DO WE NEED MORE LAWS IN SPACE? Don Surber: “The answer is a Little Red Hen no. The government did not build it, therefore, the government does not own it.”
Archive for 2024
February 29, 2024
THREAD:
⚡️Campaign Finance 🧵: Letitia James
When I got asked to look into Letitia James’ financials last week, I really wasn’t expecting to find much. As you probably know, James is the Attorney General of New York who just secured a $454 million judgement against Donald Trump.
— Mel (@Villgecrazylady) February 27, 2024
A few highlights before you click over.
• The first thing you’ll notice when you download and sort the expenditures of any politician running for reelection in a safe seat is how they use their campaign funds to supplement their lifestyles to a degree middle America could never dream of.
• What do I mean? Well, in 2023 alone, James spent over $28,500 on hotels. Over $15,000 of that was spent on luxury hotels in Puerto Rico.
• Then there’s the airfare. In the 5 years she’s been the New York State AG, James’ has spent over $84,000 on airfare to fly herself all over the country.
This includes private jet rentals.
• Tens of thousands spent on “office” at everywhere from Target to BJ’s wholesale.
Over $7,000 dropped at a nightclub in NYC and billed as “office.”
Wait until Mel gets to the part about the “ghost donors” making possible all this largesse.
You should also know that Mel — someone you’ve likely never heard of with the handle “Villagecrazylady” — is just one woman on Twitter, doing the job the entire mainstream media won’t do.
They can’t fail and fold hard enough, fast enough.
THE VIEW FROM INSIDE THE BELTWAY: No, Really — WaPo Says Biden’s Border Invasion Has the Economy ‘Roaring.’
February 28, 2024
OPEN THREAD: Share important knowledge.
MY LATEST SUBSTACK ESSAY: Some Parts of America Still Work. Hint: They’re not in the government or academic worlds.
As always, if you like it, please take out a paid subscription.
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:
BREAKING: Ukraine To Lose Top Republican Senate Seat https://t.co/EVVDp9Iamt pic.twitter.com/CTn7efAAhK
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) February 28, 2024
THE NEW SPACE RACE: Rocket Lab pushing for first Neutron launch in 2024.
FROM HIPSTER HYPE TO FINANCIAL FLOP: VICE MEDIA, RIP:
The company did things that might have sent a guy called Trump to jail — at least 25 years ago. Like paying someone to pretend he was an MTV executive interested in a show to mislead a reporter profiling the company. Or having Vice employees bring friends with laptops to pose as workers.
Vice was accused of using hidden techniques to artificially inflate its audience numbers. According to one of Smith’s former girlfriends, “Shane would talk all the time about how stupid people were for giving them money.”
After being warned by a Vice employee of the company’s sizzle minus the steak, one investor replied, “You were totally right, but the story is good, and we’re just gonna pass it on to the next guy.”
An early, important investor was my ex-boss, Rupert Murdoch, whom Smith reportedly told, “I have Gen Y, I have social, I have online video. You have none of that. I have the future; you have the past.”
It worked. Murdoch invested $70 million in 2013, pushing Vice’s valuation to $1.4 billion.
A few months later, I noticed a problem. At the time, I ran FoxNews.com and was looking to boost our social media presence. Analyzing other media outlets, it became apparent to me that Vice’s Facebook numbers were inflated to the point of nonsense. The company had millions of supposed followers, but its posts generated a tiny number of comments and interactions. It was a clear sign of either bot accounts or, more likely, overseas “users” who would follow a Facebook page for pennies.
Since the boss had just dropped $70 million, I thought I should give him a heads-up. After a meeting, I mentioned what I had found to Rupert, summarizing it as “they’re full of s**t.”
I expected him to be perhaps a tad bit worried, but that wasn’t in Rupert’s DNA. He just chuckled and said, “Of course they’re full of s**t.”
The next year, a venture-capital firm and A&E invested $500 million, raising Vice’s valuation to $2.5 billion. By 2017, another $450 million investment pushed its worth to nearly $6 billion.
Money like that buys a lot of video production, articles, and audience. With it, Vice spawned two feature film studios, a publishing arm, a cable TV channel, and more.
All gone.
Related: How the cult of Vice came crashing down.
For young people trying to break into TV, pitching to every other media outlet, from the BBC to Channel 4, felt like an endlessly demoralising grind. Patronising boomers would asphyxiate any remotely fun idea you dreamt up. Meanwhile, Vice was covering cannibal warlords in Liberia and sending reporters to see what it was like to do stand-up comedy on acid. It even had a dedicated drugs correspondent called Hamilton Morris!
Vice’s genius strategy was to offer salaries way below industry standard to hungry young journalists and filmmakers. This meant that its offices were packed to the rafters with privileged kids who were happy to pass up a decent pay cheque in exchange for the infinitely more valuable social currency of working there. To pick just one example, Hamilton Morris was the son of Academy Award-winning documentarian Errol Morris.
At its height, Vice was the most contrarian and unconventional publication out there. Much of this is owed to co-founder Gavin McInnes. He fell out with co-founder Shane Smith and left Vice in 2008, long before I was trying to become part of the cult. Still, it was undoubtedly Gavin’s irreverence that gave the magazine its unique flavour. When it launched its British edition in London in 2002, McInnes said: ‘We will have no taboos. Vice has never been about shocking people, we’re just shocking in nature.’
By the 2010s, that punk attitude forged by McInnes had attracted huge corporate interest. The style was re-packaged and sold to advertisers for millions, via its in-house creative-services agency, Virtue. I made some adverts for the commercial arm. This was a far more cut-throat operation than the gonzo magazine.
Other creative agencies at the time would take a brief from a brand and then eagerly pitch in their little ideas. In contrast, Vice sales staff would swagger into boardrooms and make stuffy corporate execs feel so uncool that they would simply pay for whatever Nathan Barley-esque nonsense the gold-ring wearers had dreamt up at 1am the night before above the Old Blue Last. Such was their cultural cachet that, for a period, Vice sales staff convinced the entire consumer-goods market that they had discovered a Rosetta Stone to translate corporate messaging into youthspeak. Naturally, they charged through the nose for this.
Eventually – inevitably – the money took over. Investment flooded in from the likes of Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox, the Walt Disney Company and private-equity firm TPG Capital. Like many other online media platforms, Vice struggled to turn this into profit. The multiple #MeToo settlements it faced didn’t help either. Amid its financial struggles, it signed a deal with Mohamed Bin Salman’s regime to make films promoting Saudi Arabia. Meanwhile, editors repeatedly blocked stories that might offend the Saudi government.
As Anne Beatts, one of the original writers on Saturday Night Live famously said, “You can only be avant-garde for so long before you become garde.” Or in Vice’s case, palace guard:
Someone is going to write a great book about Vice and how it went from "I Snorted A Line Of Coke Before BASE Jumping" to "My Weekend With Somali Pirates" to "1000 Things Not to Say to People With Long COVID".https://t.co/U3SP445KtD
— Ben Sixsmith (@BDSixsmith) February 23, 2024
SONNY BUNCH: The Zone of Interest Review.
This is going to sound perverse, but the film’s very conceit almost treats Holocaust knowledge like comic book movies treat in-universe lore: as something in the background for knowledgeable audiences to pick up on. “Ah yes, here’s the manufacturer Siemens working with Höss, can you believe they’re still a going concern?” “Do you hear that piece of music the camp worker is playing? ‘Sunbeams’? It’s a piece that was actually written in and rescued from Auschwitz, did you know that?” “Oh, did you hear that woman say she found a diamond in a bottle of toothpaste? Yes, there were many efforts to save family wealth; none of them worked.”
* * * * * * * *
I FIND THE ZONE OF INTEREST somewhat flummoxing. Glazer has undoubtedly made a masterpiece of not-showing. For those who are familiar with the horror of the Holocaust, it will be a deeply unsettling work, less about the banality of evil than the willing acceptance of it; there are few moments from recent cinema more chilling than when Hedwig, having suffered a humiliation, tells a housekeeper that her husband could spread her ashes over the fields. In that taunt, she reveals not just her complicity but her active desire to hurt her enemies. The cruelty is the point, and all that.
And yet, I can’t help but wonder what the one-in-five young Americans who think the Holocaust was exaggerated will make of the very act of not-showing. I can’t help but wonder what the teachers who have noted a rise in antisemitic humor and students ironically praising Hitler as based will respond to it. Or how such a film will be received in a period of soaring antisemitism. Assuming knowledge that either isn’t there or has been warped by the vicissitudes of the online swamp alters the cinematic calculus in ways that I am not entirely sure how to grapple with.
Sadly, Bunch’s question was answered in 1995 and a much more conventional film about the Holocaust: Students’ Laughter Angers Schindler’s List Viewers.
When Steven Spielberg released his gritty “Schindler’s List,” he hoped the film about the Holocaust would provoke a range of responses, from horror to despair to anger. Laughter was not one of them.
But because of their ignorance of the subject, a group of high school students broke into giggles while watching the film during a field trip to an Oakland theater this week. In what appears to be a clash of cultures and generations, theater managers ousted the Castlemont High School students after other moviegoers complained that they were laughing loudly and contemptuously after one of the movie’s most affecting scenes.
“They were laughing at people being murdered by Nazis, laughing out loud,” said Allen Michaan, owner of the Grand Lake Theater. “People were shaking with anger. The issue was: They weren’t permitting other patrons to enjoy the movie.”
School administrators and teachers, however, accuse the theater and the media of blowing the incident out of proportion. They claimed that the laughter was not disruptive and sprang from a nervous, immature reaction to the depiction of a brutal execution.
“We told [students] that they were going to see a movie of a serious nature and they were to act appropriately,” said Tanya Dennis, Castlemont’s dean of students. But, she added, they couldn’t help but be shocked by the scene.
Needless to say, Zone of Interest isn’t a film for most teens. For the rest of us, it’s a hypnotic, if at times far too mannered a film that illustrates Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” trope through an extremely difficult 104 minutes of viewing.
ONE COMEDIAN REMEMBERS ANOTHER: Another Great From the Comedy Boom Era Is Gone — Richard Lewis Dies at 76.
SUSTAINED SMALL CHANGES ARE BETTER THAN CRASH DIETS: Scientists Urge People To Think Twice Before Going on a Diet.
THIS IS KIND OF A BIG DEAL: Obama’s CIA Asked Foreign Intel Agencies To Spy on Trump Campaign. “The revelation that the U.S. intelligence community, under the Obama administration, sought the assistance of the “Five Eyes” intelligence alliance to surveil Donald Trump’s associates before the 2016 election is a chilling reminder of the lengths to which the Deep State will go to protect its interests and challenge its adversaries. (The Five Eyes countries are the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.) This bombshell, reported by a team of independent journalists, exposes a dark chapter in American political history, where foreign intelligence services were reportedly mobilized against a presidential candidate.”
Read the whole thing.
ANTHROMORPHIZE HARDER: Destined to Die, Odysseus Moon Lander Stoically Sends Back Its First Grainy Pics.
Alternate headline: Probe designed to last until next lunar night works as planned.
MARK JUDGE: In Defense of Affirmation. “Lack of affirmation is a serious problem in modern culture, and a more complex issue than people think.”
THE SUPREME COURT IS NOT SUPPOSED TO BE A WISH-FULFILLMENT DEVICE: Female law professor breaks down crying while working on constitutional law syllabus because conservatives now win cases at the Supreme Court.
JIM TREACHER: Hump Day Grab Bag. That sounds kinda dirty, I guess.
[Aaron] Bushnell posted on Reddit at Acebush1, and it looks like most of his comments have been deleted. But here’s one that survives:
Well, we already knew he hated Jews so much that he was willing to literally set himself on fire. So this fits.
Read the whole thing.
WE TRULY ARE GOVERNED BY IDIOTS: SCOTUS Justice Jackson Just Said the Dumbest Thing About Guns and I Can’t Stop Laughing.
The piece has been updated (and this post bumped!) now that the official transcript is available.
‘UNCOMMITTED’ IN MI: Did the Pro-Palestinian Left Humiliate Biden — Or Themselves?
The only humiliation created by the “Uncommitted” turn applies to the pro-Palestinian activists. In the context of the normal levels of discontent in non-competitive primaries, they barely moved the needle, if they did at all. The slight difference in percentage between the 2012 and 2024 results for “Uncommitted” may well have come from Democrats who think Joe Biden is too senile to serve as president. I’d bet that was a much bigger issue than Biden’s policies on the Hamas-Israel war or Tlaib’s influence. Tlaib’s campaign flopped, but don’t expect her or the pro-Palestinian press to cover it that way.
But that doesn’t mean that Biden scored a big win in Michigan either. Rather than look at the relative percentages in the primaries, compare the vote totals instead. Biden got 81.1% of 762,187 votes (as of 8:47 am ET); Trump got 68.1% of over 1.1 million votes. Trump alone got nearly as many votes as the total number of voters that cast ballots in the Democrat primary (756K to 762K). Haley got nearly half as many voters as Biden got.
It’s possible that some Michigan voters opted for the GOP ballot in the primary because it was more competitive. However, even if you take away all of Haley’s votes, Republicans still got a better turnout than Democrats did last night. That should be a huge red flag for Democrats about voter enthusiasm for a candidate that can’t reliably go out on the campaign trail, and can barely operate from the White House podium these days.
Finally, some thoughts from a trusted ABC News election analyst:
Whoopi tells the pro-Hamas voters in Michigan to get in line behind Biden and warns them that they're "in danger of seeming like a one-issue voter."
She suggests "uncommitted" voters are trampling on the right to vote that others have fought for. pic.twitter.com/gowoC3TsVI— Nicholas Fondacaro (@NickFondacaro) February 28, 2024
Or as a famous “Progressive” was quoted as saying from inside her exoskeleton, “You don’t have to fall in love, you just have to fall in line.”
BAD THERAPY: When Every Day is a Mental Health Day. Abigail Shrier, whose last book was banned by Target to placate transgender activists, now offers an astute and impassioned analysis of the mental-health crisis afflicting American adolescents raised by permissive parents and overtreated by therapists.
BE PREPARED: 2.95” Serrated Blade Pocket Knife – Black Folding Knife with Glass Breaker and Seatbelt Cutter. #CommissionEarned