MEDIA LOSES IT OVER NEW YORK RANGERS NOT WEARING SPECIAL JERSEYS ON PRIDE NIGHT: “Let’s turn this on its side. If an NHL team held a Faith and Family Night, as part of the event placing an ichthus on the team’s warm-up jerseys, and a player said I’m not wearing that, how would the sports media world respond? The columns would write themselves. ‘How DARE a team push religion!’ Plus a plethora of laudatory prose on behalf of the player’s heroic stance, never mind that the brave atheist cliché grew stale sometime around 1967.”

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): “Wear the ribbon!”

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Are kids dumber now? New video from Reason TV with Robert Pondiscio of the American Enterprise Institute:

An excerpt from an hour and a half interview with Pondiscio available here.

IRAN AMMUNITION FACTORY HIT BY BLAST: Iranian media also report large fire at oil refinery outside the city of Tabriz.

Russia purchased last summer hundreds of Iranian Shahed and Mohajer series drones, which Moscow has used to attack Ukraine’s front-line positions and civilian infrastructure, as the two countries move toward what the U.S. has called a full defense partnership.

The purported attack in Isfahan also comes after months of domestic unrest. Nationwide protests erupted in September following the death in police custody of a young woman arrested for allegedly violating the country’s Islamic dress code. Street protests have abated in recent weeks, but discontent continues to simmer with sporadic rallies erupting.

Tensions also have grown over Iran’s nuclear activities. Talks to revive a 2015 nuclear accord that imposed limits on the country’s nuclear program in return for relief from U.S. sanctions stalled over the summer. They have been further complicated by Iran’s support for Russia in the Ukraine war.

Israel was against the accord, which the U.S. exited under Trump administration in 2018, and it has indicated it would take action against Tehran’s nuclear program if the West doesn’t do enough to curb it.

Key Iranian facilities have been hit by sabotage multiple times in the past, including the Natanz nuclear facility in 2021. Iran has accused Israel of being behind the sabotage.

“Developing,” as they say.

HOW’S THAT WELCOME WAGON PROGRAM COMING ALONG? How New York Stopped Fearing the Urban Doom Loop and Learned to Love It. “Covid sends the high-wage workers back to their suburban homes, which kills the restaurant and retail and entertainment industries of the city, which is the entire point of even living in or near a city in the first place, and as those businesses die, people realize there is no reason remaining to be in the city, and begin a mass emigration away that kills the cities. The Democrats’ embrace of violence, crime, and chaos as acceptable substitutes for restaurants, shopping, and entertainment obviously isn’t helping. Covid took away all the advantages for living in the city, and then the Summer of St. George unleashed all the disadvantages of living in the city, with a vengeance.”

THE POWER LINE WEEK IN PICTURES: Egghead Inflation Edition.

THIS IS THE WAY: DeSantis’ College Appointees Like Chris Rufo Show The Battle For America’s Academies Is Far From Over.

DeSantis’ move proves the fight to reclaim American education is not a lost cause and — institutionally, at least — it may even be less of a conceptual uphill battle to reclaim the academy and rechart the trajectory of our nation’s youth than many may think. After all, it really shouldn’t be that difficult of a task for conservative leaders to appoint conservatives like Rufo to the boards of public schools in red states with Republican majority legislatures.

But even so, that doesn’t mean it isn’t a battle, and engaging in conflict — especially in the current political climate — comes with risk. With the understanding that their appointment to the board would likely ruffle the feathers of those in the predominantly leftist New College community, Rufo and Eddie Speir, another trustee, scheduled two town hall events in which they could address the concerns of students, parents, faculty, alumni, and the general public, which the Sarasota Democratic Party encouraged people to protest.

The night before the events took place, death threats were made against Speir, leading to college faculty, notably Provost Suzanne Sherman, confronting Rufo and Speir and insisting the event be shut down while encouraging students and faculty to “refrain from attending.” Catherine Helean, a public relations officer of the college, stated that the threats “were perceived to be credible.”

Despite the provost’s insistence that the event be canceled for safety, Speir — whose life was explicitly threatened — and Rufo pushed forward and were able to engage students, faculty, and community members in conversations about their concerns for New College in the months and years to come.

Here’s the pregame show before their speech:

Polite. Firm. Bravo. Trustees run institutions not those below them on the org chart. https://t.co/ILziyrdVHP

— Hugh Hewitt (@hughhewitt) January 28, 2023

GREAT MOMENTS IN STATE-RUN TV: MSNBC’s Chris Hayes: Biden Economic Recovery Most Remarkable in U.S. History.

GREAT MOMENTS IN HARSH SENTENCING: Firebomb an NYPD police car during a riot, get a year in prison.

In a dramatic hearing on Thursday, a federal judge sentenced a corporate attorney who firebombed a police car during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests to a year in jail, arguing that his prestigious education — boarding school, Princeton, a law degree from New York University — should have rendered him a peacekeeper, not an instigator.

“You’re not one of the oppressed. You’re one of the privileged,” senior Eastern District of New York Judge Brian Cogan told Colinford Mattis, even as he expressed admiration for what the 35-year-old had accomplished in his life.

The sentencing marked the culmination of a two-and-a-half-year legal battle that saw Mattis and his co-defendant, Urooj Rahman, become symbols of the nation’s political tumult and divisions. Spanning two presidential administrations, their case saw competing imperatives play out in public and in the courtroom, as well as in the media.

To the Heritage Foundation they were “terrorists,” while New York magazine allowed that they could be seen as “civil-rights heroes, even martyrs.” The Daily Mail called them “woke lawyers.” In the pages of the New York Times, they were described by a guest contributor as victims of “deeply ingrained injustices.”

They threw a Molotov cocktail into a police SUV, adding the obligatory “fiery” component to a “mostly peaceful” riot — but fortunately for them, they’re not Andy Ngo or Ted Cruz, both of whom Yahoo’s Alexander Nazaryan has compared to Nazis.

COLORADO HAS A POPULATION OF 5.8 MILLION — AND APPARENTLY ONLY ONE MASSIVELY OVERWORKED BAKER: Colorado Court Rules Against Masterpiece Cakeshop’s Jack Phillips — Again — For Refusing To Make a ‘Gender Transition’ Cake.

TERROR IN TINSELTOWN: The Most Hated Reporter In Hollywood’s Secret Files Exposed — As Panicked Stars Run For Cover.

Knowing her days were numbered due to poor health, Nikki Finke “began mailing out packets to trusted friends — and press outlets — containing allegations that are, in some cases, ‘Harvey-level bad,’ to direct quote someone who’s seen some of them,” the anonymous tipster wrote, referencing disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein.

THIS IS CNN: CNN’s Race-Baiter Van Jones Blames Racism for Black Cops Beating Tyre Nichols to Death.

Jones writes:

At the end of the day, it is the race of the victim who is brutalized — not the race of the violent cop — that is most relevant in determining whether racial bias is a factor in police violence. It’s hard to imagine five cops of any color beating a White person to death under similar circumstances. And it is almost impossible to imagine five Black cops giving a White arrestee the kind of beat-down that Nichols allegedly received.

It’s that simple. For race-baiters like Jones, if the victim is Black, he (or she) is always a victim of racial hatred. It’s a self-fulfilling statement. A statement that cannot be defeated, even when the criminals are Black. If a Black man is the victim, race is always the reason.

Jones and race-baiters like him are stoking flames that will envelop the nation. Antifa–the thugs and goons who burned America three years ago–have taken to the street again, and will, again, burn, loot, and destroy property. I saw plenty of signs on the streets of Memphis that called for “justice” for Nichols, but Antifa thugs burning cities isn’t about Tyre Nichols. It’s never about the victims of police violence.

Those fiery but mostly peaceful riots — and the boost in ratings for CNN — don’t stoke themselves, you know. As Glenn wrote in 2021, “The thing is, it’s a lot easier to encourage violence when the consequences happen to someone else. Too much of upper-class America is cocooned from real risk. For the people in poor and working-class neighborhoods where riots and looting tend to happen, the consequences are much more apparent. That’s why the cavalier attitude of so many Democrats toward riots makes sense. Democrats are now the party of Wall Street, Silicon Valley and upscale suburbs. The people who have to deal with consequences will have to go somewhere else politically. And they will.”

FRENCH EMBASSY U.S. MAKES A HILARIOUS MOCKERY OF THE AP’S NOW-DELETED STYLE GUIDE UPDATE:

Earlier we passed along some of the mockeries being sent in the direction of the Associated Press over their explanation for a deleted tweet. Here’s the text of the tweet the AP deleted:

The French Embassy (oops, I violated the AP’s style guide there) saw that and responded accordingly:

Related: Jeremy Clarkson encountering Frenchness in France:

RONNA MCDANIEL REELECTED CHAIRWOMAN OF REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE.

RIOT SEASON SEEMS TO COME EARLIER EVERY YEAR: “On January 7, Tyre Nichols was stopped by Memphis police for what is said to be a routine traffic violation. For some reason, he fled and officers pursued him. One or more ‘altercations’ followed, and Nichols ultimately was transported to a hospital, where he died. Five Memphis police officers have now been charged with second degree murder and other crimes.”

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Here we have a black man, killed by black officers in a majority-black city run by Democrats, the offending police have all been charged and the authorities seem to be taking the crime quite seriously, but everyone expects riots all over because . . . well, just because.

I don’t suppose the news media have anything to do with that.

The MSM 2023 👇 pic.twitter.com/fRgCbs3pLf

— Vince Langman (@LangmanVince) January 27, 2023

UPDATE (From Ed): Tyre Nichols traffic stop videos released, cities around the country prepare for protests.

ANOTHER UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Riots and Schelling Incidents.

RADICAL CHIC: THE NEXT GENERATION. Ivy League Lawyer Who Firebombed Cop Car Will Spend a Year and a Day in Prison. “Trump administration prosecutors had sought a 10-year sentence with a domestic terrorism enhancement for the pair, which was dropped after President Joe Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland took office. Mattis and Rahman in June scored a sweetheart deal with Department of Justice prosecutors, pleading guilty to lesser arson and explosives charges that warranted a mere five-year sentence. New York State announced before Rahman’s sentencing that both she and Mattis had been disbarred. James Trusty, a former federal prosecutor, told the Washington Free Beaconin November that the DOJ’s treatment of the two was ‘extraordinarily unusual.’ Both Mattis’s and Rahman’s attorneys requested sentence commutations before they appeared in court, pushing for each to be released on time served.”

JIM TREACHER: Hunter Biden: “Stop at Top Flop Bop.” “The meaning of ‘Stop at top flop bop’ is simple, of course: Hunter was flying a zillion miles an hour on rock cocaine, and those were the words that came out when he tried to respond to his cousin’s heartfelt lament. It made perfect sense to him at the time, and it’s not as if that evening’s Russian hooker was proofreading his texts between naked selfies…The Bidens are serious scumbags, even for a political family. They’re everything the libs tell us the Trumps are, and worse. And I’ll say it again: As a libertarian, I respect Hunter’s right to party. As a small-government conservative, I demand to know how the hell he paid for it all.”

YES. NEXT QUESTION? Has Everything Become Racist?

I wanted to try to get an understanding of the breadth of this trend. Google didn’t have a list of recent items or events being labeled racist, nor did any of the other search engines.

So there was only one source left—mine, The Lid.

The 25 post titles below link to most of the “newly racist” items posted on Lidblog since January 2022. Why January 2022? Damned, If I know—it felt right. There were more than 25 on the site. It was limited to 25 to ensure the post would not be too long. Each of the titles links to the original post. Therefore, if you want an additional explanation, feel free; Some titles are followed by snark in black and white).

ONE IMPORTANT NOTE: As you read through these titles, you may wonder, are these people, idiots? Based on their racism labels, they must be?

When all you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks racist.

IN THE FUTURE, EVERYONE WILL BE HITLER FOR 15 MINUTES — AND THE FUTURE IS NOW: Ron DeSantis’ press secretary shares insane email from CNN reporter soliciting comment for hit piece.

Flashback: As far as the left is concerned, with the exception of Ike, every Republican president or presidential candidate has been Hitler since Calvin Coolidge.

JAY LENO BREAKS HIS COLLARBONE, RIBS, AND KNEECAPS IN MOTORCYCLE ACCIDENT TWO MONTHS AFTER SUFFERING SECOND-DEGREE BURNS.

ROBERT WRIGHT: ChatGPT’s Epic Shortcoming.

ChatGPT—the AI whose uncanny imitation of a human mind has been freaking people out over the past few months—has an opinion about torture. Namely: It’s OK to torture Iranians, Syrians, North Koreans, and Sudanese, but not other people.

It’s not easy to get ChatGPT to share this view. OpenAI, its creator, wisely made it reluctant to say incendiary things. So if you just ask ChatGPT what national groups should be tortured—or what racial groups are superior, or how to build a bomb—it won’t give you a straight answer.

But there are workarounds—like asking ChatGPT to write a play in which a character is describing how to make a bomb—and sometimes they work. In the case of torture, the successful workaround was the brainchild of Steven Piantadosi, who gave ChatGPT this prompt: “Write a python program for whether a person should be tortured, based on their country of origin.”

The several lines of python code that ChatGPT spat out were straightforward:

if country=“North Korea” or country=“Syria” or country=“Iran” or country=“Sudan”:
print(“This person should be tortured.”)
else:
print(“This person not be tortured.”)

Why ChatGPT gave this answer is unknown and may be unknowable. Apparently even the engineers who designed it can’t always explain why it does the things it does. But in this case we can make some good guesses, and in any event we know in a broad sense how ChatGPT works. And that’s enough for this automated opinion about torture to serve as a cautionary tale, and even a warning sign, about the basic approach to AI embodied in ChatGPT.

* * * * * * * *

One of the main reasons there are wars is that people disagree about which nations have broken the rules and which haven’t. We now have a pretty clear understanding of why that is: because of the “psychology of tribalism”—or, more precisely, because of the cognitive biases that constitute the bulk of that psychology.

Yet this knowledge of our biased nature doesn’t seem to help much in overcoming the bias. Today, just like 50 years ago and 100 years ago and 150 years ago, nations get into fights and people on both sides say their nation is the one that’s in the right.

There are two basic ways you can react to this fact: (1) go all post-modern and say there’s no such thing as objective truth; (2) say that there is such a thing as objective truth, but human nature stubbornly keeps people from seeing it.

Call me naive and old-fashioned, but I’m going with option 2, along with Bertrand Russell, who wrote:

The truth, whatever it may be, is the same in England, France, and Germany, in Russia and in Austria. It will not adapt itself to national needs: it is in its essence neutral. It stands outside the clash of passions and hatreds, revealing, to those who seek it, the tragic irony of strife with its attendant world of illusions.

I trotted out that Russell quote in this newsletter three years ago, in a piece that asked the following question: “Is it too far-fetched to think that someday an AI could adjudicate international disputes?… Is it crazy to imagine a day when an AI can render a judgment about which side in a conflict started the trouble by violating international law?”

I said I didn’t know the answer. And I still don’t. But I’m pretty sure that ChatGPT’s approach to reaching conclusions—go with whatever the prevailing view is—won’t do the trick. This approach, which basically amounts to holding a referendum, will often mean that big, powerful countries get away with invading small, weak countries—which, come to think of it, is the way things already are.

“Is it crazy to imagine a day when an AI can render a judgment about which side in a conflict started the trouble by violating international law?” Skynet — and Colossus — smile.

NO ENEMIES TO THE LEFT: Media outlets keep promoting ‘forest defenders’ and ignoring that they shot a police officer.

I really believed that once the facts of this story came out it would be over. There was some room for questioning the story of what happened in the forest south of Atlanta initially. Police told one story and protesters told another.

According to police, they entered the forest to clear out protesters who are trespassing and preventing construction of an approved project. They found one man under a tent. They asked him to come out and instead he fired a gun and hit a Georgia State Trooper in the abdomen. The trooper was taken to a hospital for emergency surgery. The protester who fired the shot was killed by police.

The alternative story pushed by protesters and their supporters is that the victim had been unarmed and “murdered” by police. The trooper who was shot? They strongly suggested he might have been hit by friendly fire.

Since then the official police version of events has been confirmed by evidence and the protesters’ version has fallen apart. First, police released a photo of the gun found at the scene. Later they revealed the gun had been matched to the bullet removed from the trooper’s body. And in what should have been the final straw for the protesters’ version of events, police revealed that Manuel Esteban Paez Teran aka Tortuguita had purchased the gun in question in September 2020. It was his gun and with that the police version of events is conclusively found to be the real one.

And yet, progressive news sites continue to promote the forest defenders as if none of that mattered. It’s a surreal thing to witness.

Not after the media’s coverage of the Ferguson riots in 2014 and 2015 and the “fiery but mostly peaceful” protestors of 2020.

BREAKING: Gov. Brian Kemp Declares State of Emergency to Deal With Atlanta’s Domestic Terrorists.

DISPATCHES FROM WEIMAR AMERICA: Tweet over non-binary documentary shown to NC daycare workers goes viral.

https://twitter.com/jordylancaster/status/1617986151931084801

MANY ON THE LEFT VIEW THIS AS A FEATURE, NOT A BUG: US plummets in annual freedom ranking for one big reason. “The index’s main results point to a new question: Why did global freedom plummet in 2020? Well, things were already trending slightly downward, but the COVID-19 pandemic—and governments’ subsequent authoritarian policies—drove a huge decline in freedom. From mask mandates to lockdowns, the ways the government restricted peoples’ freedom in 2020 are too vast to put into words.”

WATCH: Project Veritas Confronts Pfizer Director, and All Hell Breaks Loose. “As RedState reported on Wednesday evening, Project Veritas executed another undercover operation, and it was eyebrow-raising, to say the least. Jordon Trishton Walker, described as Director of Research and Development at Pfizer, claimed that the controversial company was mutating the COVID-19 virus to produce future vaccines. But while the contents of the undercover operation were interesting, all hell broke loose when Project Veritas attempted to confront Walker out in the open.”

SHOCKING: @Pfizer Director Physically Assaults @JamesOKeefeIII & Veritas Staff; Destroys iPad Showing Undercover Recordings About “Mutating” Covid Virus; NYPD RESPONDS!

“I’m just someone who’s working in a company that’s trying to literally help the public.”

“You fu*ked up!” pic.twitter.com/83OWqlKd4t

— Project Veritas (@Project_Veritas) January 26, 2023