AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

THE BBC OBTAINS A MOBILE PHONE SMUGGLED OUT OF NORTH KOREA:

This is 1984 level surveillance in practice. Crazy video. https://t.co/7acbzG72Xg

— Aristonkle (@ParanoidPol) May 31, 2025

Forgetting that England in the 21st century resembles Orwell’s Airstrip One, the BBC thinks this is all wonderful stuff:

ROB LONG: Cheers and the Art of the ‘Norm!’ Entrance (audio).

THE POWER LINE WEEK IN PICTURES: Agony of Defeat Edition.

(If you’re wondering, of course it’s a real CNN story.)

STARRING HUNTER BIDEN AS THE NEW AQUAMAN: Dolphins ‘deliberately get high’ on puffer fish nerve toxins by carefully chewing and passing them around.

JIM TREACHER: Everybody Hates Jake.

Who is the audience for Jake Tapper’s new book, Original Sin? Apparently, there isn’t one.

Republicans are mad at Tapper for pretending he had nothing to do with the cover-up of Joe Biden’s senility.1 Democrats are mad at him for admitting there was a cover-up of Joe Biden’s senility. He’s taking a drubbing from pretty much everybody.

Tee-hee!

Maybe that’s why his dumb book sold a mere 53,737 copies in its first week. Is that despite Tapper’s endless media tour promoting the book, or because of it? Is everybody else as sick of that insufferable bonehead as I am?

Well, even if his book is a flop, at least he’s still a big hit on cable news, right?

Right?

Brian Flood, Fox News:

CNN host Jake Tapper had his lowest-rated month in nearly a decade in May despite a whirlwind publicity tour giving him an onslaught of attention…

“The Lead with Jake Tapper” averaged 525,000 total viewers from April 28 through May 25, shedding 25% of CNN’s audience in its timeslot from the same period last year in the process…

It was Tapper’s lowest-rated month since August 2015.

Ouch! His ratings are back down to pre-Trump levels.

Ace of Spades writes, “I actually know Jake Tapper’s real defense for covering up Biden’s dementia:”

If he were being honest — which he never is — he’d say, “Look, my audience consists entirely of Trump-deranged liberals. I cannot report the truth without losing my entire career. CNN wouldn’t even allow it. If I reported any of this before 2024 CNN would have had a ‘talk’ with me with the threat of suspension made clear. I’m showing ‘bravery’ [by Jake Tapper standards, at least] by just reporting a slim slice of the truth five years after it was obvious to all non-Trump-deranged liberals.”

So Jake Tapper’s Trump-deranged audience — the only audience remaining after ten years of groteqesque leftwing propaganda from Jake Tapper and his fellow communists at CNN — is abandoning him, and I am, as forty-two-year=old Millennials on Twitter say, here for it.

John Nolte adds: Original Sin Authors Change Their Story … Again.

Of course, the media knew Biden was brain-dead. Of course, the media lied to us. You think we’re stupid? And what is groupthink if not something worse than a conspiracy, but The Way Things Are? We all saw it. All of us. There it was, the biggest scandal in presidential history and also the most blatantly obvious, and you serial liars still chose to gaslight and bully us. You whored out your credibility for the same reason you always whore out your credibility: to benefit Democrats.
But now it’s over, y’all.

We see you.

We all do.

We all know how the fake media operate.

The regime media have spent the last decades serially lying to us, getting crucial story after crucial story deliberately wrong, all to the benefit of their fascist, leftist agenda. And now no one listens to them anymore, and these two jokers aren’t moving many books.

The best part of the video comes at the end, when Bari Weiss sticks it in both their asses:

I think that one of the things that is kind of baffling about this story, is it’s so much, in the end, about groupthink and cowardice. Because normal, ordinary Americans who will watch the clip of him—you remember, when he was in the field with Georgia Meloni and those other people and he’s sort of stumbling and doesn’t know where to go—anyone can watch those 15-second clips—they don’t need any sources in Washington to know that person is infirm and certainly not capable of being the president of the United States.

We could also have years and years of seeing how Tapper treats people with an (R) after their name versus a (D):

Jake Tapper in 2018 on a NY Times report on Trump's mental fitness versus Tapper on a 2024 WSJ report on Biden's mental fitness.

One report is "stunning." The other is partisan. pic.twitter.com/fxxMLztFHI

— MAZE (@mazemoore) May 19, 2025

THIS IS THE WAY: Watch: Absolutely Must-See Exchange Between CA Attorney and Defiant CNN Host on ‘Transgender’ Athlete.

California Attorney Julie Hamill became all of us on CNN on Friday after a truly incredible exchange with host Brianna Keilar. The argument at hand was over high-school student Junior AB Hernandez, a “transgender” athlete who “identifies” as a female but is a male. He is currently set to compete in several competitions at the state championship on Saturday.

What made Hamill’s appearance on CNN so noteworthy, though, was her dogged pursuit of the truth in the face of Keilar’s attempted enforcement of transgender ideology. It was one of those rare moments on a mainstream press network where a guest didn’t just roll over in the face of scrutiny over stating biological reality. A fair warning that you may find yourself feeling extremely satisfied after watching this.

NEW: California attorney Julie Hamill corrects CNN's Brianna Keilar after she tried calling biological male track athlete AB Hernandez a girl.

Keilar was very confused during the interview & struggled to keep up.

Keilar: What would make this fair for her to compete?

Hamill:… pic.twitter.com/gNdmkI6BkM

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) May 30, 2025

Exit quote: “All the praise in the world for Hamill speaking the hard truth to a CNN hack who has gotten way too comfortable having her priors confirmed. AB Hernandez is a male. He is not a girl. He can not become a girl. California can do without federal funding if it would like to place his delusions over the well-being of female athletes in the state.”

DEMS KEEP TRYING TO REBUILD THEIR DEATH STAR:

Their failure in 2024 has only emboldened Dems like Rep. Crockett to act out more than ever before, breaking the united front Democrats were once famous for holding, and lashing out at anyone who tries to silence them.

That’s not landing well, either. In fact, it only becomes a throw-away line for Trump in a press conference.

So the Dems are taking a page out of the GOP’s playbook, kind of.

They want to find their own Joe Rogan.

There’s just one or two problems with that idea, though.

Rogan wasn’t found. He made his show what it is today virtually by himself. He began podcasting when people thought the format was a flash in the pan in the late 2000s. But he kept plugging, exploring his own varied interests through fascinating guests and introducing his listeners to new ideas and ways of thinking. He built his empire by catering to nobody but himself, not by reading on air the latest missive from Cory Booker.

The second problem, and the arguably larger one, is that a Democrat Joe Rogan doesn’t exist. Rogan, while not a Democrat or a Republican, has the brand of being physically strong, emotionally stable, and deeply-rooted in family values.

The Democrats don’t have anyone like that. It’s actually impossible to be a Democrat that vaguely resembles Joe Rogan. If a liberal had a whiff of any of Rogan’s traits, they’d be labeled as a MAGA supporter and deserted by their party.

The mantra of the Democrat Party is inclusivity, diversity, acceptance, and, frankly, non-traditional family values. You’ll never find a genuine person that isn’t mentally unwell who is willing to embrace every radical idea that floats their way to meet those standards. Again, it’s impossible to recreate what Joe Rogan has built in a liberal fashion.

The bizarre recent interview of Tim Dillon by a sleepy Elle Reeve of CNN does illustrated on how utterly fixated 2025 Democrats are with Rogan, just as 2017 Dems glommed onto “fake news” and “Russian collusion” to explain their previous loss to the Bad Orange Man.

BOMB CANADA, THE CASE FOR WAR: CBC Brags About Shutting Down Popular Political Clips YouTube Channel.

A rising Canadian YouTube channel that had been pulling major traction has suddenly been banned following an aggressive report from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), which labeled the channel a “content farm” and reached out to YouTube directly. Not long after, the channel was gone.

“It’s just one example of what experts refer to as the ‘content’ or “engagement” farming phenomenon, in which individuals or organizations tailor their content to tap into the algorithm of the platform and boost their popularity,” the CBC explained in an article, as if this isn’t something that most YouTubers do.

Real Talk Politiks, the creator behind the now-deleted account, took to X on Sunday to reveal what happened, pointing the finger at government-aligned media and tech collusion.

“CBC, Canada’s state-funded media just got YouTube to terminate my channel — not for breaking rules, but for having the wrong political views,” the post read.

Evergreen:

(Classical reference in headline.)

THIS IS THE WAY: Watch: CNN Reporter Tried to Play the Ol’ ‘Undocumented Migrant’ Game and Stephen Miller Ain’t Having It.

TANNED, RESTED, AND TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! Biden Responds To Book: “I’m Mentally Incompetent, I Can’t Walk, And I Could Beat The Hell Outta Both Of Them.”

REPORTER: What has this been like for your family? Obviously, this is also an emotional time. This is the ten-year anniversary of your son Beau’s passing. You received this diagnosis just two weeks before that.

BIDEN: Well, we’re all optimistic about the diagnosis. Matter of fact, one of the leading surgeons in the world is working with me. And he had diagnosed the same exact thing 32 years ago. He’s alive and well and doing very well. So we’re optimistic. We’re optimistic.

REPORTER: There’s also been a lot of discussion recently about your mental and physical capabilities while you were in office.

BIDEN: You can see that I’m mentally incompetent and I can’t walk, and I can beat the hell out of both of them.

REPORTER: Do you want to reply to any of those reports, and also to the fact that there are some Democrats who are now questioning whether you should have run for reelection in the first place?

BIDEN: Why didn’t they run against me then? Because I’d have beaten them.

REPORTER: Do you have any regrets?

BIDEN: No, I don’t have any regrets. Look, there’s a lot going on, and I think we’re in a really difficult moment—not only in American history but in world history. I think we’re in one of those inflection points in history where the decisions we make in the next little bit are going to determine what things look like for the next 20 years. I’ve been talking about that for a long time. And I’m very proud. I’d put my record as president against any president at all. You notice that 12 of the 10 leading presidential historians rated me pretty good up on that list—and the guy I ran against, I rated him last. So, we’ll see.

Biden in 2028! He’s absolutely ready to exploit his opponent’s youth and inexperience!

More seriously, it’s a great moment of projection, as America will be cleaning up the many disasters created during Biden’s tumultuous single term in office.

Also watch the video above for the truly creepy way that Biden gets in a female journalist’s face, despite her not having actually asked a question. I’m sure her hair must smell awesome.

THE CAPITALISTS SOCIALISTS WILL SELL US THE ROPE WITH WHICH WE WILL HANG THEM: How Churchill’s Successor Gave Stalin the MiG.

Since Bevin was comparing Stalin’s regime to the Nazis in January 1947, it was not the case that Attlee’s cabinet was seized with optimistic delusions concerning the nature of the USSR. In fact, already on June 5, 1946, Attlee had adopted Churchill’s phrase, “the Iron Curtain” when speaking of disagreements with the Soviet Union. At the same time, Attlee cynically called on Britain to “try and understand the Russian mind and Russian history” in pursuit of better relations. Remarkably, this attitude toward Russia, practically verbatim, is still common in 2025.

STRIKE A POSE, THERE’S NOTHING TO IT:

Shot:

Martha's Vineyard elderly resident, on Trump's latest ICE raid in the area: "I think it could be any of us next."pic.twitter.com/Zgzgr2HSGc

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) May 30, 2025

Chaser:

Martha's Vineyard residents cheer as illegal immigrants are led to a bus to a military facility pic.twitter.com/0iLDln2Pmn

— Jack Poso 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) September 17, 2022

THE 21st CENTURY ISN’T TURNING OUT AS I HAD HOPED: Sydney Sweeney To Start Selling Soap With Her Own Bathwater Mixed In.

Famous actress Sydney Sweeney joined forces with Dr. Squatch Soap Co. to make her dirty bathwater available for fans across the globe.

The superstar just made soap a little dirty, according to an Instagram post shared Thursday by Dr. Squatch, a personal care product company. Sweeney will dunk herself in bathwater that will be bottled up, turned into beauty soap, and sent to those that want to lather up with this intimate item.

“You kept asking about my bathwater after the @drsquatch ad… so we kept it. Introducing Sydney’s Bathwater Bliss! A very real, very limited-edition soap made with my actual bathwater,” Sweeney wrote May 29 on her official Instagram page.

Ayn Rand didn’t intend for The Return of the Primitive to be a how-to guide.

RIP: Bernie Kerik, former NYPD Commissioner known as ‘America’s Cop’ after 9/11, dead at 69.

DAVID HARSANYI: No, David French, we have no constitutional duty to subsidize Harvard.

Now, I’m not accusing David French of being blind to the struggles of Jewish students. I am accusing him of being blinded by the presence of Donald Trump. Are the president’s motivations political? Probably. So what? So are those of Harvard’s defenders.

Harvard, a private institution, can do as it likes. There’s nothing illegal about coddling extremists or pumping out credentialed pseudointellectuals. If the Trump administration failed to follow a bureaucratic process before freezing funds to the university, fine. Get it done. But what “constitutional principle” dictates that the federal government must provide this specific institution with $3 billion in federal contracts and grants? Giving it to them was a policy decision made by the executive branch. Withdrawing the funding is the same.

French reasons that the administration should, at very least, “target the entity and individuals responsible” for the bad behavior. Defund the Middle Eastern studies department, rather than, say, the pediatric cancer research department. I’m sympathetic to this idea. But funding, as we all understand, is fungible. Targeting one department will do nothing to change the culture.

Moreover, leadership is responsible for the culture. It allowed, nay, nurtured, a Middle East Studies department staffed by a slew of nutjobs. It’s not the only department. Think about it this way: There is a far higher likelihood of finding an apologist of Islamic terrorism than a Christian conservative on the Harvard faculty. Less than 3% of the Harvard faculty identify as conservative. There are real-world consequences for Harvard’s radicalism, as their grads are staffing newsrooms, influential law firms, and government agencies without ever hearing a dissenting view.

Why is French supporting Harvard when they haven’t hosted a Drag Queen Story Hour in over a year?

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Elon Musk Leaves Job Of Making Government More Efficient For Much Easier Job Of Sending Humans To Mars.

2013’s HER: JOAQUIN PHOENIX AND SCARLETT JOHANSSON GO TWENTY MINUTES INTO THE FUTURE OF AI.

My take on the remarkably prescient look at the dangers of AI, over at Ed Driscoll.com.

QUESTION ASKED: So, Did Jake Tapper Actually Apologize to Lara Trump for Their Viral Biden Decline Interview or Not?

While Tapper claimed Trump “saw something that I did not see at the time,” he has subsequently suggested that he was duped because the Biden White House wasn’t being honest.

“And I think that we need to be skeptical of everything that we are told by people in power. And I mean that obviously should be the mantra of being a journalist to begin with. If your mother tells you she loves you, get a second source,” Tapper said on PBS last week. “But we just need to remember that. Like, politicians lie. White Houses lie. Power is an aphrodisiac, and we just need to all remember that and not take at face value anything that we’re told.”

[Glenn] Greenwald said the exchange, which also involved The Atlantic’s Jeffery Goldberg, was embarrassing. “Watching a person who is 56 years old, who has been in… journalism for 30 years, be asked by Jeffrey Goldberg, ‘What is the lesson that we are all supposed to take from this?’ And then he says – as though it was the most profound insight – ‘We really have to remember that people in power lie… and, therefore, we can’t take what they say at face value.’ If I were to teach a journalism course to eighth graders, that would be the very first thing I would emphasize on the very first day,” he noted.

As he explained, it is hard to believe “Jake Tapper just woke up,” but he thinks the framing is part of a larger strategy. Tapper and Thompson reportedly hired a crisis PR firm to help them navigate the book launch, and Greenwald said he sees those fingerprints are all over the authors’ media tour – beginning with their appearance on The Megyn Kelly Show.

“[Tapper] kept using this phrase with you… ‘I look back on my coverage with some humility.’ This is the kind of thing that they tell you to say so that you seem like you’re taking accountability even though you are absolutely not,” Greenwald noted. “Like, what does that mean? You were the one who helped to lead the cover up that you are now… making millions of dollars off of exposing. It is a huge scandal.”

Related: Joe Biden, Jake Tapper, and the Lampshading of America.

In story writing, lampshading refers to having a character in the story acknowledge an irrational or unbelievable action by another character as such in the hopes of explaining it. For example, if a notably cowardly character inexplicably becomes brave in a certain situation, another character might remark how odd that was. It draws attention to the unusual event and tells the reader that the characters in the story see it the same way you do.

The issue is that lampshading acknowledges absurdity, but it doesn’t explain it. That is what Original Sin does. It explains the how of the coverage of Biden’s decline, that being that those closest to him were lying to others and to themselves about his faculties. It does not explain the why: why so many of our elites, our supposed truth seekers who go forth without fear or favor, so credulously swallowed nonsense so obvious for so long. While Thompson specifically deserves credit for skeptically covering Biden’s health when it mattered, the media’s coverage of Biden’s decline overall, and Tapper’s specifically, was indefensible. As Tapper said to Lara Trump in an interview shortly before the 2020 election:

Ok… it’s so amazing to me – a ‘cognitive decline.’ I think you were mocking his stutter. Yeah. I think you were mocking his stutter and I think you have absolutely no standing to diagnose somebody’s cognitive decline. I would think somebody in the Trump family would be more sensitive to people who do not have medical licenses diagnosing politicians from afar.

I suppose that, in isolation, it’s a good thing that Tapper said that he regrets the way he handled that interview. But it is insufficient to say that the mainstream media got the story wrong, though it did. It is insufficient to say that the Biden administration lied, though it did. It must also be said that Republicans and conservative media got the story right. And that wasn’t by happenstance, a lucky coincidence of reflexive criticism. They simply observed reality as it was plain to everyday Americans. If you had read me specifically, you would have known well over a year ago that Tapper’s “it’s just a stutter” absurdity was just that. (READ MORE FROM 2020: Tracking Biden’s Mental Decline)

Responding to Bari Weiss’ extended interview with Tapper and Thompson, John Sexton writes: The Media Just Isn’t Skeptical Enough of Democrats.

I know there are a lot of people on the right who dislike Jake Tapper and who think he’s not trustworthy on any of this. My own take is that while Tapper is clearly not without fault, which he’s admitted several times, he’s also not lying about what the White House was doing. I say this because I’ve talked briefly with another pretty well-known reporter (who I also don’t think is a liar) who said a version of the same thing, i.e. there were no available sources to question the president’s fitness at the time. No one would talk at all much less tell the truth. This also jibes with what Chris Cillizza has said publicly. The rules of traditional journalism (as opposed to opinion writing) don’t allow you to state conclusions without sources and there were no sources. The White House made sure of that.

In sum, what do you do when all of the people who know the truth are willing to lie?

I really do believe that much is true in this case. The people around Biden were all willing to lie and did lie making it very difficult for journalists who might have reported the truth to get it. And here I think we can probably pin this directly on Anita Dunn, the person running the White House responses to the media and the person who I have long believed was probably behind some of the strategic decisions about how Biden was being hidden from the public. Bluntly, I think she saw outright lying as the only path to a reelection win and she went for it and made sure everyone else was following her lead.

And yet, I don’t think that explanation is enough. I don’t think it absolves the wider media of responsibility. Sure, you were lied to by political apparatchiks and that made things difficult but in my view there’s no doubt that the press would not have accepted the same lies from a Republican White House. Lacking traditional sources, the press would have leaned into videos (which don’t require sources) showing a Republican president’s decline, just as the right did with Biden. Instead we got articles full of BS about “cheap fakes.”

Exactly. I don’t recall the media being anywhere near as deferential during President Reagan’s second term when he began slowing down,  culminating in his 1994 announcement that he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

SHAKE ‘EM ON DOWN: Hawaii’s first-in-the-nation climate change tourist tax expected to generate nearly $100M annually.

Hawaii’s governor signed legislation Tuesday that boosts a tax imposed on hotel room and vacation rental stays in order to raise money to address eroding shorelines, wildfires and other consequences of climate change.

The signing, which comes nearly two years after a Maui wildfire killed 102 people and wiped out almost all of Lahaina town, marks the nation’s first such levy to help cope with a warming planet.

Officials estimate the tax will generate nearly $100 million annually. The money will be used for projects like replenishing sand on eroding Waikiki beaches, promoting the use of hurricane clips to secure roofs during powerful storms and clearing flammable invasive grasses like those that fueled Lahaina’s wildfire.

Gov. Josh Green, speaking at a bill signing ceremony, said Hawaii needs to build more firebreaks and pay a fire marshal, a new position created after Lahaina that Green expects to be staffed within the next two months.

Green said other states and nations will need to act similarly to address climate disasters roiling the planet.

“There will be no way to deal with these crises without some forward-thinking mechanism,” Green said.

Given Hawaii Democrats’ concern over global warming — despite being a state that relies heavily on air travel for people get there — perhaps tourists should seek other destinations to allow the island time to “heal.”

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

UPDATE:

A party with less than 20% approval is using unelected Judges to deny the will of the American people.

I never want to hear the term “Constitutional Crisis” ever again.

— C3 (@C_3C_3) May 29, 2025

RUY TEIXEIRA: Hispanic Moderates’ Big Swing Right.

The release of the new data and report from Catalist has underscored the extent of Hispanic defection from the Democrats over the last two presidential cycles. We’ve seen massive drops in Democratic support from pretty much every subgroup of Hispanics, albeit with some variation: working-class Hispanics more than the college-educated, women (interestingly) more than men, younger Hispanics more than older ones, and urban residents more than those in the suburbs. But all the defections have been substantial—at least 22 margin points and usually much more between 2016 and 2024.

The Catalist data are confined to standard demographic subgroups so can’t tell us about variation among Hispanics by factors such as ideology. But the Blue Rose Research data, released just prior to the Catalist data, can and the results are astonishing. According to their data, Democratic support dropped by a gobsmacking 46 points among Hispanic moderates, from +62 to +16, between 2016 and 2024. As David Shor has pointed out, Hispanic moderates’ political behavior is now quite close to that of white moderates.

What’s going on here? Here’s Patrick Ruffini’s take:

In 2020 and 2024…realignment came for nonwhite voters. A basic tenet of the Democratic Party—that of being a group-interest-based coalition—was abandoned as the party’s ideologically moderate and conservative nonwhite adherents began to peel off in a mass re-sorting of the electorate…[T]hese voters were now voting exactly how you would expect them to, given their ideologies: conservatives for the party on the right, moderates split closer to either party.

This explanation for political realignment should concern Democrats deeply, because it can’t be fixed by better messaging or more concerted outreach. The voters moving away from the Democrats are ideologically moderate to conservative. Their loyalty to the Democratic Party was formed in a time of deep racial and inter-ethnic rivalry, when throwing in with one locally dominant political party could help a once-marginalized group secure political power. The system worked well when local politics was relatively insulated from ideological divides at the national level. But this wouldn’t last forever—and national polarization now rules everything around us.

This seems exactly correct to me and makes it easier to see why Hispanic moderates increasingly resemble white moderates politically. They are voting their ideology and political views not their group identity. This is further illustrated by examining Hispanic moderates’ more specific political views.

Read the whole thing.

AXIOS ON THE AI JOBS DANGER: Sleepwalking into a white-collar bloodbath.

Dario Amodei — CEO of Anthropic, one of the world’s most powerful creators of artificial intelligence — has a blunt, scary warning for the U.S. government and all of us:

• AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs — and spike unemployment to 10-20% in the next one to five years, Amodei told us in an interview from his San Francisco office.
• Amodei said AI companies and government need to stop “sugar-coating” what’s coming: the possible mass elimination of jobs across technology, finance, law, consulting and other white-collar professions, especially entry-level gigs.

Why it matters: Amodei, 42, who’s building the very technology he predicts could reorder society overnight, said he’s speaking out in hopes of jarring government and fellow AI companies into preparing — and protecting — the nation.

Few are paying attention. Lawmakers don’t get it or don’t believe it. CEOs are afraid to talk about it. Many workers won’t realize the risks posed by the possible job apocalypse — until after it hits.

• “Most of them are unaware that this is about to happen,” Amodei told us. “It sounds crazy, and people just don’t believe it.”

The big picture: President Trump has been quiet on the job risks from AI. But Steve Bannon — a top official in Trump’s first term, whose “War Room” is one of the most powerful MAGA podcasts — says AI job-killing, which gets virtually no attention now, will be a major issue in the 2028 presidential campaign.

• “I don’t think anyone is taking into consideration how administrative, managerial and tech jobs for people under 30 — entry-level jobs that are so important in your 20s — are going to be eviscerated,” Bannon told us.

In his 2023 book, The Conservative Futurist, James Pethokoukis predicted:

What are the best current guesses for AI’s impact? Goldman Sachs, a bank, finds a third of tasks that make up nearly a thousand U.S. occupations are exposed to the current state of AI automation. That translates to some two-thirds of all occupations. But that doesn’t mean two-thirds of all jobs are going away. Some occupations are more exposed than others. GS economists see a high level of exposure in administrative and legal jobs, low exposure in “physically intensive” jobs such as construction and maintenance. Overall, the bank’s assumptions would mean 7 percent of current U.S. employment being substituted by AI, 63 percent being complemented, and 30 percent being unaffected. But not even a megabank knows for sure.

Of course, AI will only become more capable. Maybe the reassuring story that history tells us about automation (machines destroy jobs but, eventually, create more new ones) will be a poor guide going forward. But that’s not my baseline case. In his 2022 paper “The Labor Market Impacts of Technological Change: From Unbridled Enthusiasm to Qualified Optimism to Vast Uncertainty,” MIT economist David Autor offers a cautiously optimistic prediction on continued human employment (although he includes a caveat that tech progress faster than what current experts predict could make his forecasts too rosy). Even if AI ends up replacing far more of what humans do than augmenting what they do best—making those tasks more valuable—or creating new things to do, the economy’s increased productivity could be such that average wages would rise. Workers would get less of the economic pie, but the pie would be bigger. Without the emergence of human-like artificial general intelligence, Autor sees an upper limit to the automation process. He thinks humans will continue to have a “comparative advantage” in a number of areas: creativity, judgment, hypothesis formation, contextual thinking, causal analysis, communication, emotional intelligence—“the importance of which we likely do not fully appreciate and the difficulty of which we surely vastly underestimate.” Autor is also confident that the most skilled workers “will likely continue to be complemented by advances in computing and AI—such as workers who invent, design, research, lead, entertain, and educate.”

The next obvious question is what humans will do for work if AGI is reached, which some experts are predicting could happen by 2040, if not earlier. Again, history should be the baseline here. We always overstate the impact of technology on jobs. Who would guess that just one of the 270 jobs in the 1950 U.S. census has been eliminated by automation?52 And who would guess further that job is elevator operator? Beyond looking at history, it’s hard to say what comes next for workers. And that’s OK. “The limits of both our collective knowledge and our individual imaginations constrain well-intentioned efforts to plan for the workforce of the future,” Adam Thierer, a policy analyst, observes. It’s always been easier to recognize which current jobs can be automated than to envision the jobs and industries that don’t exist yet but will be created by new technologies.

We’ve been here before of course; in 1995, lefty futurist Jeremy Rifkin wrote The End of Work, where “Rifkin predicted that automation, mechanization, and computerization would cause massive unemployment within America in the near future. Reality check: Unemployment is lower [in 2004] than it was in 1995. A columnist for the Financial Post remarked in 2003: ‘Who can forget the jeremiads of that great intellectual flim-flam man, Jeremy Rifkin, whose book, The End of Work, said it all. And what ensued? The greatest bout of job creation in post-war history!’”

Of course, one reason why Web publications such as Axios fear a “white collar bloodbath” is how recent AI trends are effecting their industry: Business Insider axing 21% of workforce as AI sends web search traffic plunging.

Business Insider is laying off about 21% of its workforce, an internal memo showed on Thursday, as the financial news outlet grapples with shrinking search traffic and the growing use of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT.

The New York-based company joins several digital media companies in restructuring operations as consumers increasingly depend on artificial intelligence for news synopsis, which is eating into web traffic.

In the memo, CEO Barbara Peng told staff the company now generates twice as much revenue for each website visit as it did two years ago, but 70% of its business still has some degree of traffic sensitivity.

“We must be structured to endure extreme traffic drops outside of our control, so we’re reducing our overall company to a size where we can absorb that volatility,” Peng said in the memo seen by Reuters.

The New York-based company is accelerating adoption of AI, with a majority of employees already utilizing Enterprise ChatGPT and several AI-driven products to enhance operations and reader experience, Peng said.

In December of 2002, Virginia Postrel noted the disconnect between a remarkably mild (considering what had just happened in September of 2001) recession and how it was being reported by the legacy media:

In today’s NYT, Dan Akst puts the current economic gloominess in perspective, reminding us that even in the current slump the economy looks more like an earlier era’s dream than the nightmare too often portrayed in media account. By historical standards, things are looking awfully good: “low interest rates, affordable energy, full employment without inflation and broad access to home ownership.” We’ve even learned to compete with the Japanese. Why the disconnect? One reason “may be the sharp advertising downturn that started in early 2001. The resulting media recession, including layoffs and other cutbacks, has produced a grimmer-than-usual attitude in the perennially gloomy fourth estate. The industry’s concentration in New York and Washington, both of which were struck by terrorists last year, has further darkened the industry’s outlook.” Dan is no outsider taking cheap shots at reporters. He’s a long-time journalist acknowledging a psychological truth: We all grant more salience to facts we experience directly. And journalists know lots and lots of people who’ve lost jobs in this recession.

The legacy media’s fear of what AI will do to their profession is driving a lot of their more feverish nightmare scenarios for the world at large.

ROGER SIMON: How Culpable Is the UN in the Gaza War?

This is the same UN whose “humanitarian chief” as recently as a week ago accused Israel of imminently murdering 14,000 infants. From JNS:

“The United Nations and the BBC on Wednesday corrected a dramatic claim that 14,000 infants in the Gaza Strip faced death within 48 hours, clarifying that the figure actually refers to children at risk of severe malnutrition over the course of a full year.

“U.N. humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher made the claim on BBC Radio 4‘s “Today” program, saying: ‘There are 14,000 babies that will die in the next 48 hours unless we can reach them.’ The comment was quickly picked up by national media outlets, cited in U.K. parliamentary debates and referenced in international diplomatic discussions.”

This is evil propaganda that not even Hamas itself could duplicate.

By now the role of UNRWA in aiding Hamas in so many ways, including helping hide their munitions, missiles and launchers, command and control centers and so forth under hospitals and schools—all against international law— has been detailed ad infinitum.

With friends like the UN, who needs Al Jazeera?

And it doesn’t stop with UNRWA. Corruption is everywhere in the UN, a prominent example being the Oil-for-Food Programme that turned the Iraq War into a money machine for sleazy international bureaucrats. It’s almost as if the organization were set up for profiteering outside of legal jurisdiction. And who can forget how the UN’s World Health Organization tilted toward protecting China during COVID-19, therefore playing a large role in the global shutdown whose horrifying results are being questioned everywhere?

As a kid, when I would drive by the UN or visit with my father who then occasionally worked for WHO, I would look on its buildings with awe. Now I see it as evil on the East River. I know I am not alone in this.

What is to be done? Can it be resurrected?

In the short run, I doubt it. In many ways it is worse even than its short-lived predecessor, the League of Nations.

Maybe some day humanity will be able to countenance a genuine international organization without the endless corruption, manipulation and bias. But those days seem to be far off.

For now, we should save our money. And as for those magnificent buildings on the East River, such priceless real estate must have better uses.

Read the whole thing.

AND AGAIN: Judge Blocks Trump Administration from Terminating Harvard’s Student Visa Program.

As Glenn writes in his New York Post column: Courts are infected with ‘injunctivitis’ — and tempting Trump’s defiance.