Robert Pondiscio, AEI Senior Fellow, in his commencement address to the Atlanta Classical Academy, said this, in part:
We didn’t stop watching movies. We stopped watching them together.
And if we’re not careful, we won’t stop learning—but we may stop learning the same things. We may stop learning together.
One more thing: we will (not may) stop learning as quickly or as thoroughly. The interaction, the joint questioning, facilitate learning to the nth degree.
Ex-FLOTUS Jill Biden, in a CBS News interview, said that during Joe Biden’s 2024 debate with then-Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump she became afraid that her husband was in the middle of a stroke, evidenced by his disjointed, often incoherent performance. Now the press, led by CNN‘s Abby Phillip, is very upset and calling out Progressive-Democratic Party politicians over their deceptiveness regarding Biden’s mental decline.
It’s true enough that Party politicians lied to the rest of us about Biden’s mental capacities. The deceptiveness wasn’t only theirs though.
That rest of us could plainly see Biden’s progressive decline while it was happening. If the press couldn’t see that with their own eyes, they were only deceiving themselves. That alone removes any credibility they might have had regarding their reporting—they couldn’t then discriminate between reality and what they wanted reality to be, and there’s no reason to believe their acuity has improved since.
More likely, though, they were either deliberately oblivious to Biden’s ongoing mental degradation, choosing the lazy path of accepting at face value Party politician assurances of his hale and hearty alertness, or they were actively complicit in the deception. That laziness and/or dishonesty destroys press credibility, and the only way for the press to regain credibility is to achieve a wholesale turnover of news writers, editors, and publishers. The current crop can never again be believable.
The lede carries the surrender.
The British Museum postponed a public lecture scheduled for Wednesday on the Iron Age kingdoms of Israel and Judah less than 24 hours before it was due to start. The reason, the museum said, was security concerns. A “significant proportion” of the registered attendees were “individuals intending to deliberately disrupt the event.” The lecture, to be given by Paul Collins, who runs the museum’s Middle East department, was planned as a highlight of Britain’s first ever Jewish Culture Month.
“Security” concerns over “disruption.” Sure. Dominic Green’s subheadline understates the case:
Canceling events over “security concerns” gives bullies and frauds exactly what they want.
It’s far worse than that. These are people who should know better. They’re not only telling bigots they can have whatever they want, these…personages…are broadcasting to the world at large that what Brits have to say to those who threaten them is…”please don’t hurt us.”
Green had this near the end of his piece:
Rather than hunker down before the bigots and behind managerial waffle, Messrs Cullinan and Osborne [museum director and chairman, respectively] should seize the chance to redeem the museum from its self-inflicted disgrace and show the world what it stands for.
Sadly, they’ve already demonstrated plainly and for all to see exactly what the museum does not stand for.
Nor is the museum’s cowardice a one-off. Green listed some other examples of Brit surrender, also.
The inaugural Jewish Culture Month was created to counter this kind of criminal intimidation and institutional weakness. The museum’s lecture was intended to “highlight” the Month in its first major event. All the event highlighted, though, was timidity in the face of threats.
Beyond that, the British people continually and repeatedly elect governments infamous for looking the other way as their girls are groomed for the sex trade and then used in it; governments that insist that defending oneself against assault is itself a crime; governments that won’t even defend the nation’s own borders against illegal alien inflows, a particular infidelity to those few who were owed so much in times past.
These are not the people whose army stood tall against a vastly numerically superior Zulu army at Rorke’s Drift and won, nor are they the people whose army and air force stood tall against Germany’s Nazi armies and air forces, ultimately contributing critically to the Allied defeat of Nazi Germany.
Today’s Brits are utterly betraying their own Winston Churchill’s injunction to Never give in—never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Further betrayal of their own, Churchill’s speech to the House of Commons in 1940:
[W]we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. …we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. …we shall never surrender.
These are not the people of a special relationship.
Today’s Brit meekness is as disgusting as it is dismaying.
The Wall Street Journal‘s editors are amused by the press’ response to Pope Leo XIV’s writ that warns of the dangers that Artificial Intelligence presents to the humanity of us all.
I’m amused by the Pope’s naïveté. He wrote this (as cited by the editors), for instance:
Some of what he writes is hard to dispute, such as that AI has “harmful uses, such as the manipulation of information or violations of privacy.”
So do the printing press and reporters since that machine’s invention engage in the harm of manipulating information—what they choose to write, what they choose to not write, how they choose to present either. So do the reporters, specifically, with the means they use to snoop out what they choose then to write about.
And
“There is also a subtler danger,” he writes, of AI “reflecting and reinforcing the stereotypes or ideological bias of their designers and developers.”
“Subtler dangers?” That’s the press and reporters here, too. Reporters today only write consistently with their preconceived notions and/or those of their employers, the press’ collection of editors and publishers. Particular stereotypes are blithely peddled where they support those preconceived notions or contradict the obviously wrong notions of those whom they oppose.
The Pope is on firm ground when he advises the flock—and the rest of us—on morality and the role of God in our lives. However, if he’s going to move from the general of morals and God’s Word to specifics like the tools we use, he would do well to at least be consistent. AI is in many respects, if not most, simply an extension of the printing press, the press industry, and reporters in the arena of information generation and dissemination.
In last Tuesday’s Texas Progressive-Democratic Party primary runoff election “for a recently redrawn House seat,” ex-Progressive-Democrat Congressman Colin Allred (from a pre-redraw district) defeated incumbent Progressive-Democrat Congresswoman (from a pre-redraw district) Julie Johnson by 54%-46%.
This is upsetting to senior Party members, even as the upset itself is surprising by its existence. The upset is centered on Johnson being Texas’ only openly LGBTQ Representative in Congress, as if that matters in some way.
For instance, here are Congressmen Mark Takano (D, CA) and Ritchie Torres (D, NY), Party’s Equality PAC co-chairs:
It’s no secret that, without Julie, Texas—and likely the entire South—will lose openly LGBTQ representation in Congress. Many in our community remain deeply hurt by Colin Allred’s decision to challenge one of our own.
The effrontery of Allred—that seat belonged to the LGBTQ community.
The dismay also is typical of Party’s attitude toward blacks. Johnson is white, and Allred is black. That man should have remembered his place, which is squarely in back of the LGBTQ community.
Never mind that, by solidly choosing Allred in the primary, Party voters themselves clearly demonstrated their overall preference for Allred, if not their overall dissatisfaction with Johnson.