Jul
11
2024

The Bigger Problem's at the Other End of the Alimentary Canal, Doc

Sure, as Mr. Ramirez implies, there are big problems in his brain.

But today is the one-year anniversary of Charles C. W. Cooke's norm-breaking National Review headline: Joe Biden Is an Asshole.

There is a moment in Back to the Future Part III in which Marty McFly steps outside of the unfamiliar mores of the 19th-century American West and says of Buford Tannen, the man who has challenged him to a duel, “He’s an asshole!”

That line is just three words long, but it contains a universe within its delivery. McFly is incredulous. He is impatient. He has lost his desire to play along with the customs of the age. “We can all see this, right?” he seems to be asking the assembled crowd. We all know that Tannen’s an asshole?

I feel the same about President Joe Biden. He’s an asshole. Can we not all see it? For those who cannot conceive of truth without triangulation, I will freely stipulate that Donald Trump is an asshole, too — and that, in some ways, he’s an even worse one. But that does not let Biden off the hook. President or not, Biden is a decrepit, dishonest, unpleasant blowhard. He’s a nasty, corrupt, partisan fraud. He is, as Shakespeare had it, “a most notable coward, an infinite and endless liar, an hourly promise breaker, the owner of no one good quality.” Biden is twice as irritating as he believes himself to be, and half as intelligent into the bargain. From the moment he arrived on the scene — nearly 50 years ago, Lord help us — he has represented all that is wrong with our politics. A century hence, his name will be set into aspic and memorialized under “Hack.”

A year later, and the big difference is that Joe's personality flaws are biting Democrats in the rear. And before you can say "We gotta protect our phony baloney jobs here, gentlemen", the patently obvious fact that CCWC pointed out last year is now an acceptable talking point in the MSM and among more honest Democrats.

A couple articles from Issues & Insights bring us up to date on character/policy issues:

Fair? Probably not. But if you're a Democrat looking for talking points to urge Joe to take "more time with his family", there they are.

And, for the rest of us, the first article quotes an amusing array of independent minds singing off the same page of the hymnal: "Joe Biden is a Good Man".

Also for our amusement (or disgust, if you're so inclined): Robby Soave notes Biden's BFFs Knew the Cognitive Decline Was Real. Some powerful Democrat pols are jumping off the sinking ship, but…

But the most devastating defection for Biden might very well be George Clooney, who wrote an op-ed for The New York Times on Wednesday calling on the president to drop out. Clooney is not merely a celebrity supporter—he's actually a major fundraiser for Biden.

"Last month I co-hosted the single largest fund-raiser supporting any Democratic candidate ever, for President Biden's re-election," he writes. "I love Joe Biden. As a senator. As a vice president and as president. I consider him a friend, and I believe in him. Believe in his character. Believe in his morals. In the last four years, he's won many of the battles he's faced."

"But the one battle he cannot win is the fight against time."

Clooney is at least somewhat qualified to judge Biden's cognitive decline for himself; he recently saw Biden up close. His June 15th fundraiser for the president, which featured Jimmy Kimmel interviewing Biden and former President Barack Obama, brought in $28 million for the campaign. Former Obama advisors David Axelrod and Jon Favreau, who also attended the fundraiser, told CNN that absolutely everyone who interacted with Biden at the event came away deeply concerned.

But that deep concern? Not so much for the country. That kind of patriotic concern coulda/woulda/shoulda been expressed weeks ago.

No, this was a "oh oh, this is something that could make us lose if it got out" concern.

Gee, I wonder if Nina Jankowicz will be covering this disinformation effort?

And for the record, George Clooney was excellent in Gravity.

Also of note:

  • Nirvana: Gateway to Serfdom. George Will cheers while progressives moan: Whoops, the progressive road to nirvana ran into a Supreme Court detour.

    Should progressives be more alarmed by Donald Trump’s threat to the Constitution or by the Constitution’s threat to progressivism? For the answer, read on.

    Woodrow Wilson, a progressive and the first president to criticize the Founding, considered the Constitution’s essence — the separation of powers — an impediment to a modern necessity: encompassing government wielded by an unimpeded executive. Progressives’ dismay about two of the Supreme Court’s end-of-term rulings illustrates how far their criticism of the Constitution goes beyond Wilson’s.

    When a federal agency ordered four small fishing companies to pay the estimated $700-a-day cost (reducing their profits 20 percent) of on-board government inspectors, the companies sued, arguing that no statutory language explicitly authorizes the agency to impose this burden. The agency invoked Chevron deference, a court-created (in 1984) doctrine that says when Congress uses ambiguous legislative language, or is silent on a subject, a court reviewing an agency’s disputed action should defer to the agency, if its action is “reasonable.”

    Spoiler: the answer to the question posed by GFW in the first paragraph is "the latter".

  • Yes, he's irritating. But… Kat Rosenfield defends an actor that doesn't get a lot of love from conservatives: The Warped Case Against Alec Baldwin.

    Picture this: you’re hanging out at a Fourth of July barbecue when your friend hands you a stick of dynamite. Not real dynamite, obviously—that would be insane, and dangerous!—but a harmless facsimile, a piece of clay with a lil’ sparkler stuck in the end. “Go on, light it,” he says, and you do, laughing, before passing the fake dynamite to your friend, who also laughs.

    He’s still laughing when the dynamite—which is, as it turns out, real—explodes in his face.

    He’s still laughing when the dynamite—which is, as it turns out, real—explodes in his face.

    It’s a question that brings us to the trial of actor Alec Baldwin, which began today, nearly three years after he shot and killed a woman on a movie set outside Sante Fe. The charge is involuntary manslaughter, not murder; Baldwin, who fired the reproduction revolver that killed Rust’s cinematographer Halyna Hutchins, had been told the weapon wasn’t loaded. But through some combination of negligence and incompetence, there was one real bullet in the gun’s chamber.

    For the record, Mr. Baldwin was excellent in The Hunt for Red October.

  • News you can't use, at least not yet. I've been pretty blithe about looking at issues of free will and consciousness over the years. But here's an Ars Technica article that points to the strong possibility that in a short time we may be confronted with an issue with which we have no idea how to deal: Could AIs become conscious? Right now, we have no way to tell.

    Advances in artificial intelligence are making it increasingly difficult to distinguish between uniquely human behaviors and those that can be replicated by machines. Should artificial general intelligence (AGI) arrive in full force—artificial intelligence that surpasses human intelligence—the boundary between human and computer capabilities will diminish entirely.

    In recent months, a significant swath of journalistic bandwidth has been devoted to this potentially dystopian topic. If AGI machines develop the ability to consciously experience life, the moral and legal considerations we’ll need to give them will rapidly become unwieldy. They will have feelings to consider, thoughts to share, intrinsic desires, and perhaps fundamental rights as newly minted beings. On the other hand, if AI does not develop consciousness—and instead simply the capacity to out-think us in every conceivable situation—we might find ourselves subservient to a vastly superior yet sociopathic entity.

    Neither potential future feels all that cozy, and both require an answer to exceptionally mind-bending questions: What exactly is consciousness? And will it remain a biological trait, or could it ultimately be shared by the AGI devices we’ve created?

    If you're interested, I strongly recommend the excellent book The Weirdness of the World by Eric Schwitzgebel.