HANS A. VON SPAKOVSKY: University of Virginia School of Law — Exposed.

To graduate from the 8th-ranked University of Virginia School of Law these days, you have to demonstrate an “understanding” of “bias/racism/cross-cultural dependency.” Granted, the school’s website doesn’t explain what that means, but the course catalog does indicate which offerings would satisfy that politically correct requirement.

Clearly, the left’s Woke obsessions with race, gender, abortion, and other tenets of political orthodoxy are now officially ensconced at the public university founded by Thomas Jefferson in 1819 to “advance human knowledge, educate leaders, and cultivate an informed citizenry.”

PJMedia’s series on the country’s “top” law schools, as rated by U.S. News and World Report for the 2022-2023 school year, has illuminated the bad, the ugly, and the uglier at the supposedly “elite” institutions charged with instructing our nation’s next generation of lawyers.

This is the latest in PJ Media’s ongoing series exposing the secrets of America’s law schools.

JUST DON’T EAT THEM: Don’t Throw Away Those Silica Gel Packets! Here Are 14 Smart Ways to Reuse Them.

YOU CAN ONLY LOSE SO MUCH MONEY TAINTING SO MANY PROPERTIES BEFORE PEOPLE START TO NOTICE: Mouse House Getting Nervous as Disney Shutters Lucasfilm Studio in Singapore.

FASTER, PLEASE: Revolutionary implants can restore 20/20 vision to the blind and visually-impaired.

MATT MARGOLIS: Trump Attorneys Blast Latest Sham Indictment, DA Fani Willis.

Related:

Here are five straight minutes of Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams denying the results of her 2018 election loss pic.twitter.com/oRYMeZR6vQ

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) August 15, 2023

Where’s her grand jury?

JUST ONE OF MANY HEADLINES LIKE THIS: $278 billion and 170,600 jobs: How Biden’s landmark climate bill changed the economy.

The press jumped right on board the Biden cabal’s rebranding of the Inflation Reduction Act as a kind-of jobs-and-climate-change law. That tells me inflation is probably gearing back up as another trillion or two in funny money starts working its way through the economy.

Meanwhile: Not So Fast With The CPI Celebrations: Rents Are Surging Again And Back To Record Highs. “In other words, not only are surging commodities about to blow away hopes for moderation in headline CPI, but economists are once again dead wrong, and instead of looking at the moderation in YoY rents – which they correctly see as indicative of a slowdown in the CPI basket-heavy OER index – what they should be looking at is the real-time actual rental index, which has been rising for 6 months now and is about to take out all time highs at a time when the Fed is supposedly pausing its rate hikes and if anything, is already planning its next easing cycle.”

BUYING THEIR VOTES WITH YOUR MONEY: Biden Moves Forward With Plan to Cancel $39 Billion in Student Loan Debt.

HMM: Strange Patterns Discovered on the Red Planet Offer Tantalizing New Evidence for Ancient Life on Mars. “Rapin and the research team say these salt deposits are the first direct fossil evidence of an ongoing cyclical Martian climate where both wet and dry seasons occurred in its ancient past, although previous research had already suggested changes in the seasonal environment on the planet would be capable of providing conditions perfect for the formation of complex compounds that form the building blocks of life.”

MY UNDERSTANDING IS THAT MISGENDERING IS A CAPITAL OFFENSE: Karine Jean-Pierre Does It Again, Messes Up Names and Gender of Hawaii Senators.

COMMIES GOTTA COMMIE: The Chinese Communist Party Is Infiltrating China’s Private Sector.

Historically, these party branches are tied to the recruitment and management of party members among employees. In contrast to SOEs, the CCP charter gives a somewhat circumscribed role for party units in private businesses. They are mainly charged with ensuring the company complies with the laws and promoting its “healthy development.”

In most businesses, party branches tend to focus on “business-friendly” activities and do little more than organize study sessions or social gatherings for party members. Yet that may be changing as Xi has called on the private sector to “unite around the party.” Following a requirement initiated in 2015 for SOEs to enshrine the role of CCP entities in their articles of association, an increasing number of private companies, mostly those with mixed ownership or political connections, have also implemented such amendments.

The CCP’s objective is to “cultivate a team of private economic persons who are resolute in walking with the party” and can be relied upon “in times of crisis.” Entrepreneurs are expected to undergo further education and monitoring to make sure they remain in line with the party’s objectives and “cultivate a healthy lifestyle.”

“Healthy lifestyle” generally means “doing what the party says.”

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: The Sad Truth About Drug Legalization.

DISPATCHES FROM WEIMAR AMERICA: Gov’t Employees Told To Work From Home Due to Rampant Crime Outside the Nancy Pelosi Federal Building in SF.

OH: RFK Jr. Flip Flops on Three-Month Abortion Ban.

AI JUST GOT A LITTLE SMARTER: The New York Times prohibits using its content to train AI models. “The move could be in response to a recent update to Google’s privacy policy that discloses the search giant may collect public data from the web to train its various AI services, such as Bard or Cloud AI. Many large language models powering popular AI services like OpenAI’s ChatGPT are trained on vast datasets that could contain copyrighted or otherwise protected materials scraped from the web without the original creator’s permission.”

DECEPTION? YES. CLEVER? NOT SO MUCH: Is ‘Decreasing’ Inflation a Clever Deception?

CHANGE (IT BACK): An American Airlines pilot’s message about good conduct goes viral. “Just as people commenting on those fashion posts yearn for a more refined era, it turns out that people generally wish for a level of social maturity extending beyond toddlers throwing tantrums. That’s the only explanation I can find for a viral video of an American Airlines pilot giving a pre-flight speech explaining to passengers that he expects them to behave politely and with respect for their fellow travelers.”

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Garbage Indictments Could Give Trump Electoral Superpowers. “It is beyond surreal that the Democrats are hell-bent on punishing Donald Trump for questioning the results of an election by proving that they are willing to go to any lengths to tamper with an election. This time they’re making sure that they get a huge head start.”

Related:

Trump wanting signature verification is a criminal act in our Banana Republic. pic.twitter.com/ktNAAdHYLN

— Paul Hookem 🇺🇸 (@PaulHook_em) August 15, 2023

The brazenness is supposed to dispirit you. Don’t let it.

THE CHINA SYNDROME: In a First Since World War II, Japan May Develop a Fleet of Jet Bombers.

Japan is reportedly considering breaking a postwar taboo to deal with threats from North Korea and China.

Under a new proposal, Japanese C-2 planes would use the American Rapid Dragon system to quickly convert them from long-range transport jets into bombers. The postwar government banned bombers as weapons of aggressive warfare, but military pressure from its neighbors is pushing Tokyo to reconsider.

According to Jiji Press, the Japanese government is “considering using a type of missile whose engine ignites in the air after the missile is dropped during flight.” This is a reference to the new American Rapid Dragon system, which the Air Force Research Lab established in December 2019 to leverage the hundreds of American transport jets (including C-130J Super Hercules and C-17 Globemaster III aircraft) in the Air Force’s inventory, turning them into temporary bombers.

Previously: Japan’s Navy Is Getting Aircraft Carriers and Stealth Fighters—and China Isn’t Happy.

DON’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT HISTORY: ‘White People’ Were the Only Slavers of History, Black Professor Claims.

CHANGE: AI is going to eliminate way more jobs than anyone realizes.

Past automation technologies had the most effect on low-skilled workers. But with generative AI, the more educated and highly skilled workers who previously were immune to automation are vulnerable. According to the International Labor Organization, there are between 644 and 997 million knowledge workers globally, between 20% and 30% of total global employment. In the US, the knowledge-worker class is estimated to be nearly 100 million workers, one out of three Americans. A broad spectrum of occupations — marketing and sales, software engineering, research and development, accounting, financial advising, and writing, to name a few — is at risk of being automated away or evolving.

This doesn’t mean, however, that there will be a flood of unemployed workers begging for any job. AI will lead to net job creation over the long run, and some roles that seem like they will be affected may actually grow in demand. For instance, ATMs increased the number of bank tellers.

“I do not think we’ll see mass unemployment,” Brynjolfsson, who anticipates AI spreading faster than other general-purpose technologies, told me. “But I do think we’ll see mass disruption, where a lot of wages for some jobs will fall, wages for other jobs will rise, and we’ll be shifting around into demand for different kinds of skills. They’ll have to be a lot of reallocation of labor and rescaling of labor with winners and losers.”

Plus:

The small and large compounding effects of productivity growth across many industries are central to the growth trajectory and the long-run effects of AI. Goldman Sachs estimated that over 10 years, generative AI alone could raise annual US labor-productivity growth by just under 1.5 percentage points, “roughly the same-sized boost that followed the emergence of prior transformative technologies like the electric motor and personal computer.”

That will be great for the world, but maybe less great for this country. AI requires a lot of electricity — which Biden’s so-called Inflation Reduction Act will likely reduce.

THE FIX IS IN: Ted Cruz Rips Into AG Garland Over Special Counsel Appointment in Hunter Biden Case.

FAIL, BRITANNIA: Why US tech giants are threatening to quit the UK.

Their “tipping point” is UK regulation – and it’s coming at them thick and fast.

The Online Safety Bill is due to pass in the autumn. Aimed at protecting children, it lays down strict rules around policing social media content, with high financial penalties and prison time for individual tech execs if the firms fail to comply.

One clause that has proved particularly controversial is a proposal that encrypted messages, which includes those sent on WhatsApp, can be read and handed over to law enforcement by the platforms they are sent on, if there is deemed to be a national security or child protection risk.

The NSPCC children’s charity has described encrypted messaging apps as the “front line” of where child abuse images are shared, but it is also seen as an essential security tool for activists, journalists and politicians.

Britain wants unlimited ability to read people’s private communications and, given what local police already do with public communications, tech firms would be right to quit the UK.

CHILD ABUSE: Feminists’ Fear and Loathing of Their Own Sons.

HuffPost Personal recently posted an opinion piece titled “I Took My 15-Year-Old Son To See ‘Barbie’ Because I’m Worried He Could Become Ken,” which at first I understandably took to be satire. But no, progressivism is often simply a parody of itself, and that is the case with this HuffPost piece. Beyond its unintentional entertainment value, however, it’s a revealing look into the mindset of feminists who wrestle with the misfortune of having borne one or more male children instead of daughters with whom they can bond over their shared oppression under the boot heel of – ugh – men.

The author is Wendy Besel Hahn (pronouns she/her), a writer and editor and the 51-year-old mother of a 15-year-old son. Her HuffPost article is full of virtue-signaling about her compassionate activism, Trump-hating moral superiority, and determination to raise a feminist son, but it also betrays an underlying, misandrist panic that her son’s very nature is toxic and must be exorcised out of him.

“I’m painfully aware that my son is merely six years away from having more rights in America than I do,” she says, referring to the “privilege” of “bodily autonomy” she “lost” when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

So Hahn was “thrilled” that the smash summer movie Barbie, which has drawn widespread criticism among many conservatives for its heavy-handed feminist messaging, gave her the opportunity to educate her son about “the patriarchal American society we live in today.”

Read the whole thing.

THE FIX IS IN:

Per @reuters Fulton County, Georgia posted the Trump felony charges before the grand jury may have officially returned the indictments. Just shows you what a banana republic we are living in right now. pic.twitter.com/hff3dIvgJR

— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) August 14, 2023

Full details here.

Link was bad before — sorry!

HISTORY YOU CAN DRINK: Origins of Cappuccino: A Saintly Friar and a Battle Against the Turks.