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Google launched its new AI video model Veo 3 this week and people have already created incredibly impressive synthetic videos from it.
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Strategic Initiatives
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Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
- New York City progressives championed a bill to allow noncitizens to vote in municipal elections, which passed in December 2021.
- The law was met with celebration from advocates, but faced legal challenges due to its apparent violation of the state constitution.
- The law was declared illegal by New York State's highest court in March 2025, with judges at every level ruling it invalid.
- Despite appeals, the courts upheld the decision, leading to a muted response from advocates.
- Attention has shifted to new causes within the immigrant advocacy network, such as efforts to free Mahmoud Khalid and promoting deportation defense.
Permitting noncitizens to vote has been an obsessive concern for New York City progressives for almost 20 years. Efforts to extend voting rights in municipal elections to noncitizens had failed repeatedly—until December 9, 2021, when the city council extended the vote to all “legal residents,” to great acclaim from advocates and sponsors of the legislation.
The triumphant noise among progressives and the city’s expansive immigrant-rights nonprofit network was deafening. “So, we live in a democracy,” declared Council Member Carlina Rivera on the day of the vote, “but nearly one million New Yorkers with a green card or work authorization are not going to be able to vote in our local election. Well, that changes today!” A large crowd erupted in applause. Supporters hailed the bill’s passage as a historic moment—proof, they said, that democracy was finally living up to its ideals.
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New York State’s highest court declared the law illegal in March 2025. Debate on the bill from the beginning noted that it appeared to violate the state constitution, which holds that “[e]very citizen shall be entitled to vote at every election for all officers elected by the people and upon all questions submitted to the vote of the people provided that such citizen is eighteen years of age or over and shall have been a resident of this state, and of the county, city, or village for thirty days next preceding an election.” The language unmistakably limits the vote to “citizens.” Advocates either pretended not to notice this stipulation or made tendentious claims about its meaning.
That the law would be overturned seemed inevitable, even at the time of its passage. I asked then–City Council Speaker Corey Johnson—who had shepherded and celebrated the bill’s approval—whether he thought it would survive court challenges. He shrugged. “Who knows?” he said, though his tone clearly suggested, “Who cares?” The instant of victory, he meant, was more important than the actual prize. What progressives seek is the appearance of progress—for without the impression of momentum, they falter. Even if their immediate cause for action is an obvious nonstarter, the important thing is to rally the troops and wave the flag, if only to demonstrate their capacity to activate themselves.
As the case made its way through the courts, with judges at every level ruling the law invalid, activists rallied outside City Hall and other government buildings, insisting on the essential right of recent arrivals to vote in local elections. “Our city, our vote!” they chanted. “I don’t always go to Staten Island, but when I do it’s to protect our democracy,” Brooklyn Council Member Shahana Hanif posted after a Richmond County court issued an injunction blocking the law’s implementation in June 2022. “Whether they came here or were born here, Asian New Yorkers deserve a voice in our city!” said a representative of the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, standing in front of the State Supreme Court building in June 2023 as the city council advanced its first appeal of the ruling. That appeal failed in February 2024.
By the time of the city council’s second appeal in February 2025, the writing was on the wall. Advocates barely bothered to stage demonstrations in support of the law. A month later, six of the state’s seven highest court justices—most of them liberals—ruled that the New York Constitution clearly reserves the right to vote for citizens. The response from advocates, already reeling from the second Trump administration’s aggressive deportation agenda, was muted. Cesar Ruiz, associate counsel at LatinoJustice PRLDEF, called the ruling a “terrible setback for our immigrant communities who contribute so much to the well-being of the city.”
Attention has since shifted to the next cause. The New York Immigration Coalition, once a leading force behind the push for noncitizen voting, is now focused on staging demonstrations to free Mahmoud Khalid. Make the Road, another immigrant advocacy group, is promoting its “Deportation Defense Manual.” New York City’s immigrant advocacy machine—which receives tens of millions in taxpayer dollars annually—will keep running. There’s always a new crisis to rally around.
Seth Barron’s next book, Weaponized, will be published in November.
Photo: MDoculus / iStock Editorial / Getty Images Plus via Getty Images
Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
You hear that, everyone? The person who, based on the flags, identifies as a “Gay-Trans-Pirate-Canadian-Ukrainian-Palestinian” says you are all nuts.
Wed May 21 2025 07:50:22 GMT+0200 (Central European Summer Time)
Wed May 21 2025 07:50:22 GMT+0200 (Central European Summer Time)
Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
Too bad Robert Hur didn't do a prostate exam during his interview with Joe Biden too.
Yesterday, former president Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. said he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer that has metastasized to his bones. The overall five-year survival rate for such cancers is under 40 percent, according to the American Cancer Society.
In normal times, the only decent response would be sympathy for Biden and his family.
These are not normal times.
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(Whatever the circumstances, the truth matters. For under 20 cents a day.)
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Both the timing of Biden’s cancer announcement and the news itself raise more questions than they answer. Biden, his family, and his handlers cannot dodge them.
For Biden is not an ordinary 82-year-old man whose comfort after a devastating diagnosis is paramount. Less than a year ago, he was the president of the United States - and seeking another term. Had he won, the reins of the American nuclear arsenal would be in the hands of a sick and likely dying man.
The timing first. Yesterday’s statement came as Biden and the people around him face the sharpest scrutiny yet over their efforts to hide his mental decline as president.
On Friday, tapes leaked from Biden’s October 2023 interview with Robert Hur, the prosecutor who investigated Biden’s handling of classified documents, revealing Biden was nearly incoherent. Tomorrow, a new book about the coverup comes out. The excepts that have already been published show it is a massive exercise in score-settling from Democrats who stayed quiet before Biden’s disastrous debate performance last June exposed his incapacity to the world.
Biden and his wife recently tried to deflect the criticism with interviews claiming he remains mentally fit. Those did not go well. New Yorker editor David Remnick — the capo di tutti capi of the liberal media elite — said that Biden’s stumbling appearance on The View on May 8 had only reinforced the belief that “it would’ve been a bad idea for Joe Biden to risk being President into his mid-eighties.”
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(Joe and the Juicers!1)
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So yesterday’s announcement can fairly be seen as a desperate effort to change the subject, to not-so-subtly argue that the truth about Biden’s decline no longer matters. Let the aged king take one final bow and shuffle offstage as the curtain comes down.
Except Biden didn’t act alone.
And whatever happens to him, the people who aided — if not outright drove — the cover-up of his mental incapacity cannot be allowed to use his illness to avoid the fullest examination of the efforts to hide the truth from the American people.
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Then there is the news itself.
Prostate cancer is easy to diagnose, thanks to a simple blood test that measures levels of a hormone called prostate-specific antigen, or PSA. Any man2 with unusually high levels of PSA can then be examined for malignancies.
Prostate cancer is also usually very slow-growing. In fact, it is so easy to diagnose and slow-growing that doctors now counsel most men against getting a PSA. The Centers for Disease Control now recommends men over 70 not routinely get the test.
The reason is that the diagnosis can lead to a “medical cascade” of tests and treatments, some with serious side effects, for prostate cancers that men would otherwise never know they had. Only in the rare instances when prostate cancer metastasizes does its lethality explode.
But Joe Biden was not most men over 70. He had the world’s most important job, president of the United States. And he had a family history of aggressive cancers. Did his doctor really not give him PSAs before or during his presidency? If not, why not? If so, what did the tests show?
As Dr. Greg Murphy, a urologist and Republican member of Congress, wrote on X yesterday:
Prostate cancer is diagnosed by a blood test called prostate specific antigen, or PSA as well as rectal examination. Makes me wonder why someone running for President of the United States, especially someone who is elderly, did not have these examinations. Screening is critical.
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(Help me screen for the truth. For less than 20 cents a day.)
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Of course, Joe Biden might be telling the truth.
It is possible he happens to have a very rare and aggressive form of prostate cancer that developed quickly. It is also possible that for whatever reason his doctor decided not to give him either PSA tests or rectal examinations and a slow-growing and treatable cancer turned into a likely lethal malignancy.
The first would be terrible luck. The second would be medical malpractice. But though either is possible, neither seems at all likely.
What is likely is that the legacy media — which circled the wagons around Biden even after Robert Hur tried to tell the world the truth — will accuse anyone who asks questions about what really happened of being cruel to a sick old man.
As with Covid, the propaganda is not so much Orwellian in its ferocity and effort to intimidae as late-Soviet in its contempt for the intelligence of its audience. We have gone from kids will be fine without in-person schooling and mRNA is a miracle cure to a man with unlimited access to the world’s best medical care wound up with cancer in his bones before anyone noticed.
The good news is that if the rebellion on X is any guide, this effort at narrative control is already failing. People learned during Covid that if they let the media and public health establishment cow them into silence, they and their children would suffer.
They aren’t going to let the lies metastasize this time.
1
A reference to “Joe and the Juice,” an overpriced coffee-and-fruit-drinks chain headquartered in Copenhagen and coming soon to a hipster neighborhood near you.
2
Or transgender woman, since transgender women have prostates too!
Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
As announced at The Android Show: I/O Edition last week, Google is more widely rolling out the “Find Hub” update that rebrands “Find My Device.”
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Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
As previewed earlier this month, Google today released the NotebookLM app for Android ahead of I/O 2025.
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Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
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