May 25, 2025

JONATHAN TURLEY: The justices must at long last deal with ‘chronic injunctivitis.’ “The court has long failed to address the problem, and what I call ‘chronic injunctivitis’ is now raging across the court system. Justices have only worsened the condition with conflicting and at times incomprehensible opinions.”

Posted at 2:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds 55

OF COURSE NOT: Trump’s Golden Dome, and Why the 1967 Outer Space Treaty Is No Obstacle to It. “The Outer Space Treaty is outdated and has greatly limited human development of space. But it’s no impediment to Donald Trump’s missile shield, no matter who claims otherwise.”

The Chinese want to ban it with vague international law mumbo-jumbo because they can’t compete on this front and they saw what SDI did to the old Soviet Union.

Posted at 2:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds 65

YES, I TOO OFTEN CONFUSE JAKE TAPPER AND LAURENCE HARVEY: Dems are mad about Biden book. Jake Tapper must be a deep undercover MAGA agent.

It’s been a big week for news about former President Joe Biden.

On May 20, a book detailing Biden’s decline hit the bookshelves. And only days before, Biden announced he had an aggressive form of prostate cancer.

All of it has sparked intense speculation among the media and political leaders. “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again,” by CNN host Jake Tapper and Axios reporter Alex Thompson, lays out in detail the lengths to which Biden’s family and closest aides went to try to hide the president’s true condition.

And thanks to a cooperative legacy media, the Biden cover-up went as planned until he showed the world just how bad things were at the June 2024 debate with Donald Trump.

Yet, even now, after so much attention and reporting on what Biden and Democrats attempted to keep from the American people, some in the media and many on the left are offering surprising takes.

Take this post on X from The Daily Beast, for example: “JD Vance wasted no time sharing his concerns that the former president was not ‘capable of doing the job’ while in office − fueling the MAGA conspiracy about a ‘cover-up’ of Biden’s health.”

The Daily Beast was responding to an answer Vance gave about Biden’s cancer news.

Or consider this observation from NBC News: “An initial wave of bipartisan sympathy for Biden’s cancer diagnosis has given way to suggestions from Trump’s allies that the former president’s inner circle masked his condition while he was in office to create an illusion that he was still up to the job.”

If the cover-up of Biden’s deterioration was a “MAGA conspiracy” by “Trump’s allies,” one must conclude the following: Tapper – and Thompson by association – are deep undercover MAGA agents.

It’s laughable, I know. But it’s essentially what Democrats and the liberal media are alleging.

It’s a safe bet that thinking that Tapper is the second coming of the Manchurian Candidate will fade rapidly once this box ticking exercise is concluded, and Tapper, Thompson and the rest of the DNC-MSM start obsessing over the health of Trump, soon to be 79, over the course of his second term.

Posted at 1:45 pm by Ed Driscoll 66

TOO GOOD TO CHECK: Brazilian tribe sues for £113million after claims they became addicted to porn after Elon Musk’s Starlink system gave them access to high-speed internet.

But note who’s getting sued here:

An indigenous Brazilian tribe has sued the New York Times over a report which claimed they had become addicted to porn after Elon Musk‘s Starlink system gave them high-speed internet access.

The Marubo tribe from the remote Javari valley, who existed in small huts scattered along the Itui River for hundreds of years, filed a defamation lawsuit seeking at least £133million ($180million) in damages this week at a Los Angeles Court.

It also names TMZ and Yahoo as defendants, alleging their stories amplified and sensationalised the report for The Times and further tarnished the 2,000-member tribe.

The suit claims the June 2024 NYT story by reporter Jack Nicas on how the tribe reacted to the satellite service introduction ‘portrayed the Marubo people as a community unable to handle basic exposure to the internet, highlighting allegations their youth had become consumed by pornography’.

Buried lede: Lionel Hutz is alive and well and living in the Brazilian rainforest!

Posted at 1:14 pm by Ed Driscoll 75

ATOMIZED AMERICA: Young Shoppers: Avoiding People Is the Point. “A recent consumer survey by GoDaddy compares the shopping habits of younger and older Americans. The results show a generational divide: Millennials and Homelanders favor remote, contactless interactions, while Boomers and Xers lean toward in-person, social experiences.”

Posted at 1:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds 118

ROGER KIMBALL: The Centenary of Buckley and the Crisis of Free Speech.

Free speech, it turns out, is like other freedoms: its victory is never permanent. It is a melancholy truth that the right of free speech, like other civilizational achievements, must constantly be renewed to survive.

That was one of Edmund Burke’s central insights. But it is an insight that is regularly forgotten—until reality intrudes upon our reverie to remind us. Every generation finds that it must work anew to win or at least to maintain the freedoms bequeathed to it by earlier generations.

What was argued for and won yesterday is today once again up for grabs. Which moves patience and perseverance to the head of the queue of political virtues. You already made the argument. But it always turns out that you must make it again.

During the Japanese bombardment of Shanghai in 1932, the Austrian essayist Karl Kraus was anguishing over the placement of commas in a column. It might seem futile at such a moment, he told a friend, but concluded that “if those who are obliged to look after commas had always made sure they were in the right place, then Shanghai would not be burning.”

Was that hyperbolic? Perhaps. But the general point holds: language matters. Telling the truth is not only a linguistic desideratum; it is also a political imperative. I know that Bill Buckley, who devoted much of his seemingly boundless energy to broadcasting the truth, would have had much to say about the many ways our culture has colluded against that often lonely but always exigent task.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 12:45 pm by Ed Driscoll 90

SCOTT JOHNSON: Looking back at 23 years.

It’s been a while since I took the occasion of Power Line’s anniversary to look back. Borrowing from previous editions, I want to do so again today to highlight themes that continue to resonate with me.

  • It was 23 years ago this weekend — 23 years ago today, I think, but maybe tomorrow — that John Hinderaker went to Blogger and set up Power Line. On Memorial Day that weekend he gave me a call and invited me to contribute. We’ve moved on from Blogger, but we’re still here. Survival has its charms; many good sites have come and gone or gone off the deep end over the years.

* * * * * * * * *

  • On the evening of September 8, 2004, CBS News/60 Minutes II broadcast the inaptly titled report “For the record.” With a little help from Atlanta attorney Harry MacDougald supplemented by information from some knowledgeable readers and fellow writers online, we had a hand in turning the CBS News story into Rathergate. Triggered by the Hollywood version in 2015, John and I looked back on the scandal in the Weekly Standard article “Rather shameful.”

  • We made our contribution in part through readers who got us going with information they emailed on the morning of September 9. It is amazing to me in retrospect that we were able to post the initial updates to “The Sixty-First Minute” based on messages from the few thousand regular readers we had at the time. Other readers came that morning from links that directed them to us.

  • As we were flooded with emails following the post, I called John mid-morning for help sorting through the messages and assessing the information. John took a look and called me back 15 minutes later. “Dan Rather is toast,” he said. “The key to the case is kerning.” I’m sure John had never heard the word before reviewing the email that morning. With his trial lawyer’s eye, however, he had fastened on powerful proof of the fraud.

  • Working for Matt Drudge, Andrew Breitbart linked to the post early that afternoon with a screaming siren on the Drudge Report. By the end of the day some 500,000 readers had visited the post. Inside CBS News they were trying to figure out what had happened. What had happened was one of the great journalistic frauds of all time, the unraveling of which led to Dan Rather’s early retirement from CBS News.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll 94

AI TAKES OVER THE WORLD, WOMEN HARDEST HIT: How the AI takeover might affect women more than men. “Women are more likely to have their jobs replaced by generative AI, and they are slower to adopt AI technology into their work. Eight out of ten women in the workforce are in ‘occupations highly exposed to generative AI automation,’ compared to six out of ten men, said a 2023 analysis by the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise. ‘Overall, 21% more women are exposed to AI automation than men even though men outnumber women in the workforce.’ This is because women predominantly hold some of the top jobs being replaced by AI, like administrative and clerical work. In jobs that are not being replaced, but rather augmented with AI, women are also more reluctant to use the technology than men, according to a working paper by Harvard Business School.”

Posted at 12:15 pm by Glenn Reynolds 78

NIETZSCHE SMILES: Man in the image of OpenAI.

This week, OpenAI acquired Ive’s AI device startup, io, ahead of a new product they’ve been outfitting.

It will look something like another personal device, though one devoted to the full offerings of artificial intelligence. The Wall Street Journal reports that it will be “able of being fully aware of a user’s surroundings and life” and “unobtrusive,” physically. One leak indicates the device may be worn around the neck and have camera and microphone capabilities.

In short, it’s a constant companion in the style of God — one in which the user’s life, ​​his “intimate thoughts and expressions,” are the prized input. Every consumer knows he is the real product, and as such knows his personal information is at risk implicitly anytime he is online. This time, no longer is data collection a matter of possibility, or even a negative externality: Knowing the person, and then using and preempting his experiences is the whole, explicit product. That precise mode is part of what makes it such an attempt at “creating God in our own image,” as one bizarre entrepreneur and venture capitalist has put the idea of a superintelligence.

Gosh.  As Spencer Klavan writes in response:

I don’t wish death on Bryan Johnson. About that, he and I are agreed. But I wouldn’t wish the kind of life he’s living on him either, nor on my worst enemy. The man is spending millions every year to keep from dying, and he looks like a wreck. Gaunt, drained, frozen in a Botox half-smile—the kind of look you’d expect from an aggressively calibrated life.

Most recently, Johnson appeared on Bari Weiss’s Honestly podcast and murmured eerily about a common AI trope: “I think the irony is that we told stories of God creating us, and I think the reality is that we are creating God.”

Since not a single major religion proposes that God is anything like a supercomputer, I struggle to imagine what sorts of spiritual longings Johnson thinks GPT-1000 is going to satisfy or replace. But really this is just primitive Babel-tier tech worship, not even informed enough to rise to the level of error.

Baby steps, please. Let’s try to successfully get Siri mated up with ChatGPT before worrying about creating God, huh?

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll 85

MAKING PROGRESS:  A few months ago, Pete Kirsanow and I sent a letter to Members of Congress asking for college accreditation reform.  Now Senator Jim Banks has responded!  We got a bill going!  (Now all we have to do is get it introduced in the House, get it passed in both houses, and signed into law by the President.  Stay tuned …)

Posted at 8:25 am by Gail Heriot 23

TEN YEARS GONE:

The following year, Joe was making very ill-advised jokes about the topic: Joe Biden jokes about faking prostate cancer to get out of Obama administration.

At an event honoring former Vice President Walter Mondale, Mr. Biden recounted the conditions he placed on joining Mr. Obama’s ticket in 2008 and also made clear he would leave the administration if he encountered deep, substantive policy differences with the president.

“Two things: to be able to completely be level with you and argue with you if we disagree, privately,” Mr. Biden said of his 2008 conversations with Mr. Obama, in which the two men discussed the vice president’s role.

“And secondly, I want to be the last person in the room on every major decision, and I didn’t mean that figuratively, I meant that literally — the last person in the room,” he continued. “He’s president. He gets to make the decision, and unless there’s an overwhelming disagreement in principle, in which case I’d develop prostate cancer or something and leave, and he knew I meant that … I get to be the last person in the room. And that’s where I think I can serve best.”

Biden was cast by Obama in 2008 as the boring old grownup in the room to give the appearance of offsetting Barry’s inexperience and radical chic background. Who makes jokes like this?

UPDATE: Video surfaces of Biden making his very strange 2015 joke(?) about prostate cancer: Decade Old Video of Biden Shows Him Joking of Faking Prostate Cancer to Get Out of Obama Administration.

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll 258

May 24, 2025

OPEN THREAD: Party on.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds 1717