HISTORY, MEDIA Comments turned off

Another Pulitzer Prize discredited as propaganda By Monica Showalter

Posted By on March 11th, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/03/another_pulitzer_prize_discredited_as_propaganda.html

Remember all that political hay the far left and its media allies made during the Vietnam War about the wickedness of America’s South Vietnamese ally and the importance of abandoning that country to the communists?

Here’s the Pulitzer Prize–winning AP photo that was supposed to prick our consciences and make us turn against that “immoral” war against a communist takeover:

There’s no doubt about it, the photo is hard to look at. It’s crude, rough, wartime justice, a picture of South Vietnamese Police Captain Nguyễn Ngọc Loan coldly executing Viet Cong Captain Nguyễn Văn Lém. The film is even harder to look at.

It ran on the front page of the New York Times, cropped from the original to fill the space and make its impact even more immediate.

And it got the results the anti-war left wanted: public sentiment abruptly turned against the war as a result of this photo.  The Vietnamese people were abandoned by the Americans, whose cut-and-run evacuation from the Saigon embassy rooftop was only recently bested by Joe Biden’s Afghanistan pullout.  After that, the re-education camps rolled in, the boat people launched into the high seas, and the killing fields of Cambodia began.

Jane Fonda must have been so proud of herself.

FOREIGN POLICY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

China Winning Technological War: Biden Administration Allowing It by Judith Bergman

Posted By on March 11th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19451/china-winning-technological-race

China has made no secret of its ambition to become, by 2049, the world’s greatest power, surpassing the US as the economic, technological, political and military leader of the world. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been planning and operating in line with those ambitions for decades.

In July 2020, FBI Director Christopher Wray said that Chinese theft of US intellectual and other property is happening on “a scale so massive that it represents one of the largest transfers of wealth in human history.”

A particularly disturbing technological lead is the leap China has made in the military and space sectors… China’s research interests and performance in military and space sectors are particularly notable, including an advanced hypersonic missile that China tested, to the US military’s surprise. China, it turns out, houses seven of the world’s top 10 research institutions focused on the field of hypersonics.

The overriding importance of technology for the Chinese Communist Party is reflected in the fact that Chinese President Xi Jinping has filled 40% of the CCP Central Committee –- the institution that decides China’s major policies — with officials who have backgrounds and experience in aerospace, artificial intelligence and other critical technological areas.

If the US and other Western countries wish to check China’s rise, they will have to make a far more serious effort to prioritize and invest in research and technology, not to mention doubling down on preventing more theft of technology and intellectual property.

Without urgent action on the part of the West, the world will soon be run by China.

China is winning the technological race with the West, and is well on its way to becoming the world’s leading technology superpower, according to a new report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI).

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Biden Administration Allowing Iran’s Mullahs to Join the “Nuclear Club” by Majid Rafizadeh

Posted By on March 11th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19473/iran-nuclear-club

Ever since the Biden Administration shifted Washington’s Iran policy from maximum pressure to total appeasement, the ruling mullahs’ nuclear advances have been remarkable.

In the meantime, the Biden administration does not appear even slightly concerned that a regime which has frequently threatened to wipe two entire countries, America and Israel, off the map, is closer than ever to possessing nuclear weapons.

General Hossein Salami, the commander-in-chief of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has made the Iranian regime’s plans vehemently clear. “Our strategy is to erase Israel from the global political map,” he announced on Iran’s state-controlled Channel 2 TV in 2019. Khamenei has also published a 416-page book, “Palestine,” about destroying Israel.

Thanks to the Biden Administration’s weakness, Iran’s anti-American, genocidal mullah regime, which is still calling for “Death to America!” and “Death to Israel!”, is about to join the “nuclear club.”

This — along with the surrender to the Taliban in Afghanistan and the many green lights offered to the Chinese Communist Party — will be the disastrous legacy of the Biden Administration.

Ever since the Biden Administration shifted Washington’s Iran policy from maximum pressure to total appeasement, the ruling mullahs’ nuclear advances have been remarkable.

The Iranian regime is rapidly forging ahead with uranium enrichment. Inspectors from the United Nations nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), recently found uranium particles in Iran that were enriched up to 83.7%, just shy of the 90% needed for nuclear weapons. The enrichment has been taking place in Iran’s underground Fordo nuclear site. Before the Biden Administration, the regime was enriching uranium at 3.5%. This is a remarkable nuclear escalation in just two years.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Stanford Law Students Scream at Federal Appellate Judge, Call Him ‘Scum,’ After He Is Invited To Speak at Prestigious School Matthew Rice

Posted By on March 11th, 2023

DPS Comment: “If I even need an attorney, as with doctors, I will only hire one who is past his/her late 30’s or into their 40’s.” Could not agree more….rsk

‘You’ve invited me to speak here, and I’ve been heckled nonstop,’ the judge tells the seething crowd as a dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion denounces him for causing ‘pain.’

A conservative federal judge on the Fifth Circuit of the United States Court of Appeals was screamed at on Thursday by dozens of Stanford Law School students who disagreed with his rulings, bringing new light to the conversation about freedom of speech at America’s elite universities.

At an event titled “The Fifth Circuit in Conversation with the Supreme Court: Covid, Guns, and Twitter,” Judge Kyle Duncan was met by an angry crowd of students and faculty. The judge had been invited to speak by the Stanford chapter of the conservative Federalist Society. 

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Covid Worsened America Rage Virus, for Which There’s No Vaccine Critics of the pandemic response were silenced, permanently damaging trust in institutions. By Daniel Lee

Posted By on March 11th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-worsened-america-rage-virus-for-which-theres-no-vaccine-lockdown-vaccine-mandates-ron-desantis-stanford-masking-2670cd39?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

EXCERPTS

Three years ago, I was in St. Pete Beach, Fla., as the reaction to the Covid-19 pandemic was accelerating. On Monday I waited an hour for a seat in Skidder’s Restaurant. Then Gov. Ron DeSantis closed bars and limited restaurants to 50% capacity. By Wednesday evening, I had the back porch of the Wharf Restaurant to myself, my only company a seagull perched on a piling, eyeing my fried oysters.

On the drive back to Indiana I found exit-ramp restaurants closed to dine-in patrons. Families had to eat grumpily in their minivans. At home the usually bustling Greenwood Park Mall parking lot was empty. Some employees received “essential workers” letters from their companies allowing them to go to their jobs, but thousands of presumably inessential employees found their incomes drying up.

As horrific as Covid-19 was as a physical illness, it was even worse as a social pathogen. The virus leapt from the body to the body politic. People were arrested for exercising in public, holding church services and refusing to wear masks. Others lost jobs for refusing the vaccine. Confrontations between maskers and antimaskers went viral. Schools were closed, damaging kids’ development. In Canada nearly two years into the pandemic, the government froze the bank accounts of people daring to demonstrate against its Covid-abatement efforts.

Vaccine mandates poured gasoline on the smoldering distrust of media outlets and science that had seemed rife with political ideology even before the outbreak. The mandates provoked resistance to even common-sense disease-limiting practices.

And the disease was quickly politicized. Progressives found an opportunity to expand government management of health—by force if necessary. For conservatives this seemed to prove they were right to distrust activist government. Donald Trump was encouraging ingestion of horse dewormer and household cleansers. Joe Biden was forcing deadly shots on children. Or so some claimed.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

‘I Firmly Say Yes’: Italy’s Deputy PM Enthusiastic About Recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s Capital

Posted By on March 11th, 2023

https://unitedwithisrael.org/i-firmly-say-yes-italys-deputy-pm-enthusiastic-about-recognizing-jerusalem-as-israels-capital/

“I believe the time has come for Rome to recognize Jerusalem as the ancestral capital of the Jewish people for 3,000 years,” Netanyahu said ahead of his trip to Italy.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that he will ask his Italian counterpart to recognize Jerusalem as the Jewish state’s capital, prompting immediate backing from Italy’s Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini.

“I believe the time has come for Rome to recognize Jerusalem as the ancestral capital of the Jewish people for 3,000 years, as the United States did with a gesture of great friendship,” Netanyahu said in an interview with Italy’s La Repubblica newspaper published ahead of his departure on Thursday, referring to the Trump administration’s 2017 recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and its subsequent embassy move.

Salvini expressed enthusiastic support for Netanyahu’s bid. “I firmly say yes to Jerusalem, capital of Israel, in the name of peace, history and truth,” he posted on Twitter.

Netanyahu also told the newspaper that Israel has “plenty” of natural gas, which he seeks to bring to Italy “to support its economic growth.”

In light of the fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Italy has committed to seeking energy alternatives.

EDUCATION, MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Code Red: Downplaying Academic Excellence in Med School Admissions Charles Lipson

Posted By on March 11th, 2023

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2023/03/10/code_red_downplaying_academic_excellence_in_med_school_admissions_148958.html

America’s top medical schools, worried they have too few minority students, are doing something about it. They are lowering academic standards for admission and trying to hide the evidence. Columbia, Harvard, the University of Chicago, Stanford, Mount Sinai, and the University of Pennsylvania have already done so. The list already tops forty, and more are sure to follow.

Of course, the universities won’t admit what they are doing – and certainly not why. All they will say is that their new standards add “equity” and “lived experience.” Unfortunately, adding those factors inevitably lessens the weight given to others.

The harsh reality is medical schools are downplaying academic achievement and MCAT scores, which give the best evidence of how well students are prepared for medical school. The MCAT is specifically tailored for that purpose. In addition to a section on critical reasoning (similar to the SATs), it examines students on biology and biochemistry, organic chemistry, the physics of living systems, and the biological and psychological foundations of behavior. It’s easy to see how those relate directly to higher education in medical science. Yet med schools want to downplay them and add inherently subjective criteria like “lived experience.”

Med schools are especially eager to get rid of the MCATs. After years of evaluating admissions folders, they know they cannot meet their goals for minority enrollment if they retain their near-total emphasis on academic qualifications. They know, too, that standardized tests and grades leave a statistical trail. They want to kick dust over that trail before the Supreme Court’s expected ruling against affirmative action. They fear the statistics will show marked differences in admission rates for individuals from different groups who have similar scores and GPAs. That’s not a wild guess. Admission teams know the evidence from years of experience.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

AI: A Hot Date with ‘Sydney’ by Drieu Godefridi

Posted By on March 10th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19470/artificial-intelligence-chatgpt

At this stage, it is not possible to measure or list what the countless uses of tools such as ChatGPT will be in the future — but it is clearly a revolution.

After all, does ChatGPT have its own consciousness? Let’s ask her!

Question: Dear ChatGPT, do you consider yourself as a personality in its own right, distinct from your creators?

ChatGPT: As an Al language model, I don’t have the capacity to consider myself as personality in its own right, distinct from my creators. I don’t have feelings, emotions, beliefs, or desires like a human being. I’m just a machine learning model designed to process and generate natural language responses based on the patterns it has learned from large amounts of data. While I’m capable of generating responses that may appear to be conversational, I’m ultimately just a tool created by humans to assist with language-based tasks. I don’t have a sense of self or a distinct personality separate from my programming.

Faced with the emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbots such as ChatGPT and its little brothers (and sisters), two ways of approaching them stand out. The first could be described as not-all-that-good at knowledge and the second as not-all-that-bad at knowledge.

The first approach is the result of catching AI at fault, for example by showing that it is in fact wrong, or flawed in its “reasoning” process. This is a very common line of attack on the networks, which are now littered with screenshots showing GPT chat errors. This is not useless: it reminds us that these AIs are not infallible. But who doubted that, when it is explicitly stated that ChatGPT, for example, has no access to the web and that its credentials end in 2021? It is amusing, in this respect, to see an intellectual as sharp as Nassim Nicholas Taleb being outraged that ChatGPT is unable to deliver URLs valid in 2023 on the bikeable roads in Atlanta.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Recent First Ladies and Their Academic Degrees By David Solway

Posted By on March 10th, 2023

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2023/03/09/recent-first-ladies-and-their-academic-degrees-n1676985

“I might say in my defense that I would not have addressed so contentious a subject had the press, the talking heads, and the bien pensants — those I call intelleftuals — not extravagantly touted such mediocre efforts as pageants of superior accomplishment and intelligence. Their bloviations merely serve a political agenda rather than a scrupulous assessment of quality — which is, I submit, the curse of our age.”

I am frankly amazed at the intellectual ineptitude revealed by our recent Democrat First Ladies’ degree-awarded ventures in academic exposition and by the media adulation they have received for their efforts. Having recently published an analysis of Jill Biden’s doctoral dissertation, pointing out its utter inadequacy, I find it comes as no surprise that former First Lady Michelle Obama considers it a work of substantial merit and heaps accolades on Biden as “a brilliant woman who has distinguished herself in her profession.”

Michelle Obama is herself the recipient of an academic honor in the shape of a Bachelor’s Degree from Princeton for her senior thesis, “Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community,” in which she attempts to estimate “an introspective measure of change, as perceived by the individual” in “the effects of a Princeton education on Blacks and Black students’ attitudes…pre-, intra-, and post-Princeton.” A putative achievement of this dubious nature does not confirm Obama (then Michelle LaVaughn Robinson) as qualified to comment on the brilliance of others.

Given the acclaim Michelle Obama has enjoyed for her influential public voice, it behooves us to consider where and how her career acquired its impetus — her vaunted thesis. True, the thesis was written many years ago, but let us not forget that it served as Obama’s ticket into the “new elite,” despite its being a gallimaufry of platitudes and pseudo-academic fustian.

P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

White House Gives International Women’s Day Award to Biological Man By Eric Lendrum

Posted By on March 10th, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/03/09/white-house-gives-international-womens-day-award-to-biological-man/

On Wednesday, the Biden White House celebrated International Women’s Day by presenting an award to a biological man who believes he is a woman.

The Daily Caller reports that the Woman of Courage Award was given to Alba Rueda, who serves as the Special Envoy for Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity in Argentina’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In that post, he is responsible for Argentina’s adoption of a policy known as the “Transgender Labor Quota,” which mandated that no less than one percent of all public sector jobs be held by people who believe themselves to be “transgender.”

“Now in its 17th year, the Secretary of State’s IWOC Award recognizes women from around the globe who have demonstrated exceptional courage, strength, and leadership in advocating for peace, justice, human rights, gender equity and equality, and the empowerment of women and girls, in all their diversity – often at great personal risk and sacrifice,” the White House said in a press release announcing the award for Rueda, who was born a male.

“In Argentina, Alba Rueda is a transgender woman who was kicked out of classrooms, barred from sitting for exams, refused job opportunities, subjected to violence, and rejected by [his] family,” said Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks, as the award was presented to Rueda by Jill Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken.