Blue Origin (NOT Space X!) shot singer Katy Perry into space today—or yesterday, I really don’t care— and unfortunately, she will be coming back, or is she back already? (See previous comment.)
There are a lot of videos up now with pop star Perry making moronic observations about her trip. She will be accompanies by a slightly less flagrant idiot and a far less influential one, Gayle King, Oprah’s <cough> galpal. (Althouse features another one of Katy’s deep thoughts videos.)
Why are we—anyone— sending celebrity idiots into space? All this does is encourage weak minds to consider them worth listening to when they are not. There must be easily a million Americans whose journey “to the stars” would convey more long and short term benefits on our society.
The New York Yankees opened their season by crushing the Milwaukee Brewers with a record number of home runs. Some of the homers were hit by players using a new bat design imagined by a one-time MIT physicist. The bat is shaped at teh end like a bowling pin, or a torpedo. The Yankees hit a franchise-record nine home runs in the first game—-notably the player who hit the most was Aaron Judge with three, and he used an old-fashioned bat. The series sweep served “as a live infomercial.”
The Yankees aren’t the only team with players using the new bats. The Cubs, Minnesota Twins, Toronto Blue Jays and Tampa Bay Rays have some players who are trying them out. “It’s legal,” says one enthusiastic player. “It’s under MLB rules and everything. Just basically moving the sweet spot down. Those balls that you’re getting jammed on are finding some barrels.”
On June 3, 2022, the young protestor above tied her neck to the net during a tennis match at the French Open, with her shirt reading “We Have 1028 Days Left” sending the critical message to the world that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had decreed that if massive de-carbonization was not implemented before that (literal!) deadline, it would be too late to save the planet from a climate change apocalypse.
The 1,028th day was last week, Thursday March 27, 2025. Does that young woman feel ridiculous? She should. Now, she probably is one of those fanatics who won’t procreate because children are bad for the environment, but if she does, her kids will have a ball with that photo. I know I would have, just as if there was a photo of my mother as a teen dressed as a banana, or my father with dicks on his face after having them drawn on while he was asleep.
The Totalitarian Left in the U.S. has been citing “science” to justify irresponsible policies for years, indeed decades, and accountability is at hand. If the science of climate change is so “settled,” why are all the predictions and deadlines proven ridiculously false? Even our currently under-educated, critical thinking deprived rising generations are smart enough to figure out a con when they see, well, when they see the same con over and over again. Here’s an article about how the Great Barrier Reef that we were told was being destroyed by global warming (Science!) has more than doubled in a decade and its size and health is the highest ever recorded.
“[A] long-withheld report from the Biden Administration directly contradicted the claims of climate change used to limit increased U.S. liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports. The suggestion is that this was an knowing effort to cap carbon admissions rather than carbon emissions. The impact that new U.S. LNG exports have on the environment and the economy was reviewed by U.S. Energy Department scientists and completed by September 2023. It appears that neither President Biden nor Secretary Jennifer Granholm liked the science or the conclusions. Rather than “follow the science,” they buried the report while allegedly making claims directly refuted by their own experts…The draft study, “Energy, Economic, and Environmental Assessment of U.S. LNG Exports,” found that, under all modeled scenarios, an increase in U.S. LNG exports and natural gas production would not change global or U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. It further found that it would not increase energy prices for consumers. Biden and Granholm reportedly buried the report and then announced a pause on all new U.S. LNG export terminals in January 2024, citing the danger to environmental and economic impacts.”
Gee what a surprise.
But seriously folks, anyone who is even faintly surprised at this development hasn’t been watching, listening or paying attention to either the “science of cliamte change” or the debate over energy policy. What is far from “settled science” is deliberately presented as a consensus. Policies that harm the U.S. economy and consumers have been regularly inflicted on the nation as pure virtue-signaling to the Left, with full knowledge that they can’t possibly have any effect on the world’s climate, present or future. And revealing that the Biden Administration engaged in public deception….well, this is a group that regularly manipulated government employment figures, Wuhan virus pandemic statistics and social media to control public opinion as much as as possible.
Heck, this is a group that hid who was really wielding power in the White House! Hiding a study that doesn’t support a Democrat-Progressive world view? Totalitarianism 101, and the Democratic Party is poisoned by a totalitarian-trending political culture now, as we repeatedly saw during the last four years.
My only problem with Turley’s analysis is that it is thinly sourced, because apparently only Fox News has covered the story so far. I searched for it at the New York Times site: nada. If the story is somewhere in the Times, then the news story is being buried like the study itself…or this is another example of the partisan divide in our unethical “journalism” making it impossible for the public to find out what’s really going on.
In the interest of time—mine—I’m going to list the relevant developments and my observations as bullet points, with the full knowledge that I will be posting on this again, and probably soon. So here we go, into the wreckage…
The photo above carries the caption: “Metropolis parking utilizing AI to create drive in drive out parking without the need for a ticket and validation. This lot is at 236 S. Los Angeles in Little Tokyo in Downtown Los Angeles.” Here’s my caption: “Metropolis parking can bite me.”
Wait, what? An Executive Order can be legal and go into effect without a President actually signing it? A so-called “autopen signature” counts? EVEN WHEN THE PRESIDENT MAY NOT BE CAPABLE OF KNOWING WHAT HE’S “SIGNING”?
A Heritage Foundation investigation has discovered that the majority of official documents signed by President Joe Biden used the same autopen signature. The Oversight Project, which is an initiative within the conservative Heritage Foundation that investigates the government, announced, “We gathered every document we could find with Biden’s signature over the course of his Presidency. All used the same autopen signature except for the announcement that the former President was dropping out of the race last year. Here is the autopen signature,” the group said, attaching photo examples like these:
“Experience the future of companionship with an AI girlfriend chatbot. Designed to listen engage and respond with intelligence and warmth this virtual partner offers meaningful conversations, emotional support, and personalized interactions. Whether you seek a friend a confidante or just casual chats this ai girlfriend chatbot companion is always there for you anytime anywhere. Enjoy a unique ever-evolving connection powered by artificial intelligence.”
I think a blow-up doll is more ethical. The product is as perilous as crack or heroin, and destined to cripple and manipulate vulnerable, lonely people, like, say, me. It is the logical and inevitable next step from 800 sex chat phone lines. They can’t be made illegal; someone will undoubtedly argue that AI girlfriend chatbots can be therapeutic and even, on balance, capable of accomplishing more good than bad.
Aleysha Ortiz, 19, has sued the Hartford Board of Education and city officials alleging that she cannot read or write even though she graduated with honors from Hartford Public High School in 2024. Her suit accuses defendants of negligence by failing to provide adequate special education services. She told CNN that she was promoted all the way through 12 years in Hartford public school despite never acquiring fundamental literacy skills; in a May 2024 city council meeting, she testified that she was unable to read or write, yet was awarded an honors diploma.
Ortiz is now enrolled at the University of Connecticut: yes, she was accepted and got a scholarship despite being, in her own assessment, illiterate. She explains this by her adeptness in using technology such as speech-to-text and text-to-speech programs.
Says Newsweek, amusingly, “The case has drawn attention to how academic achievement is measured and whether special education students are truly receiving the skills they need to succeed beyond high school.”
“If the NOAA data adjustments cannot be tied to specific metadata like station moves or instrumentation changes, then they are not really scientific “data,” but rather just opinions of people who are interested in promoting the global warming narrative. They are completely unusable for purposes of making public policy.”
Yes, but the manipulated data does make charts like the “hockey stick” graph above seem convincing, even though all those data points come from after-the-fact guesses about what the real data should be.
Ethics Alarms 