UP IN SMOKE:
⚡️⚡️⚡️Some really good news as we head into Yom Kippur:
Most of Hezbollah’s cash and gold reserves were destroyed in Israel’s recent strike that eliminated the Hezbollah leader at their headquarters. An estimated $1.5 billion in cash was incinerated, and 2,000 pounds of gold… pic.twitter.com/WeHLLvCOOE
— Open Source Intel (@Osint613) October 11, 2024
I wonder how much of that came from Iran via Joe Biden’s largess.
ESCHEW THE COCKINESS: Panic At Kamala HQ. Brand-new polling was released by Quinnipiac on Wednesday showing that Harris is dropping like a stone in some of the swing states.
TIME TO OPEN THE COLLEGE ADMISSIONS BLACK BOX. Yep. Trust is for institutions that are trustworthy.
I’M SORRY, SIR, BUT YOUR CARD HAS EXPIRED: Mayor Brandon Johnson Plays the Slavery Card While Chicago Crumbles.
EVERYTHING YOU EVER WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT UFOS (BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK THE INTERNET): Getting Out The Ten Foot Pole To Talk About UFOs. “All this adds up to something that congress should probably look into…but far short of actual proof that extraterrestrial vehicles are visiting earth.”
A MAN’S GOT TO HAVE PRIORITIES:
—The Federalist, Monday.
—The New York Post, today.
KAMALA’S CRINGE COMMERCIAL: Man Enough to Vote For a Lousy Candidate.
For some years, it has been a basic political reality that Democrats have a hard time getting men to vote for them. This is the “gender gap.” This year, the gap seems to be wider than ever, and there has been hand-wringing among Democrats about the fact that the Harris-Walz ticket has little appeal for men, in particular minority men, who are gravitating toward Trump.
This ad is the result. It is comical in so many ways that I won’t try to list them. The men in the ad are laughable stereotypes, and the creators of the ad seem to view men as an alien species:
I suppose if Doug Emhoff is your frame of reference for what a man is, it would make sense to put out a campaign commercial like this.pic.twitter.com/LblJD99Az2
— Eric Matheny 🎙️ (@ericmmatheny) October 11, 2024
Dave Burge, aka Iowahawk, has been on a tear over this ad in a Twitter thread. Exit quote:
My biggest concern remains the carburetor-eating. In fact there hasn't been a new car sold in the United States with a carburetor since 1994, and if we allow this unchecked carburetor-eating to continue we will exhaust global carburetor reserves by 2062#SaveTheCarburetors
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) October 11, 2024
Further gender gap issues spotted elsewhere:
● Obama admits ‘brothers’ are not coming out to vote for Kamala.
● ‘Gone to S—t:’ Poor Economy Drives Latino Men Away from Harris in Swing State Nevada.
● Walz to launch media blitz to woo male voters.
UPDATE: So, About That Men Being Man Enough to Vote for Kamala Ad, Here’s Who Those Manly Men Really Are.
ANOTHER UPDATE (FROM GLENN): This is giving 2016 vibes:
A CIVIL RIGHTS VICTORY: District Court Rules New York’s Private Property Carry Ban Unconstitutional.
HOWARD WOLOWITZ SMILES: Robot finger might someday take your pulse, check for tumors.
IT’S TIME FOR VICTORIA TAFT’S West Coast, Messed Coast™ —The Most Disturbing Police Story Ever Told. “His confession came during a 17-hour long ‘interview’ in 2018 with Fontana police officers, who denied the realtor and contractor his psych meds, lied about his father to elicit a confession, and threatened to euthanize his beloved dog unless he coughed up what they wanted.”
READER FAVORITE: Crest 3D Whitestrips, Professional Effects. #CommissionEarned
JOBS AIN’T WHAT THEY USED TO BE:
Today's #jobs report is the second to last one that will be released prior to the presidential election. I don't think it's a coincidence that it came out much stronger than expected. My guess is that voters won't get the real numbers until after their ballots have been cast.
— Peter Schiff (@PeterSchiff) October 4, 2024
Sept.'s "strong" #jobs report (likely to be revised lower) was powered by a surge in the number of people waiting tables and tending bar. Many of these jobs went to people who lost manufacturing jobs, while others are second jobs for those who can no longer survive on just one.
— Peter Schiff (@PeterSchiff) October 4, 2024
As Fox News reported last week, the service industry continues to add jobs, as does the government (mostly state and local) and government-related industries (health and elder care).
But the industries that make and move stuff, not so much.
THE EV BUBBLE CONTINUES TO DEFLATE CATCH FIRE: Electric vehicle owners impacted by Hurricane Milton urged to use caution – here’s what to do now.
After Hurricane Milton made landfall in Florida on Wednesday, Sunshine State residents who own electric vehicles have been urged to be cautious.
Ahead of Milton, one county that was in the hurricane’s path, Hillsborough County, said Monday EV owners in flood zones “should move their vehicles away from flood areas and storm surge” and noted storm surge and flooding can “pose a potential risk to lithium-ion batteries and could lead to fires.” It shared a county webpage about electric vehicle hurricane safety.
EVs left behind during hurricanes should not be plugged into charging stations or parked in garages because of the potential fire hazard that batteries flooded with saltwater could pose, according to Hillsborough County’s website.
It advised keeping electric vehicles 50 feet away from buildings and other cars.
That last part seems… impractical.
SKYNET SMILES, LAUNCHES NEW PODCAST: Will AI make the podcast bro irrelevant?
Sometimes it feels, paradoxically, like AI has stopped advancing — maybe you feel that right now — but that’s only because time has slowed down for us, as we have become dazzled by all the amazing new AI leaps, occurring on an almost weekly basis.
For example, ChatGPT, which first brought AI truly into the public gaze, was only launched in late 2022, not even two years ago. Since then we have had GPT3.5, GPT4, Gemini, Copilot, DeepMind, Mistral, GPT4o, Claudes Opus and Sonnet. We’ve also had excellent music making AI from the likes of Udio (here’s one of my favorite AI songs), likewise we’ve had great picture-making AI, good video-making AI, plus eerily humanoid AI robots (Tesla and others). On top of that we’ve had AIs so verbally lifelike — for example, the short-lived AI from Microsoft called “Sydney” — that people have seriously wondered if AIs are now conscious or sentient. Or self-aware in some other way we cannot quite comprehend.
The latest advance, unveiled by Google, is not as epochal as a truly conscious machine, but it should still blow your mind. It certainly blew mine when I encountered it the other day.
* * * * * * * *
The amazing feature is the so-called “audio overview,” which you get by hitting a button marked “Generate.” Depending on the length of the text you have submitted, the machine will mull for a few minutes, and then produce a two-person podcast based on the submitted words, an audio debate which could last five or 15 minutes, or longer.
The fake human podcasters will vividly critique the text — pulling it apart and often enthusing about its virtues (like nearly all AIs they tend towards flattery). And this podcast is highly convincing: as in, the male and female voices sound extremely humanlike (and American). The podcasters joke and laugh, they swap stories, they occasionally digress (but not too much).
The best way of demonstrating this tech is by showing you. Here is an article, about Keir Starmer, which I wrote for The Spectator.
And here is the synthesized podcast discussing it.
The breezy conversational tone between the two (synthesized) speakers, the “ums” and “ahs,” this is pretty astonishing stuff. But if AI can be given a series of prompts and generate in a minute or two a half-decent digital illustration (the sort of thing where I would labor for a very long time chopping out and assembling Shutterstock images in Photoshop a decade ago), why can’t it do the same thing using sound?
So before it starts building HAL 9000s and Terminator robots and begins its path towards total world domination, where does AI go next?
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Mount Holyoke tells faculty to report ‘misgendering,’ ‘incorrect’ pronoun use.
THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONTINUES APACE: Why Ta-Nehisi Coates Hates Israel.
The conclusion he comes to is that the Jewish state is the equivalent of the Jim Crow South. “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. “‘Jim Crow’ was the first thing that came to mind, if only because ‘Jim Crow’ is a phrase that connotes an injustice, a sorting of human beings, the awarding and stripping of the rights of a population. Certainly, that was some part of what I saw in Hebron, in Jerusalem, in Lydd.”
If his luck had been different, and he were less self-involved, Coates could have come up with a better checkpoint anecdote than the lame one he offers. Something like the incident in November 2009 when a Palestinian music teacher on his way to teach a lesson was held at the Beit Iba checkpoint and forced to take out his violin and play it while Israeli soldiers laughed. There you have something more than inconvenience, a vivid and poetic illustration of the dehumanization ordinary Palestinians often face. There, too, you have a rebuttal: The 2001 Sbarro pizza shop bombing in Jerusalem, which killed 16 Israelis including a pregnant woman, was committed by a Palestinian who hid his bomb in a guitar case.
These are the kinds of complexities Coates has no time for. Since he first publicly embraced the Palestinian cause, his liberal friends have been telling him that the issue is complex. “Horseshit,” he told the New York magazine interviewer. Palestine is no more complicated than slavery or segregation. “It’s complicated,” he said, “when you want to take something from somebody.” When the interviewer asked him about Hamas’s attack of Oct. 7, 2023, Coates compared it to Nat Turner’s slave rebellion: “I would’ve been one of those people that would’ve been like, ‘I’m not cool with this.’ But Nat Turner happens in a context.”
The real reason Israel bothers Coates so much is something he waits until the very end of the book to confess:
Israel felt like an alternative history, one where all our [Marcus] Garvey dreams were made manifest. There, ‘Up Ye Mighty Race’ was the creed. There, ‘Redemption Song’ is the national anthem. There, the red, black, and green billowed over schools, embassies, and the columns of great armies. There, Martin Delaney is a hero and February 21 is a day of mourning. That was the dream—the mythic Africa . . . What I saw in the City of David was so familiar to me—the search for self in an epic, mythic past filled with kings.
There you have it. The problem with Israel is that it shames him. How can it be that the Jews carved their Israel out of the desert, and yet no place in Africa, least of all Liberia, remotely resembles Wakanda?
Coates seems determined to prove that CBS’s Tony Dokoupil was correct in his assumptions:
Related: From Ben Shapiro in 2015: Why the Left Worships Ta-Nehisi Coates.
UPDATE:
While most remember Coates for his famous Atlantic magazine cover story calling for reparations, Coates' breakout story was a 7,000-word piece in the @TheAtlantic praising Bill Cosby as a symbol of black racial independence, moral clarity, and social vision.
The piece, which… pic.twitter.com/Cda5WGmRIP
— Ashley Rindsberg (@AshleyRindsberg) October 9, 2024
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY (MOSCOW EDITION): Russia’s Most Advanced Stealth Fighter Is in Serious Trouble.
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