90 Miles From Tyranny

Wednesday, August 26, 2020

Too Close To Call...

BBC staff will be given diversity lessons to stop 'microaggessions' in bid to make corporation more welcoming to black programme makers

Pictured: Spineless Cuckold

Piers Wenger has been in ‘discussion’ about how to remove 'unconscious bias’
£250k-a-year Drama Commissioning Controller said it was now 'ground zero'
Told Edinburgh TV Festival now is ‘the moment where we have to get it right’
Executive staff are being advised to have unconscious bias training, reports say

The BBC’s drama boss has vowed to get rid of inadvertent instances of racism known as ‘microagressions’ among staff at the Corporation.

Piers Wenger told the Edinburgh TV Festival that he has been in ‘deep discussion’ about how to ‘eradicate unconscious bias’ to help improve the representation of ethnic minorities.

The £250k-a-year Drama Commissioning Controller said it was now ‘ground zero’ and ‘the moment where we have to get it right’.

His comments come amid reports that executive staff at the BBC are being advised to have unconscious bias training to make sure they don't inadvertently offend anyone, according to The Times.

The BBC’s drama boss Piers Wenger (centre in 2017) has vowed to get rid of inadvertent instances of racism known as ‘microagressions’ at the Corporation

Mr Wenger said: ‘It’s also the role of commissioners to really get it right because we know that we are at the very beginning of the process.

'If talent isn’t being protected and nurtured and empowered, if ethnic minority stories aren’t making their way on to screens then we have a big part to play in that.’

He added: ‘Over the last few months as a department we’ve been in deep discussion around how to eradicate unconscious bias and microaggressions.

‘We just can’t deny that those things exist.’

A microaggression is a remark or action which unintentionally reveals a prejudice towards a minority group, such as asking someone: ‘So where are you really from?’

Mr Wenger said that he wanted the BBC to be ‘radical’ and it was ‘the moment to act’. He added in recent months people had been trying to ‘drill down into the...

Elon Musk’s brain-implant firm Neuralink to show off ‘working’ device Friday

Elon Musk says his brain-implant firm Neuralink will show off a “working device” at a highly anticipated Friday event.

Musk announced the live demonstration on Twitter early Wednesday, apparently referring to the brain-machine interface — a device that would link human brains to computers — Neuralink has been developing since it launched in 2017.

The tech tycoon also indicated that Neuralink will unveil the latest version of a high-tech robot it’s built to surgically implant electrodes that would let humans control computers with their minds. He said in February that the new machine would be “awesome” compared to an earlier version Neuralink presented last year.

Musk — the billionaire mogul behind Tesla and SpaceX — has offered scant detail about the event since he set a date for it last month. He suggested in a July 30 tweet that Neuralink planned to “show neurons firing in real-time,” without elaborating on what that meant.

Neuralink’s ambitious project aims to pack thousands of tiny electrodes attached to flexible “threads” into an implantable device that could enable people with neurological disorders to use computers or other devices. The San Francisco-based startup says it has successfully implanted such devices on rats and reportedly plans to conduct human trials of its technology.

But the company has been plagued by a “chaotic internal culture” that rushed along projects and killed them just as fast, according to a STAT News investigation published Tuesday. Only two of Neuralink’s eight founding scientists are still on board, and researchers have privately discussed the need for the firm to focus on simpler projects to accelerate...

WATCH: Man Shot in Head at Kenosha Riots

A man was shot in the head in Kenosha, Wisconsin on Tuesday night, as riots swept through the city for a third consecutive night.

The incident occurred just before midnight local time as semi-automatic gunfire erupted in what appeared to be the parking lot of an auto-repair shop.

WATCH: (NSFW)

It’s unclear whether the man was a part of the riot, or who shot him. However, according to independent journalist and investigative reporter Drew Hernandez, a car was lit on fire by rioters at the parking lot where the man was shot, “in retaliation.” Such an event could indicate the man was shot by the owner of the business, but that has not been...