TIME MAGAZINE’s 2025 MAN OF THE YEAR CONTINUES TO KNOCK IT OUT OF THE PARK: Washington Post’s AI-generated podcasts rife with errors, fictional quotes.

The Washington Post’s top standards editor Thursday decried “frustrating” errors in its new AI-generated personalized podcasts, whose launch has been met with distress by its journalists.

Earlier this week, the Post announced that it was rolling out personalized AI-generated podcasts for users of the paper’s mobile app. In a release, the paper said users will be able to choose preferred topics and AI hosts, and could “shape their own briefing, select their topics, set their lengths, pick their hosts and soon even ask questions using our Ask The Post AI technology.”

But less than 48 hours since the product was released, people within the Post have flagged what four sources described as multiple mistakes in personalized podcasts. The errors have ranged from relatively minor pronunciation gaffes to significant changes to story content, like misattributing or inventing quotes and inserting commentary, such as interpreting a source’s quotes as the paper’s position on an issue.

Which means that the WaPo’s AI is currently behaving like most flesh-and-blood journalists at the WaPo. And as Glenn wrote last year after Google’s AI declared that we are all National Socialists now (classical allusion), “Of course, the thing about AI is that AI keeps getting better, while people stay about the same.  (Indeed, there’s some evidence that the average person is getting dumber, which if true will only close the gap faster.)  At a sufficiently advanced level of technology, AI will be super-effective at manipulating people, and they won’t even know they’re being manipulated.” So AI should continue to clear the gap between man and machine at the WaPo surprisingly quickly.

KRUISER: Dems Would Last Maybe 5 Minutes in the Civil War They Think They Want. “All of the posturing and potty-mouthing in front of friendly audiences has given the Democrats the mistaken impression that they actually are tough. It’s mostly amusing, especially given the fact that fey soy boy Gavin Newsom is their highest polling ‘fighter’ right now.”

THIS:

I watched a Falcon 9 launch just now. Enjoyed the space footage, and the sound of flight controllers calling out milestones like max-q and stage separation.

And I thought, not at all ironically, "I shall sing you the song of my people". This is the epic of our age of technology,…

— Eric S. Raymond (@esrtweet) December 11, 2025

HELL HATH NO FURY LIKE …: Is MTG Plotting to Destroy the GOP?

BECAUSE YOU DON’T GET TO $108 BILLION BY KEEPING MONEY-LOSERS LIKE COLBERT ON FOREVER. NEXT QUESTION? Stephen Colbert Wonders Why ‘The Late Show’ Was Canceled if Paramount Has $108 Billion to Offer for Warner Bros.

THIS IS LOVELY: Aging Gracefully and the Songs That Grow With Us.

GREAT GIFT: Klipsch The One Plus Premium Bluetooth Speaker System. #CommissionEarned

WEAKNESS BEGETS AGGRESSION: China Is Quietly Breaking America’s Pacific Defense Chain.

China is methodically chipping away at America’s Pacific defense architecture, and Yap’s Woleai airfield is the latest warning sign.

Despite the Federated States of Micronesia’s Compact of Free Association with Washington, Beijing has secured a deal to refurbish the airfield—just 450 miles from Guam.

That puts a potential dual-use Chinese facility inside the second island chain, complicating U.S. plans for agile air dispersal in a Taiwan war.

Naval expert Brent Sadler argues that Interior, regional commands, and legal advisers have all failed to enforce CoFA protections, risking billions in U.S. investments and eroding America’s positional advantage in Micronesia.

We paid for those islands with American blood. China is buying them with American dollars.

WHY IS HIGHER EDUCATION SUCH A CESSPIT OF ANTI-SEMITISM? Students allege discrimination for ‘Jewish sounding’ last names at Chapman U.

ROBERT SPENCER: ‘Minnesota Somalis Are as Minnesotan as Tater-Tot Hotdish,’ But There’s Just One Catch. “The Center for Immigration Studies revealed Wednesday that ‘nearly every Somali household with children (89 percent) receives some form of welfare.’ Even worse, ‘altogether, 81 percent of Somali households consume some form of welfare, compared to 21 percent of native households.’ Nor does this dependency lessen with time: ‘Somalis with 10 years of residency have welfare consumption rates that are only marginally lower than the Somali population as a whole.'”

GREAT GIFT FOR SMALL SPACES: Keurig K-Mini Mate Single Serve Coffee Maker. #CommissionEarned

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Care Bears, Play-Doh, PJ Party: Colleges help students cope with exams.

JUST TRULY TERRIBLE PEOPLE: Newsom Press Account Had NO IDEA the Hell They Would Unleash Trolling Elon Musk With His Mentally Ill Son. “It takes someone really, really, really low to use one’s mentally ill child to hurt them. Still, then again, we are dealing with Governor Newsom and his broken, hateful, thin-skinned, troll press office account run by whack-job haters, so we’re not exactly surprised they’d go after Elon Musk by exploiting his son, who thinks he’s a girl.”

UPDATE (From Ed): Newsom would enjoy seeing many more families ripped apart:

It's going to be an ad. https://t.co/kVlI6D9TLK

— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) December 11, 2025

MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE: OCC Fingers Big Banks That De-Banked ‘Controversial’ Business Like Gun Makers, Retailers. ““It is unfortunate that the nation’s largest banks thought these harmful debanking policies were an appropriate use of their government-granted charter and market power. While many of these policies were undertaken in plain sight and even announced publicly, certain banks have continued to insist that they did not engage in debanking… Going forward, the OCC will hold banks accountable for these actions and ensure unlawful debanking does not continue.”

WHO THOUGHT THIS WOULD SELL?

‘Debacle of epic proportions’: Nuzzi book flops in first week https://t.co/bwMdVfjz9e

— POLITICO (@politico) December 11, 2025

KELLY SHOULD DRAW CROWDS OF PROTESTERS WHEREVER HE APPEARS: Seditious Mark Kelly Slams Trump as UnAmerican.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: The Quiet, Captivating Genius of Kamala Harris. “We all saw Harris for four years. Rare was the occasion when she could string together three coherent sentences. Typically, she would get stuck on a word or phrase and then repeat it. I called it the hamster wheel in her brain. Once she realized that she wasn’t getting off the wheel, she would begin gesticulating wildly, as if that made everything clearer.”

THIS IS THE CORRECT TAKE:

Christopher Caldwell gets the Trump NSS exactly right. Trump doesn't "hate Europe"; he hates the globalist technocratic class ruining it. Michael Anton, the chief drafter of the NSS, told me that he personally loves Europe — but not the EU & its mindset.https://t.co/IZuRUEOxrF

— Rod Dreher (@roddreher) December 11, 2025

“Brussels saps the economic power and the morale of our European allies while purporting to unite and strengthen them.”

WHY ARE DEMOCRATS’ BACKGROUNDS ALWAYS FAKE? EXCLUSIVE: Wes Moore Won a Key White House Post Claiming He Was ‘Touted as a Foremost Expert’ on Radical Islam and Was Studying for an Oxford PhD—But His Thesis Is ‘Missing’ and There’s No Evidence He Was Ever a Doctoral Student.

HOW TDS BLINDS DEMS TO REALITY: A Senate SBA hearing earlier this week gave a host of uniquely vivid illustrations of how Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) blinds its victims like Democratic senators Ed Markey and Mazie Hirono to the reality of chronic, deeply rooted, and horrendously costly waste, fraud and abuse in federal spending.

OH, CANADA:

When they tell you who they are, believe them. pic.twitter.com/0iqllNmZfQ

— Vivid.🇮🇱 (@VividProwess) December 11, 2025

You can look in vain for a Community Note, but there aren’t even any pending.

Yesterday, I wrote about the five steps of “postmodern reverse colonization,” and here they are again:

• Migration, often at the behest of the local population or their elites.
• Non-assimilation.
• Formation of ethno-religious political blocs.
• Street violence/mob tactics/mass rape as power tests.
• Demographic tipping points.

Parts of the UK are well into the fourth step, and it looks like Canada is doing its best to catch up.

ICYMI, IT’S MY THURSDAY ESSAY FOR VIP SUBSCRIBERS: One Cheer for Colonialism! “It is unseemly, untimely, unjustifiable, distasteful, and surely flat-out wrong to offer even one cheer for colonialism. So here I go.”

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Viagra goes pink (finally!): First-of-its-kind cream promises to jump-start arousal in women.

The topical treatment — which contains sildenafil, the same active ingredient in Viagra — is filling a long-overlooked need.

Studies show that women experience sexual dysfunction as much as men, and it can be treated with similar drug mechanisms, said Sabrina Martucci Johnson, president and CEO of Daré Bioscience.

“We have this scientific evidence that sildenafil as an active ingredient can work if only it were designed and formulated specifically with women in mind,” Johnson told The Post, “and that’s really then where we came into the equation.”

Well, good.

21st CENTURY HEADLINES: Woman given a new 3D-printed windpipe in a world-first.

THE EV BUBBLE CONTINUES DEFLATING: Fewer EVs need fewer batteries: Ford and SK On end their joint venture.

Cast your mind back to 2021. Electric vehicles were hot stuff, buoyed by Tesla’s increasingly stratospheric valuation and a general optimism fueled by what would turn out to be the most significant climate-focused spending package in US history. For some time, automakers had been promising an all-electric future, and they started laying the groundwork to make that happen, partnering with battery suppliers and the like.

Take Ford—that year, it announced a joint venture with SK to build a pair of battery factories, one in Kentucky, the other in Tennessee. BlueOvalSK represented an $11.4 billion investment that would create 11,000 jobs, we were told, and an annual output of 60 GWh from both plants.

Four years later, things look very different. EV subsidies are dead, as is any inclination by the current government to hold automakers accountable for selling too many gas guzzlers. EV-heavy product plans have been thrown out, and designs for new combustion-powered cars are being dusted off and spiffed up. Fewer EVs means a lower need for batteries, and today we saw that in evidence when it emerged that Ford and SK On are ending their battery factory joint venture.

Ending subsidies really meant finding out what the actual EV market could sustain.