In any case, the choices to plug into the headline are rapidly narrowing: Kamala Harris vice president choice narrows to Walz, Shapiro, sources say. “Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris has narrowed her search for a vice presidential running mate to two finalists, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, three sources with knowledge of the matter said on Monday. Harris, the U.S. vice president, is expected to announce her selection by Tuesday, ahead of her first scheduled public appearance with her running mate that evening at Temple University in Philadelphia.”
A recent survey has revealed that the New Jersey accent is among the most challenging for artificial intelligence systems to comprehend.
According to a study by Guide2Fluency, the New Jersey accent ranks high on the list of dialects that pose difficulties for AI voice recognition systems. The survey assessed various regional accents across the United States and their impact on AI accuracy.
The research highlights that accents from New Jersey, along with those from Boston, New York, and the Southern United States, are particularly troublesome for AI. This finding raises concerns about the inclusivity and effectiveness of AI technology in accurately processing diverse speech patterns.
The study involved testing several AI voice recognition systems with audio samples from speakers with different regional accents. The results indicated that the New Jersey accent frequently led to higher error rates in transcription and comprehension.
But what is a “New Jersey accent?” Despite its relatively small size, my old home state has many, many accents:
And I suspect that there could be even more difficult accents for Siri to understand. Such as this classic moment with Terence Stamp and Bill Duke from Steven Soderbergh’s 1999 film, The Limey(language alert):
Unfortunately, Pennsylvania is a must-win state for Kamala, and it has an oil boom going on. Promising to kill off all those high-paying, blue collar, oilfield jobs is a winning message in San Franciso and Boston, but it doesn’t play so well in western Pennsylvania. So Kamala is trying the always difficult “Trust me, I’m lying” approach, hoping she can fool the blue-collar voters in Pennsylvania, while also hoping her radical left-wing base knows she is just lying to get elected, and that they’ll still vote for her despite Kamala now being on the record as pro-fracking.
Vice President Harris has reversed her position on fracking, signaling a move to the center on the issue. The rightward shift comes as she tries to court swing voters in states like Pennsylvania.
As with all of her flip-flops, the media will be eager to let proceed forward, unburdened by what has been.
Former Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle and others in top agency leadership positions wanted to destroy the cocaine discovered in the White House last summer, but the Secret Service Forensics Services Division and the Uniformed Division stood firm and rejected the push to dispose of the evidence, according to three sources in the Secret Service community.
Multiple heated confrontations and disagreements over how best to handle the cocaine ensued after a Secret Services Uniformed Division officer found the bag on July 2, 2023, a quiet Sunday while President Biden and his family were at Camp David in Maryland, the sources said.
At least one Uniformed Division officer was initially assigned to investigate the cocaine incident. But after he told his supervisors, including Cheatle and Acting Secret Service Director Ron Rowe, who was deputy director at the time, that he wanted to follow a certain crime-scene investigative protocol, he was taken off the case, according to a source within the Secret Service community familiar with the circumstances of his removal.
Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi did not immediately return RCP’s request for comment.
The discovery of the bag of cocaine posed an unusual problem for Cheatle, who resigned in the face of bipartisan pressure after the July 13 assassination attempt against Donald Trump.
Finally! A stock market I like! I almost salivate when the stock market crashes as hard as it is right now, because it means good companies are suddenly selling for 10 percent off.
It’s almost always the case that an inverted yield curve eventually leads to a recession, and with our Fed-induced yield curve inverted for more than 500 days now we shouldn’t be surprised to see the economy slowing. There have been signs of slowing in the data in recent weeks in manufacturing and consumer demand, and keep in mind that the job market is always a lagging indicator, so last week’s weaker-than-expected jobs number may be the signal that we’re going into recession for real.
Over the weekend I noticed one particular story that suggested the party might be over: Warren Buffett has been selling some large amounts of his leading holdings (especially Apple and Bank of America), building up a huge cash hoard ($277 billion) and, most significant of all, bringing Berkshire-Hathaway stock buybacks to a screeching halt in the last quarter.
Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. released a bizarre video on X Sunday, in which he tells comedian Roseanne Barr about the time he dumped a dead bear cub in New York City’s Central Park a decade prior.
In the video, RFK and Barr are situated around a dinner table in a home, as the independent candidate tells his story. He explains that he’s trying to get ahead of a story The New Yorker is working on.
RFK says he was taking a group of people falconing in Goshen, New York, about a two hour-drive north of New York City.
RFK tells Barr he was on his way there when a woman in a van in front of him hit a young bear and killed it.
“So, I pulled over and picked up the bear and put him in the back of my van because I was going to skin the bear… and put the meat in my refrigerator,” RFK says, as a visibly shocked Barr listens. He notes that the practice is legal in New York State under certain conditions.
RFK says he continued hawking with his group of acquaintances and ended up staying late. Instead of going home, RFK says he had a dinner obligation in New York City.
RFK then admits, without elaborating, that he had to go the airport after dinner and couldn’t go home.
“I didn’t want to leave the bear in my car because that would have been bad,” RFK says.
As Kate Hyde quips, “All of a sudden we’re supposed to act surprised that a Kennedy would leave a dead body behind.”
In any case, I really much preferred this story when it was an old Woody Allen standup joke from the ’60s.
VIRGINIA POSTREL: The Technocratic Temptation. Just sweep everything away and build from scratch….What could possibly go wrong?
Right now, I’m happy to ally with people who want to jettison the precautionary mindset that demands ever-increasing regulation and continually multiplies veto players. But eventually we’ll have to fight about just how much leeway the would-be builders get.
Many of our current problems stem from the backlash against the sweeping redevelopment efforts done by government at all levels in the mid-20th century. We replaced the top-down redesign of cities with procedures that made voluntary building more difficult. Simply going back to the “good old days” doesn’t solve the underlying problems of knowledge and permission. For that, you need to leave most building to markets and demand a high burden of proof—and true market pricing for eminent domain purchases—from government projects.
When today’s critics equate techno-optimism with techno-fascism, this is what they’re afraid of: Progress means smart people sweeping away whatever you value and deciding how everyone will live. Don’t be like that!
My favorite image of technocratic progress glamour, from a 1930 radio ad. See The Power of Glamour for more.
As I wrote in April, it’s all fun and games until you turn 30, your lifeclock starts blinking, and it’s time to don the doomsday hockey masks of Carousel:
Something extraordinary happened in the UK this week: the murder of three working-class girls was turned into a moral panic about working-class communities. Ruthlessly, with something approaching relish, the media elites dragged the public gaze from the frenzied stabbing of girls in a seaside town to the supposed frothing bigotries of the seaside town itself. In elite circles, angst over the evil visited on the children of Southport gave way to a foreboding over what lurks within Southport. In those terraced houses, with their white working-class inhabitants, so susceptible to online lies, so given to racial animus. These people want us to fear not the wicked individuals who terrorise our towns, but the towns themselves.
It has been a chilling spectacle. I am struggling to recall the last time the moral narrative around a horrific event was so mercilessly rewritten by those with cultural power. The week started with the grim news that a young man had invaded a Taylor Swift dance class in Southport in north-west England and used a curved kitchen knife to assault its attendees, leaving three girls dead and others seriously injured. And it ends with the elites focussing their fury and energy almost exclusively on the civil unrest that followed that act of barbarism. On the ‘moral deviance’ less of the killer who laid waste to three precious lives, than of those small sections of working-class society that erupted in fury at his killing. The establishment is back in its comfort zone – fretting over the alien morality and unwieldy energy of the white working class.
As this awful week draws to a close, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that we are ruled by people who fear the anger of the masses following acts of inhumanity more than they do the acts of inhumanity themselves. You can deplore the riotous disorder that followed the Southport massacre, as I do, and still ask why that disorder elicited a more zealous reaction from the opinion-forming classes than did the slaughter that provoked it. To my mind, the street violence in Southport, Hartlepool, Sunderland, Manchester and central London was wholly destructive. Groups of men hurled projectiles at cops and, most despicabably, threw bricks at mosques. This was a betrayal of the quiet dignity the good people of Southport have shown following the horror that befell their community. And yet it is curious, concerning in fact, that this criminal behaviour seems to be occupying Britain’s moral guardians and policymakers more than the murderous nihilism inflicted on Southport’s girls.
The country is like a melting-pot, yes — but a melting-pot of molten anger. The government has laid the blame with everyone from “the far-right” to “the Russians” but this is to woefully and willfully misunderstand the unprecedentedly fractious and factional nature of modern Britain.
Vast levels of immigration — bringing cheap labor for the rich and decreased wages for the poor — is at the core of much of this anger. “White Riot, I want a riot of my own,” the left-wing Clash sang back in the day, but now any white rioter will be called “right-wing” simply because of the color of their skin.
This is exacerbated by the two-tier policing we have had for some time here. When non-whites riot, police tend to retreat, whereas when whites riot, police tend to charge. Prime Minister Starmer’s first in-office nickname is “Two-Tier” Keir — not an auspicious start for a man who promised to bring national unity.
White working-class boys are currently the most likely to fail at school and the least likely to succeed in life, yet they are told that their skin color confers “privilege.” Now they’re being told by the liberal establishment that their riots are the “wrong” kind of riot — but after applauding the riots of Black Lives Matter, it’s hard to put the genie back into the bottle just because he’s paler than they would prefer.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): I disagree with Brendan O’Neill that “quiet dignity” is an appropriate response to atrocities. The government should fear the mass of ordinary citizens, especially when it’s treating them with such contempt.
Although the real buried lede here is San Fran Nan defending Teddy Roosevelt. Doesn’t she know that after decades of being the Democrats’ only acceptable Republican president, her party completely memory holed him during their cultural revolution in the summer of 2020?
Unstable, strung-out homeless weirdos have swarmed large parts of Manhattan’s West Side, littering streets with needles and menacing locals and tourists alike — and there’s no help in sight.
The invasion of homeless, mentally ill and drug-abusing people is a full-blown “humanitarian crisis” greeting millions of tourists and office workers who arrive in Midtown and its highly trafficked surrounding neighborhoods, wrote Councilman Eric Bottcher in a recent letter to the mayor asking for aid.
“Our neighborhoods need help right now,” he wrote. “The status quo cannot be allowed to continue.”
West Side wackadoos — including one dead-eyed junkie wandering with a needle sticking out of his hand along 36th Street near bustling Penn Station — were out in force as The Post visited the neighborhoods over the past two weeks.
A bedraggled security guard, who only gave Fisher as his name, said he sees doped-up derelicts do drugs “all day and all night” in the public courtyard at the Midtown Holiday Inn hotel along Eighth Avenue’s infamous “strip of despair.”
“It’s crazy out here,” the battle-weary Midtown security guard, 50, said.
As Kevin Williamson warned a decade ago, “the thing about [Mike] Bloomberg is, he’s a busy body and a nanny and self-regarding and sanctimonious and unbearable, and Jesus, are we going to miss him when he’s gone, because Bloomberg, for all of this faults and his weird little psychosis about bacon and salt and soft drinks and sugar and all the rest of it, and smoking, especially, basically kept what was best about the Giuliani administration.”
Manhattan now spirals back into the pre-Rudy Bad Old Days:
It wasn’t so long ago that things were completely crazy, when guests at cocktail parties chatted about strategies for dealing with muggers (it was widely believed that you should always carry what we called “mugger money” so as not to anger your attackers). Those who were brave enough to park cars on city streets made sure to remove the stereos when they parked, then place “No radio, nothing valuable in car” signs on their dashboards.
—“NYC, July 1993,” Kyle Smith, the New York Post, July 21, 2013.
Kamala Harris is being hidden away, much like Joe Biden was. What makes this even worse for our pals on the Left is they at least had an excuse with Biden and could claim his age was the main issue when it came to answering questions or speaking without a teleprompter.
They can’t do that with Kamala because she’s only 60.
And her inability to answer a question without sounding like a drunk high schooler has nothing to do with her age and everything to do with her incompetence. For example, she tried to explain how the Cloud works …
No, really. She did.
WOOF.
If you’re wondering why Kamala hasn’t been let off the teleprompter for 14 days as the Dem nominee — she still hasn’t done a single interview or any unscripted voter meetings at all — here she is explaining cloud computing: pic.twitter.com/6OpDpAXD0C
A selection of punk-rock collectables from the new book Ancient Artifax, whose curator has become the go-to source for connoisseurs of the music genre’s memorabilia.
And yet, the dealer du jour for these sort of collectables is not some venerable auction house, but rather a 40-year-old New Jersey resident who has become arguably America’s most in-demand collector of rare punk memorabilia. His name is Brian Gorsegner, and he exhibits his envy-inducing loot on the Instagram account @AncientArtifax, whose 25,000 followers include an impressive array of illustrious cool kids: Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth), Lars Frederiksen (Rancid), Brian Baker (Minor Threat), Mac McCaughan (Merge Records), Violet Grohl (daughter of Dave), Roger Gastman (art dealer/graffiti guru), Lance Bangs (music-video director to the indie elite), Les Savy Fav (the band) and—who knew?—Brooke Smith (Silence of the Lambs/Grey’s Anatomy).
* * * * * * * *
“I’d come to realize that as important, or perhaps even moreso, than the items I was acquiring, was the first-hand tales that accompanied them,” Gorsegner writes in the intro. “I feel a great sense of pride and responsibility that the items in this book have been entrusted to me to survive another 40 years. This wasn’t memorabilia, and it wasn’t ephemera. These were artifacts of a time and a place that would shape my way of life.”
Gorsegner began collecting and selling as a teenager in central New Jersey. After touring the world as the vocalist for his own successful band (Night Birds), and establishing a career as a booking agent (whose clients include OG punk legends like Alice Bag and T.V. Smith), he saw his hobby take off during the pandemic, when everyone was at home “digging in their attics and their basements, either doomsday selling or doomsday buying.”
He began traversing the country to rummage through the mementos of aging punks, at times accompanied by a film crew for a four-part documentary produced by the rebooted Creem magazine. (The series is still looking for a home.) He pays good money for collections, often in the mid-five-figures. (“That’s me emptying my bank account.”) He keeps the items he can’t bring himself to part with and tries to break even by selling the rest either on Instagram or at occasional pop-ups, like the one Gorsegner is hosting at the Queens music venue-cum-gallery TV Eye as one of several book release events. Reflecting on punk’s evolution as a luxury commodity, Gorsegner is as astounded as the next guy. “This stuff was made by delinquent children,” he says, “and now it will sell for $10,000.”
Speaking of the ’70s, as original Saturday Night Live writer Anne Beatts famously said, “You can only be avant-garde for so long before you become garde.”
It’s mind-blowing that the Harris campaign would blame Trump for the poor jobs report and accuse him of “bringing us to the brink of recession.” He hasn’t been in office since January 20, 2021, and yet the current economy is now his fault?
Does that make sense to anyone?
While it is nonsensical to blame Trump for the jobs report, especially when Kamala has been claiming for years that “Bidenomics is working,” there is a method behind the madness.
An election year recession is devastating to the party in power. Case in point: McCain had a nearly three-point lead in the RealClearPolitics average before the economic collapse in September 2008. Stagflation also contributed to Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory in 1980 over Jimmy Carter.
So, the Harris campaign is trying to push the narrative that Trump is to blame for the coming recession. Do they really think that will work? It’s a desperate and weak strategy that is destined to fail, but it’s the only play they have.
In 1992, the DNC-MSM portrayed a growing economy as “the worst in 50 years” to help Bill Clinton, only to admit after he won that, as the Charlotte Business Journal noted in 2010, “The U.S. economy actually grew 4.2% in the fourth-quarter that year and went on to enjoy a terrific decade-long run of prosperity. And we learned in hindsight that recession had actually already ended when the [September 1992 Time magazine] article was printed.” Time described it in December of that year as “Bush’s Economic Present for Clinton.”
In 2008, in order to crown Obama as the next FDR, the media focused on what Virginia Postrel dubbed at the time as “Depression Lust, and Depression Porn.” In April of 2020, Kurt Schlichter wrote, “The Democrats Totally Want A Depression.” Will their media outlets portray Biden-Harris’s stagnant economy as still quite good to prop her up or the end of the world in an attempt to blame it on the Bad Orange Man — who’s been out of office for four years?
Exit quote:
Kamala is asked how she will fix inflation…
She answers by saying generic words about what inflation is for a solid 45 seconds.
Paul Sracic, political science professor at Youngstown State University, said political strategist James Carville was right when he said “It’s the economy stupid” when he centered former President Bill Clinton’s campaign on economic issues.
“As it was then and now, it is how people feel about the economy and if their lives are better that is driving this election,” he said. “The word recession is powerful. A lot of economics is psychological. The numbers that came out on Friday is very bad news for the Harris campaign. They were touting a soft landing last week and that is not going to happen now.”
Sracic said Biden and Harris both got the messaging wrong from the onset on the economy: “It began with inflation. They woefully underestimated inflation from the start, dismissing it as transitory. Maybe if they had reacted sooner, not understanding would not have become an overarching theme for them.”
Chevron Corp., based in California since the days of kerosene lamps, is moving headquarters to Texas after years of fighting Golden State officials over strict environmental policies and costly regulations.
The move announced Friday will end the company’s 145 years of being based in the most populous US state. The shift prompted Texas Governor Greg Abbott to welcome Chevron to its “true home,” while a spokesperson for his California counterpart Gavin Newsom dismissed it as a “logical culmination” of a years-long transition by the oil giant.
Doubtless those workers losing their jobs or forced to relocate will be comforted by the thought that their fate is the “logical culmination” of a long process.
* * * * * * * *
Chevron’s CEO, Mike Wirth, is saying that the decision to move is not about politics, but about “what’s good for our company to compete and perform.” In reality, it’s obviously about both. He has clearly been eyeing Texas for a while and describes Houston as “the energy capital of the world.” Bloomberg quotes Wirth as telling an audience in, well, Houston back in 2019 that “policies in California have become pretty restrictive on a lot of business fronts, not just the environment.”
“The deployment of ZEVs [zero-emission vehicles] and a robust mass transit system are critical for achieving the state’s climate goals, reducing local air pollution, and eventually eliminating dependence on the volatile global petroleum markets. As demand for gasoline shrinks, refineries may close or convert to processing clean transportation fuels,” the report states. “This will lead to fewer gasoline refineries, with increased market concentration and associated market problems that often accompany it.”
To address the market concentration issue, the CEC proposed a variety of state interventions, including setting up state-owned refineries.
“The State of California would purchase and own refineries in the State to manage the supply and price of gasoline,” wrote the study’s authors, with the scope of the initiative ranging from “one refinery to all refineries in the state.”
Back in 2008, City Journal’s Max Schulz referred to “California’s Potemkin Environmentalism.” Now the Sacramento is looking to make it official and go full Soviet. Or perhaps worse; earlier this year, Steve Hayward dubbed the state “The North Korea of the USA.” As he wrote, “Never mind the social tyranny the state has attempted to impose, such as strict vaccine mandates, legal sanctions for anyone who dissents from transgender ideology or uses the wrong pronoun, and attempted legal penalties for any physicians who dissent from official Covid ideology. Stick with just economics.”
Otherwise, this could end as well as the real North Korea:
How did the magical thinking arise in the first place? One source is the habit of credulity that is a by-product of all utopian thought. The Democrats have mutated into the party of nowhere, so it is not surprising that they prefer pleasing fantasy to sobering reality.
The other chief source is the attack on objective truth that, in various ways, has been the gospel proclaimed by fancy professors for the past several decades. Students everywhere are taught to be suspicious of truth, to proclaim the relativity of values. This is a brain-addling teaching, but one that you would have to look far and wide to find a place it hasn’t reached.
As I noted in that earlier column on magical thinking, epistemic nihilism is the order of the day in all the best colleges and universities. But the result is not so much a failure as a promiscuity of belief. Hence the hyperventilating media shamans with their intoxicating potions. Some conservative pundits are fretting that Kamala Harris represents a credible challenge to the Trump juggernaut. Absent an assassin’s bullet, the successful rekindling of Democratic lawfare, or some other praeternatural intervention, I think the Democrats are setting themselves up not only for major disappointment but for staggering disillusionment. That’s the trouble with magical thinking. Sooner or later, reality intrudes and destroys the web of fantasy that the spurious magic has spun. Donald Trump is an avenging angel of reality. The Dems, as well as certain besotted anti-Trump conservatives, are dancing now. They won’t be gyrating when the music stops and the hall empties.
Like CNN before him yesterday, why is George Stephanopoulos obsessed with telling a black man why his opinions are wrong, and that being an Indian-American is a “slur?”
An unhinged George Stephanopoulos threw a tantrum this morning over Kamala Harris's "racial identity"
George: "I don't understand why you keep on repeating it. Why the president keeps repeating it"
Byron: "George, actually I'm not the one who keeps repeating it…you're the one… pic.twitter.com/tJ84k24GZJ
Let’s be clear: Joe Rogan is NOT a conservative. And he’s never been anywhere close to being a conservative. Ever. In fact, if you ignore the media’s coverage and focus instead on what Rogan actually believes, he’s a liberal man who “identifies” as a conservative man.
And I’d even go further: If he’d hosted “The Joe Rogan Experience” in the 1990s or 2000s, Rogan would’ve been — by a ridiculously wide margin — the single most leftwing man in American media: He supports gay marriage, increased social safety nets, drug legalization (and how!), abortion, and universal basic income. He even backed Bernie Sanders for president. His ideology isn’t exactly “The Way Things Ought to Be, Part II.”
This is why he’s such a useful barometer of how far to the left everyone else has gone: Only on a planet that’s completely fallen off a cliff could a leftwinger like Rogan appear to be a conservative… simply because he likes MMA, works out, wasn’t a fan of mandatory COVID vaccines, and thinks it’s unfair for men to fight women.
But Rogan’s biggest crime — and the reason the liberal media will never forgive him — is that he’s not hostile to conservatives.
It would be a much shorter list to narrow down the things that leftists don’t lose their minds over these days. But kudos to Netflix for airing Rogan’s special, and for reminding their workers when they had lost their leftist hive minds over Dave Chappelle, “As employees we support the principle that Netflix offers a diversity of stories, even if we find some titles counter to our own personal values. Depending on your role, you may need to work on titles you perceive to be harmful. If you’d find it hard to support our content breadth, Netflix may not be the best place for you.”
The U.S. government has inadvertently sent at least $239 million to the Taliban in development assistance since 2021, according to a new report. The oversight occurred because the State Department failed to properly vet award recipients.
Less than a year after it was reported that the Taliban established fake nonprofits to siphon millions of dollars in U.S. aid to Afghanistan, a new investigation by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) reveals that the terrorist group has received hundreds of millions in development assistance due to inadequate vetting by the State Department. Since the 2021 U.S. military withdrawal, at least $239 million have likely filled the Taliban’s coffers.
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