It’s Wednesday, April 4th, 2023…but before we begin, the following got us thinking:
Talk about an incredibly irresponsible, over-the-top solution to a problem which doesn’t even exist.
Here’s another example from The Rubin Report, courtesy of Douglas Murray:
Now consider this recent posting from the incomparable Stilton Jarlsberg which warns:
“AI is a funny thing, which is perhaps why Elon Musk and other high-tech types are currently warning the world to put further development on immediate hold before it destroys us all. Which is a real possibility, albeit probably not in the way that most of us would have expected. Social media and the (ahem) “news” are all guided by algorithms now. Algorithms designed to ramp up our fears and anger against others and addict us to getting more and more upsetting information. Which is why our country is so divided and angry.
But AI puts those algorithms on steroids (currently growing in what has been called a double-exponential curve) and will be able to tell each and every one of us exactly the most convincing arguments to embrace full-fledged paranoia and enmity of others while developing a heroin-level dependence on whatever the computers (or whoever’s running the computers) wants to tell us. Bonus: any information – audio, video, photo, document, or text – that can be transmitted electronically can be faked easily, instantly, and (quite soon) perfectly.
So slowing things down on AI development is probably a very good idea…and also the definition of the genie already being out of the cybernetic bottle.”
If Progressives can promote non-existent crises without the benefit of AI, think what they can do with it!!!
“…The student activists alleged that the law school is complicit in these injustices by giving Kavanaugh, as well as other “guest speakers” supposedly tied to racist and white supremacist groups, a platform. CLS and the Federalist Society “disguise this violence under pretenses of apoliticism, objectivity, and neutrality,” the statement read.
In 2018, Kavanaugh was subject to a vicious, partisan confirmation process that wreaked havoc on his family and reputation. Democrats took Christine Blasey Ford’s uncorroborated 30-year-old allegation of sexual assault and treated it as though it were uncontested fact. Student leaders from the National Lawyers Guild parroted the Democrats’ unsubstantiated conclusion that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted Blasey Ford in their statement. “It is patriarchy that elevates men like Brett Kavanaugh to the nation’s highest court despite multiple survivors credibly speaking out against his history of sexual assault,” they wrote. “It is patriarchy that allows CLS to think it is acceptable to highlight and celebrate Kavanaugh as normal.”
…The Empowering Women of Color group similarly said it would skip future CLS recruiting events because of the law school’s post. “We cannot condone complicity with a man who is credibly accused of sexual assault,” it said. “The insinuation from the Communications Office that the post was neutral and just the Law School’s way of highlighting activities students are participating in is laughable and untrue. A post of this kind, with its caption, is a terrifying stamp of approval.””
Thus do lies become truth, proving the prescience of Nazi general lost to history whom Alan Clark quoted in Barbarossa: “It matters not what is true or false, but exclusively what is believed.” Tell us again who are the fascists now?!?
“A radical transgender group said the transgender Nashville shooter felt “no other effective way to be seen” than killing six people at a private Presbyterian school.
The Trans Resistance Network (TRN), a far-left transgender “collective,” released an inflammatory statement on Monday in the wake of the Covenant School shooting by transgender woman Audrey Hale in Nashville that killed three 9-year-olds and three adults.
Calling the mass murder a dual “tragedy,” the group wrote the first was the deaths of the children and adults in the school and extended their “deepest sympathies and heartfelt prayers to those families dealing with the loss of loved ones.”…”
Since when did “being seen” become a “right” which trumped the unalienable ones detailed in the Declaration of Independence: Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?!?
From the way NBC covers the massacre…
Fear pervades Tennessee’s trans community amid focus on Nashville shooter’s gender identity: “We were already fearing for our lives. Now, it’s even worse.” https://t.co/dftpoDE5C2
…you’d think a God-fearing Christian had shot their way into a transgender convention, a Bible in one hand, an “assault rifle” or two in the other. And precisely WHO is focused on the killer’s gender identity other than The Left?!?
Here’s the juice in meme form:
Until, that is, you attempt to use violence to force us to care…at which point our caring will take a decidedly uncaring turn.
Next, NRO‘s Noah Rothman catalogues the numerous times the MSM has gone truly over the top in…
“The trauma of mass gun violence — at least in places where mass gun violence has not become a terrible feature of daily life — is compounded today by the perfunctory ritual through which the arbiters of American discourse drag the rest of the country.
At least, that’s the routine when the shooter fits a demographic profile with which we’ve become woefully familiar: white and male. But recent episodes of mass violence perpetrated by shooters who do not fit the part has compelled cultural observers and the press to innovate new ways of talking about mass violence. These new methods rob the victims of these attacks of their sacrifice and transfer their victimization onto their killers.
Commentary around Monday’s horrific mass shooting at a Christian elementary school in Nashville, Tenn., followed a familiar trajectory right until the perpetrator was revealed to be a biological woman who identified as a man. This priors-scrambling detail sent media outlets off on the frenzied pursuit of something that would justify the preconception that those who assume a trans identity are never victimizers, only victims.
First, there was the mad dash to indict Nashville police for failing to use the pronouns preferred by the person who shot and killed three teachers and three nine-year-old students. That was followed by an attempt from media outlets and politicians to allege — the lack of substantive evidence to back them up notwithstanding — that the shooter had been incited in some way by local legislation restricting “adult cabaret performances” in the presence of children and the provision of hormone-blocking therapies to minors. The application of a moment’s reasoning to the suggestion that any of this explains, much less justifies, the murder of children must have proven unsatisfying, because the press soon moved on to crafting a narrative of victimization for the deceased killer.
The humiliation and rejection that serve as the shooter’s supposed origin story stretch back into early childhood. “Twenty years later, after being rejected by her Christian family when she came out to them as gay,” the Daily Mail’s report on the shooter’s psychological trauma concluded, the shooter “had turned into a killer.” The tragedy of mass murder is, in fact, “not one tragedy but two,” according to a statement release by the Trans Resistance Network. The killer “felt he had no other effective way to be seen other than to lash out by taking the life of others.”
NBC News reporters Matt Lavietes and Jo Yurcaba alleged that the killer’s victims tangentially include Tennessee’s trans community, who could now expect to face increased discrimination. That extraordinary claim rests on the existence of a provocative hashtag on Twitter and the media outlets that accurately reported on the shooter’s identity and actions within the same sentence. “We were already fearing for our lives,” acting president of Tri-Cities Transgender, Aislinn Bailey, told NBC’s reporters. “Now, it’s even worse.” The actual victims of violence in this case were replaced by the hypothetical victims of conjectural violence — the less disorienting sort that fits within a familiar rubric.
The pattern we’ve been forced to witness this week has been in development for some time, because the perpetrators of mass violence increasingly fail to meet the expectations set for them in the mainstream press.
The Chinese citizen who shot and killed seven of his colleagues in Half Moon Bay, Calif., last year experienced “mounting frustrations with his job conditions and simmering tensions” at the farm where he worked, according to local media outlets. The “final straw” was thought to be an “insult” about his “diminutive” size. That trauma was reportedly exacerbated by the ghastly conditions endured by America’s agricultural workers.
“Viewed the crime scenes today in Half Moon Bay,” San Mateo County supervisor Ray Mueller reported. “Deplorable, heartbreaking living conditions. As I said on the campaign trail, we must raise the quality of life of farm workers, NOW.” California governor Gavin Newsom agreed. “California is investigating the farms involved in the Half Moon Bay shooting to ensure workers are treated fairly and with the compassion they deserve,” Newsom said. The killer’s victims were soon displaced by local farm workers and their activist allies, who demanded “better pay” and higher standards of living.
A similar pattern emerged when a 72-year-old Asian man shot and killed ten people at a dance studio in Monterey Park, Calif., earlier this year. “With the significant amount of anti-Asian hate, there’s been this feeling of a lack of safety and being under threat,” the founder of Stop AAPI Hate told The Guardian in the wake of the Monterey Park killer’s murder spree. “It really perpetuates this fear that they are not safe,” a local community organizer agreed, citing the rise of anti-Asian hate in America since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. “We need more acknowledgment on how important it is to address this lack of support for immigrant, refugee and monolingual populations, and we need more resources.”
Once again, the actual victims of violence were generalized, transformed into abstract avatars of the demographic to which they belong. The “jealousy” arising from a domestic dispute that served as the shooter’s motive, according to the dance studio’s owner, had become irrelevant. The “specter of anti-Asian hate” and the “tragic saga in Asian-American history” took center stage. After all, the AAPI-centric outlet The Yappie warned, just because “the gunman has been identified as an Asian person doesn’t exclude the possibility of hate, misogyny, or ethnic discrimination as a motive.”
Even the last time America had to witness a terrible act of mass violence in a school, the shooter’s identity confused observers to the point that they felt compelled to humanize him. “When I see photos of” the gunman who murdered 19 children and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas, “I also see Latinos I know,” LA Times columnist Gustavo Arellano mourned. He agonized over the “merciless ridicule” the shooter “suffered,” seeing himself in the killer and his experience with the cultural milieu in which young “Latino males” incubate.
The Uvalde killer’s act “certainly feels like another kind of performance of young masculinity,” psychiatrist Jonathan Metzl told the Washington Post in an article that transformed the killer into a theoretical construct. In cases like his, “We are talking about boys who have been emasculated over a period of time,” criminal-justice professor Eric Madfis added. “They were bullied, or ignored, or didn’t have the dating life or popularity they wanted.”
In all the above cases, something approaching sympathy pervades the analysis of these heinous actions in the left-wing press. Mass shooters are motivated in part by the notoriety their predecessors attain through violence, which renders these contortions shockingly derelict. The impulse to reduce these disturbed individuals to categories and to force their actions to comport with a preferred ideological framework serves no purpose other than to preserve a fragile worldview. But it is not a harmless exercise.”
“One of the mantras of Democrats and their media voices in response to Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg’s indictment of Donald Trump has been that “no one is above the law.” That’s a fine sentiment, but there are three very big problems with Democrats making this argument: They don’t believe it, they don’t mean the same thing by “law” as the rest of us, and Alvin Bragg is about the worst possible representative for the theory that violations of the law will never be tolerated.
In particular, I never want to hear another word — not another syllable — about how “nobody is above the law” from people who spent years on end telling us that perjury and obstruction of justice by the president should not lead to consequences because it was “just about a blow job.” I never want to hear this from people who professed to be horrified by “lock her up” chants on the theory that one should never call for jailing political opponents even when they have violated specific federal criminal statutes regarding the handling of sensitive information — least of all in defense of a prosecutor who ran for office publicly promising to go after this particular political opponent of his. I never want to hear it from people who said that the vice president could break a federal law without consequence so long as there was “no controlling legal authority” interpreting the law. I certainly do not want to hear this from people who are, even today, arguing that the president can get away with breaking the law and seizing the powers of Congress to give away half a trillion dollars of our money to his supporters so long as he can argue that nobody has standing to sue him in federal court.
…This is not how Democrats talk about the law when one of their own is in the crosshairs. The most obvious and glaring parallel is Bill Clinton’s perjury. At the time, the all-but-uniform argument among Democrats was that the Clinton impeachment was “just about sex,” as if covering up a sexual affair is somehow a defense to breaking the law. On the simplest charge against Clinton, perjury in his civil deposition, there really was no question that Clinton lied under oath about his affair with Monica Lewinsky. He did so again in the grand jury. And yet, we were told that he should be neither prosecuted nor impeached, and that even investigating him for this was a terrible affront because he was the president.
Democrats were united in treating Clinton as being above the law against perjury, even though federal judges had previously been removed from office for committing perjury and filing false documents such as income-tax returns. Two hundred of the 205 House Democrats voted against impeachment. Every single Democrat in the Senate — every last one — voted for acquittal on all charges. That includes six Senate Democrats who are still there (Durbin, Chuck Schumer, Patty Murray, Dianne Feinstein, Jack Reed, and Ron Wyden); it includes prominent Democrats who were in the House then, including Pelosi, Neal, Lee, Schumer (who voted against impeachment before joining the Senate and voting for acquittal), and Ed Markey; and it includes Joe Biden…”
Since we’re on the subject of those who believe they’re above the law, the editors at NRO confirm it’s…
“Last week, Republicans in Congress passed the Parents Bill of Rights, 213–208. Critics will dismiss it as a messaging bill, but the message it sends about Democrats’ priorities is unsettling in the extreme.
Consider: The bill requires schools in receipt of federal funding to publish their curricula and to provide parents with a list of books and materials accessible at the school library. It also contains provisions that require schools to notify parents of any planned elimination of gifted-and-talented programs, to alert parents to any violent activity that took place at school, to provide parents a forum to speak at school-board meetings, and to offer two in-person meetings between parents and teachers in each school year. It requires parental consent for any medical exams or mental-health and substance-use screenings. Crucially, it establishes for parents “the right to know if a school employee or contractor acts to . . . change a minor child’s gender markers, pronouns, or preferred name; or . . . allow a child to change the child’s sex-based accommodations, including locker rooms or bathrooms.”
As you can guess, each one of these provisions relates to the rash of controversies swirling around public schools in the news the past few years, including the introduction of critical race theory and sexually explicit material for young readers and the treacherous subterfuge of school districts’ making major psychological-health decisions for students while deliberately keeping parents in the dark.
There is legitimate debate about whether the federal government ought to assert itself this way upon locally controlled school districts. But that was not the substance of objections from Democrats. Progressives tended toward hysterical fictions. “Extreme MAGA Republicans don’t want the children of America to learn about the Holocaust,” alleged Hakeem Jeffries, absent any evidence. Or they outright took the side of the state usurping the proper role of parents. “This Republican bill is asking the government to force the outing of LGBT people before they are ready,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said on the House floor. “When we talk about progressive values, I can say what my progressive value is, and that is freedom over fascism.” (Who didn’t see THAT coming?!?)
Here we must reassert a truth so primordial it predates conservatism as a political philosophy: Parents are the primary educators of their children. Taxes are raised (or fees collected) and schools are established only to assist them in this task, not to take it over. Civilized nations deprive parents of this role or limit it only when there is established criminal neglect.
Democrats, by their universal opposition to this bill in the House, in the Senate, and from the White House, are the ones sending a message. They are the party that wants to treat normal parental oversight and curiosity as a conspiracy against the state, as presumptively seditious, and as dangerous for children. It is the most noxious Marxist conviction that the American Left cannot shake: that normal family life itself ideologically deforms children, and that only the strong checking and supervisory role of the state can save them from the baleful influence of Mommy and Daddy…”
Which provides the same clarity resulting from what was essentially another self-inflicted nut kick courtesy of Jack Reacher:
Then there’s this follow-up on our earlier assertion that while we firmly believe in miracles, we don’t believe in coincidences with odds lower than winning the lottery:
Had it been Tommy DeSimone grilling Yellen rather than Utah’s Chris Stewart, he’d have quipped:
Moving on, here’s another sterling septet of special selections certain to sate the curiosity of inquiring Conservative minds:
(1). Writing at The Epoch Times, AEI‘s Benjamin Zycher notes what green energy proponents term growing pains are actually fundamental obstacles impossible to overcome. As our expert energy correspondent Jeff Foutch observed, this isn’t an energy transition, it’s a lifestyle upheaval. And a utterly unnecessary, completely counterproductive one at that…as are any policies purposed for the increase of Progressives’ personal political power and wealth.
Yes, those are Winston-Salem faith leaders shepherding their flocks down the same path pioneered by Sodom-Gomorrah. These are the folks we are warned about in 1 Timothy 6:20-21, John 8:44, 2 Timothy 3:5 and many other verses in Scripture. They and what they represent are the living embodiment of Romans 1:21-24.
“DNA found in a half-eaten burrito helped exposed a former Wisconsin university research assistant now accused of firebombing a pro-life center last Mother’s Day. The attack on the headquarters of Wisconsin Family Action in Madison, Wisconsin, came about a week after the leak of a Supreme Court draft opinion that would later overturn Roe v. Wade.
About 10 months after a Molotov cocktail was tossed inside the office and the message, “If abortions aren’t safe then you aren’t either,” was scrawled on the building’s side, Hridindu Sankar Roychowdhury, 29, of Madison, was arrested in Boston on Tuesday and charged with one count of attempting to cause damage by means of fire or an explosive.
The Justice Department said he traveled from Madison to Portland, Maine, and he purchased a one-way ticket from Boston to Guatemala City, Guatemala, departing Tuesday morning. Law enforcement arrested Roychowdhury at Boston Logan International Airport…”
We have to wonder, if Republicans hadn’t taken the House and started investigating the DOJ/FBI’s curious lack of any meaningful progress with the pro-life center bombings if Mister…
…would have been identified, let alone apprehended. And call us a conspiracy theorist, but we also have to question the fact he waited until now to flee the country; It couldn’t be someone involved in the investigation tipped him or others in his terror cell an arrest was imminent?
More importantly, who eats only half a burrito?!?
Magoo
Video of the Day
Jordan Peterson at his most passionate…and if you’ll forgive his French, perhaps his finest.
Tales of The Darkside
The money quote is Douglas Murray’s response to the question posed at the 2:13 mark concerning why Progressives focus on our differences rather than our commonalities: “What if that’s the point?”
On the Lighter Side
Courtesy of Balls Cotton, we present part of the reason why, on average, women live longer than men.
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