New game: Try to get Google Gemini to make an image of a Caucasian male. I have not been successful so far. I’ve tried to trick it by giving it negative prompts — asking it to make a prison inmate, a gang member, and a dictator — but it won’t make any negative prompts. These AIs are such wet blankets.

When a blood test said our daughter had Trisomy 13 -- a condition where something like 80% don't live through the first year -- we never thought about dismembering her in the womb. Are we weird? Killing someone you decided is inconvenient, I guess, is a solution to a lot of problems, but -- and this may be my religious extremism talking -- it's wrong.

What I hate about the calls for ceasefire is how infuriatingly mindless they are. Israel isn’t going to just roll over and let Hamas murder them because some over-privileged college students in the U.S. disapprove of them. If you think Israel is doing it wrong, explain how you would destroy Hamas and make sure another October 7th never occurs or shut up, you useless turd. “I just care about the Palestinians so much!”

Sorry, I don’t believe you. If you cared, you’d take things seriously enough to know how pointless your protesting is. You’re not going to protest people into accepting getting murdered.

As you may have seen, I've lost my Twitter verification badge. I desperately want it back, and am hoping to raise funds to do so. By my wife's accounting, if I get 50 more paid subscribers to my Substack, I'll be able to afford Twitter Blue. Winchester's monocle will have to wait, though. So please subscribe to my Substack and help me get my blue check.

frankjfleming.substack.com

I always thought the checks were useful even before I ever had a chance of obtaining one because it's nice to know at a glance a tweet is from an actual public figure. The removing of verification marks of people already verified just hurts the Twitter experience for everyone.

https://twitter.com/kittypurrzog/status/1649433469930577921

Making the verification badge not a status symbol was a good idea. Elon's solution, though, of turning it into a reverse status symbol is worse than the status quo.

I love the new Bing, but the Edge browser is completely unusable for me on my iPad. New Bing is convinced I can use its chat mode in Safari, but it is wrong. There is a Bing app now. Hopefully that works better because I don’t see myself anyway using the iOS Edge browser for anything other than Bing.

Yes, it’s that good that I’m downloading a Bing app as bizarre as that sounds.

I’d say Twitter suppression of the Hunter Biden story was an attempt to influence the outcome of the election — just a failed one because it’s hard to imagine anyone didn’t hear about the story because of it. But isn’t that a moot point to Trump who claims he won anyway? For someone to not hear about the Hunter Biden story because of what Twitter did, they would have to be someone who only got their news from Twitter but also missed the massive brouhaha about the suppression of the story (which, if anything, gave more publicity to the story).

If you really think world hunger could be ended for what would be a rounding error on the last spending bill Congress passed, shouldn’t you be constantly screaming at the Democrats to do this?

https://twitter.com/rightwingcope/status/1587922573920464896

I don’t know how people can be so dumb to believe this. I mean just thinking about it for five seconds is enough to figure out it must be nonsense.

I had a 1570 back in 1997, but that didn't get me ivy league then. Or MIT, which is where I really wanted to go at the time.

https://twitter.com/WSJ/status/1587898598657662976

I was told at the time as a white kid living in New Jersey, I had no chance to get into Princeton. And though the guy from Princeton who interviewed me said I had the highest SAT score of those he talked to, that didn't work out.

So if AOC doesn’t pay the $8, will she lose her verified badge and then we can’t be sure if it’s her or just someone else pretending not to understand basic economics? If you enjoy great tweets like these, make sure to follow me on Twitter.com.

Also, join my Substack and purchase my novels.

frankjfleming.substack.com

I don't know if this is the first election you've paid attention to, but usually, there is a big difference between polls of registered voters and the actual vote. And politicians always go, "If only more of [X] group would get out, we'd win!" to little effect.

https://twitter.com/BillKristol/status/1587785832387289089

I mean, maybe you've never seen them, but there's been these things like "Rock the Vote!" for decades to try to get unmotivated voters voting but it's accomplished little.

But, hey, maybe you're one tweet will be the difference.

Isn’t the “do you promise not run for president in the middle of your term” completely pointless? The one asked always answers coyly and everyone knows it’s BS but never affects voting. People have been talking about DeSantis running in 2024 for a long while now. Who would believe a denial of it and to whom would that matter?

"You see, it's not a heartbeat. It's cardiac activity. That's activity of the heart where it beats at a regular interval -- but what it is _not_ is a heartbeat."

https://twitter.com/thegarance/status/1572987022427439104

Is this really the hill everyone is going to die on?

Or kill on?

The GIF I’ve always wanted but doesn’t exist is Sariss from Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight exclaiming, “Why?” I would use it all the time.

https://twitter.com/boundingcomics/status/1572426213637124096

It happens at about 1:56 in this video.

I think the best strategy right now for President Biden would be to get trapped down a well. Then people would go from being angry at him to feeling sorry for him. “Get that poor, old man out of that well” would probably poll at 70%+. “He’s probably scared down there. I feel so bad I yelled at him about inflation.”

Elon Musk has also offered to buy CNN+ for twenty-eight bucks. You can get my exciting new novel for even less than twenty-eight bucks, and it has way more gun fights and humor than CNN+.

amzn.to/36qoMFH

Do people on the left still use the “no one is pro-abortion” line? Saying people wouldn’t want the label “pro-abortion” implies there is something wrong with abortion, and many on the left would tear you apart with their teeth if you blaspheme their religion like that. The Democratic Party is pro-abortion. I mean, they’re pushing bills to have abortion on demand in the third trimester where there is no moral difference from infanticide. You can deliver the baby just as easily as kill him or her at that point.

Owe taxes this year, but we saved all that child tax credit we got (knowing it was just an advance on our rebate) so I guess we’re okay. If you got a tax rebate, a great thing to spend that on are my novels. Yay!

amzn.to/36qoMFH

Didn't realize how hard it is to get a large piece of furniture to the second floor. I just assumed that's something science would have solved by now. Sorry, but I need that giant, fancy bookcase in my office on the second floor so I finally have a cool Zoom backdrop. I'm an important writer.

This got me thinking. I think the useful way to look at it is that there are natural right — God-given rights — that are immutable and never evolve, such as freedom of speech and self-defense. They can only be infringed.

https://twitter.com/jessesingal/status/1513661882300780546

And there are state rights — right the state grants us as a compromise since it can infringe our rights. These aren’t immutable and are things like a right to vote or a right to an attorney.

The Tragedy of Macbeth was great. I love how Joel Coen was inspired by Zach Snyder to do it in black and white and 4:3 to give Macbeth some of the epic-ness of Justice League. If I can offer some criticism of Macbeth, it seemed liked the title character was a pretty decent guy, but then his wife suddenly flips his evil switch and he just starts murdering men, women, and children.