It might be an unpopular minority viewpoint, but I do not personally love the Michigan Rag.

Trump Swearing-In Ceremony Moved Indoors Due to Cold Weather
January 17, 2025

□ [“Queen - If it was recorded in 50s"]

I don't know who's responsible for this, if it's some big companies funding cover versions or just people with access to the most up-to-date A.I. programming, but there's been a recent increase in cover songs and remakes of movies, deliberately changing the style.  For the most part it's about redoing music or movies in an older style, although the original material may have been done before the style being used.

I don't pay much attention to these but I will admit to having spent some time on them.  It really is fascinating how complete they are.  I mostly ignore the movie tracks, they're too long or just too uninteresting.  So far they haven't gotten into anything I might be genuinely interested in, but my interest in film-in-general is quite low.  I might see a Star Wars video but even then it might not look interesting.  Just today I saw someone had apparently remade the entire One True Trilogy in a 1950's style, I looked at about ten seconds of it and that was it.  Still, it's mindboggling that this is capable of being produced in full.

I'm trying to avoid listening to the remakes of music but there is more there that will grab me.  Queen is my favorite band so I saw this video and didn't hesitate.  It was... interesting.  It really does sound like a complete band playing with full instrumentation and extra vocals as needed.  Experts in music can probably hear that it's not a real band but it's not far off, which is almost scary to contemplate.

The real problem is that it's not an actual remake of the song.  The music has little to do with the original.  If there were no vocals, you wouldn't think of Queen in the slightest.  That goes for other tracks I've heard.  Someone has remade the Beatles' complete Rubber Soul and Revolver as albums from Motown.  The Beatles version was instantly catchy, these aren't.  But how much better does the A.I. need to be before it can actually remake them for real?

Someone else had done Revolver as an 80s hard rock album and that one was genuinely enjoyable.  "Yellow Submarine" stood out for quality, it probably sounded better than a lot of demos from bands that got signed to big companies.  It's probably a good thing that A.I. isn't publicly available (as far as I know) or I'd be seeing what I could do with it.

I have looked into some of the online versions to see what could be done with art, specifically comics.  Unfortunately I haven't seen a way to actually handle the layouts so the computer makes up its own, and the art is too detailed and unrealistic.  I would be ordering it to look like a given artist from before the 90s, that's not an option.  Yet.

Creatively there seems to be some great potential, but we said that about the internet a couple decades ago and look how that worked out.  If anything, this looks like a distraction, because a lot of people will be using A.I. against the rest of us and we're just trying to remake the Breakfast Club with certain porn stars.  Or, you know, whatever you might be into.

Self-Deportations Already Underway as Fear of What Trump Is About to Do Sets In
January 17, 2025

□ [“The Atlantic:  ‘Selfish’ Joe Biden ‘Destroyed His Legacy’ — ‘Failed Spectacularly’ at Saving Democracy"]

Leftists are starting to realize how bad they've made things for themselves.  We can really only see that with the media, and anecdotally from liberals we may associate with, but it's happening all across the board.  The media thinks they have their own respective company masters and, pretending for the sake of argument that's true, they're all reacting in different ways.

They are finally admitting that Biden has serious problems, but they're not acknowledging how far back those go.  He was never the brightest bulb on the, you know, the thingy where you plug in lights and push buttons and stuff, but he had clearly gotten worse in the four years after being veep.  I go back and forth on whether he really wanted to run for POTUS in that condition or if the party (and Jill) forced him to do it.  But then the elections were stolen and pretending to hold the highest office in the land made him quickly get worse.

And the media still isn't acknowledging that they covered it all up.  On his rare public appearances, it was obvious that he wasn't even capable of pretending to be competent.  Go look at videos of Joe from two or three decades ago, he still wasn't capable of being POTUS but he could at least present himself as a successful politician.  I'm worried that Trump has started going downhill too but he's still energetic and does enough public appearances that it would be easy to put together clips of whatever goofs he makes.

Biden's masters and pet media wouldn't let that happen to him.  They had to convince the peasants that everything was fine, so they knew what they were hiding.  And now that it's starting to come out, they have to find a way to justify themselves.  We saw this when Democrats were so happy last July when Biden finally dropped out of the race, but few of them could even admit it.  That's the mentality their side has to deal with and just repeating how wonderful everything is doesn't really help.  So now who do they have to turn to?

Australian Transgender Given Lenient Sentence For Sexually Abusing His 5-Year-Old Daughter After Court Considers “Transphobia”
January 16, 2025

Biden Issues Largest Single-Day Clemency in History, Shattering Old Record He Set One Month Ago
January 17, 2025

□ [“Local Police Are Refusing to Help Secure Trump’s Inauguration"]

They're not giving much explanation, so maybe they're lazy, maybe they hate Trump, maybe they can't be involved in federal affairs for some reason.  Or maybe something is expected to happen on Monday and they don't want to be on-site when it goes down.

Still unclear what, if anything, will happen.  This is the last real chance the elite have to take Trump out.  Not literally, but he'll have much more protection and power afterwards.  In a technical sense, I assume he has full Secret Service protection now, probably access to what he would need as POTUS.  Can't sign bills or order the military, stuff like that, but I would think he's essentially moved in.

Don't know if it's true because the media is so untrustworthy, but I've heard that China actually thought Trump would lose.  Maybe that's false, that they actually supported him.  Gotta admit, not sure how they could have lost if they had the last four years to reinforce their control.  But it does indicate that something is going to happen.  This isn't even close to over yet.

FBI Agent with Nose Ring Who Said New Orleans Terror Attack “Not a Terrorist Event” is Reassigned
January 17, 2025

That moment when you realize Biden has only a couple days left to pardon P. Diddy.20250117

□ [“1,500 Congressional Staffers Beg House and Senate Leadership for a Shortened Work Week"]

Another snapshot of how leftists work.  First of all, they're just lazy.  It's oh so hard to do the job they're hired for, so they need to do less of it but get paid just as much.  Of course they'll be entitled to raises and promotions too.  Second of all, it's a way to bring in more of their own kind, since you'll need to hire more employees to do the same amount of work.  They're demanding reinforcements who also believe in global warming, dozens of genders and DEI.

Third, notice the timing of this demand, they're doing it right before Trump takes over.  That's probably the main reason for this, because they know they'll be rejected which will (supposedly) give them more reasons to resist Trump and everybody who works for him.  Not really sure that will play out as they expect because they're the minority and the whole point of the job is to work for the guy who was elected by the majority.  The same thing applies to Congress.  If the ruling party wants to reduce government employees, they're just handing over another reason.

Unless there's an actual plan for resistance, and I'd give that a 50-50 chance, this is just another example of the left showing how idiotic their plans are.  How do they *ever* manage to seize power with this sort of approach?  We see that with the media having recent problems in court and finally admitting that things weren't perfect about the elections, but this is just these congressional staffers setting themselves up for a fall.

Trump Admin to Carry Out Large-Scale Immigration Raids in Chicago Next Week
January 17, 2025