March 30, 2025

OPEN THREAD: Ring out the weekend.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds 439

“UPSETS:” Statham’s A Working Man upsets Snow White to take No. 1 at the box office. Complete with an “unexpectedly” moment in the lede from AP!

In an unexpected upset, the Jason Statham thriller “A Working Man” took No. 1 at the box office, besting the rapidly declining “Snow White,” according to studio estimates Sunday.

Even after a lackluster debut, the Walt Disney Co.’s live-action remake was predicted to remain the top film in U.S. and Canadian theaters over the weekend. Instead, “Snow White,” plagued by bad buzz and backlash, nosedived in its second weekend and dropped 66%.

As John Nolte writes: Weekend Two Delivers Even More Box Office Humiliation for Snow White. “It is now quite possible that Snow Woke could fail to hit $200 million globally. This means that after the theaters take their cut, Disney will see only $100 million in box office returns, which will add up to an incredible $270 million LOSS. Disney could conceivably lose more than a quarter of a billion — with a “B” — on this, making it the biggest box office bomb in history.”

 

 

 

Posted at 8:16 pm by Ed Driscoll 194

DOMESTIC TERRORISM:

Posted at 7:18 pm by Glenn Reynolds 200

GREAT MOMENTS IN PROJECTION:

Posted at 5:16 pm by Ed Driscoll 176

I REMAIN PUZZLED BY THIS: Why do LLMs make stuff up? New research peers under the hood.

The answer provided here doesn’t actually explain why the models make up fake articles with fake citations, for fake books with fake ISBN numbers. I’m also troubled that we didn’t completely understand this from the beginning.

Posted at 2:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds 245

HMMMM: “Signalgate” is a Masterclass in the application of Useful Idiots.

Last week, The Atlantic’s editor Jeffrey Goldberg discovered that he had somehow been added to a group chat (GC) on Signal titled “Houthi PC small group” by National Security Advisor Michael Waltz. This GC appeared to have top cabinet members of the Trump administration on its roster. Goldberg appears shocked to be included in this GC, especially as a journalist intensely critical of the current administration. His last article was titled, Trump: ‘I Need the Kind of Generals That Hitler Had’, so he probably wondered why he was added. At first, he doubts the veracity that the GC he’s been added to is genuine. He writes:

“After reading this chain, I recognized that this conversation possessed a high degree of verisimilitude. The texts, in their word choice and arguments, sounded as if they were written by the people who purportedly sent them, or by a particularly adept AI text generator. I was still concerned that this could be a disinformation operation, or a simulation of some sort. And I remained mystified that no one in the group seemed to have noticed my presence. But if it was a hoax, the quality of mimicry and the level of foreign-policy insight were impressive.”

Suffice to say, Mr. Goldberg stayed in the GC, only leaving it this past Sunday, March 23rd. He then wasted no time furiously banging out a 3500 word essay on his adventures in GC land, replete with accompanying screenshots of the chat. How he had time to do this between scheduling cable news interviews is a testament to this true American patriot. (sarcasm)

However, is that really the entire narrative? That a Progressive-Liberal journalist just happened to be accidentally added to a high-level chat group discussing policy positions and goals? One that includes some of the most powerful figures in the current administration? Which led to the inevitable story being leaked?

Occam’s razor

I lean towards a theory of “Signalgate” being intentional (1), starting with some of the members the chat.

Read the whole thing.

Related:

And now for this weekend’s latest attack on Hegseth: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth Included Wife in Sensitive Meetings: Report.

The Edith Wilsons of the multiverse all smile.

Posted at 1:44 pm by Ed Driscoll 167

KINDA MAKES YOU QUESTION THE VALUE OF ACADEMIC POLITICAL SCIENCE, DOESN’T IT?

Posted at 1:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds 94

YES. NEXT QUESTION? Are Democrats Whitewashing Hitler with Lame Attacks on Trump?

I’m old enough to remember when Hitler personified incomparable, bottomless, merciless evil. These days he’s mostly used by the left as a cudgel to hammer, ineffectively, Donald Trump. In doing so, Democrats risk trivializing and even sanitizing Hitler.

What sets Hitler apart from other monstrous 20th century dictators — such as Mao Zedong and Stalin — was his all-consuming Jew hatred, his unprecedented Jewish murders, his factories of death and extermination that slaughtered 6 million Jews.

Mao and Stalin (himself an antisemite) each killed more people than Hitler, yet the German fuhrer is recognized as the worst tyrant. The reason is clear — the Holocaust.

There have been other genocides, such as those of Turkey against the Armenians and the Hutus against the Tutsis in civil war in Rwanda.

But in none was genocide as central to a regime’s core and purpose as in Hitler’s Germany. None of those other murderous campaigns erected a massive industrial complex of death camps devoted to the annihilation of one people.

You can’t separate Hitler from his pathological loathing and mass murder of Jews.

If someone is likened to Hitler, it’s inescapable that this person must be a rabid Jew hater.

To invoke Hitler without his murderous antisemitism is to homogenize him as another one of the 20th century’s dictators, just the most infamous.

In doing so, Democrats purge him of his singular crime against humanity.

President Trump is Hitler, shout progressives.

That would be the same Trump whose grandchildren are Jewish. The same Trump who is described by Benjamin Netanyahu, prime minister of the Jewish state, as “the greatest friend that Israel has ever had in the White House.”

Some Hitler.

* * * * * * * *

We should never forget who Hitler was.

Volumes have been written about him. Among the most intriguing was Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of his Evil by Ron Rosenbaum.

Rosenbaum examined many of the theories and explanations about Hitler.

After doing so, he cautioned that explaining Hitler can carry a potential downside.

We should remember, he said:

“To resist the way explanation can become evasion or consolation, a way of making Hitler’s choice to do what he did less unbearable, less hateful to contemplate, by shifting responsibility from him to faceless abstractions, inexorable forces, or irresistible compulsions that gave him no choice or made his choice irrelevant.

“To resist making the kind of explanatory excuses for Hitler that permit him to escape, that grant him the posthumous victory of a last laugh.”

Are the Democrats’ frivolous invocations of a Hitler without the Holocaust opening another avenue to grant him the posthumous victory of a last laugh?

Also trivializing Hitler is that these same attacks are made by the left whenever there’s a president with an (R) after his name in the White House. In 2003, Jonah Goldberg responded to the left’s unceasing “Bush=Hitler” attacks:

I don’t say this because I feel a passionate need to defend George Bush. I would make the exact same points if Al Gore were president. I would make the exact same points if anybody running for the Democratic nomination were president. This has nothing to do with partisanship. It has to do with the fact that such comparisons are slanderous to the United States and historical truth and amount to Holocaust denial. When you say that anything George Bush has done is akin to what Hitler did, you make the Holocaust into nothing more than an example of partisan excess. Tax cuts are not genocide, as so many Democrats have suggested over the years. (For example, during the Contract with America debate, Charles Rangel complained that “Hitler wasn’t even talking about doing these things” that were in the Contract with America. In other words, the Contract with America was in some way worse than what Hitler did. At the end of the day, that is Holocaust denial.)

Last year, the left was begging this former Hitler to endorse Kamala Harris, as Dick Cheney, Bush’s co-Hitler 20 years ago, did.

And if you missed it yesterday, Benjamin Kerstein on the Rise of the ‘anti-Nazi’ Nazis. “The progressive left believes that it owns anti-Nazism. Literally owns it. Anti-Nazism is progressivism’s personal property, and no one else has any right to it. As such, progressivism can wield anti-Nazism as a weapon against anyone and anything it finds distasteful with total impunity. Today, with campus antisemites stating at every possible opportunity that their goal is a second genocide of the Jews and engaging in the racist hate crimes necessary to prove it, we are faced with an irony that is world-historical in scope: Progressives use anti-Nazism to defend people who are very much like Nazis. Progressives then go even further and claim that these people are victims of Nazism.”

Posted at 1:14 pm by Ed Driscoll 146

GREAT MOMENTS IN ASTROTURFING: Asphalt Assault: Anti-Tesla Protesters Unleash Their Scariest Weapon Yet – Nazi-Infused Line Dancing!

Tesla protesters in Seattle, Washington pulled out their scariest secret weapon against Elon Musk – line dancing. It was an assault on the eyes. Protesters hate Musk’s electric vehicles but enjoy the Electric Slide.

Have a look. (WATCH)

The irony of choosing the Electric Slide was not lost on commenters.

Other Tesla protestors had their talking points preprinted in large type, just like a Biden press conference. (Why didn’t his handlers talk him into attempting the electric slide?):

And then everybody quit at noon.

No word yet, if like the mob in Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein, they all went off for brunch afterward “to have a little sponge cake und a little wine,” before contemplating their next assault on civilization.

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll 156