December 16, 2025

ALSO, NO, WE’RE NOT DOING PHRASING ANYMORE:  Hard Or Soft?

Posted at 2:00 am by Sarah Hoyt

December 15, 2025

SEE ALSO, DAVID FRENCH, BILL KRISTOL, ET AL.:

Posted at 10:52 pm by Glenn Reynolds

SOME OF US WARNED THEM FOR DECADES, BUT THE DIDN’T LISTEN AND CALLED US NAMES:

Posted at 10:49 pm by Glenn Reynolds

OPEN THREAD: With still no master plan. Fishin’ in the rivers of life. Bring the beat back!

Background on this video here.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

APOLOGIES TO THE PERSON READING THIS ON VR GOGGLES: The metaverse is cooked, and Wall Street couldn’t be happier.

It appears Meta may finally be ready to put the metaverse out of its misery.

Shares of the company formerly known as Facebook shot up 7% early Thursday in response to a Bloomberg report that CEO Mark Zuckerberg is slashing the metaverse team’s budget by as much as 30%. CNN hasn’t confirmed the report. In a statement, a Meta spokesperson confirmed that “we are shifting some of our investment” from the metaverse group toward AI glasses and wearables.

The stock ended the day up 3.4%.

It’s not hard to see why Wall Street is so thrilled. After four years and billions of dollars wasted, the metaverse — a feature that Zuck believed in so deeply that he renamed the company after it — is more or less cooked.

The thing never made much sense, even when Zuck dramatically declared the metaverse would be “the successor of the mobile internet.” The company initially set a goal of 500,000 monthly active users in Horizons Worlds, a virtual reality space, by the end of 2022. According to the Wall Street Journal, Meta revised that goal by nearly half later that year.

To be clear, we don’t know yet what will become of the metaverse, which is part of Meta’s Reality Labs division overseeing its virtual reality headsets. And Zuckerberg has said he still believes people will one day spend significant amounts of time in virtual worlds.

Virtual reality was Silicon Valley’s big obsession in the late 1980s before the World Wide Web came along, so it wasn’t surprising to see Zuckerberg reviving VR fever — nor is it a big surprise to see it fail. As I wrote last year when Apple debuted their stillborn Vision Pro goggles, Hollywood sci-fi has been conditioning us since Star Trek debuted in 1966 to consume information via screens, not via goggles, which helps to explain the much smaller demand from the public.

Posted at 8:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

JACOB SAVAGE: The Lost Generation.

The doors seemed to close everywhere and all at once. In 2011, the year I moved to Los Angeles, white men were 48 percent of lower-level TV writers; by 2024, they accounted for just 11.9 percent. The Atlantic’s editorial staff went from 53 percent male and 89 percent white in 2013 to 36 percent male and 66 percent white in 2024. White men fell from 39 percent of tenure-track positions in the humanities at Harvard in 2014 to 18 percent in 2023.

In retrospect, 2014 was the hinge, the year DEI became institutionalized across American life.

In industry after industry, gatekeepers promised extra consideration to anyone who wasn’t a white man—and then provided just that. “With every announcement of promotions, there was a desire to put extra emphasis on gender [or race],” a former management consultant recalled. “And when you don’t fall into those groups, that message gets louder and louder, and gains more and more emphasis. On the one hand, you want to celebrate people who have been at a disadvantage. On the other hand, you look and you say, wow, the world is not rooting for you—in fact, it’s deliberately rooting against you.”

As the Trump Administration takes a chainsaw to the diversity, equity, and inclusion apparatus, there’s a tendency to portray DEI as a series of well-meaning but ineffectual HR modules. “Undoubtedly, there has been ham-fisted DEI programming that is intrusive or even alienating,” explained Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor in The New Yorker. “But, for the most part, it is a relatively benign practice meant to increase diversity, while also sending a message that workplaces should be fair and open to everyone.”

This may be how Boomer and Gen-X white men experienced DEI. But for white male millennials, DEI wasn’t a gentle rebalancing—it was a profound shift in how power and prestige were distributed. Yet practically none of the thousands of articles and think-pieces about diversity have considered the issue by cohort.

This isn’t a story about all white men. It’s a story about white male millennials in professional America, about those who stayed, and who (mostly) stayed quiet. The same identity, a decade apart, meant entirely different professional fates. If you were forty in 2014—born in 1974, beginning your career in the late-90s—you were already established. If you were thirty in 2014, you hit the wall.

Because the mandates to diversify didn’t fall on older white men, who in many cases still wield enormous power: They landed on us.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Bumping this post up, and including the related tweet that Steve linked to earlier today:

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

THE FREE PRESS: Mr. President, Don’t Mock the Dead.

Given Rob Reiner’s contributions to American culture—from his days as a sitcom star on All in the Family to his direction of iconic films such as When Harry Met Sally and A Few Good Men—it was entirely appropriate for the president of the United States to weigh in on his horrifying death over the weekend.

Sadly, the way President Donald Trump has done so is beyond the pale. His Monday post on Truth Social is worth reading in full, in part because many Republican lawmakers will spend the next few days claiming not to have seen it.

This is what we know. Reiner and his wife, Michelle Singer Reiner, were found stabbed to death on Sunday. Their troubled son, 32-year-old Nick Reiner, has been arrested for their murder. There is no evidence that the slaying had anything to do with Trump. But the president has a penchant for making everything about himself, and so he has here, casting their death as somehow the result of their opposition to him and his politics.

We’re living through an era of political violence, something we take very seriously. We’ve published numerous essays on how Americans can and must come together and solve our differences the way they are meant to be solved: civil debate, the democratic process, a respectful airing of differences. Those values are at the heart of everything we do.

In his 50-plus years as a top American entertainer, Reiner—like most major Hollywood figures—was a liberal. And like a solid percentage of the country, he did not care for Trump. But there is no indication this was an act of political violence, and it is obscene for the president to try to make it into one.

Many Americans have come to expect the president to be petulant and self-centered. We’ve become inured to his wild social media ramblings. Yet he still finds ways to shock us on occasion; his statement on Reiner is exceptionally beneath the office he holds. Rob Reiner was not a political figure. He was merely an outspoken supporter of liberal causes, which of course was his right.

To be fair, Reiner was more of a political figure than movie maker in the last quarter century of life, as this 2002 Reason column by Tim Cavanaugh notes:

California (which had one of the nation’s highest excise rates even before the smokes-to-schools Proposition 10 was passed in 1998) now collects 50 cents per pack to keep kids in class and off Teletubbies – certainly the most creative yoking together of source and beneficiary since Iran-Contra.

But more important than either of these civic efforts is what Prop 10 has done for Reiner himself. From merely being another Hollywood player, he has now become a quasi-governmental official – Chairman of the California Children and Families Commission – with a leadership role in disbursing $700 million in annual tobacco tax revenues. This is just the latest feather in the cap of the successful director, producer, actor and intellectual beacon (to Hillary Clinton during her village-taking days). It’s common to marvel at how far Reiner has risen above early typecasting as Mike “Meathead” Stivic, the sanctimonious mooch responsible for so many of Archie Bunker‘s most painful hours on the TV classic All In the Family. (You can track Reiner’s rising profile by how his relationship to Prop 10 is described in the press; while early reports called him the “driving force” or “inspiration” behind the measure, the Chronicle now designates him the law’s “author.”)

On closer inspection, though, it’s not always easy to see the difference between the freeloader who lectured Archie on women’s lib and overpopulation while helping himself to the Bunker groceries (a practice that no doubt contributed to the Hollywood triple threat’s relentless supersizing), and the tiresome busybody who can’t stop haranguing us with obscure data points like the fact that smoking is bad for you and that children should be fed and changed on a regular basis.

By 2010, Reiner was going full gnostic, imagining the libertarian-themed, leave us alone Tea Party as crypto-Nazis: I’m From Hollywood: Meathead’s Junk History.

Full gnostic? Actually, Reiner was just getting started, as six years later, he would begin enthusiastically embracing every leftist conspiracy theory about the Bad Orange Man, as a scroll through our archives highlights. As does a scroll through Reiner’s Twitter/X archives:

So, it’s not entirely surprising that the person who’s been a target of Reiner’s TDS doesn’t turn the other cheek today:

Still though, where’s Franklin when you need him?

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

FASTER? PLEASE! 5,000 FPS? “I assume many in the gun community will see a bullet that light out of a barrel that small as nothing more than a novelty, but 5,000+ fps is nothing to sneeze at.”

Posted at 6:18 pm by Stephen Green

FAKE PLASTIC TREES: Fox Business host says Americans need to buy fake trees so Christmas farms can be used for AI data centers.

There’s a winning message for Fox News’ core demographic! As Harris Rigby of Not the Bee writes, “Even Hollywood couldn’t get away with a movie about a cartoonish conservative whose evil plot is to shut down all of the family heirloom Christmas tree farms data centers.”

Classical reference in headline:

Posted at 6:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

57 YEARS AGO TODAY: The story of Philadelphia Eagles fans throwing snowballs at Santa Claus.

The Eagles, only six years removed from an NFL championship, started 0-8 in 1968 under coach Joe Kuharich and seem poised to finish with the worst record in the league and earn the No. 1 draft pick in the draft. That meant a chance at selecting USC running back O. J. Simpson.

Only once the Eagles won two straight games — hadn’t anyone heard of Tankadelphia? — essentially surrendering the top spot to Buffalo, disillusioned fans were fed up headed into the finale. And when the Eagles needed a pinch-hit Santa to fill in for the real-deal halftime act either stranded elsewhere in a snowstorm or simply no-showing because of one, they plucked a fan out of the stands who happened to dress as Saint Nick to toss candy canes into the crowd.

As instructed, 20-year-old Frank Olivo ran downfield past a row of elf-costumed “Eaglettes” and the team’s 50-person brass band playing “Here Comes Santa Claus.” Only fans turned on him in his disheveled outfit, angry over another lost Eagles season, and cold, tired and feeling a bit churlish, they booed and chucked snowballs at the woeful Santa impostor.

“Certainly,” said Eagles fan Ray Didinger, sitting at the Snowball Game in Row 24, “no one was trying to hurt Santa Claus.”

Yet, here they are, 55 years later, still atop the naughty list for sports fans everywhere.

The Eagles themselves sure don’t hate Christmas — they sing all the holiday classics instead. Led by Lane Johnson, Jason Kelce and Jordan Mailata, the Eagles have released Christmas albums in consecutive seasons.

The snowball story, though, stuck to Philly, so when the Eagles host the New York Giants on Monday, the incident surely will be recycled on the TV broadcast, or on local news, or on national sports highlights — Hey! The city that hates Santa played on Christmas!

“It’s never going to go away,” said Didinger, a journalist who went on to cover the Eagles for 53 years. “Just don’t let it bother you anymore. If you don’t think the Philadelphia fans are like that, and I don’t, then just sort of say, ‘oh well.’ It’s not me. It’s not the way I approach things.”

The legend of Eagles fans booing Santa Claus certainly the bar extremely high for rowdiness at Philadelphia sporting events: Eagles Fans Behaving Badly: The Decade-by-Decade History.

And then there was the broadcaster behaving badly at an Eagles game:

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll