May 23, 2025

YOU WON’T BE WRONG IF YOU UNDERSTAND THE ENTIRE POST WWII POLITICAL ORDERING AS A BIPARTISAN EFFORT TO MAKE SURE THE VOTERS DON’T GET WHAT THEY WANT:

Posted at 10:38 pm by Glenn Reynolds

OPEN THREAD: Ring in the weekend.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

21st CENTURY HEADLINES: Google Releases Mind-Blowing AI Video Technology That Will Both Amaze and Worry You.

I’ve been keeping track of the capabilities of various AI companies and the capabilities they’ve put forward. One of the more interesting to me has been the advancement of AI video, which has grown in leaps and bounds over the past few years. People were creating some incredible things through various AI services such as OpenAI’s “Sora.”

But Google just introduced its Veo 3, and I think we might have a new king of AI video generation, and what’s more, I don’t see how Hollywood doesn’t see this and begin having anxiety attacks.

Veo 3 from Google doesn’t just look realistic to a point where you can hardly tell its AI sometimes… but it also introduced sound, and I don’t just mean background noise. I’m talking AI having full-on conversations with each other.

Here’s a sample. There are still those AI hiccups you get such as delayed reactions and random skewing of people or objects, but compared to how this was just a few years ago, it’s minimal. Moreover, pay close attention to how the speech differs based on the location they’re speaking in, such as slight echos or enclosed sound based on the spaces the AI figures fill. That in itself is incredible.

I feel like even this announcement video from Google doesn’t cover the full range of what it can do. Watch this one as well, and once again, pay attention to the details. Crowd laughter, microphone pops, facial expressions and quirks.

We’ve come a long way in ten years from Industrial Light & Magic’s slow and expensive to create, and yet only so-so digital replications of the late Peter Cushing and 1977-era Carrie Fisher in Star Wars: Rogue One.

Just don’t ask the AI NPCs their thoughts on Memorial Day: Google AI Claims Memorial Day Is ‘Controversial’ in Response to MRC’s Question.

More here: Yikes! Here’s What Google’s Veo 3 AI Model is Capable of With Video.

UPDATE: America’s Newspaper of Record explores the benefits of these new technological developments:

Posted at 9:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

RADICAL CHIC, THE BOY BAND ERA: Remember when the New York Review of Books had a diagram of how to make a Molotov Cocktail on its cover in 1967?

Condé Nast-owned Wired magazine says, hold my Chablis:

As Ed Morrissey wrote in April: Taylor [Lorenz] LOLs: Hey, I Didn’t Praise That Backshooting Coward When I Called Him a ‘Morally Good Man!’

Mangione is nothing new. The Left has always turned violent psychopaths into cultural icons as long as they ostensibly supported the Left’s causes. Che Guevara got transformed into a literal fashion icon for decades, despite his bloodthirsty march through 20th century history in support of some of the worst regimes and terrorist groups of his era.

* * * * * * * * *

The Left loves its murderous “revolutionaries,” and Mangione is only their latest crush. They’ve run through the Mansons, the Weathermen, the Red Army Faction/Baader-Meinhof, and the Symbionese Liberation Army, just to name a few. If Antifa were dumb enough to take off their masks, no doubt a handful of them would also achieve icon status on the Left. They might even get their photos onto fashion items and have clueless entertainers toting them around to promote murder and mayhem, as long as their politics aligned properly.

The problem with Che Fever is that it sets the incentives to deliver on that prophecy. That’s why we’re seeing an explosion in violence, such as the arson at Josh Shapiro’s governor’s mansion, assassination attempts on Donald Trump, attacks on Tesla owners and dealers, and the thuggery of Hamasniks on college campuses. The Taylor Lorenzes of the media use them to promote La Causa and hail the violent nutcases as brave soldiers for change. And that’s because the moral compasses of the Taylor Lorenzes of the media skew toward cowardly backshooters and Molotov-cocktail throwers as “morally good,” whether they admit to it or not.

Earlier: A Clockwork Blue: How the Left Has Come to Excuse Away and Embrace Political Violence.

UPDATE:

Posted at 8:48 pm by Ed Driscoll

NEW YORK TIMES OR AL JAZEERA, IT’S ALL THE SAME:

Posted at 8:43 pm by Glenn Reynolds

BUY A GUN:

A friend asks — forget the security camera, where was the security? I agree. This guy should’ve been plugged before he fired the second shot. Third at most.

A single Garland, Texas city cop would have put him down, so why did he manage to empty a magazine and survive unscathed?

Posted at 8:40 pm by Glenn Reynolds

BENJAMIN KERSTEIN: Smash the Free Palestine Nazis.

In some ways, the horrific murder of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim z”l at a Jewish event in Washington, DC by a Free Palestine Nazi is an exception to the rule. It is explicable in its logic, and its cause can be easily traced.

Its cause is Free Palestine Nazism itself: The first full-scale antisemitic movement in the United States since the 1930s, led by the Red-Green Alliance between radical progressives and Islamic supremacists.

Its logic is the same as antisemitic murder has always been: the satanic belief in the necessity, the obligation, to kill Jews. This is the logic of everyone from Haman to Hitler, and it remains unchanged since Amalek slaughtered the women and children of the refugees from Pharaoh’s oppression.

We know this is true because, like the movement that birthed him, the swine who committed the atrocity said so. But we know more than that: This is not a matter of one’s man guilt. The complicity is vast and collective.

Put simply, everyone involved in Free Palestine Nazism, from the foot soldiers to the collaborators, the entire antisemitic movement that took to the streets literally the day after the Oct. 7 massacre to hail the murder of Jews, is guilty.

Politicians are guilty, journalists are guilty, activists are guilty, students are guilty, professors are guilty, academic administrators are guilty, the leaders of international institutions are guilty, beloved NGOs are guilty, all of them are guilty. All of them stand indicted. All of them stand condemned.

Related: The tragic naiveté of liberal Jews. “The Nazis didn’t care whether a Jew lit Shabbat candles or marched for Socialist causes. They shoved everyone into the same cattle cars and crematoria. Today, those who chant ‘globalize the intifada’ don’t differentiate between Likud voters and Labor supporters or between reservists in the Israel Defense Forces and Israeli artists protesting judicial reform. Ditto for Rodriguez, who didn’t check the credentials of Lischinsky and Milgrim when he fired several rounds into their bodies.”

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

I DID NAZI THIS WAPO SUBHEAD COMING: For U.S. Jews, D.C. museum killings deepen resolve — and fear. The killings of two Israeli Embassy staffers amplify confusion felt since the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks about where Jews belong.

The only correct answer being, “Anyplace they want to be, that’s where.” Otherwise, when the Post’s then-sister publication declared at the start of 2009, “We Are All Socialists Now,” I didn’t realize there was a tacit “National” modifier in that headline.

The article itself, with four authors attached to its byline, is a bit more nuanced, until you get to this moment of moral equivalence:

Hamas’s attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Israel’s subsequent attacks on Gaza, followed by divisions around the world over what had caused the conflict and who was at fault, left the 40-year-old mother of three feeling confused with no easy solution to the conflict in sight. Now, after the shooting at the Capital Jewish Museum on Wednesday she felt similarly disoriented.

And this one:

The shooting at the D.C. museum was tragic, said Joseph Landson, 56, a Navy veteran from Springfield, Virginia. “It’s a horrible time” to be Jewish in America, he said.

The shooting was “just another in an unending string of anti-Israel attacks. Notice I wrote anti-Israel. I really don’t consider the attack antisemitic. New data could change my mind,” Landson said.

Landson, who can’t work due to chronic disease, said he tries to find balance between supporting Israel — but not unconditionally.

While he tries, he wrote The Post, to walk a middle ground, “it feels like moderation is becoming impossible.”

Yes, a shooter yelling “Free Palestine” after murdering two Israeli Embassy staffers outside of the Capital Jewish Museum does tend to make moderation a bit more difficult.

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG:

Related:

Posted at 7:21 pm by Glenn Reynolds

PROGRESSIVES HATE ALL ACTUAL PROGRESS:

Posted at 7:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

DISPATCHES FROM THE PARTY OF SCIENCE AND DIVERSITY: ‘Why Do We Want Him?’ James Carville Says Dems Shouldn’t ‘Bring Elon Musk Back’ To Party.

“Should they bring Elon Musk back? His platform X is pretty useful. He said he’s not going to put any more money into politics for the time being,” host Joanna Coles said. “But should the Democrats woo him back or is he too damaged at this point?”

After clarifying Coles meant bringing Musk back into the Democratic Party, the Democratic strategist answered, “No.”

“No? You think he’s done now?” the host followed up.

“Well, I can’t imagine that after all of this that he’d want — I mean, what does he bring? … Look at the damage he’s done to the federal government,” Carville said. “Why do we want him?”

Coles asserted that Musk’s X platform is valuable, but said Carville had a “fair point” about Musk’s government role. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) claims on its website that as of May 11 it had saved taxpayers an estimated $170 billion through terminating and renegotiating contracts, eliminating fraud, cancelling grants and cutting the federal workforce.

For instance, DOGE has substantially cut the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which reportedly squandered taxpayer funds by supporting initiatives that pushed a far-left agenda abroad, along with indirectly backing extremist groups.

“It’s just that he used to be a Democrat,” Coles added. “Then he got embraced and suckered in by the Republicans.”

“Maybe he used to be smart and then he went crazy,” Carville responded.

“I mean, what does he bring?” Yes, the party whose leaders proposed sending men to the moon and demanded that electric cars be a moral imperative are now casting into the cornfield the African-American immigrant who builds spacecraft and electric cars, and who led DOGE, which was an extension of the proposals of Carville’s former boss and Barack Obama.

As Glenn noted in the very early days of Instapundit, “As the old saying has it, the left looks for heretics and the right looks for converts, and both find what they’re looking for. The effect is no doubt subliminal, but people who treat you like crap are, over time, less persuasive than people who don’t. If people on the Left are so unhappy about how many former allies are changing their views, perhaps they should examine how those allies are treated.”

Posted at 4:50 pm by Ed Driscoll

WELL, WHICH IS IT?

Posted at 3:52 pm by Stephen Green

FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY [VIP]: Leave That MAGA Man Alone. “It’s time for your much-needed break from the serious news, and this week, you’ll learn where not to punch a cop, the worst time to play hide and seek, and all about the Texas Mom who really knows how to throw a party.”

Posted at 3:21 pm by Stephen Green

THIS IS CNN: CNN Can’t Kill Tim Dillon:

I’ve been researching comedy,” CNN’s Elle Reeve announces grimly at the start of her hour-long interview with comedian Tim Dillon, released this week more than a month after it was recorded. What follows is an extended whine about the manner in which legacy broadcast media in America has ceded its status as the gatekeeper of the American cultural narrative to podcasters.

Is it the most satisfying piece of television I’ve ever watched? Possibly, yes.

The irony – and it’s almost too perfect to articulate – is that had Dillon not demanded, while appearing recently on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, that CNN release the interview in full rather than packaged into a tightly edited segment to fit a specific narrative, it probably would never have seen the light of day.

The viewer quickly becomes aware that Reeve – who has the unfortunate habit of speaking with her eyes closed, as if she cannot bear to look at Dillon – is still far from over the bewildering failure of the American people to seize the God-given opportunity they recently had to elect Kamala Harris as president.*

She wonders if this catastrophe was not the fault of a gang of Rogan-led podcasters who have become the new establishment.

To his credit, Dillon responds to her question in good faith: “To hang this defeat on a few podcasters and to say they were the problem, I just don’t buy the narrative. I don’t think I’m the new establishment. If you weigh a few comedians with podcasts versus all of the people who supported Kamala Harris… multi-billionaires, huge media institutions, a whole political party apparatus, I just don’t think most people are going to buy that. It seems a great way to excuse running an unpopular candidate on a platform the American people weren’t sold on.”

* * * * * * * * *

Watching Reeve’s interview, it is easy to see how through her questions she deliberately casts a wide net, seemingly comfortable in the knowledge that anything contentious or controversial in the responses will be amplified in the editing process. She pushes Dillon, for example, on the fascist-style salutes Elon Musk and Bannon supposedly made, the Machiavellian manner in which Rogan apparently controls American comics, and what she perceives to be the modern cancellation of left-wing comedians.

To this last point, Dillon cites the vast and ongoing success of left-leaning comedians Chelsea Handler, John Mulaney, Sarah Silverman and Bill Burr. When he mentions Louis CK, she instinctively makes a throat-slitting sign to imply cancellation. He continues: “Is Trevor Noah not popular? He does arenas. He’s one of the most popular comedians in the country… Where’s Amy Schumer? I don’t know. Maybe she’s in her $15 million townhouse in Brooklyn. I think she’ll be OK.”

* Christian Toto notes that Dillon told Reeve, “his podcast bookers reached out to both Sen. Bernie Sanders and Gov. Tim Walz to appear on his podcast, presumably before Election Day. Both declined the invitation.”

As Natalie Sandoval of the Daily Caller adds, Tim Dillon Agrees To Interview With CNN And It Went Exactly How You Expect. “Kudos to CNN for airing the entire interview. The true ineptitude of the CNN brain trust, sans editing, is a sight to behold. If only there was a way to play Reeve’s portion of the interview at double speed. Not that I’d dare fast forward through a second of her insights, but because she speaks with all the vitality of a patient hooked up to a morphine drip.”

Say what you will about Cathy Newman grilling Jordan Peterson, at least she brought plenty of energy to the proceedings. Reeve appears in the interview to be the equivalent of this meme if it had downed a whole bottle of Mandrax:

(Artwork by Jon Gabriel.)
Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll