THERE ARE RECEIPTS: Joe Biden’s White House Directed Facebook COVID-19 Censorship.

OVER AT MY NEW SUBSTACK, I talk to Prof. Mark J. Perry about how he’s fighting woke bigotry on campus, and how you can help.

I have this one set up so that only paid subscribers can comment on the article. We’ll see how that works out, but I think it’s how I’ll do things over there.

GREAT MOMENTS IN PROJECTION: Classified documents from when Biden was VP are found in his think tank’s Washington office: Ten files were found day BEFORE midterms — but Department of Justice investigation has only just been made public.

No word yet if Biden will be siccing the FBI on himself over this.

Exit quote:

President Biden spoke about the classified documents the FBI found in former President Trump’s home. When Mr. Biden saw the FBI image of the documents he says he thought to himself, “How anyone could be that irresponsible?” https://t.co/7SixTE3OMT pic.twitter.com/sgQraMMOl5

— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) September 19, 2022

 
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Yep.

YES. NEXT QUESTION? Did ‘every conspiracy theory’ about Twitter turn out to be… true? New video from Reason TV:

Earlier:Jonathan Turley: “We Don’t Do This:” Adam Schiff and the Underbelly of American Censorship.

A NEW METHOD OF REFRIGERATION: “A temperature shift of 25 degrees Celsius (45 degrees Fahrenheit) was measured through the application of less than a single volt of charge in the experiment, a result that exceeds what other caloric technologies have managed to achieve so far.”

GOOD: Jim Jordan to chair ‘Weaponization of Government’ Select Committee: This investigative panel will demand emails and correspondence between the Biden administration and big tech companies, and follows the massive revelations that came to light through the recent release of the Twitter Files. “If government personnel and agencies do not comply, subpoenas are likely to be issued, per a GOP source. The GOP is committed to digging into “the politicization of the FBI,” which not only includes the work done to discredit accurate reporting from the New York Post in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election, but the allegations of Russian election interference in the lead-up to the 2016 election. The use of Biden’s Department of Justice to go after parents who spoke out angrily at school board meetings will be investigated as well. Ohio’s Jordan was instrumental in the discovery that the letter requesting a DOJ investigation into these parents, issued by the National School Boards Association, was actually requested to be written by Merrick Garland’s DOJ in the first place. The head of the NSBA was then given a plum post in the administration.”

THE NEW SPACE RACE: Virgin Orbit helps launch Britain’s first orbital space mission. “Virgin Orbit successfully launched its ‘Start Me Up’ mission Monday evening with Britain’s first-ever orbital space launch from its own soil. The private-public joint collaboration led by Virgin Orbit will deliver satellites into space.”

VITAMIN D UPDATE: Researchers Discover Surprising Risks for COVID-19 Infection + Significant Protection From Vitamin D. “This study found in particular that taking vitamin D provided significant protection against acquiring COVID-19.”

If you suggested Vitamin D was protective 2 or 3 years ago, it was “misinformation.” Even as they closed the parks and kept people indoors.

IT’S A LONG WAY TO THE TOP, IF YOU WANNA ROCK AND ROLL: From Vinyl Roofs to Classic Vinyl. Review: The Lives of Brian by Brian Johnson.

The big rock acts have become tribute bands to their younger selves. They pad the thinning ranks of their original members with substitutes for the growing ranks of their dead, like those medieval soldiers who propped up corpses on the ramparts in order to hold off the siege. They have been doing this for so long that some of the substitutes now pass for the real thing. Ron Wood joined The Rolling Stones in 1975, replacing Mick Taylor, who replaced Brian Jones. This is the musical equivalent of the philosopher’s conundrum known as the Raft of Theseus. If you replace all the plank-spankers, how can it still be the same vessel?

Brian Johnson joined AC/DC in 1980 after the death of the band’s original singer Bon Scott. Before we proceed to Johnson’s amiable rockography, The Lives of Brian, we should clarify the musical technicalities. AC/DC are not a heavy metal band. They are frequently hard rock, but essentially they are a rock ’n’ roll band. Like Motörhead, and like the early punk bands that shared their energy and glee, they are the last, late progeny of ’50s rock ’n’ roll. They are loud and bluesy, and have more in common with Johnny Kidd and the Pirates than with Metallica or Def Leppard. The boogie in their early albums carries echoes of the age before Elvis. Like Motörhead’s Philthy Phil Taylor or The Damned’s Rat Scabies, the drumming of AC/DC’s first drummer Phil “The Stud” Rudd swings with the ghost of Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich.

Second, AC/DC are Australian. Formed in 1973, they came up the old way, which is the hard way, on the Australian pub circuit. The “pub” part might evoke cozy and ramshackle British country inns, but Australian pubs, according to those who have visited them and survived, are cavernous beer halls full of raging drunks. These bracing conditions made AC/DC what the Irish call a “show band,” playing other people’s hits, and entertaining the punters like a very loud vaudeville act. Hence their guitarist Angus Young dressing as a schoolboy, complete with satchel.

Third, Bon Scott was and always will be AC/DC’s singer. This is the Raft of Theseus part. Scott had been with the band for six years before he choked on his own vomit after an especially exuberant night out in South London. Brian Johnson replaced him in 1980, and freely admits that he is a singing caretaker, preserving Scott’s songs and the band that made them. Johnson’s 42 years on the job begin where The Lives of Brian ends. This is the story of what Johnson did before he became famous, and what he did to become famous. It is, as Bon Scott wrote, “a long way to the top if you want to rock ’n’ roll,” but the scenic route is much more interesting than the rock star’s cycle of arena shows and private jets.

Read the whole thing.

TYLER O’NEIL: YouTube Censors Doctors, Heritage Foundation Expert for ‘Medical Misinformation’ on COVID-19.

Nearly three years after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and just after President Joe Biden effectively claimed the pandemic is over by trying to reverse Title 42, YouTube removed footage of a panel involving doctors and a Heritage Foundation expert discussing COVID-19 and restrictions imposed on religious liberty in the name of public health.

One speaker on the panel told The Daily Signal that this Big Tech censorship proved his point about suppression of freedoms during the pandemic, and he condemned YouTube’s move as “Kafkaesque.”

The panel, “Setting the Record Straight,” took place at the Restoring Our Faith Summit last October in Vermont.

Speakers included Dr. Robin Armstrong, owner of an organization of hospital and nursing home physicians; Dr. Janci Chunn Lindsay, a toxicology expert; Aaron Kheriaty, a psychologist and scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center; and Roger Severino, former director of the Office for Civil Rights at the Department of Health and Human Services and currently vice president for domestic policy at The Heritage Foundation. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s news outlet.)

“Hi Restoring Our Faith Summit, Our team has reviewed your content, and, unfortunately, we think it violates our medical misinformation policy,” YouTube wrote Dec. 13 to the summit, using boldface for the final three words.

YouTube noted that it had removed content on the panel discussion from the social media site’s platform.

How’s Elon Musk’s YouTube clone for Twitter coming along?

DO TELL: How health insurance may have made health care more expensive.. “It was when you get this third-party payer system where the patient doesn’t have to pay all of the cost of it directly, the insurer pays a chunk of it. That gives you relentless upward pressure on pricing, because if you’re going to get paid, why not get paid some more?”

TREATING SOCIAL MEDIA LIKE TOBACCO COMPANIES: Seattle public schools sue social media companies for allegedly harming students’ mental health.

On the other hand, there’s no question that public schools have done more than social media to harm kids’ mental health, and I suspect that Seattle is worse than the national average. I think something akin to the “unclean hands” doctrine should apply here.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Schools blocking ChatGPT because of cheating.

I’ve been spending some time lately checking out and writing about the latest generation of Artificial Intelligence chatbots that have been released. One of the most formidable is ChatGPT, recently released by AI startup OpenAI. While it doesn’t seem remotely close to being sentient, it’s very powerful and can create reams of very “human-sounding” text on almost any subject you can name when you pose a question to it. But people are already wondering if a fully developed ChatGPT program may wind up replacing some human beings in their jobs, including those of journalists and researchers. An even larger potential concern is whether students could use the chatbot to cheat on tests or write their homework assignments for them. This month, that fear led the New York City school system to ban ChatGPT on all devices in the city’s public schools. (Associated Press)

Ask the new artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT to write an essay about the cause of the American Civil War and you can watch it churn out a persuasive term paper in a matter of seconds.

That’s one reason why New York City school officials this week started blocking the impressive but controversial writing tool that can generate paragraphs of human-like text.

The decision by the largest U.S. school district to restrict the ChatGPT website on school devices and networks could have ripple effects on other schools, and teachers scrambling to figure out how to prevent cheating. The creators of ChatGPT say they’re also looking for ways to detect misuse.

Then there is the issue of ChatGPT having the occasional “hallucination:”

ChatGPT is based on GPT-3.5, but was developed specifically to be a chatbot (“conversational agent” is the preferred term of art in the industry). A limiting factor is that ChatGPT only sports a text interface; there is no API. ChatGPT was trained on a large set of conversational text and is better at holding up a conversation than GPT-3.5 and other generative models. It generates its responses more quickly than GPT-3.5, and its responses are perceived to be more accurate.

However, both models have a tendency to make stuff up, or “hallucinating” things, as those in the industry call it. Various hallucination rates have been cited for ChatGPT between 15% and 21%. GPT-3.5’s hallucination rate, meanwhile, has been pegged from the low 20s to a high of 41%, so ChatGPT has shown improvement in that regard.

Despite the tendency to make things up (which is true with all language models), ChatGPT marks a significant improvement over the AI models that came before it, says Jiang Chen, founder and vice president of machine learning at Moveworks, a Silicon Valley firm that uses language models and other machine learning technologies in its AI conversational platform, which is used by companies in a variety of industries.

“ChatGPT does impress people, surprise people,” says Chen, who previously was a Google engineer who worked on the tech giant’s eponymous search engine. “The reasoning ability is something that probably surprised a lot of machine learning practitioners.”

ChatGPT won’t pass the Turing Test, but we’ve certainly come a long from Eliza.

HAHA: Nation Devastated As Congress Resumes Functioning.

DEALS ON MEN’S shoes. #CommissionEarned

THE WAR ON GAS: US Safety Agency to Consider Ban on Gas Stoves Amid Health Fears. “Parallel efforts by state and local policymakers are targeting the use of natural gas in buildings more broadly, in a push to reduce climate-warming emissions (such as from methane) that exacerbate climate change. Nearly 100 cities and counties have adopted policies that require or encourage a move away from fossil fuel powered buildings. The New York City Council voted in 2021 to ban natural gas hookups in new buildings smaller than seven stories by the end of this year. The California Air Resources Board unanimously voted in September to ban the sale of natural gas-fired furnaces and water heaters by 2030.”

We want everyone to go all-electric, after which we’ll shut down most of the power plants.

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT (FOR OUR VIP SUPPORTERS): A Tasty Movie Review: ‘The Menu.’ “A pointedly satiric love-hate letter to fine dining… It’s a real joy to be treated as an intelligent viewer for a change, instead of being hit over the head with a virtual frying pan at each plot point and character reveal.”

MCCARTHY VOTE WAS DEMOCRACY, NOT CONFUSION: It’s not something that happens with any frequency these days, but experts on the Left and Right interviewed by The Epoch Times agree last week’s 15-roll call marathon was the kind of deliberative process the founders envisioned as the heart of the American republic, not the chaos and confusion it was dubbed by the Mainstream Media.

FAITH ON THE HILL: Big majority of the Members of Congress claim affiliation with one of the many Protestant or Catholic denominational congregations, according to Pew Research Center, but a wide variety of other religious views are also represented, including one Messianic Jew (accepts Jesus as the Messiah).

TAMARA KEEL: Are We Seeing A Revolver Renaissance?

A BILLION HERE AND A BILLION THERE…: Binance Is Bleeding Assets, $12 Billion Gone In Less Than 60 Days. “The outflow of cash from Binance is worse than the CEO Changpeng Zhao indicated last month, and it’s become considerably more severe since then, a Forbes analysis shows.”

PHOTO-OP: Joe Biden Went to the Border on Sunday — Without Actually Going to the Border.

Previously:

THE DANGERS OF GROUPTHINK: Southwest Airlines pilots to disastrous bosses: It’s your education, stupid.

How many times, over the last few years, have you heard companies being described as “run by accountants”? How many times have you worked for such companies? And how many times have you considered those to be extremely well-run companies?

Oh, accountants might know how to satisfy Wall Street every three months, but do they really know how to run a business with a longer-term perspective?

I only ask because the pilots don’t think so. Nekouei describes this accountant-centric mindset as “a recipe for operational ignorance and collective groupthink. A monetization of the once vaunted Southwest culture and instead turning it into a headquarters-centric cult. A good old boys and girls network indeed.”

What happens to a company that, in Nekouei’s words, institutes “an obsessive focus on cost-control to increase shareholder return”?

Does it become a happier place to work? Does it become a place that serves customers better? Or does it become a place where the few earn untold millions while the remainder have to deal with the consequences?

I think we know the answers.

WELL, THIS IS THE 21st CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Sony Star Sphere Will Let You Take Photos from an Orbiting Satellite.

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: ISS astronauts are building objects that couldn’t exist on Earth.