In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

I keep thinking there's got to be a great New Jersey joke out there with a punchline involving drones, but I just haven't found it yet. Maybe Gutfeld will tell it when he comes back from wherever he is. (Full disclosure: I grew up in New Jersey until I was 15, when my family moved to Bethesda, of all places. I guarantee you, there are no Bethesda jokes. Nobody would dare.) The fact that the only people seeing these drones are in New Jersey, though, keeps me from taking these reports as seriously as I otherwise might, but on the other hand, there's John Kirby pooh-poohing the whole thing from the White House: "Using very sophisticated electronic detection technologies provided by federal authorities, we have not been able to, and neither have state or local law enforcement authorities, corroborate any of the reported visual sightings," he said. "To the contrary, upon review of available imagery, it appears that many of the reported sightings a...

Let's take a quick tour of this week's AI news. Despite all the potential AI-enhanced tools at law enforcement's disposal, such as DNA, facial recognition, phone and GPS location, and even genetic genealogy, Luigi Mangione, the accused assassin of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, was caught by low-tech ordinary citizens at a McDonald's in Altoona, PA : “Don’t that look like the shooter from New York?” one of the regulars, who only gave his first name, Larry, recalled his friend joking. “He probably heard us,” Larry said of the man seated maybe 10 feet away in the back, near the restrooms of the fast-food restaurant in Altoona. All joking aside, Larry’s friend was correct: That man turned out to be the wanted fugitive suspected of calmly pulling out a pistol with a silencer on a Midtown Manhattan street last week and gunning down the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare in a brazen assassination that gripped the nation. A worker behind the counter used a ...

Much of the second-guessing so far over the Harris cmpaign has come from the left, arguing that it should have brought racial identity and Marxism more to the fore, which were what the working class really wanted, or something like that. Via Real Clear Politics, one such piece from The Nation unintentionally stumbles on a worthwhile insight. No, Kamala Harris Staffers Did Not Run a “Flawless” Campaign : Quentin Fulks told Pod Save America , “We were honestly in, in crisis management mode of keeping President Biden in the race.… Trump’s favorability numbers were creeping up as Plouffe said, and we had to do something about that as well. And so it was a lot of walking and chewing gum at the same time, but there really was no sort of contingency planning to turn the race over to her right after that debate or at any point until President Biden definitively said he wasn’t going to continue on.” The fact that there was no contingency planning even after Joe Biden’s horrendou...

The Atantic, which let's recall is owned by Laurene Powell Jobs, #8 on Forbes's 2023 list of the world's richest women, is worried that Trump is starting to look normal : [W]hat is actually happening in the capital is, by any rational standard, disturbing. Donald Trump is filling his administration with “loyalists,” a prerogative that his opponents have grudgingly accepted as his due. Yet he is defining loyalist in maximal terms, including the belief that Trump legitimately won the 2020 election and was justified in his attempt to seize power. The winners are rewriting the history of the insurrection, and their version of history is about to acquire the force of law. But isn't the election just past a vindication of the view that the 2020 election was "stolen"? Look at the efforts that began almost immediaately after 2020 to drive a stake through Trump's heart, the second impeachment of a lame duck, the January 6 prosecutions, the lawfare, incl...

A John Kass essay linked at Real Clear Politics yestesrday, To Move Forward, Democrats Must Oust Obama , tries to argue one point, but it actually proves another: [H]ow did America get to the point where Republicans, once the country club white shoe party of the Bush family, could begin to wrestle with Democrats for the votes of the working class, minorities and women? How did the Republicans win so decisively? It was Trump. What he did in remaking the Republican Party is simply astounding. But first he had to politically eviscerate the Bush family political dynasty that controlled the GOP. And so he relentlessly attacked Jeb!, then the standard bearer of the Bush clan for the disastrous war in Iraq, which slaughtered thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis while wasting trillions of American dollars on this and other endless neo-con forever wars. With that, the Bush GOP panicked and whined, but the Bush era was mercifully over. Eventually, working cla...

Generations ago, IBM was the dominant player in tech. It was said that you couldn't be fired if you went with IBM, but within a few years of when I started, people definitely began to be fired for going with IBM, and I was never much of a fan. But when I started thinking about this post, I found this piece at IBM's website that tries to give an overview of artificial intelligence, or AI. It's as good a start as any. I decided I needed to update my own understanding of AI, because the tech billionaires who've lined up with Trump want to influence AI policy. It seems to me that there are two main fields within AI, massive database search and machine learning. Massive database search involves things like searching huge numbers of phone calls or e-mails for keywords or other associations to identify targets. Machine learning involves teaching computers to underatand, translate, and generate natural language, produce original text or works of art, or self-drive automobi...

In yesterday's post, we saw how accounts suggest that Kamala Harris had the inside track for nomination as Joe's running mate in 2020, as well as a lock on designation to replace Joe as the Democrat nominee once he withdrew from the race last July. While some accounts attribute this influence to James Clyburn, I think the evidence points much more strongly to Nancy Pelosi, and to a slighly lesser extent, Barack Obama. Numerous accounts have reported that Joe is angry at both Pelosi and Obama for forcing him out of the race, for instance : Pelosi and Biden have not spoken since he stepped away. And the president’s anger flashed to the surface during a televised interview that aired this weekend when he namechecked the former speaker as he explained why he quit the race. “And I was concerned if I stayed in the race, that would be the topic,” Biden told CBS. “You’d be interviewing me about why did Nancy Pelosi say, why did so — and — and I thought it’d be a real di...