DEAL OF THE DAY: Glocusent LED Neck Reading Light. #CommissionEarned
Archive for 2023
March 31, 2023
ROGER KIMBALL: The Trump indictment and the abrogation of the law.
Legitimacy means nothing now. It’s all about power.
To be fair, they don’t just hate Trump, they hate his supporters more.
MATT MARGOLIS: There’s Something Suspicious About Trump’s Indictment. “So, in a week’s time, the grand jury went from being unconvinced to indicting Trump, despite few opportunities to hear more evidence after Costello’s testimony?”
IF SOMETHING CAN BE DESTROYED BY THE TRUTH, IT SHOULD BE DESTROYED BY THE TRUTH: Don Surber: Banning the Truth.
THE DISINFO WARS: A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century.
Step one in the national mobilization to defeat disinfo fused the U.S. national security infrastructure with the social media platforms, where the war was being fought. The government’s lead counter-disinformation agency, the GEC, declared that its mission entailed “seeking out and engaging the best talent within the technology sector.” To that end, the government started deputizing tech executives as de facto wartime information commissars.
At companies like Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Amazon, the upper management levels had always included veterans of the national security establishment. But with the new alliance between U.S. national security and social media, the former spooks and intelligence agency officials grew into a dominant bloc inside those companies; what had been a career ladder by which people stepped up from their government experience to reach private tech-sector jobs turned into an ouroboros that molded the two together. With the D.C.-Silicon Valley fusion, the federal bureaucracies could rely on informal social connections to push their agenda inside the tech companies.
In the fall of 2017, the FBI opened its Foreign Influence Task Force for the express purpose of monitoring social media to flag accounts trying to “discredit U.S. individuals and institutions.” The Department of Homeland Security took on a similar role.
Read the whole thing.
HANS A. VON SPAKOVSKY: Stanford Law School — EXPOSED. “It is no wonder that Stanford Law School is producing such boorish students, with no understanding of the First Amendment, when you examine the curriculum of the law school. Its website says that it is ‘committed to enhancing its focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion’ but it is obvious that ‘diversity’ does not include diversity of thought or hearing from anyone who disagrees with the prevailing political orthodoxy of the law school.”
This is the second in a ten-part series on America’s law schools.
CULTURE OF VIOLENCE AND IMPUNITY: Activists violently shut down pro-life event at VCU, two arrested, two pro-life students injured.
BECAUSE THE PARTY HAS DECLARED HIM DOUBLEPLUS UNGOOD: WATCH: GMU students want Glenn Youngkin off campus but can’t say why. That’s the only reason you need, if you’re an idiot or a leftist.
THE SINGULARITY IS HERE, BUT BEING SLOW-WALKED: With GPT-4, OpenAI Is Deliberately Slow Walking To AGI: There are indications openai has intentionally limited gpt’s power in an attempt to manage agi ‘take-off’ risks. “The performance numbers published in the GPT-4 technical report aren’t really like normal benchmarks of a new, leading-edge technical product, where a company builds the highest-performing version it can and then releases benchmarks as an indicator of success and market dominance. Rather, these numbers were selected in advance by the OpenAI team as numbers the public could handle, and that wouldn’t be too disruptive for society. They said, in essence, ‘for GPT-4, we will release a model with these specific scores and no higher. That way, everyone can get used to this level of performance before we dial it up another notch with the next version.'”
Plus: “Everyone who’s working in machine learning, with zero exceptions I can think of, considers this technology to be socially disruptive and to have a reasonable potential for some amount of near-term chaos as we all adjust to what’s happening. I’m not talking about AGI-powered existential risk scenarios, though there are plenty of worries about that. But more along the lines of the kinds of social changes we saw with the smartphone, the internet, or even the printing press, but happening in such a small amount of time that the effects are greatly magnified.”
IT’S BAD FOR BUSINESS: China Seeks to Reassure CEOs as Worries Swirl Over Potential War. “Underscoring the risks are fears that China may one day act on threats to seize Taiwan by force. A recent survey from the American Chamber of Commerce in China shows the country is no longer one of the top three investment priorities for US firms, with almost half of them already in the market planning no new investments.”
On the flip side, maybe Xi will figure he has less to lose.
SETH BARRETT TILLMAN ON Robert Jackson and the Trump indictment.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Trump Gets the Green Light to Take a Flamethrower to the System. “The Democrats are so terrified of running against Trump next year (the ‘IT DOESN’T MATTER BECAUSE IT’S ALL RIGGED AND WE’RE DOOOOOOMED!’ crowd can just skip ahead to the comments and begin the rending of garments now) that they couldn’t wait until next year to begin their election tampering.”
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Financial world legend sounds alarm over ‘biggest bank that’s going down.’ “The biggest bank that’s going to go down is Bank of Japan.”
CHANGE: Democrat Governor In Heavily GOP State Signs Bill To Crack Down On Woke Investments.
Critics of the ESG movement largely align with conservatives and assert that the philosophy intermixes political and social causes in a manner that compromises or distracts from profitability. Beshear signed a bill last week to require fiduciaries of the state’s retirement funds to only consider factors which have a “direct and material connection to the financial risk or financial return of an investment” rather than any “environmental, social, political, or ideological interest” without a connection to the financial realities of an asset.
Beshear, who won an upset victory four years ago in the predominantly Republican state, is presently campaigning for a second term; the general election will occur at the end of the year.
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT), both of whom will be on their respective ballots in primarily Republican states next year, recently voted against fellow Democrats to pass a resolution scrapping a White House rule that allows retirement fiduciaries to invest in accordance with the ESG movement. President Joe Biden vetoed the resolution last week.
American investors are broadly skeptical of the ESG movement and desire that their funds are allocated in a politically neutral manner.
And they’re right.
CORN, POPPED: Florida Files FOIA Request for Info About Disney’s Reedy Creek Maneuvers. “The new board for the renamed Central Florida Tourism District — which DeSantis handpicked and put in place — worried that the actions neutralized the board’s authority, but Disney forgot who it was messing with.”
OUT: DOUBLE-SECRET PROBATION. IN: DOUBLE-SECRET EXONERATION. George Washington University Says an Investigation Cleared It of Anti-Semitism. Why Won’t It Release the Report?
LIGHTNING DEAL: FitBeast Hand Grip Strengthener. #CommissionEarned
TWO ITEMS RELATING TO THE TRUMP INDICTMENT: Ham Sandwich Nation: Due Process When Everything is a Crime.
And: Crime Follies: Overcriminalization, Independent Prosecutors, and the Rule of Law. (Bumped).
THE NEW SPACE RACE: First piloted flight of Boeing’s oft-delayed Starliner astronaut ferry ship slips to mid-summer.
The first piloted flight of Boeing’s Starliner astronaut ferry ship is slipping from late April to at least July 21, officials said Wednesday, to allow more time to close out paperwork and to carry out an additional test of the spacecraft’s parachute deploy system.
Running years behind schedule, the Crew Flight Test, or CFT, mission will carry two veteran astronauts — Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita Williams — to the International Space Station to verify the ship’s readiness to begin regular service ferrying crews to and from the lab complex, alternating with SpaceX’s already operational Crew Dragon.
NASA Commercial Crew Program manager Steve Stich said there’s nothing wrong with Starliner’s parachute system and “when we look across the vehicle, the Starliner spacecraft is in really good shape. … The Atlas Launch vehicle is ready for flight.”
But reviewing the paperwork needed to officially clear the spacecraft for flight, along with the addition of another ground test and fitting the flight into a busy East Coast launch schedule, combined to push the long-awaited mission from spring to the mid-summer timeframe.
It doesn’t sound serious, but yet another delay doesn’t look good.
SO NO REAL CHANGE, THEN: Buzzfeed’s AI-assisted-content is terrible.
KEVIN DOWNEY JR: Scaredy-Brat AOC Backs Down to Libs of TikTok Creator, Flees in Fear. “Chaya Raichik, the creator of Libs of TikTok — who is hated by the trans-pansexual grooming gang — met Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) in the Capitol, and it didn’t go well for the supposedly tough Bronx denizen.”
TikTok has enlisted three heavyweights from American politics and business to advise it behind the scenes as the social-media app tries to convince U.S. authorities that it isn’t beholden to the Chinese government.
David Plouffe and Jim Messina, veterans of Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns, and Zenia Mucha, the former longtime communications chief of Walt Disney Co., DIS 1.27%increase; green up pointing triangle are advising TikTok in its fight against efforts to ban it in the U.S, according to people familiar with their roles.
All three helped coach TikTok Chief Executive Shou Zi Chew for more than a month ahead of what turned out to be a contentious U.S. House hearing last week, the people said.
In hiring the trio of U.S. advisers, TikTok, which is owned by Beijing-based ByteDance Ltd., is turning to people who made their name selling the world some of the most prominent American brands: Barack Obama and Disney.
Um.