This is so right on. She's awesome.
After 36 years, Paramount Media Networks President Chris McCarthy announced that the network will be shutting down @MTVNEWS. @KennedyNation reflects on her time with the network and provides insight at to why it is coming to a close. https://t.co/qjGnLKkqDp pic.twitter.com/xpnxuw7vXw
— FOX News Radio (@foxnewsradio) May 11, 2023
Same day as Tucker Carlson, too. Makes for some intrigue.
Lemon's termination is hardly surprising. The fucker's both arrogant and stupid. It cost him.
Tucker? That's another story. That one hits me out of left field, though I can understand Rupert Murdoch's position. He's still on the hook for the Smartmatic lawsuit, which is supposed to be more blockbuster than Dominion's.
At the Wall Street Journal, "Don Lemon Is Out at CNN."
Blockbuster! Absolutely blockbuster!
I was teaching when I happened to see that Carlson was fired --- and I stopped for a minute to mention to my class how big a piece of news this is. I'm just now back home and able to surf around for some news.
He's out not just because of Dominion, apparently. According to the Los Angeles Times, "Carlson’s exit is related to the discrimination lawsuit filed by Abby Grossberg, the producer fired by the network last month, the sources said."
And at CBS News:
A big piece on Murdoch's Fox News problems.
At the New York Times Magazine, "How Fox Chased Its Audience Down the Rabbit Hole: Rupert Murdoch built an empire by giving viewers exactly what they wanted. But what they wanted — election lies and insurrection — put that empire (and the country) in peril."
Also, "The FBI Paid Twitter Three and a Half Million Dollars to 'Help' It Censor 'Misinformation'."
And from yesterday, "Twitter Files Part 7: The Guns Begin to Smoke."
See also, Michael Shellenberger, from yesterday:
We expect the FBI, our highest law enforcement organization, to be above politics. The Twitter Files show that it isn't.
— Michael Shellenberger (@ShellenbergerMD) December 20, 2022
We need a serious congressional investigation and perhaps a special counsel to get to the bottom of its apparent corruption. https://t.co/AtU08zfsYS
Lorenz is headlining on Memeorandum.
She long ago blocked me, but it's not hard to find out what evils she's up to on the platform.
Elon's suspended her. Haven't heard yet if it's a permanent ban, but if anyone deserves it, it's Lorenz.
Too bad, though, because apparently she's been reinstated.
Her message to followers before the reinstatement, full of self-aggrandizement and unearned self-importance. Gawd:
Presstitutes https://t.co/mtFqUEuUX6
— 🍁 Bean 🍁 (@BeanFromPA) December 18, 2022
At Amazon, Chris Stirewalt, Broken News: Why the Media Rage Machine Divides America and How to Fight Back.
From Michael Anton, at the Compact:
The people who really run the United States of America have made it clear that they can’t, and won’t, if they can help it, allow Donald Trump to be president again. In fact, they made this clear in 2020, in a series of public statements. Simply for quoting their words in an essay for The American Mind, I was mercilessly mocked and attacked. But they were quite clear. Trump won’t be president at noon, Jan. 20, 2021, even if we have to use the military to drag him out of there. If the regime felt that strongly back then, imagine how they feel now. But you don’t have to imagine. They tell you every day. Liz Cheney, Trump’s personal Javert, has said that the 45th president is literally the greatest threat facing America today—greater than China, than our crashing economy, than our unraveling civil society. That’s rhetoric, of course, but it isn’t merely that. It’s safer, and generally more accurate, to assume that your adversaries mean what they say. If you doubt this, ask yourself: When was the last time they acted more moderately than they talk? Even if it is just rhetoric, the words nonetheless portend turbulence. “He who says A must say B.” The logic of statement A inevitably leads to action B, even if the speaker of A didn’t really mean it, or did mean it, but still didn’t want B. Her followers won’t get the irony and, enthused by A, will insist on B. Take some time to listen to the mainstream media. It doesn’t have to be long; five minutes should do. Then spend another five or so reading the statements of prominent politicians other than Trump. To round it out, sacrifice another five on leading intellectuals. It should become abundantly clear: They all have said A and so must say—and do—B. Take some time to listen to the mainstream media. It doesn’t have to be long; five minutes should do. Then spend another five or so reading the statements of prominent politicians other than Trump. To round it out, sacrifice another five on leading intellectuals. It should become abundantly clear: They all have said A and so must say—and do—B. And B is that Trump absolutely must not be allowed to take office on Jan. 20, 2025. Why? They say Jan. 6. But their determination began much earlier. And just what is so terrible about Trump anyway? I get many of his critics’ points, I really do. I hear them all the time from my mother. But even if we were to stipulate them all, do Trump’s faults really warrant tearing the country apart by shutting out half of it from the political process? Love him or hate him, during Trump’s presidency, the economy was strong, markets were up, inflation was under control, gas prices were low, illegal border crossings were down, crime was lower, trade deals were renegotiated, ISIS was defeated, NATO allies were stepping up, and China was stepping back (a little). Deny all that if you want to. The point here is that something like 100 million Americans believe it, strongly, and are bewildered and angered by elite hatred for the man they think delivered it. Nor was Trump’s record all that radical—much less so than that of Joe Biden, who is using school-lunch funding to push gender ideology on poor kids, to cite but one example. Trump’s core agenda—border protection, trade balance, foreign restraint—was quite moderate, both intrinsically and in comparison to past Republican and Democratic precedent. And that’s before we even get to the fact that Trump neglected much of his own agenda in favor of the old Chamber of Commerce, fusionist, Reaganite, Conservatism, Inc., agenda. Corporate tax cuts, deregulation, and bombing Syria: These are all things Trump’s base doesn’t want, but the oligarchs desperately do, which Trump gave them. And still they try to destroy him.... Anti-Trump hysteria is in the final analysis not about Trump. The regime can’t allow Trump to be president not because of who he is (although that grates), but because of who his followers are. That class—Angelo Codevilla’s “country class”—must not be allowed representation by candidates who might implement their preferences, which also, and above all, must not be allowed. The rubes have no legitimate standing to affect the outcome of any political process, because of who they are, but mostly because of what they want. Complaints about the nature of Trump are just proxies for objections to the nature of his base. It doesn’t help stabilize our already twitchy situation that those who bleat the loudest about democracy are also audibly and visibly determined to deny a real choice to half the country. “No matter how you vote, you will not get X”—whether X is a candidate or a policy—is guaranteed to increase discontent with the present regime. People I have known for 30 years, many of whom still claim the label “conservative,” will no longer speak to me—because I supported Trump, yes, but also because I disagree on trade, war, and the border. They call not just my positions, but me personally, unadulterated evil. I am not an isolated case. There are, as they say, “many such cases.” How are we supposed to have “democracy” when the policies and candidates my side wants and votes for are anathema and can’t be allowed? How are we supposed to live together with the constant demonization from one side against the other blaring 24/7 from the ruling class’s every propaganda organ? Why would we want to?
From Kat Rosenfield, at UnHerd, "Should everyone be beautiful?":
The late Rush Limbaugh once said that feminism was created to “allow ugly women access to society” — a comment all the crueller because it was true. A central tenet of feminism is that a woman’s social value should be predicated on her humanity, not her beauty. The only legitimate response to being called ugly, then, is surely a shrug: yes, and? So what? But Limbaugh’s comments were met with outrage, for the most obvious, human reason: even feminists want to be beautiful. These competing forces — a resentment of punishing beauty standards on one hand, and on the other the yearning to be beautiful oneself, with all the privileges that entails — have long been a source of tension, one that the movement keeps trying to resolve by treating beauty not as an objective quality, but a resource to which all women are entitled. Hence the endless campaigns telling women that they’re beautiful no matter what they look like, that they deserve to feel beautiful, that beauty is something every woman possesses in her own way. The latest iteration of this phenomenon is a howler of a trend piece, which was published at the weekend by the New York Times — and subsequently went off-the-charts viral. “A social media movement inspired by the rapper Megan Thee Stallion strikes back at the gatekeepers of beauty,” announces the subhead. This movement sees being “hot” not as the condition of being physically attractive or sexually desirable, but as a state of mind, a vibe. Gone are the days when being hot required that another person bestow the label upon you. If you identify as hot, then you are. The NYT piece goes on to enumerate all the ways in which young women “are expanding the definition of hotness, taking it beyond its former association with old notions of attractiveness”. You can be hot by doing things like eating spaghetti, cleaning grout, graduating from law school, and taking walks. In fact, the hotness of a given endeavour seems defined less by the activity itself than by the fact that the woman doing it is a) conventionally attractive, and b) under the age of 30. (Meet the new hotness, same as the old one.) There is nothing original here. It is a truth universally acknowledged that young people like to mess around with language, walling themselves off with vernacular from the generations that came before them. Before the vibe shift there were trends, or the zeitgeist; before the hot girl there was the cool girl; the feminists of the Seventies trashed their sisters while their granddaughters cancel each other. But the idea that hotness could have nothing whatsoever to do with beauty, or the male gaze, or even the most nebulous idea of being hot to another person… well, this is also not new. We — that is, women — have tried this before. It’s 1945 in the fictional village of Bedford Falls, New York: a young woman named Violet Beck responds to a compliment on her dress with a scoff, “What? This old thing?” It’s 2017: Karlie Kloss is just having a casual cup of tea in her bathrobe, not trying to look nice or anything. It’s 2022: a TikTok influencer named Mia Lind is taking a “hot girl walk”, the tenets of which are self-affirmation, self-reflection, and goal-oriented thinking. (“You may not”, Lind says, “think of boys or boy drama”, a great new riff on that old gag where you tell someone not to think of an elephant. Of course I’m thinking about boy drama now.) The hot girl walk is a four-mile exercise in cultivating confidence. It has nothing to do with looking good, as you can tell by the photos Lind posts of herself on her walks, in which she looks absolutely hideous. Here, oddly enough, both contemporary feminism and the patriarchy seem to be in agreement: the opposite of “hot” is trying too hard. A truly beautiful woman is not like other girls. She’s effortless, unassuming, even unaware of how alluring she is — because she’s either too modest to acknowledge it, or too liberated to care...
I watched about an hour of Depp's testimony a couple of weeks ago, and he looked pained, an abused and harried man with a dangerous, unstable wife.
There's been a lot of piling on, especially on Ms. Amber, who was probably abused herself. It's a matter degrees. She actually won her case two, but was award $2 million to Depp's $15 million.
I find it actually sad, a horrible statement not just on the couple, but on society.
At WSJ, "Jury Rules in Favor of Johnny Depp in Defamation Lawsuit Against Amber Heard":
Jury awards Mr. Depp $15 million in damages; Ms. Heard receives $2 million in damages. A Virginia jury ruled in favor of actor Johnny Depp in his case against Amber Heard, closing a widely watched and emotional trial centered on defamation and abuse accusations between the former couple. The seven-member jury found Mr. Depp proved all three counts of defamation against his former spouse in an op-ed she wrote for the Washington Post in 2018, awarding him $15 million. The jury also found Ms. Heard was able to prove one of three counts of defamation against Mr. Depp, based on statements made by one of his attorneys. The jury awarded her $2 million in compensatory damages. The trial, which started in April, drew massive attention on social media, where viewers attempted to analyze details of the proceedings. Fans of Mr. Depp gathered outside of the court Wednesday cheered in response to each of the verdicts coming down, according to a live stream of the scene. The case began in 2019 when Mr. Depp filed a $50 million defamation suit against Ms. Heard over the 2018 op-ed she wrote. In the piece, Ms. Heard referred to herself as “a public figure representing domestic abuse.” Mr. Depp alleged that, while Ms. Heard’s op-ed didn’t specifically mention him by name, the actress falsely implied he was a domestic abuser and wrote the piece “with actual malice.” He claimed the accusations of abuse damaged his reputation and career. The lawsuit also alleges Ms. Heard abused Mr. Depp. Ms. Heard has denied his abuse accusations and accused Mr. Depp of defamation for claiming she fabricated injuries related to alleged abuse. Ms. Heard countersued Mr. Depp for $100 million for defamation in August 2020. She has said the op-ed is accurate and that the actor emotionally and physically abused her throughout their relationship and marriage, often when he was drunk or high. The counterclaim also accused Mr. Depp of orchestrating efforts to destroy her career. Mr. Depp has denied accusations of abuse, her claims that he made defamatory statements and sought to “destroy her career.” Mr. Depp didn’t appear in court for the verdict due to “previously scheduled work commitments made before the trial” and would watch from the U.K., a person familiar with the matter said before the verdict was read. Videos posted on social media over the weekend showed the actor performing alongside singer Jeff Beck at a concert in England. Ms. Heard sat between her lawyers in the courtroom as the verdict was read Wednesday. Judge Penney Azcarate ordered the names of the jurors to be sealed for one year after the trial, according to court documents. Mr. Depp previously lost a libel case in the U.K. in 2020 against a British tabloid that referred to him as a “wife beater” over his alleged treatment of Ms. Heard...
