K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Schools blocking ChatGPT because of cheating.

I’ve been spending some time lately checking out and writing about the latest generation of Artificial Intelligence chatbots that have been released. One of the most formidable is ChatGPT, recently released by AI startup OpenAI. While it doesn’t seem remotely close to being sentient, it’s very powerful and can create reams of very “human-sounding” text on almost any subject you can name when you pose a question to it. But people are already wondering if a fully developed ChatGPT program may wind up replacing some human beings in their jobs, including those of journalists and researchers. An even larger potential concern is whether students could use the chatbot to cheat on tests or write their homework assignments for them. This month, that fear led the New York City school system to ban ChatGPT on all devices in the city’s public schools. (Associated Press)

Ask the new artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT to write an essay about the cause of the American Civil War and you can watch it churn out a persuasive term paper in a matter of seconds.

That’s one reason why New York City school officials this week started blocking the impressive but controversial writing tool that can generate paragraphs of human-like text.

The decision by the largest U.S. school district to restrict the ChatGPT website on school devices and networks could have ripple effects on other schools, and teachers scrambling to figure out how to prevent cheating. The creators of ChatGPT say they’re also looking for ways to detect misuse.

Then there is the issue of ChatGPT having the occasional “hallucination:”

ChatGPT is based on GPT-3.5, but was developed specifically to be a chatbot (“conversational agent” is the preferred term of art in the industry). A limiting factor is that ChatGPT only sports a text interface; there is no API. ChatGPT was trained on a large set of conversational text and is better at holding up a conversation than GPT-3.5 and other generative models. It generates its responses more quickly than GPT-3.5, and its responses are perceived to be more accurate.

However, both models have a tendency to make stuff up, or “hallucinating” things, as those in the industry call it. Various hallucination rates have been cited for ChatGPT between 15% and 21%. GPT-3.5’s hallucination rate, meanwhile, has been pegged from the low 20s to a high of 41%, so ChatGPT has shown improvement in that regard.

Despite the tendency to make things up (which is true with all language models), ChatGPT marks a significant improvement over the AI models that came before it, says Jiang Chen, founder and vice president of machine learning at Moveworks, a Silicon Valley firm that uses language models and other machine learning technologies in its AI conversational platform, which is used by companies in a variety of industries.

“ChatGPT does impress people, surprise people,” says Chen, who previously was a Google engineer who worked on the tech giant’s eponymous search engine. “The reasoning ability is something that probably surprised a lot of machine learning practitioners.”

ChatGPT won’t pass the Turing Test, but we’ve certainly come a long from Eliza.

WELL, THIS IS THE 21st CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Sony Star Sphere Will Let You Take Photos from an Orbiting Satellite.

JIM TREACHER: Biden Tried to Silence Tucker Carlson on Facebook. “Remember, we wouldn’t know any of this stuff if Elon Musk hadn’t dropped $44 billion to buy Twitter. He opened the floodgates, and now all of this sewage is spilling out. How many other social media companies have been censoring conservatives like this? I assume the answer is: All of them.”

KATIE PORTER READS THE SUBTLE ART OF NOT GIVING A F*CK DURING SPEAKER VOTE:

While the House Republican conference was in turmoil Friday as GOP lawmakers struggled to cobble together enough votes to elect a speaker, California Congresswoman Katie Porter sat quietly on the other side of the aisle reading a book.

Porter, dressed to match the books cover, was reading, “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F–k,” making a not-so-subtle statement that captured how many Democrats were feeling after watching Republicans try and fail to elect a House speaker again and again over four days.

The New York Times best-selling self-help book by Mark Manson argues that people need to stop thinking positively and learn to cope with bad situations in order to be happy, albeit in much more profane terms.

I think it’s more a case of Katie Porter held up a copy of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck during the speaker vote for the photo op, because I doubt she’s read it, considering the most important passage in Manson’s book:

The deeper the pain, the more helpless we feel against our problems, and the more entitlement we adopt to compensate for those problems. This entitlement plays out in one of two ways:

1. I’m awesome and the rest of you all suck, so I deserve special treatment.
2. I suck and the rest of you are all awesome, so I deserve special treatment.

Opposite mindset on the outside, but the same selfish creamy core in the middle. In fact, you will often see entitled people flip back and forth between the two. Either they’re on top of the world or the world is on top of them, depending on the day of the week, or how well they’re doing with their particular addiction at that moment…What most people don’t correctly identify as entitlement are those people who perpetually feel as though they’re inferior and unworthy of the world.

At the very least, she hasn’t internalized those paragraphs yet:

● Rep. Katie Porter used racist language, ‘ridiculed people for reporting sexual harassment,’ ex-staffer claims.
● California Congresswoman Katie Porter Blamed, Punished a Staffer For Allegedly Giving Her COVID-19.

JOHN NOLTE: Insider Report Says Woke Hollywood Killing Art, Discriminating Against White Men.

Hollywood’s “old boys club is dead,” writes the Free Press. “But a new one—with its own litmus tests and landmines—is rapidly replacing it. ‘This is all going to end in a giant class-action’.”

The outlet spoke to “more than 25 writers, directors, and producers—all of whom identify as liberal, and all described a pervasive fear of running afoul of the new [woke]dogma.”

“Best way to defend yourself against the woke is to out-woke everyone, including the woke,” one writer told the Free Press, which would go a long way towards explaining the self-humiliation Stephen King and Rob Reiner engage in daily by way of Twitter.

How do you out-woke the woke? Easy. “Suddenly, every conversation with every agent or head of content started with: Is anyone BIPOC attached to this?”

For those who don’t know, “BIPOC” stands for something-something people of color.

Plus:

One showrunner said,  “It’s gotten to the point where I won’t give notes on a script any longer to a woman or person of color.” Why? He’s terrified of being accused of racism.

Another showrunner said, “You’re not allowed to pick your staff anymore, and studios won’t let you interview anybody who isn’t a person of color.” He added, “I’m sitting in a room trying to run a show with a collection of people I don’t totally trust.”

The “room” is the writer’s room, which, for obvious reasons, is “supposed to be smart, funny, nasty, a little bawdy, the kind of place where people can make jokes and riff and wonder aloud and vomit out ideas that might become an unforgettable scene.”

Hollywood showrunners wanted more socialism — welcome to East Germany, fellas; enjoy the Stasi!

From the Free Press article:

It is important not to lose sight of the backdrop against which all of the above has happened. On this, pretty much everyone agrees.

Over the past decade, the streaming services have upended old business models and imposed a new ruthlessness on an industry that was already pretty ruthless.

For years, the real money in Hollywood came from the television channels that broadcast reruns and old movies; residuals meant creatives were paid handsomely. But with the rise of Netflix, Amazon and other streaming services, that model collapsed. And the vast majority of creatives had to make do with less.

Now, most people in the industry do not earn enough to support a family of four in Los Angeles. As money has gotten tighter, people have gotten angrier, and things have gotten uglier. “I’d say all that probably expedited the radicalization,” a longtime Hollywood creative said of the shifting marketplace.

As veteran TV producer Rob Long wrote in Commentary last month: The Good Times Lasted a Century.

Today, the worst thing you can do for young people trying to break into show business is encourage them. The number of movies in release has never been smaller, and studios are still trying to figure out the economics of the feature-film business in the age of streaming. They have only recently discovered that spending $100 million on a feature film that goes directly to streaming is a money-loser—but then so are multi-episode series that sit, unwatched, on the servers of Netflix, Hulu, Peacock, you name it.

An ambitious young person chasing a show-business bonanza in 2022 needs to be content working in an environment with no big production deals, much smaller episode fees, and a television “season” that lasts six episodes. A writer on a current multi-season television series may eke out the equivalent of an annual salary in the $75,000 range, which in the late 1990s was what a lot of writers were paid per episode.

Hollywood has been able to right the ship before; Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls is a story of the film industry reinventing itself twice in the space of a decade. First with a group of Young Turks (Coppola, Scorsese, Altman) supplanting a dissipated old Hollywood guard who spent the 1960s chasing its tail trying to recreate the success of The Sound of Music with a series of musicals that flopped as public tastes changed in the 1960s. Then when the Young Turks spend the next ten years creating a series of dark, European-themed films to mostly medium success, along comes Steven Spielberg and George Lucas to reinvent the B-picture and Republic serials as Hollywood smash hits for suburban audiences.

Who will be person who breaks the woke logjam, and start consistently creating product that doesn’t alienate audiences?

JOHN GABRIEL: The Unbearable Lightness of Buttigieg. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has not met a crisis he can’t dodge.

Last July 4 weekend, airlines canceled more than 2,200 flights and delayed another 25,000. Democrats on Capitol Hill demanded reforms, but the Transportation Secretary did nothing.

That brings us to the last two weeks, when Southwest Airlines canceled thousands of flights, stranding thousands of travelers while their luggage was who knows where. Four days into the mess, Buttigieg wrote a letter. Four days later, Southwest fixed the issue on its own.

“Pete, what would you say you do here?”

This gig won’t ‘pad his resume for President’

Despite positive media treatment, Democrats are increasingly pointing out the unbearable lightness of Buttigieg.

“Nearly six months ago Bernie Sanders and I called for Buttigieg to implement fines and penalties on airlines for cancelling flights,” Rep. Ro Khanna (D–Calif.) posted to Twitter. “Why were these recommendations not followed? This mess with Southwest could have been avoided. We need bold action.”

Hey, he pushed for more electric cars to be purchased to be driven on roads he deems to be racist. Isn’t that enough for one man?

No? Why it’s as if:

JONATHAN TURLEY: “We Don’t Do This:” Adam Schiff and the Underbelly of American Censorship.

In the latest tranche of “Twitter Files,” journalist Matt Taibbi revealed that Twitter balked at Schiff’s demand that Twitter suspend an array of posters or label their content as “misinformation” and “reduce the visibility” of them. Among those who Schiff secretly tried to censor was New York Post columnist Paul Sperry.

Sperry drew Schiff’s ire by writing about a conversation allegedly overheard by one of his sources. Sperry’s article, which appeared in RealClearInvestigations, cited two sources as overhearing two White House staffers discussing how to remove newly-elected President Trump from office. The article raised the possibility of bias on the part of an alleged key player in launching the first Trump impeachment, CIA analyst Eric Ciaramella. The sources reportedly said that Ciaramella was in a conversation with Sean Misko, a holdover from the Obama administration who later joined Schiff’s staff. The conversation — in Sperry’s words — showed that “just days after [Trump] was sworn in they were already trying to get rid of him.”

Rather than simply refute the allegation, Schiff wanted Sperry and other critics silenced. His office reportedly laid out steps to cleanse Twitter of their criticism, including an instruction to “remove any and all content about Mr. Misko and other Committee staff from its service — to include quotes, retweets, and reactions to that content.”

The date of Schiff’s non-public letter in November 2020 is notable: Earlier that year, I wrote a column for The Hill criticizing Schiff for pushing for censorship of misinformation in a letter that he sent to social media companies. His office promptly objected to the very suggestion that Schiff supported censorship.

We now know Schiff was actively seeking to censor specific critics on social media. These likely were viewed as more than “requests” since Schiff was sending public letters threatening possible legislative action against these same companies. He wanted his critics silenced on social media. After all, criticizing his investigations or staff must, by definition, be misinformation — right?

Over to you, Kevin McCarthy: McCarthy: ‘Adam Schiff will no longer be on the Intel Committee when I become Speaker.’

Anything beyond that?

BIPARTISAN SUPPORT! The Illegal Migrant Busing Program Wins in the End.

Four months ago, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis committed a prosecutable offense. At least, that’s what his more hysterical critics snarled as they processed their inchoate frustration with the governor’s shuttling of displaced migrants to the rarified atmosphere of Martha’s Vineyard. His alleged crime pales in comparison to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s, who sent thousands of migrants north from the border towns where they congregate to cities in the Northeast and Midwest. The humanitarian crisis these governors disaggregated exposed them to ill-defined legal consequences, their critics insisted. Well, these Republicans are in good company. Colorado’s Democratic Gov. Jarred Polis may soon join them both in the dock.

“We were notified yesterday that the governor of Colorado is now stating that they are going to be sending migrants to places like New York and Chicago,” New York City Mayor Eric Adams told reporters on Tuesday, making a splash Polis might have hoped to avoid. “This is just unfair for local governments to have to take on this national obligation,” Adams complained, adding that he was only informed of that this effort was underway the night before.

When contacted by Politico, Polis’s administration defended itself. Denver is only assisting asylum seekers in their efforts to reach their final destinations inside the United States, and they’ve been doing so for weeks. It’s a logical and justified response to an influx of migrants, which has overwhelmed public services and forced Colorado’s capital city to declare a state of emergency. Moreover, the program is fully financed by legitimately allocated funds, and professionals are overseeing the needs of the migrants themselves. Polis insisted that it’s “terrible” that “people are being used as political props” by some unnamed scoundrels. By contrast, he insisted, “what we are doing here is just honoring our values by treating people with dignity and respect.”

How Polis’s migrant distribution program differs appreciably from those authored by Abbott and DeSantis is, however, a mystery.

Earlier: Sanctuary Cities Seethe as Illegal Immigrants Actually Arrive.

The surest sign that public policies are simply virtue signals is when the messages don’t cost anything. The easiest way to tell when that signal starts to fail is to watch politicians flounder as the costs start to rise and voters demand relief.

It was free—and meaningless—for progressive churches to post banners calling themselves “nuclear free zones” during the Reagan era. Their dwindling congregations loved it. It was free, after George Floyd‘s murder, to post woke catechism signs on your front lawn, proclaiming “In this house, we believe: Black Lives Matter, women’s rights are human rights, no human is illegal” and so on. Maybe the neighbors gave you high-fives. And for years it has been free for deep-blue cities to proclaim themselves “sanctuaries” for illegal immigrants. That’s changing now that voters want some sanctuary for themselves.

Changes like this happen when voters realize the old virtue signals actually entail serious costs—and that they will have to pay them. That is exactly what’s happening in New York City and Washington D.C. now that Texas governor Greg Abbott is sending those cities a few busloads of illegal immigrants from his state.

These progressive bastions were silent when the Biden administration flew planeloads of illegal immigrants to suburban airports in the middle of the night. TV coverage was prohibited, and the arrivals were secretly dispersed. Abbott’s buses, by contrast, arrive downtown greeted by local TV crews. Now you can hear the politicians screech.

To paraphrase Sarah Hoyt in October, Adams’ mouth wrote the checks; he should pay for them.

CHRISTOPHER RUFO: The Quiet Right.

Though few have noticed, this is already happening. A “Quiet Right” is patiently, and nearly invisibly, building a viable counterculture.

The main locus of this movement is in education, where conservative families have created robust alternatives to the secular and predominantly left-wing public education system. Many have turned to homeschooling, which has seen double-digit growth in recent years. Others have enrolled their children in a fast-growing network of “classical schools,” which have returned to the traditional liberal arts curriculum of logic, rhetoric, grammar, mathematics, Latin, and music. And the small but influential network of traditional, faith-based colleges, such as Hillsdale, Benedictine, Thomas Aquinas, and University of Dallas, have seen record-breaking enrollment.

In the cultural domain, the Quiet Right has broken significant new ground. In the arts, right-wing pseudonymous authors have created new magazines, publishing houses, and literary prizes. More mainstream companies, such as the Daily Wire, have sought to create conservative media institutions at industrial scale. Figurative painting and neo-classical architecture have gained appreciation. At the grassroots level, faith-based and family-oriented social media content have seen rapid growth, with “mom bloggers” revalorizing family and motherhood and a “back-to-the-land” movement appealing to classic Americana imagery and offering an alternative to millennial aesthetics.

The Quiet Right is also reshaping America’s social geography. The past decade has seen a movement to repopulate small towns and create culturally moderate communities that offer an alternative to misgoverned coastal enclaves. Covid-19 accelerated this shift, with many families packing their bags and seeking more ideologically compatible communities. They fled California, Illinois, and New York for Florida and Texas. Even within states, the flight to the suburbs is, in large part, a flight from left-wing culture and policy.

But haven’t we been here before, many times? At the end of 1969, Time magazine named “The American Middle Class” its collective “Man of the Year,” and with Henry Luce having left the building a few years prior, the magazine was left wondering just who are these strange conservative people in flyover country — the people his magazine was originally created to serve.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: New York City schools ban AI chatbot that writes essays and answers prompts.

New York City schools have banned ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence chatbot that generates human-like writing including essays, amid fears that students could use it to cheat.

According to the city’s education department, the tool will be forbidden across all devices and networks in New York’s public schools. Jenna Lyle, a department spokesperson, said the decision stems from “concerns about negative impacts on student learning, and concerns regarding the safety and accuracy of contents”.

ChatGPT was created by OpenAI, an independent artificial intelligence research foundation co-founded by Elon Musk in 2015. Released last November, OpenAI’s chatbot is able to create stunningly human-like responses to a wide range of questions and various writing prompts. ChatGPT is trained on a large sample of text taken from the internet and interacts with users in a dialogue format.

According to OpenAI, the conversation format allows ChatGPT “to answer follow-up questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests”. Users can request rephrasings, summaries and expansions on the texts that it churns out.

The decision to ban the chatbot in New York schools comes amid widespread fears that it could encourage students to plagiarize.

ChatGPT seems very limited right now, but it’s only going to get smarter:

The bot doesn’t work perfectly. It has a tendency to “hallucinate” facts that aren’t strictly true, which technology analyst Benedict Evans described as “like an undergraduate confidently answering a question for which it didn’t attend any lectures. It looks like a confident bullshitter that can write very convincing nonsense.”

It’s the early days — Skynet isn’t smiling just yet, but it will eventually.

JOYCE CAROL OATES PERPLEXED BY OLD PHOTO OF WINSOME SEARS HOLDING A RIFLE; ‘SHE IS IN NO DANGER.’ “Sears is a badass who served in the Marines and supports Second Amendment rights. That’s why she’s posing with the rifle. It’s not a candid action shot from the battlefield. But Oates is (playing?) dumb by thinking Sears is preparing to shoot something.”

C’mon Joyce, you can figure this one out, if you wanted to.

ITS ORIGIN AND PURPOSE, STILL A TOTAL MYSTERY: Media Blackout Over Terror Incident At Vegas Power Plant.

The US power grid is under attack as extremists shoot, sabotage, and vandalize electrical equipment at power stations. One of the highest-profile attacks was when two men used guns to paralyze a substation in Washington state on Christmas Day, leaving thousands without electricity. The incident made national news, but strangely enough, another attack last week on the Las Vegas power grid went unnoticed by the national press.

Mohammad Mesmarian, 34, rammed his car through the gate of a solar power generation plant outside Las Vegas on Wednesday and set his car on fire, intending to damage a massive transformer, 8 News Now reported.

“Employees at the plant said they found a car smoldering in a generator pit,” 8 News Now said, adding the Mega Solar Array facility provides power to 13 properties on the Las Vegas Strip, all belonging to MGM Resorts.

Investigators believe Mesmarian “siphoned gasoline from his car to put on wires at the transformer,” 8 News Now said, citing documents from investigators.

“Mesmarian clarified he burned the Toyota Camry,” police said. “Mesmarian said he burned the vehicle at a Tesla solar plant and did it ‘for the future.'”

Move along, nothing to see here.

ROGER KIMBALL: The New McCarthyism.

The bottom line is that McCarthy’s prerogatives as speaker have been curtailed, which is a good thing. Also, he has made public promises on important matters that it will be difficult to walk away from without cost. At the same time, I get the distinct feeling that not a lot is going to change. Will there be a meaningful investigation of the January 6 protest at the Capitol? (Where was Nancy Pelosi? Why was the offer of deploying the National Guard not accepted? Who, finally, is Ray Epps and was he correct in saying he “orchestrated” the protest and entry into the Capitol?) Will the partisan and grotesquely un-democratic actions of the January 6 committee presided over by anti-Trump fanatics receive the scrutiny they deserve? I doubt it.

I expect the changes to the people’s business-as-usual to be mostly cosmetic under the reign of this new McCarthyism. I might, of course, be proved wrong. I hope I will be.

Read the whole thing.

ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Riddle solved: Why was Roman concrete so durable?

During the hot mixing process, the lime clasts develop a characteristically brittle nanoparticulate architecture, creating an easily fractured and reactive calcium source, which, as the team proposed, could provide a critical self-healing functionality. As soon as tiny cracks start to form within the concrete, they can preferentially travel through the high-surface-area lime clasts. This material can then react with water, creating a calcium-saturated solution, which can recrystallize as calcium carbonate and quickly fill the crack, or react with pozzolanic materials to further strengthen the composite material. These reactions take place spontaneously and therefore automatically heal the cracks before they spread. Previous support for this hypothesis was found through the examination of other Roman concrete samples that exhibited calcite-filled cracks.

To prove that this was indeed the mechanism responsible for the durability of the Roman concrete, the team produced samples of hot-mixed concrete that incorporated both ancient and modern formulations, deliberately cracked them, and then ran water through the cracks. Sure enough: Within two weeks the cracks had completely healed and the water could no longer flow. An identical chunk of concrete made without quicklime never healed, and the water just kept flowing through the sample. As a result of these successful tests, the team is working to commercialize this modified cement material.

“It’s exciting to think about how these more durable concrete formulations could expand not only the service life of these materials, but also how it could improve the durability of 3D-printed concrete formulations,” says Masic.

Well, this is the 21st century you know, to coin an Instaphrase.

4CHAN SCORES AGAIN: There Are Many Questions About George Santos, but Latest Leftist Complaint Is Incredibly Dumb.

There are a ton of valid questions that one might ask about Rep. George Santos (R-NY) who seems to be following in the grand tradition of Joe Biden and lying — a lot — about his background and a variety of aspects of his life.

Given all the things that Democrats could validly attack about him, they lost what was left of their minds to spread a conspiracy theory that he was flashing a “white power” sign during the voting for Rep. Kevin McCarthy for Speaker of the House. I could go through the whole rigamarole that an “okay” signal isn’t necessarily a “white power” sign, that the whole thing was originally made up as a troll on 4chan to see who would fall for it, and some of the people on the left continue to do so. They’ve been told, but they keep spreading this gas periodically throwing this out there at someone.

Here goes the left and the liberal media again.

Funny, that’s not what Snopes told me in 2020: Snopes: Trump Campaign Falsely Suggests Biden Promoted ‘White Power’ Symbol.

In reality, Biden used the hand gesture to illustrate his assertion that massive corporations and U.S. President Donald Trump himself have in the past paid “zero” in taxes.

So evidently, using the “Okay” hand gesture to indicate zero is not racist, but using the “Okay” hand gesture to indicate, err, “Okay” is?

As Glenn noted in December of 2019 when Rolling Stone got the vapors because someone at the Army-Navy game flashed the OK sign, “The 4Chan trollers have scored again. I remember when ’culture jamming’ was a lefty thing, but the lefty culture jammers never scored at this level.”

AND THE BEARDS HAVE ALL GROWN LONGER, OVERNIGHT: The New CNN: Watch Commentators Sneer at McCarthy Victory.

JORDAN PETERSON: I will risk my license to escape social media re-education. Weaponizing the College of Psychologists’ disciplinary process.

SOUND AND (WELL, SOMETIMES) VISION: Not everything Bowie did was genius – he was more interesting than that.

For younger generations, including my own children, Bowie has simply become synonymous with genius, an artist who had a preternatural gift for mapping out the future; which is to say, their present. A man who exuded sexual intrigue, effortless cool and impeccable artistic taste.

Anybody who lived through Bowie’s later 1980s and early 1990s – or indeed possesses more than a passing awareness of his 1960s – will find this blanket deification a little hard to countenance. For the record, I am a massive fan, particularly of the remarkable records he made between 1974 and 1980, as well as The Buddha of Suburbia, 1.Outside, Heathen and his masterly final album, Blackstar.

I know my subject. I paid my dues. I fell for Bowie at the age of 11, in 1985, slap bang in the period widely recognised as his doldrums: getting into Bowie in the mid-1980s was akin to discovering Orson Welles during the period he was taping commercials for Paul Masson Wines. I weathered the ignominy of trying desperately to like his 1987 nadir Never Let Me Down, and the blokey ‘call me Dave’ downscaling farrago of Tin Machine. I failed, as did most people.

Because what the myth often fails to print these days is that, around this time, Bowie was close to a laughing stock. The influential weekly music papers begged him to pack it in. He couldn’t buy a good review. He punted his wares on Wogan and TFI Friday like all the other poor ‘pick-me’ pop stars. He was resolutely Earthbound and frequently embarrassing. Remember Bowie kneeling to give the Lord’s Prayer at the Freddie Mercury Tribute concert? Remember the video for the plodding ‘Day In, Day Out’, which depicted him rollerblading through some MTV version of Skid Row, lamenting the drug blight in America? Remember all those awful movies? I do.

Speaking of Bowie movies: Is ‘Moonage Daydream,’ the New David Bowie Documentary, Worth the Roller Coaster Ride?

60 MINUTES MAKES FAKE NEWS ABOUT HUMANS RUINING EARTH:

Chalk this up as 60 Minutes hosting the worst peddler of false knowledge since Dan Rather left the set.

CBS kicked off 2023 by touting “mass extinction” blather by Paul Ehrlich, the guy who’s been peddling radical and misanthropic eco-garbage since his book The Population Bomb in 1968.

That screed began: “The battle to feed all humanity is over. In the 1970’s the world will undergo famines–hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”

This may qualify as the drop-dead dumbest announcement of the Sixties and should have disqualified him from the status of Expert by the end of the 1970s. But the left-wing media never tire of him. They can’t get enough of this ecological self-loathing. The human race is always a pestilence on the planet.

Pelley led off the show with Ehrlich warning that “I and the vast majority of my colleagues think we’ve had it; that the next few decades will be the end of the kind of civilization we’re used to.”

Something that Ehrlich has been shouting for over 50 years: 60 Minutes Promotes Paul Ehrlich’s Failed Doomsaying One More Time. The Population Bomber has never been right, but is never in doubt that the world is coming to its end.

And curiously, someone who has long wished to implement socialism nationally sees National Socialists under every bed:

America’s Newspaper of Record suggests an alternate guest for the show: 60 Minutes Interviews Population Control Expert Thanos.

HOW’S THAT WELCOME WAGON PROGRAM COMING ALONG? More U-Haul Trucks Left California Than Any Other State In 2022, Texas Top Destination: Study.

CHINA IS FACING A COVID-19 ‘NUCLEAR WINTER’. THE CCP CAN’T STOP IT.

IN THE COURT OF THE CRIMSON KING: Over at Ed Driscoll.com, I have a review of the new documentary that explores 50 years of the world’s weirdest rock band.

THE POWER LINE WEEK IN PICTURES: Speechless Edition.

NARRATOR VOICE: As the comic industry goes increasingly woke, no one is actually shocked by this. The Joker Shocks Fans By Becoming Pregnant.

CHRISTIAN TOTO: Man Called Otto Is Oscar-Bait at Its Worst.