IT’S A PRETTY DECENT MOVIE: Watch Democrat Privilege in Action in ‘Chappaquiddick’ Before It Leaves Netflix.
My only major beef with Chappaquiddick is that the movie chickens out in the last reel, switching the focus to a long-suffering Ted Kennedy using “tragedy” to escape his abusive father’s wrath.
THAT’S BECAUSE IT’S A TERRIBLE IDEA: Algorithms will soon be in charge of hiring and firing. Not everyone thinks this is a good idea.
One of the most compelling examples is that of AI tools being used in the first stages of the hiring process for new jobs, where algorithms can be used to scrape CVs for key information and sometimes undertake background checks to analyze candidate data. In a telling illustration of how things might go wrong, Amazon’s attempts to deploy this type of technology were scrapped after it was found that the model discriminated against women’s CVs.
According to the TUC, if left unchecked AI could, therefore, lead to greater discrimination in high-impact decisions, such as hiring and firing employees.
Mostly AI will allow HR to shrug off bad decisions with “but the algo said to.”
TRUMP’S WEB SITE GOES LIVE: How long before Big Tech finds a way to hack and close it?
SPACE: SpaceX Launches Starship SN11 Prototype Successfully, But Misses Landing. Fog was an issue, apparently. No explosion, though, so that’s progress.
I HAVE A TWOFER FOR PJ MEDIA/TOWNHALL VIP SUPPORTERS: The WHO’s Own Data Suggest the Futility of Masks and Lockdowns.
And: One of These Hot Spots May Set Off the Next World War.
If you’ve been considering becoming a member, don’t forget that nifty VODKAPUNDIT discount code.
SHARKNADO! Sharks that devoured whale ‘like hyenas’ will migrate to Cape this summer: Captain.
We’re starting on the shark stories awfully early this year. Let’s hope they aren’t the same eerie portent of a disastrous fall in 2021 that they were, in retrospect, in the summer of 2001.
“CHARGES OF RACISM” ARE WHAT BLUE CITIES HAVE INSTEAD OF COMPETENCE. In San Francisco, Turmoil Over Reopening Schools Turns a City Against Itself: The San Francisco school board has infuriated parents and the mayor. Now it has descended into chaos over accusations of racism.
Plus:
Adding to the district’s woes, it is facing a steep budget deficit and now risks losing even more funding as enrollment declines. Data from the district shows a roughly 10 percent drop in the number of students submitting applications for kindergarten for 2021-22.
As early as last summer, it was clear that the board had no appetite for reopening schools. When the superintendent, Vincent Matthews, proposed using grant money to hire a consultant to help devise a reopening plan, the board voted against it, in part because the consultant had connections to charter schools.
So schools remained closed all fall, even while San Francisco enjoyed some of the lowest virus rates in the country. But the board proceeded with a plan to rename 44 schools whose names were deemed to be associated with slavery, genocide or other injustices. . . .
Asian-American students and parents who called into the meeting fulminated against Ms. Collins and other members of the board, their voices cracking with emotion.
“This board is becoming a case study for performative, shallow activism and hypocrisy,” said one caller who identified himself as a student in the district.
Like I said, what they have instead of competence. But how bad is it? Bad enough to inspire a lucid moment in Larry Tribe:
But Laurence Tribe, a Harvard law professor and an alumnus of the San Francisco public school system, said the board had used “cultural distractions” as a way of covering up its inability to get schools reopened.
“It’s clear,” he said, “that the internecine conflict among relatively privileged liberals sometimes leaves behind people that they genuinely believe they are concerned about.”
Ya think?
Can you say K-12 implosion? All is proceeding as I have foreseen — with a healthy push from blue-zone ineptitude and the pandemic.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: 12 Private College Presidents Earned Over $2 Million In 2018.
I think the pay of executives at tax-exempt organizations should be capped at that of a Supreme Court Justice.
FORGET “NINETY MINUTES FROM NEW YORK TO PARIS”: This New Supersonic Airliner Will Fly From NYC to London in Less Than an Hour.
MICHAEL YON ON THE MIGRANT SURGE: Children in Great Danger: Madeisy Contacted us 11 hours ago: 10 Dead, 10 raped, according to Madeisy.
OLD AND BUSTED “ACAB.”
The New Hotness? Footage Shows Cowardly Antifa Will Hide Behind the Police They Hate When Americans Practice Their Rights.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Barely Coherent Biden Is Still Babbling About Mask Mandates. “Democrats, however, find it impossible to resist the urge to have the government in control of every aspect of our lives. They’re really creepy that way. They can’t wrap their heads around the thought of the citizens doing the right thing without being threatened by bureaucratic tyrants. Kinda makes you wonder what kind of people they really are if they think of others that way.”
PRESIDENT XIDEN IS NOT GOING TO OFFEND THE CHINESE, THOUGH: Pressure Grows on Biden to Act on Crisis in Tibet.
WHEN A HATE CRIME ISN’T REALLY A HATE CRIME:
I haven’t yet been able to identify a single anti-Asian hate crime committed by a Trump supporter, despite the Democrats’ insistence that Trump-loving racists are the main perpetrators. What I did discover, however, was something the media refuses to report. Consistent with the U.S. Bureau of Justice data that was compiled until 2018—Asians are now lumped into the “other” category, a suspicious decision that merits investigation—black males are the main perpetrators of the pandemic’s anti-Asian hate crimes, and there’re videos supporting this claim that the media isn’t going to show you. The media’s problem is that, under the current progressive definition of racism, blacks can’t be racists because, as a group, they have no power. Since reporting that black males are committing race-based violence against another minority group runs counter to this narrative, the media finesses it by not mentioning the race of the assailant if he’s black.
It’s not racist to point out who’s committing these hate crimes—data can’t be racist. Anti-Asian hate crimes were up by about 150 percent in 2020, so it’s a serious problem that needs to be addressed head-on, not danced around. But what we’ll get are more articles like the one Yahoo News ran in February, “Anti-Asian violence has been rampant. Here’s why it’s not always a ’hate crime.’” Suddenly, the media wants to make sure we don’t exaggerate a specific hate crime problem. The authors of the piece say it’s important to use “precise, accurate language in discussing” anti-Asian violence. In other words, use precisely the opposite sort of language progressives use when attributing an incident to “white supremacy.”
That narrative doesn’t write itself, you know. Also in the Splice Today article above:
The USA Today article spells it out with this observation on all of the instant ‘experts’ weighing in: ‘But the evidence, they thought, is in our experience. Experience reflecting centuries of white supremacy.’ ‘Lived experience’ is now considered ‘evidence’ of a crime, and the media runs with it because everyone’s become entitled to their own reality.
Related: The tyranny of ‘lived experience.’
#FIGHTFORFIFTEEN: Boston Dynamics’ Newest Robot Can Move 800 Boxes an Hour.
ONLY SOME “HATE” COUNTS: Universities lamented the Atlanta shooting, ignored the Boulder massacre. “After a white man on March 16 gunned down eight people in Atlanta — six of Asian descent and two white victims — the response from campus leaders was lightning fast. In most cases, within a day or two of the massacre, university presidents fired off memos to their respective campus communities lamenting the tragedy. Fast-forward to March 23, when a young man of Middle Eastern descent shot and killed 10 people in a Boulder grocery store, a massacre in which all 10 victims are white. Were these college presidents quick to take to their keyboards once again to mourn this loss with their students, faculty and staff? Outside of Colorado, the answer is a resounding no. . . . The Atlanta suspect is a white man named Robert Aaron Long who is said to be Christian. The Boulder suspect is a naturalized U.S. citizen from Syria who identifies as Muslim, according to a former classmate.”
QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED:
Growing up at nice lefty, wildly expensive private schools, I learned history as a series of progressive triumphs over conservative intolerance.
It made me happy to know that was how the world unfolded. It made me happy to know I’d be on the righteous side. It made me happy to know that the good team would win out. Each day is better than the last, and the path forward is always clear.
Religious schooling does not impart that message. It can’t. The Bible’s myths are all about chaos and complexity, sin and redemption, destruction and forgiveness, cowardice and courage, idiocy, luck.
To instill blissful confidence in me, the educational system had to downplay or ignore leftist failure. Secular, liberal Americans like me are taught a very beautiful and simple myth. It goes a little like: every progressive program that has failed or caused suffering didn’t do so because of some flaw in the plan or some misunderstanding of human nature. It failed because of forces on the wrong side of history.
This is how the system popped me out, at 22 years old, with only the vaguest knowledge of why the Soviet Union was a disaster. I had absolutely zero awareness that Jews there had any issue at all. If any of this was taught, it was fast and light enough to scuttle across my mind without leaving a mark.
My ignorance hit me hard in my Jewish 101 class, where one student was the daughter of Russian Jews, but she knew very little about Judaism from her family. I had no idea Judaism has been illegal there, that the rituals and the community had been pressured for generations to erase all traces of religiosity, all traces of difference, any part of themselves that might be Jewish. I’d never heard about any of that.
—“Why Do I Know Nothing About the Soviet Union?”, Nellie Bowles, Substack, Thursday.
Another troublesome fact has cropped up, gravely complicating the longtime dream of socialism. That troublesome fact may be best summed up in a name: Solzhenitsyn.
With the Hungarian uprising of 1956 and the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 it had become clear to Mannerist Marxists such as Sartre that the Soviet Union was now an embarrassment. The fault, however, as tout le monde knew, was not with socialism but with Stalinism. Stalin was a madman and had taken socialism on a wrong turn. (Mistakes happen.) Solzhenitsyn began speaking out as a dissident inside the Soviet Union in 1967. His complaints, his revelations, his struggles with Soviet authorities—they merely underscored just how wrong the Stalinist turn had been.
The publication of The Gulag Archipelago in 1973, however, was a wholly unexpected blow. No one was ready for the obscene horror and grotesque scale of what Solzhenitsyn called “Our Sewage Disposal System”—in which tens of millions were shipped in boxcars to concentration camps all over the country, in which tens of millions died, in which entire races and national groups were liquidated, insofar as they had existed in the Soviet Union. Moreover, said Solzhenitsyn, the system had not begun with Stalin but with Lenin, who had immediately exterminated non-Bolshevik opponents of the old regime and especially the student factions. It was impossible any longer to distinguish the Communist liquidation apparatus from the Nazi.
—Tom Wolfe, “The Intelligent Co-Ed’s Guide to America,” 1976.
THIS IS NOT WHAT THE NEWS MEDIA’S EXPERTS PREDICTED: Texas Hits Record Low COVID Cases, 3 Weeks After Lifting All Pandemic Restrictions.
Hardest hit: Biden urges states to restore mask mandates as Walensky warns of an ‘impending doom’ over a possible virus surge.
Related: Why is everyone in Texas not dying?
CANCEL CULTURE IS ALL IN YOUR MIND, THEY SAID: Should Capitol Rioters Be Able to Crowdfund Their Legal Defenses? USA Today Says No…
YOU DON’T LET STUDENTS RUN YOUR LAW SCHOOL: The Precarious State of the Georgetown University Law Center. “Georgetown is a canary in the coal mine. Recent events have revealed dangerous trends in legal academia.”
FROM MACKEY CHANDLER: Another Word for Magic
Fleeing the Solar System after an attack by North America, the three Home habitats now have to seek their own fortunes. Heather, Sovereign of Central on the Moon saved them but now has to make certain the USNA can never threaten them again.
What was a tentative research partnership with the Red Tree Clan of Derfhome becomes a full alliance of equals. Lee finds she has to grasp authority and act for the Red Tree Mothers and herself to repossess the planet Providence she and Gordon discovered. The Claims Commission on Earth has collapsed without the leadership of North America. Explorers like her are cut off from their payments and the colonists on Providence are left in the lurch too. To do that she needs these powerful new allies.
RECREATING TRADITION: The New Project – With a Deadline.
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