Category: Huffington Post

Arianna Huffington’s Lesbian Daughter Recovers From Cocaine Habit

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A couple years ago, Christina Huffington was hospitalized with respiratory problems after she went on a cocaine binge at Yale. She’d been addicted to coke since she was 16. She was also bulimic.

Now everything is OK, because she’s 24 years old and has a job as an editor at — you’ll never guess — the Huffington Post.

Also, she’s dating Sophie Watts, a film producer: “Christina and Sophie have been dating for a while, they’re very happy.”

 

HuffPo Women: Advice for Losers

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Am I the only person who reads the Huffington Post’s “Women” category? Because I’ve got a feeling that if any feminists paid attention to it, they’d be outraged at this pink-collar ghetto of insipid journalistic dreck. Some recent HuffPo Women headlines:

  • 8 Things America Gets Wrong About Sex — Barnard College alumna Amanda Duberman says Americans are not having sex “as freely, safely and enjoyably as other parts of the world.” So, apparently, folks in Bolivia, Belgium and Botswana have much better sex than us — or at least better sex than Barnard College girls have.
  • ‘Love Hormone’ Oxytocin May Intensify Orgasms — Dyslexics beware! Oxytocin is not the same as Oxycontin, which won’t do anything for your orgasms, and will only “intensify” your lethargy, slurred speech and impaired coordination.
  • I Fell in Love With a Man Who Refused to Text Me — She loves the Luddite guy with a “cute Australian accent” she married 12 years ago. He probably never dated any Barnard College girls.
  • The Problem With ‘Waiting For Marriage’ — Mandy Velez was a virgin attending the University of Pittsburgh until she “attended a sex-positive event on campus” featuring “a fun lesbian speaker.” Somehow, this event convinced her to have sex with her boyfriend. They “eventually broke up,” but now she’s been living with another boyfriend for two years, which means . . .? I dunno. There’s no obvious point. Just one of those silly “Vagina! Empowerment!” pseudo-feminist sex columns that get published routinely at HuffPo Women. Velez calls herself “a straight, cisgendered, reasonably privileged woman” and also uses the magic feminist phrase “sexual autonomy.”
  • Shedding Light on the Myths About Women Who Have a Lot of Sex — Marrie Lobel is “irritated” by “persistent half-truths and complete fabrications hyped as fact. It’s time to expose reality by shattering outdated perceptions of women who have a lot of sex.” None of the “myths” Lobel attacks involve Barnard College girls or sex-positive events with “fun lesbian” speakers. However, she does use the magic feminist phrase “patriarchal dogma.”

Anyway, that gives you an idea of what Huffington Post editors think women want to read. If following their advice doesn’t lead you to happiness, you can always check out “Huffington Post Divorce.”

UPDATE: Wow! How did I miss this Huffington Post pictorial of women’s armpit hair? Gotta be some Barnard girls there . . .

 

Hollywood Actress Urges Hollywood to Create More Jobs for Actresses

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If any misogynist is looking for evidence of female mental inferiority, the Huffington Post’s “Women” category is a treasure trove, with dumb writers and dumber topics (e.g., “Why I Hate Wearing Bras” and “I Was On Reality TV — Here’s What It’s Like To Fake ‘Real Life‘”), suggesting that there are two basic ideas behind the category:

  1. Women are too stupid to be interested in actual news, and require their own special kind of non-news reading;
    and
  2. The only people who can write this kind of meaningless drek without embarrassment are untalented women.

Bad women writers producing stupid articles for dumb women readers — that’s the “Huffington Post Women” category in a nutshell. And as if we needed more evidence of HuffPo’s belief in female inferiority, this was a feature article in the section Monday:

Cate Blanchett Lets Hollywood Know
Women Are Not A ‘Niche’ Audience
Cate Blanchett has done it again.
As if there weren’t already enough reasons for us to love Blanchett, last night she stole our hearts all over again with a gracious yet enlightening acceptance speech for Best Actress at the Academy Awards.
Our favorite moment? When she called out Hollywood’s sexist tendencies and reminded everyone that people really do want to see films with female leads:

And thank you to… those of us in the industry who are still foolishly clinging to the idea that female films, with women at the center, are niche experiences. They are not — audiences want to see them and, in fact, they earn money. The world is round, people.

Far be it from my purpose to defend “the industry” from any of its critics. If Cate Blanchett wants the world to believe that Hollywood is run by a bunch of sexist swine whose misogyny is so powerful as to transcend their notorious greed, she’ll get no argument from me. But everybody who follows the movie business knows that the economic challenge in the age of instant-download video and home-theater giant screens is how to create an “event” that will get people to leave home and take the kids to the multiplex. The Top 10 U.S. box-office films of 2013 were:

1. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
2. Iron Man 3
3. Frozen
4. Despicable Me 2
5. Man of Steel
6. Gravity
7. Monsters University
8. The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug –
9. Fast & Furious 6
10. Oz The Great and Powerful

I don’t pay much attention to movies, so I can’t say if any of those are “female films, with women at the center,” but most of them clearly are not. Cate Blanchett keeps working as Galadriel in the Lord of the Rings series, so she got a spot in the Top 10, but it’s hard to argue for The Hobbit as a movie “with women at the center.”

Why is it, however, that there is something inherently righteous about actresses demanding more work for actresses? Would we applaud Clint Eastwood if he gave an Oscar speech demanding that Hollywood create more roles for geriatric geezers?

But if you’re looking for thoughtful criticism of the self-serving inanities uttered by movie stars — or thoughtful discussion of anything, really — don’t look for it in HuffPo’s “Women” category.

 

Patch: AOL’s Expensive Failure

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Do you remember in February 2011 when AOL bought the Huffington Post for $315 million? Did that price tag come to mind in August when Amazon’s Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post for $250 million?

Do these numbers even make sense?

Huffington Post = $315 million
Washington Post = $250 million

Excuse me for suspecting that the brand Bezos bought was far more valuable than the brand AOL’s Tim Armstrong bought, and excuse me also for thinking Armstrong is one of the most clueless executives in online media.

AOL’s Tim Armstrong reluctantly lets go
of Patch as shareholder pressures mount

Maybe you don’t care about this little media industry story, but it’s fascinating how the failure happened, and how Armstrong was permitted to throw away money on this pet project:

Mr. Armstrong had a sentimental, and some would say debilitating, attachment to Patch. He helped create it in 2007 while a senior executive at Google. When he got the top job at AOL in 2009, he persuaded the company to buy it. Patch then proceeded to churn through leadership, business models and write-downs on the way to its reduced state.
The board of AOL, handpicked by Mr. Armstrong, authorized him to invest $50 million on the idea in 2010 and after that, it became a black hole for cash. By the end, it had cost an estimated $300 million. (AOL said the figure was more like $200 million.)

Well, $200 million, $300 million, what’s the difference? Either way, it was a lot of cash: At least $50 million a year for four years. And for a dollar amount similar to what Tim Armstrong pissed away on this experimental network of hyper-local news sites, he could have bought the Washington Post, but Patch was Armstrong’s beloved brainchild:

Mr. Armstrong is nothing if not a true believer. Even though Patch is being dismantled or perhaps sold off to various partners, he still believes that he had the right product in the right space, and that he just ran out of runway.
That runway ended because of a schedule he set. In May 2012, he promised restive investors on an earnings call that he would make Patch profitable by the end of 2013. That page of the calendar arrives this month while profitability remains on a far shore, so Mr. Armstrong is reluctantly throwing in the towel.
The theory was that Patch would use a single news person and a single advertising person, at least initially, to create a digital maypole in hundreds of communities at a cost of about $100,000 annually per site. . . .
The execution risk was large — Patch was all moving parts, many undermanaged. At its peak, some 900 sites employed 1,400 people.

This is from a 2011 interview with Armstrong:

Patch was something I started on a personal level that I funded and co-founded with another person who’s at AOL with me now, Jon Brod. Basically, Patch was formed because in my community [of Riverside, Conn.], we had a real lack in information. As the economy got worse, there was less and less journalism in my town and there was a lot of missing information online. So Patch started as a personal project to see if I could help solve the issues in my town. As we got going and realized it was broader and broader, we decided to ramp up and do a much bigger project. I think Patch is in about 800 communities across the U.S. It will go up to 1,000 communities this year. We’ve hired about 1,000 journalists. I brought Patch into AOL when I came to AOL.

So, what began as “a personal project to see if I could help solve the issues in my town” turned into a sucking chest wound that bled AOL’s bottom line to the tune of at least $200 million. By the way, Armstrong’s Patch co-founder recently left AOL:

Brod is one of the last AOL executives with longstanding ties to Armstrong. He was one of Patch’s co-founders, and joined AOL after Armstrong, an early Patch investor, bought the company in June 2009.
After that, he held a variety of roles: He first ran AOL Ventures, and at one point was in charge of “integrating” Arianna Huffington and her operation after AOL bought her company. Armstrong moved him back to Patch in 2011.

Also last week, it was reported that AOL editor in chief Cyndi Stivers, who was only hired in May, is leaving the company.

Rats, sinking ship, some assembly required.

At some point, AOL’s stockholders will either wise up and get a new CEO, or else they’ll sell off, but however it shakes out, Tim Armstrong will not be allowed to continue failing this way.

 

Why Are Huffington Post’s ‘Gay Voices’ Columnists Fixated on Underage Sex?

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A week ago, a Huffington Post columnist argued that it was homophobic to criticize gay men who use Internet sex sites to meet teenage partners. You might shrug that off as an anomaly, if you didn’t realize that in May, Huffington Post was enthusiastically aboard the “Free Kate” bandwagon to legalize sex with 14-year-olds in Florida.

OK, so on Friday, Huffington Post published this “Gay Voices” column by lesbian writer Ella Boureau:

In June of this year, I sent out a story to be considered for Best Lesbian Erotica 2014, a popular anthology put out by Cleis Press. The largest independent queer publisher in the U.S., Cleis has established itself as the de facto clearinghouse for lesbian erotica. . . .
The story I submitted, called “Cottonmouth” . . . is about two teenage cousins who go for a walk in the Mississippi woods to escape the afternoon heat and end up face-to-face with the mystery of sexuality and nature and the myths created about the two. The story was accepted by the guest editor, Sarah Schulman. While Sarah loved it, she had a tussle with the publishers about whether or not the story’s focus was “bestiality.” Sarah’s position was, “So what?” . . .
Then August came, and I received another email from Sarah saying that Cleis wanted to remove “Cottonmouth” from the collection because the characters were underage, and claiming that Cleis faced “legal vulnerability.” Sarah, whose novel The Child, about a sexual relationship between a 15-year-old boy and a 40-year-old man, faced no legal consequences, immediately recognized this as censorship and wrote, “I cannot permit this and will go to the wall.”  . . .
Now I see that the discomfort generated by my story marks a shift in what Cleis Press is targeting as their main audience. The “queer” label associated with the publisher is no longer so much about making a space for outsiders to be heard as it is about niche marketing. This is where the fear comes in. Ultimately, the anxiety around the homosexual as pedophile and the uncomfortable linkage of homosexuality with bestiality still looms large in a certain sector of the American public’s imagination.

Translation: “Hey, it’s just a harmless story about two teenage cousins who have sex with a snake, what’s the big deal? And I mean, c’mon, the guest editor wrote a novel about pederasty, so obviously you didn’t have a problem with that, right?”

But remember, there’s no such thing as a “gay agenda.” Anybody who says there is such an agenda is a paranoid homophobic bigot.

 

Rick-Rolled by HuffPost

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You might think that a professional journalist would be completely immune to cheap marketing tactics, but occasionally even I fall for it.

Backstory: Last year some evil troll decided to sign me up for every single news feed at the Huffington Post. As a result, I probably get 30 or 40 different e-mail pitches a day, including some in French and Spanish. I haven’t bothered to cancel the subscriptions because (a) I’m lazy and (b) occasionally I find good blog fodder from the stuff (although I try to avoid linking HuffPo unless I have to).

OK, I hadn’t checked my e-mail in a while and was skimming through when I saw this subject line on an e-mail from HuffPo Lifestyle:

’90s Supermodel Poses Topless

Celebrity breasts don’t usually impress me much. In fact, at age 53, I’m not easily impressed by breasts in general. This isn’t to say I don’t enjoy breasts, but at some point in a man’s life he realizes that the variety is not infinite and . . . Well, breasts are breasts. The fact that a particular pair is attached to somebody famous, so what?

Nevertheless, (a) if this was some kind of “celebrity scandal” angle, it might be good for blog traffic, and (b) hey, it’s got to be more interesting than Valerie Jarrett talking health care. Given a choice between Valerie Jarrett and “topless supermodel”? C’mon.

OK so I click link and it’s Elle McPherson on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar, “topless” strictly in the sense that she’s not wearing a top — with her (predictably implant-enhanced) breasts discreetly hidden — rather than “topless” in the sense of Show Me Your Boobies.

But if you want to see a really nice pair . . .

 

The Huffington Post Lies About Steven Crowder’s CPAC Monologue

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by Smitty

I happened to be in the ballroom for the remarks made by Crowder, as mis-reported by the Puffington Host:
Screen Shot 2013-03-17 at 8.38.53 PM

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Steven reports:

So HuffingtonPost is outright lying and trying to slander me, and I could really use support.
As you know, Ashley Judd has recently been heard equating both mining and purchasing Apple Products to “rape.” So my commentary at CPAC on her stupid, and insensitive comparisons was exactly this
“This just in, Ashley Judd just tweeted that purchasing apple products is akin to rape… from her iPhone”
I followed it up with “Rape? Really, now she knows what my mind felt like after Divine Secrets of YaYaSisterhood”
Clearly taking aim at Ashley Judd for her stupid rape comments. Instead, HuffPo says that I made a “rape joke” about Ashley Judd. Obviously this narrative is important, and I would reeeaaally welcome some any support in resetting it.

Steven is one of the good guys, as evidenced by this foul assault. Maybe somebody at the Puffington Host thinks it’s funny or something, but this is precisely the sort of nonsense propaganda that feeds into the even uglier #WarOnWomen meme.

Fall off the planet, Puffington Host. Let’s rally all of the blogs to support Steven and point out that these liars lie.

Update: welcome, Instapundit readers!

Update II: Ed Driscoll introduces the important Lefty verb “Laphamize,” which is achieved by deciding upon a narrative for an opposition event, writing an anachronous review, and then passing it off as reporting.

Update III: Counterargument from Screed of Momus, more support from the Lonely Conservative.

UPDATE IV (RSM): Yeah, I unloaded a few hundred words — including “hired liars” — about HuffPo & Co.

HuffPo and the Homo-Supremacy Agenda

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The rah-rah from the cheerleaders has become so deafening that people don’t even hear the noise anymore, and can’t think clearly about what is being constantly shouted at them.


 

Pardon my blunt language. One of these HuffPo articles is particularly intriguing. You see, not all “political causes” are created equal:

After her daughter’s eighth grade math teacher wore an anti-gay marriage pin to school, Cynthia Deford, a gay parent in Port Angeles, Washington, started an online campaign to ban teachers from promoting political causes in the classroom.
The Steven’s Middle School teacher, who has remained unnamed, wore a button to class in the days before the Nov. 6 election that stated “No on 74: one man + one woman = marriage,” according to Deford. The political message refers to Washington’s Referendum 74, which legalized gay marriage in the state, passing with 52 percent of the vote.
Although Port Angeles School District Superintendent Jane Pryne told the Peninsula Daily News that the issue has been addressed, and the school district already has policy regarding politics in the classroom in place, Deford wants more to be done; she is calling for an official apology and sensitivity training for teachers.
“It just shocked me that it happened here,” Deford told the Peninsula Daily News.
In her online petition on SignOn.org, Deford wrote that her daughter came home upset after seeing a teacher — who she once thought highly of — wear such a discriminatory button in class.

She wants to “ban teachers from promoting political causes in the classroom,” but tolerance toward homosexuality . . . Well, that’s not political. That’s just the way things are. Unless you question “the way things are,” and then you’re evil.

So the agenda now is compulsory approval. Everyone must pledge allegiance to the Rainbow Flag, and once you are forbidden to disapprove of homosexuality, logically, your refusal to participate in gay sex will be classified as an unacceptable form of “discrimination.”

This isn’t about “equality” or “liberation.” No, it’s about homo hegemony, as the fanatics seek to secure a privileged and superior status for themselves and their preferences. That’s not disco music you hear, it’s the sound of hobnailed boots marching over broken glass.

Tolerance gradually reveals itself as totalitarianism, and it’s amazing that people acquiesce to such bullying. According to a recent Gallup survey, 3.4 percent of Americans identify themselves as “LGBT,” to use the de rigeur acronym. Why should 96.6 percent be compelled to kowtow to the sensibilities of the 3.4 percent?

Why are we constantly being hectored about issues related to “LGBT” when there are probably more Lithuanian-Americans than there are lesbian Americans? Should a minority be rewarded with extra attention just because they make obnoxious pests of themselves?

What was once “The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name” has become The Alternative Lifestyle That Won’t Shut Up, and their constant yammering about it has become clichéd and repetitive.