May 20, 2024

FIRE HARRISON BUTKER? K.C. Star Opinion Writer Says Yes. Time to Hire Female Kicker.

Anybody who thinks this controversy is about women’s rights is missing the point. Butker said nothing that would indicate that he opposes women’s empowerment and ability to chase their dreams, whatever they might be.

What offends the left has nothing to do with that; it has everything to do with undermining family values. It is their hatred of the family that is revealed, not their zeal for girl bosses.

It is awfully hilarious though seeing the leftist establishment suddenly and in lockstep remembering how to define “what is a woman,” only two years after Ketanji Brown Jackson’s legendary “I’m not a biologist” meltdown.

Posted at 10:55 am by Ed Driscoll

WHY AM I REMINDED OF “FLOWERS FOR ALGERNON”? Just the News filed a short take that honestly makes me wonder if Fetterman has been red-pilled, or at the very least, somehow came out smarter after his stroke than he was before it happened:

“In the past, I’ve described the U.S. House as The Jerry Springer Show,” Fetterman posted on X. “Today, I’m apologizing to The Jerry Springer Show.”

I did not have “Fetterman getting into a beef with AOC” on my bingo card.

 

Posted at 10:30 am by Charles Glasser

NOW OUT FROM ANDREW WAREHAM: Part 1 of a new series, The Half-Bred Heir.

Posted at 10:01 am by Glenn Reynolds

SKYNET SMILES: OpenAI dissolves team focused on long-term AI risks, less than one year after announcing it.

Sutskever and Leike on Tuesday announced their departures on social media platform X, hours apart, but on Friday, Leike shared more details about why he left the startup.

“I joined because I thought OpenAI would be the best place in the world to do this research,” Leike wrote on X. “However, I have been disagreeing with OpenAI leadership about the company’s core priorities for quite some time, until we finally reached a breaking point.”

Leike wrote that he believes much more of the company’s bandwidth should be focused on security, monitoring, preparedness, safety and societal impact.

“These problems are quite hard to get right, and I am concerned we aren’t on a trajectory to get there,” he wrote. “Over the past few months my team has been sailing against the wind. Sometimes we were struggling for [computing resources] and it was getting harder and harder to get this crucial research done.”

Leike added that OpenAI must become a “safety-first AGI company.”

If they weren’t going to become one when they had a safety team, it seems less likely without one.

Posted at 9:36 am by Stephen Green

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: On Cue, Biden Is Lying About Republicans and Elections. “The Democrats are the most backwards-looking ‘progressive’ political movement on Earth. FDR still drives their economic policy, and race relations in America haven’t improved since the late 1950s in their telling of the story. As Rick points out in his post, this kind of garbage still resonates with older Black voters.”

Posted at 9:05 am by Stephen Green

BIDENOMICS IS WORKING: Consumers are so demoralized by inflation and high rates that they’ve given up on saving for the American Dream and are spending money instead, economist says.

Joanne Hsu, who is the director of the University of Michigan’s consumer sentiment survey, told CNBC on Friday that she thinks Americans have abandoned plans to save money as they see their financial goals look less attainable and are spending money instead.

“This positive spending is not a reflection of some sort of internalized secret sense of confidence that consumers have,” he explained. “And instead my interpretation is that consumers see that a lot of aspirational goals that we talk about as part of the American Dream—homeownership, paying for college, paying for college for your kids, having a comfortable retirement—with high prices and high interest rates right now, those aspirational goals just feel increasingly out of reach.”

And as a result, consumers have “given up” on saving for those goals, Hsu added, noting that the still-strong labor market allows them to spend now.

The unintended (and ironic) consequence is that the front-loaded aggregate demand is inflationary.

Posted at 7:32 am by Stephen Green

#LEADERSHIP:

Posted at 7:09 am by Glenn Reynolds

THE TYPE OF FICTION WE ENJOY IS SHAPED BY OUR LIVES, AND SHAPES OUR LIVES IN TURN:  Literary Imagination.

Posted at 6:29 am by Sarah Hoyt