December 9, 2025

OUT TODAY: Kurt Schlichter’s latest Kelly Turnbull novel, Panama Red.

Posted at 6:15 pm by Glenn Reynolds

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Non-Binary Teacher Cites Personal Safety Concerns to Avoid Director’s Child, Sparking Legal Action.

Does the reverse work as well?

Posted at 5:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

ACE OF SPADES: Paramount/Skydance Launches Hostile Takeover Bid for Warner Bros.

David Ellison is reportedly trying to induce Trump to block the Netflix buyout by promising that if he gets hold of Warner Bros. — and its failing “news” channel CNN — he’ll remake CNN into a fair and balanced network.

Paramount CEO David Ellison assured Trump officials that if the government OKs his company’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) he would overhaul the president’s media arch nemesis — CNN.

Netflix announced last Friday it reached a deal to acquire Warner and HBO properties for $72 billion – but Paramount immediately launched a hostile counterbid, taking its case directly to shareholders.

The Netflix-WBD merger is facing a stiff challenge from Paramount, whose majority shareholder is the billionaire Donald Trump ally, Oracle founder Larry Ellison.

On Monday, Paramount made its move, offering $77.9 billion in all-cash and urging Warner shareholders to reject the Netflix deal.

On a recent visit to Washington, DC, Ellison’s son David told Trump’s team he would impose sweeping changes at CNN if he purchased its parent company WBD, sources told the Wall Street Journal.

David’s father Larry discussed firing hosts like Erin Burnett and Brianna Keilar – figures Trump dislikes – with White House officials during takeover bid talks last month, the Guardian reported.

Is that true? No idea. I do know that if you really were making this offer you would want to do it privately, not publicly, with the Wall Street Journal notified. Because the president isn’t supposed to approve or nix mergers based on his personal or political self-interest. By making this supposed offer so public, it basically stops Trump from even considering taking the alleged “deal.”

It could be that Netflix, not Ellison, is pushing this story out there to pressure Trump to approve their own bid.

Leftwing movie review[er] Grace Randolf claimed that Warner Discovery shareholders are faced with two repellent options — accept Netlix’s deal and “kill the theater business,” or accept Ellison’s deal and (horrors!) put two movie studios under the control of a “conservative” man friendly to Trump.

Quelle horreur! Wait until Randolf that the movie industry only exists today because it was created by and under the control of conservative men for the first 60 years or so of the industry’s lifespan.

Posted at 5:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

HOLIDAY SEASON OF TERRORISM IN U.S.: American intelligence experts are overwhelmed with incoming evidence pointing to multiple holiday season terrorist attacks here in the U.S., according to Richard Pollock. He’s talking to level-headed, non-alarmists with long records of being right, one of whom says:

“Our detection and enforcement systems are overwhelmed. We’re not just talking about individual terrorists and jihadists, but organized terror networks and their legal support systems, and state-sponsored covert intelligence networks whose cadres are professionally trained and strategically deployed.”

This is a must-read.

Posted at 5:24 pm by Mark Tapscott

COLUMBIA BROADCASTING STRUGGLE SESSION CONCLUDES: CBS News has picked Tony Dokoupil as ‘CBS Evening News’ anchor: source.

According to the London Independent, their fellow lefties across the big pond at CBS are not happy: CBS News staff grouse over ‘mediocre’ Tony Dokoupil getting ‘Evening News’ gig: ‘It’s an insult.’

Many staffers at CBS News are not thrilled with editor-in-chief Bari Weiss tapping Tony Dokoupil as the next anchor of the network’s flagship nightly news broadcast, describing the CBS Mornings host as a “mediocre straight white man” who only got the job because his views align with Weiss’ pro-Israel stance.

“It’s an insult to the storied news giants who came before him,” one CBS News reporter told The Independent.

Well, I certainly hope so, given how in thrall to the institutional left those “giants” were for about 70 years or so.

Flashback to October of last year: CBS Rebukes [Dokoupil] Over Tense Interview With Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

“FISHING”:

For those still harboring any doubts about those high-speed “fishing” boats in the Caribbean.

Posted at 4:51 pm by Stephen Green

JUST DON’T MENTION THE WAR:

Posted at 4:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY:

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

SPACE: This supermassive black hole flung out matter at 134 million mph: ‘On a scale almost too big to imagine.’

Astronomers using XRISM first spotted a brief but intense burst of X-ray radiation erupting from the area around the black hole. A few hours later, XRISM picked up the blast of wind unleashed from the same area racing outward at 134 million miles (216 million kilometers) per hour. XRISM’s instruments measured the speed and structure of the wind and pinpointed its source, while instruments on the XMM-Newton X-ray telescope helped measure the extent of the cosmic storm. Space Research Organization Netherlands astrophysicist Liyi Gu, who is another author of the study, and colleagues say the process that spawned the storm is not much different from the process that causes solar flares and coronal mass ejections from our own sun — just on a gargantuan scale.

“The winds around this black hole seem to have been created as the active galactic nucleus’s tangled magnetic field suddenly ‘untwisted,'” said Guainazzi.

The magnetic field around our sun is a restless thing. It’s constantly in motion, and sometimes its magnetic field lines snap and then reconnect. That violent severing and rejoining kicks off a solar flare, a short burst of radiation from the sun’s surface. The same process often flings a massive glob of plasma (electrically-charged gas particles) out into space.

But the supermassive black hole lurking at the core of NGC 3783 is 30 million times the mass of our humble sun, and the magnetic field writhing around is millions of times stronger, so when its lines snap and reconnect, the resulting flare is an eruption of almost unfathomable power.

Attempt no landings there.

Posted at 3:49 pm by Stephen Green

HOW TO DEFINE ACADEMIC FREEDOM? The UNC system faculty is–get this!–actually thinking through it. I know, I know, professors being professor-y seems old-fashioned these days, but I feel like Americans like it when higher ed sounds like a place where smart people consider things thoughtfully.

Posted at 3:45 pm by Robert Shibley

GAVIN MORTIMER: Yes, Europe’s civilization is being erased.

Last week the Trump administration expressed its fear that Europe faces “civilizational erasure.” Its concern was articulated in a 33-page National Security Strategy that outlined Donald Trump’s world view and how America will respond economically and militarily.

The sentence that caused the most reaction on the other side of the pond was the assertion that, if current trends continue, Europe will be “unrecognizable in 20 years or less.” Those trends are mass immigration and what conservative French commentators call the “Islamification” of Europe. If Europe doesn’t address these trends, the Trump administration predicts the continent’s “civilizational erasure.”

Germany’s Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul issued a tetchy response to the Security Strategy report, claiming his country does not need “outside advice.” Is he sure about that? Last year the chief of police in Berlin, Barbara Slowik, warned Jews and gays to hide their identity in the city’s “Arab neighborhoods.” In France, Jews have been leaving the country in large numbers: 60,000 between 2000 and 2020, which is more than ten percent of the French Jewish community. Since 2023, acts of anti-Semitism have soared by 300 percent, including the burning of synagogues and the beatings of rabbis.

The “civilizational erasure” is also to a large extent self-inflicted, and it is particularly noticeable at this time of year.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 2:47 pm by Stephen Green

IT IS TIME FOR US TO DO WHAT WE HAVE BEEN DOING. AND THAT TIME IS EVERY DAY:

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll