OPEN THREAD: Enjoy.
April 25, 2024
MY LATEST SUBSTACK ESSAY: Education Apocalypse Now? The Ivy League Hits An Iceberg.
21st CENTURY HEADLINES: Is This the First AI Hate Hoax?* White Principal Accused of Racism Based on Fake Audio.
A pretty dramatic story out of Baltimore today which reveals what may be the first hate hoax perpetrated with the help of artificial intelligence. The principal of Pikesville High School, Eric Eiswert, was accused in January of making blatantly racist comments behind closed doors after an inflammatory audio file was posted on a popular Instagram account.
In the recording, the person speaking refers to “ungrateful Black kids who can’t test their way out of a paper bag.”
The speaker goes on to question how hard it is to get those students to meet grade-level expectations. He uses names of people who appear to be staff members and says they should not have been hired. The speaker sayshe should get rid of another person “one way or another.”
“And if I have to get one more complaint from one more Jew in this community, I’m going to join the other side,” the voice in the recording stated.
* * * * * * * *
Siwei Lyu, director of a media forensics lab at the University at Buffalo, said the audio is not particularly sophisticated. Lyu has developed technologies at the State University of New York for spotting audio and images created using artificial intelligence.
This audio is “not a challenging case for the algorithms. I believe someone just made this using an AI voice generator,” Lyu said, adding that he doesn’t believe the person who made it put a lot of effort into the task. Online voice generator tools, like one from Eleven Labs, are available to anyone and advertise their ability to instantly create audio that’s indistinguishable from human speech.
There is, however, clear evidence the audio was manipulated, Lyu said.
Today we got further confirmation of that as police arrested the man they say created that audio in an effort to get back at Eiswert for an earlier investigation.
* * * * * * * *
[Dazhon “DJ”] Darien (allegedly) stirred up a lot of fear and mistrust in his community. Like Jussie Smollett, he’ll probably get a minor slap on the wrist. I don’t know what he’s facing exactly but I hope if he’s convicted he gets the maximum possible sentence.
This headline earlier today won’t exactly help Darien clear his name: Ex-athletic director accused of framing principal with AI arrested at airport with gun. “Darien, 31, was apprehended as he attempted to board a flight to Houston at BWI Airport, Baltimore County Police Chief Robert McCullough said at a news conference Thursday afternoon. Darien was stopped for having a gun on him and airport officials saw there was a warrant for his arrest. Police said they did not know whether Darien was trying to flee.”
* It certainly won’t be the last, given the rapid spread AI and the increasing ease in faking audio, which, at least for now, is far more easy to manipulate than video. (Though expect plenty of the latter to be faked as well, going forward.)
THE NEW SPACE RACE: Russia vetoes U.N. resolution on nuclear weapons in space.
The Outer Space Treaty already forbids those, so this is basically a symbolic move on both sides. But to the extent that the Outer Space Treaty’s prohibition is weakening, the prospects for a nuclear Orion spaceship improve.
AMERICAN HIGHER ED’S FREE SPEECH PROBLEMS DIDN’T START ON OCT 7, 2023. My newest Substack piece looks at the absolute bedlam rocking college campuses across the country (Columbia chief among them), the ‘hypocrisy projection’ of people who didn’t care about free speech until it was their ideological comrades being censored, and more.
WELL, THERE YOU ARE: A Scientist Says He Has the Evidence That We Live in a Simulation. The headline overpromises a bit, but it’s interesting.
IT’S ALWAYS THE BIGGEST FREE SPEECH HYPOCRITES WHO THINK EVERYONE ELSE ARE HYPOCRITES. In my latest piece for my Substack, The Eternally Radical Idea I call out the ‘hypocrisy projection’ from the “free speech for me but not for thee” crowd and address the recent campus chaos at Columbia & beyond.
IF YOU’RE OLD, being fat improves life expectancy. We’ve seen other studies to this effect. It may just be a marker for the people who aren’t wasting away with sarcopoenia, though, rather than any specific benefit to being fat.
NO COMPETITION, PLEASE: ABA proposal to accredit online law schools faces opposition from law deans.
UNEXPECTEDLY! US economy grew slower than expected at the start of 2024.
The U.S. economy grew at a slower pace than expected at the beginning of 2024 as consumers pulled back on spending in the face of higher inflation.
Gross domestic product, the broadest measure of goods and services produced across the economy, grew by 1.6% on an annualized basis in the three-month period from January through March, the Commerce Department said in its first reading of the data on Thursday.
That is much lower than the 2.4% increase forecast by LSEG economists and marks a sharp slowdown from the 3.4% pace seen during the fourth quarter. It is the slowest pace of growth in two years.
“This was a worst of both worlds report — slower than expected growth, higher than expected inflation,” said David Donabedian, chief investment officer of CIBC Private Wealth US. “The biggest setback is the acceleration in core inflation, and in particular, the services sector rising above a 5% annual rate.”
And Team Biden is prepared to drive those growth figures down even more! Biden administration sets national goal to cut freight emissions to zero.
MISTER, WE COULD USE A MAN LIKE FRANK RIZZO AGAIN:
In the middle of an interview with San Jose's mayor, a random guy starts fighting the mayor's security.
California is literally a GTA server.pic.twitter.com/jN2CAtMINe
— Adam B. Coleman, The Black Zoolander (@wrong_speak) April 25, 2024
Somebody like Big Frank, an ex-police commissioner, would have loved to have join in the rumble with the nutter passerby himself, instead of anemically texting through the incident. And why doesn’t the mayor of San Jose have a better armed — or trained — security guard?
THERE’S AN ELECTION SIX MONTHS AWAY, SO PROBABLY: Should You Be Worried About Bird Flu?
READER FAVORITE: Etekcity Lantern Camping, Flashlight for Power Outages. #CommissionEarned
HEADLINES FROM 1890: Rush hour chaos in London as 5 military horses get spooked, run amok.
THE RULING CLASS’S PRIORITIES AND SENSITIVITIES ARE NOT SHARED BY THE CITIZENRY: More Harris Poll: Half of Americans Want ‘Mass Deportation’ of Illegal Aliens.
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:
Palestine Protester Tries To Argue With Skinhead But They Just Agree On Everything https://t.co/rqdc755ihr pic.twitter.com/X7cVcJdMlk
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) April 24, 2024
It’s a bromance as old as time:
The Russian word “pogrom” refers to an organized effort to displace Jewish populations from the spaces in which they reside by force. That is precisely what we’ve seen on far too many college campuses since the October 7 attack.
That’s what we saw at Cooper Union, where a braying mob of what we’ve been assured are only anti-Israel protesters threw themselves at the doors of a library in which a handful of Jewish students took refuge. Chanting “globalize the intifada,” in reference to the outbreaks of violence that targeted Israeli civilians with murder, the demonstrators terrorized their Jewish colleagues and compelled them to evacuate their refuge under guard. The Jewish students are suing their school for “being locked in a campus library to shield them from an unruly mob of students that was calling for the destruction of Israel and worldwide violence against Jews.”
Similar language could be used to describe the successful effort to scare Jews away from campus facilities at Cornell University. Following an outbreak of threats to “shoot up,” rape, and slash the throats of Jewish students on campus by pseudonymous harassers calling themselves “hamas,” “jew evil,” “jew jenocide,” “hamas warrior,” and “kill jews,” the school threw up its hands. Cornell advised its Jewish matriculants to avoid the campus’s Kosher dining hall lest they risk bodily harm. Of course, those students heeded their school’s warning.
“What shocked me the most,” said one witness to Rutgers University’s conciliatory attitude toward its agitated pro-Hamas contingent, “was the fact that the Jews attending the town hall were escorted out by police, not the individuals protesting and breaking the rules.” The event that so enraged the anti-Jewish protesters was only a banal effort by university president Jonathan Holloway to hold an event in which students could ask questions about the war in Gaza and the school’s approach to it. “Before he was able to answer a single one, anti-Israel protesters unleashed chaos,” Zach Kessel reported for NR.
And at Columbia, host to the recent spasm of anti-Jewish sentiment that led Cotton to call for reinforcements, the threat of violent antisemitism has forced many Jewish students off campus. The activists who called Jews “inbred,” demanded they “go back to Poland,” and chanted “Burn Tel Aviv to the ground” and “Go Hamas, we love you, we support your rockets, too” somehow managed to convince their Jewish colleagues that they meant business. Columbia administrators appeared to agree. It facilitated their flight to the shadows by moving classes to a “hybrid” setting so Jews could continue to study out of the sight of their tormentors.
Thus leaving Mediaite’s Michael Luciano (or his headline writer) to breathlessly scream, “Tom Cotton Brings Hysteria About Campus Anti-Semitism to Its Absurd Conclusion: ‘Nascent Pogroms.’”
Or to put it another way:
DON’T MESS WITH TEXAS: Texas State troopers arrive at UT Austin occupation, start making arrests.
The organization initially planned to march and occupy UT Austin’s South Mall, but administrators notified the group that the event wasn’t authorized.
”Simply put, The University of Texas at Austin will not allow this campus to be ‘taken’ and protesters to derail our mission in ways that groups affiliated with your national organization have accomplished elsewhere,” a letter from university administrators stated. “Please be advised that you are not permitted to hold your event on the University campus. Any attempt to do so will subject your organization and its attending members to discipline including suspension under the Institutional Rules.”
A large state police presence has been reported at the protest, according to the report. A state trooper reported that at least three had been arrested, with the university later confirming to local news that 10 had been arrested.
The University of Austin at Texas Hillel said on Instagram that administrators have assured them that “there will be no tolerance for disruption.”
But how will that play out for UT Austin? In her 2007 book, The Death of the Grown-Up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization, Diana West looked back at the college riots of the 1960s and noted wryly the outcome of the one campus were the faculty fought back:
The fact is, general support for the Vietnam War under President Johnson, and, later, President Nixon, remained fairly solid during periods of student upheaval—although such support was going to be lower amid the increasingly liberal subset of society that sent its children to, or taught them in, college. But what did these supporters say to their children? It’s not difficult to imagine long distance arguments over what was going on at school between Junior and the ’rents—liberal or conservative—but what harsh words ever led to harsh actions? That is, what collegiate revolutionary ever saw his dining hall contract canceled, or his bursar account closed? (As one historian remarked, he knew of no other uprising in history in which the revolutionaries had fellowships.) The conduct of the war in Vietnam, the pace of civil rights reform, or university slumlordship wasn’t ever the parenting issue. What concerned Mom and Dad—or should have—had to do with Junior’s behavior. Dirty words. Shoving. Pushing. Cutting class. Cutting fire hoses. Waving guns. Taking things. Breaking things. Throwing things (paving stones, Molotov cocktails). Burning things (buildings, records, research). But it didn’t—at least not in any consequential way. Indeed, at the University of Chicago, which may be the one campus where administrators acted swiftly to expel students who had occupied a building, “parents took out newspaper advertisements protesting the draconian punishment visited upon their darlings, thus providing a clue to what had gone wrong with their children.”
As James Lileks wrote about advertising in the 1950s and ‘60s, “Turns out that living in near-Utopia has the worst possible effect: you decide to strive for a different Utopia altogether. Come to think of it, though, the roots of it all are in the ads. They’re testaments to happiness, a goal, a mode of living. But it’s not happiness you get because you’ve earned it. It’s happiness that you deserve as an American. That’s where things started to go sideways. It’s a short hop to thinking you deserve it all because you exist.”
LESSONS:
In the same month, the Fed missed its target for the consumer-price index; inflation registered 8.2%, some six percentage points higher than the 2% reading at which the central bank was taking aim. Behold physics—and behold economics."
— GRANT'S (@GrantsPub) April 24, 2024
