FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY [VIP]: Two Karens Meet in a Parking Lot… “It’s time for your much-needed break from the serious news, and this week we have a hard lesson in instant Karma delivered in a Publix parking lot, a case of penis-waving road rage, and a real-life five-year-old Florida hero.”
Archive for 2024
July 5, 2024
WELL, MAYBE: Living longer tied to gratitude for positives in life, Harvard study suggests. The Insta-wife likes to point out that people who live longer are healthier, and people who are healthier have more positive attitudes.
FIVE BIG FREE SPEECH TAKEAWAYS FROM THIS TERM’S SUPREME COURT CASES. With eight First Amendment cases, it was a blockbuster term for freedom of speech.
ROCKY MOUNTAIN LOW: Colorado Republican officials submit petition to remove Dave Williams as state GOP chairman.
Among the reasons Republicans cite, he said, are Williams’ refusal to step aside as party chairman when he declared his congressional candidacy and the party’s decision to take sides in contested primaries this year, throwing its tradition of neutrality out the window.
“They didn’t just endorse people,” Watkins said, noting that Williams and his cohorts, including state vice chair Hope Sheppelmann and party secretary Anna Ferguson, openly attacked Republican candidates in the run-up to Tuesday’s primary.
While the state GOP passed a bylaws change last fall allowing the party to back candidates who met certain criteria in primaries, Watkins said the amendment was “so poorly written, it actually says the opposite of what they think it says. There are yoga instructors that wish they were as flexible as that sentence.”
Watkins said the state party’s track record endorsing in the primary underlined why he wants Williams to go.
He also used state party funds to support his losing primary race.
READER FAVORITE: 10-Minute Strength Training Exercises for Seniors: Exercises and Routines to Build Muscle, Balance, and Stamina. #CommissionEarned
KRUISER: Sorry Lefties — We’re Not Fringy, YOU Are! “We are witnessing a repudiation of the establishment, but I also think that a lot of conservative ideas are being embraced around the world because they’re — SURPRISE! — good ideas. Those ideas are far more mainstream than leftists will ever admit, which is why so many people around the world are enthusiastically opting for them.”
WE WON! WE WON!! WE WON!!!: I’m sorry to have been AWOL for the last week, but as of last Thursday, we won the battle against California’s Assembly Constitutional Amendment 7 (ACA7) at least for this year and possibly for much longer. A few weeks ago, I predicted that ACA7 would fail to pass the Cal Senate before the deadline for the November ballot, but now it’s official. Since last Thursday, I’ve been partly on the road and partly frantically trying to meet an unrelated writing deadline, so I’m only now getting around to announcing the win here.
If you’re a loyal Instapundit reader, you probably know what I’m talking about. But if not, I can tell you that ACA7 was/is an effort to nullify the following words in the California Constitution: “The State shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education or public contracting.”
ACA7 was/is a bit tricky. Instead of a straight repeal of those words (which had been put in the state constitution in 1996 by Proposition 209), it purported to “merely” give the governor the power to grant EXCEPTIONS. But the exceptions would almost certainly have swallowed the rule. Indeed, that was the whole idea. California progressives have been gunning for Proposition 209 since the day after Election Day 1996. ACA7 was/is just the latest effort.
I had a certain amount of personal interest in defeating ACA7, because (1) I had co-chaired the Proposition 209 campaign in 1996; and (2) I had co-chaired the campaign to defeat the repeal effort–No on Proposition 16 in 2020–which we won overwhelmingly (57.22%) despite being outspent by more than 14 to 1. I was therefore willing to chair the “No on ACA7” campaign. That has meant spending what seemed like 95% of my waking hours for the last eight months trying to stop ACA7 (and preparing for a full-scale campaign in case I failed).
But I didn’t fail. I won. ACA7 had passed the Cal Assembly back in the autumn, but it needed to pass the Cal Senate. The deadline for inclusion on the November ballot was June 27, and ACA7’s chief sponsor has now let it be known that the Senate was not going to pass it and that it is dead at least for this year. Like any legislation, it can always be brought up later, but the next scheduled election isn’t till 2026, so we have a long time.
Thanks to everyone who helped kill this nasty bill—Brita, Cia, Dan, Frank, Eva, Jason, Maimon, Rachelle, Saga, Steve, Tony, Wenyuan, and many others. Thanks also to the Wall Street Journal, the Orange County Register, the Epoch Times, the City Journal, the Federalist, the California Globe, Power Line, and the National Review.
When we did the “NO on Proposition 16” back in 2020, we had a devil of a time raising money. All the big-money donors thought we would lose, so they figured giving us money would be a waste. If ACA7 had been on the ballot, we’d have done much better with big donors than we did with Proposition 16. And a couple of non-profits would have been able to conduct substantial voter education projects. Thank you, Leonard, Mark, Michael, and Norm for being willing to provide funding.
STILL NOT READY FOR PRIMETIME BUT YOU’LL BE SADDLED WITH IT ANYWAY: AI drive-thru ordering is on the rise — but it may take years to iron out its flaws.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: MIT grew staff size by 1,200 while enrollment barely budged: University hired 6 new DEI deans in 1 year.
GO AWAY, KID, YA BOTHER ME: SJP pens message to ‘progressive left’: ‘We are not loyal to our oppressors.’ You’re loyal to terrorists, which is not an improvement.
NIFTY: Meet the Air Force’s secretive long-range drone that flies for days. “The Air Force officially started buying ULTRA, which began under the DOD’s small business innovation research program (SBIR), in the 2025 budget request, and asked to buy four drones for $35 million, according to budget documents. The program was developed from DZYNE’s Long Endurance Aircraft Program, or LEAP, McCue said, a previously under wraps autonomous aircraft deployed since 2016 that can fly for up to 40 hours.”
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Another 4th of July That England Will End Up Regretting. “One party being in power that long is bound to give voters the urge to shake things up a bit, but this was a good old-fashioned butt whuppin’, well beyond what could be considered voter fatigue. This is closer to a mass hysteria event.”
UK ELECTIONS: Keir Starmer is new UK prime minister after landslide election win.
A low-turnout landslide, though: U.K. Election Turnout Set to Be Lowest in Over 20 Years.
DEFUND THE UN:
Call me crazy, but I think that the UN warning of an epidemic of aid workers sexually abusing women in Gaza is a PRETTY BIG DEAL.
From an April report:
Humanitarian actors must scale up their PSEA [Protection from Sexual Exploitation and Abuse] and Safeguarding capacity to…— Elder of Ziyon 🇮🇱 (@elderofziyon) July 3, 2024
“Somehow, this didn’t make it into the @NYTimes or @CNN or @Reuters.”
What, the same outlets that hid Joe Biden’s increasing senescence for five years?
YOU GO TO WAR WITH THE DUD YOU HAVE, NOT THE DUD YOU WANT: Kamala Harris is a dud, just 25% say she helps Biden.
LIMITED TIME DEAL: WYZE Rechargeable Night Lights. #CommissionEarned
WHEN AFTER ALL, IT WAS YOU AND ME: Can You Guess Who White House Reporters Blame for Their Decision Not To Expose Biden’s Mental Decline?
JESUS NEVER SHOWERED WITH HIS DAUGHTER OR FALSELY ACCUSED A TRUCK DRIVER OF KILLING HIS WIFE: Dem Rep Compares Joe Biden to Jesus at Virginia Fundraiser.
And Biden never sacrificed himself for his fellow man.
WHOSE DATA IS IT, ANYWAY? AI trains on kids’ photos even when parents use strict privacy settings.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) continues to reveal how photos of real children casually posted online years ago are being used to train AI models powering image generators—even when platforms prohibit scraping and families use strict privacy settings.
Last month, HRW researcher Hye Jung Han found 170 photos of Brazilian kids that were linked in LAION-5B, a popular AI dataset built from Common Crawl snapshots of the public web. Now, she has released a second report, flagging 190 photos of children from all of Australia’s states and territories, including indigenous children who may be particularly vulnerable to harms.
It’s a serious story but you have to laugh at the last line which has a real “World to End Tomorrow — Women and Minorities Hardest Hit” vibe.
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY:
How it started vs How it‘s going pic.twitter.com/kb70W8Blof
— Velina Tchakarova (@vtchakarova) July 4, 2024