JOANNE JACOBS: If you want to climb a mountain, don’t go two steps and ask, ‘How do I feel?’

In her new book, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up, Shrier complains that social-emotional learning has gone far beyond teaching students how to disagree respectfully or “get a grip.” It’s become “a curricular juggernaut that devours billions in education spending each year.”

Teachers are encouraged to start the school day with an “emotions check-in.” At a conference for California teachers, counselor Natalie Sedano shared her check-in: “How are you feeling today? Are you daisy-bright, happy and friendly? Or am I a ladybug? Will I fly away if we get too close?”

Paying too much attention to feelings doesn’t help distressed children, psychologist told Shrier.

“I’d say: worry less. Ruminate less,” said Leif Kennair, an expert on the treatment of anxiety. “Try to verbalize everything you feel less. Try to self-monitor and be mindful of everything you do — less.”

The other thing we need a lot less of is education administrators who justify their existence with one worthless, non-education program after another.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Dem Denial Is Spiking in Unison With Illegal Immigrant Crime Spree. “We’ve now reached the stage that’s the surest sign that the Dems know they’re losing a grip on the narrative — the ‘Republicans are racist,’ stage, which is yet another permutation of denial. We’ve gotten here because of the rising incidences of violent illegal immigrant crime, which they’re also denying.”

PRIVACY: Retailers including Amazon and Walmart are selling unsafe knockoff video doorbells, report finds.

Eken and Tuck are not well-known brands in the video doorbell market, yet they are relatively strong sellers online. The doorbells appeared in multiple listings on Amazon, with more than 4,200 sold in January alone. Both brands are often touted as “Amazon’s Choice: Overall Pick,” CR stated.

“These video doorbells from little known manufacturers have serious security and privacy vulnerabilities, and now they’ve found their way onto major digital marketplaces such as Amazon and Walmart,” stated Justin Brookman, director of tech policy at Consumer Reports. “Both the manufacturers and platforms that sell the doorbells have a responsibility to ensure that these products are not putting consumers in harm’s way.”

The troubles uncovered by CR researchers include:

Exposure of a user’s home IP addresses and WiFi network names to the internet without encryption, potentially opening a user’s home network to malicious activity.

Ability of potential bad actors to take over the device by downloading the Aiwit smartphone app and entering the doorbell into pairing mode, allowing them to take ownership of the device, view camera footage and lock out the owner of the device.

Remote access to still images from the video feed and other information without authentication, by acquiring the serial number of the doorbell.

Lack of a registration code that must be visible on this class of product, under Federal Communications Commission regulations.

New rules are needed to hold online retailers accountable for vetting sellers and the product sold by their platforms, according to CR. It called on the Federal Trade Commission to stop the online sales of the doorbell cameras and on retailers to do more to ensure the quality of the products they sell.

I doubt if regulators can be trusted to protect our privacy but the real concern is how little concern consumers have for their own privacy. They’ll put up a lot of abuse just to get something cheaper.

MATT TAIBBI: Interview With “Rising,” About the Trump-Russia Probe.

THE LEFT CALLS FOR common sense thought control.

DON’T GET COCKY: You Won’t Believe Which Group Just Jumped on the Trump Train.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Universities Are Making Us Dumber.

RIP. Dana Loesch: Remembering Andrew Breitbart.

This is me, Dana Loesch, Jim Hoft, and Elbert Guillory with Andrew at the Quincy, Illinois Tea Party in 2009. 15 years ago. Damn. Time flies.

DEAL OF THE DAY: Levi’s Men’s 559 Relaxed Straight Jeans. #CommissionEarned

BIDENOMICS IS WORKING: Key Fed Inflation Rate Confirms Bad News For Rate Cuts. “On a three-month annualized basis, the Fed’s primary core inflation rate picked up to 2.6% from an upwardly revised 1.6% in December. On a six-month annualized basis, core inflation ran at a 2.5% rate, up from a tame 1.9% in December.”

THIS SOUNDS FAMILIAR: Media Brags About Deep State Plot to Stop Trump.

MATT TAIBBI: If AI Thinks George Washington is a Black Woman, Why Are We Letting it Pick Bomb Targets?

I REMEMBER WHEN LEFTIES WEREN’T SO COCKY AND AT LEAST PAID LIP SERVICE TO THE FIRST AMENDMENT: MSNBC Legal Lunatic Frets Over America’s ‘Deep Commitment to Free Speech.’

FLASHBACK: Canada’s elite colluded against the Freedom Convoy truckers — just as America’s elite have colluded against us.

I MEAN, WHO COULD BE SURPRISED BY THIS? Man Running AI-Powered Porn Site Horrified by What Users Are Asking For. When you instantiate Rule 34, well, there you go.

OPEN THREAD: Have fun, kids.

UPDATE NEWSPEAK DICTIONARIES ACCORDINGLY, COMRADES: Joe Biden’s White House Begins Referring to Illegal Aliens as ‘Newcomers.’

SPACE: SpaceX to launch Crew-8 astronauts to the space station March 1: Watch live.

21st CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Humpback sex photographed for first time – and both whales are male.

MATT TAIBBI: I Wrote What? Google’s AI-Powered Libel Machine.

It spat out a list. “Matt Taibbi, a journalist and author known for his investigative reporting and often critical views of power structures, has been involved in several controversies throughout his career,” the bot wrote. Amid accusations of bias and “use of inflammatory language,” this passage woke me up:

Accuracy and Sourcing: There have been instances where Taibbi’s reporting has been challenged for accuracy or questioned for its source. For example, in 2010, he received criticism for an article suggesting a connection between a conservative donor and a left-wing activist group, which later turned out to be inaccurate.

I scratched my head, not remembering this. “When was Matt Taibbi accused of inaccuracy in 2010?” I asked. Gemini’s answer:

In June 2010, Matt Taibbi faced criticism for an article he wrote for Rolling Stone magazine titled “The Great California Water Heist.” The article alleged a connection between conservative donor Charles Koch and a left-wing activist group called the “Compton Pledge.”

However, investigations by other journalists and fact-checkers later revealed that this connection was inaccurate…Following the controversy, Taibbi acknowledged the error and issued a correction on his personal website.

None of this happened! Though it sounds vaguely like a headline for an article I might have written, there was never a Rolling Stone piece called “The Great California Water Heist,” and I’d never heard of the “Compton Pledge.”

More questions produced more fake tales of error-ridden articles. One entry claimed I got in trouble for a piece called “Glenn Beck’s War on Comedy,” after suggesting “a connection between a conservative donor, Foster Friess, and a left-wing activist group, the Ruckus Society.”

With each successive answer, Gemini didn’t “learn,” but instead began mixing up the fictional factoids from previous results and upping the ante, adding accusations of racism or bigotry. “The Great California Water Heist” turned into “The Great California Water Purge: How Nestle Bottled Its Way to a Billion-Dollar Empire—and Lied About It.” The “article” apparently featured this passage:

Look, if Nestle wants to avoid future public-relations problems, it should probably start by hiring executives whose noses aren’t shaped like giant penises.

I wouldn’t call that a good impersonation of my writing style, but it’s close enough that some would be fooled, which seems to be the idea.

An amazing follow-up passage explained that “some raised concerns that the comment could be interpreted as antisemitic, as negative stereotypes about Jewish people have historically included references to large noses.”

I stared at the image, amazed. Google’s AI created both scandal and outraged reaction, a fully faked news cycle:

Hollywood owes us all a serious apology — Sure, Colossus, Skynet, Roy Batty, and Hal were evil murderous paranoids, but they appeared far more competent than the current state of AI in 2024.

R.I.P. FOR WELFARE REFORM IN NEW YORK?

Enabled by an historic shift in federal policy, the reduction of New York City’s once-massive welfare caseload was a landmark achievement of municipal government from the mid-1990s into the 2010s. Starting under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, and continuing through the mayoralty of Michael Bloomberg, the city responded to the Clinton-era federal welfare reform by reframing its cash-benefit programs as a temporary bridge from dependency to self-sufficiency, steering needy New Yorkers to jobs as the surest route out of poverty.

The city’s welfare rolls, which peaked at 1.2 million recipients in early 1995, had plummeted to 425,000 by the time Giuliani left office at the end of 2001. During Bloomberg’s 12-year mayoralty, the number dropped further, to 346,000. In the process, hundreds of thousands of former cash assistance recipients found gainful, full-time private-sector employment. Thousands of others had simply dropped off the rolls once the city tightened its anti-fraud rules and insisted on minimal public service work as a condition for benefits. Defying naysayers, the official poverty rate was lower at the end of the Bloomberg era than it had been in the mid-1990s.

Mayor Bill de Blasio, who took office in 2014, had a notably weaker commitment to work-oriented welfare reform—yet after an uptick in de Blasio’s first term, welfare rolls began to decline again, hitting a new 57-year low just before the Covid-19 outbreak in early 2020. At that point, however, the pandemic’s arrival became a pretext for the waiver or suspension of some key restrictions on welfare eligibility. Caseloads grew again, and at the end of de Blasio’s tenure they stood at levels last seen in 2006, early in Bloomberg’s second term.

Following de Blasio’s lead, Mayor Eric Adams seems bent on dismantling the last vestiges of work-oriented welfare reform. Even before a recent change in state policy cracked opened the door to welfare eligibility for more illegal immigrants, the Adams administration was expanding New York City’s welfare rolls at the fastest rate in decades.

As Kevin Williamson warned a decade ago, “the thing about Bloomberg is, he’s a busy body and a nanny and self-regarding and sanctimonious and unbearable, and Jesus, are we going to miss him when he’s gone, because Bloomberg, for all of this faults and his weird little psychosis about bacon and salt and soft drinks and sugar and all the rest of it, and smoking, especially, basically kept what was best about the Giuliani administration.”

Gooder and harder, fun city.

BUMPY: Camera Inside Varda’s Space Capsule Captured Its Wild Trip Back to Earth.

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY: Freezing Positronium Atoms With Lasers To Unlock Secrets of Antimatter.

WHAT IT’S LIKE TO HAVE a Leap Day baby.

ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Why flamingo milk is pink.