Author: Ophelia Benson

  • Guest post: One at a time please

    Originally a comment by Sackbut on The cuppa accords.

    If Muslim homophobia is just a result of never having shared tea with a gay person, that would be even more ridiculous than being homophobic because a non-existent god spoke to a deluded ‘prophet’ back in the days when no one had indoor plumbing…or religious freedom.

    Indeed. There are plenty of people, some of whom I’ve known, who make homophobic comments, or make racially insensitive statements, or express sexist views, despite having a family member or close friend or spouse who is a member of the maligned group. Certainly plenty of married men disparage women.

    I think part of the issue was well captured by an old Doonsebury comic about Ronald Reagan, in which Reagan was decrying “welfare queens”. An aide described a woman in a difficult situation who needed help, and Reagan said to go find this woman and help her. The aide said it wasn’t a specific woman, but a general class of people, and Reagan went back to complaining about the “welfare queens” again.

    That is, there is a difference between how people deal with one individual and how they deal with a whole class of people. It may be possible for this hypothetical Muslim man to sympathize with this one gay man over coffee/tea, but not necessarily to extend that to the general idea of gay men. The “cuppa” only goes so far.

  • Party time for the Heggies

    Meanwhile in even more Hegseth:

    Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s decision to bring six of his children on an official trip to France that began Friday is putting added strain on his personal protective detail amid heightened threats stemming from the Iran war, one current and two former employees of the agency responsible for his security said.

    Hegseth, whose wife, Jennifer Hegseth, also joined the trip, is in France to commemorate the 82nd anniversary of D-Day and honor the tens of thousands of American troops who stormed the beaches of Normandy on June 6, 1944.

    So why not make it a party? It’s such a jolly, festive occasion, right?

    “I’ve never, ever seen anything like that with a whole family going,” said one former official with the Army’s Criminal Investigative Division, or CID, the agency responsible for securing the defense secretary’s movements at home and abroad. Like others interviewed for this report, this person spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal.

    A spokesman for Hegseth said the defense secretary is covering the cost of his family’s travel but did not specify whether that includes the additional security personnel needed to protect his family.

    Nor does it deal with the whole jolly outing for the whole fam aspect. D-Day was not what you’d call festive. It was welcome, it was desperately needed, but it was not festive.

    A current Army official said that the increased costs stemming from Hegseth’s security needs have taken a toll on the agency and that, as a result, CID has struggled to provide adequate training for its agents and Army criminal investigations have been curtailed in some instances.

    “As a taxpayer, I’m concerned about it,” the official said. “But as a professional who always has to claw for money to do just basic missions, I just look at that cost and think, how much more of X, Y and Z could we have bought if not for that?”

    The Hegseths have taken their children on official trips in the past, as well, including one in October that included a stop in Hawaii. At the time, the Pentagon would not say whether the secretary reimbursed the government for the cost of having his family accompany him.

    Which means he didn’t.

  • Piggy man deletes all the women

    TV personality kicks all women off promotions list.

    After Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth cut nine Navy officers, including all the women, from a promotion list, several female officers say they see the unusual intervention as a sign that their careers now have a ceiling and worry for the future generation of female military leaders.

    The Navy had selected 31 sailors to promote from the rank of captain to one-star admiral, but Hegseth recently intervened to strike nine people from the list, including three women and two Black men, according to a defense official…

    As a result, the Navy is not promoting a single woman to the one-star admiral rank this year even though women make up about one-quarter of all Navy officers and nearly one-third of the sea service’s midgrade ranks, according to military data from 2024.

    Well give him time, he’ll kick all of them out.

    Sean Parnell, the Pentagon’s top spokesman, said on social media this week that “military promotions are given to those who have earned them” and that the Pentagon “will never consider the color of a service member’s skin or their gender as a factor in promotions.” The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request seeking further comment.

    The Navy’s process for choosing which officers to promote to the one-star rank has been relatively constant and transparent over the years. The service convenes a group of officers, called a promotion board, that examines the records of eligible officers and chooses the most qualified.

    The board that selected the initial slate of 31 officers for promotion was directed by then-Navy Secretary John Phelan, an appointee of President Donald Trump, to “recommend for promotion the best qualified officers within their respective competitive category.”

    Whatever. Hegseth is in charge and he considers women inferior, so there’s no more to be said.

    The full list of 31 people to be promoted was approved by Phelan, other Navy leaders and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Dan Caine, before it reached Hegseth, who chose to make the changes, the defense official said.

    While Hegseth is within his rights to intervene in the list, “it’s just not the norm” and its “a break from tradition” said Katherine Kuzminski, a researcher specializing in military recruiting and retention at the Center for New American Security think tank. She said that promotions historically have been seen “the services’ business.”

    I’m guessing that’s because they’ll know a lot more about it than the political appointee who perches on top of the department.

    Kuzminski noted that “this is a decision that’s not being made by the U.S. Navy — it’s being made by the secretary of defense” and said Hegseth’s growing interference in operational aspects of the military services such as promotions is creating “tension” about what “normal” will look like going forward.

    Because what normal will look like going forward is grim.

    In addition to pulling the recent promotions of three women to admiral, Hegseth shortly after he took office fired Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the service’s top officer and the first woman to hold the job. He never explained his rationale.

    Since then, he also has fired two other female three-star admirals without explanation.

    The explanation is very simple. He thinks women are inferior.

  • Eyes off the oceans

    Hide the information; that will solve the problem.

    The Trump administration has announced it will dismantle a $368 million deep-ocean monitoring system that provides critical data on the world’s oceans. The decision is sparking alarm among experts that US is taking eyes off the oceans at a dangerous time of record-breaking sea temperatures, an imminent super El Niño and fears a critical system of ocean currents could collapse, ushering in global chaos.

    Yeah yeah, blah blah, Trump knows what he’s doing so shut up.

    The Ocean Observatories Initiative, or OOI, was set up in 2016 and is made up of around 900 instruments in parts of the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans specially designed to withstand the immense pressure and corrosive saltiness of the ocean depths. Moored equipment and underwater gliders continuously collect real-time data allowing scientists to monitor the health of the ocean, including shifts in ocean chemistry and changes to the powerful currents that shape global weather and climate.

    The initiative was supposed to operate for three decades, but on May 21, the National Science Foundation, which funds the system, announced it would be “descoping” the network. Over the next 15 months, “in-water infrastructure” will be removed from arrays off the coasts of Alaska, Washington, Oregon and North Carolina and from the North Atlantic off southeast Greenland, the NSF said in a statement.

    The decision “aligns with NSF’s wider strategy of a nimbler approach to prioritize support for evolving scientific priorities and emerging technologies, as well as smart lifecycle management within its research infrastructure portfolio,” Mike England, head of media affairs at NSF, told CNN.

    Ew. That’s not scientific language, it’s corporate-speak. Nimble, smart, portfolio – spoken like a true head of media affairs during the Trump reign.

    The announcement comes as the Trump administration undoes climate protections and attempts to dismantle and defund climate science, at the same time as it pushes to start mining the deep sea for critical minerals. Scientists have expressed deep concerns that dismantling this ocean monitoring system undermines ocean science at a critical time, reduces US scientific leadership and is abandoning taxpayer-funded equipment already paid for and installed.

    But installed without Trump’s permission, or when he wasn’t looking, or without the appropriate level of gilding. One of those.

    “I’d call this penny wise, tons foolish,” said Rick Spinrad, an oceanographer who led the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration during the Biden administration. “OOI is proving its value for a range of economic and social benefits: from fisheries management to weather forecasting, to protection from coastal flooding … Where’s the analysis of return on investment that shows that eliminating OOI is in the taxpayers’ best interest?”

    Um…oh I know, it’s in that bathroom at Mar-a-Lago – nobody is allowed to go in there any more.

    The global oceans are enduring a period of huge change — some of which remains largely unexplained. Ocean temperatures have been off the charts in some places, fueling more intense hurricanes, driving sea level rise and causing mass coral bleaching.

    Sustained ocean monitoring is “how we detect emerging risks in real time,” said Helen Findlay, a biological oceanographer at the Plymouth Marine Laboratory in the UK. “Without them, we are effectively choosing to navigate an increasingly volatile ocean with diminishing visibility.”

    But that costs money that could be spent on bullfights in the Rose Garden.

    A huge area of concern is what the loss of monitoring will mean for our understanding of a crucial network of Atlantic Ocean currents called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC. Scientists have used data from the OOI to help try to map the AMOC’s fate.

    A growing body of research suggest the AMOC could be on course to collapse, potentially as early as this century, which would bring catastrophic consequences, including accelerated sea level rise along the US East Coast, a winter deep freeze in Europe and prolonged droughts across a swath of Africa.

    Get yourself a good strong raft. Get yourself a top quality down jacket. Stay away from Africa. Problems solved!

    Experts say the ripple effects of what is being lost will be wide. It will “create an irreparable blind spot for our country in predicting earthquakes, fishery health, storm forecasting, coastal flooding and more,” said Chris Robbins, associate director of scientific initiatives at Ocean Conservancy. “It just doesn’t make sense.”

    It makes trumpsense though.

  • Guest post: There is another possibility

    Originally a comment by The Whimster Gap on Gender-neutral childmaking.

    Yes, but maybe also no. Sorry: I’m going to play devil’s advocate again.

    Some of the drive towards gender-neutral newspeak might very well be based in a contempt for women qua women. Some might be based in a concern for the person, as separate from the body, or bare prudery about the body. This could be based in contempt for one sex or the other, but it doesn’t have to be.

    There is another possibility, though, which is less sinister: it gives the law a way to deal more easily with lesbian couples. Obviously, only one of those will be the genetic parent (at least for the time being, though who knows what gene-splicing tech will be available soon). The genetic parent will likely be the gestatrix.

    But the other woman will also be a parent in an entirely meaningful sense. She’d not be the father, though. Now, one might want to say that she’d be a kind of mother. But one might perfectly plausibly say that that’s not so – at least if one thinks that motherhood does have something to do with gestation. (Again, there may be disputes about that, but there is a use of the word “mother” in standard English that works that way; and one can’t easily try to proscribe that sense, or to prescribe a new one, without playing the same game as the genderloons.)

    And there might be a further reason not just to call them both mothers which doesn’t depend on that kind of position. Suppose our lesbian couple splits up, and it’s acrimonious. There’s a dispute about child custody. Here, the law might want to take into account which partner gestated the child: that might be one of its considerations, even if only as a tie-breaker.

    But why not talk about the gestational and the non-gestational mother in such cases? Well, because that doubles the work of the law. After all, straight couples sometimes split up, too; and in such cases, who is the mother and who is the father might matter when deciding what is best for the child, again, if only as a tie-breaker. So we could have one law that talks about gestating and non-gestating mothers, and another that talks about mothers and fathers. But these laws would be functionally identical. It’s therefore more efficient to cut the faff and talk about the non-gestating parent, because – bluntly – there’s really no significant difference between the non-gestating mother and the non-gestating father.

    (Well, OK: there is the genetic contribution. But it’s not clear why that carries much weight, and as I’ve noted, it might not be a watertight distinction in the near future. Or the father might be adoptive, and so be in essentially the same position as the non-gestating mother. Or whatever. There’s going to be some conceptual bleed-through whichever way we cut it.)

    So there is – arguably – a reason to distinguish in law between gestating and non-gestating parents that doesn’t rely on lunacy or misogyny. I’m not saying that that’s driving things here, but it’s still available.

  • One of the conditions

    You have got to be kidding.

    I’m so tired of constantly being shown how little women matter.

  • Guest post: Our time is not free for the taking

    Originally a hell no comment by Artymorty on He done been reflecting.

    Why are gay people the passive ones here? Are we all just sitting around waiting for someone to interact with us? Idle until someone walks up to us to “take” us for coffee? In video games, those are called NPCs — Non-Player Characters. They are the computer-generated and computer-controlled AI characters that populate the game world, which don’t have real-live human players behind them.

    An NPC is nothing more than a prop in the game’s world, whose only function is to fulfill the human players’ needs.

    Well, this is the real world, and I’m not a fucking NPC. My time is not free for the taking; I’m not just sitting around, waiting for a Muslim to approach and interrogate me about my gayness over a cuppa tea.

    In fact, I can’t stand when strangers treat me like the token gay.

    Muslims have plenty of resources to learn about homophobia and gay rights. The same as the rest of us. I’m not here to guide them through it. It’s almost as if they are the NPCs, completely lacking personal agency. Well, they can go right the fuck ahead and Here-Let-Me-Google-That-For-You their own way through it.

  • He done been reflecting

    Yes so that “Take a gay for a cuppa” thing is going really well for Harry.

    One, he’s so dim or sloppy or both that he can’t see even the most glaring typos, but more to the point, two, he’s surprised by the homophobic comments. Dude, what do you think Islam is? Just a few friendly suggestions? A close cousin to Quakerism?

    Glaring typo again, followed by idiocy. Go speek with the communnnniny, i.e. have a cup of tea with one Muslim man. Not a woman of course, Harry knows women are too stupid to talk to, plus her male relatives would throw him off a roof.

    Adam Sellers is right. Muslim bros get the cuddly treatment; uppity women are called names and banished to outer darkness.

    He’s quite the fool, this Harry.

  • The cuppa accords

    Communniny-thought at its most rigorous and powerful.

    See that? Having a cup of tea with one person=speak with the community.

    Dude, speaking with one person is speaking with one person. It’s not speaking with “the community” – whatever that is.

    One observer notes that he doesn’t give the same advice to himself when it comes to us pesky women who refuse to agree that men can be women.

    Yeah, Harry! Why don’t you invite us for a cuppa? One stubborn woman at a time?

  • Don’t accept the ludicrous rationalizations

    Jonathan Last at The Bulwark:

    Four days after Bari Weiss decapitated the leadership of 60 Minutes, she sent her new executive producer, Nick Bilton, to meet with the remaining staff. What happened will reverberate in journalism for years.

    In full view of the newsroom Scott Pelley took Bilton and Weiss (in absentia) to the woodshed.

    The best account is from Oliver Darcy at Status, who had a recording, and the short version is that Pelley:

    • Asked Bilton to explain the firings of correspondents and reporters.
      • Bilton absurdly tried to pretend that he didn’t know anything about these firings.
    • Observed that Bilton had only the most slender qualifications for the job of EP and that Weiss had no qualifications for running CBS News.

    That. That is the part that just completely baffles me. Since when do random outsiders get hired to run something as consequential as a major news organization? Trivial jobs like the presidency are up for grabs, but you’d think major news orgs would be more responsible and cautious and attentive to qualifications than the voting public.

    Weiss has attempted to do to journalism what Trump has done to American government: Transform an ancient, messy, imperfect—but basically functional—web of institutions into a corrupt gangland organization. To do so, both Weiss and Trump have depended on the opposition refusing to notice what they are doing and—when they do notice it—to accept ludicrous rationalizations.

    Ergo: Trump turns Elon Musk and DOGE loose on USAID and says it’s about saving money. Trump directs his attorney general to indict his enemies and says it’s about stopping the weaponization of government. Trump has ICE agents assault people and says it’s about deporting hardened criminals.

    Or: Weiss dismantles 60 Minutes and pretends it’s about getting more views on digital.

    Because she’s a whole lot less stupid than Trump, her rationalization is more credible. Evil, but credible.

    Here is why Scott Pelley’s stand was so important: He didn’t just refuse to be party to Bari Weiss’s lie—he stood up and exposed it. Even though she has the power and he does not.

    Remember Christopher Wray? He was the director of the FBI. Trump wanted to fire him. And Wray, instead of forcing the issue, meekly resigned his office and pretended that he was preserving the integrity of his institution.

    Followed by a long list of other examples. Surrender after surrender.

    Authoritarianism exploits politesse.

    The corrupter counts on the existing establishment normalizing her actions, hoping that they can work with her. She depends on people not noticing the plain reality and, if they do notice, politely looking the other way. Or quietly resigning. Not being unpleasant.

    Throughout the 60 Minutes meeting yesterday, one of Bari Weiss’s lieutenants begged Pelley to stop asking questions because, he insisted, Pelley was being “rude.” As if civility and obeisance were the same thing.

    Pelley would have none of it. He kept going. He said the things that were obviously true. He called things by right names.

    Politeness is not always the best approach. With people like Trump, it never is.

  • Guest post: Bad reasons rarely have just one effect

    Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on The women don’t matter party.

    This is a point I keep returning to: It is perfectly possible to reach the right conclusion for the wrong reasons. It might be tempting to think that the wrongness of the reasons doesn’t matter as long as people end up accepting the right facts and supporting the right causes. The problem with that intuition is that bad reasons rarely, if ever, have just one effect. The same kind of wrong reasons that gave us Jainism (supposedly a religion of total pacifism) also gave us Jihadism*. Aversion to technology, or anything perceived as unnatural, chemical**, artificial, manufactured, synthetic, or man-made, may seem benign enough when it leads people to reject fossil fuels (hardly unnatural, admittedly), not so much when it leads them to reject vaccines.

    * Even if the wrong reasons lead you to embrace the most harmless and (in terms of consequences) benign conclusions imaginable it will be absolutely no thanks to you as long as the only thing keeping you from crashing planes into buildings or blowing yourself up on a bus is that the coin-toss of faith happened to come up heads rather than tails.

    ** I still haven managed to get any of these people to provide an example of a non-chemical substance. I guess technically dark matter qualifies, but I’m pretty sure that’s not what they have in mind.

  • If only it were true

    Andy Borowitz tells us:

    PYONGYANG—Embattled CBS News chief Bari Weiss abruptly left the network on Wednesday to accept a new role as general manager of North Korea’s state-run media.

    “I was a big fan of her work at CBS,” said the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong Un. “I’ve spent years trying to purge all the news from our media and she pulled it off in a matter of months.”

    “Plus, her willingness to do David Ellison’s bidding proved she can debase herself to a leader who got his position purely from nepotism,” he added.

    But Weiss’s tenure at the North Korean network DLT (Dear Leader Television) got off to a rocky start as staffers quit en masse, complaining about her lack of television experience.

    That’s ok, she can do all their jobs herself.

  • Gender-neutral childmaking

    New York state did what now?

     A New York bill that replaces several traditional family-law terms with gender-neutral language is drawing backlash after passing both chambers of the state Legislature. The Assembly measure, sponsored by Assemblywoman Amy Paulin, lists its purpose as replacing terms such as father, mother and filiation in state law.

    But…but…but you need terms such as mother and father in state (and national and local and international) law. Of course you do. The words name a reality, and the reality the words name is an important one, to put it mildly. Also, by the way, the words are not obscene or pejorative or abusive of others so why in hell would you want to replace them with something less informative?

    The bill text changes language in parts of the Family Court Act and related statutes, using terms such as parentage, gestating parent and non-gestating parent in places where older law used paternity, mother and father. The Senate page for the bill shows it passed the Assembly in March and the Senate on June 2.

    Ahhhh I see – gestating parent. It’s just another installment of this fun project to stop talking about women – this project to erase women from public awareness altogether. Listen, have you guys thought of forcing us all to wear burqas?

  • When he snapped

    Trump verbally abuses a female journalist again.

    Donald Trump lashed out at a reporter in the Oval Office yesterday who asked him a question about his $1.8 billion fund that he had the Department of Justice approve to disburse money to people he believes were unfairly targeted by the criminal justice system under President Joe Biden, including the Capitol rioters of January 6, 2021.

    CNN’s Kaitlan Collins asked Trump whether the fund was “dead or is it on hold,” and Trump said he would check with his lawyers, then started rambling about how the fund is “a beautiful thing.”

    It’s a very ugly thing. It’s not “unfair” to arrest and prosecute people who make a violent attempt to overthrow an election.

    Collins tried to press him on her original question when he snapped, “Wait a minute. Be quiet!”

    He told her she should be “ashamed” of herself. He then turned to the room to talk about her as if she weren’t there and said, “She used to be a conservative from Alabama, can you believe it?”

    …

    That’s when Trump started to ramble about her and her employer, calling CNN “a very corrupt organization” and her “a corrupt reporter.”

    “Never smiles. She’s a young, beautiful woman, never smiles!” he said about Collins, not explaining why she should smile as he berated her for trying to get answers about the legal status of his slush fund.

    “I never see a smile on her face. I see her standing there with hatred in her eyes.”

    Women are supposed to smile radiantly at him at all times. He can snarl and bark and insult and sneer all he wants, because he has a dick, but women must smirk and simper and placate, because they have no dick.

    Anderson Cooper defended Collins, saying on CNN, “That’s the president of the United States, a nearly 80-year-old man who has no problem commenting on her physical appearance and telling her she needs to smile… That doesn’t happen to men. No one’s ever said that to me in an office setting.”

    “She was there like every other journalist doing her job, standing around with a bunch of nonsmiling men, by the way, all behind her,” Cooper added. “She gets singled out.”

    Because Trump thinks women are inferior and subordinate.

  • Just slap a coat of paint on it

    What a strange thing to do.

    When soccer fans converge on Dallas this month for World Cup games, the aesthetically inclined ones will encounter a city home to art museums, galleries, and public art. And yet, the city will be missing a major and longstanding public artwork, after a conservationist artist’s beloved mural was painted over in May.

    Florida-based artist Robert Wyland has filed a $25 million federal lawsuit against FIFA and the owners of the building where his mural had appeared for a quarter-century, who, he says, painted over Ocean Life (1999), one of a hundred murals he painted around the world to raise consciousness about marine pollution and conservation efforts. The eight-story-high, 17,000-square-foot mural showed endangered humpback whales and dolphins and other marine life. 

    Why would you do that?

    It’s all the more appalling given the ugliness of everything else in that photo. I count at least nine nasty-ugly buildings plus a nasty-ugly parking lot full of boring cars. The mural is the only pleasing thing to look at in that entire swath of urban landscape. Why destroy it to promote a temporary football contest?

  • The Women Don’t Matter Party

    The Green Party boasts of its campaign to re-bulldoze the rights of women.

    Legislative action must comply with every demand of entitled men at the expense of those worthless people known as women. That’s the Green Party’s take on this issue.

    What exactly is “green” about it?

  • To find a way back

    The struggle continues.

    That’s his version of course; Bari Weiss’s is bound to be very different.

    I still think Bari Weiss running CBS is like Trump running the US. Amateur Hour type of thing.

  • Queer pagan liminal healing practices

    Colin Wright gave us this gem:

    This person just got a PhD in human sexuality for a thesis about “How Queer Witches Heal Without Western Psychology” and why “magic” should be a “public health priority.”

    From the abstract:

    “What can queer pagan liminal healing practices teach therapists and other practitioners? Investigating the dichotomies of clinical versus spiritual and history versus present, as well as the inherent liminality between queer memory and queer futurity, aid us in understanding the many subaltern patterns of queer witch healing that are created in the absence of support from mental health fields of practice.”

    Liminal AND subaltern – that is deeply impressive.

    The dissertation was submitted to the – wait for it – California Institute of Integral Studies. Does that sound prestigiousy or what?

    So let’s take a look.

    CIIS Academics

    CIIS cultivates therapists, thought leaders, creatives, and activists through integral education — an embodied and whole-person approach to learning, teaching, and knowing.

    Oh I see, that kind of “academics”. Thought leaders and creatives and activists are all…how shall I put this…self-described. Anyone can call herself a thought leader or creative or activist, without any board of qualification asking to see her credentials. In short there are no criteria, no barriers, no requirements. Therapists are a bit more…liminal?…being as how some kinds of therapists do have to have credentials, but I think people are still free to declare themselves therapists without having to know anything.

    CIIS blends intellectual rigor with embodied practice, offering flexible formats and deeply relational learning environments. Whether online or in person, in community or in solitude, our students engage in transformative education that bridges theory and lived experience.

    That sounds nice, but it also sounds like hokum. Furthermore, it tells us absolutely nothing. It’s just “we are good” but in more words.

    It has a Department of Women’s Spirituality.

    Our Women’s Spirituality programs at CIIS are rooted in deep exploration as a means to create extraordinary change. 

    The Department of Women’s Spirituality envisions a new kind of scholarship, one that puts our interconnectedness at the center of all that we know and do. We offer a transdisciplinary, multicultural, and socially engaged approach to the study of gender and spirituality.  

    It could talk that kind of toe-curling guff and still be a genuine college of some sort…but…that kind of guff is bound to repel any genuine academics, so I have to wonder what the faculty is like.

    There’s one very odd thing about the photo on this page though. It shows a bunch of people on chairs in a big room that doesn’t resemble your basic classroom or seminar room. The odd part is: they are all women. It’s downright spooky.

    Actually, on second look, more than one very odd thing. There are no desks. No laptops. No books. They’re just sitting in a big circle, having a good laugh. Inside the circle there’s a weird Magical table of some sort with totems on it. I guess it’s an interconnectedness seminar.

  • Controversial efforts

    CNN predicts a lawsuit.

    CBS News fired veteran “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley on Tuesday, one day after he sharply criticized the newsmagazine’s new leadership in front of the staff.

    CBS said Pelley was terminated for cause, and industry analysts immediately predicted that Pelley might take legal action against the network.

    Here’s hoping.

    The firing is sure to trigger even more scrutiny of CBS News editor in chief Bari Weiss and her controversial efforts to overhaul the network news division.

    Controversial in part because she is such a random choice for CBS News editor in chief.

    The letter referenced Pelley’s decision to pointedly question and criticize Bilton in a staff-wide meeting on Monday morning. Pelley’s scathing remarks immediately leaked to outside news outlets and ignited a crisis inside CBS.

    In the meeting, Pelley pressed Bilton to explain last Thursday’s firings of top producers and two correspondents at the storied newsmagazine. Bilton, who was appointed on the same day, tried to reassure staff that he respected the program’s legacy while arguing that changes were necessary.

    And a random tech journalist is exactly the right person to make those changes!

    Pelley also accused Weiss, who was not in attendance, of “murdering” “60 Minutes.” When Bilton said Weiss loves the show, Pelley responded, “She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it, and she’s been doing exactly that.”

    Pelley’s charge had political overtones. President Donald Trump sued CBS in 2024 over a “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris, and even though legal experts said the suit was frivolous, Paramount’s previous ownership team decided to settle the case in July 2025 rather than defend the program in court.

    Furthermore, Paramount’s new ownership team has sought a close relationship with Trump and his administration, and some critics of CBS have asserted a link between corporate attempts to appease Trump and the current overhaul of “60 Minutes.” 

    Gosh, ya think??

  • It ain’t broke so we’ll break it

    The Bari Weiss 60 Minutes continues to scorch the earth it stands on.

    CBS News fired Scott Pelley on Tuesday, jettisoning one of the network’s best-known journalists in a clash over the future of “60 Minutes,” the country’s top-rated news program.

    Mr. Pelley, 68, a “60 Minutes” correspondent and a former anchor of “CBS Evening News,” joined the network in 1989. At a staff meeting on Monday, he accused the network’s editor in chief, Bari Weiss, of “murdering ‘60 Minutes,’” citing the ouster last week of the program’s leadership team and two on-air correspondents.

    “We have parted ways with Scott Pelley,” Nick Bilton, the tech journalist who was hired last week as the new “60 Minutes” executive producer, wrote in a memo to the show’s staff on Tuesday night.

    Why the flaming hell hire a tech journalist to run 60 Minutes?

    To ruin it, that’s why.

    The firing of Mr. Pelley is among the most consequential moves of Ms. Weiss’s rocky tenure at CBS. And it is almost certain to spike tensions that have coursed through the network for months.

    It also raises the stakes of Ms. Weiss’s surprising decision to replace the entire leadership team at “60 Minutes,” CBS News’s most successful franchise, and hire Mr. Bilton, who has no experience in broadcast TV, to oversee the show. The program’s viewership was up 9 percent this past season from a year prior, and the show is routinely among the nation’s highest-rated weekly broadcasts, according to Nielsen.

    It ain’t broke, so Bari Weiss is fixing it, i.e. tying it to a cannonball and throwing it overboard.

    At the staff meeting on Monday, which Ms. Weiss did not attend, Mr. Pelley repeatedly pressed Mr. Bilton about the network’s decision to fire Tanya Simon, the show’s previous executive producer. He also told Mr. Bilton that he had “slender” qualifications to oversee the show and that he would “never be welcome” at “60 Minutes.”

    In his letter to Mr. Pelley on Tuesday, Mr. Bilton expressed his deep frustration with those remarks.

    “You hijacked my first meeting with staff to disparage me, my qualifications, and my intentions with remarkable incivility and contempt,” Mr. Bilton wrote. He called it a “performative display of hostility” that “demonstrated that you have no interest in contributing to the future success of the show.”

    Me me me, my my my – but what was he doing there in the first place? Why hire a tech journalist to run a muckraking show like 60 Minutes? To kill it, that’s why.

    Ms. Weiss was appointed last year by CBS’s owner, the tech scion David Ellison, with a mandate to revamp the news division for the digital era. An opinion journalist with little experience in broadcast television, Ms. Weiss was also a longtime critic of the legacy media

    Tech tech tech, digital digital digital – all presentation, no substance. If it ain’t broke, don’t revamp it.