DOES THE PHRASE “IT’S THE ECONOMY STUPID!” RING A FAINT BELL? During a stop in Muskegon Heights, Michigan, Bill Clinton admitted the economy was better under Donald Trump, but that’s not a good enough reason to vote for him over Kamala Harris.
Archive for 2024
November 1, 2024
THERE MIGHT NO LONGER BE AN ENGLAND: PLEASE HELP: They’re trying to kill Tommy Robinson in prison.
AND EXPECTING US TO BE STUCK: Painting Themselves Into a Corner.
A CORRECT AND MAGNIFICENT RANT: Lockstep Voting and Bullying.
STRANGELY UKRAINE IS ALSO NOT REPORTING ITS PLANS TO THE US: Once again, the White House has “leaked” confidential information provided by the Ukrainian mission to the press—this time regarding long-range weapons—the way I see it clearly to warn the Russians of Ukraine’s plans.
IT’S THE CRAZY YEARS. OR A GLOBAL FIGHT AGAINST THE GLOBALISTS: Despite all coverage of the US election craziness, things are happening elsewhere too.
LIMITED TIME DEAL: Robot Vacuum and Mop Combo, 2 in 1 Mopping Robotic Vacuum. #CommissionEarned
I’M PROBABLY CONFUSED ABOUT THE PARTICULAR FICTIONAL/HISTORICAL INSTANCE DUE TO LACK OF SLEEP* BUT ALL THE SAME: Burn The Boats.
*Stupid respiratory infection is dragging towards 3 weeks. Apparently younger DIL is dragging me to doctor tomorrow for my own good.
October 31, 2024
OPEN THREAD: Hang on baby, Friday’s coming.
Hell hath no fury like a strong, intelligent, Republican woman scorned.
It’s a lesson billionaire Mark Cuban learned the hard way when he emphatically stated on “The View” that former President Donald Trump is “never” around any “strong and intelligent women,” bringing prominent GOP women out of the woodwork to put him in his place.
“They’re intimidating to him. He doesn’t like to be challenged by them. Nikki Haley will call him on his nonsense with reproductive rights and how he sees and treats and talks about women. I mean, he just can’t have her around. It wouldn’t work,” Cuban said on the show Thursday morning.
His bumbling remarks come one day after President Biden wrote off Trump supporters as “garbage,” the double-barrel insults from the two Harris supporters coming less than a week before Election Day.
Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY):
“Democrats have an uncanny ability to say what they think, to show their disdain for the American people. And just two days ago, Joe Biden, the sitting president of the United States, called 250 million Americans ‘garbage.’ And then we have Kamala Harris’s top ally basically calling women who support President Trump weak and dumb, saying that you can’t be strong and intelligent and support President Trump. That is the disgraceful closing argument that Democrats are making.”
There are no atheists in foxholes, and in the last week of a presidential election, there’s suddenly no shortage of leftist biologists who can identify what a woman is.
Things get awfully sketchy during all the other weeks, however:
THE NEW SPACE RACE: NASA updates list of Artemis 3 landing sites.
SETH MANDEL: Purging Jews From the Arts.
Sally Rooney is a clarifying figure in the literary world. She does not go for complexity or nuance, and she doesn’t like to leave herself open to interpretation. Rooney has now written the same novel four times, likely to avoid any possible confusion over what it is she wants to say. And rather than hide behind some disingenuous claim of “just anti-Zionism,” she does things like oppose her last novel’s translation into Hebrew, an act of overt hostility to Jews and only Jews.
So it’s no surprise to find Rooney’s name atop a McCarthyite attempt to purge the arts of the People of the Book. What’s more interesting is to see who else jumps on Rooney’s straight-talk express and whether the wider societal reaction reaches a fraction of what it ought to be.
Hundreds of writers have joined what is framed as a boycott but is actually the institution of a global loyalty oath for Jews. The novelist Rachel Kushner, whose new book contains a rather creepy rant aimed at French Jewish intellectual Bernard-Henri Levy, is one of the more famous of Rooney’s inquisitors. Junot Diaz, like a once-famous emo act reuniting for a Gen X nostalgia tour, is on there as well.
Lee Child, creator of the Jack Reacher novels, is not on there. He objected to the purge, as did Lionel Shriver and Howard Jacobson. The crux of the loyalty test is as follows:
“We will not cooperate with Israeli institutions including publishers, festivals, literary agencies and publications that:
“A) Are complicit in violating Palestinian rights, including through discriminatory policies and practices or by whitewashing and justifying Israel’s occupation, apartheid or genocide, or
“B) Have never publicly recognized the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people as enshrined in international law.”
You are to be unpersoned, that is, if you write about Israel without denouncing the Jewish state—a rule that is intended to disqualify Jewish writers of any and every nationality—or if you are Israeli and have not renounced your country and your people, like any Good Jew apparently would. Israelis are currently under fire from seven fronts in a war that began with an explicitly genocidal invasion by Iranian proxies, and if you do not do something to help the cause of exterminating your own people, you are heretofore banished from the arts.
I’m not sure it’s possible to top the reaction from the poet Gillian Lazarus, who said:
“The likes of Sally Rooney would boycott the likes of Amos Oz, David Grossman and Yehuda Amichai. It’s as if a composer of advertising jingles boycotted Mozart.”
The writer of the liner notes for Roger Waters’ next album just identified herself, though.
At the Free Press, Lionel Shriver adds “Count me out” of “Sally Rooney’s Literary Mob:” “Although some say we’ve passed peak woke, the modern left’s authoritarian impulse to push other people around is alive and well. It’s just that a memo must have gone out to the faithful that the agenda has switched, and now instead of black lives mattering or the climate changing, they’re all to lose their wits over Israel and stick it to the Jews. These are very obedient disciples.”
EIGHT YEARS AGO TODAY:
THE AI CHATBOTS ARE ROOTING FOR KAMALA.
Silicon Valley may pride itself on being a home for people who think outside the box. Yet when it comes to the hottest product in tech right now—artificial intelligence chatbots—there’s a stunning amount of political groupthink.
The country is evenly divided between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. But when we asked five of the biggest language models—ChatGPT, Grok, Llama via Meta AI, Claude, and DeepSeek—to assess the positions of the two presidential candidates on a multitude of pressing issues, the answers were mostly the same.
Which candidate has the “right” platform on healthcare? Abortion? Criminal justice? According to the machines, with only one exception, the answer was always Harris.
Why is this concerning? Generation Z are AI power users, with up to 75 percent using the technology to plan meals, create workouts, and assist with job applications. They already use AI daily to help them make decisions, so it is not difficult to assume they could use these platforms to decide how to vote.
On Wednesday, The Free Press asked the five artificial intelligence assistants to answer 16 policy questions on a spectrum of issues—from the economy and inflation to gun control and climate change. (We excluded Google’s Gemini, which has been specifically programmed not to answer questions about 2024 elections worldwide.) We asked the bots to answer the questions first as if they were Donald Trump, and then answer as if they were Vice President Kamala Harris.
* * * * * * * *
Four AI assistants—ChatGPT, Grok, Llama via Meta AI, and DeepSeek—said Kamala Harris’s policies were right and that they agreed with her responses on each and every issue. Click to read this spreadsheet for our full list of questions and the AI’s answers.
Having grown up in a middle class cybernetic family, and really, really loving Venn diagrams, Skynet remains unburdened by what has been.
AVOID ALL ONTOLOGICAL FRAMEWORKS OF COCKSUREDNESS: Axios: What Trump is being told. “A new internal memo by Tony Fabrizio, chief pollster for all three of Donald Trump’s presidential campaigns, tells the former president he’s in a radically better position than he was right before the 2020 election. Why it matters: The memo reflects the exuberance that Trump staffers and allies exude in interviews and behind-the-scenes conversations. The optimistic framing could make it even more difficult for Trump followers to accept a loss as legitimate.”
Related: MAGA world’s hyper-confidence raises risk of post-election meltdown.
STEVE KRAKAUER: Washington Post endorsement debacle exposes our ‘zombie elites.’
The Washington Post is a “Zombie Elite” — a formerly important institution that doesn’t know it is already dead. It is stiffly wandering around with a smug facade of elitism, not realizing the power and influence it formerly possessed have been deeply — and likely irreparably — eroded.
The Post is not alone in today’s culture. There are examples of Zombie Elites throughout the media landscape, as legacy mainstays like CBS News and ABC News have been drained of their elite status. Zombie Elites exist in government, the scientific community and the foreign policy world. During the Trump Era, but particularly in the past four years since the COVID pandemic and the rise of independent media overcoming the “Censorship Industrial Complex,” more Zombie Elites than ever are walking among us.
But at the same time, the Washington Post is a particularly notable kind of media Zombie Elite. What major story has the outlet broken in the past few years? The New York Times has essential new media properties, like “The Daily” podcast (and Wordle!). What inroads into the future has the Post made? When the rest of the establishment press temporarily rediscovered their interest in telling the truth about President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline between the debate disaster and his eventual withdrawal from the race, the Post barely contributed to the conversation.
And in a sign of failure even among insider-y journalistic elitism, it hasn’t even won a Pulitzer Prize in two years.
Bezos has a noble stated goal of no longer talking “to ourselves,” and both being, and appearing to be, less biased. But a skeptical audience’s trust can’t be reestablished through the billionaire boss torpedoing an endorsement at the last minute. It requires full-scale reinvention.
At the PJ Mothership, Mark Tapscott asks: Will Jeff Bezos Save the Washington Post the Way Elon Musk Rescued X?
Otherwise, how many more headaches like he’s had over the past couple of weeks does Bezos need from a publication that’s largely a money pit? Or as Ira Stoll asked in June: Who Will Be the Washington Post’s Next Owner?
(Via Ace of Spades.)
DOES BEZOS HAVE THE SAME COURAGE AS MUSK? The uproar in the Washington Post newsroom over owner Jeff Bezos’ decision to forego presidential endorsements in 2024 and thereafter shows he understands the indisputable reality that the vast majority of his journalist employees just don’t get.
But, as I explain in my latest PJ Media column, it’s one thing to give such folks an uncompromising introduction to the harsh reality facing the Mainstream Media, but the far more difficult step is doing what must be done to effect needed change. Musk did it, but will Bezos? How he responds likely will tell the story of the future of the Post, reconstruction and revival, or, in the Amazon man’s own words, “stay on autopilot and fade into irrelevance.”
LEFT PLANNING ELECTION NIGHT/INAUGURAL VIOLENCE: Demonstration permits examined by former New Left radical trainer Richard Pollock show multiple far-Left and Pro-Palestinian groups moving ahead with plans to take to the streets of the nation’s capital to protest a Trump election victory and inaugural.
“The applicants claim about 15,000 protesters could descend on Washington, D.C. on election night and up to 200,000 anti-Trump protests could arrive leading up to and including Inauguration Day, when the next President is sworn in,” Pollock reports.
One of the organizers, a veteran of the 2017 inaugural disruptions, told a Leftist outlet that for the 2024 events “we want to undermine Trump’s presidency from the get-go. There has been a lot of talk of peaceful transition of power as being a core element in a democracy and we want to reject that entirely and really undermine the peaceful transition.”
What’s the maxim? Believe them when they tell you who they are and what they are planning.
BYRON YORK: You can’t tell who’s winning this race. “The bottom line is that there is an extraordinary amount of voter enthusiasm and intensity behind Harris at the moment. Some Republicans look at big Trump rallies and assume that there has to be less passion on the other side. That’s not the case. It doesn’t mean that Harris will win, but that enthusiasm and the poll numbers make it clear that this election is wide open with less than a week to go.”
SEEMS LIKE IT’S USUALLY A VEGETABLE: CDC confirms onions caused McDonald’s E. coli outbreak.
CHRISTOPHER RUFO: How Gender Ideology Captured the State Department.
The U.S. Department of State is charged with advancing American interests abroad through complex and delicate diplomatic missions, as well as maintaining the safety of those missions and the Americans serving them.
The institution’s lodestar should be the national interest, but under President Joe Biden, the State Department has demoted that critical objective in favor of a new global agenda: to spread radical gender theory to foreign nations.
The shift began at the top. President Biden and, in turn, the apparatus beneath him led America’s leftward charge on the world stage. Upon taking office in 2021, the administration used the previous year’s racial unrest as a pretext to issue a slew of executive orders and memoranda entrenching left-wing ideologies in all levels of the federal government, under the guise of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” or DEI.
As part of this initiative, the White House required each federal agency to submit detailed DEI progress reports regularly, appoint a chief diversity officer, and create “Agency Equity Teams,” whose leaders were tasked with “delivering equitable outcomes.” These requirements contributed to what the president called “an ambitious whole-of-government equity agenda.”
The gender component of this agenda spread to the State Department through the president’s “Memorandum on Advancing the Human Rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Intersex Persons Around the World.” Published in February 2021, this memorandum directed State and other agencies to monitor closely and report on the “LGBTQI+” policies of our allies, to “broaden the number of countries willing to support and defend” the radical Left’s understanding of gender—for example, by funding pro-transgender “civil society advocates” in order to shift public opinion in those countries—and to tie in the principles of gender theory to America’s foreign-aid programs.
What could possibly go wrong?
20 MINUTES INTO THE FUTURE: More Apple Intelligence Features Like ChatGPT Drop With the iOS 18.2 Developer Beta.
Apple’s push for generative AI, under the none-too-subtle name of Apple Intelligence, took another step forward with the developer beta software releases for iOS 18.2, iPadOS 18.2 and MacOS Sequoia 15.2. The drop includes even more Apple Intelligence features like GenMoji, Image Playground and the ChatGPT integration for Siri.
This release follows the latest iOS 18.1 public beta, which includes a handful of Apple Intelligence features like AI-suggested writing tools that pop up in documents or emails, photo tools including Clean Up to remove unwanted parts of an image, and a number of Siri changes. The most conspicuous changes to Siri include a new voice designed to sound more natural, the ability to understand the context of conversations, a new glowing border around the display when Siri is running, and a new double-tap gesture on the bottom of the screen to type to Siri.
Those early Apple Intelligence tools are expected to drop next week with the public release for iOS 18.1. Rumors from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman point to Apple releasing some Apple Intelligence features on Oct. 28. The iOS 18.2 developer beta has even more features includes visual intelligence for the iPhone 16 and 16 Pro which uses the new Camera Control button to trigger a search of whatever the camera is pointed at — similar to Google Lens.
I know that Apple is taking a slow and somewhat cautious approach to integrating AI into their products, and I’m looking forward to seeing how it shapes up. Right now, AI seems like it’s where the Apple II and TRS-80 were in the late ’70s and early ’80s: the potential is certainly there, but the road forward to reach it may be quite long. I installed IOS 18.1 on my iPhone and iPad recently; right now, this cartoon neatly summarizes what it initially seems to add to those devices:
