HE IS AN EMBARRASSMENT AND YET INCAPABLE OF EMBARRASSMENT: Biden Suffers Embarrassing Defeat in One Primary Contest.
Archive for 2024
March 6, 2024
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: “Totalitarianism, however, does not so much promise an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia. A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud. Such a society, no matter how long it persists, can never afford to become either tolerant or intellectually stable.”
BYRON YORK: Haley loss another reminder: GOP can’t go back.
Each Republican candidate running in 2024 had to reckon with Trump’s complicated legacy — and then with Trump himself. Some tried to be super Trumpy. Some tried to be anti-Trumps. Some tried to be old school. None succeeded.
All had to recognize one fact: For the GOP, there was no going back. In February 2022, I had a long discussion with Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), who at that time was clearly thinking about running for president but still had to enact his legislative agenda and win reelection. (He did both in a very impressive fashion.) I mentioned that there were some Republicans who were simply more comfortable with the old style of Republicanism and the old line of succession. I asked DeSantis if he thought there was any going back to that. He laughed. Absolutely not, he said. No way, no how. Despite his loss, he was right.
Indeed, there is not. But there are still those Republicans who are nostalgic for a more orderly GOP. And many of them looked to Haley as their final hope, at least for now, of making that happen. Haley spoke passionately about the “chaos” that surrounds Trump — and indeed, he is a man facing 91 felony counts and all the trouble that entails. She promised a return to a calmer and more disciplined Republican Party. Her problem was that there were not nearly enough Republicans who want that, too. Some love Trump, others don’t love him but like his results, and others think that for all his flaws he is what the GOP needs to fight a Democratic Party dominated by progressive activists. Some would even like to move on from Trump but don’t believe there is another Republican on the scene with the strength and talent to lead the party in a new direction. In any event, Haley has lost, and those supporters who want to change today’s Republican Party will have to wait for new circumstances to bring new leaders.
Meanwhile, at America’s Newspaper of Record: Raytheon Lowers Flags To Half-Staff After Nikki Haley Drops Out. “The aerospace technology corporation, which had been holding out hope that the world would enter a new era of highly profitable war, destruction, and death with the onset of World War III, was devastated by this morning’s news that Haley had suspended her campaign.”
CORRELATION AND CAUSATION? WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE. Researchers say education might slow pace of aging.
BEN SHAPIRO: The Dirty Little Secret of the 2024 Campaign.
Meanwhile, Trump is winning over more and more vote-switchers. That’s because his positions are moderate. On abortion, for example, he may support a federal 16-week ban. By polling data, 48% of Americans support such a ban, compared with 36% who oppose such a ban. Only 24% of Americans support Biden’s position — availability of abortion without limits. On immigration, Biden is underwater by over 20 points. On inflation and spending, Americans favor lower inflation and lower spending — both propositions that cut against Biden’s preferred policies. On national security, Americans broadly favor Israel over Hamas — and yet Biden’s administration has steered toward the pro-Hamas voters in Dearborn, Michigan.
For some reason, Biden and his team think that their echo chamber strategy — shouting “Jan. 6!” over and over while demonizing their political opposition as insurrectionists and traitors — is likely to jog enough base turnout to overcome their loss of the middle. But that’s a chimerical proposition. Biden, in other words, has been suckered by the very people who want him to win most — the radicals in the media who keep ramming him toward the far left, even as he falls further and further behind in the polling.
Don’t get cocky; Joe’s enablers could still get him over the finish line one more time: The ‘cabal’ that bragged of foisting Joe Biden on us must answer for his failed presidency.
“IT’S WORSE THAN YOU KNOW”; “IT USUALLY IS”: Joe Biden: Confuzzled Warmonger “Presidentish Joe Biden has just issued another stupid and none-too-subtle threat that could extend the bloodshed in Gaza. That’s on top of another recklessly stupid decision last week that will certainly lead to more dead and wounded on both sides — and those two stupid things are just the most recent in a string of stupid mistakes leading the world to wider wars.”
SEEMS LIKE A GOOD WAY TO PROMOTE RESISTANCE: One dose of antibiotic after sex halved STD rates, study shows. “Just one dose of the antibiotic doxycycline taken after sex halved the number of chlamydia and syphilis cases in San Francisco, promising new research shows. In the study, gay and bisexual men and transgender women who had a history of sexually transmitted infections or multiple sex partners were given a supply of the antibiotic and asked to take two 100-milligram pills within 72 hours of unprotected sex. The strategy is known as doxy-PEP.”
COME SEE THE HOMOPHOBIA INHERENT IN THE LEFTISM: Jon Stewart Mocks Dr. Phil as Gay for Noticing Border Invasion.
YOU CAN ALWAYS COUNT ON THE NYT STAFF TO SIDE WITH THE BARBARIANS: “Tensions at The New York Times over an investigative report on Hamas’ use of sexual violence in the October 7th attacks have erupted into the open over the past week with fresh conflict surfacing nearly every day.”
“At the heart of the newsroom tensions stands a powerful story about sexual violence during Hamas’ deadly Oct. 7 attack in Israel. The story, published in late December under the byline of international correspondent Jeffrey Gettleman and two freelancers, said The Times had documented a pattern of sexual assault by Hamas as a brutal strategy.”
From the comments: “Raping someone to death for leftist political purposes isn’t rape-rape, right?”
THEY’RE DOING PRETTY WELL AT SINKING SHIPS, FOR A COUNTRY WITHOUT A NAVY: Ukraine Claims to Have Sunk Another Russian Warship in the Black Sea. “A modern Russian coastal warship has been swarmed by drones and sunk, Ukraine claims, the latest strike against the dwindling Black Sea Fleet.”
This bodes poorly for a Chinese Taiwan invasion fleet.
MSNBC RESUMES 2016-ERA IN-KIND CONTRIBUTIONS TO TRUMP CAMPAIGN: MSNBC: It Is Hilarious That Illegal Immigration is Top Issue for Republican Virginia Voters.
Curiously, not that long ago the issue wasn’t a laughing matter to these prominent Democrats:
FLASHBACK: Barack Obama laments the "problem" of illegal immigration in a presidential debate #DemDebate2
— Kambree (@KamVTV) June 28, 2019
WELL, I THINK IT’S BECOME OBVIOUS THAT THE IMPORTANCE OF JANUARY 6 WAS INFLATED: McConnell endorses Trump in 2024 race despite railing against him after Jan. 6.
YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT TRACK F: That’s the NSF bureaucratese for $39 million worth of federal grants that went to academic teams and private firms to develop digital censorship tools capable of monitoring and cancelling every word you put on the Internet. The details are in my Epoch Times Premium Report. I put this link up here several days ago but I’m reposting it today for those who missed it previously. This is important.
DISPATCHES FROM WEIMAR AMERICA: KY lawmaker criticized for implying pedophiles could benefit from ‘child sex dolls.’
BE PREPARED FOR SPRING: Crocs Unisex-Adult Classic Clogs. #CommissionEarned
STUCK WITH JOE: Michelle Obama Out as POTUS Candidate.
THE SWAMP PROTECTS ITS OWN, EVEN THE ONES NO LONGER BREATHING: How Dianne Feinstein secured $1 billion in ‘pet projects’ — the year after her death.
WHY IS HIGHER EDUCTION SUCH A CESSPIT OF ANTISEMITISM? UCSB Black Studies faculty plan ‘day of interruption’ to protest protections for Jews.
MEA CULPA: Google Is Even More Evil Than I Thought.
WHY IS HIGHER EDUCATION SUCH A CESSPIT OF HATRED AND ANTISEMITISM? Illinois Wesleyan University faces federal investigation over anti-Semitism complaint: The Department of Education opened an investigation into Illinois Wesleyan University over its response to anti-Semitism on campus since the Israel-Hamas war began on October 7, 2023.
WELL, YES: Sergey Brin says Google ‘definitely messed up’ Gemini image launch.
Brin, 50, spoke to entrepreneurs on Saturday at the “AGI House” in Hillsborough, California, just south of San Francisco, where developers and founders were testing Google’s Gemini model. AGI stands for artificial general intelligence and refers to a form of AI that can complete tasks to the same level, or a step above, humans.
In taking questions from the crowd, Brin discussed AI’s impact on search and how Google can maintain its leadership position in its core market as AI continues to grow. He also commented on the flawed launch last month of Google’s image generator, which the company pulled after users discovered historical inaccuracies and questionable responses.
“We definitely messed up on the image generation,” Brin said Saturday. “I think it was mostly due to just not thorough testing. It definitely, for good reasons, upset a lot of people.”
Except that isn’t the case at all:
Roughly, the “safety” architecture designed around image generation (slightly different than text) looks like this: a user makes a request for an image in the chat interface, which Gemini — once it realizes it’s being asked for a picture — sends on to a smaller LLM that exists specifically for rewriting prompts in keeping with the company’s thorough “diversity” mandates. This smaller LLM is trained with LoRA on synthetic data generated by another (third) LLM that uses Google’s full, pages-long diversity “preamble.” The second LLM then rephrases the question (say, “show me an auto mechanic” becomes “show me an Asian auto mechanic in overalls laughing, an African American female auto mechanic holding a wrench, a Native American auto mechanic with a hard hat” etc.), and sends it on to the diffusion model. The diffusion model checks to make sure the prompts don’t violate standard safety policy (things like self-harm, anything with children, images of real people), generates the images, checks the images again for violations of safety policy, and returns them to the user.
“Three entire models all kind of designed for adding diversity,” I asked one person close to the safety architecture. “It seems like that — diversity — is a huge, maybe even central part of the product. Like, in a way it is the product?”
“Yes,” he said, “we spend probably half of our engineering hours on this.”
Either Brin doesn’t know what’s going on in his own company or he can’t admit it in public. Neither should be comforting to jittery shareholders.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: It’s Time for a Nikki Haley Wellness Check. “Nikki Haley has been hanging around thanks to the largesse of leftists who are consumed by hatred for Trump. Many of them still claim to be Republicans, but they’ve thrown in with the Democrats and are hoping that Trump will end up in jail before election day.”
WELL, BYE: Nikki Haley to drop out of 2024 race, ending challenge against Trump for GOP presidential nomination. I was impressed with her once, but that changed as I got to know her better. She’s basically a female Mitt Romney.