If I had seven months to go as a lawmaker, my sense of urgency would not come from wanting to hurt and backstab the guy who endorsed my opponent, or anyone else. Rather, my urgency would spring from a desire to do as much good for my constituents as possible before I leave.
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Friday on MS NOW's "Morning Joe," Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA) said the Trump administration's targeting of immigrants whose only crime is their presence in this country is harmful to the nation.
The post Padilla: Trump Targeting Illegal Immigrants ‘Harmful’ to Our Nation’s Interests appeared first on Breitbart.
The Maextro S800 wants very badly to be a Rolls-Royce.
At 18 feet long, painted two-tone, lined with soft leather, backed by Huawei and built by a thousand robots in Hefei, it has the size and the price tag of ambition. What it lacks is the one thing Rolls-Royce has spent a century perfecting: restraint.
A car that can park itself is a clever feat of engineering; most Rolls-Royce owners employ a driver for that.
The Maextro comes with a 40-inch screen, roughly 40 speakers, and a party trick that lets it park itself while you film it for social media. Rolls-Royce sells the absence of gimmicks. The Maextro sells gimmicks as a feature.
Treat what follows as a cultural diagnosis. The car is just a symptom of a nation rich in cash and short on class.
Motor trendI lived and worked in China for two years. The Maextro is the most expensive version of the kind of tacky automotive excess I saw every day on the streets of Shanghai and Chengdu.
A pearl-white BMW 7 Series gliding through traffic with a Pikachu decal the size of a dinner plate slapped on the rear door. A matte-black Porsche Cayenne with Hello Kitty stickers ringing the wheel wells. A Mercedes S-Class in a finish that violates several local optometry standards, with the owner's WeChat QR code printed on the trunk in case you wanted to add him.
People who make these choices have plenty of money. They want you to know it, immediately, from a great distance, with no possibility of misinterpretation.
The Maextro is that instinct scaled up and given a research and development budget.
Spirit of ExcessRolls-Royce understands something the Maextro does not, which is that genuine luxury operates on the principle of subtraction. The iconic Rolls-Royce Spirit of Ecstasy hood ornament is small. The grille is dignified. Everything about the car suggests that the owner has nothing left to prove, because the proving was done by his grandfather, his great-grandfather, or some ancestor who did something morally questionable in the 1700s and was richly rewarded. Old money and new money operate on very different frequencies
China, in fairness, has had perhaps 30 years to figure out what to do with serious wealth. Desperate poverty was the default for many Chinese until relatively recently. The first generation of Chinese billionaires grew up eating cabbage in winter and now own art collections that would make a Medici blush. There is no inherited playbook for this. There is no grandfather who can pull you aside and gently suggest that the diamond-encrusted Vertu phone might be a touch much. The cultural muscle memory for restrained wealth hasn’t had time to develop, because the wealth itself is still wet behind the ears.
RELATED: Who makes the Waymos flooding American streets? China.
David Paul Morris/Bloomberg/Getty Images
From Ming to blingSo you get the Maextro: a "luxury vehicle" that confuses features with refinement, that mistakes the bill of materials for taste. Forty speakers is a number a teenager picks. A 40-inch screen is what you install when you have never considered that a car's interior might benefit from looking less like a control room. A car that can park itself is a clever feat of engineering; most Rolls-Royce owners employ a driver for that. The Maextro is engineered to impress someone standing on the sidewalk. The Rolls-Royce is engineered to impress the person sitting inside it. These are different products serving different psychologies, and only one of them is luxury.
There is something comical about watching a nation with 5,000 years of refined aesthetic standards produce a flagship sedan that resembles a karaoke lounge on wheels. This is country that gave the world Song dynasty celadon and Ming furniture so understated it still looks modern.
The classical Chinese ideal was the scholar in the bamboo grove, the brushstroke that suggests rather than declares. Somewhere between the Cultural Revolution and the iPhone, that sensibility was misplaced. What replaced it is a culture where a man worth $200 million still feels the need to wrap his Bentley in something that announces itself from a block away, because somewhere in his lizard brain, he’s still the kid whose grandmother boiled tree bark during the famine.
The Maextro will sell. It will sell to people who want a Rolls-Royce and cannot quite stomach the price and to people who want a Rolls-Royce and find the actual Rolls-Royce insufficiently exciting. It will be photographed at the entrances of exclusive nightclubs and parked outside fancy restaurants where the valets know to leave it where everyone can see it. It will do everything its buyers want a car to do.
What it won't do is fool anyone who has ridden in the real thing. Taste is built, not bought. China has the money now. The wisdom to spend it well is a generation or two behind.
A Catholic company with an "extremely popular" product said it has decided turn away from using artificial intelligence, no matter the cost.
A well-known Catholic retailer called the Little Catholic Box said the company's decision to use AI received passionate opposition from its consumer base.
'AI can be a valuable tool that requires vigilance.'
The company took out a Facebook ad on Tuesday that discussed its extremely popular Saint Trading Cards and said they "were prototyped using AI."
After using AI-generated images for the cards, the company's leaders said the backlash inspired them to do more research and even reach out to real, human artists for their input.
However, what truly seemed to change the company's mind was words from the pope on AI and the direction of humanity in the face of emerging technologies.
Referring to the pope's May 15 encyclical entitled "Magnifica Humanitas," Little Catholic Box wrote that while "AI can be a valuable tool that requires vigilance" it can "never replace the human person."
From that point forward, the company decided not to use AI for its art and vowed to start commissioning original art from "human artists."
In the face of a longer timeline and higher costs, the leaders of the Catholic company — founded by parents of seven — said they believed the change would actually result in a better product and "stronger Catholic community overall."
RELATED: A real nation knows who is in and who is out
AI-generated art previously used by the Little Catholic Box. Image courtesy the Little Catholic Box
Pope Leo XIV's letter thoroughly discussed the rapid increase and digitalization of the world through AI and robotics. However, he left room for grace, even for AI, and said technology should not be considered, "in itself, as a force antagonistic to humanity."
"On the contrary, it has formed part of our history since the beginning as 'a profoundly human reality, linked to the autonomy and freedom of man,'" he added.
The pope stressed being "profoundly human" in an era of AI and called on Catholics to "safeguard the grandeur of humanity bestowed upon us."
"Let us not be afraid to get our hands dirty," Leo continued, "on the 'construction site' of our time."
This included placing the human person "at the center of our choices," while making the "rejected stones" of society the cornerstone, which he listed as including "the poor, the sick, the migrants, and the least among us."
RELATED: Brazil sends off its World Cup team in the most Catholic way possible
Human-created art now used by the Little Catholic Box. Image courtesy the Little Catholic Box
The Little Catholic Box said the company is still going to sell through its original set of AI works, but has now paid out human artist commissions for the new products.
"We feel really good about the direction these products are headed, but it honestly bothers us that Set 1 is still for sale," the company claimed.
In a comment to Blaze News, owner Greg Johnson said AI was initially used to generate images of the saints because the company "believed it was the fastest and cheapest way to bring them into existence with extremely limited resources."
Johnson said they immediately discovered that a large segment of their market was "adamantly opposed to the use of AI" for this purpose, and when further research was conducted into AI ethics, they "concluded that we could no longer use it."
"While our initial decision to use AI seemed to make sense at the time, we did not fully understand how its use would alienate a significant portion of our audience, some of whom we will never win back," he added.
At first, Johnson also explained, he did not fully understand the arguments against the use of AI around sacred images.
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A reported active shooter incident leaving at least one dead and others injured has turned into a police standoff in Midland, Texas.
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The Department of War on Friday released a third tranche of documents and videos on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), including multiple "orb" sightings over the northeastern United States in recent years.
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Some Democrats hate President Donald Trump's White House ballroom construction so much that they are in favor of tearing it down.
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The trial for a Bulgarian immigrant to Scotland took an unexpected turn when the judge made a ruling surrounding claims of racism.
Ilia Belov, a 22-year-old Bulgarian immigrant, was convicted on Thursday following a violent incident with a group of young girls that took place last September, resulting in one female, then 12 years old, being dubbed the "Scottish axe girl."
'The words of the children were eloquent to describe your behavior.'
The young lady and her family had said for months that she had acted in self-defense when she wielded an axe and a blade in order to protect herself and her friends from abusive migrants.
This week, the judge of Dundee Sheriff Court, Sheriff Timothy Niven-Smith, convicted Belov after seeing what was described as "proof beyond reasonable doubt."
As reported by the Irish News, Scottish axe girl, now 13, claimed Belov made sexual remarks to her as she and friends walked to a bus stop: "He kept saying, 'Come here sexy. I will show you how to have a good time,'" the girl recalled. She also said Belov shoved her to the ground while his sister, whom he called for help, arrived and attacked another girl.
The Bulgarian agreed that he both called his sister and shoved the girl, but only to protect his sister after allegedly seeing the young girl had a knife under her shirt. He also denied making sexual remarks and accused the girls of calling him a "f*****g migrant."
However, the judge was not having it.
On top of describing Belov's defense as "neither credible nor reliable," Niven-Smith called it a revision of the facts, especially in the face of video evidence that was shown to the court.
Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
Niven-Smith then completely dressed the Bulgarian down, saying that he found his testimony to be "wholly unconvincing and self-serving."
The judge called out inconsistencies in Belov's story, including that he had turned his back to the girl despite claiming he was fearful he would be attacked by her. Niven-Smith then blamed Belov's comments as the reason the whole ordeal started.
“I accept that as a result of the comments you made abuse was directed at you, which included swear words, including you being called a 'f*****g creep and an immigrant,'" the judge detailed.
Then, Niven-Smith delivered a striking rebuff of Belov's defense.
"The words of the children were eloquent to describe your behavior given your age and their respective ages," the judge stated. "Having made the sexual remarks to the children you then, enraged by the fact that they became angry and started shouting abuse at you, followed them."
Niven-Smith criticized Belov for calling his sister — who "immediately" attacked one of the girls on arrival — instead of calling the police or leaving the area.
RELATED: Police charge man and woman in connection with Scottish axe girl incident
NIKOLAY DOYCHINOV/AFP/Getty Images
Belov's claim that the young girl could be seen with a knife under her T-shirt was also rejected, with the judge saying he was "entirely satisfied" that the video footage showed the Bulgarian indeed assaulted the girl.
Belov was convicted of assault and behaving in a "threatening or abusive manner" toward four girls.
His sister, 20-year-old Nadjedzha Belova, pleaded guilty to one charge of assaulting a 13-year-old girl.
The siblings will be sentenced on August 5.
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SpaceX opened trading Friday at $150 per share under the ticker SPCX following the largest IPO in history, with shares quickly climbing above $160 and pushing the company's market capitalization beyond $2 trillion.
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A plane hit a radar pole at a Turkish airport on Thursday, frightening its 267 passengers as the aircraft taxied to its gate.
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