December 21, 2024

MAKE MONEY WHILE YOU SLEEP, by having an AI Influencer post content on social media. “Your influencer will do it by themselves while you’re not around – chatting and selling exclusive content, so you don’t have to.”

Have I mentioned that the 21st Century isn’t turning out as I’d hoped? In a few years, of course, people will have their personal AIs skimming social media and giving them a summmary, meaning that it will mostly be bots talking to bots.

Posted at 9:18 am by Glenn Reynolds

YEP:

Posted at 8:45 am by Glenn Reynolds

STANDARDS:

Posted at 8:30 am by Glenn Reynolds

PAGING DR. MILLEI: Currency Tailspin Forces Brazil’s Leader to Do the Unthinkable: Cut Spending: Brazil’s currency plunges to lowest level in 30 years after breakneck spending on pensions and social services.

For months, Brazilian leaders have thrown almost everything they have in an effort to stop the country’s currency from a precipitous yearlong plunge. But nothing had worked, including hiking its benchmark interest rate above 12%.

Now, as the Brazilian currency, the real, slipped in recent days to its lowest level against the dollar since its introduction in 1994, lawmakers rushed to do something that’s anathema to leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva: cut government spending.

Da Silva and his leftist allies in Congress have spent lavishly on pensions and social benefits since he defeated the far-right firebrand Jair Bolsonaro in the 2022 election. But worries over Brazil’s soaring deficit have torpedoed the currency of Latin America’s biggest economy, just as this country of more than 200 million faces the prospect of a trade battle with President-elect Donald Trump that could weaken the real further.

Just copy Millei and you’ll be fine. It’ll only hurt at first.

Posted at 8:00 am by Glenn Reynolds

EDITH WILSON’S CLOSEST ACCOMPLICES MAINTAIN THEIR OMERTÀ: Jacqui Heinrich Explains Why KJP Did Not Get 1 Q About WSJ’s Report on WH Hiding Biden’s Decline.

From the WSJ:

To adapt the White House around the needs of a diminished leader, they told visitors to keep meetings focused. Interactions with senior Democratic lawmakers and some cabinet members—including powerful secretaries such as Defense’s Lloyd Austin and Treasury’s Janet Yellen—were infrequent or grew less frequent. Some legislative leaders had a hard time getting the president’s ear at key moments, including ahead of the U.S.’s disastrous pullout from Afghanistan.

Senior advisers were often put into roles that some administration officials and lawmakers thought Biden should occupy, with people such as National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, senior counselor Steve Ricchetti and National Economic Council head Lael Brainard and her predecessor frequently in the position of being go-betweens for the president.

Press aides who compiled packages of news clips for Biden were told by senior staff to exclude negative stories about the president. The president wasn’t talking to his own pollsters as surveys showed him trailing in the 2024 race.

That last part might help explain why Biden seemed to think that most Americans thought he was actually doing a great job.

But guess what subject didn’t even arise at today’s White House briefing:

Of course Democratic Party operatives who cosplay as reporters aren’t going to ask KJP about the (p)resident’s decline, when their silence is a huge part of the story:

Meanwhile, Van Jones, kicked out of the Obama administration because he believed Republicans caused 9/11, learned his lesson about conspiracy theories so well, that he’s not remarkably incurious about who was in charge of the White House while his party was running it during the last four years:

Why, it’s as if: Walter Duranty Would Be Proud Of How The Press Covered For Biden.

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Censorship at Georgetown: A departmental journal editor says the quiet part out loud, and the professors applaud.

It’s rare to see such overt ideological censorship in print. Most academics know enough to couch their partisanship in comments about the quality of citations or the need for more data. But Click is just a symptom of the wider problem. She has grown up in a department and in an American history profession where outright ideological fixations are considered good form. That a white woman was scolding a brown man for having unchaste thoughts about colonialism was especially delicious. . . .

Rather than apologize to Raghavan, the Georgetown history department chair, Adam Rothman, circulated an email to all department members calling our exposure of the act of censorship “a matter of concern.” “The History Department is aware of this situation, and we are working with partners at Georgetown to ensure the safety of our students and maintain a culture of academic freedom, professionalism, and civility in our Department,” he wrote. The head of Raghavan’s program, Ananya Chakravarti, followed up with another email offering counseling to those traumatized by the exposure of the department’s intellectual rot and “what it means to pursue academic inquiry in the age of social media.”

Note that the impetus for the professors to act was not the evidence of censorship, which I had earlier shared with them in an email, but the panic of being caught with their pants down on X. In so responding, both professors completely missed the point. The “matter of concern” should be censorship and ideological monoculture at Georgetown. The only student whose safety is at risk is Raghavan, left out to dry by the faculty who should be supporting him. The lessons for academic inquiry in an age of social media is that it can no longer be rigged, censored, or just plain ignorant.

If, as I believe, this is an indicator of the state of freedom and intellectual diversity on American college campuses, then the new Trump administration cannot act fast enough to defund miscreants. Georgetown, which despite its Jesuit roots is today a Woke joke, might be chosen as the exemplar.

Use a broad brush.

Posted at 7:30 am by Glenn Reynolds

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Joel Kotkin: The American university is rotting from within.

This arrogance reflects decades of the sector’s rising power and influence. University became the ultimate passport into what Daniel Bell called the ‘knowledge class’ a half century ago. A National Journal survey of 250 top American public-sector decision-makers found that 40 per cent of them are Ivy League graduates. Looking at the question globally, David Rothkopf, author of Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making, compiled a list of more than six thousand members of what he calls the global ‘superclass’: leaders of corporations, banks and investment firms, governments, the military, the media and religious groups. Nearly a third attended one of 20 elite universities.

Also like their clerical ancestors, today’s academics tend to embrace a common ideology. By 2017, according to one oft-cited study, 60 per cent of the faculty identified as either far left or liberal compared with just 12 per cent as conservative or far right. In less than three decades, the ratio of liberal faculty to conservative faculty has more than doubled. As pollster Samuel Abrams and historian Amna Khalid note, all this has occurred just as the US itself became somewhat more conservative.

Ideologically homogenous universities have become something akin to indoctrination camps, where traditional Western values are trashed while woke ideology is promoted. Not surprisingly, the graduates of today’s universities are inclined to maintain rigid positions on various issues, confident of their own superior intelligence and perspicuity while being intolerant of other views. They also tend to be not particularly proud to be American. The kind of support professors gave to the war effort in the Second World War would be hard to imagine today.

How bad have things have gotten? This bad: Violent Anti-Semitism As a Campus Recruiting Tool. “That meant that in future years, already-radicalized students would seek to join these campuses, knowing they’d be well at home there. Which is exactly what appears to have happened with Hassan. Which means Hassan is unlikely to be much of an outlier. We can’t know how many people with violent designs will be caught while on campus, but we can be sure they know that America’s campuses—certain ones more than others—are the right destination for them.”

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll

December 20, 2024

YEAH, WHO COULD HAVE SEEN THIS COMING? Stunned Massachusetts educators, ADL call for MassCUE apology after ‘hateful’ anti-Israel and Holocaust rhetoric at conference.

MassCUE’s fall education tech conference — held in partnership with the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents at Gillette Stadium — apparently went off the rails during a panel on equity in education. That’s when the discussion reportedly delved into the current Middle East conflict in Israel and Gaza.

“Speakers leaned very heavily into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a very one-sided, dangerous rhetoric,” Uxbridge High School Principal Michael Rubin told the Herald.

That included references to “Israeli genocide” and “Israeli apartheid.”

A panelist also suggested that the teaching of the Holocaust has been one-sided, and “two perspectives needed to be taught,” recalled Rubin, whose grandparents survived the Holocaust, during which the Nazis killed 6 million Jews.

“It was jarring, unexpected, and unprofessional,” added Rubin, who’s also the president of his synagogue.

If it was unexpected, it’s only because you haven’t been paying attention. Our institutions are infested with garbage people.

Posted at 9:41 pm by Glenn Reynolds

OPEN THREAD: Never give up! Never surrender!

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

TO BE FAIR, IT’S EASY TO FORGET:

Posted at 7:48 pm by Glenn Reynolds

ALL THE BEST PEOPLE TOLD ME THIS NEVER HAPPENS:

Posted at 7:42 pm by Glenn Reynolds

NOT PERFECT, BUT MUCH IMPROVED:

Posted at 7:38 pm by Glenn Reynolds