DEAL OF THE DAY: Timex Men’s Expedition Grid Shock 50mm Watch. #CommissionEarned
Archive for 2023
March 17, 2023
THE SLOW RETURN OF ROTC TO THE IVIES. Booting ROTC off was a disgrace, but I have to wonder if more Ivy League grads in the military will help or hurt our ability to win wars at this point.
“I’M NOT GOING BE IGNORED, DAN”: ‘Shouted Down’: KJP Smiles Her Way Through Mini-Rebellion During WH Press Briefing.
The press secretary said it is “with coordination” with the rules of visiting leaders and the press will be able to ask questions at the Oval Office.
“But he doesn’t answer questions,” one reported said.
“That’s not true, he’s answered questions,” Jean-Pierre said, following a series of shouting from a group of reporters.
“The press is always shouted down when we’re in the Oval Office,” one said.
“They always shout at us to get out,” someone else said.
“I hear you guys, I hear you guys,” Jean-Pierre chuckled.
When Biden was busy barely campaigning in 2020, the press didn’t seem to have much trouble being ignored like this.
DECOUPLING: Alabama university closes China-sponsored Confucius Institute. “Because of their connection to the Chinese Communist Party, Confucius Institutes have drawn scrutiny from scholars, political groups, and both Democratic and Republican lawmakers amid rising concerns regarding the Confucius Institutes’ open connections to the dictatorial regime.”
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR ILYA BUYNEVICH: I grew up in the Soviet Union. Even those universities valued merit more than some American schools do today.
Walking near Temple University, I noticed a flyer advocating for “socialism in our lifetime.” The message from an outside group reads in full, “Socialist Revolution: Join the fight for socialism in our lifetime.” Having grown up in Soviet-era Ukraine and now a tenured professor at Temple, I feel strongly that most college-age Americans do not understand what they are saying when they advocate for socialism.
Today, many American college students do not understand that they are advocating for a system that goes beyond what even the Soviets promoted. There is a real distinction that students do not appreciate between the romanticized idea of state socialism in Scandinavia and the reality of socialism – what I experienced as a student in the Soviet Union.
Most student activists tout equity and many undergraduates champion socialism as a means to achieve equity – a process to engineer outcomes. Where I grew up, this would mean giving everyone the same grade, so it was never a factor in Soviet higher education.
Read the whole thing.
WHY DID NOBODY LISTEN? For nearly 2 months, a short seller was warning on Twitter that Silicon Valley Bank was about to blow up. ‘It was sitting there in plain sight.’
The tweets started on Jan. 18, the day before SVB reported earnings, when Martin’s account posted a prescient thread that began: “Investors have rightfully been fixated on $SIVB’s large exposure to the stressed venture world, with the stock down a lot. However, dig just a little deeper, and you will find a much bigger set of problems at $SIVB.” . . .
When the bank experienced an increase in withdrawals from depositors this year, deep losses on sales of some securities created a hole in the balance sheet that triggered its spectacular failure in just two days this week, as a run on the bank erupted among its clientele of mostly young tech companies.
Martin said he initially started analyzing SVB out of suspicion that he’d find weakness in its book of loans to Silicon Valley startups. Instead, he realized how vulnerable the firm’s fixed-income investments had left it following a year of deep losses in the bond market.
“They had bought all these mortgages at the top of the market and were sitting on a massive unrealized loss,” he said in an interview. “And it was sitting there in plain sight. There were a number of other banks and insurance companies with similar issues, but I haven’t seen anyone anywhere near the scale of Silicon Valley Bank.”
Losses on the asset side of the bank’s balance sheet were more alarming in light of signs of trouble on the liabilities side: Its deposits were at risk of disappearing amid a cold snap in the once red-hot world of startups. Many of SVB’s customers were now burning cash rather than raising fresh funds thanks to the largess of the VC industry.
I imagine he made quite a lot on his short.
However, insiders complained as the bank grew at breakneck speed, its top management became inordinately focused on social issues and overly reliant on the use of expensive consultants to explore new strategies, when they should have prioritised management of the bank’s expansion and properly hedging against its interest rate risk. “It felt like a lot of decision makers were relying on consultants in order to make decisions,” said a former executive, citing SVB’s relationships with consulting groups such as McKinsey. “It felt like a lot of overengineering to get to [answers] that people ought to have figured out on their own.” SVB executives were also deeply committed to social justice, according to several of its ex-employees. “I almost felt like I was at work on a college campus,” said another former executive, who recalled weekly internal “TED talks” on social issues and classes on “how to make sure you were not committing a microaggression”.
Get woke, go broke.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Climate Change Whackos Are the Real Danger to the Planet. “The only upside to all of this is that a lot of the younger climate cultists don’t want to breed because they’re convinced that we’re doomed, so a voluntary culling of the herd is under way.”
JULIAN EPSTEIN: Democrats Fear the Truth About Biden’s 2024 Presidential Run.
My fellow Democrats have shown their own kind of cowardice by refusing to say that President Biden shouldn’t run for re-election. Polls show most Democratic voters don’t want Mr. Biden to run again, but Democratic elites apparently believe that any dissent from party leadership or independent thinking—even in the name of an obvious truth—is dangerous to their job security.
To be sure, opposing Mr. Biden’s 2024 run can be tricky. He is a preternatural panderer with nearly every audience, which keeps many activist groups at bay. And increasingly he comes across—even to his supporters—as a foggy retiree. Attacking him can seem ageist, even sadistic.
But unlike his Democratic presidential predecessors, Mr. Biden’s job approval has been consistently in the dumps, and his legislative record is debatable at best. He and his staff promised centrism but instead governed from the far left. Voters of all races—especially working-class voters, for whom Democrats claim to fight—continue to desert the party.
Maybe the real reason Democrats are afraid to speak the truth about Biden is that they don’t have anyone better to replace him.
AND THEY WONDER WHY CRIME IS EXPLODING: Not to worry too much if you happen to be arrested in the District of Columbia. Data compiled by the U.S. Attorney’s Office shows two out of three arrests are not followed by charges being filed.
I’M SORRY DAVE, I CAN’T ALLOW YOU TO EMAIL THAT WORD DOC: Microsoft unveils AI-powered Microsoft 365 Copilot assistant.
Microsoft has announced a new assistant powered by artificial intelligence to help boost productivity across Microsoft 365 apps, currently being tested by select commercial customers.
Known as Copilot, the new AI feature helps create and manage documents, presentations, and spreadsheets, as well as triage and reply to emails.
Copilot is coming to all Microsoft 365 apps, from Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams to Microsoft Viva and Power Platform.
It uses the GPT-4 large multimodal model just like the new Bing Chat and works like a chatbot, enabling users to generate content based on prompts exchanged via a chatbot interface.
According to OpenAI, “while less capable than humans in many real-world scenarios, exhibits human-level performance on various professional and academic benchmarks.”
It harnesses the power of large language models (LLMs) with users’ data in Microsoft Graph and Microsoft 365 to increase productivity.
Clippy has become self-aware. What could possibly go wrong?
https://youtu.be/8_lXSmlwk1s
In 2014, after the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, the #staywoke hashtag became a digital rallying cry around Black Lives Matter activism. Then, in the Trump years, progressives freed the slogan from its BLM context and deployed it wherever needed. Which is why you’d see pieces in the New York Times such as, “In Defense of ‘Woke,’” by Damon Young. In 2017, a photo of a baby wearing a “stay woke” sign at a Women’s March event went viral. Stacey Abrams spoke at something called the “stay woke” rally in 2018. When the pandemic hit in 2020, #stayhome #staywoke hashtags appeared on liberal Twitter. By the time George Floyd was killed by Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis, every white liberal interested in signaling his revolutionary sympathies was advertising his wokeness. As Aja Romano noted candidly in Vox in October 2020, “‘woke’ has evolved into a single-word summation of leftist political ideology, centered on social justice politics and critical race theory. This framing of ‘woke’ is bipartisan: It’s used as a shorthand for political progressiveness by the left, and as a denigration of leftist culture by the right.”
That’s right. Back then, both sides understood that wokeness had become a leftist catch-all term. Conservatives still do, but the Left decided to erase its own role in this history. Why? Because soon after 2020, wokeness became an embarrassment and a political liability. The country started to reject the widespread radical project. In November 2021, Republican Glenn Youngkin was elected governor of Virginia. At the time, Democratic strategist James Carville was asked what went wrong. “Well, what went wrong is this stupid wokeness,” he said. “Some of these people need to go to a woke detox center or something.”
But short of detox, there’s always wishful thinking. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez responded to Carville by claiming that “woke” was “a term almost exclusively used by older people these days.” The Left has been trying to fight the term ever since, pretending that it’s something cooked up by racist right wingers to discredit their opponents. As we get closer to the 2024 election, we’re going to see more of this revisionism.
Oceania has never been at war with Eastasia.
LIGHTNING DEAL: Surge Protector Power Strip with USB. #CommissionEarned
A VERY PUBLIC EDUCATION: Utah Teacher Has Kids Eat Bugs Because Cows Are Destroying the Environment.
BAN ALL THE THINGS: Bay Area will end sales of gas furnaces and water heaters.
The rules, approved by the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, are meant to reduce air pollution from some of the worst home-appliance offenders. The main pollutants targeted are nitrogen oxides, or NOx, which can cause acid rain and smog as well as increase risk for asthma and other respiratory diseases.
People will be able to repair their gas appliances if they break — but the rules take effect when existing gas-powered furnaces or water heaters no longer work and need to be replaced. New construction will also be required to have zero-NOx — effectively, electric — furnaces and water heaters.
Coming up next: Black market furnace and water-heater repairs, just like Harry Tuttle in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.
Also coming soon: Black market Skittles.
REGULATION STYMIES NEW ENERGY TECHNOLOGY:
Last week, Georgia Power said that the nuclear fission process has begun inside the Unit 3 reactor at the Vogtle nuclear plant, about 150 miles east of Atlanta. This means that the reactor has achieved “initial criticality,” which is when atoms start to split and produce heat. The company expects the reactor to be fully operational by May or June. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission said that this is the first time a nuclear reactor has reached this stage since 2015, when the Watts Bar Unit 2 reactor in Tennessee began its nuclear reaction.
What the NRC — a federal independent agency that replaced the Atomic Energy Commission in 1975 — failed to mention is that Vogtle Unit 3, once fully operational, will be the first reactor that started with the NRC and moved all the way to completion. So given that track record, it’s perhaps unsurprising that the supposed future of nuclear fission power is taking longer than expected. They promised us small modular reactors, or SMRs, and all we’ve gotten is continually stretched-out timelines.
Which is super disappointing. The selling point of SMRs is that they would be potential solutions to the biggest problems facing traditional nuclear power: speed of construction, cost, size, and safety. In a recent MIT Tech Review piece on SMRs, reporter Casey Crownhart compares Vogtle Units 3 and 4 to the planned SMR from NuScale, which has received a final NRC approval for its reactor design. For instance, the Vogtle units will each have a generation capacity of 1,000 megawatts and sit on 1,000 acres versus NuScale plans for several 100-megawatt reactor modules located on 65 acres.
Creating the NRC was a mistake. Part of the AEC’s mission was promoting nuclear power. The NRC’s mission was simply to regulate it.
AS A WISE COMMUNITY ORGANIZER ADVISES, GET IN THEIR FACES AND PUNCH BACK TWICE AS HARD: Farmers’ protest party win shock Dutch vote victory.
The Farmer-citizen movement (BBB) was only set up in 2019 in the wake of widespread farmers’ protests.
But with most votes counted they are due to win 15 of the Senate’s seats with almost 20% of the vote.
“This isn’t normal, but actually it is! It’s all normal citizens who voted,” said leader Caroline van der Plas.
The BBB aims to fight government plans to slash nitrogen emissions harmful to biodiversity by dramatically reducing livestock numbers and buying out thousands of farms.
But its appeal has spread rapidly beyond its rural heartland, on a populist platform that represents traditional, conservative Dutch social and moral values.
Shocked by the scale of their success, Ms van der Plas told supporters that voters normally stayed at home if they lost faith in politics: “But today people have shown they can’t stay at home any longer. We won’t be ignored any more.”
Much more like this please.
FOLLOW THE MONEY: BLM Shakedown Raked In Billions; This Group Tracked the $$$.
DON SURBER: Newsless Papers.
March 16, 2023
OPEN THREAD: Hang on baby, Friday’s coming.
THREE YEARS AGO TODAY: “15 Days to Slow the Spread.”
The federal government issued new guidelines Monday for Americans on how to combat the coronavirus pandemic, titled “15 Days to Slow the Spread.” The 15 days are seen as a trial period for the new recommendations and add to previous guidance about practicing good hygiene, staying home if sick and following state and local authorities.
Fauci and Birx’s glee during the announcement is something to behold:
Remember when everybody had to stop going to school and start living inside their houses? Newscasters started broadcasting from home and everything? All that weird stuff?
And, oh yeah, they broke the economy like snapping a dry twig over their knee.
These people. https://t.co/d9CsJ55TsD
— Daddy Warpig (@DaddyWarpig) March 17, 2023
JOHN NOLTE: Happy 90th Birthday to the Mighty Michael Caine.
Michael Caine turned 90 this week. I can hardly believe it.
Caine was born in 1933, and like his irreplaceable contemporaries — Robert Duvall (Born 1931) and Clint Eastwood (born 1930) — he keeps on keeping on. How fortunate we are for that.
If you read Caine’s superb 1992 autobiography, What’s It All About?, you’ll discover that his true contemporaries were legends like Peter O’Toole and Terence Stamp and that he grew frustrated watching their careers explode while he scraped along…
But he hung in there, and stardom finally arrived at the ripe old age of 31 with Zulu (1964), a supporting role he basically lucked into. Zulu ended up being a box office hit (and is now rightly regarded as a classic), and in it, Caine proved he was something special: a true actor who was also a movie star, a leading man capable of character roles. But, most of all, there is his depth, a bottomless reservoir of Something’s-Going-On-Down-There-And-Something’s-Going-To-Happen. Without opening his mouth, Caine’s mere presence gives his every character a history and emotional life.
Related: Michael Caine at ninety, in his own words. “We might know him as Michael Caine, but he took his knighthood in his real name. He is really Sir Maurice Micklewhite. Sir Maurice takes being Michael Caine very seriously — and he is very good at it — but his diplomacy has limits. When I ask him if the media have been unfair to Woody Allen, the director of Hannah and Her Sisters, who is dogged by allegations of sexual misconduct, he says yes, but adds no more. When I tell him that Zulu is listed on the counter-terror Prevent scheme as a piece of culture that incites the far-right, he says: ‘That is the biggest load of bullshit I have ever heard.’ Again, he adds no more. He pursues happiness. His perfect day is being at home with his grandchildren, and on his birthday, he says, he will dine with his family.”
I’D SAY YES, AT THE VERY LEAST: Space Force: We expect to see ‘interfering, blinding’ of satellites during conflict.