A NEW POST ON MY SPACE SUBSTACK: Heart of Darkness: Astronomy and Timon of Athens.
I’ve actually had a number of subscriptions, and I really love getting subscriptions. And of course, paid subscriptions anre even better.
Archive for 2025
April 2, 2025
HOLLY MATHNERD: Systemic Misogyny: A Theorem Disproved. What my feminist professors lied about. “Turns out, the oppressors were just guys. And the cage I thought they built? Feminism handed me the blueprints — and I helped weld the bars.”
ANALYSIS: TRUE.
More like corrupt IMO.
They know exactly what they are doing.
— Publius (@OcrazioCornPop) April 2, 2025
Previously: “Congress is now less a place to commit serious acts of lawmaking and more of a perch for launching lucrative social media side gigs and sweetheart stock trades.”
HEH:
great val interview with @ELLEmagazine from 2006 pic.twitter.com/KpheODr0Gp
— brooke is crashing tf out rn (@verybrookie) April 2, 2025
Quentin Tarantino, call your office!
WILL NO ONE RID BYTEDANCE OF THIS TURBULENT APP? TikTok Might Have Found an American Buyer, and It’s a Perfect Match.
DOOMSDAY LOOPS — THEY’RE NOT JUST FOR SAN FRANCISCO ANYMORE! Hollywood’s Theatrical Business At Risk Of Entering “Negative Feedback Loop”, Wall Street Analyst Warns.
Hollywood is at risk of entering a “negative feedback loop” with fewer wide movie releases and a shrinking theater footprint combining to squeeze box office revenue, a veteran media analyst says.
In his annual assessment of the theatrical sector, billed as a “memo to Hollywood,” TD Cowen analyst Doug Creutz notes that he has taken a “bearish stance” on the theatrical window for some time. Results from 2024, with total grosses slipping 4% from 2023 to $8.57 billion, the number of wide releases down 6% from pre-Covid levels, and other factors have only reinforced his view.
“We have said for several years now that the outlook for a sustained recovery looks questionable, and that we don’t think the existing global theatrical footprint can be supported solely by a handful of blockbusters,” Creutz wrote in the 20-page report.
The number of screens in the U.S. has declined to about 35,000 from 41,000 before Covid struck in 2020, with exhibition also facing big challenges in 2023 and 2024 due to the strikes. That smaller footprint might help theater owners in the near term, but it could end up hastening the decline of the overall business, Creutz believes. Downsizing “risks having more films skipping theatrical and going direct to streaming services…and now you have all the ingredients for a negative feedback loop.”
Creutz emphasizes that he is “not calling for a complete collapse of the theatrical window, but we think box office is more likely to decline than rise over the next few years, particularly as major studios continue to cut back on the number of films they make in favor of concentrating their box office efforts in fewer, bigger, established IP films.”
Found via Michael Walsh who adds, “The Industry must wean itself from its green-eyeshade addiction to comic books and wokism if it is to have any chance of salvaging the theatrical model — which thanks to streaming, it probably doesn’t.“
PERSPECTIVE:
We won 2 of 3 special elections and secured voter ID in the state of Wisconsin.
And some people are acting like with lost 0-4. lol
— Catturd ™ (@catturd2) April 2, 2025
And DataRepublican from the replies: “Also, the last-minute surge was real. We have the power to make 3 of 3 happen next time.”
THE CRITICAL DRINKER: A Working Man Who Beat Snow White.
Related: Rob Long on The Good Psychopath.
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: At an average university, the average student is ‘functionally illiterate.’
The average college student is “functionally illiterate,” writes “Hilarius Bookbinder,” who teaches philosophy at a public university that attracts students with mid-range academic records.
Most students “could not read a serious adult novel cover-to-cover and understand what they read,” nor do they have “the desire to try, the vocabulary to grasp what they read and most certainly not the attention span to finish,” writes Bookbinder. They don’t read textbooks or primary texts, “even in upper-divisions courses that students supposedly take out of genuine interest.”
Students write at the eighth-grade level, he writes. They submit the cheapest cliché as novel insight.
Exam question: Describe the attitude of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man towards acting in one’s own self-interest, and how this is connected to his concerns about free will. Are his views self-contradictory?
Student: With the UGM its all about our journey in life, not the destination. He beleives we need to take time to enjoy the little things becuase life is short and you never gonna know what happens. Sometimes he contradicts himself cause sometimes you say one thing but then you think something else later. It’s all relative.
The alternative is a coherent answer written by a bot.
Combine lack of knowledge with safetyism (and institutional antisemitism), and you’ve produced Ben Rhodes’ next batch of journalists who “literally know nothing.”
MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Val Kilmer: RIP
STAY SAFE: GP BackGrip PRO, Headrest Car Passenger Hand Grip. #CommissionEarned
MIKE SOLANA: Bad Ghibli.
Regardless of the quality, it was hard to argue the avalanche of AI-generated images we saw last week, grasping for attention in a kind of life-like mass beyond anyone’s control, wasn’t slop-like, and I alluded to as much that afternoon. Later, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman responded on X, “One man’s slop is another man’s treasure.” Different strokes for different folks, case closed. But the conversation on slop, in keeping with its basic nature, was a bit of a distraction.
It was Sam’s following tweet that exposed a real — and in my opinion really fascinating — problem:
Obviously, he was alluding to the White House social media team’s Ghibli, now the most famous example of OpenAI’s new image generation by far. And the first really great, and really impactful, example of bad AI-generated art:
A bad Ghibli, we’ll call it. A piece of AI-generated art that is incredibly successful — at conveying something you didn’t intend to convey.
* * * * * * * *
While it’s hard to know exactly what the White House social media team was trying to achieve with its Ghibli (though my sense is probably nothing, and they were simply working from instinct as most of us are online), I think it’s safe to say they didn’t want to evoke a sense of pity in the average American for a deported fentanyl dealer. But that is what they achieved.
The moment their Ghibli went viral, and the first wave of backlash began, many hardline supporters of the White House were quick — naturally, correctly — to point out this was an AI-generated picture of a felon, almost certainly responsible for the death of Americans, who had already been deported once before. She was also, in real photos that emerged, (I am not being petty here, this is important) physically repulsive. Just look at her, the bad Ghibli defenders cried. And I understand the impulse. I mean, take a look yourself:
Who wants this person in their country? Nobody. Who cares if she cries on her way home? Not me. But, incredibly, in order to defend the cartoon, White House allies had to point to the real photo of an actual criminal, which the White House had already released at the time of the Ghibli. In this, we are not using imagery to massage or explain away reality, as we often see with propaganda. We are using reality to explain away an entirely generated controversy that happened, it seems to me, by mistake. Because someone who is not an artist generated real art he didn’t understand.
How did we get here?
Read the whole thing.
In his early days as creator/producer of Saturday Night Live, Lorne Michaels once rejected a potential sketch by telling its writer that it suffered from “premise overload.” In 2022, Biden’s infamous nighttime Independence Hall speech rant was the result of his handlers trying to put him in a real-life “Dark Brandon” scenario, which thrilled his hyper-online far left base and left the vast majority of Americans confused and angered by the Leni Riefenstahl-like images they were seeing. Similarly, the Trump comm team’s confusing AI slop last week was premise overload as well. I didn’t make the connection with Basora-Gonzalez, and I initially pondered if the man in the cartoon was some sort of Tim Walz callback, given his rounded face and middle-aged appearance, and Walz’s comical obsession last year with camouflage-colored haberdashery.
Solana concludes, “Be careful what you prompt for.” I would argue, prompt away; ChatGPT’s ability to effortlessly spitout Ghibli cartoons is lots of fun, but a political comms shop needs to make sure that the vast majority of the people seeing the image will connect with it before deciding to hit the publish button on social media.
SHOULD GRANTS SUPPORT INDIVIDUAL SCIENTISTS, NOT TEAMS? “The creativity, curiosity, perseverance, and skills, observational as well as cognitive, of the scientist are, in fact, the main factors in the success of basic science… Sadly, government science agencies now make no effort whatsoever to assess these qualities as part of the grant-proposal process. This was not always the case.” We can certainly do better than whatever we’re doing now.
CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Federal Measure Would Deregulate Short-Barreled Rifles, Shotguns, AOWs.
LET’S SEE IF BOEING CAN GET THE FIRST VERSION RIGHT BEFORE GETTING TOO EXCITED: F-47 Fighter Program Could See Multiple Versions Built In Increments.
RAYMOND IBRAHIM: Muslims Still Furious Over Christian Victories at Battles of Tours (732) and Vienna (1683).
I’ve been learning a lot from Ray’s video podcasts.
LIMITED TIME DEAL: REDTIGER Dash Cam Front Rear. #CommissionEarned
SPRING CLEAN: Greenworks 3000 PSI Pressure Washer (2.0 GPM Max). #CommissionEarned
I HAD THOUGHT MAYBE THIS WAS AN APRIL FOOL’S PRANK, BUT NO: New San Francisco program backed by Newsom will issue speeding tickets based on income. “Violations for speeding range from $50 to $500, but individuals with a household income at or below 200% of the federal poverty level are eligible for a 50% discount, according to the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency. Indigent persons, or individuals who are homeless, are eligible for an 80% discount on the speeding ticket.”
ROBERT SPENCER: It Was All Fake: Far-Left Billionaires Astroturfed the Tidal Wave of Early Enthusiasm for Harris.
Last summer, after Old Joe Biden was forced out of running for reelection and Kamala Harris was anointed as the Democrat candidate for president, the far left’s propaganda arm (that is, the establishment media) made a massive push to make this failed vice president and longtime party hack seem new and appealing. A key part of this effort was a gaggle of young “influencers” who took to Instagram and TikTok with an enthusiastic pro-Harris message. It was sincere, it was spontaneous, it was exciting — or at least that’s what it seemed to be. Now (I know, knock me over with a feather) it turns out that the whole thing was faked: the entire Harris bubble was the artificial creation of a bunch of leftist billionaires.
RealClearInvestigations blew the whistle on this astroturfing enterprise in a lengthy exposé on Monday, detailing concerted efforts to portray Harris as if she had “Gen Z-friendly hipster appeal.” This involved “influencers” making “neon-matcha green pro-Harris videos synced to beats from singer Charli XCX’s album ‘Brat’ released last year,” as well as flooding the interwebs with “memes celebrating Harris as the voice of queer and black youth, in contrast with the Republican agenda of white supremacy.” Yeah, not only did they create a fictional Harris, but they conjured up a fake opposition to her in the bargain.
The campaign went heavy on sexual excess, with a heavy helping of hysteria: “Digital creator Amelia Montooth, in one viral TikTok video, kissed a woman and tried searching for pornography, actions her sketch suggested would be banned if Harris lost the election.” Apparently presenting Harris as the porn candidate wasn’t enough, and so “another TikTok and Instagram series backed by the donors, called ‘Gaydar,’ featured interviews quizzing people on the streets of New York City about gay culture trivia with little election-related content,” but the pro-Harris subtext was unmistakable.
Then there was a caravan featuring “an inflatable IUD” that traveled to Philadelphia, Washington, Raleigh, St. Louis, and elsewhere. “The tour, which featured content creators producing posts along the way, was designed to bring attention to claims that Trump would ban contraceptive devices.” Yeah, of course he would.
Harris never quite gelled as the front woman for twenty-first century amorality; RealClearInvestigations notes that she was “a career politician favored by the Democratic Party’s establishment,” and so “never quite fit the bill as an icon of activist movements.” But this wasn’t for want of trying: “the sudden influencer buzz seemed to transform the stodgy former prosecutor into an icon of the cultural zeitgeist.”
Harris’ campaign was the last gasp of Obama’s advisors attempting to run his playbook to advance a candidate who lacked his rock star 2008 appeal. And speaking of Barry: Obama was working against Kamala Harris behind the scenes, didn’t think she could win, new book reveals.
Reporter and author Jonathan Allen said Tuesday that former President Barack Obama was working against Vice President Kamala Harris after President Joe Biden dropped out, advocating for an open primary because he didn’t think Harris could win.
“President Obama absolutely did not think that Joe Biden should continue, according to our sources close to President Obama,” Allen told MSNBC. “And he also didn’t want Kamala Harris to be the replacement for Biden. He didn’t think that she was the best choice for Democrats, and he worked really behind the scenes for a long time to try to have a mini-primary, or an open convention, or a mini-primary leading to an open convention, did not have faith in her ability to win the election.”
Allen, a senior politics reporter at NBC News, and Amie Parnes, a senior political correspondent for The Hill, joined MSNBC to discuss their new book set to be released this month, titled, “FIGHT: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House.”
“As it turned out, she didn’t win, but he was really working against her,” Allen continued.
But hey, his former advisors sure got to burn through lots of money trying: Democrat Megadonor: The Kamala Harris Campaign “Legally Stole” the $1.5 Billion They Raised from Donors.
OKAY, I’M SOLD — REPEAL THE 22nd AMENDMENT: Neil Young says he may be barred from returning to US over Donald Trump criticism.
Neil Young has shared his concerns of being barred from the US after his European tour later this year, thanks to his outspoken critiques of Donald Trump.
On Tuesday, on his website Neil Young Archives, the 79-year-old musician – who has dual Canadian-American citizenship – wrote of his fears after the recent spate of people being detained and deported upon entering the US. These incidents have been credited to vague or unspecified visa issues, but have frequently affected individuals who have criticised the Trump administration either publicly or in messages on their phone read by immigration officers.
“When I go to play music in Europe, if I talk about Donald J Trump, I may be one of those returning to America who is barred or put in jail to sleep on a cement floor with an aluminium blanket,” Young wrote. “That is happening all the time now. Countries have new advice for those returning to America.”
Evergreen:
ANALYSIS: TRUE. RFK Calls HHS Layoffs a ‘Win-Win for Taxpayers.’