Archive for 2024
October 21, 2024
BYRON YORK: As attacks intensify, Trump becomes more popular. “It’s entirely possible that wildly negative media coverage is actually causing many people to view Trump more favorably. After all, the media are some of the least-trusted institutions in public life, and if top media figures say something, millions of people are likely to think the opposite. It’s hard to see Trump-bashing as helping Trump, but that might be what is going on.”
WARGAMING THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE: Prepare to Be Shocked.
BATTLESWARM BLOG: Two Approaches To Drone Defense.
The Russo-Ukrainian War has nailed down the fast forward button on drone evolution. The success both sides have had with taking out expensive equipment with cheap drones has prompted a lot of the usual suspects to dust off their standard “the tank is obsolete” talking points.
But military technological evolution is always a two way street. Offense pulls ahead for a while, only for defensive countermeasures to quickly catch up. Such is the case with drone warfare, and now we’re seeing some promising approaches to cost-effective anti-drone weapons.
But wait, there’s more: A Third Drone Defense System: Microwave EMP.
GREAT MOMENTS IN 21st CENTURY PARENTING: Massachusetts parents sue school district over student receiving ‘D’ after using AI for social studies project.
The parents of a Massachusetts high school senior who used artificial intelligence (AI) for a social studies project have filed a lawsuit against his teachers and the school after their son received detention and a “D” grade.
“He’s been accused of cheating, and it wasn’t cheating, there was no rule in the handbook against AI,” Jennifer Harris, who along with her husband, Dale, are named as plaintiffs in the lawsuit filed in Massachusetts’ Plymouth County District Court last month against the Hingham High School administration and the school district, told Boston 25 News.
The lawsuit alleges that their son will “suffer irreparable harm that is imminent” over the grade that his parents say kept him out of the National Honor Society, which they claim is threatening his standing with top tier colleges.
“So, our argument to the school was could you fail him with a 59 instead of a 53 so he can have a B minus? He’s applying to top tier schools,” Harris told the news station. “He’s applying to Stanford, he’s applying to MIT. They see a ‘C’ [grade] and it’s going in the trash.”
Harris said that the school “basically punished him for a rule that doesn’t exist,” saying that the school’s code of conduct handbook never mentioned the use of AI in projects until their son was punished, WCVB-TV reported.
She added that her son argued “it’s well documented that AI is the property of the person who generated it,” WBZ-TV reported.
While the school called it plagiarism, the parents and their lawyer disagree.
“There’s a wide gulf of information out there that says AI isn’t plagiarism,” Peter Farrell, who is representing the family, told WCVB.
Your son isn’t the future Capt. Kirk besting the Kobayashi Maru test at Starfleet Academy. There may not be a rule in the handbook against using AI now, but there’s certain to be one very soon. And arguing that “AI is the property of the person who generated it,” is a reminder that it’s also the property of all of the Webpages AI trolls to generate its responses, instead somebody studying those pages himself to learn something. And while a lawyer can make the technical case that AI isn’t plagiarism, it’s an awfully lazy way to get around actually doing what in less enlightened times was once called “hitting the books.”
But as AI does to text what the pocket calculator did to math, look for more and more of reports of students relying on it to attempt to skate through doing their homework: How do teachers detect AI-generated work?
LESS-THAN-SHOCKING NEWS FROM SCIENCE: Cancer diagnosis can take devastating toll on family finances.
HEY YOU, WORKING THE FRY MACHINE! DON’T GET COCKY: The Chronically Underestimated Kamala Harris. The “caricature of Kamala Harris as a bumbling dunce makes it easy to underestimate her, particularly in the closing weeks of an exceptionally close and high-stakes presidential campaign. Harris’s past is littered with older and more experienced men who saw her as easy pickings and came up short on Election Day.”
CRISIS BY DESIGN: Indiana Kids Ignored in Schools as Migrants Flood In.
WELL, THEY’RE NOT RUNNING A TOP-NOTCH OPERATION OVER THERE: There’s Something Odd About the Harris Campaign’s Response to Trump’s McDonald’s Visit. “Does anything about this post stand out to you? The first thing I noticed is that it came from Tim Walz, not Harris. Why is that? Harris is the one who claims to have worked at McDonald’s, yet she’s conspicuously silent on the matter. Walz, her running mate, is the one stepping in to make the noise. . . . The absence of such a direct response from Harris raises a lot of questions. It would have been much more effective if Kamala herself responded by saying, ‘Trump pretended to work at a McDonald’s; I actually worked there, yada, yada, yada.’ Last month, MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle asked Kamala, ‘At any point in your life have you served two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions, on a sesame seed bun working at a McDonald’s?’ Kamala awkwardly laughed and nervously clasped her hands together and said, “I have,” but that was before Snopes fact-checked the claim and called it unproven.”
THAT’S JUST RIGHT-WING CONSPIRACY THEORY: Stating the Patently Obvious: Lithium Ion Battery Fires Are a Problem.
WELL, AT LEAST THEY’RE WAGING OPEN LAWFARE:
The lawfare against @elonmusk, as gleefully described by the New York Times: pic.twitter.com/jPLtLyaYaK
— Stephen Pimentel (@StephenPiment) October 21, 2024
“Toe the line,” they explained.
JON STEWART DOES NOT SEEM TO HAVE GOTTEN BACK TO ELON MUSK:
The Woke Mind Virus in graphical form.
It is very quantifiable.
Hey @jonstewart, why did you say at that dinner in Aspen that it’s fake?
And why did you advocate censorship? https://t.co/11G3dDkEar
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 21, 2024
THEY CERTAINLY DIDN’T MAKE IT EASY TO CHOOSE: Is This the Lamest, Most Hysterical Reaction to Trump’s McDonald’s Drive-Thru Event?
WE’VE ENTERED SOME SORT OF BIZARRE HELL-WORLD IN WHICH PIERS MORGAN IS A VOICE OF SANITY: Trump’s genius McDonald’s stunt will fry Kamala at the ballot box.
“Even if you flippin’ fries at McDonald’s,” Oprah Winfrey once said, “if you are excellent, everybody wants to be in your line.”
I thought of this quote when Donald Trump turned up yesterday at a McDonald’s restaurant in suburban Philadelphia to work a shift making French fries, then handing bags of food to drive-through customers.
As political stunts go, this might have been the best I’ve ever seen, because it served two very powerful purposes in the presidential race.
First, it reminded voters that his rival, Kamala Harris, has repeatedly boasted about having a summer job at McDonald’s to make her sound more relatable to her fellow Americans, but to date, not a single person has been able to verify this.
This is quite extraordinary given how specific she has been, with her campaign team stating that she worked at McDonald’s on Central Avenue in Alameda, Calif., in 1983 after her freshman year at Howard University, working on the cash register, french fries station and ice cream machine.
But then, she didn’t mention it in her memoir, nor does it appear on the 1987 résumé she submitted when applying for a position at the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office despite listing her other work experiences.
It was like it never happened at all!
Even more intriguingly, the New York Times reported on Sunday: “In subsequent years, Ms. Harris talked so little about her long-ago job at McDonald’s that even some of her friends and close aides did not know she had worked there.”
Hmmm.
Forgive me, but I smell the same gigantic, disingenuous rat that Trump’s been smelling about Kamala’s supposed McDonald’s career move.
And it matters because it goes right to the heart of the Democratic candidate’s persistent pitch that she is the truth antidote to fork-tongued Trump.
If you’re going to position yourself as a bastion of honesty, you can’t tell brazen, self-promoting “I’m middle class just like you” fibs about working at McDonald’s.
McDonald’s issued a very carefully written statement yesterday, droning on about the unique American qualities of the Golden Arches:
Did you catch that, buried four paragraphs into the boilerplate?
Though we are not a political brand, we’ve been proud to hear former President Trump’s love for McDonald’s and Vice President Harris’s fond memories working under the Arches. While we and our franchisees don’t have records for all positions dating back to the early ’80s, what makes “1 in 8” so powerful is the shared experience so many Americans have had.
“While we and our franchisees don’t have records for all positions dating back to the early ’80s” is a polite way of saying, “In spite of our best efforts, and believe me, we really tried, because as a ‘modern, progressive burger company,’ we really, really hate the Bad Orange Man, but we couldn’t find any proof she worked for us, either. What was she thinking doctoring her bio in the age of the Internet?”
(And why is the Kamala campaign sending out a tweet under Tim Walz’s name rather having Harris out front and center to dispute this story and/or offer proof she actually worked at Mickey D’s?)
The other benefit of Trump working at McDonald’s is that’s causing the DNC-MSM to massively overreach (or to borrow from their vernacular when they report on the response of the other side of the aisle, “sieze!” and “pounce!”) in condemning a politician for having fun with an obvious election season stunt. QED:
BROKEN MEDIA: CBS's Caitlin Huey-Burns SEETHES over Trump workday at McDonald's, calling it a "political stunt" pic.twitter.com/djiD8zKvzf
— Jorge Bonilla (@BonillaJL) October 21, 2024
As the Book of Saul tells us, “A good tactic is one your people enjoy. ‘If your people aren’t having a ball doing it, there is something very wrong with the tactic.'”
HEAR BETTER: Apple AirPods Pro 2 Wireless Earbuds, Bluetooth Headphones. #CommissionEarned
“MELTDOWN” SEEMS STRONG, BUT WE’LL SEE: Putin turns to North Korean troops as Russia’s economy heads for a ‘meltdown.’
Moscow and Pyongyang have denied any troop exchanges.
But analysts are increasingly pointing to the underlying weakness of Russia’s economy, which appears stronger due to enormous defense spending, and predicting that it will struggle to sustain its war on Ukraine.
In addition to the Western sanctions that have largely shut out Moscow from the global financial system, Russia has suffered a massive brain drain of talent fleeing the country as well as hundreds of thousands of war casualties.
That’s contributed to a tight labor market and high inflation as the defense industry and military mobilization occupy a greater share of the working-age population—representing obstacles in President Vladimir Putin’s ability to raise more troops for his war.
In an op-ed for The Hill on Monday, Rutgers University-Newark political science professor Alexander J. Motyl predicted the Russian economy will suffer a “meltdown” next year.
Despite my pessimism over a “meltdown,” the Russian central bank did raise the prime interest rate to 19% last month — hardly a sign of strength — and it’s expected to go over 20% during 2025.
PLEASE, STOP, I CAN ONLY VOTE FOR HIM ONCE:
BREAKING: Former FBI Director James Comey says that former President Trump “is coming” for the FBI and the Department of Justice.
Your thoughts? pic.twitter.com/0bK3t1b97F
— Donald J. Trump News (@realTrumpNewsX) October 21, 2024
STRANGE BEDFELLOWS: Israel Just Got the OK to Go After Iran, but It Wasn’t from Biden-Harris.
ROGER SIMON: Will Israel Save Western Civilization? The Real Housewives of Gaza.
One way of saving Western Civilization is to kill the people trying to destroy it. That approach was put virtually off limits for a while — through the efforts of those trying to destroy it, mostly — but it appears to be surprisingly effective.
WOEING: Boeing’s CEO Is Shrinking the Jet Maker to Stop Its Crisis From Spiraling.
Even if the deal is ratified on Wednesday and union members go back to work, the company remains in a perilous financial position. Industry insiders and analysts have begun to ponder something previously unthinkable: whether a breakup or bankruptcy is in Boeing’s future if it remains on its current trajectory.
Boeing is exploring asset sales that could bring in much-needed cash while shedding noncore or underperforming units, according to people familiar with the discussions. Days before the gala, the company’s board met at Boeing’s Arlington, Va., headquarters, where directors quizzed division heads and combed through reports on the state of each unit, mulling next steps for the beleaguered plane maker.
Boeing has spread itself too thin and must shrink, Ortberg wrote in a note to employees earlier this month. “We need to be clear-eyed about the work we face,” he wrote. “We also need to focus our resources on performing and innovating in the areas that are core to who we are.”
Ortberg has moved to raise at least $10 billion in cash and slash thousands of jobs to stem losses that have exacerbated Boeing’s manufacturing woes and damaged a complex supply chain.
Boeing has tried unsuccessfully to sell a rocket joint-venture it shares with Lockheed Martin, and remains saddled with U.S. government programs like a troubled military refueling tanker and Air Force One replacement jets. Last week, the company reached a deal to offload a small defense subsidiary that makes surveillance equipment for the U.S. military, people familiar with the deal said.
Ortberg took the helm of the company in August. He will make his first public comments as CEO on Wednesday, when the union is set to vote on the new contract and Boeing will detail its financial results for the period ended Sept. 30. The company has warned that it will book billions of dollars in charges and report a $6 billion quarterly loss.
Something that cannot go on forever will stop.
There’s still a lot of value locked up in Boeing but there’s still no indication management knows how to get it out.
AS A MATTER OF FACT, YES, I WOULD:
Do you want MAGA with that?
Do you want no tax on tips with that?
Do you want world peace with that?
Do you want affordable groceries with that? pic.twitter.com/z02Bzg6u63
— Tim Young (@TimRunsHisMouth) October 20, 2024
It’s really hard to dehumanize someone who always seems to be having so much fun but the Left just won’t stop trying.