OPEN THREAD: Hump Day.
April 2, 2025
MAYBE SHE’S JUST ALWAYS LIKE THIS? Is She Drunk? Kamala’s Latest Public Appearance Was… Yikes….
THE NEW SPACE RACE: JAXA institute studying Mars lander concept.
TIRED YET? NOT YET? Look Who’s Folding Under Trump’s Tariff Pressure
TYLER O’NEIL: Police Report on Nashville Transgender Shooter Plays Into Left’s Narrative.
According to the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department, authorities didn’t release the manifesto … because there wasn’t one.
“Early in the investigation, it was suggested Hale left behind a ‘manifesto’ detailing her motives and intentions,” the police report noted. “This has elicited a great deal of interest from the public and had led to repeated demands this manifesto be released for public study and comment.”
“In this case, a manifesto didn’t exist,” the report claimed.
Oh, really?
Police were at pains to define the word “manifesto” to justify their refusal to produce the documents Hale did leave behind.
“By definition, a manifesto is a mission statement or other document written and disseminated by an individual or group to enumerate or expound upon the guiding principles and beliefs that inform their actions,” the report noted. “Regardless of length, a manifesto is a single document that outlines all the factors, intentions, and objectives of an individual act or a series of actions.”
“Hale never left behind a single document explaining why she committed the attack, why she specifically targeted The Covenant, and what she hoped to gain, if anything, with the attack,” the report added.
Yet police did discover a treasure trove of information about Hale, her motivations, and her mental state.
Police found 16 notebooks; “assorted folders and loose documents”; seven sketchbooks and composition books; a yearbook; three VHS cassette tapes; eight memory storage devices with a combined 379.6 GB of data; six cellphones; three laptops; two Google Drive data cloud accounts; and more.
The report notes that the seven composition books and sketchbooks included 520 pages of content Hale wrote between 2009 and 2022.
In other words, the police had far more than enough evidence to determine the shooter’s motivations. Yet they would not release those materials because they “required a careful review of the material to understand Hale’s motive.”
Read the whole thing.
Incidentally, now that we have new management at the FBI, will we ever learn the motive of the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooter?
SO I VAGUELY REMEMBER THIS “Nick Rockefeller” guy from law school. Who wasn’t a Rockefeller at all, as it turns out, but a conman named Spiro Pavlovich III. He faked out Harvard, too. Twice!
This is not as unusual as it sounds. A guy who started with my class at YLS turned out to be a fraud as well, and was booted after a year when he was caught, not by the law school but by the law firm he worked at as a summer associate.
MICHAEL TOTTEN: How to Write a Killer First Sentence.
A NEW POST ON MY SPACE SUBSTACK: Heart of Darkness: Astronomy and Timon of Athens.
I’ve actually had a number of subscriptions, and I really love getting subscriptions. And of course, paid subscriptions anre even better.
HOLLY MATHNERD: Systemic Misogyny: A Theorem Disproved. What my feminist professors lied about. “Turns out, the oppressors were just guys. And the cage I thought they built? Feminism handed me the blueprints — and I helped weld the bars.”
ANALYSIS: TRUE.
More like corrupt IMO.
They know exactly what they are doing.
— Publius (@OcrazioCornPop) April 2, 2025
Previously: “Congress is now less a place to commit serious acts of lawmaking and more of a perch for launching lucrative social media side gigs and sweetheart stock trades.”
HEH:
great val interview with @ELLEmagazine from 2006 pic.twitter.com/KpheODr0Gp
— brooke is crashing tf out rn (@verybrookie) April 2, 2025
Quentin Tarantino, call your office!
WILL NO ONE RID BYTEDANCE OF THIS TURBULENT APP? TikTok Might Have Found an American Buyer, and It’s a Perfect Match.
DOOMSDAY LOOPS — THEY’RE NOT JUST FOR SAN FRANCISCO ANYMORE! Hollywood’s Theatrical Business At Risk Of Entering “Negative Feedback Loop”, Wall Street Analyst Warns.
Hollywood is at risk of entering a “negative feedback loop” with fewer wide movie releases and a shrinking theater footprint combining to squeeze box office revenue, a veteran media analyst says.
In his annual assessment of the theatrical sector, billed as a “memo to Hollywood,” TD Cowen analyst Doug Creutz notes that he has taken a “bearish stance” on the theatrical window for some time. Results from 2024, with total grosses slipping 4% from 2023 to $8.57 billion, the number of wide releases down 6% from pre-Covid levels, and other factors have only reinforced his view.
“We have said for several years now that the outlook for a sustained recovery looks questionable, and that we don’t think the existing global theatrical footprint can be supported solely by a handful of blockbusters,” Creutz wrote in the 20-page report.
The number of screens in the U.S. has declined to about 35,000 from 41,000 before Covid struck in 2020, with exhibition also facing big challenges in 2023 and 2024 due to the strikes. That smaller footprint might help theater owners in the near term, but it could end up hastening the decline of the overall business, Creutz believes. Downsizing “risks having more films skipping theatrical and going direct to streaming services…and now you have all the ingredients for a negative feedback loop.”
Creutz emphasizes that he is “not calling for a complete collapse of the theatrical window, but we think box office is more likely to decline than rise over the next few years, particularly as major studios continue to cut back on the number of films they make in favor of concentrating their box office efforts in fewer, bigger, established IP films.”
Found via Michael Walsh who adds, “The Industry must wean itself from its green-eyeshade addiction to comic books and wokism if it is to have any chance of salvaging the theatrical model — which thanks to streaming, it probably doesn’t.“
PERSPECTIVE:
We won 2 of 3 special elections and secured voter ID in the state of Wisconsin.
And some people are acting like with lost 0-4. lol
— Catturd ™ (@catturd2) April 2, 2025
And DataRepublican from the replies: “Also, the last-minute surge was real. We have the power to make 3 of 3 happen next time.”
THE CRITICAL DRINKER: A Working Man Who Beat Snow White.
Related: Rob Long on The Good Psychopath.
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: At an average university, the average student is ‘functionally illiterate.’
The average college student is “functionally illiterate,” writes “Hilarius Bookbinder,” who teaches philosophy at a public university that attracts students with mid-range academic records.
Most students “could not read a serious adult novel cover-to-cover and understand what they read,” nor do they have “the desire to try, the vocabulary to grasp what they read and most certainly not the attention span to finish,” writes Bookbinder. They don’t read textbooks or primary texts, “even in upper-divisions courses that students supposedly take out of genuine interest.”
Students write at the eighth-grade level, he writes. They submit the cheapest cliché as novel insight.
Exam question: Describe the attitude of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man towards acting in one’s own self-interest, and how this is connected to his concerns about free will. Are his views self-contradictory?
Student: With the UGM its all about our journey in life, not the destination. He beleives we need to take time to enjoy the little things becuase life is short and you never gonna know what happens. Sometimes he contradicts himself cause sometimes you say one thing but then you think something else later. It’s all relative.
The alternative is a coherent answer written by a bot.
Combine lack of knowledge with safetyism (and institutional antisemitism), and you’ve produced Ben Rhodes’ next batch of journalists who “literally know nothing.”
MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Val Kilmer: RIP
STAY SAFE: GP BackGrip PRO, Headrest Car Passenger Hand Grip. #CommissionEarned
MIKE SOLANA: Bad Ghibli.
Regardless of the quality, it was hard to argue the avalanche of AI-generated images we saw last week, grasping for attention in a kind of life-like mass beyond anyone’s control, wasn’t slop-like, and I alluded to as much that afternoon. Later, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman responded on X, “One man’s slop is another man’s treasure.” Different strokes for different folks, case closed. But the conversation on slop, in keeping with its basic nature, was a bit of a distraction.
It was Sam’s following tweet that exposed a real — and in my opinion really fascinating — problem:
Obviously, he was alluding to the White House social media team’s Ghibli, now the most famous example of OpenAI’s new image generation by far. And the first really great, and really impactful, example of bad AI-generated art:
A bad Ghibli, we’ll call it. A piece of AI-generated art that is incredibly successful — at conveying something you didn’t intend to convey.
* * * * * * * *
While it’s hard to know exactly what the White House social media team was trying to achieve with its Ghibli (though my sense is probably nothing, and they were simply working from instinct as most of us are online), I think it’s safe to say they didn’t want to evoke a sense of pity in the average American for a deported fentanyl dealer. But that is what they achieved.
The moment their Ghibli went viral, and the first wave of backlash began, many hardline supporters of the White House were quick — naturally, correctly — to point out this was an AI-generated picture of a felon, almost certainly responsible for the death of Americans, who had already been deported once before. She was also, in real photos that emerged, (I am not being petty here, this is important) physically repulsive. Just look at her, the bad Ghibli defenders cried. And I understand the impulse. I mean, take a look yourself:
Who wants this person in their country? Nobody. Who cares if she cries on her way home? Not me. But, incredibly, in order to defend the cartoon, White House allies had to point to the real photo of an actual criminal, which the White House had already released at the time of the Ghibli. In this, we are not using imagery to massage or explain away reality, as we often see with propaganda. We are using reality to explain away an entirely generated controversy that happened, it seems to me, by mistake. Because someone who is not an artist generated real art he didn’t understand.
How did we get here?
Read the whole thing.
In his early days as creator/producer of Saturday Night Live, Lorne Michaels once rejected a potential sketch by telling its writer that it suffered from “premise overload.” In 2022, Biden’s infamous nighttime Independence Hall speech rant was the result of his handlers trying to put him in a real-life “Dark Brandon” scenario, which thrilled his hyper-online far left base and left the vast majority of Americans confused and angered by the Leni Riefenstahl-like images they were seeing. Similarly, the Trump comm team’s confusing AI slop last week was premise overload as well. I didn’t make the connection with Basora-Gonzalez, and I initially pondered if the man in the cartoon was some sort of Tim Walz callback, given his rounded face and middle-aged appearance, and Walz’s comical obsession last year with camouflage-colored haberdashery.
Solana concludes, “Be careful what you prompt for.” I would argue, prompt away; ChatGPT’s ability to effortlessly spitout Ghibli cartoons is lots of fun, but a political comms shop needs to make sure that the vast majority of the people seeing the image will connect with it before deciding to hit the publish button on social media.
SHOULD GRANTS SUPPORT INDIVIDUAL SCIENTISTS, NOT TEAMS? “The creativity, curiosity, perseverance, and skills, observational as well as cognitive, of the scientist are, in fact, the main factors in the success of basic science… Sadly, government science agencies now make no effort whatsoever to assess these qualities as part of the grant-proposal process. This was not always the case.” We can certainly do better than whatever we’re doing now.
CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Federal Measure Would Deregulate Short-Barreled Rifles, Shotguns, AOWs.
LET’S SEE IF BOEING CAN GET THE FIRST VERSION RIGHT BEFORE GETTING TOO EXCITED: F-47 Fighter Program Could See Multiple Versions Built In Increments.
