encouraging.”

Adorable. Cable news is dead. Cable broadcasts get fewer viewers than many YouTube streamers. Trump will probably be our next president, again. Now we are fat and lazy and also outraged and misinformed and distracted. Our attention spans are shredded by the multiple devices and social media constantly capturing our attention.

And as a result: The closing of the teenage mind is almost complete.

In the 1950s, the psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg developed a model for moral reasoning that follows a trajectory similar to Piaget’s model for cognitive development: Children progress from more concrete to more abstract thinking, from more rigidity to more flexibility. Levine says that what alarms her about the rigid, concrete take on right or wrong she sees in my generation is that without the “capacity to hear opposing points of view, you don’t develop empathy. And you’ll need empathy to end up with a good partner, to be a good parent and to be a good citizen.”

Julie Lythcott-Haims, a former Stanford dean, agrees: “We’re in desperate need of humans who can grapple openly with ideas, and disagree, as reasonable people will, without villainizing each other.”

I see teenagers unintentionally becoming more unforgiving and judgmental rather than open-minded and compassionate. When we can’t or don’t talk freely, we lose the chance to find real common ground, acknowledge complexity or grasp that even our own opinions can be malleable. If we listen only to those who already agree with us, we won’t make wider connections. We won’t grow.

Some people told me not to write this piece — that I could get canceled online, cut off by peers and perhaps even rejected by colleges. That’s a risk I’m willing to take.

I definitely don’t have all the answers, but I believe that daring to get past what’s acceptable and engage in open dialogue — as we did walking away from English class that day — is the key way to finding them and becoming the empathetic critical thinkers we need to be as we grow into adulthood.

Let’s start talking.

But that would require reasoning and — heaven forfend — even thoughtful debate! It’s so much easier (for kids of all ages) just to let those knees jerk and tear down the posters when confronted with a liberal ideology that causes them plenty of cognitive dissonance.

IS OUR CHILDREN LEARNING? A diploma for you and a diploma for you! States drop exit exams.

More than half of states required an exit exam in 2002, according to Education Week’s data.

“Objective metrics of student performance really helped to shine a light on some of the important inequities that existed in school systems,” John Papay, a Brown education professor told Stanford. However, “students of color, students who grew up in poverty, multilingual learners, and students with disabilities tended to have lower scores on these exams.”

Typically, students can take and retake the exams before 12th grade. but “equity” advocates have pushed for alternative ways to qualify for a diploma.

Killing the messenger that brings bad news is an old tradition.

Why it’s as if, “The left isn’t just reading 1984 as an instruction book. It’s also reading Harrison Bergeron as [a] How to Destroy Civilization for Dummies Guide.”

ANTI-GUN MOM LOSES IT OVER MINIATURE GUNS:

The horror. pic.twitter.com/vg5SAkEeHA

— GLB – sh@tposter with excellent points 🏴 (@CallMeGlib) December 17, 2023

That’s right. THAT is what this woman is losing her mind over.

It’s a “rifle” that literally fits in the palm of your hand.

Yet in the process, Nebraska Mom here has illustrated one very important point about anti-gun folks. For all their talk about respecting the Second Amendment and not wanting to take your guns away, they are very much terrified that someone somewhere might actually like and want firearms.

In this case, she’s trying to pressure Scheels to stop selling a freaking model because it’s a model of a gun way too close to something else she thinks is only for children–sleds.

What she’s admitting here is that people like her don’t want anyone seeing guns or gun-like objects at all. They don’t like that someone out there might look at guns with something other than fear or scorn. That’s what this is truly about.

To paraphrase the leitmotif from A Christmas Story, you’ll shoot your GI Joe doll’s eye out, kid!

GLENN GREENWALD:

After 2016 — first Brexit, then Trump's win — Western elites decided populations could no longer be trusted with basic freedoms: they choose and think wrong.

That's what led to the censorship/"disinformation" regime. Now they're barring the leading candidate from running: https://t.co/ITavEgfWLW

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) December 20, 2023

In the dystopian 2012 science fiction film The Giver, Meryl Streep’s (very) Hillary-esque “Chief Elder” character tells Jeff Bridges, “When people have the freedom to choose, they choose wrong–every single time:”

In her initial appearances as a giant hologram and with her clipped and condescending speech patterns, Meryl Streep as the “Chief Elder” seems eerily reminiscent of Hillary Clinton — and indeed The Community is the futuristic yet primitive village that Hillary believes it takes to raise a child. Near the end of the film, Streep’s Chief Elder sums up the theme of the film in a line that’s right of the Clinton/Obama playbook: “When people have the power to choose, they choose wrong. Every single time.” Which neatly ties together Bill Clinton’s 1999 line on tax cuts and returning the budget surplus of that era back to the taxpayers: “We could give it all back to you and hope you spend it right. . . . Do you really want to run the risk of squandering this surplus?” And Hillary’s infamous 2004 promise that “We’re going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good.”

Despite Hillary’s remarkable similarity to Streep’s Chief Elder character, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if The Giver’s author winds up voting for her in 2016. The Wall Street Journal noted last year, “while she’s quick to burnish her own Democratic Party leanings, Ms. Lowry concedes that social conservatives ‘could find their views validated by this book.”

And we certainly can’t have that, whether it’s at the movie theater, the bookstore, or the ballot box.

LET ME JUST GET OUT AHEAD OF THE STORY AND SAY THAT JUDGE PRESKA DID NOT COMMIT SUICIDE NEXT YEAR:  Judge Orders Release of Names of Over 175 of Jeffrey Epstein’s ‘High-Profile Associates.’

DNC-MSM PIVOTS ON CUSP OF ELECTION YEAR: Media, Suddenly: Say, Did You Know Biden Is Old, Unpopular, and Corrupt?

WITH DNC IN MIND, CITY BANS CARRYING URINE, FECES: California prepares to transform sewage into pure drinking water under new rules.

California is set to adopt regulations that will allow for sewage to be extensively treated, transformed into pure drinking water and delivered directly to people’s taps.

The regulations are expected to be approved Tuesday by the State Water Resources Control Board, enabling water suppliers to begin building advanced treatment plants that will turn wastewater into a source of clean drinking water.

The new rules represent a major milestone in California’s efforts to stretch supplies by recycling more of the water that flows down drains.

“We’re creating a new source of supply that we were previously discharging or thinking of as waste,” said Heather Cooley, director of research at the Pacific Institute, a water think tank in Oakland. “As we look to make our communities more resilient to drought, to climate change, this is really going to be an important part of that solution.”

Flashback: California regulator rejects desalination plant despite historic drought.

(Classical reference in headline.)

YOU CAN ONLY BE AVANT-GARDE FOR SO LONG BEFORE YOU BECOME ‘GARDE:’ Saturday Night Live Won’t Touch Hunter Biden (And We All Know Why).

(Classical reference in headline.)

OLD AND BUSTED: “Food Deserts.”

The New Hotness?  “News Deserts!” As More Media Layoffs Ring in the New Year, Americans Face Prospect of ‘News Deserts.’

The media industry has been rocked this holiday season by news of newsroom layoffs as outlets downsize to combat volatility in advertising, after an already-brutal year of job cuts.

In the last month alone, Condé Nast, G/O Media, Vice Media and Vox Media have all cut staff, most of whom already had layoffs earlier this year. (Vice filed for bankruptcy in June.)

Broadcast, print and digital outlets collectively saw 2,681 journalism job cuts in 2023, up 48% from 1,808 in 2022 and 77% from 1,511 in 2021, according to a report from employment firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

With a collapsing advertising-revenue model and more media companies experimenting with artificial intelligence to create content, the outlook for journalism is dimming, media analysts told TheWrap. The decline underscores the need for the public and even governments to fund news gathering if it is to survive in its current form and avoid widespread “news deserts,” they said.

“All available evidence suggests that the commercial future for journalism is especially dire,” Victor Pickard, a professor of media policy and political economy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, told TheWrap. “We cannot simply let the market drive local journalism into the ground. I expect to see more legislative efforts, especially at state government levels, aimed at shoring up and even expanding local journalism.”

The staffers of China’s Xinhua News Agency, North Korea’s KCNA, and the ghosts of Pravda smile; because governments funding journalism has always ended so well for all concerned in the past.

There is a bit of good news, though. Presumably, “news deserts” will work out as well as the original “food deserts” have, as Glenn blogged in 2017:

“Food deserts” claim is bogus. “This is a good paper with a credible research design and impressive data from some 35,000 supermarkets covering 40% of the United States. Moreover, because of the widespread attention given to ‘food deserts’ this paper probably had to be written. But color me un-surprised. The results are obvious.”

Also, when you ground-truth the government’s food-desert map, you find things like this: “Knoxville’s Federally-Designated “Food Deserts” Include Super Walmart, Sam’s Club, Kroger. Plus a couple of tasty oriental supermarkets.” And a Trader Joe’s.

Related: “If food deserts actually exist, why can’t both the USDA and the local bureaucrats make an accurate map of them?” And if they can’t make an accurate map, what’s the chance that they’ll accomplish anything no matter how well-funded?

Of course, with this being Obama’s third term, the DNC-MSM have reverted to their groveling tone from the start of his original administration, along the lines of The Hill post from September of 2009: Obama open to newspaper bailout bill.

HOW IT STARTED: Mayor Rahm Emanuel: ‘Chicago Always Will Be A Sanctuary City.’

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel added his voice to the chorus of big-city mayors who say theirs will remain “sanctuary cities” in response to President-elect Donald Trump’s hard-line positions on illegal immigration.

Surrounded by immigration activists, business leaders and state and federal lawmakers, Emanuel sought to reduce the fear of immigrants living in this country without authorization.

“To all those who are, after Tuesday’s election, very nervous and filled with anxiety … you are safe in Chicago, you are secure in Chicago and you are supported in Chicago,” said Emanuel at a news conference called to publicize the expansion of mental health services for people anxious over the election results.

“Chicago has in the past been a sanctuary city. … It always will be a sanctuary city,” the mayor said.

—NPR, November 14th, 2016.

How it’s going: HA! Brandon Johnson MELTS TF DOWN Because TX Keeps Sending Illegal Immigrants to Sanctuary Cities (Watch).

Awwww, would you look at that? Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson is upset with Texas for sending illegal immigrants to Sanctuary Cities across the country. Does he not realize that’s what Sanctuary Cities are for?

Like so many Democrat mayors who were more than happy to accuse Abbott and DeSantis of being RACISTS for opposing Joe Biden’s open border, they sure seem to change their tunes quickly when they get to deal with a small, minuscule even amount of what our southern states deal with every day.

Watch this:

Mayor Brandon Johnson melts down over Texas sending illegals to sanctuary cities:

"IT IS NOT JUST A CHICAGO DYNAMIC!
HE IS ATTACKING OUR COUNTRY!" pic.twitter.com/n0yND8Mv5Q

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) December 19, 2023

Earlier: Sanctuary Cities Seethe as Illegal Immigrants Actually Arrive.

The surest sign that public policies are simply virtue signals is when the messages don’t cost anything. The easiest way to tell when that signal starts to fail is to watch politicians flounder as the costs start to rise and voters demand relief.

It was free—and meaningless—for progressive churches to post banners calling themselves “nuclear free zones” during the Reagan era. Their dwindling congregations loved it. It was free, after George Floyd‘s murder, to post woke catechism signs on your front lawn, proclaiming “In this house, we believe: Black Lives Matter, women’s rights are human rights, no human is illegal” and so on. Maybe the neighbors gave you high-fives. And for years it has been free for deep-blue cities to proclaim themselves “sanctuaries” for illegal immigrants. That’s changing now that voters want some sanctuary for themselves.

Changes like this happen when voters realize the old virtue signals actually entail serious costs—and that they will have to pay them. That is exactly what’s happening in New York City and Washington D.C. now that Texas governor Greg Abbott is sending those cities a few busloads of illegal immigrants from his state.

These progressive bastions were silent when the Biden administration flew planeloads of illegal immigrants to suburban airports in the middle of the night. TV coverage was prohibited, and the arrivals were secretly dispersed. Abbott’s buses, by contrast, arrive downtown greeted by local TV crews. Now you can hear the politicians screech.

The ghost of Saul Alinsky smiles: “Make opponents live up to their own book of rules. ‘You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.’”

Incidentally, “dynamic” seems to be an all-purpose buzzword the mayor has adopted: Editorial: Mayor Johnson, crime in Chicago is not a ‘dynamic.’ It’s a full-blown crisis.

Asked about it, Johnson told Block Club that “There’s work to be done.” He went on, then, to say, “We’re going to continue to work with the Police Department and the full force of government to address this dynamic, just like we’re addressing every single other dynamic in the city of Chicago.”

And therein lies a key part of the problem. Mr. Mayor, this isn’t a “dynamic” akin to “every single other dynamic.” It’s not a second-tier issue.

Johnson’s budget adds modestly to investment in more cops, and he’s called consistently for more detectives to try to improve Chicago’s woeful clearance rate on the most serious crimes. Homicides are down year-over-year, which is modestly good news. They remain way too high.

But what’s afflicting the public now is rampant armed theft, making it increasingly unsafe to walk neighborhood streets. Robberies are up a mind-boggling 57% so far this year. Many of those are armed robberies.

No, Mr. Mayor, this isn’t just another headache you must cope with while zealously pursuing your agenda of hiking taxes to fund more social programs. This is the job. It may not be the job you would prefer to do, but there isn’t anything more important on your plate.

In August, there was another D-word moment from Johnson:

Johnson touted among his successes movement on his Bring Chicago Home initiative to help the homeless, and his efforts to revamp the approach to policing so it incorporates his campaign promise of utilizing mental health experts for some 911 calls.

“We’re moving toward actually passing that, we’ve actually shifted the dynamic in the city of Chicago as we prepare to confirm our next police superintendent,” Johnson said. “I don’t know we’ve ever had a police superintendent talk about treatment not trauma. I mean, that’s what I ran on.”

Gooder and harder, Second City.

KEITH CANNOT BE KILLED BY CONVENTIONAL WEAPONS: The Rolling Stones rocker Keith Richards celebrates both his 80th birthday and 40th wedding anniversary to wife Patti Hansen as his famous loved ones send tributes.

Classical reference in headline:

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Alec Baldwin berated by group of pro-Palestinian protesters who flooded Grand Central, Penn Station: ‘Shut your f—kig mouth.’

Pro-Palestinian protesters targeted actor Alec Baldwin Monday evening as the “30 Rock” star suddenly appeared during a protest as hundreds of agitators flooded into Penn Station and Grand Central Station during a fiery demonstration where they told Israel to “go to hell.”

Hundreds of protesters targeted the major Big Apple transit hubs with some lambasting Baldwin and his “tanking” career while shouting up harsh slogans against Israel and President Biden during the protest opposing Israel’s military campaign in Gaza against Hamas.

Baldwin was walking by the demonstration near West 29th Street when protesters spotted him and darted toward him, accusing him of supporting Israel. A group berated Baldwin as cops stood between the group and the comedian, who was against a door.

Baldwin had no problem jawing back at them but was quickly met with the ire of the protesters.

“Shut your f—kig mouth, you have no f—king shame,” one man shouted back at Baldwin.

When he was asked if he supported Israel, Baldwin replied, “No, I support peace for Gaza.”

The confrontation ended when Baldwin was able to get through the door he was waiting in front of.

“Your career’s tanking by the way,” the man yelled as the door shut.

Insert Henry Kissinger’s Iran-Iraq War joke here.

AND THE HITS JUST KEEP COMING FOR DISNEY: Disney Marvel’s Big Rising Star, Their Next “Thanos-Level Threat,” Was Just Convicted of Harassing and Assaulting His Girlfriend.

MOVE ALONG, NOTHING TO SEE HERE: Americore Gave James Biden $600k Loan on Promise He’d Deliver Funding from Middle East, Trustee Says.

AFTER THATCHER:

The current state of affairs has analogs with how the era of Thatcher’s best overseas friend, Ronald Reagan, is seen today (though Reagan is less controversial in the United States than Thatcher is in Britain). How has it come about?

Part of the explanation is specifically British; part wider. It is important to understand that, even before Thatcher had arrived in office, there was no consensus about her in Britain. She probably did not mind that, because she loved to say how much she disliked consensus: “The Old Testament prophets didn’t go out into the highways saying, ‘Brothers, I want consensus.’ They said, ‘This is my faith and my vision!’… And they preached it.” But it meant that there was already a battle over her legacy, almost before she entered the office which she held for eleven and a half years.

In the first volume of Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography (2013), I devoted a whole chapter to reactions to her, because they were so unusually strong. Differing attitudes to her embodied a culture war. One would have expected the first woman prime minister to have aroused opposition in conservative circles because of her sex. This did happen to some extent, most notably, for example, in her Tory predecessor, Edward Heath. But the hostile reaction to her sex came much more from the Left, many of whom seemed repelled at the idea that a woman could be a strong leader in politics and yet hold the “wrong” views. When Lady Thatcher died in 2013, the House of Commons gathered to commemorate her. By far the harshest contributor, in what was naturally expected to be a respectful occasion, was the distinguished actress and Labour M.P. Glenda Jackson. She spoke of the “extraordinary human damage” Thatcher had done, and concluded, “To pay tribute to the first Prime Minister denoted by female gender, okay, but a woman? Not on my terms.” It was as if a woman not on the left was an unnatural creation. Thatcher’s sex had a big influence on how she was received and made reactions toward her much more emotional than if she had been a man.

Read the whole thing.

WELL SURE, BUT WOULDN’T TERMINATING THE NFL PRODUCE EVEN MORE DRAMATIC RESULTS? Taylor Swift’s whirlwind romance with ‘soul mate’ Travis Kelce has produced 138 TONS of CO2 emissions in three months – and the singer would need to plant more than 2,200 trees to offset the damage.

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. In the meantime, I don’t want to hear another word about Glenn Reynolds’ carbon footprint.

RIP: Legendary LA radio personality Jim Ladd dies at 75. “The news of Ladd’s death came as his colleagues from SirusXM Deep Tracks channel announced on the air that the longtime radio personality had suffered a heart attack over the weekend. SiriusXM issued a statement on social media in response to Ladd’s death[.]”