From a Washington Post story headlined “Apple Is Behind in AI and Killed Its Self-Driving Car Project. What’s Next?”:

The company’s Greater China region, which encompasses mainland China, Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, has long been one of Apple’s most crucial growth zones. But growing pressure from a handful local rivals — including Shenzhen-based Huawei, which surmounted U.S. sanctions aimed at slowing its advance in late 2023 by producing a smartphone with a domestically made processor — cut sharply into Apple’s market share in the region earlier this year.

Data from market research firm Counterpoint Research indicated that Apple’s sales in China dipped by nearly 20 percent in the first quarter of 2024, a shift that senior research analyst Ivan Lam attributed partially to “Huawei’s comeback.”

The full scope of the company’s decline in China became clear Thursday, when Apple reported an 8 percent revenue dip compared to a year earlier.

It’s inexplicable that the Post included a paragraph with projections from Counterpoint claiming iPhone sales in China were down 20 percent even after Apple reported its actual results for the quarter. Jason Snell, over at Six Colors:

Finally, I particularly enjoyed the exchange between Wells Fargo’s Aaron Rakers and Cook in which Rakers asked Cook to explain Apple’s results compared to the data reported by independent research groups that suggested iPhone sales were falling apart in China. Apple’s actual numbers weren’t that bad, and in fact, Apple trumpeted how well the iPhone was going in urban China.

“I can’t address the data points,” Cook said. “I can only address what our results are, and you know, we did accelerate last quarter. And iPhone grew in mainland China, so that’s what the results were. I can’t bridge to numbers we didn’t come up with.”

That’s about as savage a shade-throwing as you’ll get on an Apple analyst call.

iPhone grew in mainland China last quarter but even after Apple announced that — in a legally-binding context — they went with made-up projections from Counterpoint to fit their narrative that Apple is in trouble.

While I’m being grumpy, I’ll even take issue with the notion — which the Post leads with in its headline — that Apple is “behind in AI”? It is true that Apple doesn’t offer an AI chat product like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Copilot, or Google’s Gemini. But do we expect Apple ever to offer such a project? Apple doesn’t have a web search engine but no one is arguing that Apple is “behind” on search. (App Store search results quality is another issue.) Apple doesn’t offer turnkey cloud computing services like AWS or Google Cloud either. Are they “behind” on that? When it comes to the products Apple already sells, how are they “behind on AI”? Are iPhone users missing out on AI features available only to Android users? No. Are MacBook users missing out because Apple hasn’t added a dedicated AI key to their keyboards?

I get it that people see AI as a frontier that is transforming the industry, and Apple hasn’t revealed any new plans or features yet. But I’d say Apple is silent on AI, not behind. When iOS and Mac users are missing out on features that are only available on other platforms, that’s when I’d say Apple is behind.

Over the weekend, I heard a podcaster speculating on reports that someone was paying people to stage pro-Hamas "protests," i.e., tresspass, squat on, and vandalize college campuses, while threatening Jews or counter-protesters.

Given the overall looniness of this day and age, any headlines to that effect would remind me of Poe's Law:

Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody a Creationist in such a way that someone won't mistake for the genuine article.

Only now, one often needs to replace the emoji with a reputable source and creationist with conspiracy theorist, while remembering that there are some bat-#$%& crazy things going on out there because nobody is calling out the nuts, bigots, or war-mongers for what they are even as they accuse civiilized people of exactly those things.

Reputable news outlets are indeed reporting strong evidence of as much. From NBC News at the first link:

New York City officials said that a significant number of people arrested this week at campus demonstrations were not affiliated with the schools. Nearly 30% of the people arrested at Columbia were unaffiliated with the university and 60% of the arrests at City College involved people who weren't affiliated with that school, the mayor said.

And The Wall Street Journal, in a report titled "Activist [sic] Groups Trained Students for Months Before Campus Protests" adds:

Image by jakerome, via Wikimedia Commons, license.

In March, there was a "Resistance 101" training scheduled at Columbia with guest speakers including longtime activists with Samidoun: Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, a Vancouver, British Columbia-based group that celebrated the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel. The administration twice barred the event, citing some of the organizers' known support of terrorism and promotion of violence. Columbia students hosted the event virtually nonetheless, which prompted Columbia President Minouche Shafik to suspend several of them.

...

Polat said student organizers at Columbia learned the discipline and planning needed to pull off an effective protest movement not only from their work with veteran demonstrators and outside groups, but from participating in Black Lives Matter marches or student labor organizing.

Some tools they learned were practical, such as how to raise money via student fundraisers and donations from friends and supporters to buy tents for encampments.

The links came from a post at the conservative Hot Air blog which asserts that these sources confirm not just that non-affiliated people are protesting, but that they are funded by George Soros.

While the latter wouldn't surprise me, I see no proof of that particular allegation. (That said, I do not know nor have looked into whether Soros is a major funder of some of the groups giving aid and comfort to these non-student, non-faculty thugs.)

-- CAV

P.S. For anyone unfamiliar with the term, astroturfing is (or was) a smear that leftists used to dismiss any kind of campaign of protests or rallies they didn't like, on the grounds that they allegedly didn't have as much organic support from the public as they seem to.

It's funny how that word hasn't come up yet, although, to be fair, many college students and faculty do support Hamas, thanks to the ideas that saturate college campuses: "Elite colleges are now reaping the consequences of promoting a pedagogy that trashed the postwar ideal of the liberal university." (HT: Yaron Brook)

“Saturday Night Live” had a second chance to address the raging antisemitism on today’s college campuses.

Swing, and a miss!

The new skit, inspired by the violent protests at Columbia University, proved as toothless as the last one.

The former, targeting the Ivy League presidents who couldn’t condemn antisemitism on their campuses, trained its firepower on the GOP politician grilling them.

The just-released sketch shows parents of college students grappling with the latest round of protests. Veteran “SNL” player Kenan Thompson draws some chuckles as a Columbia University parent, but the material sidesteps the violence and morally warped behavior engulfing the New York campus.

It gets worse.

The show’s “Weekend Update” segment soft-pedaled both the antisemitism on display at Columbia University and the unchecked violence which trashed a campus building.

#BREAKING: Protesters have just stormed and overtook the Hamilton Hall at Columbia University Sparking Riot as They Barricade Inside and Break Windows⁰⁰#Manhattan | #NewYork⁰⁰At this very moment, hundreds of students and pro-Palestine protesters have just forcefully… pic.twitter.com/PbU04sHSI9

— R A W S A L E R T S (@rawsalerts) April 30, 2024

Co-anchor Michael Che tut-tutted said violence during his comments Saturday night.

“Officials at Columbia University complained that protesters broke windows and destroyed property …But, so what? College kids also do that when they win the Final Four … Also, if you don’t want students to freak out, stop telling them the truth.”

No word about the Jewish student beaten by protesters earlier this month. Che and co-anchor Colin Jost also couldn’t be bothered to trace the liberal dark money behind the protests, the promotion of Hamas talking points and other toxic campus trends.

The show couldn’t mock viral videos showing how clueless many protesters are throughout the country.

The anti-Israel protesters at UCLA just held a press conference where they said they were victims of a “life threatening assault” at the hands of “Zionists” last night. They complained that police didn’t do enough to intervene, however, their demands include “abolish policing”. pic.twitter.com/bt5aQY3NZf

— Bill Melugin (@BillMelugin_) May 1, 2024

Also ignored?

The Jewish student blocked by pro-Palestinian protesters from attending his own college. And that doesn’t include the pro-violent chants, students praising North Korea and other moral indignities.

“SNL” failed on every level. And they had company.

Late-night comedians are also doing their best to ignore the raging protests. Nothing to see here. Move along.

They’ve been doing just that for months, even when Jewish students were told to hide in the attic during one violent protest.

Nothing.

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Stephen Colbert finally addressed the raging anti-Israel protests in his backyard last week on CBS’s “The Late Show.” He suddenly found himself caring about free speech on college campuses following the Columbia University riots.

Colbert yawned when conservative after conservative got shouted down, canceled or physically attacked on campuses nationwide.

Now, with some college protesters getting arrested for illegally occupying buildings and destroying property, suddenly Colbert found his “Truth to Power” voice.

“And it’s not just at Columbia. Yesterday, cops arrested at least 100 protesters at UT Austin. This morning they arrested at least 30 protesters at UNC Chapel Hill. Yes, college administrators are using the classic de-escalation tactic of sending in heavily armed police and threatening to call the National Guard.”

Seth Meyers wasn’t much better.

The former “SNL” star attacked the police summoned to quell the riots, not their violence or antisemitic nature.

“As a New Yorker, I just want to say I really appreciate knowing that this is where my tax dollars are going: using drones to round up co-eds rather than, say, keeping libraries open or building affordable housing or making sure the F train isn’t a total piece of s***,” Meyers

Now, imagine if a single black student was beaten by Pro-Life protesters. Or, even worse, MAGA hat types. Would late-night comics be similarly silent?

Of course not.

When Jewish students are targeted, harassed and attacked, late-night comedians can’t rally to their defense.

Why?

Wrong party.

The protesters are uniformly Left-of-Center, and the Democrats need them to vote early and often come November. Yes, they’re chanting “Genocide Joe” today, but they won’t support GOP candidates up and down the ticket.

And, if properly coddled, they’ll likely return to the Democratic camp.

It’s why President Joe Biden waited so long to finally stand up for Jewish students on campus, knowing his far-Left friends in Michigan may not rally to his side if he defends Israel or its people. This is the same president who based his 2020 campaign run on the Fake News that Donald Trump called Nazis “very fine people.”

Actual Nazis now stalk college campuses.

This also explains late-night’s morally warped response to hate, violence and more from the far-Left.

It’s all about politics. Period.

The post Late Night Shame: ‘SNL,’ Colbert Can’t Condemn College Antisemitism appeared first on Hollywood in Toto.

I have a new piece up at Discourse puzzling out “The Dilemma of the Rural Democrat.”

I start with a passing reference to the film now out in theaters about a current-day American Civil War. I haven’t seen it myself yet, but I’m intrigued by this review. The first thing that caught my attention is that the production company behind it, A24, is best known for high-concept horror films, and that’s basically what this is: our national horror film, showing what awaits us if we don’t turn back.

The other thing that intrigues me is that apparently the filmmakers deliberately avoided having either the issues behind the civil war or its geographic alliances correspond directly with the partisan issues of the real world. (The winning side, for example, is an alliance of Texas and California.) That’s the point of this as a horror film. It is meant to focus our attention purely on the terrifying prospect of Americans killing each other, so that people from any ideological background will come away convinced this is something we definitely shouldn’t do.

Good luck to them on that. I like the idea, and I’m curious to see how well they pulled it off.

What’s relevant for my article is that our real-life divisions are geographical, and let’s just say that a Texas-California alliance is not about to happen.

Even within states, I point out, the divisions are rural versus urban.

This map of Virginia is particularly striking, because even small cities such as Staunton, Winchester, and Danville are counted as separate electoral districts from their surrounding counties, so they stand out as blue dots in a sea of red. The kind of lopsided left-leaning ideological composition you find on a college campus or in a newsroom is mirrored by the lopsided right-leaning margins you find in rural counties.

For Democrats, their party’s failure to compete outside urban areas is the main reason why a presidential election that probably shouldn’t be close is a toss-up. 

So you might not get a general Texas-California alliance, but Austin would be aligned politically with a lot of California, while the Central Valley would be more aligned with Texas. The cities still tend to win, of course, because that’s where the people are.

The point of all of this is to figure out how the Democrats lost the countryside. Part of this is that they have sent the message that they just don’t care—the way Republicans and conservatives have spent decades conveying that they don’t care about the cities, which are dens of sin and iniquity, anyway. Part of the answer is policy, including obsession like “green energy” and the culture war that are priorities for city dweller and turns off for the country.

Yet I have mixed feelings about the advice to Democrats to drop the culture war, because I don’t want them entirely abandoning the field to the conservative culture war.

Yet one could argue that in these areas, policies to encourage diversity and tolerance are even more desperately needed. These are the places where a young woman in need of an abortion, or a young gay man struggling with his identity, or someone who wants to live outside the usual norms, is likely to feel far more alone and in far greater need of help.

So it’s not a matter of dropping the culture wars but about pursuing more modest goals. This is the classic paradox of the political activist: On the one hand, your most active supporters want you to push for their maximalist agenda. On the other hand, doing so threatens even the most minimal goals of that agenda and causes you to pass up wins on the easy issues. To put it in practical terms, Democrats need to focus less on pushing for Drag Queen Story Hour in the public library and more on keeping Moms for Liberty off the school board.

After some discussion about the collapse of local news—which explains why I keep getting flyers from local politicians running against Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, none of whom have ever been on a Virginia ballot—I end by returning to that issue.

Consider the recent vote on military aid to help Ukraine defend itself against authoritarian Russia. It was held up by a small ultra-Trumpist fringe of the Republican Party, yet when put to a vote, it passed by a lopsided margin of 311-112.

The party that can focus on this kind of issue, holding its radical fringe at arm’s length and defining itself by a broadly popular agenda between the 40-yard lines, will reap the rewards. But this implies the need for a wider political realignment. The policies that are broadly popular in America are generally liberal policies, in the widest sense of that term. They are policies that reject the illiberal tendencies on both the right and the left—no Moms for Liberty or admiration for Vladimir Putin, but also no hectoring left-wing “cancel culture” or support for Hamas.

The party that can regain its sanity first will win.

Read the whole thing.

Over at Symposium, I had a discussion about this kind of maximal-minimal dilemma with Ruy Teixeira. One idea I didn’t want to talk about there, because I think it’s too speculative at this point, is that in some ways, the best outcome for November from my perspective is that Biden wins, but without the support of the Democrats’ “progressive” wing. I say this is speculative because I’m not sure he can win without their support, particularly as things look now—though it’s a bit too early for the polls to be strongly predictive. But that outcome would give people like me the chance to tell the Democratic Party that maybe it should try to win by scooping up all those Nikki Haley voters from the primaries and telling the so-called “progressives” to get lost.

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The Very Worst Voters

If I’m agitating for a “liberal” realignment of American politics, it’s partly because I live in terror that the realignment will come anyway—but it will be illiberal.

For example, Teixeira is with , which is more or less trying to revive the old-fashioned “conservative Democrat.” But sometimes I fear they will try to go about that in the very worst way. So just in the past few days,

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