Monday, February 12, 2018

In The News

Some thoughts based on what's in the news.

● More Olympic Thoughts: Kudos to the Koreans for running an excellent Olympics. Unlike "sh*thole" Brazil, the Olympic village and venues are finished, the water isn't poisoning anyone, there are no reports of Olympians or tourists being murdered, carjacked or robbed. Only three scandals so far: (1) local ski businesses are doing poorly because the hills are closed, (2) the local government won't open a special tent for Muslims to pray, and (3) some Canadian Olympian has rescued two dogs from the BBQ (//whispers Koreans eat dogs). That's about as scandal-minimum as you can get in the Olympics. Again, congrats.

Love this comment from the cross-country announcer slamming the X-Games half-pipe event. He said that it's amazing to have a 21 year old who can compete in cross-country. The other announcer said, "The winner of the half-pipe is only 17." Response: "Yes, but this event requires years of training." Zaaaap! Speaking of that 17 year old, the MSM thinks it's cute that Dipsh*t didn't know what the Olympics were before he signed up and then thought the image of his white trash family surrounded by beer cans was even better. 'Merika!

Damn the Russians can figure skate! Damn the Dutch can speed skate! Damn the Norwegians can cross-country ski! Damn our media can idiot with best of them! Katie Couric is an idiot for suggesting the reason the Dutch are good skaters is that the Dutch skate as a means of transportation. They all seem to love North Korea now. NBC's "Asia expert" had to be fired after talking about how Japan contributed to South Korea's culture.

The Husky Girls At Yahoo are celebrating a French figure skater who wore pants. She wasn't good, but they are inspired by her wearing pants. It's sad when you feel oppressed by female figure skaters wearing dress-like unitards. Perhaps, girlfriends, you should look closer to home to find out why you need to find inspiration in such pathetic things?

● Tough Sh*t: So a woman got fired after a Church group order $735 worth of takeout, but didn't tip and she went on a rant about it. Good. Tipping on a takeout order is not expected. Bitching about your clients is absolutely a reason to be fired. Imagine that... being an ass has consequences?! Well, today, the Church tipped her. That's fine, but the left is still whining that she doesn't have a job anymore. Uh, f*you. She worked at Outback. It's not like she lost her job as chief scientist for NASA. She can find a dozen replacement jobs of similar caliber within an hour if she wants. So no sympathy there.

● Get Him! There has been a concerted effort by the left to bring down Trump's Chief of Staff. Why? Because he's been the guy holding Trump in the realm of normal. So they've trumped up this idea that Kelly should be fired because some guy on his staff beat his wives when he was married. You really want to open that door? Then you first. And when you've fired everyone with a sh*tty staff person, then we'll agree to consider firing Kelly.

As an aside, these are the same people who think the left needs to protect their harassers.

● It's Racist! So it turns out that technology is racist. Facial recognition works best for white males. It works most poorly for blacks. Search engines return results that leftist groups consider racist because search terms mimic what the public is thinking. AI is proving to be super racist. Crime predictive software is much more likely to identify blacks as criminals from their history. This is going to get ugly.

Thoughts?

10 comments:

Anthony said...

1) A big Democratic donor has a taste for meth and gay black prostitutes. A prostitute died in his home but this far no charges have been filed. Drugs were all over his home but the donor knows nothing about nothing.

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2018/02/13/justice-for-gemmel-moore-family-wants-answers-in-escorts-death-at-dem-donors-home.html

Among the items being investigated is a journal that Moore appears to have kept, which investigators discovered among his belongings. The writings in the journal, which Moore’s mother, LaTisha Nixon, discussed with Fox News, describes his drug use and interactions with Buck.

“I honestly don’t know what to do. I’ve become addicted to drugs and the worst one at that,” a December entry reads. “Ed Buck is the one to thank. He gave me my first injection of crystal meth it was very painful, but after all the troubles, I became addicted…”

Moore’s final journal entry, dated December 3, 2016, reads: “If it didn’t hurt so bad, I’d kill myself, but I’ll let Ed Buck do it for now.”

2) The Trump administration's explanation of Porter and the FBI's are at odds. I blame the deep state!

http://insider.foxnews.com/2018/02/13/steve-hayes-wray-telling-entirely-different-story-wh-porter-allegations

The White House has been dogged by questions about when the allegations against Porter were known. Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said action was taken last week when officials became aware of the allegations and that the investigation was ongoing.

But Wray said Tuesday during testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee that a background check on Porter was completed last summer and sent to the White House.

3) DC's once highly touted school reform has been exposed as a sham. Schools would keep troublemakers out of school (but not suspend them because that would look bad) and pass kids who didn't learn the material because not passing them would look bad.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-politics/dc-public-schools-were-once-a-success-story-are-they-now-an-embarrassment/2018/02/01/fb15dd4c-069d-11e8-b48c-b07fea957bd5_story.html?utm_term=.63bdaeec851a

In July, The Washington Post reported that the school system had misrepresented its student suspension rates, barring many students from attending high schools because of behavior problems without formally marking them as suspended.

In May, The Post reported that Henderson, the former schools chancellor, had helped well-connected parents — including two senior Bowser aides — skirt the requirements of a lottery system that is supposed to ensure a fair shot at the best public schools for all families.

4) Trumpologist Sean Hannity has found sperm in Obama's Smithsonian portrait. This man is clearly a real reporter who the world needs to pay attention to.

https://www.mediaite.com/online/sean-hannitys-blog-speculates-that-obama-portrait-has-hidden-secret-sperm/


Guess what? The post, subtly titled “PORTRAIT PERVERSION: Obama Portrait Features ‘SECRET SPERM,’ Artist Joked About ‘Killing Whitey,'” posits that the answer to both of the above questions is yes.

“The widening scandal surrounding former President Barack Obama’s official portrait continued to swirl on Tuesday, with shocking allegations the artist included ‘secret sperm cells’ within the painting and once joked about ‘Killing Whitey’ during an interview,” the blog says of artist Kehinde Wiley.

Anthony said...

Trump's lawyer is now talking about how he paid the porn star who claims she slept with Trump 130K out of his own pocket and Trump has nothing to do with it. Why? If we want to know we have to read his upcoming book!

https://www.mediaite.com/online/trump-lawyer-michael-cohen-says-he-paid-stormy-daniels-the-130000-out-of-his-own-pocket/


“Neither the Trump Organization nor the Trump campaign was a party to the transaction with Ms. Clifford, and neither reimbursed me for the payment, either directly or indirectly,” Mr. Cohen said in a statement to The New York Times. “The payment to Ms. Clifford was lawful, and was not a campaign contribution or a campaign expenditure by anyone.”

He declined to answer several follow-up questions, including whether Mr. Trump had been aware that he made the payment, what the motivation was or whether he had made similar payments to other people over the years.

tryanmax said...

I have completely checked out of the Olympics this time around. I just can't must the interest. And I can honestly say it's not the sports (though I'm not a big sports guy), it's past experience with the coverage.

The Kelly/Porter incident is telling. It should be an excellent example of how the press keeps government in check. Within 24 hours of exposing the problems with Porter, Kelly fired him. The watchdogs did their job and government acted accordingly. It should be a win/win. But the press is out for blood; they want the whole edifice to come down as a consequence. What could've been a shining example of the American system at its best is instead squandered to vindictiveness.

Nothing makes the left look more anti-science and anti-knowledge than the claims that technology is racist. There are straightforward reasons rooted in the physics of light and developmental biology for why facial recognition works better on white males. Besides, is there any doubt that if facial recognition worked better on black males that that too would be deemed racist? I confess, I know less about search engines and AI, but I know these things are programed by uber-leftist Californians, so if they are racist, I guess that confirms that leftists are the real racists.

AndrewPrice said...

tryanmax, Totally agree on Kelly and on technology.

On Kelly, the media is out to destroy and wants to bring down the administration. So everything gets lost in the venom and overreach.

On technology. First, it's made by leftist Californians, as you note. At worst, it's made by people with no views on race or gender -- engineers... 1s and 0s. So calling it racist is rather an odd choice.

Secondly, there are physical reasons that cause things like facial recognition software to work better on certain people. It has to do with how many distinct identifiers a person has. The software isn't being racist, it just doesn't have as much data with certain groups. I'll be that fat people have it the worst, as very fat faces tend to lose a lot of points of distinction. The left likes to call this racism (just like when white witnesses in studies had a higher failure rate at identifying black subjects than blacks did identifying whites), but it has to do with data, not prejudice.

Then you have AI. The thing about AI is that as much as scientists love to talk about AI being "intelligent," it really isn't. It's just a data processing algorithm. "Look for key words in the search request, gather the data on each word, consider the percentages for what they are likely looking for, and spit that out." That's clever, but not intelligence... there's no independent judgment.

Hence, the problem arises in the data collection. The AI has no ability to screen out things it hasn't been told to screen out. Garbage in, garbage out. That's why programs like Alexa at first spewed out words like "nigga", which is all over the web, until the human engineers excluded that as a response. That's why a lot of the AI's that have been shared with the public started spewing out racist statements and conspiracy theories.

Then, more subtly, because it does process data without prejudice, it comes to see the world in all the ways the PC police tell everyone are unacceptable. To give an example, if you ask the AI to identify a student most likely to fail, it looks at graduation rates, college rates, etc., and it sees that black males are far below everyone else. So it will tell you, "a black male from a single mother household" because that's what the data says. But in the real world, the PC police fight any negative stigma against blacks or single mothers, so a PC educator will filter that to remove the issue of race and single-mothers. The AI doesn't. So the left freaks out that it's saying things they don't want it to say. Basically, unless AI is trained to be PC, it repeats facts the left doesn't want repeated. Hence: racist!

AndrewPrice said...

Anthony, He did do a painting of a black woman beheading a white woman.

AndrewPrice said...

tryanmax, BTW, I total agree that it would be called racist either way -- if it was better or worse at recognizing blacks.

There seems to be a meltdown going on in the racism industry these days.

Critch said...

One of my sons used to date a Japanese girl, she said that she likes North American men because they don't all look alike...

Obama's new portrait is silly and undignified...

tryanmax said...

Andrew, on facial recognition of women, it has been shown scientifically that there is less variation in women's faces than men's, and it's not just down to facial hair. The same processes that take hold in puberty and make men more muscular than women (on average, sheesh) also increase bone growth--because bigger muscles need bigger bones to attach to. This includes the skull and facial bones, meaning men develop more defined features overall because all the ridges and protuberances get more pronounced. Women experience far less of this, thus their features remain less distinct.

AndrewPrice said...

Critch, I used to date a Korean girl and I guarantee you that her friends would be able to fool the software.

AndrewPrice said...

tryanmax, I didn't know that, but it doesn't surprise me. The simple truth is that technology is going to notice all the things we pretend aren't real. So unless you teach technology to lie, which will affect its usefulness, it's going to be sexist and racist and other-ist.

It's also going to expose other lies we tell ourselves. For example, we all say "might does not make right," but we do believe it rather often.

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