In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

It looks like the UK is getting a new national humiliation each week lately: The migrant mega dinghy is a national humiliation . Well, if yesterday's post here is any indicator, if your ruling class has people with names like Sebastian and Zanny in it, you deserve every national humiliation you get. (Full disclosure: there is a squirrel in our back yard that hadn't been named until yesterday. Zanny it was.) It looks like Andy Burnham has achieved what his predecessors could not. He has found a solution to the small-boats crisis. . . In the early hours of Monday morning, a 49-foot dinghy carrying 230 illegal immigrants arrived on British shores from France. It is by some margin the largest number of migrants to have arrived in a single vessel. It surpasses by far the previous record of 165, a feat of human trafficking achieved late last month. As many people have already pointed out, the ‘small boats crisis’ may now technically be over, as we enter the era of migrant crui...

Yesterday I noted that Glenn Reynolds's fundamental problem is that he never got an education. Certainly, if he ever took Philosophy 101, he must have cheated. One of the basic issues covered in an introductory philosophy course is the " mind-body problem ". The mind-body problem is a philosophical issue that questions the relationship between mental states, such as beliefs and desires, and physical states of the brain and body. It explores whether the mind and body are distinct entities or one interacting component, a debate primarily characterized by dualism and physicalism. Understanding this issue is crucial for fields like psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive science, as it influences how we perceive consciousness and self-awareness. According to a UK study guide , Physicalism (sometimes called materialism) is the view that everything that exists is ultimately physical. This includes mental states, which physicalists argue can be fully explained in te...

And for that matter, not an IQ point smarter. He's congratulating himself for 25 years of Instapundit , and he's apparently grateful for Dr Fauci's example of how to do this: Along the way there were podcasts — the late, lamented Glenn and Helen Show, which I really enjoyed, several years with PJTV, and various columns for TechCentralStation, the Washington Examiner, USA Today, nearly a decade of columns in Popular Mechanics, and now the New York Post. But always there was the blog. Behind everything there was the blog. Most of my ideas came from the blog, even when they appeared in columns, podcasts or TV shows. Many of the ideas on the blog came from readers who emailed me, or, later, commented on posts. And it’s still here. As I said in my brief anniversary observation on Saturday, I never expected to do this for 25 years, and I can’t promise I’ll still be doing it in 25 more. But I can’t promise that I won’t be, either. I started following Instapundit in the mid...

At The Nerve News: Cory Doctorow: The people who tell you ‘AI is changing everything’ are lying If Donald Trump ordered Big Tech to turn off all of your country's chatbots tomorrow, nothing would change. Every one of your country's ministries and corporations would chug on with nary a hitch. Households, too, though perhaps a few of the younger members of those families would have to do their own homework again. Contrast this with what would transpire if Trump directed his tech giants to switch off your country's Office 365 access, or to brick your Android and iOS phones, or to killswitch your John Deere tractors. Your country would effectively cease to exist. Having made a career in tech, I can vouch for this insight: One person who's had a lot of opportunity to observe the shear between the stated business/AI situation and the real business AI situation is Nikhil Suresh from Hermit Tech, a consulting firm of "radically ethical data wizards" (that ...

There have been several recent TV documentaries on the November 13, 2022 murders of four University of Idaho students at an off-campus residence. I watched the one on Investigation Discovery, The Idaho College Murders . Quite a bit of the information in the program challenges the established narrative that these were four naive, unwitting victims. The first thing that struck both my wife and me was the luxury features of that off-campus residence. We'd both attended undergraduate colleges aimed at the upper middle class in the 1960s, and by comparison, our accommodations back in the day were Spartan. Not only did this place have a fully up-to-date kitchen, it had hardwood floors, fancy bathrooms, and walk-in closets. Everything had new paint. Bedrooms were up to the standard these kids could expect at home in upscale suburbs. I can only surmise that college costs are rising in part due to the increased standard of living students are led to expect. The second thing uncovered in...

The Jason Arday and Rahila Khan cases make me think of other potential literary hoaxes, for instance using AI. AI tells me that Lydia Davis, portrait above, is a highly respected author of micro fiction. I asked Chrome AI mode, "Can you write me a micro fiction piece as thoough Lydia Davis had written it?" The New Arrangement We agreed to divide the books evenly, but he insisted that the anthology of French poetry belonged to him because his grandfather had given it to him, even though he had never read a single line of it and I had translated three of the poems for a journal that paid me in copies. I let him keep it, of which I was quite proud, until I realized yesterday morning that without its spine on the third shelf, the remaining volumes of biography lean precariously to the left, forcing me to look at them slantwise every time I enter the room, which means he is still disrupting my posture months after moving out. I asked, "Can you explain how someone m...

The Jason Arday case brought to mind a somewhat similar kerfuffle from the 1980s, the Rahila Khan case. In 1986, Toby Forward, a white Church of England cleric from Hull, began submitting fiction under the pseudonym Rahila Khan, an Asian Muslim mother of two. Forward's side of the story is this : It came as quite a shock when I lost Rahila Khan. I’d known her for two years and we were very close. I told my agent that Rahila wanted to write a letter to the Guardian about a witless piece that they had done about her, but the agent was firm. ‘No. No more Rahila Khan. She’s finished.’ I was upset. We’d done a lot together in just two years. Rahila Khan and I wrote our first story for BBC Radio at the end of August 1985. We didn’t put my name on it. It was rejected, as not quite suitable, but with an encouraging letter saying that she wrote well and should try sending it to the women’s magazines. We were more pleased than disappointed, so we set to work to write another – after all...