The allegations followed the Times’ Saturday investigation into how Trump exempted more than 200 industrial facilities from stricter clean-air regulations. Hunterbrook claims portions of the report closely resemble two investigations it published months earlier into chemical pollution at plants in Texas and Virginia. The Times’ article now includes an acknowledgment of Hunterbrook’s previous coverage, though it does not specifically credit the outlet’s individual findings or reporting methods.
In a series of posts on X, Hunterbrook pointed to its May investigation into an April accident at Sterilization Services of Virginia, where a faulty valve released 580 lbs. of ethylene oxide, a cancer-causing gas. Both newsrooms used the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s HYSPLIT modeling system to illustrate how the chemical spread into nearby communities.
Hunterbrook also highlighted similarities between the Times’ reporting and its February investigation into Indorama Ventures’ chemical plant in Port Neches, Texas, which received an exemption from federal pollution rules despite a history of chemical releases.
When your ethics are seriously questioned by a former Biden speechwriter…
Seriously, between Bessant, Rubio, Hegseth, RFK Jr., and of course our crazy orange president himself, has there ever been a cabinet or an administration that on a daily basis makes you laugh out loud like these guys do?
Elite schools have been hiring for ideology — left — for almost a century. They’ve finally reached the point where they’re communist in all but name, and on top that they are fountains of ignorance. The later is the natural result of hiring for any reason but competence. Remember that. It’s important.
I’m sorry, I want to say something about selling your cloak and buying a sword, but with helicopters, in preparation for 2028. Yes, it is an evil thought. It was “half my fault, and half the atmosphere.”
I know of what I speak. Education schools are evil Marxist cesspools. It must be done to them as onto Carthage. It is in fact grossly overdue, if we want to keep civilization. And this evil twunt must be fired and barred from speaking to a kid ever, even across the street. (Okay, yes, that’s over the top, but argh.)
I just think right now, the left is dumber and thought this brochure, explaining how kids can trans without their parents’ knowledge would benefit the left. Kind of like they thought disclosing the late Lindsey Graham was gay would help them (we were fine with him being gay; we just thought he should have come out of the closet and stopped being blackmailed to fall in line with the left. Lands’ sake. We don’t want to sleep with our representatives — ew — but we don’t want them to be compromised either.) Or their newest allegations about Trump, which apparently waited till now to come out. (Rolls eyes.) We’re in a race to the bottom of the IQ pile, and the left is somehow managing to win.
At the time, both my husband and I drove cars that were considerably older than the supposed “clunkers” so they didn’t qualify (not that we’d do that. We buy them used, take care of them, and drive them till their natural death.) This orgy of destruction made it hard for our kids to afford their first cars and made life difficult for the young and poor (which are often the same.) For … no reason. Except vague “green” feels and a president’s hatred of everyone not rich.
Keep in mind, I still think it’s governmental overreach to regulate what adults can consume. But the hypocrisy of demonizing one and practically encouraging the other has long boggled me.
When we think of Leftists, we do not think of Barack Obama or Ezra Klein. Yes, these guys are on the Left, but younger Millennials and Zoomers on the Right do not think of Leftists in their own age bracket as polished technocrats.
Polished what? Children, they are exactly like current leftists:
When we think of Leftists, the first thing that pops into our head are a bunch of disgusting, depraved, spiteful mutants who want to destroy everything around them as payback for the crime of being born.
And, in Obama’s case, the vile, disgusting, depraved, spiteful mutant who is not quite a year older than I wants to destroy America, because his interestingly exotic father abandoned him, and it must be all our fault. (Spits.)
The left has been evil and destructive for a long time. Now they’re not even doing the modicum of hiding Obama did.
Start with the lion. Lewis did not consider Aslan an allegory. He called him “an invention giving an imaginary answer to the question, ‘What might Christ become like if there really were a world like Narnia.’” In other words, within the story Aslan is Christ, and Lewis gave him the title to match: the son of the Emperor-beyond-the-Sea. That makes the voice a theological decision, not a casting one. For Lewis, masculine and feminine were woven into the structure of reality, prior to biology and above it. In Perelandra he wrote, “Gender is a reality, and a more fundamental reality than sex.” And in That Hideous Strength he went furthest of all: the male we could escape, because it exists only on the biological level, “but the masculine none of us can escape. What is above and beyond all things is so masculine that we are all feminine in relation to it.” To invert that order is not to update Lewis. It is to take a crowbar to his metaphysics. The masculine none of us can escape, and Netflix may be about to find that out when it reads its box office receipts.
Defenders say the voice will be deep. A person who has seen the film told Relevant that “Aslan is clearly male,” and NarniaWeb reports that [Meryl] Streep gives the lion a deep, gravelly voice. Maybe so. But surely the best place to look for a gravelly masculine voice is a gravelly masculine actor. Hollywood isn’t short of them, but it seems short of the will to cast one. When you have to retune a woman’s voice so it sounds like a man’s, you’ve conceded the point and then hired a sound engineer to hide the concession. Lewis told us Aslan is not a tame lion, but Netflix seems determined to make him a lame one.
The Critical Drinker adds (via YouTube’s transcription, which was cleaned up by ChatGPT):
Casting a woman in an iconically male role like this, based around the central male figure of Christianity, was definitely a bold move on Gerwig’s part. I’ll say that much. And her justification left people with more questions than answers.
Quote: “I wanted someone who was profound but not pretentious, who had gravitas but not morose self-seriousness. Someone who could communicate depth and pathos as well as joy and delight. I wanted someone who was older than 70, so there was a wisdom of experience, but who also had the capacity for fresh wonder like a child, and also to be one of the greatest actors to ever do it. That list is not a long one.”
Oh, really?
That’s funny, because I can think of plenty of male actors off the top of my head who would tick all of those boxes, like Ian McKellen, Anthony Hopkins, Patrick Stewart, Charles Dance, Jeremy Irons, Ben Kingsley.
I don’t know, man. Maybe if you’d just been honest and said you really wanted to work with Meryl Streep and this was a good opportunity to do it, people might have been a bit more receptive. As it stands, it sounds like you’re arrogantly dismissing way more appropriate actors with a pretty flimsy excuse because you’d already made up your mind who you wanted to play Aslan.
And there’s no getting away from this one: considering Gerwig’s history with subversive feminist film projects, the inevitable assumption was that she wanted to put a subversive feminist spin on a traditional male-led fantasy series with Christian undertones. Maybe she did, maybe she didn’t, but optics and perception are everything in this business. And it feels like she walked straight into a major controversy before the film even started shooting.
And for what? To get Meryl Streep on the credits? I don’t know, man. It doesn’t seem worth it to me.
We’ll find out in February, which as the Drinker goes on to note, is usually a dumping ground for movies Hollywood didn’t consider good enough to succeed in the much more lucrative (and thus much more competitive) summer and Christmas release seasons.
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