MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Jazz Shaw, Rest in Peace. “All of these public details you probably know, so I want to share one of those little personal stories that get to the heart of who a person really is.”
Archive for 2024
October 31, 2024
WSJ: A Harris Victory Means a Fourth Obama Term. At home, she’s no centrist. Abroad, she seems unprepared for the dangers ahead.
You have to admire Democrats for their audacity. They claimed for more than a year that the clearly declining Joe Biden was mentally fit enough to serve another four years. When the June debate made that untenable, they did a 180-degree turn and anointed his Vice President as their nominee while claiming, without so much as a nod of embarrassment, that she somehow represents “a new way forward.”
Republicans could never pull off that one. And in the end neither has Ms. Harris, if you take her at her word. Asked on “The View” on Oct. 8 what she might do differently from the last four years, Mr. Biden’s loyal number two said, “There is not a thing that comes to mind.” That was the truest line spoken in what has been a notably dishonest and dispiriting election campaign on both sides.
Ms. Harris has presented herself as new based largely on her biography. But as far as policies and coalition go, she represents more of the same, and not merely of the last four years. Her candidacy is best understood as an attempt to continue the progressive political wave that began in 2006 with the GOP defeat in Congress and rolled ashore as a tsunami amid the financial panic of 2008. She is running for what essentially would be Barack Obama’s fourth progressive term.
Based upon the role she’s been playing in Obama’s third term, I really can’t say she deserves the promotion. Especially after she bungled all of the tasks she was given by Biden in an effort to demonstrate her competency. (Or the lack thereof.)
EVERGREEN ADVICE: Don’t Stick Your Dick In Commie. “Color me just a tad skeptical that the daughter of a high ranking Chinese communist official would find a life with Tim Walz an attractive option. The communist princesses and princelings, especially in the Deng Xiaoping/Jiang Zemin era, would have been groomed for important CCP positions or high-paying positions in the newly liberalized private sector. Now ordinary Chinese girls of the era would probably flock to the chance to escape China by marrying an American, because of all the poverty ($307 per capita GDP in 1989) and Communism, but a communist princess? I seriously doubt it.”
CHRISTIAN TOTO: Here Collapses Under Weight of Its Gimmick.
Last year, Harrison Ford looked like his old self in “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.” The de-aging effects weren’t perfect, but it still felt like Doc Brown’s DeLorean had taken us back to 1981.
Magical.
“Here,” based on the graphic novel by Richard McGuire, takes that visual approach to a new level. However, much like “Dial of Destiny” the film supporting it can’t measure up.
Director Robert Zemeckis reunites “Forrest Gump” alums Tom Hanks and Robin Wright for a cloying drama set in one expansive room.
Really. That’s both a spoiler alert and a warning.
“Here” literally spans millions of years. The story opens with dinosaurs rumbling over a green expanse of land. We fast forward through the centuries until we end up watching that very space taken up by 20th-century Americans.
Yes, Zemeckis and co. are needlessly flexing the production’s CGI budget here for no discernible effect.
We land on several overlapping stories, including the saga of Richard and Margaret (Hanks and Wright). We watch Richard, or Ricky as a boy, grows up before our eyes. The action plays out in the family’s living room, where a long, cozy sofa dominates the room.
Get used to that setup. It’s the only one you’ll see.
F/X gurus de-age both Hanks and Wright to convincingly show them as a young couple, a budding family and, years later, a duo struggling in their empty nest years. It helps that the static shot means few close-up shots.
The trailer sold Here as an intriguing family movie perfect for the holiday season, but according to Toto, it’s a CGI de-aging movie that’s filmed almost entirely on one set? At least Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman had plenty of gangster action in a multitude of locations, in addition to all of the de-aging effects, before its painfully inert last hour.
BEN SHAPIRO: NY Times, Media Matters Pressuring ‘YouTube to Demonetize and Penalize’ Conservatives.
The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro exposed the New York Times and Media Matters working together to pressure YouTube to silence conservative voices.
We also know the NYT contacted Tucker Carlson. Shapiro said the newspaper contacted others at The Daily Wire, too.
The far-left “media watchdog” organization founded by David Brock goes after conservatives, establishing boycotts and campaigns to boycott those voices.
Andrew Breitbart received a lot of wrath from the group, along with those who worked with him, like Dana Loesch.
Here’s Ben’s long Twitter thread.
The Washington Post also decided to get in on the action, sending Shapiro an email with near identical language to the one sent by the New York Times’ Nico Grant. Fortunately (this time at least) “YouTube didn’t cave:”
Grant, who earlier this week had locked down his Twitter page, has since reactivated it to promote his new article, which can be found here. His tweet linking to his hit piece (which presumably had the blessings of his editors at the Times in order to be published there), is getting the ratio it deserves:
Evergreen:
MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT [VIP]: Trump Can’t Ditch the Income Tax for Tariffs, But Here’s What He Could Do.
Members asked for more long-form essays and I’ve been happy to oblige.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: The close election that ended in a rout: Could 2024 be a replay of 1980?
Polls have consistently indicated that this year’s presidential race is exceedingly close.
At the same time, there have been a few murmurs among analysts that the election endgame could repeat that of 1980, when pollsters erroneously projected a close race between President Jimmy Carter and California’s former Republican governor, Ronald Reagan.
That election ended in a near-landslide for Reagan, who won the popular vote by nearly 10 percentage points. The outcome, said the New York Times, left Americans scratching their heads “over how Ronald Reagan won an overwhelming victory in what was supposed to be a close presidential election.”
It was an outcome pollsters had not foreseen, and afterward, they quarreled openly about why their surveys had failed to provide an accurate sense of what the election would bring. “Pollsters spat over why they erred so badly,” read a post-election headline in the Los Angeles Times.
Could this year’s race turn out similarly, in a decisive result unanticipated by the polls? Might the expected tight race morph into a clear popular vote victory, if not a landslide, for former President Trump or Vice President Harris?
Read the whole thing.
BITING THE HAND THAT FEEDS YOU IS NEVER A GOOD IDEA:
Bezos had the gall to call out the perception of bias within newsroom.
The activists reacted by publishing a hit piece aimed at their own owner, who is losing hundreds of millions each year subsidizing their salaries.
They share this as if it is evidence of their… pic.twitter.com/Vi5d32gRSy
— AG (@AGHamilton29) October 30, 2024
Firable offenses really ought to get one fired.
LIMITED TIME DEAL: 5 Pack Mens Sweatpants Open Bottom Joggers. #CommissionEarned
I DON’T LIKE GOOGLE EITHER, BUT…: Russian court fines Google $20 decillion.
A Russian court has ruled that Google owes Russian media stations around $20 decillion in fines for blocking their content, and the fines could get bigger.
To put that into perspective, the World Bank estimates global GDP as around $100 trillion, which is peanuts compared to the prospective fine. Google would therefore have to find more money than exists on Earth to pay Moscow – but on Tuesday fell a little short of that mark when it posted $88 billion quarterly revenue.
The bizarre amount has been calculated after a four-year court case that started after YouTube banned the ultra-nationalist Russian channel Tsargrad in 2020 in response to the US sanctions imposed against its owner. Following Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine in 2022 more channels were added to the banned list and 17 stations are now suing the Chocolate Factory, including Zvezda (a TV channel owned by Putin’s Ministry of Defence), according to local media.
“Google was called by a Russian court to administrative liability under Art. 13.41 of the Administrative Offenses Code for removing channels on the YouTube platform. The court ordered the company to restore these channels,” lawyer Ivan Morozov told state media outlet TASS.
The court imposed a fine of 100 thousand rubles ($1,025) per day, with the total fine doubling every week.
That’s $20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
THE DISINFORMATION DOUBLE STANDARD:
If you don’t know what the last day of voting is by now you shouldn’t be allowed to vote. You are even more brain-dead than Joe Biden at 8 p.m.
Yet ordinary Americans were investigated, prosecuted, and jailed for making jokes about voting on a Wednesday or Thursday after the election.
It was election interference, misinformation, and a conspiracy to steal the election.
Douglas Mackey was sentenced to jail for 9 months for posting such a meme, which was the equivalent of the old joke that we should vote early and vote often–a joke told by innumerable politicians and comics. But it was a joke made by a Republican, so it is out of bounds and must be punished.
Jimmy Kimmel just made a similar joke to millions, not hundreds, and the entire establishment will no doubt come to his defense. Nothing will happen, just as nothing happens when celebrities muse about shooting Donald Trump, chopping off his head, stabbing him, bombing the White House, or any other call to violence against “Nazi” Republicans.
It’s good to be in the nomenklatura.
PEOPLE HAVE LAUGHED AT ME WHEN I SAID ANDROID IS LESS SECURE: Android Trojan that intercepts voice calls to banks just got more stealthy: FakeCall malware can reroute calls intended for banks to attacker-controlled numbers.
JOE ROGAN INTERVIEWS JD VANCE (Video):
COMING SOON TO A CITY NEAR YOU? As SF DA, Harris Raised the Bar for Murder Charges ‘Unbelievably High.’ So Cops Started Going around Her.
As San Francisco district attorney, Kamala Harris developed such a reputation for her unwillingness to prosecute murder cases that police regularly went around her to secure arrest warrants and would even seek out more aggressive federal prosecutors when they had a case they felt should be pursued.
Five months after Harris took office, police began taking the unprecedented step of going to judges to obtain Ramey warrants, which are issued before charges have officially been brought by a prosecutor, in order to arrest murder suspects, according to local media reports. Police also brought local murder cases to federal prosecutors to handle instead of Harris’s office. They also routinely pushed a reluctant Harris to work with grand juries to build cases and protect witnesses who may be afraid of coming forward.
Kamala was too busy focusing on infinitely more serious issues: busting pot smokers and parents of truant children.
THEY KEEP TELLING ME HOW CLEAN OUR ELECTIONS ARE: A Non-Citizen Cast a Ballot in Michigan. Officials Say They Have to Count It.
THERE’S A LOT OF GOOD PUBLICITY ABOUT THESE DRUGS: Semaglutide linked to reduced arthritis knee pain in people with obesity, study finds.
RIP, JAZZ SHAW:
COASTAL CAROLINA U. GOING FULL-BORE FOR FREE SPEECH, INSTITUTIONAL NEUTRALITY. It’s an easy and inexpensive way to stand out from the crowd, but few schools are willing to do it. They’ll be eating USC and Clemson’s lunch before long if the big guys don’t watch out.
JANE FONDA HARDEST HIT: Big Tech Is Paving the Way for a Nuclear Breakthrough.
Small modular nuclear reactors long seemed like moonshots with lots of promise but not enough commercial interest. That changed recently after tech giants with surging power needs for AI processing swooped in with announcements backing SMR projects.
Earlier this month, Google parent Alphabet said it signed a power purchase agreement with Kairos Power for an up-to-500-megawatt SMR project. Amazon said it would work with X-energy on a 320 MW project that is jointly backed by a utility in Washington state. These SMR projects won’t be built overnight. Both Google and Amazon expect their initial projects to come online by the 2030s at the earliest. Oracle is another company to watch: Chairman Larry Ellison said in an earnings call in September that the company is designing a 1 Gigawatt-plus data center with building permits for three SMR reactors.
SMRs come with the potential to solve some of nuclear energy’s biggest headaches: Cost, safety and time—at least, in theory. That is why tech companies’ backing is so crucial. The industry needs to test and learn before it can prove out the benefits.
Faster, please.
Earlier: Leftist realizes killing nuclear power means more C02 emissions, news at 11.
BRIAN STELTER, NEW YORK MAGAZINE MAKE SURPRISE IN-KIND CONTRIBUTION TO TRUMP 2024 CAMPAIGN! Oh No! … Anyway: TV Executive Worries That a Trump Victory Would Be the Death of the Media:
It’s a well-deserved panic, as the legacy media is desperate for a massive reboot: Against the Corporate Media: Michael Walsh’s New Anthology Explores How Badly the MSM Has Fallen.
THAT’S HOW YOU CAN BE SURE IT WAS EFFECTIVE: Media Has a Meltdown Over Trump’s Garbage Truck Press Conference.