August 1, 2025

July 31, 2025

OPEN THREAD: Because I love you and want you to be happy.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds 1433

21st CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: I co-parent with ChatGPT — I love turning off my brain and letting AI help raise my child.

She’s tech-ing a break from burnout.

Even with an in-person partner, Lilian Schmidt was sick of shouldering the mental load of motherhood.

So, she’s trained ChatGPT to become a second mommy — tasking it to draft shopping lists, create meal plans, plan birthdays and vacations, and revolutionize bedtime.

“I’ve built my own bot to be our co-parent,” Schmidt, 33, a corporate brand strategist, based in Zurich, Switzerland, told SWNS.

“I use it to make me a better mom,” bragged the blond, who heavily leans on artificial intelligence for help raising and wrangling her three-year-old daughter. “I’d never go back.”

And why would she? It’s a parenting throuple that really clicks.

Hey, it’s all fun and games until Grok goes MechaHitler and orders the kid off to the Bund deutscher Arbeiterjugend.

Posted at 8:45 pm by Ed Driscoll 77

SHE WAS MURDERED IN MIDTOWN MANHATTAN. THE INTERNET CELEBRATED IT:

My initial reaction was relief.” That’s what Penny, a 30-year-old sociologist from Tampa, Florida, told me about seeing the news of Blackstone real estate executive Wesley LePatner’s killing in the lobby of a Manhattan office building.

“Her death, as a valuable instrument to such evil corporations, is nothing to mourn. Thousands of Americans die every day from situations that her company exacerbates, such as the affordable housing crisis.”

I reached out to Penny via direct message on Reddit, after I found one of her comments about the news of LePatner’s murder. Her comment made a joke about the amount of money the victim spends on her children’s private school. When I wrote to Penny directly, asking how she made sense of the news, she got back to me right away.

In no time at all after shooter Shane Tamura went on a rampage Monday, killing four innocent people before turning the gun on himself, the shock and horror over what happened competed with a frenzy of social media posts, including Penny’s, that celebrated LePatner’s death on mainstream sites from YouTube to Reddit to Instagram.

I saw dozens of them that night, and spent hours messaging back and forth with the people who wrote things like “I’m shocked it’s not more common,” and “Rest in Piss.”

As Ed Morrissey wrote in April after Taylor Lorenz went full fangirl on Luigi Mangione, “The problem with Che Fever is that it sets the incentives to deliver on that prophecy. That’s why we’re seeing an explosion in violence, such as the arson at Josh Shapiro’s governor’s mansion, assassination attempts on Donald Trump, attacks on Tesla owners and dealers, and the thuggery of Hamasniks on college campuses. The Taylor Lorenzes of the media use them to promote La Causa and hail the violent nutcases as brave soldiers for change. And that’s because the moral compasses of the Taylor Lorenzes of the media skew toward cowardly backshooters and Molotov-cocktail throwers as ‘morally good,’ whether they admit to it or not.”

Once again, America’s Newspaper of Record is doing straight-up reportage:

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll 103

BENJAMIN WEINGARTEN: Supreme Court Killed Universal Injunctions in Name Only.

On June 27, the Supreme Court handed President Donald Trump what he hailed as a “GIANT WIN,” finding that lower courts had “likely” overstepped in ordering universal injunctions blocking many of the president’s policies.

While the Court’s 6-3 opinion in Trump v. CASA appeared to disarm Trump’s opponents of perhaps their most potent legal weapon, his adversaries had other ideas.

In the weeks since, Trump’s challengers have seized on the ruling’s openings – especially the use of class-action suits in which a handful of plaintiffs may allege harm and seek relief on behalf of all similarly situated parties – to continue leveraging lower court judges to block the president’s orders.

Norm Eisen, one of the architects of a so-called “rule of law and shock and awe” strategy to blanket the administration with dozens of lawsuits, quickly helped bring a case before New Hampshire’s district court. The suit aimed to enjoin the president’s ban on birthright citizenship not only with respect to five named plaintiffs, but for “a nationwide class of all other persons similarly situated.”

On July 3, the district court ruled in the plaintiffs’ favor in that case, over the Trump administration’s objections. Other plaintiffs prevailed in a separate case in the D.C. District Court challenging the president’s crackdown on asylum claims at the southern border.

Scholars on both sides of the universal injunctions issue agree that CASA’s impact may be limited.

Stanford Law Professor Mila Sohoni, a supporter of universal injunctions, wrote in CASA’s aftermath that “the court may have in the end accomplished little beyond handing the executive branch a litigation victory.”

Josh Blackman, a constitutional law professor at South Texas College of Law Houston, who has opposed universal injunctions in congressional testimony, told RealClearInvestigations, “I’m not sure how much CASA will actually check the ability of lower courts to halt presidential policies.”

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll 44

HEH:

Related:

Posted at 8:13 pm by Glenn Reynolds 24

MORE LIKE THIS PLEASE: This Virus Doesn’t Make You Sick. It Makes You Stronger. “CPMV also offers a unique advantage as a cost-effective immunotherapy. Unlike many other therapies that require complex and costly manufacturing, CPMV can be produced using molecular farming. ‘It can be grown in plants using sunlight, soil, and water,’ Omole said.”

Posted at 7:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds 61

ANALYSIS: TRUE.

To be fair, Starmer and Macron are likely terrified of their local Muslim populations — and probably not without reason.

Posted at 5:11 pm by Stephen Green 373

MAD MEN SHOULD ONLY CARE ABOUT WHAT SELLS: Has Mad Ave Gone Anti-Woke?

You can skip the rant, but I do want to address the label at the top: “Dunkin’ Donuts learned nothing from AE, Sweeney[.]” Fact check: pants on fire. Dunkin’ Donuts took the Sydney Sweeney lesson to heart, or at least its advertisers did.

And what is that lesson? It’s pretty simple: Normal people are normal. They respond to normal stimuli, such as attractive young women and men in advertising pitches. They don’t mind looking at “kings of summer” or svelte starlets in TV and print spots. In fact, normal people tend to prefer it.

Mainly, though, normal people don’t like being lectured about social-justice causes in sales pitches, or in other forms of entertainment. They have grown sick and tired of it, in fact, so much so that they are responding very enthusiastically to advertising campaigns that either eschew it, as Sweeney’s jeans campaign does, or deliberately provoke the Lefty lecture circuit, as Dunkin’ Donuts is doing. The days of Bud Light and other woke products scolding their customers is over, and ad companies have figured that out.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 4:53 pm by Stephen Green 109

DISPATCHES FROM THE HOUSE OF STEPHANOPOULOS: Ex-ABC News reporter admits employer biased against Trump due to lack of ‘viewpoint diversity.’

“Let’s talk about bias. I worked at ABC News for almost 28 years, and I’m proud to say that,” [Terry] Moran wrote on his Substack on Tuesday. “But: Were we biased? Yes. Almost inadvertently, I’d say. ABC News has the same problem so many leading cultural institutions do in America: A lack of viewpoint diversity.”

Moran explained that ABC News was run by “White men” when he joined the network, but the Disney-owned news organization made efforts to increase diversity to change the company “for the better.”

“But there was one way ABC did not change and did not diversify. It is no secret. There are hardly any people who supported Donald Trump at ABC News,” Moran wrote.

“And this is bound to impact coverage, not so much out of malevolent bias… but more out of what is a kind of deafness,” Moran continued. “The old news divisions don’t hear many of the voices of the country, because those voices aren’t in the newsroom. Yes, news teams go out with a microphone and a camera and accost people at Trump rallies; but to me that often comes off as weirdly anthropological and inaccurate, kind of like trying to understand nature by visiting a zoo.”

So ABC has more diversity in terms of skin color, but no ideological diversity. And the same can be said for all three broadcast networks. Cal Thomas asked Leslie Stahl in 2003, “Can you name a conservative journalist at CBS News?” She hemmed and hawed but of course couldn’t answer the question. Last year, NBC and MSNBC anchors revolted en masse when management tried to bring in former RNC chairwoman Ronna McDaniel as an analyst. Only Republicans who never vote for Republicans are allowed at the Peacock Network:

And of course, everything Moran describes above predates Trump’s arrival onto the American political scene for half a century.

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll 63