I AM CONTINUOUSLY BEWILDERED BY WHAT PEOPLE THINK IS AI:  This will be the new -ist and -phobe by freaks who just want to hate. We see it with artists on x already being falsely accused. The accusers do not care about the damage they will cause.

Look, there are indeed AI tells — not that I care, if the thing is readable. Only mostly it isn’t — but it certainly isn’t stuff like m dashes which are used by every fiction writer, and twice as hard by those with ADD.  Again, ultimately the only question should be “do you like it?” Not “how was it made.” On the other hand, deciding — mostly wrongly — that things are AI and hating them for it is very on point for people who only love books if they’re written by people on the approved list, or there’s a male name on the cover, or the cover is purple, or whatever. So, there’s that.

ON THE ONE HAND BOTH NETFLIX AND PARAMOUNT ARE WOKE AS ALL GET OUT:   Movies and Other Things.

On the other hand, so is WB. And on the third hand, these are the desperate actions of drowning men. Ain’t no merger gonna save them. They are falling apart. The way forward is not mergers for the ever dwindling market for woke movies. The future is small, fractured, and indie.

THE “NON PARTISAN” CIVIL SERVICE IS A PROPAGANDA MYTH:

OPEN THREAD: Hump Day.

THINK OF IT AS EVOLUTION IN ACTION:

STEP ONE: You’re racist to even suggest this.

STEP TWO: We didn’t stop it for fear of being called racist.

STEP THREE: We were doing the raping too all along.

STOP RAPING PEOPLE!!!

HERO:

Full details at the thread.

TRIGGERNOMETRY: Jimmy Carr: A Revolution is Coming!

THEY WANT WOMEN MISERABLE, ANGRY, RESENTFUL, AND VOTING DEMOCRAT. BUT I REPEAT MYSELF.

Full article is here.

NEWS YOU CAN ABUSE: The Dave Barry 2025 Holiday Gift Guide. This year, give the gift of: Huh?

Thus we can assume that the mood in the stable was already pretty tense when the three Wise Men showed up. The New Testament tells us that they brought gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. Gold makes sense as a gift, but we have to wonder about frankincense and myrrh, which according to Google are kinds of tree resin, a “thick, sticky, semi-liquid substance” excreted by conifers. No doubt the thought was sincere, but this does not seem like a super-appropriate gift for a newborn infant. The last thing you want, as a parent, is for your baby to get his hands on a blob of tree goo.

The New Testament does not say how Mary reacted to these gifts, but if I know anything about women, by which I mean my wife, Mary was mortified that she didn’t have any gifts to exchange with the Wise Men, so she pulled Joseph aside and ordered him to go out immediately, find a conifer and bring back some gift resin. She probably also wrapped the gold in different paper and regifted it to the Wise Men. And thus the holiday tradition of exchanging gifts was born.

Thousands of years later, we’re still dealing with the stress of holiday gift-giving — the constant nagging worry that we won’t have enough gifts to retaliate against everybody who will be giving gifts to us. Wouldn’t it be great if you could drop out of this insane holiday competition? Well you can! The trick is to stop trying to give your loved ones thoughtful and appropriate gifts. Instead, you want to give them gifts that are so stupid or inappropriate that they will never want to exchange gifts with you again, and in fact may enter the Federal Witness Protection Program to avoid running that risk.

Where can you find gifts that bad? Right here, that’s where, in my annual Holiday Gift Guide. This is a carefully curated selection of real products that you can actually buy; in fact these products are all 100 percent tax-deductible if you write about them for business purposes in your professional humor Substack. So grab your credit card and prepare to be underwhelmed, because here comes this year’s lineup of gift candidates, starting with:

THE ORIGINAL TOILET MIRROR

Don’t be fooled by copycat toilet mirrors: This is the original toilet mirror, which is a mirror that comes with some adhesive strips so you can mount it on your toilet lid.

Needless to say, read the whole thing.

THE TIPPING POINT: Democrat Congressman: Yes, the US Is the ‘Great Satan.’

In a sane world, propagandists like Dean Obeidallah would try to find somebody a bit less retarded than Hank Johnson to make the moral case to his audience that Orange Man is being bad by killing terrorists, but we now live in a world where it is pretty normal for lefties to describe America as a Nazi country filled with roving bands of white supremacists killing brown people for sport.

Classical allusion in headline: