FUNNY, I DON’T REMEMBER COLOSSUS OR SKYNET EVER CRASHING: ChatGPT down for users globally, OpenAI shares major update on technical outage.
UPDATE: Was it the Apple IOS 18.2 update that crashed ChatGPT, or something far more sinister?
Archive for 2024
December 11, 2024
WNBA’S CAITLIN CLARK WINS TIME’S ‘ATHLETE OF THE YEAR,’ PROMPTLY GOES WOKE:
My thought process on this is that while her comments are disappointing, Clark is still young and getting her sea legs in a league where the huge egos and the propensity for hurt feelings are just as dominant and prevailing as they are in any other professional sports league, where rings also have to be kissed.
Right now, she’s just trying to play ball and get away from being turned into the spectacle, and she’s saying what she thinks she needs to do in order to earn respect from people from whom she likely will never get it. As soon as she grows up a bit more and figures that out she’ll probably look back on these comments and cringe.
In any event, it’s just another reminder not to put sports icons too high up on pedestals because they are human, and it is inevitable that, at some point, they are bound to let you down.
As America’s Newspaper of Record reports:
ADVANCED KNAPPING THEN, STARSHIP NOW: A Major Leap Forward in Technology Took Place 900,000 Years Ago.
RFK, JR. TRIED TO WARN YOU: Startling Findings: High-Fructose Corn Syrup Linked to Cancer Growth.
#FREEJOEL: WHY DOES INSTAGRAM HATE DOGS? Well, at least one dog. A friend of ours has — well, had — an Instagram account for her French Bulldog, Joel, pictured below as a puppy and as a full-grown dog with Helen.
The account is an entirely harmless one involving pictures of Joel walking at the park, running along the beach, snoozing in front of a fireplace, etc. But somehow InstaGram decided that something in the account — they never tell you want — violates their rules and permanently banned it.
Her appeal was refused. No details were forthcoming.
There have been worse injustices on Meta’s platform, God knows, but this seems especially stupid. I’m thinking of petitioning the FTC to require social media to provide specific details on why they banned an account, what rules were broken, and whether they treat all accounts the same. Any FTC lawyers (which I am not) are encouraged to chime in.
#FREEJOEL!
FIRST WE TAKE MANHATTAN, THEN WE TAKE BERLIN: NFL announces first-ever regular season game in Berlin in 2025.
The NFL has announced it will play a regular season game in Berlin for the first time in 2025.
The game will be played at the iconic Olympic Stadium in the German capital.
The NFL has held regular season games in Munich and Frankfurt since 2022, with the game in Berlin set to mark the fifth NFL regular season game in Germany and the first in the German capital.
‘Germany has a rich tradition of American football, and the NFL has a deep history with the city of Berlin,’ said NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell.
‘We first held a preseason game at the Olympic Stadium 34 years ago, before it was home to NFL Europe’s Berlin Thunder in the early 2000s.
‘Now, with almost 20 million NFL fans in Germany, we’ll make a historic return to the city playing a regular season game for the first time as we open the next chapter in our relationship with Berlin.’
Related: Why does the NFL keep exporting its worst games to Europe? Because it can. “The matchups that the NFL has inflicted on crowds in the United Kingdom and now Germany have almost always been putrid. There have been 42 NFL games in Europe since the NFL first brought its product overseas in October 2007. Of those, only two have pitted a pair of teams with winning records, a matchup between the Giants and Packers in 2022 and one between the Chiefs and Dolphins last season. Nine times, the NFL has subjected crowds in Europe to a game featuring at least one winless team. The 2017 Cleveland Browns made a London appearance on their way to becoming the second 0-16 team in NFL history, as did the legendarily bad Urban Meyer-coached Jaguars and a 15-loss Dolphins team quarterbacked by the immortal Cleo Lemon. It’s like introducing Italian American cuisine by opening up a can of SpaghettiOs. Or showcasing the best of American barbecue by serving a McRib.”
Couldn’t the NFL fix the onside kick and ban that weird new kickoff formation instead?
(Classical reference in headline.)
But not enough change.
THE 21ST CENTURY ISN’T TURNING OUT AS I’D HOPED: 20% of people aged 15 to 49 globally infected with herpes, study shows.
21st CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Apple Marries Siri to ChatGPT in Latest AI Update.
BREAKING NEWS FROM 1963, 1968, 1992, 2014, AND 2020: It’s time for a national conversation about left-wing violence.
If reports are true, it looks like the targeted killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York last week was politically motivated. The alleged shooter, Luigi Mangione, a former Ivy Leaguer from an affluent family, was reportedly caught with some kind of manifesto.
Even before we knew who the shooter was, however, the reaction from far too many leftists was to either justify, celebrate, or rationalize the shooting. There’s a real debate going on in some quarters of the progressive Left over whether slaying CEOs is a bad thing. And it’s unsurprising.
Of course, if any MAGA professors or journalists were online publicly defending the killing of perceived political enemies, there would be thousands of wringing hands lamenting the menacing rhetoric of conservatism. And rightly so.
It should not be lost on us that there is a clear ideological continuum between people who rationalize the shooting of a CEO and those who rationalize the murder and rape of Jews by Palestinian terrorists and those who rationalize the burning down of cities for social justice.
If you’re convinced your opponents are abetting some (imaginary) “genocide,” you have a moral duty to stop them. And much of the left-wing violence we’ve seen is predicated on the idea that the enemy is irredeemably nefarious.
On his Goodreads page, Mangione quotes left-wing terrorist Ted Kaczynski (though his reading list is mostly mainstream left-leaning technocratic authors). The Unabomber’s unhinged demonization of modernity and capitalism was a fringe position in the ’90s. Now the unhinged demonization of healthcare insurance, the pharmaceutical industry, and Big Oil (all industries, despite their inadequacies, that make lives better for everyone) is the norm. A generation of college students have been indoctrinated into believing the profit motive is killing people when the opposite is true.
One expects Mangione’s writing will be largely indistinguishable from what a person hears from elected progressives and pundits. Yet few will ponder why a seemingly rational Ivy League-educated engineer decided to become a hit man.
Professor Julia Alekseyeva, a professor at @PennEnglish @Penn appears to celebrate the alleged UHC CEO ass*ssin and the fact that he went to University of Pennsylvania and calls him an “icon” pic.twitter.com/1YYGam7h8D
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) December 10, 2024
CHARLES COOKE: Elizabeth Warren Is a Disaster for the Democrats.
It’s always the “but” that gets you. There you are, hurtling through the start of the sentence, making all the right points, saying all the necessary things, conveying all that needs to be conveyed, and then, Bam!, out comes that pesky coordinating conjunction that ruins the exercise in an instant. In her revolting statement on the assassination of Brian Thompson, the former CEO of UnitedHealthcare, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts fell prey to this trap. “Violence is never the answer,” Warren said. “But,” she continued, “people can only be pushed so far.”
Ah.
As one might have augured, Warren’s “but” was the overture to a catastrophic series of statements that, taken together, rendered all that came before them entirely moot. The killing represented “a warning,” Warren suggested,
that if you push people hard enough they lose faith in the ability of their government to make change, lose faith in the ability of the people who are providing the health care to make change, and start to take matters into their own hands in ways that will ultimately be a threat to everyone.
There’s a word for this sort of argument in the expansive English language. That word is “justification.”
Contrast Warren’s words with those from her fellow Democratic senator, John Fetterman of Pennsylvania. About the murderer, Fetterman said, “He’s the asshole that’s going to die in prison.” About those celebrating him online, Fetterman said, “A sewer is going to sewer: that’s what social media is about.” About the mainstream press’s sympathetic takes, Fetterman said, “I don’t know why the media wants to turn that into a story, just with these trolls saying these kinds of things anonymously like that.”
“Americans seeking good examples should resolve to be a Fetterman rather than a Warren,” Cooke writes. But then, as America’s Newspaper of Record reported in January:
CHRISTIAN TOTO: Late-Night ‘Losers’ – Hollywood Reporter Mocks Colbert, Kimmel. “Far-Left site torches ‘self-righteous’ hosts in wake of Trump’s victory.”
ANALYSIS: TRUE.
FUN FACT: More US Representatives have been injured at the Capitol by attacks from violent LGBTQ activists than from people on January 6th. pic.twitter.com/L9R6994NTP
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) December 11, 2024
Nice pic for Nancy Mace, though.
READER FAVORITE: VTOMAN X7 Jump Starter with Air Compressor. #CommissionEarned
PEOPLE WHO FOUGHT IN AFGHANISTAN KNOW WHY NATION-BUILDING WAS NEVER GOING TO WORK:
I was serving in the U.S. Army as a Liaison Officer to the Afghan secret police, and facilitated the interrogations of over 400 captured Taliban and Al-Qa’eda members while there. A Taliban leader once told me “You have me in a cage, my fight is over for now, but my children will fight you, and if they don’t win, their children will fight you. If It Takes a Thousand Years, we will win.” Although it didn’t take the Taliban a thousand years to win the battle of Afghanistan, it demonstrates the drive that our jihadist enemies have. They fight generational wars against the West as a whole.
When analyzing our Islamic extremist enemies, it is important for the American people to understand the tribal mindset that so many of our enemies come from. Islam developed from tribal cultures, and many tribal cultures over the past 1,400 years developed under Islam. The Islamic world itself is divided into what I would describe as tribes; you have the Sunni tribe, the Shia tribe, and within that are thousands of other tribes, one of the most recent being the “Palestinian” tribe which has become somewhat of a self-appointed identity by various lost members of other tribes. But in Afghanistan, tribalism is at a level that is virtually unparalleled in the world.
It is human nature to coalesce together into groups, but when you add Islam to the mix, it fuels different dynamics that are completely alien to Westerners. The tribal mindset is so vastly different than our own that it often makes it impossible to reason with them, and they will not respond logically or rationally as you might assume an American or other Westerner would. To Westerners, the tribal mindset may contain many elements that are quite shocking and deeply disturbing.
Part of our training upon arrival in Afghanistan included multiple briefings on Islamic and Afghan culture, since we would be working with locals on a daily basis. In one such briefing, the Afghan-American man leading the discussion began by stating; “You must understand that everything about your way of life in America, is completely different in this planet.” He quickly corrected himself to say “in this country,” but his misspeaking was not too far from the truth. From the way people say hello to the way they go to the bathroom, everything is different, and it is like another world to a Westerner.
If only we had instructed them just a little bit more on the glories of Marcel Duchamp, I’m sure we could have won them over:
ERNST DEMANDS FEDS END TELEWORK DEALS: Whistleblowers are making themselves heard at HUD, letting Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) know that Biden officials there are dickering with the local AFGE chapter to extend teleworking for another five years. Ernst has been raising the roof about teleworking abuses for more than a year and the DOGE twins are listening very closely now.
ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Will Democrats Allow Illegal Alien Criminals To Be Deported? “The Law and Order issue is one that has bit Democrats on the ass again and again, from the 1988 Presidential race to the 1993 New York City mayoral race to a whole lot of 2024 DA races. Slightly saner Democrats like New York City Mayor Eric Adams have recognized and changed course on illegal alien criminal deportations. But while the radical left, Democrat/Soros-backed so