Archive for 2025

OPEN THREAD: Another wild Saturday night here!

I FOR ONE WELCOME OUR NEW SELF-TEACHING OVERLORDS: AI will replace human teachers in new Arizona charter school.

A teacher should be a “guide on the side,” not a “sage on the stage,” educators have been saying for the last 30-ish years. Now AI is making it possible and . . . Is this really a good idea?

Unbound Academic Institute has received the OK to open a Tucson charter school without human teachers: AI will provide two hours of day of interactive, individualized lessons in literature, math and science to fourth- to eighth-graders, reports Radhika Rajkumar on ZDNet. Human “guides” will provide emotional support and, presumably, keep students from goofing off.

In the afternoon, students will attend virtual “life skills workshops” on topics such as “financial literacy, public speaking, resilience, and critical thinking led by what Unbound calls ‘community mentors,’ who range ‘from local entrepreneurs to civic leaders’,” she writes.

“The AI system will analyze their responses, time spent on tasks, and even emotional cues [via webcam] to optimize the difficulty and presentation of content,” Unbound’s charter application states. “This ensures that each student is consistently challenged at their optimal level, preventing boredom or frustration.”

What could possibly go wrong?

(Classical allusion in headline.)

JOHN HAWKINS: Does American Culture Celebrate Mediocrity Over Excellence?

It feels like there are two points [Vivek Ramaswamy is] making here, one subtle and one obvious.

The subtle one, which is at the heart of why so many tech companies REALLY want H1-B visas so badly, is that some cultures are poorer and hungrier than others. I hate to tell you this if you’re American, but as a general rule, Indians WANT IT more than you do. Why? Because the average salary in India is about $382 per month. So, if you’re Indian, educated, smart, and because of the wonders of the modern world, can do work or even remote work in America, you have an incredible opportunity.

If you have pretty good English, can take instructions, work hard, and have a good attitude, you may be able to get very “rich” doing what most Americans consider fairly mundane work. Think about it – if you can just make the minimum wage in America, that equates to $15,080 per year. Americans consider that “barely surviving.” Meanwhile, if you’re in India, that’s three times what the average person makes.

How much bullsh*t would you be willing to put up with at work to get paid lots of money to do a simple job? Personally, I’ve hired people from India to work remotely for me before, and do you know what my experience was? There were some communication issues, but generally, they did the job, they did it well, and they had a work ethic you just don’t see in America. What do I mean by that? Well, I am 100% not exaggerating when I say that I’ve had Indians tell me out of the blue they intend to work for me through their honeymoons or reach out to tell me they just had a heart attack and are in the ICU but will be back at work in a couple of days. It’s not like I’m a slavedriver or ask them to do these things either, this is just their attitude.

In my experience, Americans who are that hungry tend to be few and far between as compared to it being common somewhere like India. This is one of the few advantages poor people have over the rich. Being deprived makes them hungry for success in a way that it’s hard to be when life is easy.

Getting beyond that, it’s impossible to deny that Ramaswamy is right about America’s culture emphasizing the wrong things.

Read the whole thing.

KERRY PICKET: Rank-and-file FBI agents dismayed, ‘embarrassed’ by bureau’s handling of New Orleans terror attack.

FBI agents say the bureau’s first response to the New Year’s Day terrorist massacre in New Orleans’ French Quarter was disastrous and another reason why the Senate can’t move fast enough to confirm President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to run the agency.

According to several agents, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, the FBI failed to execute a comprehensive counter-terrorism plan when Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar of Texas, an Army veteran, rammed a pickup truck with an ISIS flag into New Year’s Eve revelers, killing 14 and wounding dozens.

They said the top FBI official on the scene broke with bureau decorum and inexplicably declared the attack not to be terrorism and that the bureau failed to follow basic procedures during the investigation.

Agents wondered why Lyonel Myrthil, the special agent in charge of the New Orleans FBI office, did not appear to be on duty when the attack happened, despite what should have been a heightened alert for a major New Year’s Eve celebrations and the college football championship, the Sugar Bowl, scheduled at the city’s Superdome on New Year’s Day.

The agents blamed poor leadership by outgoing FBI Director Christopher Wray and Deputy Director Paul Abbate.

Mr. Abbate is poised to become acting director after Mr. Wray resigns, which he said he will do before Mr. Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration.

“They need to go right now, not only Wray, but Abbate needs to go. This is awful. This is embarrassing. Kash Patel is the person to have in there,” an agent said, referring to Mr. Trump’s nominee for FBI director. “He needs to come right now, right away, because these people have to leave.”

Indeed. As Byron York wrote a couple of weeks ago: Kash Patel, onetime FBI target, now on track to run the FBI.

Not long ago, a left-wing journalist argued that when Republicans describe Kash Patel’s nomination to be FBI director as a way to “clean out” the FBI and “restore its integrity,” they are in fact creating “cover to go along with Trump’s scheme to unleash the FBI on enemies.”

It’s a common criticism in anti-Trump circles. But it raises a question. Where were these people in 2017, 2018, and after? If one wants to discuss the prospect of a new director unleashing the FBI on enemies, shouldn’t he grapple with the reality of years of bureau leadership unleashing the FBI on enemies?

During the Trump years, FBI directors and other top law enforcement and intelligence officials did the following:

1) Opened investigations on presidential candidates.

2) Deployed undercover agents and confidential sources to spy on a candidate’s advisers.

3) Hired a campaign opposition researcher under the guise of intelligence gathering.

4) Presented false opposition research to a court as a basis for wiretapping a candidate’s adviser.

5) Used false opposition research to brief the president of the United States.

6) Ambushed the president-elect with false opposition research.

7) Sought to include false opposition research in intelligence community products.

8) Ambushed the national security adviser with wiretap information on the pretense of a Logan Act violation.

9) Misled/stonewalled Congress on the investigation of the president.

10) Misled the president about the investigation targeting him.

The FBI’s response to Patel’s arrival should be fun to watch:

DOUGLAS MURRAY GOES OUT ON A LIMB: Mass immigration is killing Europe – and the political class just don’t care.

Another Christmas and the politics of Europe are once again roiled by one of the Continent’s newest traditions: the Christmas market terrorist attack.

Last Friday’s attack on a Christmas market in Magdeburg was carried out by a Saudi-born asylum seeker. In 2016 it was a Tunisian migrant who carried out a similarly horrific attack in Berlin. It is one of the reasons why for the past 10 years these once innocent family events are surrounded by police and very often by what locals sometimes cynically call “diversity bollards”. In a macabre twist, in August this year a Syrian Islamist murdered three people and stabbed eight more at a Festival of Diversity in Solingen.

Most of the Western political class and media continue to refuse to draw any link between the uncontrolled mass legal and illegal immigration of recent years and the upsurge in crimes, including terrorism. They point out quite rightly that not everyone who arrives on our shores is a terrorist. But that is a straw man. Absolutely no reasonable voice would ever make such a claim.

Almost 10 years ago I began writing a book called The Strange Death of Europe. It was a response to the unprecedented migration wave of 2015, encouraged by then German chancellor Angela Merkel. I warned that if you import the world’s people you also import the world’s problems.

I pointed out that far from what our politicians were implying we were not in fact “nations of immigrants”. We were actually societies that had been strikingly culturally and ethnically homogenous for centuries, and that what was now being called “normal” was anything but that. And I also tried to warn that our societies were likely to fracture beyond recognition if we did not control immigration and take a tougher stance on deporting people who had no right to be here.

Instead, as Brendan O’Neill writes today at Spiked: When working-class girls were sacrificed to ideology. How the elites’ cowardice and classism let the ‘grooming gangs’ get away with rape.