April 28, 2025

THIS WAS CNN:

CNN is drawing about the same number of primetime viewers as Real Housewives of Atlanta.

I’ll let readers decide which one is less fake.

Posted at 1:44 pm by Stephen Green 19

PAPER BALLOTS, EH?

Flashback: Paper ballots are hack-proof. It’s time to bring them back.

—Glenn in USA Today, June 30th, 2017.

And: Paper Ballots.

—Glenn at Tech Central Station, November 5th, 2002.

(I hope I was correcting a typo and not stepping on a joke. — Charlie)

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll 73

THE COUNTERREVOLUTION HAS BEGUN: Tranny Bathrooms And The Counterrevolution. “In Houston in 2014, openly gay mayor Annise Parker pushed the city into passing an ordinance that (in addition to many other gay agenda items like protecting “gender identity”) legalized men in women’s bathrooms. The backlash was immediate and severe, with ordinary Houstonians quickly putting together a ballot initiative push to undo the ordinance. Parker was so incensed that she actually subpoenaed the sermons of church pastors that might have opposed tranny bathrooms, because what’s trivia like the First Amendment when in stands in the way of the greater glory of social justice? When actual voters had their say, tranny bathrooms went down in flames.”

Posted at 12:42 pm by Stephen Green 67

STRIKE A POSE, THERE’S NOTHING TO IT: 60 Minutes Host Scott Pelley Calls Out Paramount In ‘Shocking’ On-Air Attack On CBS’ Parent Company.

“Bill [Owens] resigned Tuesday — it was hard on him and hard on us,” Pelley said in his closing remarks on the show he has worked on for more than 20 years.

“But he did it for us — and you,” he told viewers — then unexpectedly suggested that Owens’ exit could end the era of coverage being “accurate and fair.”

“Our parent company, Paramount, is trying to complete a merger,” he said, noting that it needs approval from the Trump administration.

“Paramount began to supervise our content in new ways,” he said.

Pelley said that while “none of our stories have been blocked,” Owens “felt he lost the independence that honest journalism requires.”

Please let me know when CBS’ era of “independent journalism” begins; for the last 60 years, its “reporting” has moved entirely in lockstep with the DNC.

Related: CBS 60 Minutes host Scott Pelley blasted for biting the $5million hand that feeds him in bold on-air outburst.

‘When you work for wages, you ride for the brand. Don’t like what you’re doing, quit. Scott Pelley bit the hand that feeds him and should be frog marched from the studio,’ one person said.

‘This show has been nothing but fraudulent the past eight plus years. This editorial by Scott Pelley jumps the shark,’ said another.

‘Find someone who loves you the way Scott Pelley loves himself,’ a third person said.

‘If Pelley believed a word of this then he should resign. He won’t though because it’s all nonsense. He knows it and we know it,’ added a fourth.

Others called out Pelley for failing to address the other recent scandals 60 Minutes and CBS have been involved in.

You’re gonna need a much bigger blog: CBS’s Scott Pelley Loses a Fight Rigged in his Favor.

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll 74

SHEDEUR SANDERS, ICARUS DESCENDING:

Oh, the promotion. The hype. Shedeur Sanders walked into the NFL Draft a legend in his own mind — literally. He built the hype, using daddy’s money to set up a bespoke “draft room,” decked out in anticipatory bling-filled celebration of his inevitable first-round pick. (The shelf of teams hats, from which he was going to pick one for the cameras, was a nice touch.) “LEGENDARY” and “PERFECT TIMING” went the slogans written on the wall behind the couch where he was to sit. He appeared conspicuously in public to be photographed wearing an enormous silver chain necklace emblazoned “$$2,” his brand nickname. (The dollar signs look like the letter “s,” get it?)

And then he went undrafted in the first round. And then he went undrafted in the second round. And then he went undrafted in the third round — by which point the first night’s events had concluded and the world was agog. The next day Sanders again went undrafted in the fourth round, which is when social media began pulling out its most brutal jokes.

Finally, the drama reached its gloriously disgraceful denouement in the fifth round: Shedeur Sanders was drafted as the 144th pick by the Cleveland Browns. For those unfamiliar with the reputation of the Browns franchise, this is as if God decided Dante hadn’t added enough circles of hell to the Inferno; Cleveland is a notorious graveyard for football talent, and particularly for quarterbacks, who tend to resemble torn, leaky sacks of flour after a year behind the Browns O-line. (The list of “Famous Cleveland Quarterbacks” makes for even shorter airplane reading than the “Famous Jewish Sports Legends” leaflet.)

Deion Sanders himself once opined, back in 2018, that anyone selected in the draft by the Browns ought to refuse to play. So let’s see what his son does here! Needless to say, the world has sent both Shedeur Sanders and his father a message: Shedeur’s talent — as groomed and shielded and questionably represented by his father — is nowhere near good enough to sustain either his or his father’s ego. Deion Sanders himself was truly a special talent in the game (I had many explain this to me over the weekend), and the only thing that truly ever held him back was an equivalent level of self-regard. Shedeur — as his father’s son — shares an apparently similar level of self-regard. (He refused to attend the NFL combine and apparently flunked every interview with various franchise officials.) He does not share his father’s talent level. NFL teams will tolerate Deion levels of self-promotion and hype only from those with Deion-level talent — and not a second longer once they begin to slip. Shedeur never had a chance.

Related: Shedeur Sanders Finally Gets Drafted, and Then His Dad’s Old Tweets Surfaced.

“Look, I’m not here to endlessly dunk on the guy, but there’s a lesson here. NFL teams are professional organizations. They don’t care what ESPN says or how much Stephen A. Smith rants and raves. Shedeur Sanders thought he was bigger than the process, and he paid the price. Perhaps this will humble him and help him have a good career. We’ll see.” Shedeur Sanders infamously said, “Don’t get me if you ain’t trying to change the franchise or the coach.” Well, here’s your chance to both prove dad wrong and singlehandedly jumpstart the most moribund franchise in the NFL.

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll 170

CDR SALAMANDER: If You Think Greenland is Strategic, Look West.

Different but related:

Posted at 11:59 am by Glenn Reynolds 19

I REALLY HAVE NOTHING TO ADD:

Posted at 11:28 am by Stephen Green 224

ANSWERS TO THE MOST IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: The Meaning of Ralph Lauren Nationalism.

When Lauren developed his own retail palaces in the 1980s, he chose properties like the former Rhinelander mansion of the Upper East Side of Manhattan that applied the same principle on a grander scale. Lauren’s restaurants, including the Polo Bar in Midtown Manhattan, are popular partly because they create a tiny stage on which his style of dressing looks appropriate, rather than for any merits of the cuisine. It’s said that Lauren even provides a location-appropriate wardrobe for visitors to his residences around the world. Nothing could be farther from, say, John Fetterman’s insistence on dressing for the Senate floor as if he were joining a pickup basketball game.

Lauren is fond of insisting that he’s not interested in trends. Actually, the details of his products are less consistent than this claim suggests. Lauren got his start as an independent operator selling napkin-width neckties that were a striking contrast to the slim lines of the Mad Men era. As admiring observers recognized, it was brilliant marketing strategy that allowed Lauren to build up a full product line. Once you bought a fat tie, you needed a new shirt with a taller and wider collar. A shirt like that wouldn’t look right under the tubular “sack” coat then favored by American men. So you also had to buy a new suit featuring broader shoulders, wider lapels, and more shape around the waist. Lauren launched his career, in short, as a vendor of the kind of 1970s gear that is still the butt of jokes. An unintentional revelation of Ralph Lauren: In His Own Fashion, a 2019 coffee table book by the clothier Alan Flusser, is just how trendy some of this stuff was.

The days of lapels that touched the shoulders passed, and Lauren had worked the exaggeration out of his look by the 1990s. Although it receives less attention in authorized chronicles of the Ralph empire, this was also the period when Polo was adopted as the aspirational brand of hiphop, then emerging as the world’s dominant popular music.

Lauren jettisoned his fat tie phase by the end of the 1970s. In 1991, Tom Wolfe discussed why this was a trend that didn’t really catch on in the boardroom in an interview with his longtime editor, Clay Felker, for M Inc. in their January 1991 issue: 

TW: I ran into Richard Press—this must have been about 1970, I guess. He was telling me how finally at his stores, J. Press—against all of his better instincts—he started stocking these big lapels and all the rest of it. He said they just died there on the rack, and he said finally it dawned on him that “the reason we can’t sell these things is that executives in New York were tired of looking like their messengers.” That’s the real problem with these innovations. You’re going to be picked up by messengers and other groovy-looking people. You’re not going to have that status demarcation between upper and lower.

* * * * * * * * *

CF: As you look at what people are wearing now, do you see anything interesting or do you have any comments about international style?

TW: You see American casual clothes everywhere. Just the triumph of jeans alone, it’s another example of something else we were talking about—what a tremendous victory the United States has won, not just in the political area with the collapse of Communism, but in the cultural area. The Berlin Wall came down and all these pictures on television of young Germans climbing the wall, they looked like Akron. Everybody’s got on these sneakers and their jeans and the wind-breakers-the American windbreakers-and all the rest of it. Ben Wattenberg makes a point which is rather nice, I think, that we’re always wringing our hands because we’re driving Japanese cars and all our young people think that Toyota is the basic American car and we use Japanese computers to transmit all our most vital information. We watch television on Japanese sets, we run with Japanese Walkmans planted to our skulls, we watch movies on Japanese VCRs-as does the rest of the world. He says, what movies are they watching? He says, how many Japanese movies does anybody around the world watch on these things? They’re all watching American movies. On the Walkman, they’re all listening to American music. He says if you have to choose, if you can only choose one, if you can only dominate either the hardware or the software, he says for God’s sake dominate the software. This, I think, is true in casual clothes. That’s the American triumph, but it’s still the English that won the battle of formal clothes.

It was Lauren who created a more stylized version of what could be found at Brooks Brothers and brought it to the masses. But eventually, as Samuel Goldman writes at Compact, Lauren’s company eventually went back to the future:

After its Ron Burgundy phase, Polo settled on a relaxed, grownup silhouette that acquired shape from the drape of the cloth rather than the wearer’s physique.

Popular in the ’80s and ’90s, this cut was an outlier to the preference for very slim proportions that took over around the turn of the 21st century. Without abandoning the old inspirations for fabric or color, Ralph Lauren products shrank until they could be worn successfully only by teenage ectomorphs. The constrictive results made an unfortunate contrast to those classic advertising campaigns orchestrated by the photographer Bruce Weber. The key to the success of Weber’s images wasn’t so much the beauty of the models, although that was considerable. It was that they looked so relaxed in the soft textures and accommodating proportions.  

Plus ça change.

Posted at 10:45 am by Ed Driscoll 78

COLONIALISM, STRAIGHT UP: Muslim Migrants Set Church in Wales Ablaze.

A church in Wales was set on fire by two Muslim migrants. Bethany English Calvinistic Methodist Chapel in Wales has stood since the 19th century. Over 1000 churches have been burned or vandalized in Europe.

Christianity under attack in the UK.

British churches are vandalised an average of eight times a day, according to new data by the Countryside Alliance.

A freedom of information request reveals there were 9,148 records of theft, burglary, criminal damage, vandalism and assault between January 2022 and December 2024.

Over three years, there were 3,237 cases of criminal damage to churches – including arson.

They aren’t “migrants.” They’re invaders.

Posted at 10:38 am by Stephen Green 104

IT’S (D)IFFERENT NOW BECAUSE SHUT UP:

Posted at 10:35 am by Stephen Green 108