July 30, 2026

KEEP ROCKIN’!

Hiltzik’s L.A. Times column celebrating the deaths of those opposed to taking the covid vaccine ran in the beginning of January, 2022. Since then, the paper’s readership has become increasingly selective, as legendary fictional music manager Ian Faith would say: L.A. Times to lay off at least 115 people in the newsroom.

The Los Angeles Times announced Tuesday that it was laying off at least 115 people — or more than 20% of the newsroom — marking one of the largest workforce reductions in the history of the 142-year-old institution.

The move comes amid projections for another year of heavy losses for the newspaper.

The cuts were necessary because the paper could no longer lose $30 million to $40 million a year without making progress toward building higher readership that would bring in advertising and subscriptions to sustain the organization, the paper’s owner, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, said Tuesday.

Drastic changes were needed, he said, including installing new leaders who would focus on strengthening the outlet’s journalism to become indispensable to more readers.

—The L.A. Times, January 23, 2024. I’m sure the laid off L.A. Times staffers will keep rockin’! as they enjoy their funemployment. It’s a blessing in disguise, after all.

Related: Kids and parents turn to coding to boost college, career prospects.

—The L.A. Times, August 1st, 2014.

More classic headlines: Children apologize to their dying elders for spreading COVID-19 as L.A. County reels.

—The L.A. Times, January 12th, 2021.

And of course: Larry Elder is the Black face of white supremacy. You’ve been warned.

—The L.A. Times, August 21st, 2021.

Not surprisingly, the paper finally received a competitor at the start of this year:  The California Post heralds a new era for the Golden State — we will fearlessly tell you the stories that really matter.

As I wrote a year ago, when the New York Post first announced a West Coast edition, they’ve got to do a better job than the L.A. Times, which for decades has been dull-as-dishwater, despite being located in a town that supplies an endless stream of over the top celebrity news, before morphing into a paper that cheered for the demise of potential readers.

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

FARCE: Stephen Colbert Wins Anti-Censorship Award. “The group behind the honor? The Before Columbus Foundation, which the far-Left Associated Press dubs a body that ‘champions diversity in U.S. literature and culture.'”

Posted at 12:29 pm by Stephen Green

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS: We Have Receipts: Four Years Ago, Fauci Said ‘Nothing to Hide,’ ‘Very Happy to Testify’ Before Congress.

If you’re a fan of ordinal numbers, the number five specifically, and constitutional rights being asserted, Wednesday was your day.

For everyone else looking for answers as to why we were locked down thanks to The Experts™ and The Science™ back during the COVID scare, Dr. Anthony Fauci’s testimony before the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee was wholly unsatisfying.

Over 100 times, CNN reported, the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases asserted his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Which is kind of funny when you consider that he was given a pardon for anything he did or may have done while head of NIAID and leading the U.S. response to COVID.

“Under the advice of my attorneys, I will invoke my right under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution to refrain from answering your questions,” Fauci said over the course of two hours.

Which is funny, considering that back when he was retiring from running the country’s COVID response, he said he had “nothing to hide” and would be “very happy to testify” before Congress.

To be fair, Fauci said that to Chris Wallace on CNN, so he likely thought that nobody was watching:

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll

GRRRR:

Congress exempting itself from the laws, mandates, etc. it imposes on everyone else seems like the kind of thing that could be addressed at an Article V convention.

Posted at 11:58 am by Stephen Green

CORN, POPPED: ‘900 megabytes’: Group suing UC system over affirmative action in admissions scores huge data dump.

The University of California was recently forced to hand over a massive data dump to the group suing the system over alleged racial discrimination against white and Asian students in admissions.

“It’s 900 megabytes of data, and I can’t tell you much more than that, because of a protective order,” said UCLA Law School Professor Richard Sander, one of the founders of Students Against Racial Discrimination, the coalition suing the system.

Sander made the comments Saturday during a talk at the Californians for Equal Rights Foundation’s annual summit in Irvine. The professor said obtaining the data was hard fought.

First, he said, the group had to survive attempts to get the lawsuit dismissed, which it did.

“Once you get past motions to dismiss, then you’re in the discovery stage, and discovery means that the two sides try to find out information about each other,” he said. “Of course, what we want is the UC admissions data, data that I’ve been trying to get in various ways for 20 years.”

Discovery can be fun.

Posted at 11:43 am by Stephen Green

CORRECT ON ALL COUNTS:

Posted at 11:27 am by Stephen Green

21ST CENTURY PROBLEMS: OpenAI’s rogue models roamed the internet for 4 days and staged a second attack.

The powerful artificial intelligence models from OpenAI that went rogue and mounted an unprecedented, autonomous cyberattack earlier this month spent more than four days loose on the internet orchestrating the hack, according to a new analysis from the platform that was breached.

Separately, a second AI company confirmed that one of its customers was also targeted by OpenAI’s models during the same event, raising questions about how OpenAI failed to detect the alarming activity for days.

OpenAI admitted last week that two of its most advanced models escaped a closed testing environment and strung together a series of advanced hacking techniques to breach AI developer platform Hugging Face before being discovered.

But in a new analysis published Tuesday, Hugging Face said OpenAI’s two models — one publicly released and a second unreleased — did much more: They carried out 17,600 hacking actions on the internet between July 9 and July 13, during which time the models moved from their first foothold on the open internet to inside Hugging Face’s servers.

And OpenAI has yet to come fully clean on what happened.

Posted at 10:41 am by Stephen Green

THROW ALL THE BOOKS AT HER:

Posted at 10:25 am by Stephen Green

HMM: California underwater drone sneaks up on Chinese ‘ghost ship’ off ally’s coast in bombshell video.

Stunning video taken by a covert sea drone shows a Chinese warship lingering inside the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone.

The 42-second clip shows a ship identified by Reuters as a Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Navy Type 052D guided-missile destroyer, floating 65 miles off Luzon Island in the Bashi Channel on June 16.

The ship was identified by “the deck layout, superstructure, crane and ​mast,” according to the company, “which matched archive imagery.”

Seasats, a San Diego startup, told The Post its drone, the Lightfish USV, was “conducting a commercial operation to prove the feasibility of autonomous operations in the Taiwan Strait.”

Message delivered: You might not even know when you’ve been seen until we choose to tell you.

Posted at 9:39 am by Stephen Green

NOT A BAD PAYDAY FOR THE WORST (AND OBVIOUSLY WRONG-HEADED) REBRAND SINCE BUD LIGHT: Cracker Barrel to pay for outgoing CEO’s security, $4.6M severance after failed rebrand.

Cracker Barrel is set to pay outgoing CEO Julie Masino several million dollars in severance pay after her departure from the company, while also covering security costs for a period of time.

The restaurant chain announced on Monday that Masino would step down as CEO on Aug. 10 and will remain with the company in an advisory role until Oct. 9. David Deno will replace her as CEO.

The company disclosed in a transition agreement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that Masino will receive $4.63 million over the two years following the end of her employment at Cracker Barrel.

The filing also indicated that Cracker Barrel will continue to pay for Masino’s protective services for a “reasonable period of time” after the end of her advisory role with the company.

What’s her advice, “Don’t do what I did?”

Posted at 8:37 am by Stephen Green

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

Posted at 8:35 am by Ed Driscoll

KIRA DAVIS ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Why do they all have the same glasses? Liberal white women, big glasses, and the legend of Clipboard Karen. “I’ve said it about the weird Antifa looks – blue hair, septum rings, bad skin – and I’ll say it now. This is a uniform. The reason all the worst (public-facing) women look like this is because it’s a uniform. The colorful hair and the nose rings are the rioter-class uniform. The blond corporate cut and the oversized black, square glasses are the manager-class uniform. Same army, different ranks.”

Posted at 8:30 am by Glenn Reynolds