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.

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.

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

CHECK OUT MY DISCUSSION ON THE JASON HARTMAN PODCAST: Men on Strike & Why it Matters to Real Estate with Helen Smith PhD:

You can check out my forthcoming book at Amazon here.

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

New @PuckNews: Tony Doukopil will be next anchor of CBS Evening News. @tonydokoupil

Bari Weiss & Tom Cibrowski expected to make announcement tomorrow.

— Dylan Byers (@DylanByers) December 9, 2025

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.

OVERSERVED: Royal Caribbean cruise passenger was served 33 drinks before he died in custody: lawsuit. Sorry, buddy, you’re no Oliver Reed.

“FISHING”:

I grew up fishing.

but what kind of fishing is this?pic.twitter.com/m7W9hU4JA2

— John LeFevre (@JohnLeFevre) December 9, 2025

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

FASTER, PLEASE: Going Hypersonic: A Look at the Record-setting X-15.

JUST DON’T MENTION THE WAR:

talking about free speech in america vs. europe is like "in germany you can be jailed for making fun of politicians," and europeans responding with a one-off story about a guy 'arrested for critiquing trump' who… actually planted a pipe bomb or threatened to shoot up a school.

— Mike Solana (@micsolana) December 9, 2025

TREAT THE PAIN: Shoulder-Heating-Pad-Heated-Wrap. #CommissionEarned

WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY:

“Actually, DEI was designed to benefit white men” is a headline that would never make it through the editorial process at any halfway-honest paper. Embarrassing. pic.twitter.com/dmN0aSVOUy

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@christopherrufo) December 5, 2025

THEY SHOULD BE: The Kids are Alright: Teens May Be the Cohort Most Distrustful of Mass Media.

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.

CONSEQUENCES? WHAT’S THAT? Oregon Nurse Who Cheered On Shiri Bibas’s Death Faces No Punishment; Renewed RN License Last Month.

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.

STAY STRONG: Toniiq NAD+ Supplement 1500mg. #CommissionEarned

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.

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

Truly, she is the Alben W. Barkley of our time https://t.co/wZLXdV8w63

— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) December 9, 2025

I THOUGHT THEY FOUGHT A WAR TO KEEP THE GERMAN HAIRY SNAILS OUT: German hairy snails are disappearing from London’s River Thames.

DON’T GET COCKY: Joe Concha makes bleak prediction for ‘unserious candidate’ Jasmine Crockett.

DEFINE “SMARTER”: Spending on AI Infrastructure Could Top $1 Trillion in 2026. Will All This Cash Make AI ‘Smarter’?

WELL: If you want that tattoo erased it’s going to hurt and it’s going to cost you.

IT SEEMS LIKE MOST PEOPLE ARE, EXCEPT FOR A MAJORITY OF NYC VOTERS: NYC Mayor Adams Dubious of Mamdani ‘Idealism’ on Homeless.

JIM GERAGHTY: Hollywood Only Has Itself to Blame for Industry Woes.

Speaking of superhero blockbusters, we should take a moment to stare in amazement at how Disney has managed to take not one but two of the all-time most popular franchises, a pair of toy- and merchandise-selling golden geese, and run both of them into the ground. There was a time not that long ago — 2019, when Marvel’s Avengers: Endgame was released — when it looked like the Marvel superhero movies and the Star Wars films would make billions, year after year, for the foreseeable future.

Chalk it up to the “M-She-U,” or the retirement of popular characters and actors, or the rapid proliferation of Marvel shows on Disney Plus, but the magic is gone; there’s nowhere near the sense of a Marvel movie being a must-see as there was before the Covid-19 interruption.

Your mileage may vary, but I actually feel like Marvel has enjoyed a comeback in quality this year with Thunderbolts and The Fantastic Four: First Steps. By the standards of other movies, they did okay; Thunderbolts is the 12th highest-grossing movie of 2025 with $190 million in the domestic box office, and Fantastic Four ranks 7th at $274 million. But by the standards of previous Marvel movies, they’re flops.

Star Wars hasn’t released a movie in theaters since before the pandemic. In May, we will get The Mandalorian and Grogu, featuring characters from a Disney Plus television show that was beloved by fans for about two seasons, then bizarrely careened off the rails in its third. Again, your mileage may vary, but the trailer for the forthcoming movie looks astonishingly “meh” for a Star Wars movie.

Finally, this complaint is the most nebulous, but I feel like the entire storytelling culture of Hollywood’s creative class is broken. This tweet from Riley Hale spoke to me:

Hollywood removed the hero’s journey, masculinity, redemption, sacrifice, and beauty standards in 2025, then wondered why global box office fell 18 percent and no film cracked $1 billion. . . . The same industry that spent a decade lecturing audiences on “problematic” tropes now releases 400 movies a year that nobody wants to watch. They didn’t just kill the blockbuster. They sterilized the entire reason humans ever told stories in the first place.

I notice that Amazon’s Reacher was one of the biggest streaming hits of the year, and in a lot of ways, it’s an “old-fashioned” show. A big burly hero, played with a lot of charm by Alan Ritchson, gets ensnared in a mystery and constantly runs into thugs and villains who look at the 6’3”, 240-pound former military police investigator Jack Reacher and think, “Oh yeah, I can take this guy in a fistfight.” As you can imagine, it almost never goes well for them.

So, yes, Hollywood and the movie business have a lot of problems. But one of the biggest and most glaring ones is that they stopped making movies that people enjoy watching.

Marvel and Star Wars at Disney, and Star Trek at Paramount, are reminders of how badly the producers of these originally male-oriented franchises absolutely hate their core audiences with a white-hot passion…

…And then they feign cluelessness when the feeling is mutual:

IT’S A BAD IDEA: A massive, Chinese-backed port could push the Amazon Rainforest over the edge.