So if [Ryan] Gosling’s Ken is a pro-“patriarchy” (as Leftists imagine it) rube, his fans are going to celebrate every word from his plastic mouth. If that is what Big Woke thinks of them, then by gum, they will live up to that expectation (and have a blast doing it).
Guys aren’t angrily boycotting Barbie (which Big Left would take as a win because it would prove that they can’t handle a strong, feminist Barbie); they’re flocking to the movie specifically to applaud the ludicrous chauvinism espoused by Based Ken. And to demonstrate to Leftists that they are perfectly willing to behave as badly as Leftists claim they do. And to laugh at the Leftists’ fuming and sputtering when they do it.
If there’s one thing totalitarians (like the modern Left) cannot tolerate, it’s fun. They sold their sense of joy along with their souls years ago. Unfortunately for them, their “Barbie” feminist film will generate more laughter, memes, mockery, and joy than they ever intended.
The Post is on a pace to lose about $100 million in 2023, according to two people with knowledge of the company’s finances; two other people briefed on the situation said the company was expecting to miss its forecasts for ad revenue this year. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal financial matters. The Post has struggled to increase the number of its paying customers since the 2020 election, when its digital subscriptions peaked at three million. It now has around 2.5 million.
A spokesperson for Mr. Bezos declined to make him available for an interview. Patty Stonesifer, The Post’s interim chief executive, said Mr. Bezos was happy with “every dollar invested” in the company. One person familiar with Mr. Bezos’ plans said The Post had planned for 2023 to be a “year for investment.”
“I’m very enthusiastic about what we can do here at The Washington Post in the decade ahead,” Ms. Stonesifer said in a statement. “Jeff’s second decade of ownership of The Post should be even more exciting.”
I just wanted to tell you good luck; we’re all counting on you, Jeff.
Hard pass. Here’s an idea – make a good film with a good female character and start your own franchise. Or would that be too much work?
Ah, but then those of a progressive inclination couldn’t piggy-back their Current Year politics onto someone else’s work, established over many decades. Plus, there’s lots of self-congratulatory subverting to be done. All that signalling about how antiquated and tiresome it is to have a white, male hero being daring and heroic. Because hey, nobody wants that.
Every single one of the eight Democrats running for mayor vowed to protect illegal immigrants from deportation, solidifying the Big Apple’s often infamous status as a “sanctuary city.”
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Entrepreneur Andrew Yang, the son of legal Taiwanese immigrants, said, “I appreciate anyone who comes to this country or New York City for a better life.”
And Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams said migrants were his neighbors growing up in Queens.
“My mother worked two jobs to provide for the six of us and we had a group of undocumented residents that lived in our community,” Adams said.
The other candidates — city comptroller Scott Stringer, former Obama housing secretary Shaun Donovan and nonprofit leader Dianne Morales — also voiced their support for the Big Apple as a sanctuary city.
The New York Times seems to be deliriously in favor of the movie Oppenheimer, with Kai Bird assuring us in his New York Times piece that opposition to the Red Scare was good and principled, that he hopes that “Christopher Nolan’s stunning new film on Oppenheimer’s complicated legacy will initiate a national conversation”, and that we can rest assured that even TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome) — our words, not his — manages to be part of the equation.
Kai Bird is the director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography, the New York Times tells us, as well as, more importantly, co-author with the late Martin J. Sherwin of “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer”, the book behind Christopher Nolan’s “brilliant achievement in formal and conceptual terms“.
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Over ten years after Antony Beevor came out with astonishing revelations from the Kremlin’s archives (his massive The Second World War was published in 2012), the historian’s conclusions are still not accepted by the élites (they are not challenged — with arguments good or ill — they are simply ignored), leading them to call opposition to communism and to the USSR “a political movement characterized by rank know-nothing, anti-intellectual, xenophobic demagogues.”
Astonishingly, [Oppenheimer] had gone so far as to say that the Hiroshima bomb was used “against an essentially defeated enemy.” The atomic bomb, he warned, “is a weapon for aggressors, and the elements of surprise and terror are as intrinsic to it as are the fissionable nuclei.”
“An essentially defeated enemy?” That would be news to the author of this 1946 Atlantic article: If the Atomic Bomb Had Not Been Used. Was Japan already beaten before the August 1945 bombings?
Was Japan already beaten before the atomic bomb? The answer is certainly “yes” in the sense that the fortunes of war had turned against her. The answer is “no” in the sense that she was still fighting desperately and there was every reason to believe that she would continue to do so; and this is the only answer that has any practical significance.
General MacArthur’s staff anticipated about 50,000 American casualties and several times that number of Japanese casualties in the November 1 operation to establish the initial beachheads on Kyushu. After that they expected a far more costly struggle before the Japanese homeland was subdued. There was every reason to think that the Japanese would defend their homeland with even greater fanaticism than when they fought to the death on Iwo Jima and Okinawa. No American soldier who survived the bloody struggles on these islands has much sympathy with the view that battle with the Japanese was over as soon as it was clear that their ultimate situation was hopeless. No, there was every reason to expect a terrible struggle long after the point at which some people can now look back and say, “Japan was already beaten.”
A month after our occupation I heard General MacArthur say that even then, if the Japanese government lost control over its people and the millions of former Japanese soldiers took to guerrilla warfare in the mountains, it could take a million American troops ten years to master the situation.
That this was not an impossibility is shown by the following fact, which I have not seen reported. We recall the long period of nearly three weeks between the Japanese offer to surrender and the actual surrender on September 2. This was needed in order to arrange details: of the surrender and occupation and to permit the Japanese government to prepare its people to accept the capitulation. It is not generally realized that there was threat of a revolt against the government, led by an Army group supported by the peasants, to seize control and continue the war. For several days it was touch and go as to whether the people would follow their government in surrender.
The bulk of the Japanese people did not consider themselves beaten; in fact they believed they were winning in spite of the terrible punishment they had taken. They watched the paper balloons take off and float eastward in the wind, confident that these were carrying a terrible retribution to the United States in revenge for our air raids.
We gained a vivid insight into the state of knowledge and morale of the ordinary Japanese soldier from a young private who had served through the war in the Japanese Army. He had lived since babyhood in America, and had graduated in 1940 from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This lad, thoroughly American in outlook, had gone with his family to visit relatives shortly after his graduation. They were caught in the mobilization and he was drafted into the Army.
This young Japanese told us that all his fellow soldiers believed that Japan was winning the war. To them the losses of Iwo Jima and Okinawa were parts of a grand strategy to lure the American forces closer and closer to the homeland, until they could be pounced upon and utterly annihilated. He himself had come to have some doubts as a result of various inconsistencies in official reports. Also he had seen the Ford assembly line in operation and knew that Japan could not match America in war production. But none of the soldiers had any inkling of the true situation until one night, at ten-thirty, his regiment was called to hear the reading of the surrender proclamation.
Did the atomic bomb bring about the end of the war? That it would do so was the calculated gamble and hope of Mr. Stimson, General Marshall, and their associates. The facts are these. On July 26, 1945, the Potsdam Ultimatum called on Japan to surrender unconditionally. On July 29 Premier Suzuki issued a statement, purportedly at a cabinet press conference, scorning as unworthy of official notice the surrender ultimatum, and emphasizing the increasing rate of Japanese aircraft production. Eight days later, on August 6, the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima; the second was dropped on August 9 on Nagasaki; on the following day, August 10, Japan declared its intention to surrender, and on August 14 accepted the Potsdam terms.
On the basis of these facts, I cannot believe that, without the atomic bomb, the surrender would have come without a great deal more of costly struggle and bloodshed.
Flashback: Bill Whittle Jon Stewart, War Criminals & The True Story of the Atomic Bombs (Video).
Related: Harry Truman was not fond of Oppenheimer:
I grew up working class in the 1970s; my mother taught me to call it Down There. Practically no one apart from sex-ed teachers used the v-word back then. Thanks mainly to feminists, its use is far more widespread now. But still there is work to be done. The Eve Appeal found in 2014 that a whopping 65 per cent of women aged 16 to 25 have a problem with using the word vagina or vulva, while 40 per cent said they used wimpy names such as ‘lady parts’ when discussing gynaecological health.
So imagine having a daughter today, just starting school. You’ve been scrupulous about using the correct word for her primary sex organ, and then she comes home from school squealing: ‘Mummy, mummy – I’VE GOT A BONUS HOLE!’ Do you think that couldn’t happen? If so, what planet have you been living on for the past few years?
George Orwell, to the white courtesy phone, please!
Something else this stupid survey appears to ignore is that the crime and pollution problems in these ten states are the exclusive problems of the Democrat-run cities in these states. Outside of these cities, life is idyllic, clean, and safe. I just spent a week in and drove through Indiana twice last month. It’s a beautiful state, stunningly beautiful and populated with farms, small towns, and nice people. The contrast to Illinois, where we also spent a week, is night and day, especially the cost of living.
Far-left CNBC is not measuring the quality of life. These liars are inventing categories that have nothing to do with our standard of living just so they can trash our way of life in Red America—which already is the Utopia leftists claim to want. Almost all the violence, hate crimes, pollution, and poverty can be found in the urban garbage piles where Democrats are in charge. Out here in MAGA Land, life is serene. People of all backgrounds live together in relative peace and harmony while enjoying safe and clean streets, water, and air.
Leftists, do not consider moving from your failing blue state to a red one. Pay attention – CNBC is correct; Texas and other red states are failed hellscapes that no one should enter. Trust the media, they are particularly correct on this issue.
At one point near the end of American Prometheus—the 2005 biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin detailing the physicist’s effort to create the atomic bomb and the effort of his political enemies to tar him as a Communist after the fact, and the book on which the film Oppenheimer is based—the authors highlight Oppie’s annoyance with a popular play that closed with a monologue announcing his feelings of guilt about the creation, and deployment, of the atomic bomb.
“Such melodrama somehow cheapened the character of his ordeal,” Kai and Sherwin write. “In short, he thought the script poor drama precisely because it lacked ambiguity.”
I have no idea what Oppenheimer would make of Oppenheimer, but it is decidedly ambiguous in its treatment of two of the great moral quandaries of midcentury America: the development and deployment of the atomic bomb, and the maniacal effort to root out Communist infiltration (or “infiltration”) of America’s political, social, and educational classes. Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) himself rests at the intersection of these two tempests, and it is through him that this storm will rage.
Titled “Attack Helicopters and White Supremacy: Interesting Malicious Responses to an Online Questionnaire about Transgender Undergraduate Engineering and Computer Science Student Experiences,” the paper reported on “individuals exercising discursive power in their language to target researchers and tamper with data.”
The authors wrote that the “backlash” to the project “reflects characteristics of contemporary far-right or fascist political movements in the U.S., such as the synthesis of antisemitism with anti-Black and anti-feminist rhetorics.”
About 25 percent of the “malicious responses” provided some airplane-related response to gender, including several who specifically identified as an “Apache helicopter.” Identifying as an “attack helicopter” is a meme that goes back to at least 2014.
Other responses included a “V-22 Osprey” and a “F-16 fighter jet.”
Some gender responses appeared to express frustration with the survey, such as “homophobic biggot, yes we exist,” “Cis gender lizard king,” and “F*cking white male.”
Other mocking answers were much more detailed, with responses to the gender prompt that included “Quasi-Demi-poney; bankai-released state queercopter with a hint of faggotdrag lesbian and homosexual upside-down Frappuccino cake” and “on-cookie-cutter cis-furry dragonkin. Don’t judge.”
Heh, indeed. Read the whole thing.™
MARK FELTON: Panther Pillboxes 1945 — German Last-Ditch Tanks in Berlin (Video).
NBC reports that Kamala Harris intends to visit Florida today to criticize its new school curriculum:
In remarks Thursday, Harris blasted efforts in some states to ban books and “push forward revisionist history.”
“Just yesterday in the state of Florida, they decided middle school students will be taught that enslaved people benefited from slavery,” she said at a convention for the traditionally Black sorority Delta Sigma Theta Inc. “They insult us in an attempt to gaslight us, and we will not stand for it.”
This is a brazen lie. It’s an astonishing lie. It’s an evil lie. It is so untrue — so deliberately and cynically misleading — that, in a sensible political culture, Harris would be obligated to issue an apology. Instead, NBC confirms that she will repeat the lie today during a speech in Jacksonville.
I have been trying to work out how best to illustrate the sheer scale of Harris’s falsehood, and I’ve come to the conclusion that the only way to achieve it is to list in one place all the relevant parts of the course about which she is complaining. So, below, I have copied and pasted every single reference to slavery, slaves, abolitionism, civil rights, and African Americans that is in the document. For those interested, the full curriculum (along with the curriculum for the teaching of the Holocaust) is here.
Exit quote: “The list is extremely long. That’s because, pace Harris, there’s a lot in there.”
The Eagles are getting ready to embark on one, Aerosmith and KISS are also eyeing the end of their touring days. Elton John just wrapped his last go round. Paul Simon has already dotted his i’s and crossed his t’s.
Now I’m hearing that Fleetwood Mac may be next. There is even talk, sources say per Mick Fleetwood, of reuniting with Lindsey Buckingham, who was fired from the group a couple of years ago. But with the passing of Christine McVie, it makes sense to get Buckingham back in the fold. He and Stevie Nicks can fight once the tour is over and they’re in nursing homes, frankly.
Also let’s not forget. John McVie retired from touring. Fleetwood Mac now would just be Mick and Stevie. They need Lindsay Buckingham, writer of many of their hits, to get on board.
As Steven Hyden wrote in his 2018 book, Twilight of the Gods, for classic rock, the brand is everything. Getting Buckingham back into the mix is the easiest way for Fleetwood Mac to simulate its classic lineup, even if one McVie is dead, and the other one is no longer touring.
Bottom line: the accusation is that Zlochevsky was coerced into paying the Bidens to ensure that Ukrainian prosecutor general Viktor Shokin was fired in 2016. How much? Joe and Hunter were each said to have made off with $5 million, plus Hunter was given a spot on the Burisma board and a stipend of between $50,000 and $80,000 per month. Nice work if you can get it. And the Bidens can and do get it.
Bottom bottom line: Burisma “hired Hunter Biden ‘to protect us, through his dad, from all kinds of problems.’” Do you believe it? I do. Will it matter? Hard to say. The wagons are circled but the Apaches are angry and getting angrier. I am looking forward to the day I can say, “Well, son of a bitch, the Bidens got fired.”
In the meantime, even with the media burying the Bidens’ myriad scandals, Yahoo is asking: Why is Joe Biden so unpopular?
The apparent media subtext was that it was either just “Old Joe” trying to be too friendly or a symptom of his cognitive decline and thus not attributable to any sinister urge.
Senescence now provides paradoxical cover for Biden’s creepiness — newfound exemption for his old boorish behavior.
Also, during the president’s latest antics, cocaine was found in the West Wing of the White House.
All the White House spokespeople had to do was to reassure the public that the drugs most certainly did not belong to first son Hunter Biden — despite being a frequent guest resident of the White House and a former crack-cocaine addict.
Instead, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre dismissed reporters for requesting such clarification.
Then the official narrative went through several contortions as to where and how the bag of cocaine was found.
The disinformation only added suspicion that the White House either would not or could not be transparent about the discovery of illicit drugs abandoned at the very nexus of American governance.
Requests for clarity were understandable not only because Hunter has had a long history of drug addiction.
He also has a troubling habit of leaving a public trail of evidence of his drug use.
Hunter forgot his crack pipe in a rental car. He abandoned his laptop, which contained evidence of his own felonious behavior. And his unlawfully registered handgun turned up in a dumpster near a school.
In sum, the president and his son both have quite disturbing and all-too-public bad habits.
The media celebrated and defended whistleblowers in former president Donald Trump’s administration. Not so much these days.
When two veteran IRS investigators testified before Congress on Wednesday that the Justice Department interfered in their probe of the president’s son, major news networks had other places to be.
Montaner, who during a more than half-century career wrote thousands of columns and more than two dozen books and novels, was a leading Castro critic, especially known in Latin America where his columns were widely syndicated.
As I was building my personal website 20 years ago without understanding much of the internet, it was his weblog, El Blog de Montaner (then with yellow or cream colors dominating and under possibly a slightly different name), that influenced me the most, possibly because it also was in two languages. Then I learned of his book, “The Manual of the Perfect Latin American Idiot,” and both blog and best-seller were a revelation that I quoted a number of times on the blog which I was invited to join the following year (2004, the very blog that you are reading now).
Montaner, along with two other Latin American co-authors, wrote “The Manual of the Perfect Latin American Idiot,” published in Spanish in 1996. The book, which ridiculed the left for blaming Latin America’s ills chiefly on the U.S., became a bestseller, sparking debate throughout Latin America.
FBI raids on journalists are rare. News organizations often respond with formal protests and legal challenges. Under a 2021 Justice Department policy, raids, subpoenas and other compulsory means of obtaining materials from reporters are banned for any investigation of matters related to their journalism. The policy became the basis for a significant shift in the stance of the Justice Department toward the press.
The Rolling Stone story created a stir. Reporter Tatiana Siegel stated that the April 22 raid was “quite possibly, the first” carried out by the Biden administration on a journalist.
In this case, the journalist was ABC* News national security producer James Gordon Meek. A former investigator for the U.S. House Homeland Security Committee, Meek had been with ABC News since 2013. He also was a producer of 3212 Un-Redacted, an investigative documentary that streamed on Hulu.
“Meek appears to be on the wrong side of the national-security apparatus,” it stated.
As the story noted, Siegel’s sources told her “federal agents allegedly found classified information on Meek’s laptop during their raid.” Siegel reported that Meek left his job at ABC after the raid; a publishing contract with Simon & Schuster evaporated.
As edited by Rolling Stone Editor-in-Chief Noah Shachtman, however, the article omitted a key fact that Siegel initially intended to include: Siegel had learned from her sources that Meek had been raided as part of a federal investigation into images of child sex abuse, something not publicly revealed until last month.
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