Kamala Caves ... And Plays 'Let Me Speak' Card Anyway

NBC’s Seth Meyers concluded Tuesday’s “Closer Look” segment on Late Night by warning his audience not to get complacent when they see polls showing Kamala Harris leading Donald Trump. Introducing a clip of Harris, Meyers declared, “With all that said, the polls are neck and neck and Republicans have a steep, a very steep advantage, in our absurd electoral college system. So, the Harris campaign doesn't want anyone getting cocky or complacent.”     The clip showed Harris telling supporters, “It's gonna be a tight race to the very end. So, let's not pay too much attention to those polls. Because, as unions and labor knows best, we know what it's like to be the underdog. And we are the underdog in this race.” Meyers responded by hyping the clip and doing a Trump impression, “This is one of the many differences between the candidates. Harris says, 'Remember, we're the underdog, and Trump says, ‘If we lose, it's because they stole it. Oh, Maxine! I can't lose again. I already lost, Maxine!’” He then digressed into expressing how grateful he is that Joe Biden is no longer the nominee: Even the fact she has to insist she's the underdog tells you how much has changed. Before Biden dropped out, I'd wake up every morning at 5:45 in a cold sweat and refresh the New York Times election forecast until I saw at least one poll saying that Biden was within five points of Trump in Wisconsin so I could go about my day without grinding my teeth. And then he'd be down nine and I'd scream ‘[bleep]’ and I'd wake up my kids, and then, they'd say, ‘Daddy, what is wrong?’ And I'd say, ‘Biden's down nine.’ And then they'd scream ‘[bleep]’ and I don't know where they learn language like that. School, yeah, it's probably school. Getting back on track, Meyers wrapped up, “A lot has changed, and a lot can still change. But one thing seems certain, the election is gonna be close. And the pro-GOP bias of the electoral college makes it even closer. Trump's hiding out in the bubble of the right-wing media hoping that's enough.” It is ironic that Meyers frets Trump will claim the election was stolen while he himself attacks the very system as “absurd” when the number of democracies that choose their leader through a direct popular vote is much lower than he implies with such descriptions. It is also ironic that Meyers accuses Trump of hiding in a bubble when Harris’s media strategy has been to hide in a left-wing one. Here is a transcript for the September 4-taped show: NBC Late Night with Seth Meyers 9/5/2024 12:50 AM ET SETH MEYERS: With all that said, the polls are neck and neck and Republicans have a steep, a very steep advantage, in our absurd electoral college system. So, the Harris campaign doesn't want anyone getting cocky or complacent. KAMALA HARRIS: It's gonna be a tight race to the very end. So, let's not pay too much attention to those polls. Because, as unions and labor knows best, we know what it's like to be the underdog. And we are the underdog in this race. MEYERS: This is one of the many differences between the candidates. Harris says, ‘Remember, we're the underdog, and Trump says, [TRUMP IMPRESSION] "If we lose, it's because they stole it. Oh, Maxine! I can't lose again. I already lost, Maxine!"  [NORMAL VOICE] Even the fact she has to insist she's the underdog tells you how much has changed. Before Biden dropped out, I'd wake up every morning at 5:45 in a cold sweat and refresh the New York Times election forecast until I saw at least one poll saying that Biden was within five points of Trump in Wisconsin so I could go about my day without grinding my teeth.  And then he'd be down nine and I'd scream “[bleep]” and I'd wake up my kids, and then, they'd say, "Daddy, what is wrong?" And I'd say, "Biden's down nine." And then they'd scream “[bleep]” and I don't know where they learn language like that. School, yeah, it's probably school. A lot has changed, and a lot can still change. But one thing seems certain, the election is gonna be close. And the pro-GOP bias of the electoral college makes it even closer. Trump's hiding out in the bubble of the right-wing media hoping that's enough. Meanwhile, Joe Biden's just chilling in his basement, calling up his buddies and asking if they want to come over and – JD VANCE: Drink beer.

Scrolling through X today, past photos of Kamala Harris avoiding journalists’ questions by holding her phone to the side of her head while wearing Apple earbuds, I was painfully reminded why I have called her the first cyborg candidate and the first word-cloud candidate. Then I remembered the Apple Vision Pro — remember that? — and the semi-viral videos accompanying the meh product’s initial hype blurp: tech bros wearing the thing while driving a Cybertruck, walking through the mall grandiosely swiping around windows and apps that only they could see. A naif could be excused for mistaking Kamala for a practitioner of the memeably absurd “beast mode” style of tech-world device-maxxing. The whole point of the Kamala cult is to liberate citizens from any proper political education or contemplation altogether, unburdening them from what difficult details of self-governance have been. But no one would mistake Harris for a founder — not of a company, not of a nation, not even of a cult, despite the fandom being manufactured around her. A critic in the vein of Twain or Mencken might suggest that America has been running on cult leaders — the socioeconomic equivalent of an all vodka-Red Bull diet — for a dangerously long time. Today the secret is largely out that (as we covered at Return early this year) a lot of tech is really about talent-spotting cult leaders and “funding” them the way high-powered firms or family offices “fund” attorneys … so much so that today many techies and wannabe techies explicitly brand their operations as cults and themselves as leaders thereof. It can be left to the reader to contemplate just how irresistibly the dark worlds of perversity and spycraft mingle with the realm of cults and for just how long. On the other hand, few cults really work well as businesses, which is why, for the past quarter-century or so, the East Coast vector of the cult/workplace dynamic has run the opposite way from the West: The purpose of human resources is to turn corporations into cults, not the other way around. So there’s a certain logic to the tech industry taking the edge off the whole cult thing by refocusing on what a would-be cult leader could be that would actually be better for business. Enter founder mode. Legendary VC Paul Graham dropped one of his legendary blog essays a few days ago minting the founder mode meme. In sum, he maintains, “There are two different ways to run a company: founder mode and manager mode. Till now most people even in Silicon Valley have implicitly assumed that scaling a startup meant switching to manager mode. But we can infer the existence of another mode from the dismay of founders who've tried it, and the success of their attempts to escape from it.” Importantly, he continues, “There are as far as I know no books specifically about founder mode. Business schools don't know it exists. All we have so far are the experiments of individual founders who've been figuring it out for themselves. But now that we know what we're looking for, we can search for it. I hope in a few years founder mode will be as well understood as manager mode. We can already guess at some of the ways it will differ.” The details in the thesis are interesting, but still more interesting is the overall context, because until the 21st century, the character of the founder has been overwhelmingly more closely associated with politics than business. If the 1619 Project people and the borg they belong to hadn’t been so successful in nuking the Founding Fathers from the popular imagination, perhaps more Americans would still think of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, etc. than Jobs, Bezos, Musk, and so on. Maybe I’m a little ahead of the times in thinking we’re already there, but that’s certainly where we’re heading. Yet the techies leaning hard into founder mode are themselves increasingly cognizant of the way that the founding spirit (or whatnot) is increasingly absent from political life, especially at the top, no matter how symbolic Biden’s use of the White House Franklin Roosevelt portrait might be. The whole point of the Kamala cult is to liberate citizens from any proper political education or contemplation altogether, unburdening them from what difficult details of self-governance have been. “One cannot say it too often," wrote Tocqueville. "There is nothing more prolific in marvels than the art of being free; but there is nothing harder than the apprenticeship of freedom. It is not the same with despotism. Despotism often presents itself as the mender of all ills suffered; it is the support of good law, the sustainer of the oppressed, and the founder of order. Peoples fall asleep in the bosom of the temporary prosperity to which it gives birth; and when they awaken, they are miserable.” Politically speaking, the post-Trump years have been, perhaps above all, the years of men in tech awakening to the alarming reality that America needs to be re-established on its foundations in order to survive — and that both political parties have failed to produce an elected official capable of carrying out this refounding. This is something of a dilemma. Long before Silicon Valley arrived, the urge of American businessmen in America was to see politics as a kind of management task ancillary to the real work of leading a business. At the same time, however, with the emasculation and bureaucratization of the military, it’s hard to find any other executive talent pipeline into government besides business. The classical political theory of dictatorship is that decadent regimes must turn in the late game to men of iron, not men of money. However well intentioned or skilled any of us are in this knotty situation, we are all in fairly uncharted territory. That is a big reason why we’re hosed without focusing attention on finding the spiritual aspect. For a better analogy than late-game pagan Rome, we should turn to the foggy years of the early-game Middle Ages, when the pious duke of Aquitaine founded numerous monasteries but none more notable than 1,114 years ago this September 11, Cluny Abbey — a pillar of order in the fractured post-Roman world focused primarily on liturgy and perpetual prayer. More illustrative still, in a way that bears deep reflection, is another founding monastic, St. Benedict, who owed his monastic life to a little-known figure with lessons for us all on the character of founders in an age of new frontiers: St. Romanus, a hermit monk who set up the wandering Benedict with a habit and a home — a cave above a Tiber tributary where Benedict would live for years before finally going founder mode.

“Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” Judge Amit P. Mehta wrote last month in deciding the most consequential monopoly case so far this century. He was talking about Google’s illegal domination of online search — there’s a 90% chance you use Google every time you search, and the judge agreed that Google gained that control of the market through bullying and secret deals with rivals.But Mehta might as well have been talking about Google’s domination of online ads (where a separate antitrust trial is under way), online shopping, or any number of other areas of our digital lives.YouTube is now so big it has reportedly been willing to lose money in some markets while it waits for competitors to wither away.One Google property that hasn’t gotten enough attention from regulators — and deserves a closer look — is YouTube, the global leader in online video. Every day more than 100 million Americans scroll through it, and in your own home it’s available on phones, computers, streaming boxes, gaming consoles, and likely even on your TV itself.How did YouTube get so big so fast? Unfortunately, the answer appears to be “by shoving competitors out of the way, and putting the squeeze on consumers,” just as in so many other areas where Google operates.The Washington Post recently called YouTube “the most consequential technology in America” because it has evolved beyond a simple phone app. YouTube is now the world’s second-biggest search engine, trailing only Google. More people use it to listen to music than Spotify or the radio. Its CEO sees your living room as “YouTube’s next frontier,” and more viewers already watch YouTube on TVs than any other streaming service.In just seven years, YouTube’s subscription TV service has grown from nothing to become the third-largest in America, behind only Charter and Comcast. By 2026, it is on track to be No. 1 in subscription TV and expects to double again before reaching its peak.YouTube’s enormous ad business keeps 45 cents of every ad dollar, generating $31 billion in revenue last year. It serves ads on the web, through its apps, on streaming services, and on the 110 million Google TV sets and devices. For those who don’t like ads, 100 million subscribers pay up to $22.99 a month for an ad-free experience. Either way, YouTube profits.While being big isn’t illegal, YouTube’s path to dominance might be. It muscled out companies that tried to be part of its ecosystem. YouTube banned third-party ad software, forcing ad buyers to use its own tools. “They crushed our growth and ruined our product,” said Brian O’Kelley, former CEO of AppNexus. YouTube copied Machinima’s creator-friendly content network model and then pushed it off the platform. On the consumer side, YouTube has worked ceaselessly to kill ad blockers, raised subscription prices, extended ad breaks, expanded ads to more platforms, and is now testing ads that can’t be skipped.YouTube is now so big it has reportedly been willing to lose money in some markets while it waits for competitors to wither away. (“That’s kind of how monopolies roll,” O’Kelley said.) It leverages Google’s immense trove of data about how you use the internet, including data it collected without permission, to target ads better than any other company in the world. It’s moved into online shopping, taking on streaming video competitors like TikTok. And like Google itself, YouTube is leaning heavily into AI.YouTube has grown so big that it often ignores copyright, privacy, and child safety laws. AI models have reportedly used a million hours of YouTube videos to train without creators’ permission, violating YouTube’s own rules. In 2019, U.S. regulators fined Google $170 million for YouTube’s violations of children’s privacy laws. Despite growing viewership among children and teens, YouTube’s algorithm serves children as young as 9 years old hundreds of gun violence videos a month. While the company claims to delete thousands of channels an hour for rule violations, it still misses thousands more, and its poor enforcement leads to legitimate channels being wrongly removed.Other countries are already acting against YouTube. European Union antitrust regulators have investigated YouTube, and a new complaint accuses it of violating EU privacy laws. South Korean regulators have labeled the company “monopolistic” and are considering action. Meanwhile, U.S. regulators have not yet subjected YouTube to the scrutiny it deserves.Companies shouldn’t be allowed to use their market dominance to interfere with the free market, crush would-be competitors, and raise prices with impunity. But that seems to be exactly what Google is doing with YouTube, just as it has done in online search and online ads. It’s time for the U.S. Justice Department to give YouTube the same full investigative scrutiny it has appropriately applied to Google’s other monopolies.

As a big fan of Hades and roguelike games in general, Ravenswatch is one I’ve had my eye on for a while. While the roots of Passtech Games’ excellent Curse of the Dead Gods can still be seen, Ravenswatch steps more dramatically away from the Hades structure to offer a freeform open-world ARPG - but one that nevertheless retains all those delicious roguelike hooks. Ahead of its upcoming 1.0 launch in late September, I got hands-on with the game and tried the newest character Carmilla at Gamescom 2024, and I’m already eager to spend more time with her. Continue reading Roguelike ARPG Ravenswatch adds a fantastic new character for launch MORE FROM PCGAMESN: Best co-op games, Best RPG games, Best roguelike games

Is EA FC 25 coming to Game Pass? It’s another year and another EA FC soccer game installment is on the way. While, historically, the series has never launched on Microsoft’s Game Pass service, there’s hope every year that the gaming giant will somehow strike a deal with the developer-publisher before deadline day to bring EA FC to the carpet. The EA FC 25 release date is just around the corner, and this year’s game looks to be making the same sort of iterative tweaks as the sports games of yesteryear, albeit with a couple of new headline features. Unsurprisingly, then, there’s hope that the winds of change will also blow over to Game Pass, bringing EA FC 25 onto the service on day one for the first time. To find out the latest on EA FC 25 Game Pass, read on. Continue reading Is EA FC 25 coming to Game Pass? MORE FROM PCGAMESN: EA FC 25 release date, All EA FC 25 heroes, EA FC 25 custom tactics codes

What are the Cyberpunk 2077 system requirements? CD Projekt Red's massive RPG has come a long way since its rocky release. The system requirements for the game have also seen some change, but there's nothing to fear as long as you're gaming PC isn't more than a decade old. You won't need the best graphics card to run Cyberpunk 2077, but if you're aiming for those 4K ray tracing specs, your entire build will likely need an upgrade. The Phantom Liberty DLC introduced the requirements for an SSD Continue reading Cyberpunk 2077 system requirements MORE FROM PCGAMESN: Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty review, Best Cyberpunk 2077 mods, Buy Cyberpunk 2077

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As Black Myth: Wukong continues to captivate and entice gamers all over the globe to dive into this Journey to the West-inspired epic. More and more players are discovering that all the boss within this game are not made equal, and that could not be more true for the Scorpionlord.