April 7, 2025

UNEXPECTED INSIGHT FROM UNEXPECTED SOURCE: Semafor Media’s Ben Smith Jr. looks at a National Press Club decision to reject a MAGA advocate’s membership application and offers an unexpected insight. He also appears to have muffed it on a related issue. See if you catch it.

Posted at 6:22 pm by Mark Tapscott 6

YES:

Related: “Actually, it’s very much an open question as to whether feminist interpretations of life make women happier. . . . Certainly, polls such as the General Social Survey suggest that women have become steadily less happy every year since 1972.”

Posted at 6:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds 159

WELL:

Related:

Posted at 5:02 pm by Glenn Reynolds 366

WHERE’S THE DOWNSIDE?

Posted at 4:55 pm by Ed Driscoll 74

HANG ON, THIS RIDE ISN’T FOR THE SQUEAMISH:

Europe has been playing the protectionist/mercantilist game for a long time. They might have regulated innovation nearly out of existence, but these commercial games they still know how to play.

Posted at 4:50 pm by Stephen Green 37

LINCOLN BROWN: Through a Wardrobe Dimly: Netflix’s Narnia Reboot. “So last week, the word was out that Netflix is playing host to a reboot of ‘The Chronicles of Narnia.’ On top of that, talks are apparently in the works to have none other than Meryl Streep voice Aslan. Yes, they are coming for Narnia in the same way they came for ‘Star Wars’ and ‘The Lord of the Rings.’ A galaxy far, far, away is not safe, nor is Middle Earth; why should Narnia be sacrosanct?”

Posted at 4:19 pm by Stephen Green 139

NOW IT CAN BE TOLD: Joe Biden Was “a Shell of Himself” by End of Term. Hunter Biden Didn’t Help.

Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House [by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes] arrived this week, loaded with, well, insider details about how Biden, Trump, and Kamala Harris tried to win the presidency: Biden aides laying down strips of fluorescent tape to help guide the president’s walk through a New Jersey fundraiser; Trump surprisingly turning away from chaos and turning down Corey Lewandowski’s bid to oust rival campaign aides; and Harris being hamstrung by Biden’s insistence that there be “no daylight” between the two Democrats.

I spoke with Allen and Parnes at a moment when the consequences of the 2024 election were hitting hard, everywhere from Wall Street to Kyiv. In the interview, edited for length and clarity, the two described how they discovered more Democratic dysfunction than was apparent at the time, and how Trump’s team kept its candidate under control. Mostly.

Vanity Fair: The opening scene of the book describes a series of power players as they watch the fateful Biden-Trump debate. Where were the two of you that night?

Jonathan Allen: I was at Shelly’s Back Room on F Street Northwest in Washington, smoking a cigar, watching the debate, and calling and texting with sources.

Amie Parnes: I was at home. My phone was blowing up. I think I had maybe 50 text exchanges that night with freaked-out lawmakers, strategists, basically everyone—Republicans, Democrats. I often go back and look at those messages because they were surreal.

At that point, in June 2024, President Biden’s physical and mental capacities had long been a central issue in the campaign. Was his terrible debate performance still a surprise to you?

Parnes: It was just stunning to watch.

Allen: We’d been watching Biden’s decline for a long period of time and, honestly, thought he had lost his fastball some when he was running in 2020. And it was still so shocking to see the leader of the free world so bereft of coherent thought.

Your book describes the lengths to which the president’s longtime inner circle—including first lady Jill Biden and senior advisers Mike Donilon and Steve Ricchetti—went to hide that decline. Who was most responsible?

Parnes: All of them. It’s pretty remarkable how they kept him very closed off. He was a shell of himself. When he entered the White House, he was so, so different from the man who I covered as vice president, a guy who would hold court in the Naval Observatory with reporters until the wee hours.

—Chris Smith, Vanity Fair, Friday.

Related: Joe Biden Is Somehow in a Better Place Today Than He Was Four Years Ago.

—Chris Smith, Vanity Fair, January 9th, 2024

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll 139

THE NEW SPACE RACE: Space Force Awards Up to $13.7 Billion in Launch Contracts.

The Space Force awarded three contracts April 4 for rocket launches worth up to $13.68 billion combined—and this time, Blue Origin is in the mix for the business along with longtime incumbents SpaceX and United Launch Alliance.

The National Security Space Launch contracts include 54 critical missions for the military and intelligence community between 2027 and 2032. Under the contracts:

• SpaceX wins 28 missions for up to $5.9 billion
• ULA wins 19 missions for up to $5.4 billion
• Blue Origin wins 7 missions for up to $2.4 billion

The disparity reflects each company’s progress and stature in the launch market at this point: SpaceX is the dominant provider, accounting for the vast majority of U.S. launches in recent years, while ULA, long a leading provider, only recently won certification for its new Vulcan Centaur rocket to provide NSSL launches. Newcomer Blue Origin has so far only executed one launch of its New Glenn rocket, which is not yet certified.

For Blue Origin, winning any launches is a major win.

The more launch providers, the better.

Posted at 3:48 pm by Stephen Green 29

CHANGE: Apple Plans to Source More iPhones From India as Potential Tariff Fix.

The adjustments are a short-term stopgap while Apple attempts to win an exemption from President Trump’s tariffs—which Chief Executive Tim Cook obtained during the first Trump administration. The company sees the situation as too uncertain to upend long-term investments in its supply chain, the people said.

Trump’s tariff package raises levies on Chinese goods to at least 54% while imposing a 26% rate on Indian goods. On Monday, Trump threatened to add to China tariffs if the country doesn’t remove the retaliatory duties they announced after U.S. tariff plans were revealed on April 2.

India is largely friendly, China isn’t.

Although the tariffs on Vietnam strike me as short-sighted. Vietnam is a potential counterweight to China (the Vietnamese Army gave the PLA a bloody nose in 1979) and has a small enough economy that we can afford a little friendly largess.

Posted at 3:17 pm by Stephen Green 98

BAD DOGGIE: Remote Access Backdoor Discovered in Chinese Robot Dog Unitree Go1.

The discovery of the backdoor was made by cybersecurity specialists Andreas Makris (aka Bin4ry) and Kevin Finisterre (aka d0tslash), who published their findings in a detailed technical report late last week. The duo reverse-engineered firmware and conducted a hands-on analysis of the Unitree Go1 robot dog, revealing that each device ships with a preconfigured tunnel client that initiates a connection to CloudSail — a remote access platform developed by Zhexi Technology, based in China.

The researchers demonstrated that upon gaining access to the CloudSail API, which they did using a recovered API key, they could:

• List all connected devices and their IP addresses
• Establish remote tunnels to those devices
• Access the robot dog’s web interface with no authentication
• Use the robot’s cameras for live surveillance
• Log in via SSH using default credentials (pi/123)
• Move laterally within internal networks to which the robot is connected

Makris and Finisterre identified a total of 1,919 unique Unitree Go1 units that had connected to the CloudSail network. While most connections originated from Chinese IP addresses, a significant number were traced to academic and corporate networks abroad. Notable institutions included MIT, Princeton, Carnegie Mellon, and the University of Waterloo, among others. The researchers even observed some units connecting via Starlink, suggesting use in mobile or remote environments.

Exit quote: “Perhaps most concerning is the implication of deliberate design. The tunnel is not merely an overlooked debug utility; it appears fully integrated into the boot process and enabled by default.”

Robot dogs are just the tip of the Communist Chinese surveillance (or worse) iceberg.

Posted at 2:46 pm by Stephen Green 94

SURVEY: MOST SELF-IDENTIFYING LEFTIES SAY KILLING TRUMP IS JUSTIFIED.

The unhinged left, fueled by Trump Derangement Syndrome and seething hatred for Elon Musk, is trending more violent, according to a new study that finds political violence targeting President Donald Trump and his billionaire adviser is “becoming increasingly normalized.”

The report, produced by the Network of Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) in partnership with Rutgers University’s Social Perception Lab, finds a broader “assassination culture” appears to be “emerging within segments of the U.S. public on the extreme left, with expanding targets now including figures such as Donald Trump.”

Less than a year after assassination attempts on then-presidential candidate Trump and the literally explosive violence against Musk’s Tesla electric vehicles, it’s no secret that leftists are ratcheting up violent rhetoric and actions. The more troubling trend is that an “assassination culture” isn’t just coming from the “fringe” left.

“These attitudes are not fringe — they reflect an emergent assassination culture, grounded in far-left authoritarianism and increasingly normalized in digital discourse,” states the report, titled, “Assassination Culture: How Burning Teslas and Killing Billionaires Became a Meme Aesthetic for Political Violence.”

…

“The reports found widespread justification for lethal violence — including assassination — among younger, highly online, and ideologically left-aligned users,” the authors of the latest study write.

James Carville asks: ‘Do You Know How This Ends?’: Carville Invokes Nazis, Opens ‘Nominations’ For Trump ‘Collaborators.’

Longtime Democratic strategist James Carville invoked the Nazis and suggested that anyone who “collaborated” with President Donald Trump might eventually suffer the same fate as those who’d cooperated with brutal German dictator Adolf Hitler.

Carville made the comments on his Politicon podcast, where he referred to major corporations and law firms that were aiding the Trump administration as “traitors” and suggested they’d be ripe for “retribution” if the people were so inclined.

Notice that unlike January of 2011 when they whipped themselves into a moral panic over Sarah Palin’s clip art after the Giffords shooting, nobody in the DNC-MSM is calling for the left to dial back their rhetoric. No enemies to the left.

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll 267

A TOUCHING MOMENT:

Posted at 2:31 pm by Glenn Reynolds 30

AILING PATIENT NOT FLATLINING YET: A Minecraft Movie Is the Hit Hollywood’s Been Waiting For.

The first three months of 2025 have been a disaster for the movie industry, with box-office disappointments including “Snow White,” “Mickey 17,” “Captain America: Brave New World,” “Novocaine” and “The Alto Knights.”

The total domestic box office in that period was $1.42 billion, down 12% from last year and 41% from 2019, the last year unaffected by the pandemic and 2023’s Hollywood labor strikes.

The first three months of the year “could not have been any worse for us,” Bill Barstow, chief executive of Main Street Theatres, a small chain of cinemas based in Nebraska, said at the CinemaCon industry convention in Las Vegas last week. Many theater owners were buzzing at CinemaCon about “Minecraft’s” potential to break out based on advance ticket sales.

Warner Bros. Discovery’s film business has been under growing pressure with two of this year’s biggest flops, “Mickey 17” and “Alto Knights,” and arguably the biggest box-office disaster of 2024 in “Joker: Folie à Deux.” Studio chiefs Pam Abdy and Mike De Luca have been spending large sums on risky projects at a time when the rest of their company is under pressure to cut costs.

Oh, and speaking of Snow White: The Last Straw: Snow White Production Slammed As Second Most Polluting Disney Film.

But do you want to know how we can tell now that the new “Snow White” and all seven vertically-challenged people have been well and truly tossed under the bus? The film is now being attacked for its carbon emissions.

By analysing more than 250 Disney film sets, Snow White was revealed to have created at least 4,258 tonnes of carbon dioxide.

This was the second most polluting Disney film, after The Little Mermaid live action remake which contributed to 5,983 tonnes, since 2019 when the environmental reporting requirement was introduced.

The combined emissions total more than Birmingham‘s and Luton’s annual CO2 contributions, according to The Observer.

Now, this information might have still been released, and the film production still criticized even had the movie been a roaring success, but I’m inclined to think not; as the old saying goes, “Success has a thousand fathers, while failure is an orphan.” On that basis, “Snow White” is the red-headed stepchild of a rented mule.

Here’s the giggle-inducing bit:

Snow White also created more greenhouse gases than the latest Fast & Furious film Fast X, despite the blockbuster principally being set around cars.

So, Vin Diesel and a bunch of hot cars roaring around the landscape produced lower carbon emissions than this Disney grenade. Makes you think, doesn’t it?

According to John Nolte, Snow White “no longer has any serious chance of reaching $100 million domestic.”

Well, I for one am happy to have done my bit to protect the environment by skipping the environmentally destructive Snow White, and am eagerly awaiting Fast & Furious X, a film that has an infinitely more Al Gore-approved message. (Actually, given that Gore tacitly declared global warming over when he sold out to oil-rich Qatar, and his reported love of gas-guzzling private jets, FFX really is a film that’s perfectly aligned with Al’s lifestyle!)

Related: The Critical Drinker on A Minecraft Movie: Pure Mindless Slop, And It’ll Make A Billion Dollars. “Minecraft is where filmmaking and imagination goes to die; the logical endpoint of lazy IP-exploiting Hollywood executives who are driven entirely by numbers and statistics.”

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll 116

ESPECIALLY THAT LAST PART: The college admissions essay is absurd, unfair and cringe.

Mounk was inspired by the saga of 18-year-old Zach Yadegari, who posted that his very high grades and test scores — and his success as a high-tech entrepreneur — were not enough to get into 15 selective colleges. He was accepted by Georgia Tech, University of Texas and University of Miami.

When he posted his admissions essay on X, dozens of tweeters told him that he was arrogant, writes Mounk. “For every student with perfect scores like Zach, there’s a student with near perfect scores and more humility who’s overcome terrible circumstances and does not seem entitled,” a condescending professor tweeted. A former admissions director implied that the essay was “garbage.”

Yadegari — the name is Iranian — apparently didn’t have a family member to tell him to fake a little uncertainty or apologize for his privilege.

He is very confident, but he has good reason to feel that way. You’d think a non-victim would add diversity to most college campuses.

That last line is stellar.

Posted at 1:44 pm by Stephen Green 82