November 20, 2024

UM, CONGRATS?

Posted at 4:52 pm by Stephen Green

ME, AS PART OF LAW & LIBERTY’S SYMPOSIUM ON NEW YORK TIMES V. SULLIVAN: Whither Sullivan?

Posted at 4:25 pm by Glenn Reynolds

JOSH BARRO: Democrats Will Not Win By Changing the Subject.

I strongly recommend Simon van Zuylen-Wood’s cover story for New York magazine, in which he talked to voters into New York City’s outer borough neighborhoods that swung hard toward Trump. In neighborhoods with significant Muslim populations, he did hear complaints about Democrats’ positioning on Gaza. But mostly, the message for Democrats was that they’ll need to move rightward to win this rainbow coalition of disgruntled voters back.

Many voters told van Zuylen-Wood that the government was too tolerant of crime and disorder; one man, who said his daughter’s entry into this country was threatened by Trump’s Muslim ban, nonetheless said he was supporting Trump. (He complained about his local public school having students wear colored shirts to form a human pride flag — an activity he asked to have his children excused from — and said he was moving to a neighborhood in Brooklyn where he could send them to a private, religious school.) But most of all, they complained about the migrant crisis, and in a right-wing way: the government had allowed too many migrants in; the migrants caused quality-of-life problems, from illegal vending to prostitution; the government was prioritizing benefits for migrants over programs for those of us who were already here. This being New York City, these complaints often came from voters who are themselves immigrants. “You can see it all, the boobs out,” one Ecuadorean-American woman, a registered Democrat who voted Republican for the first time, remarked to van Zuylen-Wood about prostitution in Corona, Queens. “That is outrageous. That is what I am telling you — especially the Venezuelans, they came with attitude.”

And when these voters looked around at the Democrats who govern them at the federal, state, and local levels, they saw a party that didn’t even appear to be trying.

Democrats have by and large abandoned the business of governing in favor of unpopular social crusades and punishing heretics.

Posted at 3:50 pm by Stephen Green

“THE BEST PART IS NO PART:” I hope Elon applies this approach to the federal government, too.

Posted at 2:57 pm by Glenn Reynolds

LAUGHING WOLF: Of Fractals And Fractures.

Many analysts talk about patterns in the data. The pattern stands out when recognized, and as you visualize and explore it, it can become a visual, a fractal that can then merge and grows into a larger shape or pattern. If one stands back far enough, these fractals can take on a different appearance, or meaning. What is a shape, perhaps even a thing of beauty at a small scale, can present a much less benign appearance when seen combining with other shapes at a distance.

Take for instance a crack in a piece of ice, or glass. By itself, it can be a thing of beauty within the crystalline solid of clear ice. However, if enough of them form and join together, you realize that the structure of the ice is compromised and what you are seeing is the shatter-pattern present just before unity disintegrates.

If you have ever seen a sheet of modern safety glass that has shattered, but held structural integrity, you know that it is a thing of beauty. The patterns within the glass are complex and can even add to the beauty by individual pieces reflecting and even refracting light in different ways. It is a beauty that lasts up until even the smallest of external forces knocks a piece out of place. Then, quite often, the whole thing collapses into a pile of pieces.

Right now, I’m trying to figure out if I am seeing fractals around the world, or shatter patterns.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 2:48 pm by Stephen Green

I’M PRETTY SURE GEORGE LUCAS CREATED THX-1138 AS A WARNING, NOT A HOW-TO GUIDE: This church has an AI Jesus for confessions: ‘It gave me so much advice.’

Is this the mess-AI-iah?

Just in case artificial intelligence hasn’t been taking on enough jobs lately — now it’s replacing the almighty. A church in Switzerland is now using an AI hologram of Jesus to take confessions from Catholic worshippers, as seen in a wild viral video.

“I was surprised, it was so easy, and though it’s a machine, it gave me so much advice,” one awestruck worshipper told DW News while describing their experience with the Sermon-ator, located at St. Peter’s Church in Lucerne.

Dubbed Deus in Machina, the futuristic shrine features a confessional booth with a screen displaying the face of Jesus through the grate.

Before entering, robo-Jesus cautions, “Do not disclose personal information under any circumstances, use this service at your own risk, press the button if you accept.”

If the worshipper opts to proceed, the digitally-rendered visage interprets their words and generates a response with the animated face moving in sync with the words.

When questioned about why women aren’t allowed to serve as priests in the Catholic church, the digital son of God responded, “The scriptures teach that certain roles are defined within the church, each role and task has its place in God’s plan.”

Jesus’ cybernetic second coming was made possible by computer scientists and theologians from the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, who programmed the bot with New Testament and religious information found online, the Daily Mail reported.

If the programmers have a sense of humor, and some knowledge of obscure sci-fi movies, hopefully the AI confessional wraps things up by saying, “You are a true believer. Blessings of the state, blessings of the masses…work hard, increase production, prevent accidents and be happy.”

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

COMCAST IS UNBURDENING ITSELF OF WHAT HAS BEEN: MSNB-See-Ya: Comcast Dumps Cable Channels In Midst of Ethics Scandal.

As rumored for weeks ahead of the election, Comcast has decided to get out of the cable-TV market. This impacts more than just MSNBC, but none of the other cable properties Comcast will shed in this spinoff has the credibility and viewer issues that their progressive-bubble service has at the moment. One has to wonder whether Comcast or its spinoff would look more attractive to investors without MSNBC as part of its package:

Comcast said Wednesday that it will spin off its cable networks, including MSNBC and CNBC, in a bid to unshackle its movie studio and theme parks from the waning fortunes of traditional television.

NBCUniversal, Comcast’s media division, is set to cleave off a bundle of cable channels that generate roughly $7 billion in revenue annually, including USA, Oxygen, E!, Syfy and Golf Channel, into a new public company. Comcast will keep the NBC broadcast network under NBCUniversal, along with Bravo, home to reality TV programs like “Top Chef,” the company’s theme parks and its Universal studio. …

Cable television, once a juggernaut that propelled the share prices of traditional media companies, has become a financial albatross. Though they remain enormously profitable, cable TV channels are in long-term decline as viewers replace subscriptions with streaming services like Netflix or YouTube TV.

Given MSNBC’s cratering ratings post-election, will Joe and Mika and Rachel still have their shows after Comcast offloads their far-left channel? And what of Al Sharpton? Long been accused of being paid by the network for his low-rated Sunday morning show as a form of protection money to prevent him from defenestrating one of their hosts, as he did to Don Imus in 2007, he’s facing more recent questions: Harris Campaign and MSNBC Involved in Major Ethics Violation Over $500k ‘Donation’ to Al Sharpton.

Shortly before sitting down with MSNBC’s Al Sharpton, Harris’s campaign made a half-a-million-dollar donation to his nonprofit organization the National Action Network, the Washington Free Beacon reported today. The campaign also paid Roland Martin’s Nu Vision Media company $350,000 about a month before she appeared as a guest on his streaming program.

While some of these fees have been dismissed as “production costs” and “advertising,” the fact that Harris exchanged any money with Sharpton at all is a major ethics problem for MSNBC. Megyn Kelly has been especially vocal about it, stating that Sharpton and MSNBC did not disclose the donations before what Fox News referred to as a “friendly interview.”

On her SiriusXM show last week, Kelly spoke of the situation during an interview with Bill Ackman, the CEO of Pershing Square:

“I’m dying from the conflict of interest. I’m dead… The bias is coming out of the ears. This is so irresponsible, unethical, and not allowed. It is so egregious… You cannot make a donation to an anchor’s charity on the side of $500,000 as a presidential candidate, then go sit with the anchor and he didn’t disclose it… This is not a news organization, but they continue to masquerade as one.”

As the name implies, when MSNBC debuted in 1996, it was initially a technology-focused channel, devoted to charting the future of the then-new, bright and shiny World Wide Web. As with A&E long ago ditching its focus on middlebrow culture and MTV its focus on video clips, it’s entirely possible the zombie future of the channel could be very different than its current incarnation, particularly since it likely won’t be sharing on-air talent and resources with NBC and CNBC.

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

DEMAND QUICKLY SURPASSED SUPPLY: A year after ditching waitlist, Starlink says it is ‘sold out’ in parts of US.

The Starlink waitlist is back in certain parts of the US, including several large cities on the West Coast and in Texas. The Starlink availability map says the service is sold out in and around Seattle and Spokane, Washington; Portland, Oregon; San Diego; Sacramento, California; and Austin, Texas. Neighboring cities and towns are included in the sold-out zones.

There are additional sold-out areas in small parts of Colorado, Montana, and North Carolina. As PCMag noted yesterday, the change comes about a year after Starlink added capacity and removed its waitlist throughout the US.

Elsewhere in North America, there are some sold-out areas in Canada and Mexico. Across the Atlantic, Starlink is sold out in London and neighboring cities. Starlink is not yet available in most of Africa, and some of the areas where it is available are sold out.

Starlink is generally seen as most useful in rural areas with less access to wired broadband, but it seems to be attracting interest in more heavily populated areas, too.

Getting Starship into service should alleviate the new waitlists, delivering bigger, more capable Starlink satellites into orbit — and more of them, at less cost to SpaceX. Still, the urban demand for Starlink is surprising since high-speed access usually isn’t an issue, and satellite bandwidth is.

Any theories?

Posted at 1:46 pm by Stephen Green

OLD AND BUSTED: Jag Man.

The New Hotness? Jag Tran! Elon Musk hits out at bizarre Jaguar advert with no cars in it:

Elon Musk has criticised a Jaguar advert that featured catwalk models in bizarre clothes but no cars.

The British carmaker on Tuesday debuted a new advert featuring several models with asymmetrical haircuts and brightly coloured, haute couture clothing walking around a Mars-like landscape bathed in bright pink.

Messages such as “create exuberant”, “live vivid”, “delete ordinary”, “break moulds” and “copy nothing” flash on the screen but no actual cars or references to Jaguar as a carmaker are featured.

The advert, which was released to promote the company’s new logo and wider rebrand, was dubbed a “hallucinogenic sci-fi movie” by Car Dealer magazine and has prompted a barrage of criticism online.

Mr Musk, the billionaire owner of rival Tesla, wrote on his social media platform X in response to the advert: “Do you sell cars?”

In his “Wednesday Review of Modern Thought,” James Lileks looks at the Jag commercial and adds:

“Challenging boundaries,” the ad concludes.

There are no boundaries left to challenge. Everything outre is de rigeur. Everything shocking is hawking something. Everything avant is already guarded by the taste-maskers to ensure its unassailability. Anything goes but everything’s gone, because the most obvious ad in the world today, the easiest, the least imaginative, stars the gender-neutral person in a dress with a sledgehammer.

Offer not valid in the Middle East, Jim Treacher writes:

If you’re wondering where the car is, don’t worry. It’s been tucked away.

Speaking of the tranny in this ad, he was omitted from the version for the Middle Eastern market. Because even ad executives know you can’t spend your salary if you’ve been beheaded.

Offer apparently also not valid in some part of Berlin, Treacher adds: “Stop me if you think that you’ve heard this one before:”

As Treacher concludes, “Hey, what’s the worst that could happen?”

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

READ THE ROOM: Los Angeles Embraces ‘Sanctuary’ Status… Arizona to Follow? “Is it possible that there are a few Democrats who said the border was ‘very important’ because they don’t believe Biden-Harris opened the border wide enough? Technically, I suppose there could be some small number of middle-aged progressive female TikTok influencers with recently shaved skulls who sincerely believe (when the Xanax isn’t working) that not enough people from Burkina Faso snuck across. But it’s safe to say they aren’t a large enough constituency to bother catering to.”

Related (From Ed):

Posted at 1:22 pm by Stephen Green

LOL: I’m 16. On Nov. 5, the girls cried and the boys played Minecraft. “Eight years ago, I was too young to feel the full force of Hillary Clinton’s loss. Now at 16, I’ve had the wind knocked out of me. On that Wednesday, I was flush with anger — but it was diluted by an even stronger feeling: defeat. I saw it in the eyes of women in my subway car that morning. I saw it in the barista at the coffee shop on the corner, the female security guard at my school and in the face of my history teacher.”

Reading this, you’d never know that a majority of white women — and nearly half of women overall — voted for Trump. The boys had their priorities straight. The girls chose to be hysterical, as did their adult women role models.

Posted at 1:17 pm by Glenn Reynolds