Archive for 2023
June 6, 2023
NOT ENOUGH TO COVER THE PAIN AND SUFFERING, BUT… Pushback: Court victory for volleyball student and coach father who were blacklisted for disagreeing with queer agenda.
June 5, 2023
OPEN THREAD: This is the way.
OUT ON A LIMB: ‘Lockdowns were a costly failure:’ New meta analysis.
THE NEW SPACE RACE: UAE outlines plans for asteroid mission.
MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN IS UP: Thank the green-energy cult for major blackouts this summer.
GREAT MOMENTS IN PROJECTION: After Overseeing Weaponization Of Government Against Trump, James Comey Frets Trump Could Weaponize Government.
HMMMM: What to make of Apple’s intriguing $3,499 Vision Pro headset.
We’re still reeling a bit from today’s announcement of Vision Pro, Apple’s biggest new platform/hardware product rollout in years. The magnitude of the entirely new computing interface the company is trying to sell here is matched only by the augmented reality headset’s significant $3,499 starting price.
Whether or not Apple’s gambit here can succeed in a headset-curious but still largely headset-skeptical market will depend in large part on the quality of the “immersive” experience Apple can deliver. We’ll only know by actually putting this thing on our heads. Before we get that eyes- and hands-on time, though, here are some immediate thoughts on how to position Vision Pro in the market and in your mind.
The crowd at the 2023 Worldwide Developers Conference in Cupertino sounds, well…reserved about the announcement:
You won’t find a better pre-sale indicator than this sound from the audience https://t.co/gERziGaQp2
— Ramp Capital (@RampCapitalLLC) June 5, 2023
Related: Google Glass is now officially dead: Why did the ‘innovative’ product fail?
GOODER AND HARDER, SAN FRAN: Owner of SF’s Largest Hotel, the Hilton Union Square, Is Walking Away, Surrendering It to Lender.
Another bit of bad news for downtown San Francisco arrived Monday morning with the revelation that the investment firm that owns the Hilton San Francisco Union Square and Parc 55 hotels is walking away from its debts and giving up hope on a return of SF’s convention market.
Virginia-based REIT Park Hotels & Resorts has opted to cease payments on a $725 million loan, as the SF Business Times reports today, essentially surrendering over 2,900 hotel rooms and hospitality facilities to its lender. This includes the 1,921-room Hilton San Francisco Union Square, which is San Francisco’s largest hotel, occupying an entire city block, and one of the country’s largest hotels outside of Las Vegas.
Park Hotels & Resorts is also giving up on the 1,024-room Parc 55, citing the continued debt burden of the two hotels on its portfolio, and multiple factors that have made the SF market less desirable for their business.
“After much thought and consideration, we believe it is in the best interest for Park’s stockholders to materially reduce our current exposure to the San Francisco market,” said Park Hotels CEO Thomas J. Baltimore in a statement. “Now more than ever, we believe San Francisco’s path to recovery remains clouded and elongated by major challenges, both old and new: record high office vacancy; concerns over street conditions; lower return to office than peer cities; and a weaker than expected citywide convention calendar through 2027 that will negatively impact business and leisure demand.”
Related: San Francisco Falls Into The Abyss. “No major American city has failed at the same level as Detroit, whose population dropped from 1.85 million people in 1950 to about 630,000 today. Move over Detroit, here comes San Francisco, which lost 6.3 percent of its population between 2019 and 2021, a rate of decline larger than any two year-period in Detroit’s history and unprecedented among any major US city.”
HOW IT STARTED:
“As mayor of our city, I would never trade away peoples’ civil rights for money,” Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg said. “That’s the only place to stand on behalf of this city that turned out 25,000 people to Capitol Mall (for the women’s march) and this city that prides itself on its incredible diversity.” Steinberg added his city would “join, if not lead, any effort to fight (the sanctuary city threat) with litigation.”
—“California leaders push back against Trump, pledge to protect immigrant ‘sanctuaries,’” the Sacramento Bee, January 25, 2017.
How it’s going: Gov. Gavin Newsom calls Ron DeSantis ‘pathetic’ on Twitter; calls for kidnapping charges after migrants dropped off in Sacramento.
—ABC7 Los Angeles.
Flashback: Sanctuary Cities Seethe as Illegal Immigrants Actually Arrive.
The surest sign that public policies are simply virtue signals is when the messages don’t cost anything. The easiest way to tell when that signal starts to fail is to watch politicians flounder as the costs start to rise and voters demand relief.
It was free—and meaningless—for progressive churches to post banners calling themselves “nuclear free zones” during the Reagan era. Their dwindling congregations loved it. It was free, after George Floyd‘s murder, to post woke catechism signs on your front lawn, proclaiming “In this house, we believe: Black Lives Matter, women’s rights are human rights, no human is illegal” and so on. Maybe the neighbors gave you high-fives. And for years it has been free for deep-blue cities to proclaim themselves “sanctuaries” for illegal immigrants. That’s changing now that voters want some sanctuary for themselves.
Changes like this happen when voters realize the old virtue signals actually entail serious costs—and that they will have to pay them. That is exactly what’s happening in New York City and Washington D.C. now that Texas governor Greg Abbott is sending those cities a few busloads of illegal immigrants from his state.
These progressive bastions were silent when the Biden administration flew planeloads of illegal immigrants to suburban airports in the middle of the night. TV coverage was prohibited, and the arrivals were secretly dispersed. Abbott’s buses, by contrast, arrive downtown greeted by local TV crews. Now you can hear the politicians screech.
If I’m reading the numbers correctly in the ABC7 article, Newsom is melting down over — brace yourself — 36 illegal immigrants. Meanwhile, “The US Border Patrol has encountered approximately 1.33 million migrants in fiscal year 2023 to date,” according to CNN. Newsom’s pain could be reversed if Biden could be persuaded to change course: Democrats Discover Only The Federal Government Can Solve The Border Crisis.
Related: Leftist Hypocrisy: Failing to Criticize Environmental Disaster of Biden’s Open Border.
SEN. TIM SCOTT TAKES ON SUNNY HOSTIN OVER SYSTEMIC RACISM:
“Progress in America is palpable; it can be measured in generations,” he said. He continued, “I look back at the fact that my grandfather born in 1921 in Salley, South Carolina when he was on a sidewalk, a white person was coming he had to step off and not make eye-contact.”
He pointed out that today every major network has black hosts and anchors. “So what I’m suggesting is yesterday’s exception is today’s rule.”
Perhaps sensing that Sen. Scott was on a roll, Hostin interjected “So America has met its promise?” This is a dodge. Sen. Scott never claimed the country had achieved perfection, merely that a great deal had changed in the past 100 years.
“The concept of America is that we are going to become a more perfect union, that in fact the challenges that we faced 50 years ago and 60 years ago should not be the same challenges that we face today,” Scott replied. He continued, “When my mother was born about 10% of African-Americans got a high school degree, diploma. Today, it’s over 90 percent.”
At this point, Whoopi Goldberg interrupted to go to a commercial and Sen. Scott made a joke about just getting started. After the break, Goldberg asked why these sorts of conversations were never discussed by Republicans.
Anyway, there’s more to the discussion but you have to hand it to Sen. Scott for walking into the lion’s den, so to speak, and doing a pretty good job defending his views when he was clearly outnumbered on the panel. At least three of the co-hosts (Hostin, Goldberg and Navarro) were out to make him look bad and he held his own.
But is Scott’s appearance all for nothing? Tim Scott’s Appearance on ‘The View’ Ends in Embarrassment Because Republicans Never Learn.
Does Joe Biden go on Sean Hannity’s show? No, he doesn’t. So why are Republicans going on the shows of people who hate them and want to see them destroyed? What is gained by helping produce ratings and money for The View or doing a town hall on CNN when the end result is so obviously a net negative?
I understand the notion that facing adversarial media makes a candidate look “tough.” But that’s not the reality of the situation. Instead, Republicans usually come away looking weak, having been denied a chance to fully explain their positions. You will never beat the left by agreeing to play by their rules. How many more times do I need to say it? How many more articles must I write? I suspect the answer will be quite a few more.
Sadly, yes.
UPDATE: Joy Behar was too cowardly to appear onstage with Scott: The View co-host who lectured Tim Scott on racism misses his appearance on show.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Blue Balls Can Affect Anyone, But 1 Group Faces More Sexual Pressure Because Of It. You guessed it: Women hardest hit!
Women, of course, never pressure men into sex. Men’s consent is always “enthusiastic and freely given.” Actually, to be fair, the article does say that women pressure men, too, but still maintains the narrative of male “coercion.”
Though I laughed at a response on an undergraduate message board, where someone was saying consent doesn’t count if it’s not “enthusiastic.” The response: I consent to paying my tuition at this dump, but I’m certainly not enthusiastic about it. Does that mean I’m a robbery victim? Yeah, if grudging consent doesn’t count as consent, a lot of people and institutions are criminals now, and not just sexually.
PLEASE NEVER GIVE A NICKEL TO THESE FOLKS: Target funds an absurdly left group that seeks the closure of Mount Rushmore–which it calls “an international symbol of White supremacy and colonization”–and the return all the public lands in the Black Hills to indigenous peoples. Customers need to make an example of the clowns at Target.
WELL, “AMERICANS” ARE A PRETTY DIVERSE POPULATION: People in other rich nations have been outliving Americans for decades. Most other rich nations are much more homogenous.
TO BE FAIR, MOST POETS ARE LEFTIES: “When I was a kid, I thought of the poetry life as having these noncompetitive values—which isn’t to say that I’m not competitive, because I’m as competitive as the next person. But I had this fantasy of a supportive bohemia with no judgment. It’s really ironic how, even though there are no rewards in poetry, the little that there are, everyone’s so competitive about, and everyone is backbiting and striving for some kind of recognition in a way that’s probably more sordid than among painters, because there is actually a possibility of having some sort of comfortable life when you’re a painter, while the poets have to fight for scraps.”
If you read the whole interview, the underlying theme is money and the lack of it. As the old saying goes, when a bunch of writers get together, they inevitably wind up talking about not art, but money.
21ST CENTURY PROBLEMS: You Can’t Yoga Your Way Out of This.
AN ACQUAINTANCE COMMENTS: “I’ve noticed the NYT has run almost daily articles for some time now attacking the legitimacy of the Supreme Court. It is amazing how they can’t see the self-destructive ways in which they go after every institution that isn’t in the Left’s hands.”
Maybe they don’t think it’s self-destructive. After all, they can pivot on a dime if things change. Under FDR they were all in on why “nine old men” shouldn’t frustrate the will of the people, then under the Warren Court they were all in on rule by a bevy of Platonic Guardians.
FIGHT THE POWER: Gun Rights Orgs Do Battle With the Administrative State’s Anti-Gun Overreach.
It is, of course, utterly inappropriate, unconstitutional, essentially criminal for the Administrative State to pursue its own policy goals in preference to those of the people, but that’s where we are.
STOP, I ALREADY PLAN ON VOTING FOR HIM: Comey Warns Trump Might Use the Constitution Against Him and His Corrupt Friends.
SOUNDS HARAM: Your Next International Flight Could Be Powered by Pig Fat Biodiesel.
I guess it might deter hijackings. . . .
THE FIELD ISN’T YET COMPLETE: ‘The Guy’s Got Balls’: Meet The Little-Known Governor Who’s Expected To Jump Into The 2024 Presidential Race.
UKRAINE WAR: Go Home, Everybody, Russia Already Countered the Counteroffensive. “The most interesting news might be the action going on around — and I do mean around — the pile of rubble once known as the town of Bakhmut. We could all be forgiven for thinking that the Battle of Bakhmut was over, with Russia taking the town in May after ten months of heavy fighting. New developments show that the battle might be far from over.”
JUST AS PEOPLE ARE TALKING ABOUT REVISITING NEW YORK TIMES V. SULLIVAN, WE GET A LIBEL CASE OUT OF ALABAMA: NEW YORK TIMES ATTEMPTS TO BACKTRACK ON REPORTING THAT ALABAMA PLAYER KAI SPEARS WAS AT SCENE OF MURDER FOLLOWING LAWSUIT.
Cooper Lee, a student manager for the Alabama men’s basketball team has revealed that he was the unnamed passenger in Alabama basketball star Brandon Miller’s car at the scene of Jamea Jonae Harris’ murder. Not — as The New York Times ad reported — Alabama guard Kai Spears.
Spears is currently suing The Times, which finds itself in one hell of a pickle.
New York Times writer Billy Witz wrote an article that claimed Spears had been the passenger in Miller’s call. This article was published on March 15. That was two months to the day after the murder that led to the arrest of former Alabama player Darius Miles and accomplice Michael Davis.
From the start, Spears, his father, and the Alabama athletic director all denied the story. However, The Times stood by its reporting.
This week, it was announced that Spears decided to sue the paper implicating him in the matter. Suddenly, The Times decided to take a second look at its reporting.
Instead of involving a segregationist police commissioner trying to silence out-of-state media, this case is a big corporation spreading lies about a young man. Both in Alabama. Ironic if this turned out to be the vehicle the Supreme Court used to overturn Sullivan.
My recent piece on that case is here.