Pro-Pence Super-PAC, 'Committed to America', Launches First 2024 Campaign Spot (VIDEO)

The background's here, "Pence allies launching super PAC to back former vice president’s expected 2024 candidacy."

Also, at MEDIAite, "Brutal Ad from Pro-Pence Super PAC Hits Trump Over Jan. 6, Abortion, Putin: ‘A Weak Man’."

'The new Oppenheimerfilm by Christopher Nolan features a nuclear explosion done without CGI...'

I'd like to see that!

At AoSHQ, movie talk, in particular, what's up with "Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One"?

See, "Is This Something?"

He's talking about this video, "The Biggest Stunt in Cinema History (Tom Cruise)."

Kari Lake is Amazing! (VIDEO)

On Twitter, folks are suggesting Ms. Lake is a much better public communicator than even Barack Obama. As Melissa Mackenzie writes, "She should be teaching classes to other Republicans. She's that good."

And on Fox News yesterday:

Paige Spirinac Gets Body-Shamed (VIDEO)

You wouldn't think so. There's obviously a ton of online hatred, but I expect of lot of these "body-shaming" attacks are rooted in pure jealousy or vicious envy.

WATCH:

A Nation in Decline': Trump Posts Video Hours After FBI Raided Mar-a-Lago

Care of Legal Insurrection, "Former President Donald Trump released a video in the style of a campaign ad on Truth Social hours after the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago."

He's running. Makes you nostalgic, even if you're sickened by January 6th (as I am). 

He's going to announce before the midterms, I'm sure of it. It's been spectulation, but now after the FBI's raid it's almost a certainty. Even GOP non-supporters are expressing their outrage over the tyannical measures the Biden administration's using to take out his main rivil for the presidency in 2024. This is what banana republics do, I must concede, as so many folks on Twitter have suggested ad nauseum.

WATCH:

The Frictionless Politics of the Social Technocracy

From Sultan Knish, at FrontPage Magazine, "The war between messy realities and smooth illusions may determine our future":

Pass a Tesla on the street or pick up an Apple Magic Mouse and you encounter the sleek simplified aesthetics that underlie the mindset of the new technocracy. Apple used Picasso's Bull, a set of drawings that reduce the animal to a stylized cubist abstraction, as the basis for its own minimalist aesthetic reductionism. It’s an aesthetic that meshes with Big Tech’s love of frictionless experiences that make complex processes appear deceptively simple.

Eliminating the extrusions on a car or a computer peripheral doesn’t actually make them any simpler to construct or to operate. It’s a marketing strategy that also shapes how people think of technology. Early computer kits were messy assemblies of wire and circuit boards. The early internet was a sprawling assortment of unregulated content. That was around the time that science fiction author William Gibson, a foremost promoter of Cyberpunk, coined the term "cyberspace". A generation later, Gibson even more radically envisioned the internet disappearing and being reduced to a few apps on the phone. And that is what happened.

A sizable percentage of the population now experiences the internet by flicking through platform apps like Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Google, YouTube, TikTok, Twitter and Amazon. People flocked to frictionless experiences that simplified the internet from a bewildering jungle to a few apps whose algorithms offered customized push content to provide a distraction for a few minutes or hours. And those platforms ended up in charge of our society and our culture.

Free speech was the first casualty of the simplified internet. Most people give it away for convenience. And they never missed it until suddenly they realized that they wanted to say or hear things that the new platforms no longer allowed. Big Tech wanted people to keep on clicking, but not in a way that disrupted their business model, their politics or culture.

The problem wasn’t just censorship. The nature of how people experienced the internet had been fundamentally altered from open to closed, from pull to push and from independent distribution to a few centralized hubs. Senate hearings and threats of Section 230 intervention wouldn’t turn back the clock on not just how the internet was run, but how people used the internet.

And how people used the internet was also how speech, culture, and politics now worked.

The frictionless internet was both a model and a microcosm of a frictionless society, one in which the complex processes of the political system were ‘simplified’ and people did what they were told without realizing that is what they were doing. Cass Sunstein's 'Nudge’ suggested using sensible “choice architecture" to "nudge" people to make the right decisions. The book by the future and former Obama official came out a few years after Time Magazine declared "You", as embodied by the social web, to be its "Person of the Year"

“You” turned out to be “Them”. Personalized recommendations were omnipresent nudges. Web 2.0 wasn’t empowering, it was profoundly disempowering. Moving from ‘pull’ to ‘push’ content turned netizens into passive feed consumers who were being distracted from their lack of agency with a bombardment of fake controversies and social media spawned nonsense. The two defining modes of Web 2.0, narcissism and trolling, were responses to the medium that also defined our society and our culture which is now one long battle between narcissists and trolls.

Early algorithms like Google’s PageRank that were bottom-up instead became top-down. The only true way to simplify everything was to rig it. And as the internet became everyday life, the difference between rigging the feed and rigging political systems became meaningless.

American elites envied the “frictionless democracies” of Europe where committees and stakeholders determined outcomes while allowing the public the illusion of participation. European elites appeared to synergistically merge media, political and corporate leadership into a smoothly running machine that amplified the right ideas and suppressed the wrong ones.

American politics was an old gas-guzzler with tail fins, fuzzy dice and smoke coming out of the hood while the elites wanted a sleek simplified electric car where all the dirty stuff happened out of sight and the public showed up on cue to vote the way that they were told.

Obama began the technocratic simplification of American politics. His brand was Picasso’s Bull applied to politics, a modernistic sketch, an abstraction, a set of delineations that simplified much, but offered nothing. Elites were impressed with how Obama simplified complicated issues with hollow aspirational platitudes. The more he spoke, the less he had to say, but the more moved the elites were by all the unspoken depths that they were sure lurked underneath.

“We are the ones we have been waiting for” was the embodiment of Web 2.0. Much like the “You” in YouTube, Obama and Big Tech were seizing power, not turning it over. The illusion of social participation was that power was being transferred to those who showed up instead of those running the system. And public frustration with the glass ceiling of the technocratic betrayal led to cultural backlashes on the internet and everything from Trump to Brexit.

Politics is meant to be ugly and messy by design. A too tidy politics has been rigged.

Frictionless politics eliminated debate and dissent. Or as Obama recently argued, "If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false, then by definition the marketplace of ideas doesn’t work. And by definition our democracy doesn’t work."

Democracy is based on a behind the scenes consensus, as he put it, "what to do about climate change" that has no room for someone who says, "This is a hoax that the liberals have cooked up." Political debate can’t extend to questioning premises, only pathways to outcomes. In a frictionless democracy, captive conservatives can offer “free market solutions” to global warming or racial inequality, but they can’t question whether these should be on the agenda.

The manufactured consensus in which people are allowed to differ on tactics not agenda items is the simplification of electoral politics that has taken hold in many first world countries. It is what leads people to think of different parties as flavors or variations on a theme. The illusion of choice fools many, but not all, especially as real problems take hold and cannot be addressed because they do not fall within the ideological premise of the artificial consensus.

Democracy that is all sleek lines, a mere hint of form, seeks to rid itself of the messy disagreements under the illusion that the elemental truth of a civilized society lies in eliminating the mess rather than embracing it. Europeans used to think this way, but Americans knew better. The Founding Fathers embraced the mess and made it the epicenter of our political experience. Radicals think that they are discrediting the Constitution when they delve into its messy history. To simplifiers who think like teenagers, the messy cannot be ideal and true.

Simplification suggests that life is simple. And that technology simplifies problems rather than complicates them. Thinking this way makes it all too easy to believe in preposterous abstractions like Modern Monetary Theory or Zero COVID. To simplify is to believe that following experts and relying on simple answers will create a natural unity like Obama’s right side of history. When political philosophies replaced religion, they outsourced Divinity to experts and to the invisible hands of whatever guiding force they believed governed all human affairs.

To deny it is political heresy or misinformation. The categorization of classes of speech as “misinformation” or “disinformation” merges politics and technocracy, reducing political dissent to a computer problem. Ideas become binary, either true or false, sorted based on expert opinion. Technology did not originate this familiar tyranny. but its aesthetics make it seem logical and rational. Riefenstahl and Eisenstein made the Nazis and Communists seem heroic figures struggling for the soul of man. Technosimplification is even more pernicious in the way that it suggests that the problems have been solved and all it takes is clearing away the excess.

Simplicity can be more dangerous than totalitarian grandiosity because the cult lies within. Its invisibility makes it more seductive. Totalitarians wanted to overwhelm society while the simplifiers underwhelm it. Less is more, society could stand to lose pounds, conveniences, and complexities. Individualism isn’t a political crime, it’s an inconvenience. Morality is a trend and the conscience surrenders to the algorithm. You will own nothing and be happy.

The minimalism that makes anti-aspirationalism seem aspirational also made anti-capitalism into capitalism. It tapped into eastern philosophy to envision a seamless future that would replace the industrial revolution with a unity of art, technology and culture. That way of looking at the world remains central to key Big Tech giants like Apple, Netflix, and Facebook. Its hodgepodge of zen and business jargon is often mocked, but still defines the machine.

The internet, like the rest of our society, is at war between its messy truths of human nature and the technology underneath and the sleek simple aesthetics that make abstract socioeconomic theories seem realizable with a smooth technocracy and better AI. Progress comes from embracing the messiness of human nature and technology, repression comes from smoothing it away. That war between messy realities and smooth illusions may determine our future.

 

Small Business Is America (VIDEO)

It's Carol Roth, author of The War on Small Business, for Prager University:

WATCH: What Do We Know About Diversity? DEI's Unknown Unknowns (With John McWhorter)

Here's the discussion at Glenn Loury's Substack, "What do we know about the effects of DEI initiatives? In one sense, we know quite a lot."

And at the video, these are great guys:

Jedediah Bila 'LIVE' (VIDEO)

On Twitter, I find myself agreeing with Ms. Jedediah more than anyone else, man or woman. She nails things every time. A national treasure.

Her new podcast, at Valuetainment, debuted June 8th.

Here's yesterday's show, on parenting and more.

WATCH:

Victor Davis Hanson Discusses New Book, The Dying Citizen (VIDEO)

His book's at Amazon, The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America.

And this discussion is excellent. He's so cool and rational about everything. 

WATCH:

What Is the Oldest Holiday People Still Celebrate Today?

Here's Dennis Prager, on Passover:

Paige Spirinac: Bengals or Rams?

She's an openly enthusiastic Pittsburgh Steelers fan. Her dad played football with the University of Pittsburgh's Panther football program, winning a national championship in 1976. But she's not a Californian --- grew up in Colorado, in fact, and lives in Arizona.

So who knows? Maybe later today we'll see her announcing her loyalties, but not yet, not yet. 

Best Rube Goldberg Contraption (VIDEO)

This is crazy!

When Sharks Turned Up at Their Beach, They Called in Drones

This is pretty cool, at NYT, "A goal of the SharkEye project is to one day produce automated “shark reports” for beachgoers to help them gauge levels of risk."

What's Her Face: 'We're Talking About the Transformation of Humanity Into a Godless Transhumanist Nighmare From an Orwellian Hell' (VIDEO)

I love this lady, lol.

Margaret Thatcher Restored Britain's Standing in the World (VIDEO)

It's Niall Ferguson, for Prager University:

Erasing America

It's James Robbins, at Prager University:



And check out his book, at Amazon, Erasing America: Losing Our Future by Destroying Our Past.

Bari Weiss: Anti-Semitism is a 'Thought Virus' (VIDEO)

Her book's at Amazon, Bari Weiss, How to Fight Anti-Semitism.

And with Bill Maher last night:

Lana Del Rey 'Doin' Time' (VIDEO)

My oldest son loves Lana Del Rey and he's seen her live on multiple occasions.

At Consequence of Sound:

It’s attack of the 50 foot Lana Del Rey in the “Doin’ Time” video: https://t.co/jp63uydxvY #DOINTIME pic.twitter.com/tkG4mQP8s1

— Consequence of Sound (@consequence) August 29, 2019

Dennis Prager Featured at the Los Angeles Times

Prager's interviewed at the piece, so, despite the radical left's mass media agenda, I was still taken aback at how harsh the piece treated mainstream conservative views. Mind-boggling sometimes.

See, "How a Los Angeles-based conservative became one of the internet’s biggest sensations."

.@latimes' attack on @prageru indicates how crucial the platform is in this climate. Lib MSM bashes @DennisPrager for making case for God-based moral system but deems @Google restricting access to their videos unnewsworthy making no mention in the article. https://t.co/OYG2UE862E pic.twitter.com/XMF2EBnvHB

— Adam Milstein (@AdamMilstein) August 26, 2019