May 10, 2024

OLD AND BUSTED: “Think Different.”

The new hotness? Apple downplays the value of human achievement.

Then the press begins to lower as a Sonny and Cher song plays. A piano is smashed and splattered with paint buckets. An arcade machine, a drawing figure, record player, trumpet, vintage film and stock cameras are destroyed. A Greek bust is smashed, and eventually the press, drooling with several different colors of paint, closes completely. When it lifts up, the new iPad rests in the middle with a voiceover bragging about how thin it is.

As several people noted on X, the ad was a direct inverse of the Nineteen Eighty-Four ad and representative of the destruction of physical media and the culture that made America. One poster on X wrote, “Apple’s new ‘Crush’ ad (let’s call it ‘2024’) is a visual & metaphorical bookend to the 1984 ad. 1984: Monochrome, conformist, industrial world exploded by colorful, vibrant human 2024: Colorful, vibrant humanity is crushed by monochrome, conformist, industrial press.”

Wall Street Journal tech reporter Katie Deighton noted, “This ad perfectly encapsulates the insight that people think technology is killing everything we ever found joy in. And then presents that as a good thing.”

In 2014, the Huffington Post noted, “Everything From This 1991 Radio Shack Ad You Can Now Do With Your Phone.”     But the iPhone and iPad were touted as great value for money because they combined all of those products into one sleek handheld device, not that they literally pulverized their predecessors into a fine paste.

Or as James Lileks writes: “We know the experience of tapping a picture of a keyboard to get a note: it isn’t real. We know the experience of striking an actual key, the way it yields but has its own presence that reacts to dynamics, the way the note comes from a soundboard of wood hewn from a tree instead of a tiny speaker. Painters know how committing a brush to a canvas is commitment you may or may not fulfill, but how noodling on glass on one of an infinite set of virtual canvases is underscored by the knowledge that nothing need be finished, and anything can be abandoned without cost. It’s like an ad that shows the press crushing the family Fido, and ends with an iPad that shows a video of the dog.”

Posted at 10:35 am by Ed Driscoll

NEO: Biden’s betrayal: “But for Michigan?”

I have long said that although it’s very clear that Joe Biden is very cognitively challenged compared to just a few years ago, he still has plenty of agency and his brain is not so far gone that he’s unaware. Plus, he was Obama’s VP from 2009 to 2017, in full possession of whatever were his native faculties, and he did Obama’s bidding on this and on just about every other topic.

So this is not some recent thing nor is it the result of his age-related cognitive problems. It’s a result of who he is: a corrupt and ambitious viper – or weasel, if you prefer – who would sell out anyone for a dime or for career advancement.

Which brings us to a famous exchange from A Man For All Seasons. No, it’s not the one I often post here, about “cutting down” the laws. It’s this one:

That’s where I got the idea for the title of this post. Biden has betrayed Israel, the Jews, the US, the West, and Congress to win the presidency (he thinks) by winning the votes of the Muslims in Michigan who would dearly love to see Israel and the Jews destroyed, and the US and the West in their current forms as well.

Past performance is no guarantee of future Trunalimunumaprzure:

Posted at 10:22 am by Ed Driscoll

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Netanyahu Is a Magnifying Glass on Biden’s Pathetic Weakness. “We can blame age-related dementia all we want, but Joe Biden would have been a weak president even if his last brain cells hadn’t taken a permanent vacation. The predictable by-product of the leader of the world’s lone (for the moment) superpower being weak is that the worst people in the world find new ways to be awful.”

Posted at 9:05 am by Stephen Green

ONE TOOL OF THE REGIME ISN’T GOING TO RAT OUT ANOTHER: Why Isn’t the Dept of Education Reporting on Sex Abuse in Public Schools? “What we haven’t received, for two decades, is a comprehensive update from the government on the number of children who are sexually abused in public schools. It was all the way back in 2004 that the Department of Education released a report finding that, between kindergarten and 12th grade, 9.6% of students nationwide were subjected to sexual misconduct by a school employee. That’s one in ten students, totaling more than 5 million child victims in the system at any given time. Teachers, coaches, and bus drivers were the most common offenders.”

Posted at 8:59 am by Glenn Reynolds

YES THE “YELLOW PERIL” HYSTERIA OF A CENTURY AGO WAS BASED ON ASIANS ACTUALLY REPRODUCING:

Posted at 8:39 am by Glenn Reynolds

GOOD: $1 million for boys kicked out of high school for greenface photo. “Two 14-year-old boys were kicked out of their Catholic high school in 2020, because a three-year-old photo of them in green acne masks was interpreted as ‘blackface.’ The day before, they’d posted a photo in a white acne mask.”

Posted at 8:38 am by Stephen Green

“AMERICAN FECKLESSNESS:” THE BIDEN TRADEMARK.

Posted at 8:30 am by Glenn Reynolds

BRITAIN: Mass migration not delivering economic benefits, study finds.

Mass migration has not delivered significant GDP growth per capita for the United Kingdom, but it has increased strain on the country, according to a new study.

While illegal immigration recently hit record highs in the United States, legal immigration poses a significant issue for the U.K., where legal migration levels are more than 25 times the level of illegal levels, according to a report Wednesday from the Centre for Policy Studies, a U.K. think tank and advocacy group.

The percentage of foreign-born people in the U.K. nearly doubled over two decades, with 9% of the population being foreign-born in 2001 to 17% in 2021, which is even higher than the U.S., where 14% of people are foreign-born.

Additionally, the United Kingdom has seen 10 million people move to the U.K. and 6.3 million leave since 2010, resulting in an additional 3.7 million new migrants.

While the study acknowledges that “correlation is not causation,” but states that a “country with more people in it will normally have a higher GDP because there are more workers,” and the increase in migration has coincided with a large decline in GDP per capita growth.

Ayn Rand pointed out 60 years ago that you can have mass immigration or a generous welfare state but you can’t have both — at least not for long.

Posted at 7:36 am by Stephen Green

NATE SILVER: The long, strange political shadow of 2020. “Even with Trump in charge, 2020 was probably the most left-wing moment in the US in my lifetime.1 Since then, the share of voters who say Democrats are too liberal has risen by 7 points. And Trump is counting on a continued backlash against the left. Consider what were perhaps the three most important political questions at the time: first, the fiscal response to the pandemic; second, the public health response; and third, the protests and accompanying ‘racial reckoning.’ For the most part, it was the left’s preferences that prevailed on these.”

Plus, on Covid: “Many of the most excessive examples involve California, which is why it’s a little rich when Gavin Newsom speaks of California as the ‘true freedom state’.”

Posted at 7:30 am by Glenn Reynolds

HEATHER MAC DONALD: Hysterics for Hamas: Why have young women been so prominent in the recent campus chaos?

The female tilt among anti-Israel student protesters is an underappreciated aspect of the pro-Hamas campus hysteria. True, when activists need muscle (to echo University of Missouri professor Melissa Click’s immortal call during the 2015 Black Lives Matter protests), males are mobilized to smash windows and doors or hurl projectiles at the police, for example. But the faces behind the masks and before the cameras are disproportionately female, as seen in this recent gem from the Princeton demonstrations.

Why the apparent gender gap? One possible reason is that women constitute majorities of both student bodies and the metastasizing student-services bureaucracies that cater to them. Another is the sex skew in majors. The hard sciences and economics, whose students are less likely to take days or weeks out from their classes to party (correction: “stand against genocide”) in cool North Face tents, are still majority male. The humanities and soft social sciences, the fields where you might even get extra credit for your intersectional activism, are majority female. (Not surprisingly, males have spearheaded recent efforts to guard the American flag against desecration.) In progressive movements, the default assumption now may be to elevate females ahead of males as leaders and spokesmen. But most important, the victim ideology that drives much of academia today, with its explicit enmity to objectivity and reason as white male constructs, has a female character.

Student protests have always been hilariously self-dramatizing, but the current outbreak is particularly maudlin, in keeping with female self-pity.

As George Orwell wrote: “It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers−out of unorthodoxy.”

Posted at 7:02 am by Glenn Reynolds