Until now, I’ve avoided getting myself worked up about ChatGPT. Prompted by this article by a Columbia undergraduate this past spring, I thought that if a student knows enough about paper-writing to make ChatGPT work for them, in the way this student describes in his piece, without detection by a minimally alert instructor, that student has probably already mastered the skills of essay-writing far more than the author of this piece seems to realize. I at least could rest easy with the knowledge that if a student used ChatGPT to write a paper for me, and it was good, I wasn’t not teaching that student what they needed to learn how to do. But this recent article, by a Harvard […]
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He reluctantly endorses mail-in votes but says “you’re never going to get an honest vote… it’s disgraceful.” As usual, he will accept the results if it goes his way.
This week the House held a hearing on UFOs Not content with chasing phantom “Biden Crime Family” investigations, the Republicans decided to take a spin in a spaceship: David Grusch, the former US intelligence officer who claims that the US government is harboring “intact and partially intact” and “non-human” pilots, appeared in Washington, under oath, to repeat the same. The US government conducted a “multi-decade” program which collected, and attempted to reverse-engineer, crashed UFOs, Grusch told the oversight committee. He added that unnamed federal agencies had even recovered “biologics” from these craft, which he described as “non-human”. Moreover, Grusch, who led analysis of unexplained anomalous phenomena (UAP) within a US Department of Defense agency until 2023, said he had encountered “people who have been harmed or injured” in the course of the government’s efforts to keep this alien program secret. Grusch told the committee that after going public with his allegations he had feared for his life.
Trump discusses the surveillance tapes He’s at a loss on this one. His excuse is lamer than usual: “These were my tapes that we gave to them,” Trump told conservative radio host John Fredericks. “These were security tapes. We handed them over to them. … I’m not even sure what they’re saying.” That’s a non-sequitur. Yes, they were his tapes. It’s what he ordered his henchman to do with them that was criminal. The Department of Justice alleged that Trump and Nauta had asked De Oliveira to delete the footage from Mar-a-Lago, so the video would not get into the hands of a grand jury. The new court documents claimed De Oliveira and Nauta were captured on surveillance video moving boxes that may have contained documents with classified markings before DOJ and FBI officials visited the property to collect subpoenaed items. It also alleged that in June 2022, on the same day that the DOJ emailed Trump’s attorney another subpoena for surveillance video, De Oliveira had a private conversation with an employee in an audio closet during which he asked how long a server containing the video kept its footage.
This is interesting… Dance, Ron, dance. Megyn isn’t quick enough to throw back in his face the long-standing GOP view of small government and the private sector being completely independent from the state. His diversion from that ideology is very Trumpian: the only rule that corporations need to follow is that they must show total fealty to … him. There’s a word for that and it starts with F and ends with ism.
This NY Times piece analyzes Trump’s long-standing habit of obstructing justice. The man who claims that everyone else is cheating has always been a cheater and a cover-up artist. He is completely unethical and immoral. By now you know the new charges in the superseding indictment. He tried to have the surveillance tapes destroyed and he worked to make sure his henchmen wouldn’t say anything. They did and now they are under federal indictment. Trump has always done this: “Demanding that evidence be destroyed is the most basic form of obstruction and is easy for a jury to understand,” said Mr. Goldstein, who is now a white-collar defense lawyer at the firm Cooley. “It is more straightforwardly criminal than the obstructive acts we detailed in the Mueller report,” he said. “And if proven, it makes it easier to show that Trump had criminal intent for the rest of the conduct described in the indictment.” The accusation about Mr.
As the fall quarter of my final year at the University of Georgia got underway in 1973, I was on the staff of The Red & Black, the student daily newspaper. I was the co-news editor that fall, but still … Continue reading
The morphing anti-woke war Another of the downsides to the steady withering of “X” is the former bird platform’s function as a town square where professional and amateur media critics could find an audience, complains Dan Froomkin of Press Watch. “Political reporters at our leading news organizations routinely put a thumb on the scale in favor of the far right – both by failing to call out its racist and increasingly homophobic nature, and by adopting right-wing frames in reporting current events,” Froomkin writes. He offers a short list of recent stories in which major media outlets tiptoe around the increasingly overt racist and homophobic impulses behind conservative actions and rhetoric. “The right-wing’s anti-woke war against trans people has now — as was entirely predictable — morphed into a war on any expression of gender or sexuality that isn’t Biblically-approved procreative sex between a man and a woman,” Froomkin posted to the X site on Friday. Slippery, meet Slope: The Washington Post story about the homophobic attack on libraries that I mentioned above is just one example.
The youngest offspring at Zoo Vienna is hard to miss. On July 17, a female fur seal was born. When it’s hungry, it loudly draws attention to itself to get its mother’s care. “In the first few days, the mother and the young seal were in the backstage area, but now they can be seen by the visitors in a specially designed shallow water area. The little one is already making its first attempts at swimming. The mother is very experienced and takes good care of her offspring,” says Simone Haderthauer, the zoological curator. Fur seals can swim and dive from birth, but practice makes perfect! Once the young seal is confident both on land and in water, she will join the rest of the group. The commented feeding of the fur seals is a highlight of every zoo visit for many visitors. However, it will take some time before the young seal exclusively eats fish and participates in the feeding. During the first six to eight months, seal pups are nursed by their mothers. Haderthauer says, “Currently, even the adult seals don’t have a big appetite for mackerel, sprats, and other fish.
A Southern man don’t need them around, anyhow Ala-by God-bama! “In an echo of mid-century southern defiance of school desegregation, the Yellowhammer State’s Republican-controlled legislature defied the conservative-dominated Court’s directive to redraw its congressional map with an additional Black-majority district,” Adam Serwer explains in The Atlantic: Openly defying a Supreme Court order is rare—almost as rare as conservative justices recognizing that the Fifteenth Amendment outlaws racial discrimination in voting. Under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, states are sometimes required to draw districts with majority-minority populations. This requirement exists because after Reconstruction, one of the methods southern states used to disenfranchise their Black populations was racially gerrymandering congressional districts so that Black voters could not affect the outcome of congressional elections. Earlier this year, Alabama asked the Supreme Court to further weaken the Voting Rights Act so as to preserve its racial gerrymander.