RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/john-stossel/2024/02/07/ai-is-coming-for-your-job-n4926202

The media warn, “Artificial intelligence will replace millions of jobs.” 

In San Francisco, Teamsters protest, demanding the government “protect” their jobs. In my new video, they chant, “Do not have these self-driving vehicles on San Francisco streets, taking jobs!”

They’re complaining about the Waymo driverless taxis already in use in part of San Francisco (and Phoenix). 

The union is right to worry. Robot cars don’t get tired. They don’t take lunch breaks. They don’t drink or get distracted. Self-driving cars will replace many delivery-driver jobs, taxi jobs, Uber jobs and truck driver jobs. 

Texas is building a special highway with a lane just for self-driving trucks. 

The idea isn’t just to save money by having machines do what people do now, but to get human drivers off the road entirely.

Safety advocates want that, because despite publicity over occasional robot-car crashes, we humans make many more mistakes. Robo-cars will save thousands of lives.

But when I said that in this column last month, some of you said government officials will soon use “safety” as an excuse to outlaw human driving. 

“Regulators will try to ban traditional cars,” writes orangecrate26. “You’re not taking my Mustang, or my guns.”

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/tech-layoffs-continue-to-roil-industry-with-32000-jobs-cut/ar-BB1hOveK

The tech industry has started 2024 with another wave of job cuts, paring back even further after widespread layoffs last year. So far, some 32,000 tech workers have lost their jobs in 2024 according to Layoffs.fyi, a startup that has been tracking job cuts in the industry since the pandemic. 

Snap Inc. became the latest example, announcing on Monday that it’s reducing its workforce by about 10%, or around 540 employees. Earlier this month, software company Okta Inc. said it would eliminate 7% of its staff to reduce costs, affecting about 400 employees. The list goes on, including Big Tech employers like Amazon.com Inc., Salesforce Inc. and Meta Platforms Inc.

This year, “tech companies are still trying to correct for their over-hiring during the pandemic surge, given that the high interest-rate environment and tech downturn have both lasted longer than initially expected,” Layoffs.fyi founder Roger Lee wrote in an email. 

There have been two main waves of job cuts in recent years, according to Lee. The “early Covid” spike, from the first to second quarters of 2020, and the “interest rate hike” effect, which has been going on since the second quarter of 2022. “This year’s layoffs are typically smaller and more targeted than the layoffs a year ago,” Lee said. 

https://amgreatness.com/2024/02/05/is-biden-malicious-incompetent-or-conniving/

What Excites Biden?

Things are becoming so strange, so surreal, so nihilistic in contemporary America that the chaos can only be deliberate. Chance, incompetence, and accident could not alone explain the series of disasters we now daily witness that are nearly destroying the country.

When the ailing and non-compos-mentis president now speaks, he rarely becomes excited about Iranian or terrorist provocations. Biden seems restrained even at Russia’s outlawry in Ukraine. The atrocities of Hamas now earn only measured objections from Biden. He does not seem too angered by the collapse of the border. Nor do the deaths of 100,000 Americans to imported fentanyl earn a loud trademark Biden scream.

No, what earns his unchecked ire, often expressed in shouts and hysterical tones, are Donald Trump and his supporters. Most recently, out of nowhere, Biden resurrected the old and proven falsehood that Trump had libeled the Normandy dead as losers and suckers. He then compounded that libel by claiming Trump’s supposed dismissal of the heroic dead was a grievous family insult to his own late son, who did not die either in combat or while in uniform but in 2015, tragically, from brain cancer.

During these anti-Trump fits, Biden wakes up and his face tightens up. He begins screaming, in uncharacteristic, animated fashion, anytime he can smear half the nation’s voters as “semi-fascists” and “ultra-MAGA” extremists. In private, he swears that Trump is a “f—ing asshole” and “sick f—k.” If only Biden substituted “cartel” or “Iran” or “Hamas” for “Trump” or “MAGA.” we might see an animate president.

A Borderless Nation

Meanwhile, a mob of illegal aliens recently tried to kick and stomp sprawled New York peace officers into senselessness—felonies that would earn any such violent citizen a decade or more on Rikers Island.

Yet somehow, only a few were arrested. Stranger still, all of them were immediately let go without bail—as if freeing wolves to prey further upon sheep.

Upon release, a few smirked and flipped their middle fingers to bystanders. Apparently, they wished to show Americans that they are violent, crude, unrepentant, and exempt. And thus they tell us that their newfound hosts are fools for letting the likes of themselves in.

And why not, given the attackers bussed with impunity to California—the land of free everything if only one qualifies as illegally residing in the U.S.

These grotesque bullies are part of the eight-million illegal aliens who pranced across the southern border without background checks—all taking Biden up on his 2019 encouragement to “surge” the border with impunity.

Many brandish their cartel affiliations. Some pay for their transit by smuggling cartel fentanyl, which contributes to 100,000 American overdose deaths per year. Others sport lengthy criminal records. All seemed to have been welcomed out of their countries by conniving Latin American governments and mysteriously invited into our country by our derelict president.

https://www.thefp.com/p/i-refused-to-approve-all-teen-gender-transitions?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

For six years I worked at a hospital that said all teenagers with gender dysphoria must be affirmed. I quit my job to blow the whistle.

I know from firsthand experience what hard times are. Though I had a happy childhood, raised as the middle child by working-class parents in Washington State, my mom died of ovarian cancer when I was 22. 

After that, my family fell apart. I felt lost and alone. 

I decided to become a therapist because I didn’t want anyone to go through what I had, feeling like no one on this planet cares about them. At least they can say their therapist does. 

I earned my master’s in social work from the University of Washington in 2012, and I have worked as a therapist for over a decade in the Puget Sound area. Most recently, I was employed by MultiCare, one of the largest hospital systems in the state. 

For the six years I was there, I worked with hundreds of clients. But in mid-January, I left my job because of what I will go on to describe.

The therapeutic relationship is a special one. We are the original “safe space,” where people are able to explore their darker feelings and painful experiences. The job of the therapist is to guide a patient to self-understanding and sound mental health. This is a process that requires careful assessment and time, not snap judgments and confirmation of a patient’s worldview.

But in the past year I noticed a concerning new trend in my field. I was getting the message from my supervisors that when a young person I was seeing expressed discomfort with their gender—the diagnostic term is gender dysphoria—I should throw out all my training. No matter the patient’s history or other mental health conditions that could be complicating the situation, I was simply to affirm that the patient was transgender, and even approve the start of a medical transition.

I believe this rise of “affirmative care” for young people with gender dysphoria challenges the very fundamentals of what therapy is supposed to provide. 

I am a 36-year-old single mother of three young kids all under the age of six. I am terrified of speaking out, but that fear pales in comparison to my strong belief that we can no longer medicalize youth and cause them potentially irreversible harm. The three patients I describe below explain why I am taking the risk of coming forward.

Last spring, I started seeing a new client, who at 13 years old had one of the most extreme and heartbreaking life stories I’ve ever heard. (For the sake of clarity, I am referring to all patients by their biological sex.)

http://www.swtotd.bolgspot.com

Edward Bellamy’s 1888 utopian novel Looking Backward showed the difficulty of getting the future right, especially when idealism co-opts reason. National socialism proved a disaster to Germany and Italy (and the world), and state ownership of industry deep-sixed the Soviet Union. Kierkegaard suggested in the rubric above, life is best lived with an understanding of history. And as George Santayana famously wrote in Life of Reason: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Divisiveness characterizes our age, like the years leading to the Civil War, the McCarthy era of the early 1950s, or the late 1960s when the Country was divided by the Vietnam War. In last Friday’s The Wall Street Journal Lance Morrow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center wrote: “Exaggeration is the traditional style of American politics, but permanent culture wars, the global pandemic, the agitations of social media and the collapse of party discipline – and, not least, the role modeling of Joe Biden and Donald Trump – have left Americans discontent with mere exaggeration.” We have, he added, “gotten addicted to apocalypse…”

Is there a way out? Can reason subsume emotion? Is a middle ground achievable? I think there is, but I don’t believe that either Mr. Biden or Mr. Trump will lead the way. The former is in cognizant decline and the latter has become detached from reality. There are big issues that separate the two parties, but democracy is about debate and compromise, not incoherent brawling, which is what our politics have become.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20367/angel-on-your-shoulder

This article was first published by Gatestone on December 8, 2022.

Scientists have long sought to bring order to our universe through the application of formulas.

Einstein created what is probably the most recognized formula with his explanation of energy as “E = mc²”. The Greek philosopher Pythagoras has been given credit for stating the relationship between two legs of a right triangle and its hypotenuse. Calculus, with its many different equations, sits on the shoulders of Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz who labored during the 1600s.

But what these formulas will never be able to compute is the function of the human heart, the role of individual conscience, and ability to recognize right from wrong.

For that, each human being on the planet must depend upon the Angel on their shoulder. The values offered by that Angel are not interchangeable. To secure happiness for us, and those around us, it is important for us to be guided by that Angel on our shoulder, for it is only then we can walk tall.

When that Angel is absent so too is morality. Equally lost is empathy. And for those who have forsaken that Angel on their shoulder, the very concept of love is missing.

During this holiday season it is particularly important to pause and insist upon a period of self-reflection for, regardless of one’s faith, that Angel is in search of the person who embraces the humanity within ourselves and the ability to love.

Author Emily Brontë understood this. In her novel, Wuthering Heights, Catherine Earnshaw, one of the main characters, was asked how she could love the gypsy stable-boy, Heathcliff. She replied, “Whatever our souls are made of his and mine are the same.” That might be as close to love, rapture, happiness as it gets.

Ironically, it may have been Einstein who authored the most cogent explanation of how that Angel on our shoulder allows us to love.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/america/2024/02/joe-bidens-election-year-phantasmagoria/

EXCERPTS:

Just now, though, as the process of selecting America’s next president leaves the station and gathers speed towards the summer conventions and November, it might well be that only a writer with the eye of Thompson’s better years can do justice to the phantasmagoria unfolding from the southern border to the snowy north, New York’s courtrooms to the mob-looted stores of Oakland, Chicago, St Louis, Los Angeles and, well, just everywhere. There is no need to hit the hallucinogens; wide-eyed reality mocks illicit pharmacology’s fantasies and distortions.

Start with the Middle East, where the remains of three Americans killed over the weekend as they slept in their Jordan barracks will by now be in Germany and the care of Mortuary Affairs Specialists, the Pentagon’s in-house undertakers. The drone that did for them was launched by what the White House’s team of press-office obfuscators prefer to call “militants”, although there are times when reporters’ questions oblige them to preface that description with “Iran-backed”. Thompsonesque weirdness prevails in the Biden administration’s perception of the situation it is attempting with limited success to sell the American public. “We don’t want a war with Iran,” National Security Council flack John Kirby has repeatedly insisted, despite Iran quite clearly being very much at war with America.

Since early October, US bases in Iraq, Syria and Jordan have been targeted on a near daily schedule — some 160 times in a campaign which might well serve as the very definition of asymmetrical warfare. The drones Iran makes and supplies its proxies costs peanuts; the missiles that have destroyed all but a handful of those incoming threats cost millions and, worse, are said to have been used so often they are now in short supply. That tally of attacks, just by the way, doesn’t include what the Houthis of Yemen have been throwing at Red Sea shipping and, when the opportunity presents itself, US warships. Joe Biden’s response to all this? So far nothing but a series of ineffective air strikes on Yemen targets and his flacks’ vague promise that more action will be taken somewhere, somehow, to some extent.

“I don’t think we need a wider war in the Middle East,” Biden said on Tuesday, “that’s not what I’m looking for.” That comment, like all his interactions these days with the White House press corps, was delivered as he prepared to board the presidential helicopter, those words even harder to make out above the chopper’s turbines than the standard incoherence of any typical public appearance. Would he mount direct attacks on Iran, the reporters shouted? America’s commander in chief stumbled, then landed upon a jesuitical distinction. His “problem” , he said, was that Tehran had provided drones and missiles to those pesky “militants”. That Iran also funds and directs them, from Hamas in Gaza to Hezbollah’s various iterations in Lebanon and elsewhere, was nothing he thought worth mentioning or, just as likely, thought about at all.

Contrast that wait-and-see prevarication with, say, Ronald Reagan, who reacted to just one Iranian provocation, the 1988 mining of a US frigate in international waters, by sinking five of Tehran’s warships and pulverising a pair of former drilling rigs converted to offshore radar stations.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/02/hell_must_be_empty.html

In New York City, the bad guys have long understood an unwritten rule: you don’t hit a cop.  In the past, doing so put you at the top of the NYPD’s to-do list and ensured that you would not be free on the streets for long.  When 30,000 officers are tasked with securing a metropolis of nine million residents, the impenetrability of the “thin blue line” is a matter of life and death.  When video emerged of a group of illegal aliens wrestling two cops to the ground near Times Square and beating them with fists and feet, that thin blue line got thinner.  When news broke that the offenders were released without bail and that a left-wing “charity” had likely given them a free ride to California, the blue line all but disappeared.  

By looking the other way as criminal invaders attack the people charged with protecting the city, NYC mayor Eric Adams and district attorney Alvin Bragg not only betray their duties to those who risk their lives every day for others’ safety, but also prove their complicity with those who wage war against citizens of the United States.  Before he disappeared without a care in the world, one of the foreign nationals apprehended for the attack left Manhattan Criminal Court with two middle fingers extended into the air and a broad smile across his face.  It was an “F you” to all Americans from a man who should never have been allowed to illegally enter the United States in the first place.  At the same time, it sure felt as if Adams, Bragg, Biden, Mayorkas, and all the other open-borders advocates and politicians were really the ones flipping off desperate American citizens whose decades-long pleas for secure borders have been entirely ignored.  

Ever since Obama’s presidency, Democrats have demonized police officers and lionized criminals.  They lied about “hands up, don’t shoot”; maligned cops as Klan members with badges; and instigated race riots throughout the country.  They excused criminal behavior, cut bail requirements, reduced felonies to misdemeanors, and celebrated unethical prosecutors who have used their powers to lock up police officers for spurious charges while treating violent crime as some kind of race-based civil right.

Barack Obama and Eric Holder (the corrupt attorney general who regularly abused the law to protect friends and target political enemies) set the country down a dangerous path, where criminal gangs are psychologically empowered to target law enforcement officers for assassination and municipal politicians are so desperate to prove their soft-on-crime bona fides that they release violent criminals from jail in order to make room for unjustly indicted cops. 

https://amgreatness.com/2024/02/04/democracy-in-decline-the-subversion-of-rule-of-law/

A friend recently wrote me to offer a sharp formulation of a distinction I have often written about myself. Regular readers know that I am fond of distinguishing between “democracy”—a political arrangement in which the demos, the people, rule—and “Our Democracy™,” a counterfeit or masquerade of democracy in which not the people but an elite nomenklatura rule. To an increasing extent, I believe, the United States is gradually subsisting into the latter, with all the political, social, and moral deformations that such anxious oligarchical arrangements entail.

True enough, the United States was never really a democracy—a form of government, as James Madison observed in Federalist 10, that tended to be “as short in its life as it is violent in its death.” Rather, the United States was, from the beginning, a democratic republic. Ultimately, the people were sovereign—that was the point of the phrase “We the People.” But their sovereignty was mediated through the agency of representation. The point of my distinction, however, still holds. The Founders bequeathed us a democratic republic and a Constitution whose chief purpose was to define and limit the power of government. Their modern successors have inhabited that political dispensation, slyly perverting and emptying it out of its original signification while maintaining the names and rituals of the original.

If you believe that the words “perverting” and “emptying it out of its original signification” are extreme, I invite you to contemplate the tenth amendment to the U.S. Constitution: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” To what extent is the letter or spirit of that instruction followed today?

The answer is: not at all. What was originally a document designed to limit government and protect people from its coercive intervention has mutated into a reliquary containing the desiccated remains of a once-potent, now mostly quaint and antique admonition.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/new-york-city-falling-into-disorder

Last weekend, video cameras posted in Times Square captured a scene that has sparked outrage across the city. While struggling to arrest a resisting suspect, two NYPD officers were viciously attacked by at least six other men—all migrants, recently arrived in our “sanctuary city.” They all got away. Not long afterward, police made seven arrests related to the incident, on charges that included assault and robbery (according to reports, one of the officers’ cell phone was stolen during the fight). Adding insult to injury, at least four of the seven attackers have already been released. The attack and the subsequent release of the alleged perpetrators may shock the consciences of many New Yorkers, but anyone surprised by this hasn’t been paying attention.

The sad truth is that this episode reveals exactly what the politicians running Gotham’s city council and the legislature in Albany have invited. For years, my colleagues and I have called attention to the destructive policies that city and state officials have proposed and enacted. We’ve warned that those shifts would embolden offenders, make police more vulnerable, and put residents at risk. The Times Square episode is an amalgam of the obvious and expected effects of just a few of those policies.

New York City mayors and other city leaders have on multiple occasions defended the decision to make the city a “sanctuary”—which includes refusing to assist federal authorities seeking to deport migrants suspected of crimes. As noted in a recent article in City & State, this has been the city’s policy since 2014, and it has been state law since a state appellate court held as much in 2018.

The city council has also criminalized the use of basic police grappling techniques through the “diaphragm law,” which, on pain of criminal prosecution, prohibits the placement by cops of any pressure on the diaphragm, chest, or back of even actively resisting suspects, or otherwise restricting their airflow. The law was initially thrown out on constitutional grounds, but a state appellate court overturned that ruling in 2022. Handcuffing a grown man who is forcefully resisting is not easy, even when officers outnumber him. Yet, we ask our police to try to win these fights without running afoul of these restrictions—even when they’re surrounded by others willing to use violence to thwart the arrest.