90 Miles From Tyranny

Wednesday, October 21, 2020

You Gotta Be A Crackhead To Vote For Biden...

Destroying the Institutions We Inherited

In the 21st century, hallmark American and international institutions have lost much of their prestige and respect.

Politics and biases explain the lack of public confidence in organizations and institutions such as the World Health Organization, the Commission on Presidential Debates, the Nobel Peace Prize, the Pulitzer Prizes, and the Academy Awards.

The overseers entrusted with preserving these institutions all caved to short-term political pressures. As a result, they have mostly destroyed what they inherited.

The World Health Organization’s director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, is the first person without a medical degree to hold that position. Why? No one really knows.

In the critical first days of the rapidly spreading COVID-19 pandemic, almost every statement issued by Tedros and the WHO about the origins, transmission, prevention, and treatment of the virus was inaccurate. Worse, the announcements predictably reflected the propaganda of the Chinese government.

The bipartisan Commission on Presidential Debates was formed in 1987 for two purposes: to ensure that during every presidential campaign, candidates would agree to debate; and to ensure that the debates would be impartial and not favor either major party.

Unfortunately, in 2020, the commission so far has a checkered record on both counts.

Conservatives have argued that the moderators of the first presidential debate and the vice presidential debate—Chris Wallace of Fox News and Susan Page of USA Today—were systematically asymmetrical in their questioning.

The moderators asked both President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence to explain prior controversial quotes and then to reply to critics’ accusations. The moderators did not pose the same sort of gotcha-type “When did you stop beating your wife?” questions to Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden or vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris.

Although the vice presidential debate was conducted with proper social distancing, along with screens and testing to protect the candidates, the commission abruptly canceled the second live presidential debate for safety’s sake and insisted it be conducted remotely.

Yet White House doctors have cleared Trump, who recently contracted COVID-19, as both medically able to debate and no longer infectious.

The public perception was that a remote debate would favor the frequently teleprompted Biden, who has been largely ensconced in his home during the last six months, and would be less advantageous to Trump, who thrives on live, ad hoc television.

Page is currently writing a biography of Trump’s chief antagonist, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. The designated moderator of the now-canceled second president debate, Steve Scully of C-SPAN, once interned for Biden.

The Nobel Peace Prize has been subject to criticism over the years for failing to adequately recognize either diplomatic or humanitarian achievement.

Yasser Arafat of the Palestine Liberation Organization won the prize in 1994, despite conducting lethal terrorist operations. He allegedly gave the final order to execute U.S. Ambassador to Sudan Cleo Noel and two other diplomats in 1973.

In 2009, the Nobel Peace Prize went to President Barack Obama, despite the fact that Obama had only been president for eight months when the prize was announced. Many felt the award was a political statement—aimed at empowering Obama and criticizing the policies of his...

YAVIN BASE, OUTER RIM—Rebel scum across the galaxy are up in arms after Twitter suspended the account of astromech droid R2-D2 for apparently sharing stolen Imperial plans vital to the survival of the Rebellion. According to sources close to the droid, he has been unable to post anything to Twitter since his suspension last week.

"Here at Twitter, we take the safety and security of the galaxy very seriously," said Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey in a response. "Our sources tell us these are very important schematics to an Imperial superweapon stolen by wanted criminal Jyn Erso and a ragtag band of mercenaries. Our rules clearly state that such sensitive material is not appropriate to be shared on our platform. Anyone caught sharing or attempting to access this information will be permanently suspended and the coordinates of their planet will be given to the Empire. We apologize for our poor communication up to this point."

According to unnamed sources, analysis of the plans has revealed a weakness in the imperial superweapon. Imperial sources have dismissed this as "Rebel misinformation that should be ignored and forgotten immediately."

Representatives in the Imperial Senate were outraged to hear of R2's suspension from Twitter and demanded that Jack be immediately transported to Coruscant for...

Facebook Is Using Chinese Nationals To Censor American Free Speech...

China is one of the most censorious societies on earth. So what better place for Facebook to recruit social-media censors?

There are at least half a dozen “Chinese nationals who are working on censorship,” a former Facebook insider told me last week. “So at some point, they [Facebook bosses] thought, ‘Hey, we’re going to get them H-1B visas so they can do this work.’ ”

The insider shared an internal directory of the team that does much of this work. It’s called Hate-Speech Engineering (George Orwell, call your office), and most of its members are based at Facebook’s offices in Seattle. Many have Ph.D.s, and their work is extremely complex, involving machine learning — teaching “computers how to learn and act without being explicitly programmed,” as the techy Web site DeepAI.org puts it.

When it comes to censorship on social media, that means “teaching” the Facebook code so certain content ends up at the top of your newsfeed, a feat that earns the firm’s software wizards discretionary bonuses, per the ex-insider. It also means making sure other content “shows up dead-last.”

Like, say, a New York Post report on the Biden dynasty’s dealings with Chinese companies.

To illustrate the mechanics, the insider took me as his typical Facebook user: “They take what Sohrab sees, and then they throw the newsfeed list into a machine-learning algorithm and neural networks that determine the ranking of the items.”

Facebook engineers test hundreds of different iterations of the rankings to shape an optimal outcome — and root out what bosses call “borderline content.”

It all makes for perhaps the most chillingly sophisticated censorship mechanism in human history. “What they don’t do is ban a specific pro-Trump hashtag,” says the ex-insider. Instead, “content that is a little too conservative, they will down-rank. You can’t tell it’s censored.”

I won’t share the names of the Facebook employees in question. The point isn’t to spotlight individuals, but to show how foreign nationals from a state that still bans Facebook have their hands on the levers of social-media censorship here in America.

The Hate-Speech Engineering team’s staff includes a research scientist based at the Seattle office who earned his master’s degree in computer engineering from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Another member of the team, a software engineer for machine learning based in Seattle, earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science from Jilin University in northeast China. Still another, an engineering manager, earned his bachelor’s in computer science at Nanjing University in eastern China.

Another software engineer previously worked for...

Bigotry of low expectations strikes again

The San Diego Unified School District has announced that it will eliminate its previously used grading standards in order to “combat racism”.

The move came about after it was revealed that just 7% of D or F grades are handed out to white students, while 23% went to Native Americans, 23% of failing grades went to Hispanics and 20% went to black students.

However, instead of trying to develop an actual understanding of why this is taking place, the school district simply announced that “discrimination” and “racism” were to blame before embarking on a complete do-over of the grading system in order to combat this apparent injustice.

Academic grades will now not be dependent on early tests (meaning students could flunk them and not have it affect their final grade), and grades “will now focus on mastery of the material, not a yearly average.”

Teachers will also not be able to consider non-material factors like bad behavior in the classroom and not handing in work on time when grading students.

The horrific irony of this of course is that is will simply incentivize already underperforming students to act out in class and miss coursework deadlines.

“The board will also review potential student disparities stemming from its zero-tolerance disciplinary policy on cheating in the coming weeks,” reports NBC News.

Once again, this will only have the impact of encouraging underperforming students to cheat more.

“This is part of our honest reckoning as a school district,” said SDUSD Vice President Richard Barrera. “If we’re actually going to...