James Joyner is a Professor of Security Studies. He's a former Army officer and Desert Storm veteran. Views expressed here are his own. Follow James on Twitter @DrJJoyner.
Pope Leo XIV responded to controversy over the Chicago cardinal’s plans to honor a Catholic U.S. senator who supports legalized abortion, saying that the senator’s record should be considered in its totality and that Americans should search together for the truth on ethical issues.
Several U.S. bishops condemned Chicago Cardinal Blase Cupich’s plans to honor U.S. Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Illinois, with a “lifetime achievement award” for his work surrounding immigration policy despite his pro-abortion voting record.
“I am not terribly familiar with the particular case. I think it’s important to look at the overall work that a senator has done during, if I’m not mistaken, in 40 years of service in the United States Senate,” the pope told reporters on Tuesday in response to a question from EWTN News.
“Someone who says I’m against abortion but is in favor of the death penalty is not really pro-life,” the pope explained. “Someone who says I’m against abortion but I’m in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States, I don’t know if that’s pro life.”
Champion of democracy Republican Speaker of the House
Mike (Jesus Loves Me) Johnson stalls swearing-in of Arizona Rep. Adelita Grijalva.
Newly elected Arizona Rep. Adelita Grijalva’s swearing-in is being delayed by House Speaker Mike Johnson, a move Democrats suspect is an effort to block a vote on releasing the Epstein files.
Grijalva would be the 218th and final signature needed on a petition to force the vote, and Democrats are pointing to Johnson’s previous actions of quickly swearing in other new members as evidence of a double standard.
This morning, Hollywood’s most legendary actress, producer and activist, the Oscar-winning Jane Fonda, announced the re-launch of The Committee for the First Amendment, a group once led by her father, Henry Fonda, among other A-list Golden Age stars, including Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. The Committee’s reformation was announced with the release of a statement signed by over 550 artists and members of the Hollywood community, a star-studded array of talent and power players — and me. [Richard Rushfield]
The Committee for the First Amendment was first formed in the 1940s to fight against the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), a Congressional committee that targeted protest and questioned the loyalties of American citizens. HUAC infamously put on trial and sentenced to prison the Hollywood Ten, directors, producers and screenwriters accused of being Communists. The fervor would soon spiral into McCarthyism, named for Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who led a Black List that raged through the entertainment industry, destroying countless careers and lives in the process.
1) The Hollywood black list was was created under government pressure, but enthusiastically enforced by Hollywood executives.
2) Hollywood could not have issued this before the 2d Trump regime because progressives would have howled.
I have been fighting Left-wing ‘censorship’ for more than a decade, and yes, I understand that censorship is a term which in law refers only to government action. But in the age of social media, censorship has been privatized, and there’s very little difference for a director or a poet or a comedian whose career has been destroyed, and don’t bother telling me it didn’t happen, I was an eyewitness.
I know two writers personally who were put out of business for years. One’s offense was that he told an off-color joke to a group of grown-ups, and a self-aware mention of watermelon in a speech praising a Black writer, a personal friend of his.
The other is one of the most sincere, devoted guys I know, who was run out of town for admitting that he wrote more male than female characters because he felt he understood boys better. Seriously, that was it.
But both men are men, and both had been very successful, so why not stick a shiv in their backs? In crude dollar terms, each man lost well over a million dollars. And so did I, for the thought-crime of defending them and again and again going back to the Hollywood black list about which they knew little and cared not at all.
Maybe this will be one good thing that comes from Trump: liberals/progressives remembering our own fucking core beliefs. Free expression is an inalienable right – no matter your politics. I know that because that’s the slogan on Jane Fonda’s poster.
I praised Disney for (eventually) standing up to Trump in the Kimmel case, and some here dumped all over me for that. But we, the Left, trained Hollywood to roll over for anti free speech attacks. Is it much worse now? No question. Much worse. But much worse in the sense that lung cancer is much worse than a three pack a day habit. Worse, but definitely connected.
A rare example of my oppositional defiance disorder being on-point, because my reaction to being told what I can and cannot say or write has always been, go fuck yourself.
Free expression is an inalienable right – no matter your politics
And to the men who want to deny me my free speech right to use terms like “toxic masculinity” and “microagresions” and to call for racists and homophobes to face civic consequences I say the same thing — go jump in a lake.
Citizen-organized boycotts and piles on are freedom of expression. And not equivalent to government attacks on the 1st Amendment, no matter how much crybaby men who wrongly think they’re entitled to audiences — and who love to scapegoat their stalling careers on imaginary victimhood rather than adjust their craft — love to claim otherwise. Cher, Madonna, and Mariah have survived controversy and lasted because they reinvented themselves as the culture changed. Do outdated male creatives think they are too good to do the same?
Private citizens have an inalienable right to assert their values in the marketplace of ideas by calling out those whose ideas they find objectionable — and over time that marketplace will decide who is to be vindicated and who went too far. Those who say otherwise are the ones trying to suppress speech.
@DK:
You’re simply wrong. Social media pile-ons are a new phenomenon and require assessment as new phenomena, particularly in view of the fact that a huge percentage of such pile-ons are in fact carried out by bots. And many of those bots are foreign governments. So, it’s not legitimate criticisms of a piece of art, it’s organized gang attacks enhanced by governments and competing corporations.
I’m going to crib from Bret Stephens:
Because there’s a silver lining for most things in life, maybe there’s also one for ABC’s craven (if brief) suspension, under thuggish government pressure, of Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night talk show. To wit: Now the left is once again all but unanimous in wanting to defend free speech.
That hasn’t always been the case in recent years.
It wasn’t the case when, a day before Kimmel’s suspension, Amy Klobuchar called on Congress to prevent violence like Charlie Kirk’s murder by cracking down on speech online. “I’m not for censorship, but I do think that more has to be done online,” said the Democratic senator from Minnesota. Sentences that begin “I’m not for censorship, but …” are usually calls for censorship.
It wasn’t the case this spring when Democrats in the Colorado legislature sought to criminalize some speech that “misgendered” or “deadnamed” transgender children, including custody threats to parents who refused to use their child’s preferred pronouns.
It wasn’t the case in 2023 when a RealClear Opinion Research poll found that three-fourths of Democrats believe government has a responsibility to limit “hateful” or inaccurate social media posts, as compared with roughly half of Republicans.
It wasn’t the case when, in the summer of 2021, MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski asked, with clear relish, whether social media companies shouldn’t be “open to lawsuits” for publishing what she and the government deemed to be “misinformation” on the Covid vaccines.
I’ll spare you additional cited examples. Here’s the conclusion:
Some readers might argue that the effort to cancel Kimmel is unique — and uniquely dangerous — because it was pushed by Brendan Carr, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. That’s true, but then why the comparative liberal silence about the Biden administration’s efforts to police speech on social media? Others might argue that Covid misinformation or hate speech should be subject to different rules from mundane political speech. More than a century of First Amendment jurisprudence, from liberal and conservative justices alike, says otherwise.
And then there are those who point to the hypocrisy of conservatives, Carr not least, who rail against censorship and cancellation when it comes from the left and then enforce their own cancel (or consequence) culture the moment they’re in power. A very fair point — and all the more reason for liberals to stick by liberal principles when it comes to their own side’s self-appointed censors.
Things are different now. We are not talking about people choosing not to watch a show or read a book, or writing a bad online review, we are talking about attacks from governments other than our own, jealous competitors, concealed actions by malicious owners of platforms (Hi, Elon!), business competitors and random nihilists who are happy to add fuel to any convenient fire. And unlike, say, criticizing a piece of art, the goal now is to destroy the creator of that art. It’s no longer, ‘Your TV series sucks,’ it’s, ‘you must never be allowed to create another series, and anyone who disagrees must be destroyed.’
You are not inside this issue so you have no clue as to how destructive these attacks have been, how thoroughly intimidated the creative community was, how baffled and frightened the gate keepers were. See, I know the people, I know the frightened publishers and producers who can’t guess what asinine outrage will be manufactured next. The Left has played an outsized role in restricting artistic expression, and that’s not supposed to be our thing, that’s supposed to be their thing.
And BTW, aside from causing Hollywood and New York to quiver in fear and pump out anodyne crap, did it work? Did it? Have we accomplished a single goddamned thing with our endless outrage? No, clearly not, because the entire enterprise has been rolled back about 20 years. And now, creatives are left to try and find an impossible-to-predict, impossible-to-define path between Leftie outrage and MAGA outrage, and that narrow path is death to creativity. There are ways I could use my platform to go after MAGA that I simply cannot do, not for fear of them, but for fear of us.
Had we stuck to our professed belief in free speech we would have pushed back on the Left’s assault on free speech. And almost no one did. And we would be more effective in pushing back against MAGA.
ETA: Love you too, you’re an excellent debater. Sometimes wrong, but never stupid.
Gary Larson cartoon incident
One of Gary Larson’s Far Side cartoons shows two chimpanzees grooming. One finds a blonde human hair on the other and inquires, “Conducting a little more ‘research’ with that Jane Goodall tramp?” Goodall herself was in Africa at the time. The Jane Goodall Institute thought the cartoon was in bad taste and had its lawyers draft a letter to Larson and his distribution syndicate in which they described the cartoon as an “atrocity”. They were stymied by Goodall herself: when she returned and saw the cartoon, she stated that she found the cartoon amusing.
Since then, all profits from sales of a shirt featuring this cartoon have gone to the Jane Goodall Institute. Goodall wrote a preface to The Far Side Gallery 5, detailing her version of the controversy, and the institute’s letter was included next to the cartoon in the complete Far Side collection. She praised Larson’s creative ideas, which often compare and contrast the behaviour of humans and animals. In 1988, when Larson visited Goodall’s research facility in Tanzania, he was attacked by a chimpanzee named Frodo.
WikiP
“It’s the idea that the illiberalism that has swallowed the progressive left — what we often refer to as wokeness — has come for the right,” The Free Press’s Bari Weiss explained in the introduction to a podcast on the subject. And while conservatives are split over whether this is a positive development or a negative one, they all seem to agree on one point: The right learned its vengeance politics from the left. “Turnabout is fair play,” the conservative activist Christopher Rufo posted on X. Right-wing cancel culture was simply “an effective, strategic tit-for-tat.”
That argument rests on a flawed premise: that the right had been devoted to open debate and restrained government power, only reluctantly abandoning these principles to counter left-wing illiberalism. But the right did not learn cancel culture from the left; the modern right in America emerged as a censorious movement. It took decades for its free-speech faction to develop, and even then, it has only ever been a minority part of the coalition.
…
And that is something both liberals and conservatives must reckon with in the months and years ahead. So much of the hand-wringing over cancel culture in recent years has assumed that the right is naturally disposed to protect open debate and a live-and-let-live culture, and that progressives were the real problem. And yes, there has been extensive debate among progressives about the limits of free speech, as well as the proper way to respond to disinformation and waves of racist invective on social media.
But long before concerns surfaced about the “woke right,” long before the campaigns to cancel Mr. Kirk’s critics, it was clear that the right’s vision of power involved sharp limits on its opponents and on their free expression. That vision relied not on debates, but on the muscular use of government power and social pressure to enforce the right’s values — and its hierarchies.
Shunning and shaming, and even cancelling, have always been employed to suppress disfavored opinion. The only thing that’s changed is that now conservatives sometimes find themselves disfavored.
Provisions in the Bill of Rights are not unlimited. The challenge is when/where/how limits are applied–typically the task of the Supreme Court.
For example, this:
It wasn’t the case when, in the summer of 2021, MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski asked, with clear relish, whether social media companies shouldn’t be “open to lawsuits” for publishing what she and the government deemed to be “misinformation” on the Covid vaccines.
What the “misinformation” is matters a lot here. If it’s “the covid vaccine causes more deaths than covid,” that’s blatantly false, and should definitely open those peddling this type of nonsense up to lawsuits. (Not, one would think, the social platforms as they are still protected by Section 230.)
The question would then become if the vaccine manufacturers would consider it a good use of their time to go after these people for defamation. Other limits on free speech include classified information, and things bound by privacy laws (HIPPA).
We have freedom of religion, but cannot claim human sacrifice is part of our religion to justify a murder. We have gun rights, but are limited in the types of weapons we’re allowed to own. Etc.
Hit up my local VA drive through vaccination clinic for flu and Covid on my way home from work. Except no Covid vaccine available this year. I was told they wouldn’t have the vaccine available until January and that it would only be for people over 65.* So my question is, why is Trump allowing RFKJ to put hundreds of thousands of veterans at risk of Covid?
* I parked in the lot after my flu shot, got on the CVS website and was able to book an appointment and stop for a Covid vaccination on my way home
On the aviation front, there’s some buzz that Boeing has begun development of a clean slate replacement for the 737 MAX.
This is causing controversy among aviation bloggers on whether it’s premature: Really. Premature to stop further contorting a design from the mid 1960s. This is something they should have begun to do in the late 90s, as the NG iteration of the 737 was coming online.
Not letting Airbus off the hook. While their mainline jet design, the A320, is “only” 40 some years old, they should be designing the replacement now. There are conflicting reports of a stretched A220-500, which would totally replace the A320neo, and, in some configurations, a few A321 neos as well.
The reason is rather simple. As commercial jets get more complex and the knowledge on making and operating them safely grows with every incident (especially those that don’t make the news), design, testing, and certification take much longer. Witness the 5.5 and counting year delay for the 777X entry into service, not to mention several years for the 737 MAX 7 and MAX 10.
If you want to sell mainline narrowbodies in the early 2040s, you’d best get cracking now.
There’s also some disappointment Boeing isn’t moving forward with a mid-market plane to finally replace the 757 and 767. IMO, the A321 XLR already does this.
@Michael Reynolds: I mean, like any good fiction writer, you have a flair for cheap melodrama, but much of this comes across as hysterical, contradictory, or even irrelevant.
Quoting Bret Stephens is certainly a choice, especially when his examples of just prove the point that all this supposedly dastardly left-wing censorship is trivia or not even The Left:
– a Dem senator responding to boys being radicalized into murder by the dark web by saying “more has to be done online” (o! the horror!)
– a proposal that Colorado Democrats opposed and blocked from their bill protecting trans citizens and their parents
– a poll showing bipartisan greement against hate and disinformation on social media
– a TV host (that normalized Trump in 2016 before marrying her colleague, a former elected Republican) exercising her free speech right to wonder if antivax lies weren’t defaming pharmaceuticals — like Fox News’s election lies defamed voting machine manufacturers
– Biden admin COVID liaisons with social media that even the MAGA Supreme Court ruled did not restrict speech in violation of the 1st Amendment — opinion written by Trump Justice Amy Coney Barrett and joined by those other noted scions of The Left, Justices Roberts and Kavanaugh
Rightwing distraction tactic agitprop is fun. But if Bret Stephens had deliberately set out to prove there’s no there there in his search for liberal action equivalent to Trump’s unprecedented FCC thuggery, he couldn’t have done better job.
Stephens should consider applying to write Trivial Pursuit cards tho, given his flair for highlighting unimportant factoids.
@Erik: It’s so bizarre how fragmented getting a covid vaccine is this year. I signed up online for flu + covid, went and got both vaccines with no problem (I am in NH). I’m under 65, and while I do technically have one of the “extenuating circumstance” conditions, nobody asked or checked.
You are not inside this issue so you have no clue as to how destructive these attacks have been, how thoroughly intimidated the creative community was, how baffled and frightened the gate keepers were.
No, before I left the industry for teaching and psychology, my fortune was built at one of the Big 5s — hiring and training TV writers and doing uncredited cleanup, after this studio paid for me to attend USC’s undergrad screenwriting program. This is how I got from exurban GA to L.A.
The technology has changed, but the creative community’s “fears” (i.e. financial imperative to cater to constantly changing cultural mores) are not new. The Hays Code, more stifling than anything encountered by today’s whiny American beta male has, governed content from 1930-1966 — shaping American entertainment and thus world culture in the process. And yet creativity flourished, with multiple artistic masterworks churned out monthly.
It’s years since I left the lot, but this alleged climate of fear seems like drama queenery. Cardi B, Nicki Minaj, Jason Aldean, Beyoncé, Lil Nas X, Morgan Wallen, Lady Gaga, Kendrick Lamar — restricted? South Park, Game of Thrones, Toddlers & Tiaras, Breaking Bad, Euphoria, 13 Reasons Why, Bojack Horseman, Stranger Things, Big Mouth — anodyne?
Quentin Tarantino, Darren Aronofsky, Ryan Coogler, Kathryn Bigelow are just a few of the filmmakers doing important, edgy work. And BookTok is wildly successful, bringing to the fore all types of books, controversial and boring, good and bad — by Donna Tartt, Dave Eggers, Rachel Kushner and on and on. Not to mention all the controversial comedians leaning either direction still selling out shows and proving uncancellable.
I’m not seeing a how culture that sent both “Wet Ass P***y” and “Rich Men North of Richmond” to #1 on the pop charts in recent years is suffering from repressive ideological creative censorship in any direction. Until the COVID disruptions and subsequent strikes, Hollywood was thought to be in a second golden age.
Maybe artists whose art stopped connecting just ran out of luck or passed their sell-by date? Because it seems blaming The Left, foreign governments, and bots might be a search for excuses, or a symptom of too much Twitter. Is The Left in control of Russian troll farms? Those amplify righty narratives, no?
Didn’t know this was going on but…
UPDATE: Pope Leo XIV wades into Durbin debate
Doesn’t matter because Durbin said screw it
I’ve said it before but the radical far right Christians have driven more people away from Christ than not.
Best summary of Federal Government impact that I’ve seen.
How the Shutdown Is Affecting Federal Services and Workers
Well this is quite amusing.
For some reason this part of a Pat Benatar song made itself an earworm on my mind today:
But lipstick lies won’t hide the truth
And they won’t keep you waterproof
A victim of your vanity
You see just what you want to see
Who’s to blame?
Flying to NYC Friday with a tight connection through O’Hare. Wish me luck with hopefully not a shut down nightmare.
Well, this is a fine kettle of crap…
https://fortune.com/2025/09/30/what-happened-soybean-farmers-argentina-china-scott-bessent-phone-texts/
It just never stops.
@becca:
I bet when El Taco said trade wars are good and easy to win, he left out he meant “for China.”
I see that the government has decided to use its considerable clout on a pharmaceutical company to get lower prices. It’s called Trump Rx, of course. I once advocated that the government use its power on the whole industry to lower prices and to control the expense of medical care in general, but I was called a pinko liberal socialist. In any event, welcome Mr. Trump. https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/09/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-announces-first-deal-to-bring-most-favored-nation-pricing-to-american-patients/
95% of men who have Tom Petty’s I Won’t Back Down on their playlist will, in fact, back down.
That is all.
The Left rediscovers the First Amendment:
1) The Hollywood black list was was created under government pressure, but enthusiastically enforced by Hollywood executives.
2) Hollywood could not have issued this before the 2d Trump regime because progressives would have howled.
I have been fighting Left-wing ‘censorship’ for more than a decade, and yes, I understand that censorship is a term which in law refers only to government action. But in the age of social media, censorship has been privatized, and there’s very little difference for a director or a poet or a comedian whose career has been destroyed, and don’t bother telling me it didn’t happen, I was an eyewitness.
I know two writers personally who were put out of business for years. One’s offense was that he told an off-color joke to a group of grown-ups, and a self-aware mention of watermelon in a speech praising a Black writer, a personal friend of his.
The other is one of the most sincere, devoted guys I know, who was run out of town for admitting that he wrote more male than female characters because he felt he understood boys better. Seriously, that was it.
But both men are men, and both had been very successful, so why not stick a shiv in their backs? In crude dollar terms, each man lost well over a million dollars. And so did I, for the thought-crime of defending them and again and again going back to the Hollywood black list about which they knew little and cared not at all.
Maybe this will be one good thing that comes from Trump: liberals/progressives remembering our own fucking core beliefs. Free expression is an inalienable right – no matter your politics. I know that because that’s the slogan on Jane Fonda’s poster.
I praised Disney for (eventually) standing up to Trump in the Kimmel case, and some here dumped all over me for that. But we, the Left, trained Hollywood to roll over for anti free speech attacks. Is it much worse now? No question. Much worse. But much worse in the sense that lung cancer is much worse than a three pack a day habit. Worse, but definitely connected.
A rare example of my oppositional defiance disorder being on-point, because my reaction to being told what I can and cannot say or write has always been, go fuck yourself.
@Michael Reynolds:
And to the men who want to deny me my free speech right to use terms like “toxic masculinity” and “microagresions” and to call for racists and homophobes to face civic consequences I say the same thing — go jump in a lake.
Citizen-organized boycotts and piles on are freedom of expression. And not equivalent to government attacks on the 1st Amendment, no matter how much crybaby men who wrongly think they’re entitled to audiences — and who love to scapegoat their stalling careers on imaginary victimhood rather than adjust their craft — love to claim otherwise. Cher, Madonna, and Mariah have survived controversy and lasted because they reinvented themselves as the culture changed. Do outdated male creatives think they are too good to do the same?
Private citizens have an inalienable right to assert their values in the marketplace of ideas by calling out those whose ideas they find objectionable — and over time that marketplace will decide who is to be vindicated and who went too far. Those who say otherwise are the ones trying to suppress speech.
Love you. Hehe 🙂
Jane Goodall has died, age 91.
@DK:
You’re simply wrong. Social media pile-ons are a new phenomenon and require assessment as new phenomena, particularly in view of the fact that a huge percentage of such pile-ons are in fact carried out by bots. And many of those bots are foreign governments. So, it’s not legitimate criticisms of a piece of art, it’s organized gang attacks enhanced by governments and competing corporations.
I’m going to crib from Bret Stephens:
I’ll spare you additional cited examples. Here’s the conclusion:
Things are different now. We are not talking about people choosing not to watch a show or read a book, or writing a bad online review, we are talking about attacks from governments other than our own, jealous competitors, concealed actions by malicious owners of platforms (Hi, Elon!), business competitors and random nihilists who are happy to add fuel to any convenient fire. And unlike, say, criticizing a piece of art, the goal now is to destroy the creator of that art. It’s no longer, ‘Your TV series sucks,’ it’s, ‘you must never be allowed to create another series, and anyone who disagrees must be destroyed.’
You are not inside this issue so you have no clue as to how destructive these attacks have been, how thoroughly intimidated the creative community was, how baffled and frightened the gate keepers were. See, I know the people, I know the frightened publishers and producers who can’t guess what asinine outrage will be manufactured next. The Left has played an outsized role in restricting artistic expression, and that’s not supposed to be our thing, that’s supposed to be their thing.
And BTW, aside from causing Hollywood and New York to quiver in fear and pump out anodyne crap, did it work? Did it? Have we accomplished a single goddamned thing with our endless outrage? No, clearly not, because the entire enterprise has been rolled back about 20 years. And now, creatives are left to try and find an impossible-to-predict, impossible-to-define path between Leftie outrage and MAGA outrage, and that narrow path is death to creativity. There are ways I could use my platform to go after MAGA that I simply cannot do, not for fear of them, but for fear of us.
Had we stuck to our professed belief in free speech we would have pushed back on the Left’s assault on free speech. And almost no one did. And we would be more effective in pushing back against MAGA.
ETA: Love you too, you’re an excellent debater. Sometimes wrong, but never stupid.
Jane Goodall
RIP
@Michael Reynolds: This isn’t in response to anything in particular you said, but yesterday NYT published an excellent piece on the long history of Republican assaults on free speech that deserves wide distribution, We Have Seen the ‘Woke Right’ Before, and It Wasn’t Pretty Then, Either by historian Dr, Nicole Hemmer.
Shunning and shaming, and even cancelling, have always been employed to suppress disfavored opinion. The only thing that’s changed is that now conservatives sometimes find themselves disfavored.
Provisions in the Bill of Rights are not unlimited. The challenge is when/where/how limits are applied–typically the task of the Supreme Court.
For example, this:
What the “misinformation” is matters a lot here. If it’s “the covid vaccine causes more deaths than covid,” that’s blatantly false, and should definitely open those peddling this type of nonsense up to lawsuits. (Not, one would think, the social platforms as they are still protected by Section 230.)
The question would then become if the vaccine manufacturers would consider it a good use of their time to go after these people for defamation. Other limits on free speech include classified information, and things bound by privacy laws (HIPPA).
We have freedom of religion, but cannot claim human sacrifice is part of our religion to justify a murder. We have gun rights, but are limited in the types of weapons we’re allowed to own. Etc.
Hit up my local VA drive through vaccination clinic for flu and Covid on my way home from work. Except no Covid vaccine available this year. I was told they wouldn’t have the vaccine available until January and that it would only be for people over 65.* So my question is, why is Trump allowing RFKJ to put hundreds of thousands of veterans at risk of Covid?
* I parked in the lot after my flu shot, got on the CVS website and was able to book an appointment and stop for a Covid vaccination on my way home
@Michael Reynolds:
“The Left rediscovers the First Amendment:”
RRRRRRRRRRRRIIIIIIIIIIGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHTTTTTTTTTTT
On the aviation front, there’s some buzz that Boeing has begun development of a clean slate replacement for the 737 MAX.
This is causing controversy among aviation bloggers on whether it’s premature: Really. Premature to stop further contorting a design from the mid 1960s. This is something they should have begun to do in the late 90s, as the NG iteration of the 737 was coming online.
Not letting Airbus off the hook. While their mainline jet design, the A320, is “only” 40 some years old, they should be designing the replacement now. There are conflicting reports of a stretched A220-500, which would totally replace the A320neo, and, in some configurations, a few A321 neos as well.
The reason is rather simple. As commercial jets get more complex and the knowledge on making and operating them safely grows with every incident (especially those that don’t make the news), design, testing, and certification take much longer. Witness the 5.5 and counting year delay for the 777X entry into service, not to mention several years for the 737 MAX 7 and MAX 10.
If you want to sell mainline narrowbodies in the early 2040s, you’d best get cracking now.
There’s also some disappointment Boeing isn’t moving forward with a mid-market plane to finally replace the 757 and 767. IMO, the A321 XLR already does this.
@Michael Reynolds: I mean, like any good fiction writer, you have a flair for cheap melodrama, but much of this comes across as hysterical, contradictory, or even irrelevant.
Quoting Bret Stephens is certainly a choice, especially when his examples of just prove the point that all this supposedly dastardly left-wing censorship is trivia or not even The Left:
– a Dem senator responding to boys being radicalized into murder by the dark web by saying “more has to be done online” (o! the horror!)
– a proposal that Colorado Democrats opposed and blocked from their bill protecting trans citizens and their parents
– a poll showing bipartisan greement against hate and disinformation on social media
– a TV host (that normalized Trump in 2016 before marrying her colleague, a former elected Republican) exercising her free speech right to wonder if antivax lies weren’t defaming pharmaceuticals — like Fox News’s election lies defamed voting machine manufacturers
– Biden admin COVID liaisons with social media that even the MAGA Supreme Court ruled did not restrict speech in violation of the 1st Amendment — opinion written by Trump Justice Amy Coney Barrett and joined by those other noted scions of The Left, Justices Roberts and Kavanaugh
Rightwing distraction tactic agitprop is fun. But if Bret Stephens had deliberately set out to prove there’s no there there in his search for liberal action equivalent to Trump’s unprecedented FCC thuggery, he couldn’t have done better job.
Stephens should consider applying to write Trivial Pursuit cards tho, given his flair for highlighting unimportant factoids.
@Erik: It’s so bizarre how fragmented getting a covid vaccine is this year. I signed up online for flu + covid, went and got both vaccines with no problem (I am in NH). I’m under 65, and while I do technically have one of the “extenuating circumstance” conditions, nobody asked or checked.
@Michael Reynolds:
No, before I left the industry for teaching and psychology, my fortune was built at one of the Big 5s — hiring and training TV writers and doing uncredited cleanup, after this studio paid for me to attend USC’s undergrad screenwriting program. This is how I got from exurban GA to L.A.
The technology has changed, but the creative community’s “fears” (i.e. financial imperative to cater to constantly changing cultural mores) are not new. The Hays Code, more stifling than anything encountered by today’s whiny American beta male has, governed content from 1930-1966 — shaping American entertainment and thus world culture in the process. And yet creativity flourished, with multiple artistic masterworks churned out monthly.
It’s years since I left the lot, but this alleged climate of fear seems like drama queenery. Cardi B, Nicki Minaj, Jason Aldean, Beyoncé, Lil Nas X, Morgan Wallen, Lady Gaga, Kendrick Lamar — restricted? South Park, Game of Thrones, Toddlers & Tiaras, Breaking Bad, Euphoria, 13 Reasons Why, Bojack Horseman, Stranger Things, Big Mouth — anodyne?
Quentin Tarantino, Darren Aronofsky, Ryan Coogler, Kathryn Bigelow are just a few of the filmmakers doing important, edgy work. And BookTok is wildly successful, bringing to the fore all types of books, controversial and boring, good and bad — by Donna Tartt, Dave Eggers, Rachel Kushner and on and on. Not to mention all the controversial comedians leaning either direction still selling out shows and proving uncancellable.
I’m not seeing a how culture that sent both “Wet Ass P***y” and “Rich Men North of Richmond” to #1 on the pop charts in recent years is suffering from repressive ideological creative censorship in any direction. Until the COVID disruptions and subsequent strikes, Hollywood was thought to be in a second golden age.
Maybe artists whose art stopped connecting just ran out of luck or passed their sell-by date? Because it seems blaming The Left, foreign governments, and bots might be a search for excuses, or a symptom of too much Twitter. Is The Left in control of Russian troll farms? Those amplify righty narratives, no?
@DK:
No, but if you’ll point me in the direction, I’d be happy to buy some stock.
While Portland isn’t a “War Zone,” it certainly is weird. Emergency deployment of naked bike riders weird regarding the National Guard deployment
@Richard Gardner:
As a Seattle refugee for 40+ years, IMO
Portland’s unofficial motto
Overall, Oregon’s unofficial motto veers between
And
* East of the Cascades and/or south of Eugene
** Everywhere
@Jen: if we had trustworthy data gathering it would make a very useful natural experiment. But instead it will just be a disaster for many many people