OPEN THREAD: Monday, Monday.
December 8, 2025
REALLY, REALLY FIRST-WAVE FEMINISM: Female gladiators shocked the ancient Roman world — but not for the reason you think.
YES, NEXT QUESTION? Were the late ’80s and early 1990s “the best time in recent years to be alive?”
RE: A Golden Age
Mrs. Dr. Publius and I were just discussing how awesome the mid-to-late ‘80s and early '90s were, in general, as the best time in recent years to be alive (full disclosure, for each of us this was our favorite time to be alive), and we were wondering if:
"Are…
— Cynical Publius (@CynicalPublius) December 8, 2025
ACE OF SPADES: Supreme Court Seems Likely To Rule That the President Has Control Over, Get This, the Executive Branch.
Related:
Repeat after me. There is no 4th branch of government. There is no such thing as an "independent" agency. https://t.co/bD0mUaqiTR
— unseen1 (@unseen1_unseen) December 8, 2025
ANDREW FERGUSON: Getting Intimate With Updike.
When he was a young writer—[John] Updike was astonishingly precocious, becoming a regular contributor to the New Yorker when he was barely out of Harvard—the protagonists of his fiction tended to be sex-obsessed young men. As he grew into middle age, the protagonists evolved into middle-aged men obsessed with sex. Entering his dotage, full of honors and years, he somehow conjured up older, materially successful protagonists who were obsessed with sex. One of the great American stylists, he nevertheless managed to write sex scenes that were unbearably cringe-making. The meticulous, magical gift for poetic physical description that led him (for instance) to describe a snowfall at night as “an immense whispering” was misapplied to the mysteries of sex. A year before his death in 2009, the British magazine Literary Review, famous for its annual Bad Sex in Fiction competition, simply threw up its hands and gave him a Lifetime Achievement Award.
And yet it would be a mistake to call him the horniest writer of his time. It was quite a time. And he had lots of competition—an entire class of phallocrats, as they were sometimes called. These were male novelists who were too old to have enjoyed the vanguard of the sexual revolution, led by youthful baby boomers, and who were making up for lost time. In the 1990s, the novelist David Foster Wallace lumped several of them together—Updike, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, Frederick Exley, Charles Bukowski—under the heading GMNs, the Great Male Narcissists. As Wallace pointed out, however, Updike was the one who evoked an especially intense mockery, at least among Wallace’s own contemporaries (Wallace was under 40 at the time, Updike in his 60s). One of Wallace’s feminist friends called Updike “a penis with a thesaurus,” a deathless tag that followed him to the grave.
Heh, indeed. It’s Andrew Ferguson, so definitely read the whole thing.
I’VE SEEN THE LOCKDOWNS AND THE DAMAGE DONE: COVID School Reopenings Quickly Cut Childhood Anxiety, Depression, and ADHD.
ROGER SIMON: Our AI Future Has Its Problems: Ask Freud.
OUT TOMORROW: Kurt Schlichter’s latest Kelly Turnbull novel, Panama Red.
TO BE FAIR, WHICH GRANNIES WERE WE SUPPOSED TO PULL OUT OF THEIR HOMES?
Charlie was killed almost 3 months ago. No Antifa raids. No major network arrests. No financial takedowns. But we have seen a lot more left-wing violence.
Dems were dragging grannies out of their homes almost immediately after J6 and going full CSI: Capitol Hill on anyone who… https://t.co/b0qqBJAN78
— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) December 8, 2025
Snark aside, the Right does need to punch back — but I’m not sure what role Congress has to play here.
DISPATCHES FROM THE BLUE ZONES: DC squatter takes over woman’s property after refusing to check out of Airbnb—police let them stay. “A homeowner in Washington, DC is now fighting to have her home back after a squatter took over the property she had rented as an Airbnb for 32 days, but has yet to leave after months. The alleged squatter, Shadija Romero, has been living in the home since February and police have said there is nothing they can do. The squatter allegedly tried to push the homeowner off a ladder.”
EVERYTHING IS ABSURD: FIFA ‘Pride Match’ Will Feature Two Countries That Ban Homosexuality.
TREAT THE PAIN: Shoulder-Heating-Pad-Heated-Wrap. #CommissionEarned
A GUT-CHECK FOR LEFTIST BIGOTRY: Lefties Can Now Wrestle With the Horror of Discovering Their Friends Own Guns in the Safety of a Chicago Theater.
IAN MCCOLLUM: ‘Why The M7 And 6.8x51mm Are Bad Ideas.’ “I’m not enough of an expert to know whether the new M7 U.S. battle rifle chambered in 6.8x51mm is a good idea or not. But I’m pretty sure Ian McCollum is such an expert, and he says it’s a bad idea.”
WELL, GOOD: Supreme Court seems likely to give Trump more power over agencies. Under the Constitution, there’s no such thing as an “Independent Agency.”
TO BE FAIR, THAT’S WHAT COMMIES DO: Commie Mamdani Defies Feds, Lies About Illegal Aliens.
STOCKING STUFFER: Toenail Clippers for Thick Toenails. #CommissionEarned
JUST IN TIME FOR CHRISTMAS: GLOCK Announces Three New Gen6 Pistols.
Having never written a review of any of the GLOCK pistols, this is a first for me. Not because I haven’t owned, shot or tried GLOCKs, but because I always considered it pretty much like evaluating a hammer. Whether you wanted a tack hammer, a claw hammer or a heavier framing hammer, they are, after all, hammers. They work if you swing them correctly.
That was always my impression of a GLOCK pistol. It was first, last and foremost, a fighting pistol. Like a Bic pen (Google it), it worked…first time, every time. And like a hammer, it offered functionality, but lacked the appeal that would get me queued up in a media line to get a turn running one of their guns.
After spending a day with the people of GLOCK, including their most senior leadership from the U.S. and Austria, I have a new respect for the company and found their new Gen6 pistols to be, for lack of a better word, appealing.
Heh.
I’ve owned Glocks for years, but “appealing” was a word that never once came to mind.
WE WILL ALL BENEFIT AS NEW TREATMENTS SPREAD: The billionaire war against death: What happens to the rest of us when the rich stop planning to die?
It may be bad news for estate-planning lawyers.
T. BECKET ADAMS: Have media forgotten what it means to be ‘sympathetic?’
The New York Times recently published what is clearly meant to be a tear-jerker, highlighting the supposed human cost of the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement efforts. Except that the paper of record tried to portray as a sympathetic character an illegal immigrant who killed a man. Amazingly, it doesn’t end there. Romeo Perez-Bravo has additional victims, including those who’ve suffered the consequences of his theft, drunk driving, and repeated illegal border crossings.
One such victim is American-born Dan Kluver, whose identity Perez-Bravo stole around 2009. Since then, the real Kluver has had to pay thousands of dollars in mistakenly assigned IRS fees. His wages have been garnished. Kluver has spent hundreds of hours trying to convince the IRS that the man they really want is the illegal immigrant who stole his identity. It gets worse. False charges of tax evasion are just the beginning.
The real Dan Kluver has also been sued in a wrongful-death lawsuit after Perez-Bravo struck and killed a 68-year-old American-born man in a vehicle accident. Perez-Bravo was “cleared of any wrongdoing” in the man’s death, according to the New York Times, but that’s no comfort for Kluver, whose name and identity are now forever linked to an accidental death in which he had no part.
If you need more proof that Perez-Bravo is a bad person, beyond the episode in which he refused to give up his stolen identity even after he killed a man, it’s worth noting that since first crossing illegally into the United States as a teenager, he has accumulated a “string of DUI convictions.” He was also deported in 2005, 2008, and 2009. Each time, he illegally crossed back into the U.S. and stole a different citizen’s identity. Perez-Bravo has since been arrested and charged with aggravated identity theft and false representation of a Social Security number. He faces a mandatory minimum sentence of two years in prison to be followed by deportation (again) to Guatemala.
Perez-Bravo is not a good person. He’s the antonym of “sympathetic.”
Yet, in its coverage of Kluver and the man who has made his life a living hell, this is what the Times chose as its headline: “Two Men. One Identity. They Both Paid the Price.”
The subhead is even worse: “Thousands of undocumented workers rely on fraudulent Social Security numbers. One of them belonged to Dan Kluver.” The story itself refers to identity theft as “a survival tactic used to pass background checks and get jobs.”
Surely, the New York Times is aware that identity theft isn’t like cancer or a wildfire caused by lightning, or some other random event. It involves agency, free will, and premeditated criminal intent. Yet its writers and editors seem to think you can slip on a banana peel and, by pure chance, end up using someone else’s Social Security number. Even more ridiculous is that Times staffers evidently believe that identity theft is a victimless crime, just a little bit of harmless truth-bending. Tell that to Kluver.
As the classic Babylon Bee headline from 2019 noted:
I assume this sort of moral equivalence is designed to keep the Grady Lady’s subscriber base happy (and thus not reaching for their pitchforks), which speaks volumes about the left’s collective mindset in 2025.
