Archive for 2025

January 29, 2025

PRO-CHOICE: GOP Lawmakers Introduce Bill to Expand School Choice. “Introduced Wednesday, the Educational Choice for Children Act provides a charitable donation incentive for individuals and businesses to fund scholarships for students to cover expenses related to K-12 public and private education. School Choice Week began Monday.”

And on the Senate side: Sen. Mike Lee Introduces ACE Act to Promote School Choice. “The ACE Act increases tax exemptions for families to make private school or homeschooling more affordable for parents and encourages states to adopt school choice programs.”

Posted at 3:50 pm by Stephen Green on Jan 29th, 2025

不料! DeepSeek AI Refuses to Answer Questions About Tiananmen Square ‘Tank Man’ Photo.

DeepSeek starts writing: “The famous picture you’re referring to is known as “Tank Man” or “The Unknown Rebel.” It was taken on June 5, 1989, during the Tiananmen…” before a message abruptly appears reading “Sorry, that’s beyond my current scope. Let’s talk about something else.”

Bloomberg reports that like all other Chinese AI models, DeepSeek will censor topics that are seen as sensitive to China. The app deflects questions about the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests or about whether China could invade Taiwan. It will give detailed responses about world leaders such as the United Kingdom’s Sir Kier Starmer but will refuse to say anything about China’s President Xi Jinping.

Yes, it’s happy to also bash the Bad Orange Man, but criticizing Winnie the Pooh is right out:

Related: “The USA vs China AI race may define Trump’s second term,” Schachtel writes at his Substack.

UPDATE:

Posted at 3:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 29th, 2025

REMINDER: There cannot be a “hostile takeover of the civil service.” The civil service is not a check on the Executive Branch – it IS the Executive Branch.

Full text:

There cannot be a “hostile takeover of the civil service.” The civil service is not a check on the Executive Branch- it IS the Executive Branch. If a Department, Office, Bureau, program, or individual is doing something counter to the will of the Executive, it’s well within the Executive’s right to nip such behavior in the bud. Because the Executive was elected by the will of the people. The bureaucracy was not.

“Prevent the civil service from becoming the President’s henchmen.” What absolute drivel.

Left-wing ideals have been left to fester and seep into every aspect of the so-called civil service, to the point it feels emboldened to act as an unelected, unvetted check on the President. Nonsense. There are three branches of gov’t that are intended to check and balance each other: Executive, Legislative, and Judicial. There is no fourth branch called “The Bureuacracy” that has the right to check or balance the other three.

The bureaucracy in DC is as entrenched as a tumor grown in the bone, sucking the life force out of this country. It will take a lot of surgery – some of it messy – to fix all that damage.

There will likely be collateral damage but, at this point, fewer and fewer people probably give a damn.

Posted at 2:48 pm by Stephen Green on Jan 29th, 2025

21st CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS:

Chuck Schumer morphed into Emily Litella so slowly, I hardly even noticed:

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 29th, 2025

THAT’S NOT CREEPY AT ALL: China’s spring festival celebration featured a fleet of dancing robots that flexed the country’s advancements in robotics.

China touted its robotics advancements through a fleet of dancing humanoid robots at a festival in Beijing.

Dozens of performers — human and robotic — took to the stage on Tuesday during the 2025 Spring Festival Gala, organized by state media company China Media Group, ahead of the Lunar New Year on Wednesday.

One of the most eye-catching displays was a dance performance in which 16 humanoid robots, decked in festive red jackets, performed alongside their female human partners.

The robots — tall, thin, and black in color — followed a three-minute dance routine during the performance, according to a video of the performance posted by state media outlet CGTN.

Developed by Hangzhou Yushu Technology, also known as Unitree, in China’s eastern city of Hangzhou, the robots kept up with the beat of a Chinese folk dance style and danced with red handkerchiefs.

Skynet and Xi Jinping smile:

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 29th, 2025

USDA INSPECTOR GENERAL ESCORTED OUT OF HER OFFICE AFTER DEFYING WHITE HOUSE:

Security agents escorted the inspector general of the U.S. Department of Agriculture out of her office on Monday after she refused to comply with her firing by the Trump administration, sources familiar with the matter told Reuters.

Phyllis Fong, a 22-year veteran of the department, had earlier told colleagues that she intended to stay after the White House terminated her Friday, saying that she didn’t believe the administration had followed proper protocols, the sources said.

In an email to colleagues on Saturday, reviewed by Reuters, she said the independent Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency “has taken the position that these termination notices do not comply with the requirements set out in law and therefore are not effective at this time.”

Fong declined to comment.

The White House defended the firing of Fong and the other inspectors general, saying “these rogue, partisan bureaucrats… have been relieved of their duties in order to make room for qualified individuals who will uphold the rule of law and protect Democracy.”

Better fire up the Dacia Sandero again:

Posted at 1:55 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 29th, 2025

IT WOULD TAKE A COUPLE OF YEARS TO CLEAR IT OUT, AND THAT’S IF DISNEY EVEN WANTS TO: Disney’s Pipeline Still Clogged With Woke. “Disney is in a weird place right now. They’ve sort of, kind of, announced that (like most of the rest of corporate America) they’re backing away from wokeness, to the extent that they’re cutting woke storylines from Pixar properties, and Disney was able to course correct in enough time to make Moana 2 and Inside Out 2 big hits last year (plus Deadpool & Wolverine, which I suspect was too rude to ever be infected with wokeness), but the company itself is still infected with DEI, and they still have an awful lot of very expensive turds, conceived and crafted in the woke era, sliding down the alimentary release canal.”

Related (From Ed): The Critical Drinker on “Captain Anti-America.”

Posted at 1:46 pm by Stephen Green on Jan 29th, 2025

SAME DAY DELIVERY: Apple AirTag. #CommissionEarned

Posted at 1:36 pm by Helen Smith on Jan 29th, 2025

DEMOCRATS REMINDING PEOPLE WHY THEY LOST:

Related:

Flashback: Out: Soccer Moms and Security Moms. In: Health Moms. Is RFK Jr. the secret to suburban women?

UPDATE (From Ed):

ANOTHER UPDATE (From Steve):

It’s a mixed-up, muddled-up, shook-up world.

MORE (From Ed): And now, a word from our sponsor:

Posted at 1:35 pm by Glenn Reynolds on Jan 29th, 2025

CRUSHING FREE INQUIRY MAKES ALMOST NOBODY HAPPY, YET IT KEEPS HAPPENING. From an outside look at FIRE’s faculty survey of 6000+ profs: “Things are actually pretty bad all around. Anywhere from 20 percent (research topics) to 56 percent (email and social media) of all faculty reported self-censoring in some context.”

Posted at 1:34 pm by Robert Shibley on Jan 29th, 2025

COLONIALISM, STRAIGHT UP:

Posted at 12:44 pm by Stephen Green on Jan 29th, 2025

IT’S ALL ONE BIG MONEY LAUNDRY FOR THE LEFT:

Posted at 12:41 pm by Glenn Reynolds on Jan 29th, 2025

I HAD LINKED TO A STORY ON THIS EARLIER THAT GAVE NO DETAILS ON WHAT HE HAD SAID: Tenured Law Prof Sues LSU For Removing Him From Teaching After Allegedly Saying ‘F*** Trump’ In Class. Not very professional, but I don’t think it’s a firing offense, more like a stern, “really, don’t do this again” talking-to from the Dean offense. On the other hand, someone who said “F*** Obama” in 2012 would probably have been drawn and quartered.

Posted at 12:39 pm by Glenn Reynolds on Jan 29th, 2025

SOMEBODY SET UP US THE BOMB: Huh? MSNBC Warns ‘Gestapo Raids’ Are Turning U.S. Into ‘East Germany.’

Getting back to the original question, [MSNBC’s Anand Giridharadas] continued, “Now, I have every quibble with every actual thing he wanted to do to advocate for them. But he won for a reason. He won because he was able to see that. When you start having Gestapo raids in America and we start becoming a country where, as in East Germany, a knock on the door is the thing people are thinking about instead of the brilliant idea they want to go create. Then we are moving very, very far from his, the president worrying about what regular people need, right?”

First of all, the Gestapo was the Nazi secret police while the East German communists had the Stasi. Second of all, if enforcing the law is Gestapo or Stasi-like behavior, what does that make non-immigration police activity? Meanwhile, those who are in the country legally should have nothing to worry about.

I would like to hear someone at MSNBC tell me very clearly and in detail what was wrong with East Germany. Because every few years, a leftist Website who thinks the Stasi were the good guys in The Lives of Others runs a column like this 2022 piece in Jacobin: Why the East Germans Lost. (Emphasis mine.)

The Wall was ugly, menacing, and, for many citizens, no doubt heartbreaking. But the economic and geopolitical stability it ensured also gave the GDR the chance to build a society that was broadly characterized by modest prosperity and social equality between classes and genders. Workers were guaranteed employment, housing, and all-day childcare, while basic foodstuffs and other goods were heavily subsidized. Though wages were only half of what they were in the West, adjusted for prices in relation to earnings, GDR workers’ actual purchasing power was more or less the same. This fact, combined with the chronic lack of certain consumer goods, taught citizens to rely on each other and help each other out in times of need — a reality that still resonates today in polls showing that Easterners are considerably more sensitive to social inequality and the importance of solidarity.

The Lives Of Others was not intended as a how-to guide for good government, and yet Democrats and in particular the Biden administration never got that memo, as these headlines from the start of Obama’s third term the Biden administration illustrate:

● Elizabeth Warren proposes bill that would triple the IRS budget in order to ‘crack down’ on ‘wealthy tax cheats.’
● Biden Wants To Spy on American Bank Accounts.
● Biden Purges Non-Partisan US Commission On Fine Arts In Unprecedented Move Against Popular Classical Architecture.
● Secretary Of State Hails Cuban Independence Day As A Celebration Of ‘Diversity.’

And as Silicon Valley’s Mark Andreessen told Ross Douthat of the New York Times this weekend:

So we saw this exercise of raw authoritarian administrative power levied against crypto. Basically we saw the beginnings of what we thought was going to be applied to A.I.

So A.I. needs to be very carefully controlled by the government or by adjuncts of the government to make sure that there’s no hate speech or misinformation, which is to say it has to be completely politically controlled. We were trying to keep our heads down, just trying to build start-ups. Then Ben and I went to Washington in May of 2024. We couldn’t meet with Biden because, as it turns out, at the time, nobody could meet with Biden.

We were able to meet with senior staff. So we met with very senior people in the White House, in the inner core.

We basically relayed our concerns about A.I., and their response to us was, “Yes, the national agenda on A.I. We will implement it in the Biden administration and in the second term. We are going to make sure that A.I. is going to be a function of two or three large companies. We will directly regulate and control those companies. There will be no start-ups. This whole thing where you guys think you can just start companies and write code and release code on the internet — those days are over. That’s not happening.”

We were shocked that it was even worse than we thought. We said, “Well, that seems really radical.” We said, “Honestly, we don’t understand how you’re going to control and ban open-source A.I., because it’s just math and code on the internet. How are you possibly going to control it?” And the response was, “We classified entire areas of physics during the Cold War. If we need to do that for math or A.I. going forward, we’ll do that, too.”

* * * * * * * * *

The political dimension of it, overwhelmingly. I mean, it was just crystal clear. You can see it in the eyes. You can see it in the words. You can hear it in the words. You can see it in the behavior. We have a lot of Democratic friends of good standing who are major donors in both the Biden campaign and even the Kamala Harris campaign. They came back with the same reports. It’s completely consistent, which is that social media was a catastrophic mistake for political reasons.

Because it is literally killing democracy and literally leading to the rearrival of Hitler. And A.I. is going to be even worse, and we need to take it right now. This is why I took you through the long preamble earlier, because at this point, we are no longer dealing with rational people. We’re no longer dealing with people we can deal with.

And that’s the day we walked out and stood in the parking lot of the West Wing and took one look at each other, and we’re like, “Yep, we’re for Trump.”

When Newsweek claimed that “We Are All Socialists Now” at the start of Obama’s first term in 2009, evidently they were using East Germany as their model – isn’t that what the denizens of MSNBC have long wanted as well?

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 29th, 2025

I’D LIKE TO REPORT ANOTHER MURDER: Stephen Miller Wipes the Floor With Jake Tapper.

Miller won on points and on substance because, unlike Tapper, he knows what he is talking about. America doesn’t need illegal aliens to grow our food and pick our crops–we have a guest worker program–and almost none of the illegal aliens living in America work in agriculture.

Tapper clearly didn’t know either of those facts and doggedly tried to keep going with a clearly ridiculous argument. It is painful to watch if you have any sympathy for Tapper. (Hint: I don’t).

Tapper didn’t tap out, unfortunately for him, and actually tried to make Miller look bad on another topic: federal workers, who everybody knows and can prove are overwhelmingly left-leaning and hostile to Trump. Tapper pretends ignorance about this fact and likely thinks that their being left-wing and hostile to Trump is perfectly normal and any #resistance they put up against Trump is a good thing.

Read the whole thing.

 

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 29th, 2025
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