May 31, 2025

FLASHBACK: The Return of Patriarchy. “Across the globe, people are choosing to have fewer children or none at all. Governments are desperate to halt the trend, but their influence seems to stop at the bedroom door. Are some societies destined to become extinct? Hardly. It’s more likely that conservatives will inherit the Earth. Like it or not, a growing proportion of the next generation will be born into families who believe that father knows best.”

Related: Harrison Butker, Harbinger?

Posted at 6:51 pm by Glenn Reynolds 10

RIP: Loretta Swit, who played Margaret ‘Hot Lips’ Houlihan on TV’s M*A*S*H, dead at 87.

Swit also praised her “M*A*S*H” character as “unique,” even if “nobody appreciated her” within the show.

“She was unique at the time and in her time, which was the ’50s, when the Korean War was happening,” Swit explained. “And she became even more unique, I think, because we allowed her to continue to grow — we watched her evolve. I don’t think that’s ever been done in quite that way.

“She was the head nurse, and her ambition was to be the best damn nurse in Korea, and I tried to help her achieve that,” she continued. “That woman was so lonely, and she was trying to do such a good job. And nobody appreciated her.”

In Variety, Alan Alda adds, “Loretta was a supremely talented actor. She deserved all her 10 Emmy nominations and her 2 wins. But more than acting her part, she created it. She worked hard In showing the writing staff how they could turn the character from a one joke sexist stereotype into a real person — with real feelings and ambitions. We celebrated the day the script came out listing her character not as Hot Lips, but as Margaret. Loretta made the most of her time here.”

Reviewing her character’s position and evolution on “MASH,” Swit once said, “I mean, certain things had to remain the same. She had to remain one of the antagonists because that was the structure of the show. In the second season, we saw for the first time that she was unhappy with Frank and wanted more from her life. Then around the third or fourth year, in an episode called ‘The Nurses,’ Hot Lips gave the nurses a speech telling them how lonely she was because she was in charge and that’s the way it was, so she couldn’t really have any friends. Her marriage and her divorce changed her. Her affair with Hawkeye in ‘Comrades in Arms’ changed both characters, so that they were never really rivals again.”

In the mid-’70s, M*A*S*H increasingly leaned hard into Alan Alda’s burgeoning real life persona as a feminist icon. Starting late in season six when CBS began using the show as counter-programming opposite ABC’s Monday Night Football, its episodes became much more sentimental than its earlier, funnier, snappier incarnation spearheaded by series creator Larry Gelbart. But we’re unlikely to see such a well-written show today than in the 1970s, when TV still had to appeal to a mass audience, and leftists could still be funny without worrying about the smothering hand of PC.

As Jerry Seinfeld said last year, “‘People always need [comedy] … they need it so badly and they don’t get it,’ Seinfeld began. ‘It used to be you’d go home at the end of the day, ‘oh, ‘Cheers’ is on. Oh, ‘M*A*S*H*’ is on. Oh, ‘Mary Tyler Moore’ is on. ‘All in the Family’ is on.’ You just expected there will be some funny stuff on TV you can watch tonight. ‘But guess what? Where is it? Where is it? This is the result of the extreme Left and PC crap and people worrying so much about offending other people.’”

UPDATE: Speaking of leftist PC crap, the Gray Lady goes into full Margaret Dumont mode in Swift’s obit:

The Times in 2025 looks back at the collective writing, directing and producing efforts of Richard Hooker, Ring Lardner Jr., Robert Altman and Larry Gelbart and concludes:

(Artwork by Jon Gabriel.)
Posted at 5:50 pm by Ed Driscoll 167

CHRISTIAN TOTO: You Won’t Believe Why Patti LuPone is Under Cancel Cuture Fire.

Patti LuPone lacks a filter.

The Broadway legend says what she wants, no matter the subject. The best example?

She famously yelled at a patron during the pandemic for not wearing a mask mid-performance.

She also has said horrible things about Christians and a certain two-term president. More on that in a moment.

All of the above didn’t derail her professional career (nor should it). Now, after a curious series of comments found in a New Yorker profile, she could get booted from the upcoming Tony Awards gala.

The Broadway diva disinvited on her own turf? Inconceivable!

Read the whole thing, which includes LuPone comparing conservative Christians to Islamic terrorists, and calling for “the Kennedy Center to be ‘blown up’ due to its connection to the Trump administration,” both of which “unexpectedly” produced crickets from her fellow leftists.

Posted at 5:30 pm by Ed Driscoll 71

AND YOU THOUGHT SMARTPHONE ADDICTION WAS DANGEROUS: OpenAI wants ChatGPT to be a ‘super assistant’ for every part of your life.

Thanks to the legal discovery process, Google’s antitrust trial with the Department of Justice has provided a fascinating glimpse into the future of ChatGPT.

An internal OpenAI strategy document titled “ChatGPT: H1 2025 Strategy” describes the company’s aspiration to build an “AI super assistant that deeply understands you and is your interface to the internet.” Although the document is heavily redacted in parts, it reveals that OpenAI aims for ChatGPT to soon develop into much more than a chatbot.

“In the first half of next year, we’ll start evolving ChatGPT into a super-assistant: one that knows you, understands what you care about, and helps with any task that a smart, trustworthy, emotionally intelligent person with a computer could do,” reads the document from late 2024. “The timing is right. Models like 02 and 03 are finally smart enough to reliably perform agentic tasks, tools like computer use can boost ChatGPT’s ability to take action, and interaction paradigms like multimodality and generative UI allow both ChatGPT and users to express themselves in the best way for the task.”

The document goes on to describe a “super assistant” as “an intelligent entity with T-shaped skills” for both widely applicable and niche tasks. “The broad part is all about making life easier: answering a question, finding a home, contacting a lawyer, joining a gym, planning vacations, buying gifts, managing calendars, keeping track of todos, sending emails.” It mentions coding as an early example of a more niche task.

Even when reading around the redactions, it’s clear that OpenAI sees hardware as essential to its future, and that it wants people to think of ChatGPT as not just a tool, but a companion. This tracks with Sam Altman recently saying that young people are using ChatGPT like a “ life advisor.”

Related: 2013’s Her: Joaquin Phoenix and Scarlett Johansson Go Twenty Minutes Into the Future of AI.

UPDATE:

It’s real, and spectacularly idiotic; we linked to this insane HuffPost article on July 4th of last year.

Given that Biden was a desiccated husk of a man by 2024, why didn’t his handlers attempt to build a younger, more vigorous version in time for the reelection by cloning his nose?

Posted at 4:44 pm by Ed Driscoll 195

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

Posted at 2:45 pm by Ed Driscoll 71