Police recently arrested two people shooting paintball guns at Jews, but have told residents there isn’t much more they can do as the protesters have First Amendment rights.
They do — but Jews have also been spat on, followed and harassed, none of which is protected by the Bill of Rights.
It’s hard to overlook the lack of outcry from outside Teaneck.
If it were a different group, the Biden Administration — and the press, but I repeat myself — would be all over this. But they need to carry Michigan and Minnesota, which have been salted with Jew-hating immigrants. Not by accident, either.
I MENTIONED HIS DEATH THE OTHER DAY, BUT HERE’S A NICE VERNOR VINGE OBITUARY. “In many ways, Vinge’s visions have arguably borne out almost to the exact year, as evidenced by the recent, rapid advances within an AI industry whose leaders are openly indebted to his work.”
"Without realising it, meaning anyone who objected publicly was marginalised, the true numbers were suppressed, and all the mainstream parties lied for years that they were about to cut immigration, but never did. https://t.co/gxiQYYSz2z
As you can tell from his title, Nazir Ahmed, Baron Ahmed – born in 1957 in Mirpur, Azad Kashmir, Pakistan – is an aristocrat, a nob, a gent, a member of the crème-de-la-crème of the United Kingdom – a man who’s moved in the most rarefied circles and enjoyed the most extraordinary privileges. A former Labour MP, he was created a life peer in 1998 by Her Majesty the Queen on the recommendation of then-Prime Minister Tony Blair. On January 5 of this year, he was convicted by a Sheffield court of buggering a boy under age 11 and of two counts of attempted rape of a girl under age 13. At the same time and in the same courtroom, two of his brothers, Mohammed Farouq and Mohammed Tariq, were found guilty of similar crimes, the former of sexually assaulting a boy of eight (four counts) and the latter of sexually assaulting a boy under eleven (two counts). All three will be sentenced on February 4.
The convictions didn’t come fast, or easily. This was the second trial of Lord Ahmed (pictured above) and his brothers on the same charges. The first began last February. Two days after it started, a judiciary official, Judge Jeremy Richardson QC, called a halt to the proceedings, supposedly because the prosecution hadn’t shared certain items of evidence with the defense. Richardson called the prosecutors “disgraceful” and “shameful.” (I can’t find any indication that he ever described the actions by Lord Ahmed and his brothers in remotely similar terms.) Richardson even sought to prevent a re-trial, which made no sense, given his professed reason for stopping the first trial. This attempt to squelch justice wasn’t surprising: as we’ve seen over and over, there are many elements in the English judiciary – as well as in the most powerful ranks of the political class – who, in the name of multicultural harmony, will do all they can to protect Muslim felons from justice.
Fortunately, the Crown Prosecution Service appealed Richardson’s order and the Court of Appeal overturned it, making a new trial – and convictions – possible.
What, you may ask, did Lord Ahmed do to deserve a title? Not much. He was a Labor Party hack and one of several Muslim cronies to whom Blair doled out aristocratic titles. Why? A few reasons. For one thing, he wanted to suck up to Muslim voters, who form a key part of the Labour Party base. For another, he wanted to make the British nobility more diverse (a pretty funny concept, if you pause to think about it). Finally, he wanted to combat Islamic “extremism” by holding up “moderate” Muslims as role models. Of course, if Blair and his crew had been less blinkered about the horrors of Islamic ideology – and about the consequent everyday horrors of British Muslim life – they might have acted a tad more cautiously. Surely no one who’s paid attention to the grooming-gangs scandal should be surprised to see not just Lord Ahmed but also his two brothers nabbed for molesting kids. . . .
I’ve mentioned that there are many individuals in the corridors of U.K. power who, in the name of multicultural harmony, will go to great lengths to prevent Muslim felons like Lord Ahmed from paying for their crimes. Many of the same eminences, for the same noble reason, have striven to put Tommy Robinson behind bars on the slightest pretext and to keep him there for as long as possible, even at the risk of his very life. The two men form a fascinating contrast: whereas Ahmed, as a young Rotherhamite, sought out English children to exploit, harm, and destroy, Robinson, who’s spent his life in the rough-and-tumble Bedfordshire town of Luton, sought from early on sought to protect the most vulnerable members of his community.
So as you’re struggling to stay in the theater, or just stay awake, through the entire—not very long—running time of the new Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, you might find yourself noticing that Bill Murray only appears in about five minutes of the picture and he seems, well, divorced from the other people in the movie.
In his first appearance, his character, Peter Venkman, throws pens at the head of the comedian Kumail Nanjiani… but we never actually see them interact. Later we see him enter the Ghostbusters fire station from the old movies and kid around with Annie Potts, the remarkably well-preserved secretary from back in the 1980s—this may be the movie’s only genuinely enjoyable moment—but are Murray and Potts actually looking at each other or at tennis balls on a green screen?
And while Venkman and Dan Aykroyd’s Ray Stantz, the buddy team from the first two movies back in the 1980s, are supposed to have been best friends then and best friends now, they do not have a moment together. Only at the very end, where the original busting team of Murray, Aykroyd, Ernie Hudson, and Potts are seen pulling down on a handle, do they all seem to be on the same set in the same scene in the same movie at the same time.
Welcome to the future of movies. Green screens and AI and actors’ schedules are going to mean it will be possible for entire pictures and television series to be produced in which the interplay of characters and the performers who inhabit them are created through digital editing rather than the filming of them working off each other.
We’ve had tastes of this before, notably in the absolutely dreadful Fast X, in which Gal Gadot and Charlize Theron and Brie Larson and a few other players who only appear for a few minutes are clearly standing alone on a stage in London or Atlanta or somewhere reading lines with an assistant director, getting a million-dollar check for their time, and vamoosing back on a private plane to their PrivatePlaneLandia. Gwyneth Paltrow reportedly didn’t even know she was in Spider-Man: Homecoming because they’d cut her in from a scene she’d filmed years earlier for some other Marvel picture and didn’t even bother to tell her.
Yes, there’s going to be a lot more of this, and the problem is that no matter how good they get at it, some part of us is going to know we’re not seeing people acting together, and the degeneration of our interest in what movie honchos and streamer bigwigs are throwing at us will continue and perhaps accelerate.
Read the whole thing. Hollywood has been sequel-obsessed for decades — but why is it making audiences actively despise its increasingly elderly franchises?
Maybe I’m just addicted to Memberberries. We all are these days. Us ‘80s kids have gotten sequels to Blade Runner, Top Gun, Tron, Mad Max, Ghostbusters… and of course, the endless firehose of Star Wars crap.
Maybe this will be good anyway. It could happen!
Or not — there’s a reason why Roger Ebert’s definition of a movie sequel was “a filmed deal.”
I’m just a soul trapped in this circuitry.” The voice singing those lyrics is raw and plaintive, dipping into blue notes. A lone acoustic guitar chugs behind it, punctuating the vocal phrases with tasteful runs. But there’s no human behind the voice, no hands on that guitar. There is, in fact, no guitar. In the space of 15 seconds, this credible, even moving, blues song was generated by the latest AI model from a startup named Suno. All it took to summon it from the void was a simple text prompt: “solo acoustic Mississippi Delta blues about a sad AI.” To be maximally precise, the song is the work of two AI models in collaboration: Suno’s model creates all the music itself, while calling on OpenAI’s ChatGPT to generate the lyrics and even a title: “Soul of the Machine.”
Online, Suno’s creations are starting to generate reactions like “How the f**k is this real?” As this particular track plays over a Sonos speaker in a conference room in Suno’s temporary headquarters, steps away from the Harvard campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, even some of the people behind the technology are ever-so-slightly unnerved. There’s some nervous laughter, alongside murmurs of “Holy shit” and “Oh, boy.” It’s mid-February, and we’re playing with their new model, V3, which is still a couple of weeks from public release. In this case, it took only three tries to get that startling result. The first two were decent, but a simple tweak to my prompt — co-founder Keenan Freyberg suggested adding the word “Mississippi” — resulted in something far more uncanny.
Over the past year alone, generative AI has made major strides in producing credible text, images (via services like Midjourney), and even video, particularly with OpenAI’s new Sora tool. But audio, and music in particular, has lagged. Suno appears to be cracking the code to AI music, and its founders’ ambitions are nearly limitless — they imagine a world of wildly democratized music making. The most vocal of the co-founders, Mikey Shulman, a boyishly charming, backpack-toting 37-year-old with a Harvard Ph.D. in physics, envisions a billion people worldwide paying 10 bucks a month to create songs with Suno. The fact that music listeners so vastly outnumber music-makers at the moment is “so lopsided,” he argues, seeing Suno as poised to fix that perceived imbalance.
One of the subplots David Mamet and Hilary Henkin wrote for Wag the Dog, Barry Levinson’s influential 1997 film about presidential politics and the spin doctors who manipulate them, involved writing a fake blues song and engineering it so that it sounded like something recorded in the 1920s:
The president is caught making advances on an underage girl inside the Oval Office, less than two weeks before the election. Conrad Brean [Robert DeNiro], a top spin doctor, is brought in by presidential aide Winifred Ames [Anne Heche] to take the public’s attention away from the scandal. He decides to construct a fictional war in Albania, hoping the media will concentrate on this instead. Brean contacts Hollywood producer Stanley Motss [Dustin Hoffman] to create the war, complete with a theme song and fake film footage of a fleeing orphan to arouse sympathy. The hoax is initially successful, with the president quickly gaining ground in the polls.
When the CIA learns of the plot, they send Agent Young [William H. Macy] to confront Brean about the hoax. Brean convinces Young that revealing the deception is against his and the CIA’s best interests. But when the CIA — in collusion with the president’s rival candidate — reports that the war has ended, the media begins to focus back on the president’s sexual abuse scandal. To counter this, Motss invents a hero who was left behind enemy lines in Albania.
Inspired by the idea that he was “discarded like an old shoe”, Brean and Motss ask the Pentagon to provide a special forces soldier with a matching name (a sergeant named “Schumann” is identified [Woody Harrelson]), around whom a POW narrative can be constructed. As part of the hoax, folk singer Johnny Dean [Willie Nelson] records a song called “Old Shoe”, which is pressed onto a 78 rpm record, prematurely aged so that listeners will think it was recorded years earlier, and sent to the Library of Congress to be “found”. Soon, large numbers of old pairs of shoes begin appearing on phone and power lines, and a grassroots movement takes hold.
All of these machinations took a fair amount of Wag the Dog’s running time for DeNiro and Hoffman to plausibly cook up. Suno would allow such a song to be produced with a few keystrokes.
A shocking video captured the moment a California man walked off with a severed human leg after a train accident where a woman died, according to police.
The video shows a disheveled man looking around while carrying a large, ragged object.
The Kern County Sheriff’s Office said that a train struck a woman at about 8:05 a.m. near G and 7th streets in the town of Wasco near Bakersfield.
A witness told KGET-TV that they saw a man remove a severed leg from the scene near an Amtrak Station.
The video shows the man in a red hooded sweatshirt and black pants leaning over an object. He turns around and erratically laughs at the person recording the scene, then staggers away.
A second scene in the video appears to show the police response and the man waving the leg at the officers.
KGET published a censored version of the video with words bleeped out and the image of the leg blurred out.
A voice can be heard on the video saying, “He’s eating that s**t!” in English and then in Spanish.
As always, life in “21st century” California imitates Monty Python’s Flying Circus: “There’s no cannibalism in the Golden State — and when I say none, I do mean that there is a certain amount. But necrophilia is right out!” (Offer not valid in Los Angeles and the Bay Area.)
In a small room in Lower Manhattan, a group of eight New Yorkers sat in a circle sharing kombucha and their climate fears against the background of pattering rain and wailing sirens.
In Champaign, Ill., a psychotherapist facilitating a meeting for other therapists held up a branch of goldenrod, asking the half-dozen participants online to consider their connection to nature.
And in Kansas City, Mo., a nonprofit that runs a weekly discussion on Zoom began its session with a spiritual reading and a guided meditation before breaking into groups to discuss topics like the ethics of childbearing amid a fast-rising global population and concerns of resource scarcity.
All were examples of a new grass-roots movement called climate cafes. These in-person and online groups are places for people to discuss their grief, fears, anxiety and other emotions about the climate crisis.
Isn’t that great? Stupid people have been bombarded with so much of this miserable nonsense that they’re now huddling together in coffee houses for comfort. They’re taking shelter from a storm that isn’t really there.
This sort of “news” story is a good example of how the news launders their propaganda. First they scare everybody with ridiculous stories about the weather killing us all.
Science has shown that kids are among the most vulnerable when it comes to the effects of a warming world.
The United Nations Development Programme is giving them a chance to take climate change into their own hands with a new global campaign called “Weather Kids.”
The campaign, which will run in more than 80 countries, asks: “What will our future look like if we do not take action urgently?”
It kicks off with a kid-presented forecast that looks ahead to the weather in 2050, based on current climate projection data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Climate Horizons reports.
The idea is to show what will happen if the world fails to uphold the 2015 Paris climate agreement, which pledged to pursue efforts to limit global warming to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, or 1.5 degrees Celsius.
But “Weather Kids” also brings a positive message of hope, encouraging adults to take urgent climate action and empowering them to be part of the solution.
No word yet on whether the latest generation of Mascots of the Anointed will be served a big heaping-helping of anti-Semitism as part of their indoctrination, as St. Greta apparently has.
Getting arrested is no child’s play — except for these California cops.
The Murrieta Police Department has been posting hilarious arrest and lineup photos with suspects’ faces replaced by Lego heads to comply with a woke state law protecting offenders’ rights.
Images on the department’s Instagram page show the Lego blocks with a variety of facial expressions — crying, frowning, smirking or raging — digitally superimposed onto the bodies of people being busted.
One appears to show two people handcuffed in the back of a squad car — with the Lego face on one angrily looking at the other, whose toy head is crying.
Another shows five people in a lineup — completely unrecognizable because of the toy heads.
The Photoshop-savvy law enforcement agency explained Monday that it is shielding detainees’ faces to comply with a new state law prohibiting the release of mugshots and booking photos of those accused of nonviolent crimes.
The law, signed by Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom last September and implemented on Jan. 1, also requires police departments to remove other mugshots from social media after 14 days.
Congrats Gavin — even America’s Newspaper of Record couldn’t anticipate how crazy the state would become under your watch:
This writer remembers when Charlie Sykes was a big local name in conservative media. She also remembers the infamous interview with Trump, the one that seems to have broken Sykes’s brain and turned him into decidedly not a conservative.
So it’s not really a surprise to see him singing the praises of FDR and his treatment of ‘isolationists’ in Politico.
Opinion: Franklin Roosevelt had a devastating way of discrediting isolationists. Biden could learn from it, writes @SykesCharlie. https://t.co/FU71F1b776
MATTHEW CONTINETTI: The Road to a Republican Senate: GOP control depends on a weak Biden and strong candidates. “Republican chances of winning control of the U.S. Senate improved Wednesday when a Washington Post poll showed Larry Hogan (R., Md.) trouncing his potential Democratic opponents by double digits. The popular former governor, known for his independence and common sense, has been supporting Israel as his Democratic rivals squabble for left-wing votes. Though Hogan remains the underdog to replace retiring Sen. Ben Cardin (D.), his successful record and unique profile will force Democrats to play defense in a blue state that they normally would be expected to win without breaking a sweat.”
Not my first-choice GOP senator, but you take what you can get, and you’re not going to get better in Maryland.
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