WHERE THERE’S SMOKE…: A Canadian Firefighter Sheds Light on the Smoke in the East.
Archive for 2023
June 13, 2023
LIGHTNING DEAL: BARTON Leather NATO® Style Watch Straps. #CommissionEarned
HAHA, NOTHING CHASTENS THE HOT TAKES: Nord Stream revelations should chasten Ukraine dam ‘hot takes.’
POLL: Opposition to men in women’s sports is on the rise.
69% of Americans believe that athletes should play against athletes of their own sex, regardless of transgender identification.
Only 26% of respondents said that transgender individuals should be allowed to compete with opposite-sex athletes.
This poll shows a considerable change in public opinion in just two years. The same poll conducted by Gallup in 2021 found that 62% of Americans felt that sports should be divided by biological sex.
Americans, gay and straight, have been too tolerant for too long of the “drag Marxists” who have hidden a far-left agenda under a guise of tolerance for queer and trans. Worse, they’ve destroyed the notion of individual rights by conflating them with obvious emotional and mental health issues.
That’s changing.
ELLIOT PAGE GROOMED AND SEXUALLY ABUSED BY TWO MEN AND WOMAN AS A TEEN:
The actor, 36, came out as homosexual in February 2014 before his gender transition in December 2020, and said he was groomed by a director at the start of his career before being targeted by other abusers around 2005 when he made a film called ‘Hard Candy ‘ – ironically about a 14-year-old female vigilante’s trapping and torture of a man whom she suspects of being a sexual predator.
Elliot, formerly known as Ellen Page, told The Guardian the director who groomed him took him to dinner, stroked his thigh under the table and told him: “You have to make the move, I can’t.”
Just before he turned 18, Elliot said he was also targeted by members of the ‘Hard Candy’ production team.
He said in his newly released memoir ‘Pageboy’ about one apparently funny and kind man who drove him home before he forced himself on the actor: “His voice sweet, his hands on my shoulders, he guided me to the bedroom.
“I went stiff. Unsure what to do as he stood tall and removed his glasses. He laid me down on the bed.”
Elliot was told by the man he wanted to perform a sex act on the actor, which he said left him feeling numb.
He added in his autobiography: “I froze. After it was over, he tried to stay in the bed with me. I had thawed marginally and told him he couldn’t, to get out.”
Why, it’s as if: Hollywood Is a Sex-Grooming Gang.
MEET THE NEW PATRIARCHY: Johns Hopkins University Is Literally Erasing Women to Be More ‘Inclusive.’
THEY’RE PUNISHING THEIR FANS FOR BEING THEIR FANS: Woke Marvel Eliminates The Punisher Due To ‘Problematic’ Conservative Fan Base. “The goal is relatively obvious – To erase competing ideals and viewpoints while saturating the market with only one political vision; a woke vision. It’s called social engineering, and anyone who claims this is not happening in the US today is gaslighting.”
JUST WAITING FOR THE NEXT FALL: Three Democrats have PACs that seem to be related to anticipation about President Joe Biden’s falls, especially the next one. One of the names will amuse you, another one will prompt guffaws and the third one, well, you’ll just have to check out this Washington Free Beacon piece by Andrew Stiles.
ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Did A.I. Just Do the Impossible and Reunite The Beatles?
HEADLINES WE’LL NEVER SEE: Issues & Insights has a lengthy and quite revealing list. At least we can dream.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: ‘Rantings of a demagogue’: Parents angered by Princeton president’s graduation address: ‘President Eisgruber’s commencement speech was a disgrace,’ one mother said.
A large contingent of parents of graduating seniors who sat through Princeton University President Christopher Eisgruber’s recent commencement address described it as hypocritical and a “woke sermon” in interviews with The College Fix.
They scoffed at his claim that the Ivy League institution is a bastion of free speech and bristled at his embrace of all kinds of diversity except intellectual diversity.
“President Eisgruber’s commencement speech was a disgrace,” a mother of a graduating senior told The College Fix in an email. “The primary assault on free speech takes place on every campus in this country – including Princeton.” . . .
“I was taken aback by the audacity of [Eisgruber’s speech] and the disingenuousness of it, even the dishonesty of it. As far as I can tell, no one else in the country has done more to undermine the protections that tenure gives to independent thought and independent scholarly activity than he has,” Christopher Nadon, the father of a graduating Princeton student, told The Fix.
Nadon, a professor at Claremont McKenna College, added that former Princeton Professor Joshua Katz was “stripped of tenure obviously for his political speech.” Katz, a longtime classics professor, was fired last year after he published an op-ed criticizing faculty proposals for anti-racism initiatives at the University and criticized a group of far-left black activists.
Eisgruber, like Lee Bollinger, was once a respected First Amendment scholar. Then he became an apparatchik.
THEY CAME AND TOOK IT: Hundreds of billions of tax dollars handed out by the feds to fraudsters, dead people, fictitious firms, etc. etc., according to new analysis by Open The Books.
SOD OFF, SWAMPY: WEF Wants to Restrict Car Ownership for Climate Change.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Virginia is latest state no longer requiring college degrees for government jobs. “Youngkin’s announcement follows a trend of states implementing similar changes. In January, Campus Reform reported that Pennsylvania had eliminated degree requirements for 92% of its government jobs.”
If higher ed’s credentialing role goes away, can it survive on the quality of education it’s providing?
DISPATCHES FROM THE BLUE ZONES: California’s COVID unemployment reckoning goes national.
Jennifer Pahlka, founder of Code For America and former U.S. deputy chief technology officer, writes that the turmoil at California’s Employment Development Department is a prime example of failures that have also plagued other major civic tech efforts, such as the post-Obamacare implosion of healthcare.gov or archaic IT systems at the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs.
“Of all the tech disasters I’ve witnessed and tried to help untangle, the one I’ve come to see as most emblematic of these forces — and the ways we consistently misunderstand them — is the story of California’s unemployment insurance in the first year of the pandemic,” Pahlka writes in the book “Recoding America: Why Government is Failing In the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better.”
Three chapters of the book chronicle Pahlka’s time co-leading a “Strike Team” deployed by Newsom in mid-2020, as long benefit delays and outlandish stories of fraud began to dominate headlines. In the months to follow, state officials would find that payments were delayed to some 5 million workers and may have been improperly denied for another 1 million, all while the state lost as much as $32 billion to fraud, according to varied state and industry estimates.
Once you understand that enabling fraud was a primary goal and that proving relief was at best a tertiary concern, everything makes sense.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Pride Month Week Two—We’re Clearly Not Being ‘Phobic’ Enough. “What I meant by today’s headline is that we need to become louder and give the Left more opportunities to call us whatever kind of “-phobe” they have teed up in their unwell brains that day.”
AI FEEDBACK LOOP: Researchers warn of ‘model collapse’ as AI trains on AI-generated content.
As those following the burgeoning industry and its underlying research know, the data used to train the large language models (LLMs) and other transformer models underpinning products such as ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney comes initially from human sources — books, articles, photographs and so on — that were created without the help of artificial intelligence.
Now, as more people use AI to produce and publish content, an obvious question arises: What happens as AI-generated content proliferates around the internet, and AI models begin to train on it, instead of on primarily human-generated content?
A group of researchers from the UK and Canada have looked into this very problem and recently published a paper on their work in the open access journal arXiv. What they found is worrisome for current generative AI technology and its future: “We find that use of model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects in the resulting models.”
Garbage in, garbage out — and if this paper is correct, generative AI is turning into the self-licking ice cream cone of garbage generation.
SHOCKER: Social media shaming is not motivated by genuine social justice concern: Study. Bullying seldom is.
SHOCKER: We’ll Save You the Time: The Trump Records Indictment Is Banana Republic BS, Too. Surely not.
WE NEED ACCOUNTABILITY AND CONSEQUENCES:
You couldn't question policy when it mattered, lest the public lose faith in the anointed, but Monday morning is as good a time as any to be a quarterback.https://t.co/QrTkUvOKdY
— wretchardthecat (@wretchardthecat) June 13, 2023
STANDING UP FOR YOUR BELIEFS (Oh, is that “ableist?”): More from JustTheNews on Professor Scott Gerber, who has the nerve to question the value, scope and size of DEI. Kudos to FIRE, once again.
Bad professor. No soup for you.
NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: Burisma Founder Who Allegedly Bribed Joe and Hunter Biden Is a Russian Asset. “The US intelligence community has a high degree of confidence in their assessment of Zlochevsky as SVR. This is not a new assessment; the intelligence community under Obama knew this, and Obama was briefed on it. Joe Biden and Victoria Nuland were briefed as well.”