Jeffrey Wells

The relentlessly woke HE comment-threader Glen Runciter has rhetorically shot himself in the foot.

Here’s something Runciter posted earlier today about Cpt. Rebecca Lobach, who was apparently piloting the Blackhawk helicopter when it smashed into a commercial jet last Wednesday evening, resulting in her immediate death along with two fellow soldiers plus 64 people on the jet.

Has everyone read the above carefully?

Runciter has stated that because Lobach was objectively well-qualified, she was, in his words, “clearly not a DEI hire.”

Repeating for emphasis: Wokey-woke Runciter has admitted that being well qualified = not DEI.

Put another way, he’d just admitted that DEI is synonymous with lower qualifications.

HE to Runciter: Given this admission, how exactly would you define DEI?

Before watching last night’s Real Time With Bill Maher episode (actually the Overtime segment), I had never heard the above term.

It was uttered (coined?) by novelist Max Brooks (“World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War”).

Brooks at 6:25 mark: “[Trump’s recent pardoning of Ross Ulbricht, the founder of Silk Road, which in the early teens became the first modern darknet market or “the Amazon of drugs”] is part of the bigger picture, which is the rise of crypto, which is the ultimate dark money…the super-rich are going to run everything.”

But Army authorities are not naming her. Why would they want to delay on this? Any guesses? Nobody’s assuming anything, The co-pilot had around 500 hours of flying experience. But why is her identity under wraps?

Among the many dozens of commercial flights I’ve taken over the last half-century, I’m presuming that a certain percentage were piloted by women, and that’s fine. No big deal, par for the course, etc.

That said, I’m not about to discount concerns about DEI hires having an adverse or questionable effect on the aviation industry.

Try to be honest — if you were about to choose between two commercial flights from New York to Paris, and you knew for a fact that the pilot of flight #1, a middle-aged male veteran, had been hired on merit, and the pilot of flight #2, a woman in her 30s or 40s, had been hired to satisfy DEI quotas….which flight would you rather be on?

If you were told that two aircraft controllers monitoring the progress of your flight were (a) a merit-based hire and (b) a DEI hire, which would you choose?

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Emilia Perez Best Actress nominee Karla Sofia Gascon yesterday attempted an apologetic walk-back after those toxic, years–old tweets blew up… “monkeys”, Muslims, George Floyd.

Sorry, sweets, but it’s over. The milk has been spilt, the bed has been shat upon, wokesters don’t know from context…forget it.

Puck’s Matt Belloni this morning…

Vertigo, The Fly, The Big Country, The Defiant Ones, High School Confidential, The Horror of Dracula, Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows, A Night to Remember, Touch of Evil, The Vikings, The Young Lions…what else?

HE decided a couple of days ago that Deepseek, a Chinese AI startup, was the most thorough and dependable of the bunch, including Claude.

Industry friendo: “So why is it so hard to find any AMPAS members, whom I speak with from time to time. who don’t love Emilia Perez? Riddle me that, big boy.”

HE to industry friendo: “I don’t want to sound cruel, but the evidence (including your own testimony) indicates that they’re simply lacking in taste, or the ability to separate the wheat from the chaff. I wouldn’t want to call them rubes, but that’s what they more or less seem to be.  

“This is proven by the fact that even in 2025, they’re STILL in thrall to kneejerk wokeism. I sympathize with wanting to tell Trump to shove it, but they’re slitting the Academy’s (and indirectly Hollywood’s) own throat by celebrating a far-fetched, bordering-on-ludicrous, trans-identity musical that 75% of the Joe and Jane Popcorn RT community doesn’t care for very much, and which is pretty much hated in Mexico.  

“To repeat an old phrase, they’re committing cultural suicide.  This is why so many popcorn megaplexers think Academy members have lost their minds. On a raft and heading for Niagara Falls…

“The Academy has to wake up, smell the coffee and stop giving Oscars to woke instructionals that celebrate this or that identity cause. Joe and Jane have have had it up to here with this crap. Anora, A Complete Unknown, Conclave…step back from the insanity brink and embrace the crafty good stuff that is blessedly free of ideology. Okay, two out of three.”

I suffered through a nightmare early this morning. So bad it woke me up, left me with stomach acid.

Detectives knocked on the door of my parents’ Wilton home (which they sold in ‘94), and at 9:30 pm or 10 pm yet. If someone knocks on the door at that hour, you know it’s trouble.

I answered, let them in. The feeling in my chest was terrible…purely about doom The detectives were inquiring about two separate murders. They were maintaining a certain professional cool, but the evidence, they calmly stated, was pointing in my direction.

Even before I opened the door, I knew I was a dead man.

Three detectives — two polite, studiously casual, mellow-as-a-cucumber dudes plus a ginger woman detective (half Rebecca Keegan, half Jessica Chastain) who was giving me a look that would grow hair on a rock. Her eyes weren’t glaring as much as burning a hole.

Obviously a typical nightmare metaphor scenario…a metaphor for something I feel haunted by or am currently fearful of.

As Alannis M. would say, “Isn’t it ironic?”

The Academy created the 10 Best Picture nominee list to include the more commercial films like The Dark Knight (that they passed on nominating) so the Joe and Jane Popcorns of the world would tune in for bigger ratings, which drives their income.

But by inviting all those international filmmakers to become members, the Academy defeated the purpose of the 10 nominees because now those invitees are voting for more int’l films.  Oh man.  What a quandary.  

And here’s the thing: if you’re going to nominate foreign films for Best Picture Oscar, then why have an international category at all?  Just eliminate it or, better yet, restrict any foreign films from competing for the BP category (along with animated films which also has its own separate category).  That way more deserving American films can get in (and British).

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth will be able to score very handily now, and a 5 pm “happy hour” inside the Pentagon will become an instant thing.