It happens nearly every time. I’ll be reading a short story, let’s say, enjoying myself, lost in the experience—when suddenly, there it is: the gratuitous and mean-spirited and out-of-context slap at Bush, or at those who support him. It’s not as though the story is even tangentially about politics, either; it can be about anything at all, it doesn’t really matter.

The Bush-dissing will be thrown in when you least expect it, just to let the reader know—well, to let the reader know what, exactly? To let the reader know that the author is hip, kindly, intelligent, moral—oh, just about everything a person ought to be. And that the reader must of course be a member of the club, too—not one of those Others, the warmongers, the selfish and stupid and demonized people who happen to have voted for Bush.

Back when I was one of the gang, too, back when I was in with the in crowd (“if it’s square, we ain’t there”), did I notice when authors dragged in their political credentials from left field? Or perhaps it wasn’t quite as commonplace back then for them to do so?

At any rate, now it seems positively obligatory. I’m reading along, sunk deep within the story, bonding with the characters—and then, suddenly, it’s as though the author has reached a hand out of the pages of the magazine (OK, I’ll confess, sometimes it’s the New Yorker—yes, I still read it for the fiction, just as some people claim they read Playboy for the interviews) and slapped me across the face.

Authors, do you really want to do this? Because, with a single sentence, you’ve managed to alienate and offend (not to mention insult) up to half your audience.

Well, it’s only gotten worse since then. Sometimes it works out for the artist; after all, one-half of the population of the US is still a lot of people. Plus, if the person is offering something of value – is a good singer or actor or writer – people on the opposite side of the political divide may decide to still buy their product rather than boycott them. But what of someone like Jimmy Kimball? Unfunny, unentertaining; all he’s got is dissing Trump and even the way he does that isn’t the least bit clever. Plus, he seems to consider himself some sort of hero.

Therefore, should anyone be surprised at his perhaps-pending cancellation? Of course not. But Jimmy seems to think he’s being persecuted, poor thing:

The “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” host opened up in a new interview with Vulture about the future of the genre following the cancellation of Stephen Colbert‘s “Late Show” on CBS and his own run-ins with Trump, including his suspension following comments made about the death of Charlie Kirk.

“I feel a little bit defeated about it,” Kimmel told Vulture after Colbert’s final episode aired on May 21. “In a lot of ways, I feel like I’m looking at my own future.”

Kimmel went on to say he was assured by the network that his show is still profitable, and yet they only renewed him for a year. Plus:

Asked if he has thought about retirement, Kimmel said he’s still unsure when his time will come. “It’s important to me to be responsible,” he said. “I know I could go out in a blaze of glory and get a lot of applause for it, but it would be a very selfish thing to do.”

That is, if he isn’t ousted first. Trump has repeatedly called for Kimmel to be fired, most recently when he made a joke about Melania Trump having a “glow like an expectant widow.” In that case and that of Kirk, Kimmel said he “had the truth on my side as a defense. What if I actually do do something wrong? I mean, that’s inevitable.”

Of the president, Kimmel said: “I don’t love him. I don’t hate him, either. I feel sorry for him. He obviously didn’t get hugged a lot.”

Sure thing, Jimmy; you don’t hate Trump at all. And that remark about not being hugged is about the typical level of Kimmel’s wit.

Makes one yearn – positively yearn – for the days of Johnny Carson, who must have had his political preferences but kept them to himself while being genuinely entertaining. But that was a long long time ago.

The post JImmy Kimmel – the art of offending at least half of your potential audience appeared first on The New Neo.

Afterwards, a line from Shakespeare kept coming to me: “Oh reason not the need.” I couldn’t recall in which play it appeared. Perhaps The Merchant of Venice? So it was time to look it up, and it’s King Lear.

Here’s the whole speech:

O, reason not the need: our basest beggars
Are in the poorest thing superfluous:
Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man’s life’s as cheap as beast’s: thou art a lady;
If only to go warm were gorgeous,
Why, nature needs not what thou gorgeous wear’st,
Which scarcely keeps thee warm. But, for true need,–
You heavens, give me that patience, patience I need!
You see me here, you gods, a poor old man,
As full of grief as age; wretched in both!
If it be you that stir these daughters’ hearts
Against their father, fool me not so much
To bear it tamely; touch me with noble anger,
And let not women’s weapons, water-drops,
Stain my man’s cheeks! No, you unnatural hags,
I will have such revenges on you both,
That all the world shall–I will do such things,–
What they are, yet I know not: but they shall be
The terrors of the earth. You think I’ll weep
No, I’ll not weep:
I have full cause of weeping; but this heart
Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws,
Or ere I’ll weep. O fool, I shall go mad!

I could use more patience.

The post What Shakespeare had to say about need appeared first on The New Neo.

Composer Philip Glass announced Tuesday that he is withdrawing his symphony from the Kennedy Center, pointing to the arts center’s values and leadership.

“After thoughtful consideration, I have decided to withdraw my Symphony No. 15 ‘Lincoln’ from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts,” Glass announced in a statement posted to X.

“Symphony No. 15 is a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, and the values of the Kennedy Center today are in direct conflict with the message of the Symphony,” he continued. “Therefore, I feel an obligation to withdraw this Symphony premiere from the Kennedy Center under its current leadership.”

Really? I was unaware of Trump’s support for slavery, or his advocacy of the South’s defiance of the federal government (seems the opposite, actually).

And I wonder whether Glass is aware that Lincoln met with many accusations similar to those against Trump: that he was a tyrant who didn’t respect the law. For example:

“What shall we call him? Coward, assassin, savage, murderer of women and babies? Or shall we consider them all as embodied in the word fiend, and call him Lincoln, the Fiend?”

So wrote Virginia’s Richmond Enquirer of the President of the U.S. in 1862. It was not unusual. Caught up in the passions of the era, the Northern Copperhead papers no less than the Southern press called Abraham Lincoln names that for venomous variety have been unsurpassed before or since in editorial tirades against a President—”The Ape,” “Simple Susan,” “Kentucky Mule,” “Illinois Beast,” “traitor,” “lowborn, despicable tyrant,” “cringing, crawling creature.” …

Thus the Illinois State Register (Springfield), taking Lincoln to task for his “assumed clownishness,” charged that his “buffoonery convinces the mind of no man, and is utterly lost on the majority of his audience.” The Chicago Times, one of his angriest foes, sneered that “he cannot speak five grammatical sentences in succession.” One of Lincoln’s greatest speeches, the second inaugural (“with malice toward none”) was dismissed by the Times as “slipshod” and “puerile.” …

Of his assassination, the Dallas Herald wrote: “God almighty ordered this event.” Houston’s Tri-Weekly Telegraph crowed: “From now until God’s judgment day, the minds of men will not cease to thrill at the killing of Abraham Lincoln.”

Then again, Philip Glass actually is a loaf of bread. If you’re unfamiliar with Glass’s work, the following parody may not make sense. It’s from a favorite play (or rather, series of short plays) of mine by David Ives, called All In the Timing:

The post Philip Glass pulls out of Kennedy Center – and buys a loaf of bread appeared first on The New Neo.

But it’s perfectly okay for networks to drop shows if they don’t like the content and/or if they’re losing money. Kimmel’s show was already in big financial trouble, and was probably not going to be renewed. What’s more, by the time FCC head Carr made his statements (and I wish he hadn’t made them, because they were unnecessary under the circumstances and also gave the left ammunition for their accusations), the affiliates were already objecting to what Kimmel had said and saying they’d drop him, which put even more financial pressure on ABC to get rid of him even before his contract was up.

Plus, the FCC is actually charged with regulating networks – and there’s a law (unenforced for decades) about equal time for political speech. Some information on that:

Mollie and Mark Hemingway made this point: The federal government really does have a statutory regulatory power over broadcast networks. The airwaves are regulated by the government because we can’t just have six stations all attempting to broadcast on the same frequency in the same area, or else they’d all interfere with each other. So the federal government assigns these valuable spectrum rights to companies, but with restrictions and requirements. One is equal time, and Brenden Carr says he’s going to enforce that requirement.

More here [emphasis mine]:

… Carr makes a very important distinction about jurisdiction. The FCC issues licenses for broadcasters only pursuant to the Communications Act of 1934 and other legislation, ie, those whose signal goes out over the public airwaves. As Carr notes (and as I noted briefly last night), the FCC does not have jurisdiction over cable channels such as Fox News Channel, CNN, MSNBC, or others. The FCC has absolutely nothing to do with online outlets either, nor newspapers. …

Most of the offensive material they would normally police has moved to cable or the Internet. The irony of this is that the FCC has largely stood down while the Biden administration essentially created its own OfCom [censorship operation] at the State Department and HHS, funding “misinformation” policing that targeted mainly the online and cable-channel markets. The federal government created censorship regimes on platforms where they had no jurisdiction, while allowing broadcasters to exploit government-provided monopolies with carte blanche on blatantly false content with clear partisan and malicious intent.

Now, one can argue that the FCC really should use a more laissez-faire approach to enforcing the “public interest” clause. However, one can’t argue that the authority doesn’t exist and hasn’t been enforced in the past.

The Biden administration pressured social media to censor the right and statements questioning the administration’s COVID policies, as Mark Zuckerberg has testified.

As the headline to this article says:

So Now the Left Is Against Government Extortion to Suppress Speech?
Congratulations, Democrats. You’re now living in the world you created.

The equal time requirement was never repealed, just ignored.

Also, we have this:

The Commission’s [FCC’s] prohibition against the broadcast of hoaxes is set forth at Section 73.1217 of the Commission’s rules, 47 C.F.R. § 73.1217. This rule prohibits broadcast licensees or permittees from broadcasting false information concerning a crime or a catastrophe if:
— the licensee knows this information is false;
— it is foreseeable that broadcast of the information will cause substantial public harm; and
— broadcast of the information does in fact directly cause substantial public harm.

Kimmel was giving out false information about a crime, and that information could cause public harm (although it doesn’t seem to have actually caused harm in any provable way). You’d also have to prove that Kimmel knew it was false, which could be difficult. So I don’t think this rule would apply.

More here:

First, a summary of what happened. Kimmel during his show’s opening monologue on September 15, 2025 blatantly lied, claiming that Kirk’s murderer was a conservative and part of Trump’s MAGA movement. Not only was this statement fundamentally untrue, based all the available evidence, it was an evil slander against the millions of people who voted for Donald Trump.

The uproar against Kimmel was immediate and gigantic. Within hours local affiliates told ABC they would not air Jimmy Kimmel Live!. FCC chairman Brendan Carr said that if ABC did not take action to publicly correct the record its FCC license could be revoked.

It is important to point out that Kimmel did not lose his job because of government action — though that action was threatened. He got fired because numerous ABC affiliate stations told the network that they would no longer air his show. These local stations decided they had had enough of this slander culture. It had to stop.

ABC was thus forced to take action. It knew that if it didn’t address the concerns of its local affiliates, its entire network could collapse.

Nor is Kimmel’s removal an unjustified action similar to the hundreds of blacklisting cases I have documented since 2020. Kimmel wasn’t fired because he stated an opinion based on reasonable facts — the typical situation when conservatives were blacklisted for the past decade. He was fired for spreading a lie about current events that could be easily verified to be false in only a few seconds of research on line. And the lie was expressly designed to defame Kimmel’s political opponents in the most vile manner.

However, Kimmel didn’t actually say point blank that the killer was MAGA. He said this: “The MAGA Gang (is) desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”

Kimmel was strongly implying the killer is MAGA and that saying the killer is anything other than MAGA is false. The implicit assumption – no other interpretation makes sense – is that of course the killer is MAGA. That is something for which there is zero evidence and goes against everything police and FBI had said at that point and thereafter. But he may have phrased it that way in an attempt to avoid exactly what happened.

The post Kimmel, TV, and government coercion appeared first on The New Neo.

Here’s the agreement reached in his lawsuit against CBS for deceptively editing a Kamala Harris interview to make her look better:

Paramount Global and CBS agreed on Tuesday to pay President Donald Trump a sum that could reach north of $30 million to settle the president’s election interference lawsuit against the network.

Trump will receive $16 million upfront. This will cover legal fees, costs of the case, and contributions to his future presidential library or charitable causes, to be determined at Trump’s discretion.

There is an anticipation that there will be another allocation in the mid-eight figures set aside for advertisements, public service announcements, or other similar transmissions, in support of conservative causes by the network in the future, Fox News Digital has learned.

I suspect that’s nothing much to CBS. But still, it’s a victory for Trump. And apparently they are also agreeing that in the future they will post entire transcripts for interviews with presidential candidates.

More:

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and eight Democratic colleagues sent a letter to Redstone in May asking her not to settle the lawsuit against CBS News, which they called an “attack on the First Amendment.” They called the potential settlement a “grave mistake” and “a blatant attempt to intimidate the media and those who speak out against him, President Trump.”

The letter also stated “presidents do not get to punish or censor the media for criticizing them” in the United States.

Nobody censored anyone – except for CBS, which censored (that is, made editorial decisions that were somewhat deceptive) the words of Kamala Harris. Trump wanted full disclosure of her words; how is that censorship? And he used a courtroom to duke it out with CBS. Of course, Trump has a lot of power as president. But CBS has a lot of power as a major network, and it has used that power over and over to put its finger on the political scales in favor of the left.

The post CBS pays Trump in settlement of biased-editing lawsuit appeared first on The New Neo.

It’s so over.

Google Veo 3 AI does speech and sound for its video generation now.

Not sure how I feel about this. pic.twitter.com/C0voPsrDY6

— Grummz (@Grummz) May 21, 2025

The possible ramifications are huge, and not just (as is obvious) for the movie business. For video proof of truth itself. Some of this change has already happened, but there’s much more to come.

From the replies to that tweet:

So basically we can’t trust anything from a screen or a speaker ever again.

Also:

I don’t know man it looks like it doesn’t have a soul.

Every now and then I play a game on my phone. Those things are rife with AI ads featuring “people” who look 99.99% like real people but somehow don’t quite make it. There’s a very slight disconnect among gestures, expressions, and speech, as well as a slight offness (very slight) to the faces. But how long will that last before they perfect it?

Will there always be a sort of Turing test for AI-generated content? Or will they finally get the “soul” thing right?

The post AI: is it real or is it Memorex? appeared first on The New Neo.

Ditto car advertisements. I just didn’t pay attention – except for one ad campaign that I remember vividly.

The year was 1957 and the ad was for Plymouth, the make of car my mother drove. The musical pitch was “Suddenly, it’s 1960!” The reason this made such an impression on me had little to do with the car and everything to do with the slogan. After all, as far as I was concerned, it had been the 1950s forever. I didn’t recall any other decade. 1960 seemed impossibly futuristic, like a science fiction dream. The ad opened my eyes to the fact that the 60s were coming, although in the far-distant three-years-away future.

Last night it occurred to me that I could probably find some of these ads on YouTube. Sure enough, this came up:

I have to admit it’s a sharp-looking car.

The post Suddenly, it’s 1960! appeared first on The New Neo.

We have all sorts of advertisements for medical installations big and small competing for our attention (and money), but even worse we have virtually non-stop advertising for prescription drugs on television. Indeed they seem to dominate the medium appearing on cable and network alike to the degree that sometimes you wonder if there is anything else. …

The United States and New Zealand are the only countries where prescription drug ads are legal on television. …

We live in a society where pharmaceutical corporations hypnotize us into thinking there is a pill for everything. They are doing the same to the medical community on a daily basis for mutual gain. Too many doctors have become prisoners of both the pharmaceutical companies and themselves, leaning expectantly on lobbyists for the latest cure-alls. It’s a toxic syndrome that must be stopped.

Here’s some of the history:

Such promotion [of prescription drugs on TV] was banned until 1997, when the FDA reluctantly allowed pharmaceutical ads on TV, so long as they gave an accurate accounting of a medicine’s true benefits and risks, including a list of potential side effects.

There’s also this:

Direct-to-consumer advertising is really intended for consumers. As a primary care physician, people certainly come into my office with advertisements that they’ve printed off the internet or that they remember seeing during the football game the previous Sunday and say, “What about this drug?” Studies show that when patients come in and ask their physicians about particular drugs, they’re more likely to get prescriptions for those drugs. Doctors of course also watch TV, but the pharmaceutical industry spends much more money advertising its drugs directly to physicians, through visits to their offices, sponsorship of continuing medical education, support of professional society meetings, consultancies, and the like. Actually, the amount of money that pharmaceutical companies spend on advertising to physicians is far higher than the amount spent on direct-to-consumer advertising because physicians are the ones writing the prescriptions.

Roger Simon’s article starts this way:

My father was a doctor and when I was a kid in the 1950s I recall asking him why he didn’t advertise. Medicine was his business, wasn’t it? Normally responsive to my questions, he was taken aback, wondering how I would even countenance such a thing. The honorable medical profession was above that. They weren’t a bag of potato chips or the latest Chevrolet.

Well, drug companies aren’t physicians, but back then they didn’t advertise either – except in medical journals. I’m not sure when the latter started, but my father-in-law was a doctor and I recall in the 1970s seeing his journals filled with drug ads.

My own father was an attorney and accountant, and I remember his horror at the idea of attorneys advertising, even through ads in the Yellow Pages (the Yellow Pages are another ancient reference at this point, of course). My father also was incensed when attorneys starting billing by the hour. He billed by the job and had his own system; whatever it was, he was good at what he did and never lacked for business, some of it pro bono.

NOTE:
I also read an article a little while back (which unfortunately I can’t locate at the moment) that said that drug ads are a huge part of the support for TV, and without them a great many stations would go under.

The post On those prescription drug ads on TV appeared first on The New Neo.

My most striking recollection of Chamberlain was passing him on a street in the theater district, perhaps fifty years ago. He was a tall and handsome presence.

RIP.

The post RIP Richard Chamberlain appeared first on The New Neo.

RIP Bob Newhart.

Greatest last episode of all time:

The post RIP Bob Newhart appeared first on The New Neo.