OPEN THREAD: Monday, Monday.
October 14, 2024
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:
PROFESSOR CARRINGTON, CALL YOUR OFFICE: ‘Stunning was the word’: Astronauts snap amazing aurora photo from ISS during severe geomagnetic storm.
MY LATEST SUBSTACK ESSAY: Some Columbus Day Thoughts About Elon Musk: Big achievements and the hatred of the petty-minded.
As always, if you like these essays, please take out a paid subscription.
EMPLOYEE OF ABC NEWS DEMANDS MORE OF HER FELLOW DEMOCRATS WITH CHYRONS: Sunny Hostin Demands Media Do More to Drag Kamala Harris Over the Finish Line.
CRISES BY DESIGN: Inside America’s Fastest-Growing Criminal Enterprise: Sex Trafficking.
At the barbecue joint off Route 75 in Dallas, Lisa pulls out her phone to show me the dozen or so online platforms that traffickers and pimps use to sell girls for sex. The platforms—which include apps like TikTok, OnlyFans, and Facebook—are chockablock with ads of women, usually wearing lingerie, their faces covered to prevent anyone guessing their age. The sheer number of ads is astonishing. “Each week, we track over 12,000 ads for women in Houston, 2,600 in San Antonio, 3,500 in Austin, and 14,000 in Dallas,” says Lisa.
I ask her if the sex trafficking of migrant girls had increased since the Biden administration threw open the border, leading to 8 million migrants crossing the southern border since 2021. “Yes,” she says. “Nearly all of my sex-trafficking rings now are migrant girls. The ads exploded within the first three months of the border being open. We started noticing new sites and ads in Spanish. That was very few before. Then sites dedicated to Latino girls popped up everywhere.” Since the border opened, Lisa added, over 90 percent of the ads are for migrant girls.
“If I wanted to, I could order a girl within 15 minutes,” Lisa says. “It’s that easy.”
Martha Raddatz would say, wait until you get those numbers under five minutes before we declare it a crisis.
HAPPY COLUMBUS DAY FROM KAMALA! Trump campaign rips into Kamala Harris over resurfaced clip of her wanting to ‘cancel’ Columbus Day.
Former President Donald Trump‘s campaign berated Vice President Kamala Harris for trying to cancel Columbus Day, which is recognized as a federal holiday on Monday.
Old video clips of Harris promising to get rid of Columbus Day resurfaced on the holiday Monday as social media users reacted her controversial proposal.
Harris endorsed the idea of an effort by the federal government to change Columbus Day to ‘Indigenous Peoples’ Day’ in response to a question from an activist in a New Hampshire town hall in 2019.
‘Sure, sure. Yeah,’ Harris replied. ‘And why it matters is to your very point, we have to remember history … we have to remember our history, uncomfortable, to your point about truths, though it may make us.’
Harris applauded the effort to address the ‘vestiges of all of that harm.’
‘Count me in on support,’ she concluded.
As Vice President, Kamala Harris recognized Indigenous People’s Day during a speech to the National Congress of American Indians 78th Annual Convention in October 2021.
She pointed to the full ‘truth’ behind the ‘explorers’ who came to America from Europe.
‘Those explorers ushered in a wave of devastation for tribal nations perpetrating violence, stealing land and spreading disease,’ she said. ‘We must not shy away from this shameful past and we must shed light on it and do everything we can to address the impact of the past on native communities today.’
Harris has also pointedly issued statements on social media and from the White House recognizing Indigenous Peoples’ Day, but not Columbus Day.
The Trump campaign reacted to the clips by reminding voters that Harris was a ‘stereotypical leftist.’
“Stereotypical leftists” have a new reason to hate him even more: Christopher Columbus was secretly Jewish. DNA tests suggest explorer hid true identity due to rampant anti-Semitism across Europe.
UPDATE: So much for blaming resurfaced clips and tweets; Harris (or at least whoever writes her tweets) is sticking to her guns, still referring to “Indigenous People’s Day” on Columbus Day 2024.
Harris is already seen by much of the public as a shallow phony. These blatant acts of plagiarism fit perfectly within that narrative. Team Trump should see this report for what it is — a political gift they should exploit to the hilt.
Let me tell you something else… Look at how far Harris rose — attorney general of California, U.S. Senator, Vice President, and Democrat presidential nominee, without the corporate media discovering this. Think about that… Think about all the corporate media outlets out there that are supposed to be vetting candidates and competing for scoops… Think of the endless resources available to them: billions of dollars and tens of thousands of staffers… And yet, they either never bothered to vet Kamala’s book — or they did, discovered the plagiarism, and hid it from the public.
The media did zero vetting of Obama in 2008 (quite the opposite, of course), but he was running an actual change campaign against a by-then exhausted administration that had been in office for eight years, and whose veep chose not to run to succeed the president. But Obama (who had his own issues with plagiarism) had the rock star charisma for his composite character creation to easily get the job done in November. Kamala is having, by contrast, a much rougher go of it at the moment: The Kamala Harris plagiarism row is a disaster for her campaign.
IS THERE ANYTHING IT CAN’T DO? Drinking Caffeine May Reduce Alzheimer’s Clumps in The Brain, Study Finds. I remember when people acted like coffee was bad for you.
MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: America’s competence gap reveals a culture of failure — but there’s hope.
WEIRD THAT SHE’S NOT DOING BETTER IN THE POLLS:
Sounds a lot like the migrants crossing the border right now!
— BlueCollarPatriot🇺🇸 (@JustinSutliffe) October 14, 2024
The comeback is funny too. Columbus brought diversity to a continent in need of it. Cortez and Pizarro fought imperialists on behalf of those imperialists’ oppressed subjects. And wealth was redistributed.
HOW’S THAT SPACE PROGRAM COMING ALONG? Astounding New 3D Images Reveal Ancient Asteroid Crater Hidden Beneath Atlantic Ocean.
SO THAT’S WHY JOE BIDEN TAPPED KAMALA AS VEEP: Christopher Rufo on “Kamala Harris’s Plagiarism Problem. The vice president appears to have airlifted sections of her book, Smart on Crime.”
To her supporters, the vice president’s rhetorical flourishes represent the values of compassion and optimism. To her detractors, her reliance on platitudes and tautologies demonstrates her unfitness for the presidency.
But, as we have discovered in this exclusive report, another element appears to exist within Kamala Harris’s rhetorical universe: plagiarism.
At the beginning of Harris’s political career, in the run-up to her campaign to serve as California’s attorney general, she and co-author Joan O’C Hamilton published a small volume, entitled Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer. The book helped to establish her credibility on criminal-justice issues.
However, according to Stefan Weber, a famed Austrian “plagiarism hunter” who has taken down politicians in the German-speaking world, Harris’s book contains more than a dozen “vicious plagiarism fragments.” Some of the passages he highlighted appear to contain minor transgressions—reproducing small sections of text; insufficient paraphrasing—but others seem to reflect more serious infractions, similar in severity to those found in Harvard president Claudine Gay’s doctoral thesis. (Harris did not respond to a request for comment.)
No word yet if Neil Kinnock will be endorsing her, as he did Joe Biden.
Meanwhile, a well-known Republican is pouncing and/or seizing in response:
UPDATE: The New York Post called Hamilton after Rufo’s story broke, leading to this terse exchange:
“Oh gosh,” Harris’ ghostwriter told The Post over the phone shortly after the allegations were published.
“I haven’t seen anything,” she added. “I’m afraid I can’t talk to you right now, though, I’m in the middle of something. Let me go try to figure that out.”
I doubt the paper is waiting for a call back.
UPDATE (6:48 PM): I did the “pouncing and/or seizing” joke above about Vanz, but the New York Times actually does the meme for real about Rufo! Sad Trombone: The New York Times Is Not Handling the Kamala Harris Plagiarism News Well at All:
The Gray Lady’s then-ombudsman confirmed the paper’s leftist bias way back in 2004, but by employing the “conservative activist seizes” headline, it’s good to see the Times remind its readers of its ideology twenty years later. As well as reminding them that paper exists to protect Democratic Party candidates, not break actual news about them.
FORGOTTEN FACTS ABOUT THE LEBANESE ‘CIVIL WAR:’ The most basic of those forgotten facts is that it was not a civil war, it was a classic genocide conducted by Hezbollah against Lebanon’s historic Christian population. Richard Pollock has the gruesome facts from eyewitnesses and victims.
EASING INTO THE 21ST CENTURY: Tesla Cybercab Robotaxi First Ride: Surviving a Trip in Tesla’s First Self-Driving Car. We didn’t ask what to do if the Cybercab started veering off-course. But we didn’t need to. “Yet myriad questions remain about the Tesla Cybercab’s viability. If its abilities are founded on software similar to the Full Self Driving system we frequently use on surface streets and highways, that’s overtly sketchy if there’s indeed no way for a human to intervene should the need arise. Our Model Y’s Full Self Driving constantly makes decisions that range from careless to dangerously moronic. It forces us to stay vigilant and remain ready to catch it out when it, for example, enters an intersection as the light turns red and creates gridlock, or misreads a speed limit sign and aggressively decelerates in the middle of flowing freeway traffic.”
A NICE PROOF OF WHAT MOST PEOPLE SEEM TO GET IN THEIR GUT: Apple’s study proves that LLM-based AI models are flawed because they cannot reason.
The group has proposed a new benchmark, GSM-Symbolic, to help others measure the reasoning capabilities of various large language models (LLMs). Their initial testing reveals that slight changes in the wording of queries can result in significantly different answers, undermining the reliability of the models.
The group investigated the “fragility” of mathematical reasoning by adding contextual information to their queries that a human could understand, but which should not affect the fundamental mathematics of the solution. This resulted in varying answers, which shouldn’t happen.
“Specifically, the performance of all models declines [even] when only the numerical values in the question are altered in the GSM-Symbolic benchmark,” the group wrote in their report. “Furthermore, the fragility of mathematical reasoning in these models [demonstrates] that their performance significantly deteriorates as the number of clauses in a question increases.”
The study found that adding even a single sentence that appears to offer relevant information to a given math question can reduce the accuracy of the final answer by up to 65 percent. “There is just no way you can build reliable agents on this foundation, where changing a word or two in irrelevant ways or adding a few bit of irrelevant info can give you a different answer,” the study concluded.
An earlier example: “The faulty logic was supported by a previous study from 2019 which could reliably confuse AI models by asking a question about the age of two previous Super Bowl quarterbacks. By adding in background and related information about the games they played in, and a third person who was quarterback in another bowl game, the models produced incorrect answers.”
I had a similar experience last week, putting together Florida Man Friday. I asked ChatGPT to create an image that had to include the eye of a hurricane. On the second attempt, I left out the request to include the hurricane’s eye. Because on the first attempt, I got a hurricane full of eyes.
Cute — but not intelligent.
JIM TREACHER: Happy Anniversary to Hunter’s Laptop.
Four years ago today, my Twitter account was instantly suspended for posting the following picture:
That’s Hunter Biden. The photo came from the laptop he abandoned at a Delaware repair shop, less than five miles from his father’s house.
Vladimir Putin didn’t take that snapshot. He didn’t plant the laptop. It belonged to Hunter, who then abandoned it and lost legal custody of it because he’s a drug addict.
And yet when I posted that photo in October 2020, just weeks before the election, my Twitter account was instantly locked down.
I don’t mean within minutes, either. The instant I clicked the button to post that, I was locked out of my account.
Here’s the warning I received:
I had been censored. Lil’ ol’ me!
So I removed the tweet, under duress, to restore access to my account.
As it turned out, I was far from the only one. Anybody who shared any part of that news story — and it is a news story — got instantly locked down by Twitter. You couldn’t even share the URL of the original NY Post story. A complete blackout.
The Democrats wanted Trump out of the White House, and they thought this story would interfere with that. So they locked it down.
Exit quote: “Hunter’s laptop. COVID-19. ‘Climate change.’ Letting boys beat up girls in sports. No matter the issue, some very powerful Democrats want you to shut up about it. You can vote however you want, but you can’t make me complicit.”
THERE’S A HEADLINE I WASN’T EXPECTING: Boom! Stanley Kubrick’s Daughter Silences Angry Leftists Over Trump’s ‘Full Metal Jacket’ Campaign Ad.
THE ATLANTIC’S EDITOR-IN-CHIEF JEFFREY GOLDBERG WARNS NEWSROOM DECAY IS HOW ‘DEMOCRACY DECOMPOSES:’
We work very hard to produce only highest-quality journalism. Sometimes, we don’t hit the mark, but not for lack of trying. Our operating theory is so simple. The only way to get people to pay for your product is to make a great product, something they can’t find elsewhere. To do this, we have to have the best journalists. Readers become our subscribers when they realize that they will find illuminating and delightful stories, written by journalists at the very top of their game, on a regular basis.
How worried are you about the decline we are seeing transpire in many legacy newsrooms? And what effect will that have on society?
It’s awful. To look at cities that used to be served by newsrooms of 300, or 500 journalists, now reduced to virtually nothing, is terrible. This is the way democracy decomposes. We’re sleepwalking into an absolute disaster. Jefferson had it right almost 250 years ago when he said he’d rather have newspapers without a government than a government without newspapers.
I wasn’t expecting Jeffrey Goldberg of all people to be advocating for a massive reduction in the size of government, but I’m happy to see him advocating for America to return to its libertarian roots. However, “newsroom decay” (a phrase written by CNN alum Oliver Darcy in his headline, not Goldberg) happens in a variety of ways, not just in shrinking the quantity of the manpower inside of the newsroom.
Another leading cause are weak editors who let their young uber-woke, and very emotionally brittle staffers wag the dog, and that’s something that Goldberg knows quite a bit about. Two years before the New York Times and other publications began their Marxist struggle sessions (leading to last week’s freakout at CBS News over Tony Dokoupil performing journalism), Goldberg hired and then almost immediately fired Kevin Williamson when his female employees dived for the fainting couches over the never-Trumper’s views on abortion. As Kurt Schlichter tweeted at the time:
And while the Atlantic appeared to have survived 2020 without a struggle session on par with it collective 2018 meltdown, that year saw the magazine infected with a massive case of Covid-driven paranoia (in addition to its already dangerous levels of TDS), as Christine Rosen wrote in Commentary two years ago: The Atlantic’s Nervous Breakdown.
The Atlantic launched the COVID Tracking Project to count the number of cases and deaths when they were not readily available, and published innumerable stories, articles, items, and memoirs on the subject. Ed Yong won a Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting for his COVID stories.
But with Trump out of the White House and pandemic fatigue becoming more fully entrenched among the public, subscription growth has slowed significantly. According to Byers, “even with last year’s substantial surge, the magazine had lost more than $20 million and was on track to lose another $10 million [in 2021].” The magazine laid off 68 employees in the spring of 2020, though they were mostly in the public-events area—understandable, given that there were no public events to be staged in a country in lockdown.
Twenty million is a drop in the bucket for Laurene Jobs, but nobody likes to lose that kind of money. Chris Hughes, the Facebook billionaire whose purchase of the New Republic was the original model for the Laurene Jobs play, found that magazine’s annual losses a quarter of that size intolerable and sold it off after only a couple of years.
Those numbers might help explain why the overwhelming experience of reading the Atlantic in 2021 and the first weeks of 2022 is like being a therapist whose severely anxious patient flops on the couch and delivers a monologue about the tortures of his daily life.
Or perhaps we should view the Atlantic community of editors, writers, and readers as a kind of daily group-therapy session. Consider that the “Most Popular” articles on the magazine’s website on a late-December day featured one potentially heartening story about COVID—“Omicron is the beginning of the end”—followed by several more that promised only horror: “How Long Does Omicron Take to Make you Sick?” “Is Omicron Milder?” A week earlier the magazine had warned, ominously, “America Is Not Ready for Omicron.”
And lest one think this tone infects only reporting on COVID, another popular recent piece promised to explain how “We’re Heading Toward a Very American Climate Tragedy.” An earlier one highlighted the looming menace of . . . rocks: “The Terrifying Warning Lurking in the Earth’s Ancient Rock Record.” Even our cars are threatening: “Big Cars Are Killing Americans” was another headline of late. The print magazine strikes a similar tone: A 2021 cover story about foreign autocrats warned that “The Bad Guys Are Winning.”
Fortunately for Goldberg, he’ll know in about a month if his subscription numbers will see a significant upturn next year.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: A Brief Guide To Pistol Compensators.
EVERYTHING FOR THE STATE, NOTHING OUTSIDE THE STATE, NOTHING AGAINST THE STATE: Universities shred their ethics to aid Biden’s social-media censorship.
UPGRADE YOUR WORKOUT: Doctor-Developed Gym Wrist Wraps/Lifting Wrist Straps for Weightlifting. #CommissionEarned
BATTLESWARM BLOG: Why Leftists Keep Lying About The Second Amendment. “What’s more, there are literally dozens of similar quotes from the men who debated and ratified the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Virtually all of them recognize that the Second Amendment conveyed an individual right to keep and bear arms.”
The Left wants the people disarmed presumably because they want to implement policies that would have the people up in arms.
