CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: House Judiciary Advances Concealed Carry Reciprocity.
Archive for 2025
March 31, 2025
FAIL, BRITANNIA AND/OR NOTHING’S SHOCKING: You’ll Never Believe Why a Toddler Was Kicked Out of Nursery School.
READER FAVORITE: Greenworks 40V 16″ Cordless Lawn Mower. #CommissionEarned
THE REPUBLICAN CONGRESS IS SO FAR NOTABLE MOSTLY FOR ITS INACTION:
My earnings are confiscated for EPA slush funds that "reduce barriers and increase feelings of safety for disadvantaged communities visiting the Oregon coast"
Republicans could repeal this funding anytime without a single Democrat vote. https://t.co/vtAcf4IDCh
— Oilfield Rando (@Oilfield_Rando) March 30, 2025
IF IT CAN BE DONE BY CHEATING, IT WILL HAPPEN: Republicans are acting like there’s a Blue Wave coming: Could Democrats retake the House … *before* the midterms?
I’d like to see a lot more urgency from Republicans in the legislative branch about now . . .
PAY FOR PLAY: Al Sharpton Books Labor Bosses Who Pour Millions Into His Nonprofit on MSNBC Show.
Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network has received millions of dollars from prominent labor unions whose bosses frequently appear on the controversial activist’s MSNBC show, often without any disclosure about their lucrative financial ties.
In the past year alone, Sharpton, who hosts PoliticsNation on the weekends, has interviewed the presidents of five unions that have given his nonprofit a total of $6.3 million: American Federation of Teachers, National Education Association (NEA), Service Employees International Union (SEIU), American Federation of Government Employees, and American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME).
In all, labor unions have given nearly $8 million earmarked as “gifts,” “grants,” or payments for “political activities” to the National Action Network, which in some years has paid Sharpton a $1 million salary and paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for private jets and limo services.
To be fair, union bosses are likely clamoring to appear on Sharpton’s show due to its boffo, blowout ratings:
HMM: FBI raids home of prominent computer scientist who has gone incommunicado: Indiana University quietly removes profile of tenured professor and refuses to say why. “A prominent computer scientist who has spent 20 years publishing academic papers on cryptography, privacy, and cybersecurity has gone incommunicado, had his professor profile, email account, and phone number removed by his employer Indiana University, and had his homes raided by the FBI. No one knows why. Xiaofeng Wang has a long list of prestigious titles.”
THOUGHT: If you’re an actual Nazi, you can now drive around with swastikas on your Tesla and people will just assume it got vandalized.
KURT SCHLICHTER: When Conservatives Refuse to Play Along, the Dems and Regime Media Lose.
One of the delights of the last couple of months has been watching the Democrats and their regime media adjuncts running their decades-old political playbook and seeing them completely outflanked by the Trump administration running its modern playbook. Check your calendars, guys. It’s 2025, and what used to work doesn’t work anymore. You guys haven’t changed, but we Republicans have. The fact that we are no longer reacting as you expect and demand us to, along with the revolution in media that has allowed us insurgents to evade the regime media gatekeepers, has made all your old go-to moves utterly useless. We’re winning, and you’re losing. It’s beautiful, man.
Take the ridiculous Signal onanism of last week. That pseudo-scandal is gone now, except in the dank recesses of the collective colon of MSNBCNN, where the regime media left attempts to wring a few more nutrients from it before it passes completely.
Why did what they portray as the biggest scandal of all human history sputter into nothingness in less than a week? Putting aside that no one outside of Washington, DC, or Twitter cared about it – I drove almost 2,000 miles across the country last week, met dozens of people, including military folks, and never once heard it mentioned – there’s another reason it vapor-locked. We Republicans refused to play along this time, and our refusal to do so killed it.
Exit quote: “Our cooperation is the key to perpetuating the scandals. They can’t win unless we help them win, and we’ve chosen not to help them win anymore.”
IS EVERYTHING THE LEFT DOES ASTROTURF? There’s Something Very Suspicious Going on With Those Tesla Protests.
TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE (CONT’D): Twisted NJ special education teacher sent 25,000 texts to 8th-grade boy she molested: indictment.
READER FAVORITE: COOFANDY Men’s Cotton Linen Henley T-Shirts. #CommissionEarned
PEOPLE GOT COCKY: Louisiana voters overwhelmingly reject all four constitutional amendments. “‘This was a ‘primal scream’ kind of vote, driven by robust Democratic EV turnout that I’m not seeing being offset by a strong GOP Election Day vote,’ John Couvillon, an award-winning pollster, said in a post on X.”
CLUTCH CARGO: THE NEXT GENERATION! First “visually dubbed” feature film hits US theaters this May.
Swedish sci-fi adventure flick Watch the Skies is using a technique called ‘visual dubbing’ to alter the cast’s lip movements and map them to dubbed English dialogue for international audiences – without reshooting a single scene.
That’s thanks to Los Angeles-based movie-making AI firm Flawless, and its TrueSync technology that analyzes the entirety of an actor’s performance, utilizes deep learning to create a volumetric 3D representation of their face, and then adapts their mouth movements in the footage in post-production.
TrueSync has actually been around for a few years, and was notably used to remove F-bombs from the PG-13 edit of the 2022 British survival horror movie Fall (which happened to have been directed by Flawless CEO Scott Mann).
* * * * * * * *
This time around, Flawless’ tech is being used to visually dub an entire movie. Watch the Skies, which debuted in its home country back in 2022 as UFO Sweden, follows a teenager searching for her missing (and possibly abducted by aliens) father with a UFO watchers’ club. The original actors dubbed their own performances into English at a recording studio, so their Swedish accents are intact.
Knowing that this effect was used, audiences will likely be staring very closely at newly swapped-in AI mouths, which may make selling the illusion a bit more difficult. And I hope the script wasn’t just run through AI for a quick and dirty translation into English. Very bad things can happen if the dialogue isn’t carefully reviewed by someone who actually natively speaks English, as I wrote in 2023: Springtime for AI.
But this technique has definitely made massive progress since the days of Clutch Cargo in the late 1950s:
(Via Justine Bateman.)
CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL: The Age of Le Pen.
Le Pen died in January at age 96, two weeks before Trump returned to office. Half a century ago, Le Pen called for an uprising against a dawning era of human rights, abortion, sexual liberation, transnational governance, and—above all—mass migration. He won the near-unanimous loathing of his country’s journalists and intellectuals, who accused him of racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism. For a time he was the most despised major politician in the West, rivaled only by Britain’s Enoch Powell. Not all of his views have been vindicated—far from it. But his general vision, which passed through Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul and Brexit on its way to Donald Trump, has triumphed. It is worth looking at what he got right and what he got wrong. By September 2021, when I spent an afternoon interviewing him at his house in Rueil-Malmaison, west of Paris, he recognized that he had been mistaken in some of his most passionately held positions. The same, of course, can be said of his critics. Though certain of their arguments were well founded, others were opportunistic inventions of a power structure that despaired of besting Le Pen in debate.
Like other populists he was a has-been by the time he really hit his stride. It’s amazing what a combination of longevity and precocity will do. When Le Pen was born in Brittany in 1928, Raymond Poincaré was France’s prime minister and Calvin Coolidge the American president. Le Pen was a child studying classics with the Jesuits in the 1930s, a teenager when his fisherman father died after his boat struck a mine in the 1940s, and a member of the National Assembly—elected for the Left Bank!—in the 1950s. A soldier, he was shipped to Vietnam in 1954, just missing the catastrophic encirclement of French troops at Dien Bien Phu, and to Algeria later that decade. Suppressing the anti-colonial rebellion there became his passion. In 1972, he co-founded the National Front, the political party he would lead till passing it to his daughter Marine in 2011. In 1976, an attacker blew up his house—a crime that was never solved. In the 1980s he became a member of the European Parliament in Brussels and spent more than three decades there—the longest-serving French member of a body he loathed. He started regularly taking 15% or so of the vote in presidential elections at home, and in 2002 broke through to the second round. Though he was defeated by Jacques Chirac, the slap to the three big establishment parties—Socialists, Gaullists, liberals—is still felt today. And today, the National Rally, as Marine Le Pen renamed her father’s party, is bigger than any of them. It is more popular, in fact, than any party in France, commanding a solid third of the vote and kept out of office only by ever-more-elaborate deals between the establishment parties.
There’s a lot of that going on in Europe, to keep the grift going before the lights (possibly literally) go out.
MY LATEST SUBSTACK ESSAY: Three Small Items: On Political Passion in Trump’s Second Term.
THEY REALLY COULDN’T: The Stakes Couldn’t Be Higher in Wisconsin’s April 1 Special Election.
Trump turned Wisconsin purple. This election means to turn it blue and lock it in.
PROBABLY WON’T SEE THIS ON THE LEGACY MEDIA: Here’s What the Stranded Astronauts Have to Say About Trump and Musk.
THE NEW SPACE RACE: SpaceX is set to launch 4 people on a first-of-its-kind mission around Earth’s poles.
A crew of four passengers — led by a cryptocurrency billionaire — is set to launch aboard a SpaceX capsule that will carry them over the Earth’s poles, marking the first time humans have flown such a mission.
The group is slated to lift off from a launchpad in Florida during a 4.5-hour window that opens at 9:46 p.m. ET Monday.
Malta-based investor Chun Wang is financing the mission, which was dubbed Fram2 after a Norwegian ship that carried key expeditions to the North and South poles around the turn of the 20th century.
Wang made his fortune with bitcoin mining operations, and he paid SpaceX an undisclosed sum of money to conduct this mission. Joining him are three polar explorers whom Wang met through his Earth-bound travels: Norwegian film director Jannicke Mikkelsen, German robotics researcher Rabea Rogge and Australian adventurer Eric Philips.
No one on the crew has ever traveled to space.
Godspeed.
Just a few years ago it was almost unimaginable that a mission like this one would be commercial.
LONGEVITY UPDATE: Multivitamins Slow Biological Aging in Large Trial.
The COSMOS trial included men and women who were older adults (≥ 60 years of age). In this study, the average age was 70.2 years. I’d like to acknowledge that I’m a co-investigator on this study. Approximately 950 participants who had blood tests at baseline and at 1-year and 2-year follow-ups were randomly selected. Biological aging was assessed using five different epigenetic clocks, two of which were first-generation, two were second-generation, and one was DunedinPACE.
In all five epigenetic clocks, there was a signal for slower aging in the multivitamin compared with the placebo arm. For the two second-generation clocks (PCGrimAge and PCPhenoAge), there was significant slowing of biological aging in the multivitamin arm compared with the placebo arm, with an average of about 10%-20% slower aging with daily multivitamin use over the 2 years of the intervention. This equated to about 4 months of aging that seemed to be averted or prevented. Among participants who had accelerated aging at baseline, the reported benefits were even greater.
Vitamins are cheap.
HEY, REMEMBER BRAT SUMMER? THAT WAS FUN: Revealed: Pro-Kamala Social-Media Millions That Couldn’t Sync ‘Brat’ With ‘Democrat.’
The abrupt withdrawal last year of President Joe Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee, followed rapidly by his replacement with Vice President Kamala Harris, irked many voters left out by the process. Yet social media seemed to ooze with enthusiasm and Gen Z-friendly hipster appeal.
Influencers flooded the web with neon-matcha green pro-Harris videos synced to beats from singer Charli XCX’s album “Brat” released last year. The poppy rave videos, gushed journalists, showed that Harris embodied the confidently independent “brat” vibe conveyed by the music. Social media pages bubbled with memes celebrating Harris as the voice of queer and black youth, in contrast with the Republican agenda of white supremacy. 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.Influencers flooded the web with neon-matcha green pro-Harris videos synced to beats from singer Charli XCX’s album “Brat” released last year. The poppy rave videos, gushed journalists, showed that Harris embodied the confidently independent “brat” vibe conveyed by the music. Social media pages bubbled with memes celebrating Harris as the voice of queer and black youth, in contrast with the Republican agenda of white supremacy. 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.
Harris, a career politician favored by the Democratic Party’s establishment, never quite fit the bill as an icon of activist movements. But the sudden influencer buzz seemed to transform the stodgy former prosecutor into an icon of the cultural zeitgeist.
As it turns out, the tidal wave of enthusiasm was not entirely genuine. Much of the content, including Montooth’s videos, was quietly funded by an elusive group of Democratic billionaires and major donors in an arrangement designed to conceal the payments from voters.
RealClearInvestigations obtained internal documents and WhatsApp messages from Democratic strategists behind the influencer campaign. Way to Win, one of the major donor groups behind the effort, spent more than $9.1 million on social media influencers during the 2024 presidential election – payments revealed here for the first time. The amount was touted in a document circulated after the election detailing the organization’s accomplishments.
The Harris campaign torched through a bonfire of money that would make even the Joker blush: “Questions have mounted over the campaign spending decisions from Harris and her supporting organizations. The Harris campaign and her SuperPAC spent over $1.5 billion in the last months of the campaign, with much of the money flowing to consultants and media advertising. Alex Cooper, who hosted Harris for an interview on her ‘Call Her Daddy’ podcast, was baffled about why the campaign spent about $100,000 on a ‘cardboard’ temporary studio set that ‘wasn’t that nice.’ Others have raised similar concerns about payments to Oprah Winfrey’s production firm.”