Author Archive: Glenn Reynolds

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Blackouts, Here We Come.

If you care about the planet, sabotage the backup generators of rich activists and pols. Also their air conditioning this summer.

AARON BUSHNELL DIED FOR WHAT HE BELIEVED IN: Namely, Hating Jews.

You might think you’re an antisemite in good standing. You might belong to a neo-Nazi group, or a “pro-Palestine” group, or some other group that’s obsessed with the eradication of the Jews. You might march around and scream and yell and block traffic. You might even attack people for being Jews or sympathizing with Jews.

But have you ever set yourself on fire? I mean literally. Have you ever doused yourself in an accelerant, lit a match, and set yourself ablaze because you just hate Jews that much?

A brave martyr named Aaron Bushnell just did. . . .

I didn’t know who Aaron Bushnell was yesterday, and I’ll probably forget him by tomorrow. But for today, I live in hope that this young man’s sacrifice will inspire the rest of these “pro-Palestinian” Nazis to do us all a favor.

In a world where “12-hour hunger strike” isn’t considered an oxymoron, where hashtag activism is as far as most of these miserable bigots go, at least Bushnell had the courage of his convictions.

He was willing to die for what he believed in: hating Jews.

Think of it as evolution in action. But more troubling is that he was active-duty Air Force.

CDR SALAMANDER: VLS Reloading: time, distance, & opportunity cost. “So, things are moving at the speed of rust – but perhaps at this rate we’ll have something available for the fleet by . . . 2030?”

TRUTH: “An appliance used to be a machine. Now it’s a bureaucracy.” “Things used to work in this country. This is the stock complaint of the Baby Boomers, and if you are lucky enough to inherit a piece of their technology, you may find yourself agreeing. But when I say ‘things used to work,’ the object of inherited nostalgia is not only manufacturing standards before planned obsolescence and offshoring. Things used to, literally, work. You turned a knob, and sound came on, because the knob controlled the mechanism that tuned the radio to the broadcast that the big metal radio towers dotting the landscape beamed at you. I am not a gearhead of any description and don’t care much about how the insides of electrical devices work, but I know exactly what I, personally, have to do to operate my end of the GE radio. There are no downloads, no platforms, no passwords, no little pull-down menus, no verifications or account recovery protocols. There is no streaming. Personal technology used to be a machine. Now it’s a bureaucracy.”

Worse yet it’s an intrusive, dishonest, woke bureaucracy.

GOOGLE’S GEMINI FAILURE: AN ANALYSIS.

Gemini’s ridiculous–I mean that literally, as it inspired an enormous amount of ridicule–photo generation bias isn’t really important in and of itself. AI photos generated by Gemini are not good enough to be “deep fakes,” and everybody can see how stupid these images look.

So why is the story so important?

It showed us the man behind the curtain, and not in some abstract way. We got to see the world Google is trying to recreate in pictures worth more than a thousand words.

We see that Google’s world is a carefully constructed lie.

If you can’t trust them, what are they worth? And it’s clear that you can’t trust them. A friend writes:

Woke AI is useless AI, as are woke employees. Gemini has now made this perfectly clear. As Mario Juric asks in a recent X post:

“Would you hire a personal assistant who openly has an unaligned (and secret — they hide the system prompts) agenda, who you fundamentally can’t trust? Who strongly believes they know better than you? Who you suspect will covertly lie to you (directly or through omission) when your interests diverge?”

Nope.

Nope, indeed.

Related: Google’s problem is a lack of diversity. “How does that happen? How does an organization with thousands of engineers remain blind to what is easily seen by the rest of the population? The answer: a complete LACK of diversity in Google’s leadership and employee population (and this isn’t limited to Google, of course). . . . The result of all of this: an echo chamber full of politically left-leaning head nodders. There was no one in the room who could look at the results, raise a hand, and say ‘Um . . .I think we may have a problem here.’ That person simply did not exist. There was no one to question the outcomes – no diversity of thought… and it left them blind.”

LIFE IN THE BLUE ZONES: State of Maryland vs. The Takoma Torch. “My name is Eric Saul, and I am the creator of the Takoma Torch. Unfortunately, this is not a satirical article. Instead, this a disturbing true story that I never would have believed was possible: the Montgomery County State’s Attorney has criminally charged me for a satirical tweet. Here’s how it happened.”

MORE ON AMERICA’S INTERNAL REFUGEES: A Blue State Exodus: Who Can Afford To Be A Liberal.

Is the blue state exodus from California, New York, and Illinois making red states like Florida, Texas, and South Carolina more liberal? Studies suggest the answer is no. . . .

I disagree with the comment by Lush, “When you’re younger you can afford to be a liberal.”

Instead, I propose the first group of people who can most afford to be liberals are the political class that takes advantage of young idealistic fools. The process is accurately called “vote buying”.

The second group that can afford to be liberals are the arrogant elites such as Bill Gates and George Soros.

Blue state exodus is largely Red or Independent because Republicans and Independents make up the majority of people with enough money to afford a house and choose to do so in a non-blue state for tax purposes.

As a result of blue state exodus, the blue states will get bluer and bluer until the whole thing blows up in the faces of blue state politicians.

I’m hoping for an earth-shattering kaboom.

And check out Roger Simon’s new book, American Refugees: The Untold Story of the Mass Migration from Blue to Red States.