YOU CAN’T SPELL GROOMERS WITHOUT THE INITIALS “GM:” Drag queens and drag races, Chevy does it all. “Chevrolet has partnered with LGBTQ Nation to promote transgender ideology and other LGBTQ+ issues, emphasizing among other things that they have a political agenda to destroy current social norms and transform the society and our children into something matching their vision. The mask has come off, and it is a bad look for Chevy. Far from merely asserting that the goal is to expand tolerance for and acceptance of alternative lifestyles, the program is explicitly political. Chevy has decided to enter the culture wars on the side of the gender benders.”

IT’S ONE OF THE BLESSINGS OF LIBERTY: The NYT’s new conservative columnist is… David French.

Cockburn asked a few conservatives what they make of French’s move to the New York Times. “French claims to be a Republican but his move to the New York Times proves that he is in the globalist elitist uniparty,” said Roger Stone. “There is no differentiation between the views of David French and the effete, out-of-touch, elitist NYT editorial board. He will fit right in!”

“David French has emerged in recent years as the American punditry class’ foremost house-trained, faux-‘conservative’ voice,” said Newsweek‘s Josh Hammer. “It is thus wholly unsurprising that the wokesters at the New York Times would deem French a good fit to be their shiny new controlled-opposition columnist.”

Ryan Girdusky, author of the National Populist newsletter, simply said: “David French? Never heard of her.”

Heh, indeed.™

LATERAL MOVE: Former Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R[ino]-IL) Joins CNN as Senior Political Commentator.

WISCONSIN NEEDS TO JOIN WEIGHT WATCHERS: Melted butter clogs Wisconsin canal after dairy plant fire.

21st CENTURY QUESTIONS: What Happens to Songwriters When AI Can Generate Music?

If you think 100,000 songs a day going into the market is a big number, “you have no idea what’s coming next,” says Alex Mitchell, founder/CEO of Boomy, a music creation platform that can compose an instrumental at the click of an icon.

Boomy is one of many so-called “generative artificial intelligence” music companies — others include Soundful, BandLab’s SongStarter and Authentic Artists — founded to democratize songwriting and production even more than the synthesizer did in the 1970s, the drum machine in the ’80s and ’90s, digital audio workstations in the 2000s and sample and beat libraries in the 2010s.

In each of those cases, however, trained musicians were required to operate this technology in order to produce songs. The selling point of generative AI is that no musical knowledge or training is necessary. Anyone can potentially create a hit song with the help of computers that evolve with each artificially produced guitar lick or drumbeat.

Not surprisingly, the technology breakthrough has also generated anxiety among professional musicians, producers, engineers and others in the recorded-music industry who worry that their livelihoods could potentially be threatened.

Further thoughts from Rick Beato, who also explores how Auto-Tune destroyed pop music:

NUCLEAR POWER CATCHING THE EYES OF SILICON VALLEY’S TECH BILLIONAIRES FOR CLEAN ENERGY ALTERNATIVE.

I DON’T WANT TO HEAR ANOTHER WORD ABOUT GLENN REYNOLDS’ CARBON FOOTPRINT: Pete Buttigieg brought husband Chasten on military aircraft to attend sporting event in Netherlands. American taxpayers who have faced commercial airline delays ‘should be furious,’ government watchdog director tells Fox News Digital.

HIDE THE DECLINE: TV’s awful year.

Congratulations to NBC. It passed CBS last year as the most-watched network on television — because NBC’s viewership fell by only 7%, while CBS lost 8% of its viewers.

That’s according to Variety.

45 of the top 50 TV channels and networks lost viewers. Only 3 gained (ESPN, ESPN 2 and the Paramount Network). TV Land and Bounce TV neither gained nor lost viewers.

The drop in viewers came despite an Olympics, a popular  war and a federal election.

It is pretty spectacular that people tuned out coverage of a very close election. Fox News viewership dropped 1%, MSNBC dropped 22% and CNN dropped 34%.

You cannot blame the drop in viewers on cable cutting.

How bad is TV’s decline? CNN Lost a Third of Its Primetime Viewers in 2022 – an Election Year.

Related: The Good Times Lasted a Century. “From Herman Mankiewicz’s 1926 telegram [to Ben Hecht, in which he cabled, ‘Millions are to be grabbed out here. And your only competition is idiots.’] to the most recent depressing Warner Brothers Discovery earnings call, the business was doing, as we used to say when there was still a reason to say it, boffo business. Today, the worst thing you can do for young people trying to break into show business is encourage them. The number of movies in release has never been smaller, and studios are still trying to figure out the economics of the feature-film business in the age of streaming. They have only recently discovered that spending $100 million on a feature film that goes directly to streaming is a money-loser—but then so are multi-episode series that sit, unwatched, on the servers of Netflix, Hulu, Peacock, you name it.”

FANS GIVE MILLIONS TO DAMAR HAMLIN’S TOY DRIVE FOR KIDS. “Hamlin’s goal was simple: He wanted to raise $2,500 online to buy toys for needy kids. It took about two years. Then came Monday, when the Buffalo Bills safety was critically injured and needed his heart restarted on the field in a chilling scene that unfolded during a nationally televised game against the Cincinnati Bengals. He instantly became one of the biggest stories in sports, and thousands of people found his GoFundMe page. The result: roughly $3.7 million donated in the first 12 hours. And the number is climbing.”

RIP: Ken Block, Rally Car Racer and Hoonigan Founder, Killed Snowboarding in Utah.

Block featured in one of Top Gear’s most iconic clips, as he jumped between dunes in a rally car with an astonished James May in the passenger seat, while a C-130 Hercules and a motocross driver fly by:

HAPPY NEW YEAR FROM 60 MINUTES! Paul Ehrlich Is Always Wrong. “0% of the time, he’s right every time,” Jim Treacher writes:

When a 90-year-old man says there are too many people on the planet, you’re allowed to ask why he’s still sticking around.

* * * * * * * *

I’d ask why CBS News is still giving this crank a platform after he’s been wrong about literally everything for over half a century. I’d wonder why sonorous dimwit Scott Pelley is still spreading Ehrlich’s nonsense. But it’s not as if the field of journalism is capable of disappointing me anymore.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s okay to hate humanity. Some of my best friends are misanthropists. But creeps like Ehrlich try to cloak their malevolence in altruism, and it’s just phony. The climate cultists don’t care about mankind. They see us as vermin and want us out of the way so they can bring about a utopia they can rule. They’re fascists.

Should Pelley offer a second opinion to counterbalance Ehrlich’s eco-doomsaying? Let’s ask him! In January 2007, Pelley “was asked why he refused to include global warming skeptics in his reporting. He responded, ‘If I do an interview with [Holocaust survivor] Elie Wiesel, am I required as a journalist to find a Holocaust denier?’”

HEADLINE OF THE YEAR: New Year’s Eve fireworks cancelled because of masturbating walrus.

Thor the walrus put on an X-rated show of his own — after his arrival put an end to a town’s New Year’s Eve fireworks display.

As huge crowds gathered to see the Arctic mammal lounging at a harbour, council officials axed the light show so he was not disturbed.

But parents had to cover their children’s eyes when the two-ton beast appeared to perform a solo sex act on the slipway on Saturday.

Footage of Thor’s un-family friendly performance in Scarborough, North Yorks, went viral on social media.

One wag joked: “Walrus misunderstood ‘Are you coming to Scarborough fair’?”

Another posted: “David Attenborough missed that in Blue Planet.

Experts reckon Thor is the same walrus spotted on a beach in Calshot, Hampshire, in December and is stopping to rest on a journey back to colder waters.

It seems like a cold shower would do him a lot of good.

Just catching up on the ‘masturbating walrus cancels NYE fireworks’ story. pic.twitter.com/u1LxFWhYcp

— Rita Panahi (@RitaPanahi) January 2, 2023

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: “Wait I don’t think that’s a beach ball!” Is This the Best Car Decal Ever?

JIM GERAGHTY: NFL Shaken by Damar Hamlin Collapse.

A few folks have wondered if, once Hamlin’s condition has stabilized and we know he’ll be okay, the game can be continued or replayed, and if so, how. There is just one more week in the regular season, and both the Bills and Bengals have already qualified for the playoffs. In the early morning hours, the Bills players and staff returned to Buffalo; they’re going to need, at minimum, a couple of days before they can refocus on football. The playoffs are scheduled to start on Saturday, January 14. Right now, it seems likely that 30 of the NFL’s 32 teams will play a 17-game schedule, and the Bills and Bengals will play only 16 games, and that awkward imbalance will have to do. Put an asterisk in the record books, and chalk it up to extraordinary and unavoidable circumstances.

Last night also brought a lot of the idiotic usual suspects out of the woodwork to contend that Hamlin’s collapse had nothing to do with the impact to the chest he had suffered moments earlier and was some sort of delayed — I guess really delayed — serious reaction to the Covid-19 vaccine.

At some point, those who speculate that every health problem of every celebrity or public figure is a reaction to a Covid vaccine whose supposed dangers the whole wide world is covering up will become akin to those who attribute all world events to aliens or lizard people. As the saying goes, you can’t reason a man out of a position he didn’t reason himself into. These people will use words such as “medical evidence,” but they’re clearly not interested in that. They choose to live in an alternate world of dark conspiracies, shadowy secrets, brainwashed “sheeple,” and themselves: the bold, rebellious heroes of their own narrative. It is a faith-based argument meant for a faith-based audience.

Speaking of faith-based, I can’t help but notice that modern America is a secular society, with more than a little sneering and eye-rolling at organized religion.

And then something like this happens, and the word “pray” comes out of so many mouths.

ESPN hosts as they tap danced and improvised before the game was officially cancelled by the ozone layer of NFL management were a grim spectacle. The same leftists who get the vapors over the phrase “thoughts and prayers” after a violent act in America were certainly offering a lot of them last night.

MARK JUDGE: Reediting Babylon and sanctifying Hollywood.

GOODER AND HARDER, AMERICA: These three Biden tax hikes just took effect with the new year.

SOYLENT GREEN WAS NOT A HOW-TO GUIDE: New York makes human composting after death legal.

Perhaps like we all do in January, they simply wrote the wrong year down:

“PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE FLAILING:” Trump unleashes his disdain for pro-life voters.

Donald Trump just made his first significant political error of the 2024 nomination battle, and it’s a doozy.

After being asked about the abortion issue by Semafor reporter Shelby Talcott, Trump took to Truth Social to post the following:

It wasn’t my fault that the Republicans didn’t live up to expectations in the MidTerms. I was 233-20! It was the “abortion issue,” poorly handled by many Republicans, especially those that firmly insisted on No Exceptions, even in the case of Rape, Incest, or Life of the Mother, that lost large numbers of Voters. Also, the people that pushed so hard, for decades, against abortion, got their wish from the US Supreme Court, & just plain disappeared, not to be seen again. Plus, Mitch stupid $’s!

It’s hard to express how many factually false claims Trump makes in this “Truth”.

* * * * * * * *

But if abortion was the determining issue of the cycle, you would expect a slew of pro-life candidates to struggle. Instead, they all won — even in high stakes targeted races. Marco Rubio and Ron DeSantis won easily in Florida, Brian Kemp won in Georgia, Greg Abbott won in Texas, Mike DeWine and J.D. Vance won in Ohio and the long list of Trump-endorsed Senate candidates who won — such as Ted Budd in North Carolina, Eric Schmitt in Missouri, Markwayne Mullin in Oklahoma and Katie Britt in Alabama — were all solidly pro-life. Arguing that abortion politics was more to blame for the one Senate seat that flipped — Pennsylvania’s — than the utter failure of Trump-endorsed gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano to even field a campaign is quite the stretch.

Third, Trump says pro-life voters got what they wanted from the Supreme Court then “just plain disappeared, not to be seen again.” There is literally no evidence for this statement whatsoever. The Republican Party had a massive success in turning out its voters, winning the popular vote nationwide by 51-48 percent. There’s plenty of evidence that Democrats increased the number of young voters, which was the largest in a midterm in thirty years, thanks to the abortion issue. But the increase of the pro-abortion vote doesn’t decrease the other side. Trump’s suggestion that pro-life voters didn’t show up is just a lie.

Ron DeSantis smiles.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: “Professor George has put up one of the greatest tweets ever. Today’s American universities are strongly religious places with many, many rituals.”

s Tom Wolfe wrote in his epochal 1976 article, “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening:” “It is entirely possible that in the long run historians will regard the entire New Left experience as not so much a political as a religious episode wrapped in semi military gear and guerrilla talk.” (That line was written with early ‘70s radical chic in mind, but reverberates quite nicely today, given Antifa’s current love of paramilitary cosplay.)

MEET THE NEW HITLER, SAME AS THE OLD HITLER*: Ben Shapiro greets new Vanity Fair piece on ‘terrifying’ DeSantis presidency with respect it deserves.

* And all the Hitlers that came before him. With the exception of Eisenhower, every Republican presidential candidate, from Thomas Dewey (smeared as a Nazi by no less than Harry Truman) to the present will be attacked by the left in this fashion, no matter his temperament, or his small government, libertarian bona fides. He will then be rehabilitated (except Trump, since he has announced he is running again) by the DNC-MSM as a wise elder statesman, compared with the terrifying GOP demagogue who has or is about throw his hat into the ring.

SPORTS ILLUSTRATED: Bills DB Damar Hamlin: Vitals Normal, But Placed on Breathing Tube in Critical Condition.

Earlier: Bills-Bengals Game Suspended After Player Collapses, Given CPR on Field.

UPDATE: Reactions Stream In After Damar Hamlin Collapses On Field.

QUESTION ASKED: Have Cancer Drugs Warped Putin’s Decision Making?

FLIPPIN ‘ECK: Walrus draws crowds to Scarborough on New Year’s Eve.

A spokesperson for Scarborough borough council said: “We have taken the decision to cancel tonight’s New Year’s Eve fireworks display on the advice of British Divers Marine Life Rescue, because of the arrival of the walrus Thor in the harbour. There are concerns that the display could cause distress to the mammal.”

Council leader Steve Siddons said: “We are really disappointed that we’ve had to cancel the fireworks but the welfare of the walrus has to take precedence.”

It is believed to be the first time a walrus has been spotted in Yorkshire, and a cordon has been put around him to keep excited crowds from getting too close.

Thor is clearly an advanced scout; reinforcements will eventually arrive in greater numbers, much like San Francisco’s sea lions.

I THOUGHT MY 4-YEAR-OLD WAS TRANSGENDER. I WAS WRONG:

Somehow, my partner and I came to clarity that the deeper truth for our son was that he was not actually a transgender girl, but rather a highly sensitive, likely autistic boy who was born into this world without a skin, and for whom the structure of certainty the girl identity provided him was a type of protection, or defense. It also provided him a way of attaching to me through sameness, a primal need for his security in the world. We decided that since we were the ones who led him on this path, we were the ones that needed to lead him off if it.

A year ago, just before our son’s 8th birthday, we did just that. And while the initial change was hard, incredibly hard, the most immediate and tangible emotion we felt from our son was relief. Actual relief. In the days following my first conversation with him about going back to his birth name and pronouns, my conversation about how males cannot be females, and that we were wrong to tell him he could choose to be a girl, he was at first very mad at me, then sad. Then the next day, I felt my son rest. I felt him release a burden, lay this adult burden down, that he, as a child, was never meant to carry. He felt incredible relief. He came to rest.

Since that time, we have been healing. He has been healing. It was not easy, but my son is happy and thriving. We have watched him coming to a deeper peace with himself as a boy, and he is blossoming and growing. For now, he is safe, and as each day passes, he grows into himself more. As for our younger son, he is also happy, thriving and healing. Once his older brother became his older brother again, he happily and almost immediately settled into his identity as a boy — a further validation of our insight into the primal attachment drives that were underneath his pursuit of sameness for so long.

I fear for the future, the future for a sensitive, feminine, socially awkward boy who has spent his early childhood years actually thinking he was a girl. I fear for what our culture, our institutions, his peers, and the internet will tell him. I fear the power of the state, that seems hell bent on destroying the parental child relationship. No matter what the future holds, I will never ever stop fighting to protect my sons.

I am no longer a true believer.

This experience for me has felt like leaving a cult, a cult that would have me sacrifice my child to the gods of gender ideology, in the name of social justice and collective liberation. I have left this cult, and I am never turning back.

That’s because, fortunately, you did leave a cult. We’re going to be seeing lots of articles like this in the coming years.

DISPATCHES FROM THE INTERSECTION OF “OKAY, GROOMERS,” AND UPDATES TO THE NEWSPEAK DICTIONARY: Scotland briefly rebrands pedophiles as “minor-attracted persons.”