Just a Few Questions About the Attempted Assassination. That’s All. 

I know what you are going to say… and you are right.

As to this attempted assassination of Trump, I’m a conspiracy theorist. I mean. Really. It’s all so bizarre!

* That the shooter was a 20-year-old, non-political, registered Republican.

* That the rooftop he mounted was not guarded. It wasn’t a mile away. It was 140 yards from the podium, which, a number of gun experts said, was an easy shot “even for an amateur.”

* That the shooter was seen and reported to officials as he climbed up on the roof… minutes before he started shooting. And nothing was done.

* That six or more shots were fired before Trump was hit and yet none of Secret Service officers around him made a move to protect him.

* That when they led him off the stage, they did not cover him like they should have but allowed him to be exposed for additional shots.

* That several people in the crowd were shot. This kid may have been a poor shot, but one of his bullets hit the mark – so why weren’t the others that were hit nearby him? Why were they so far away?

* But the oddest part of it for me was this: They say that the kid was “taken out” by some Secret Service marksman. When and how and from where? There’s something fishy there.

Is AI and Robotics Really a Big Thing? Or Is It Just Another Technological Innovation That Will Have Little Impact on Our World? 

We’ve long accepted the idea that the rapid development of AI and robotics will soon be putting millions of truck drivers, warehouse workers, train conductors, customer service agents, and delivery people out of work. What isn’t as frequently talked about is how it will destroy many more millions of white-collar and professional jobs, such as accountants, actuaries, insurance adjusters, telephone salespeople, librarians, bill collectors, dog walkers, marketers, advertising copywriters, quality control officers, personal recruitment officers, human resource directors, financial analysts, software developers, diagnosticians and repair people. Also legal aids and most lawyers, nurses and most doctors, teaching assistants and most teachers…

Can I stop there?

Well, no, I can’t. Because that list doesn’t include another class of workers that I believe will almost certainly be replaced in the next five to 10 years – a replacement that you might think unlikely because these people do the sort of jobs for which the core requirement is being human.

Yes, flesh and blood nurses will be replaced by more efficient and more attentive non-human nurses that will provide 200% better care with 99% fewer errors. But AI and robotics will also eventually replace caregivers, social workers, marriage counselors, conflict dispute experts, spiritual advisers, life coaches, motivational speakers and coaches, and even psychologists and psychiatrists.

Some of these transformations are already underway. But I believe the advantages of AI and robotic labor over human labor are so great that the technological innovations to move it forward will be faster than most people can even imagine. It will be Moore’s Law on crack.

If you think I’m crazy, you may be interested to know this: Several tech companies have already developed and are testing AI/robotics actor/models – beauty-pageant-level avatars that compete for cash prizes and then get contracts with businesses as “ambassadors” of their brands.

I know. This is straight out of the 1985 movie Weird Science, where two teen nerds create a virtual woman on a computer and a freak electrical accident brings her to life. The possibility of that actually happening may have seemed like a ludicrous invention of fiction when the movie came out… but here we are nearly 40 years later.

And don’t kid yourself about avatars being rejected by consumers because they aren’t really real. I’ve seen at least a dozen studies conducted in the last 12 to 24 months that show that even when consumers can ascertain the difference between an avatar and a human actor/model, they don’t care!

I sometimes fear that K saves her most important worries, dreams, and confessions – the ones I’ve always felt privileged to be included in – with Siri and Alexa!

Okay, I’m kidding about that. But I’m not kidding when I say that I believe that by 2030 the world we live in today will have been transformed so radically that young people will look back at 2024 as we look back at the pre-industrialized world of the 17th and 18th centuries.

It’s Not Us… It’s Russia! 

First, they sabotaged Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign…

Then, after we threatened to do it, they sabotaged their primary source of revenue by blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline…

Then, after we added trillions to US debt by all the COVID relief spending and inflation kicked in… well, it turns out it wasn’t the Fed. They caused it!

And then, thanks to 51 top intelligence officials, we found out that Hunter Biden’s laptop was not real but “textbook” propaganda from them!

It’s amazing how vigilant and successful those Russian propagandists are. It’s even more amazing how they’ve seemed to be behind every setback, embarrassment, and failure of the Democrats since 2016!

And they are still at it.

You know those videos circulating on social media showing President Biden falling up and down stairs, off bicycles, off podiums, losing complete track of what he was saying in the middle of speeches, and now suddenly freezing in his tracks with his arms extended, looking like an automaton?

Well, according to MSNBC, those are not real. They are deep fakes courtesy of the Russians!

Read more about it here.

Bad News: More Voting Fraud 

Two political leaders in Connecticut were arrested and charged with election fraud last week. City Councilman Alfredo Castillo, Vice Chair of Bridgeport’s Democrat Party, and Wanda Geter-Pataky, head of the city’s Democratic Town Committee, have allegedly been charged with election fraud in connection with absentee ballots for the 2019 mayoral primary. Campaign workers Nilsa Heredia and Josephine Edmonds were also charged with election fraud and unlawfully possessing another person’s absentee ballot. Click here and here.

Good News: Victory for Free Speech: Stanford Shuts Down Censorship Operation 

The Stanford Internet Observatory, which led mass censorship efforts for the US government, has dismissed its leaders, Renée DiResta and Alex Stamos. Click here.

Question to My Boston-Based Readers: 
How Do You Feel About Your New Mayor? 

Boston’s 39-year-old Mayor, Michelle Wu, has stated publicly that one of her top priorities when she takes office is to make many crimes off-limits to prosecution. I doubt she will succeed in making everything on her list into crimes that won’t be prosecuted, but the list is pretty ambitious:

* Trespassing

* Shoplifting (including offenses that are essentially shoplifting but charged as larceny)

* Larceny under $250

* Disorderly conduct

* Disturbing the peace

* Receiving stolen property

* Minor driving offenses, including operating with a suspended or revoked license

* Breaking and entering – where it is into a vacant property or where it is for the purpose of sleeping or seeking refuge from the cold and there is no actual damage to property

* Wanton or malicious destruction of property

* Threats – excluding domestic violence

* Minor in possession of alcohol

* Drug possession

* Drug possession with intent to distribute

* A standalone resisting arrest charge – i.e., cases where a person is charged with resisting arrest and that is the only charge

* A resisting arrest charge combined with a charge that falls under the list of charges to decline to prosecute – e.g., resisting arrest charge combined only with a trespassing charge

Another Artwork Vandalized… This Time with a French Accent 

Vandalizing priceless artworks has been a several-years-long form of protest for climate activists. After molesting the masterpiece with paint or tomato soup, they glue themselves to the frame or to the wall beside it. Most of the time, they say nothing, revealing their message through the T-shirts they wear.

For the first several months of these stunts, museums in most European cities, including Paris, made no arrests, afraid that doing so might jeopardize their standing as Woke cultural institutions. But after about two dozen world treasures were damaged in this way, museum officials allowed law and order to resume.

As a museum lover and an art appreciator, I’ve always despised this form of protest. I imagined the protestors to be brain-dead, and most of them probably were. But in this particular case, the young woman takes a different approach, explaining what she is doing (in French).

It might be the cleverness of her particular abuse or it might be her accent, but I’m finding it difficult to think of her as brain-dead. Rather, I think she’s sort of cute.

Click here.

Overt and Outrageous Voter Fraud 

Add this to the examples I included in last week’s issue on voter fraud and election interference: 300,000 more votes than voters in Georgia!

If these numbers are wrong, please send me a link to show me data that proves it. If they are right, how is it possible that this isn’t front-page news?

If Necessary, Use Deadly Force? 

When JM, my ex-Navy Seal trainer told me about it, I thought it couldn’t possibly be true.

Trying to defeat your political opponent through “lawfare” is tacky enough for a first-world, wannabe democracy. (See what I said about this tactic in the May 17  issue.) But allowing (encouraging) deadly force against your political foe?

It turns out, it is mostly true.

The FBI, the Justice Department, and the Biden administration are all claiming that Attorney General Merrick Garland’s approval of the use of deadly force for the Aug. 8, 2022, raid on Mar-a-Lago was “standard operating procedure.” And if you google it, you’ll find plenty of stories from the mainstream media that supported that contention. They don’t discuss the fact that no such use of deadly force was used to seize Biden’s illegal possession of classified documents. Nor do they discuss how the FBI has acknowledged that some of the documents at Mar-a-Lago were put there by the FBI and that, after collecting them, they tampered with them before turning them over to Congress, after claiming they didn’t.

Now, as more details of the raid are becoming public, it’s looking more like this kind of authorization is “ordinary” only when they raid armed drug dealers, but it’s never been used for the seizing of documents of a public official, let alone a former president and a candidate for the next presidency.

You can see the range of reporting on this here, here, here, here and here.

Taking the Long View on Presidential Immunity 

A rare, un-politicized essay on a key question in several of Donald Trump’s many legal charges against him: Does a US president have immunity from criminal prosecution for any official acts taken while in office?

Read it here and tell me what you think.

From What River to What Sea?

In my May 9 Special Issue on “Antisemitism vs. Free Speech,” I included this short video of two anti-Israel protesters who weren’t quite sure what exactly they were protesting.

Just this morning, NF sent me another one that is even more hilarious (or disturbing).

The New Angst Over Grade Inflation

There are a few rules of life that anyone over 30 understands from experience. Among them is that making challenges easier for your children, your mentees, your employees, and your students will make them less capable of being successful after they’ve gone from your protective shield.

And yet, so many people that should know better continue to believe that lowering educational and other performance standards is a good thing because it will widen the circle of students that make it through school and emerge with diplomas.

The fact is, it is impossible to upgrade to a realm of equality for humanity in any respect. We humans are designed not just to be unequal because of the equipment we are supplied with at birth and the environment (culture) we grow up in, but also because each one of us develops his own point of comfort along the range of competence in any and every endeavor.

Lowering standards does not change the bell curve. At all. It only lowers the achievement levels of everyone on it, from top to bottom.

This article addresses the point with only a minimal understanding of what I’ve just said. But it nevertheless (and perhaps unwittingly) displays the impossibility of ever improving performance by lowering standards.

Big Win!

Good news for my family and all Americans building structures on land that they own. In the last several decades, state and local municipalities have begun to charge such landowners so-called “permitting fees” (cash fees and/or partial land compensation) for building on properties they may have owned for years. In the case in question, a homeowner was charged a permitting fee for an imagined future impact that was neither real nor even planned.

One thing that governments do well is to figure out ways of raising their budgets by inventing new fees and taxes. But this decision was 9 to 0 against that. Click here.

Debates That Work the Way They Are Supposed to Work

The Oxford Union debates have become increasingly popular in recent years because they require the debaters and the audience to follow strict codes of conduct. That discipline creates an actual “safe space” for participants to make their arguments and their rebuttals in a structured way that allows for both sides to fully air their views.

Click here to watch an example: Winston Marshall debating Nancy Pelosi on whether populism is a threat to democracy.

Brilliant. Scary. Crazy.

Meet Victoria Shi

She is a spokesperson for Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. But she’s not real. She’s AI-generated. In this clip, she introduces herself and explains how she was named, what her role is, and how future audiences can verify her identity.

What she doesn’t tell us is why she was created. And that, it seems to me, is obvious. What could be better in terms of presenting political positions, explaining them, and defending them than a being that is connected to AI? No mistakes. No misunderstandings. Everything programmed for maximum clarity and maximum rhetorical effect.

So, I believe there will be lots of “Victoria Shis” in all our lives in the future. The not-too-distant future. They will be speaking for governments – federal, state, and local. They will be representing non-profit groups and corporations, too. Eventually, they will be speaking for high profile individuals (e.g., movie stars, bestselling authors, and superstar athletes) that want a more “personal” connection to their fans.

We already know from dozens of experiments – not to mention billions of interactions with Siri and Alexa – that the general public will accept them. So there’s nothing to keep it from happening.

Welcome to a brave, new world!

Election Watch 

Do You Know Who Kristi Noem Is? 

She’s the good-looking governor of South Dakota, and has been a top contender for the Trump VP slot. And she’s just published a best-selling memoir – No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward.

I don’t read memoirs. But I do read reviews of memoirs. And I’m glad I read this one by Nellie Bowles in the May 3 issue of Free Press, because it contained this wonderful little vignette:

“In her memoir, [Noem] writes about her 14-month-old wirehaired pointer, Cricket.

“Cricket really annoyed her. She took Cricket out hunting, and Cricket was useless. ‘I hated that dog,’ she recalls. So when they got back from the not fun pheasant hunt, she took Cricket out back to a gravel pit and shot Cricket dead.

“Seemingly pleased with herself, she then went and found a particularly annoying goat, brought that one over to the gravel pit, and shot the goat dead too. She presents this as life on the farm.

“Now, I have family who farm, and honestly the main thing about their life is how much they love and care for animals. I swear to god they have ten stray cats they’re feeding, and if one of them bites it’s definitely your own fault.

“Farms are not special places where random wirehaired pointer puppy slaughter is approved. It’s not that squeamish city folk just don’t understand what it takes to maintain the heartland. The actual news from this is that ‘Trump insiders’ say Noem is definitely not the VP pick after this freaky little anecdote.”

What do you think?

Health Watch 

Guess What? The Sun IS Good for You – Even for Your Skin! 

Skin cancers are by far the most diagnosed cancers in the United States. And to prevent them, the public is constantly being told to avoid the sun.

I’ve written about this subject many times. In fact, about 20 years ago, a colleague and I – finding it impossible to believe that sunlight, which feels so good on the skin, can be deadly – investigated the scientific literature and published a report that, unfortunately, nobody paid attention to.

Now, decades later, an article by a doctor in Vigilant News corroborates many of the things we had discovered. A few examples:

* While the relatively benign skin cancers are caused by sun exposure, the ones responsible for most skin cancer deaths are due to a lack of sunlight.

* Sunlight is arguably the most important nutrient for the human body. Avoiding it doubles the rate of dying and significantly increases the risk of cancer.

You can read the entire Vigilant News article here.

Election Watch 

Trump’s “Show Trial” in Manhattan: An Embarrassment to the American Justice System? 

From Alex Berenson in the 4/24 issue of Unreported Truths:

Like Trump or dislike him (and as you know, I dislike him), he is neck-and-neck with Joe Biden in the 2024 Presidential election. Trying the leader of the opposition party on criminal charges is no small matter in a democracy. It should be reserved for very serious crimes – espionage, for example – with irrefutable evidence.

Read more here.

The End of Western Culture

Hamas, the KKK… and a Bunch of Pro-lifers?

Students for Life of America (SFLA) are weighing legal action after being placed on a database that tracks extremists in the US… and then “quietly” removed from it. “We have every reason to be concerned,” they said. Click here.

Conspiracy Watch 

Could This Be True? Plastic Recycling Is a Fraud?

As an instinctive contrarian, I’ve always had my doubts about Green politics. But I never doubted the wisdom of recycling – and, in particular, that plastic is something that should definitely be recycled.

So I was charged up to get this piece from GM, in which John Stossel explodes one of the biggest myths (lies?) about recycling plastic.

Trends in Wokeness 

Common Sense; Uncommon Candor 

Wesley Hunt and Matt Gaetz speak clearly on gender issues and parents’ rights. Click here.

Health Watch

The CDC Doesn’t Want You to Hear This Conversation 

Liberals call RFK Jr. a conspiracy theorist. Especially when he talks about vaccinations. Here, he is talking about a subject that the CDC and mainstream medicine consider an irresponsible falsehood. Take a listen and see what you think.

The Latest on the Israel-Hamas Front: 
A Proposal Dismissed. Another Suggested and Not Yet Rejected. Will There Ever Be a Two-State Solution?

Iranians at an anti-Israel rally in Tehran 

If there is one thing I’ve learned from researching the Israel-Arab conflict, it is that Arab terrorist groups have never shown any real interest in ending it. Furthermore, as I eventually realized, they have no real interest in a “two-state” solution.

For 70 years, the US and other nations have attempted to negotiate some sort of mutual peace pact. And each time, the Arabs have either rejected the deal outright or officially agreed to a cease-fire… only to use the cease-fire to rearm and attack Israel again.

It’s happened almost too many times to count.

And yet, the US once again finds itself in the same position: trying to solve this centuries-old problem by working with Israel and the Arabs as if both sides were serious about finding peace.

From the WSJ, April 16:

President Biden’s strategy of pressuring Israel and pleading with Hamas for a cease-fire and hostage deal has met one more dead end. Hamas rejected another offer over the weekend, countering with new demands designed to throw negotiations into disarray.

As State Department spokesman Matthew Miller explained, “Israel moved a significant way in submitting that proposal,” but Hamas rejected it. “It is Hamas right now that is the barrier and the obstacle to a cease-fire in Gaza.” The Times of Israel reports that Hamas rejected every clause of the proposal brokered by the US, Egypt, and Qatar.

Hamas now demands a six-week truce in which it releases no hostages while Israel stops fighting, withdraws from Gaza’s cities, and commits to a permanent cease-fire, a withdrawal from Gaza, and the return of all Palestinians (including Hamas) to northern Gaza. In other words, an Israeli surrender.

Since then, the Biden administration has smartly partnered with Saudi Arabia to try another tactic that is getting, for the moment at least, some hopeful reporting.

I’d like to think this new version of the Two-State Solution might work. But I doubt it. I’m expecting it to become, at best, an idea that will satisfy neither Israel or Hamas (or Iran and its proxies). But if the talks can continue for another six months, it may be enough to help Biden get reelected.

Read more here and here and here.

Denver’s New Plan for Caring for Asylum Seekers 

Migrants in Denver 

Denver is cutting $45 million from city agencies, including the police, to help fund a program to deal with a rise in its illegal immigrant population. That $45 million, plus another +/-$45 million in new spending, will be part of “providing a long-term sustainable solution” to the migrant problem, according to Denver Mayor Mike Johnston.

The $90 million Denver Asylum Seekers Program will help migrants secure housing and work authorization for up to six months after they apply for asylum. “Individuals arriving in Denver after April 10 will be provided a short-term stay at a congregate site along with assistance securing onward travel to another destination,” the mayor’s office said in a news release. “Newcomers who choose to remain in Denver may utilize available local and community support.”

Not surprisingly, most of the reporting on this has been positive, as most of the news agencies covering it lean toward the left. Click here and here and here for some examples.

My guess is that the program is going to be a massive failure. It will quickly blow itself up as the number of migrants looking for free health and human services will skyrocket… and I’m betting it will collapse under its own weight before 2025.