The same teacher who informed my kid’s class that “a white person killed MLK” now found it necessary to give a presentation on the global warming. As a result, I had to spend two days turning it from a high-anxiety topic to something non-disturbing for my kid.

These are very small children. They feel helpless around big issues that they can’t comprehend. All it does is make them scared and upset.

This teacher is new at the Christian school, so she hasn’t yet abandoned the public school mentality. I’m getting increasingly annoyed with these forays into adult topics when almost nobody in the class even reads fluently yet.

This whole idea – which is very present in higher ed, too – that you should propagandize and convert instead of teaching your own discipline in which you are educated and credentialed is wrong. If your profession is early childhood education, what the flying ef are you doing, plunging into environmental sciences or race relations history in which you are not qualified?

A few days ago, a colleague who is a professor of chemistry was chewed out publicly for saying, “I teach chemistry. I don’t lecture about race in my classroom.” Fifteen minutes later, he was chewed out again for having high fail rates in chemistry. But still, he’s supposed to give valuable class time to spout inanities about race relations.

So I finally did try out the ChatBot for myself. Here are my takeaways:

• the algorithm is extremely basic
• the output is the definition of generic
• it isn’t anything remotely resembling a search engine because it doesn’t search for information. I gave it my full name and full title, yet it didn’t figure out I’m an existing person.
• any professor who gives assignments that can be done by this program deserves to be fired
• I gave it an acronym and a link where it’s explained, and still it returned a mistaken version of the full title
• however, there’s a positive side. It can churn out large amounts of completely generic text on administrative subjects. I’m doing an annual report, and it gave me a long very rough draft. If you are working in a bureaucratic system where you want to drown people in a tsunami of meaningless bureaucratic sentences, it can be useful.

Biden just gave a State of the Union speech whose key themes and most enthusiastic riffs could have been lifted—albeit with more Bidenisms and fewer insults—from Trump’s populist campaign.

Ross Douthat, NYTimes

Absolutely. Only blind partisanship can prevent people from seeing this. The moment we free our brain from personality cults it becomes clear that the Biden presidency has enormously more in common with the Trump presidency than, for example with Obama or Bush Jr times.

Obama was Bush Jr version 2.0 and Biden is Trump version 2.0. Yes, the rhetoric is completely different and so are the slogans. But surely we are smarter than the incompetents who take slogans seriously and confuse them with action?

I feel sad for people who are so in thrall to slogans and personality cults that they can’t see the obvious similarities between Trump and Biden administrations.

Yesterday I was driving home and saw a very long line of cars queuing for something. This brought back all the bad memories from the lockdowns when people would line up to the Starbucks window in order to relive the memory of driving to work and stopping for some coffee. I did it a couple of times, too, to feel like myself again.

I wondered what people could possibly line up for in the absence of a lockdown. What can be so attractive on a freezing February afternoon?

Turns out that a Chick-fil-A opened in town and people are going cuckoo-bananas with joy. I never understood the love affair people have with Chick-fil-A. My niece comes over from Canada, desperate to go there. Locals sit in their cars for an hour. Why? It’s one of a million fast food places. OK, it’s better than Arby’s but then partially digested concrete would be better than Arby’s.

I don’t get it.

By the way, in case anybody is wondering, my favorite fast food in the US is KFC. That shit is irresistible which is why I never go.

In Europe, my favorite fast food is at those shawarma carts you can find everywhere. Wonderful stuff!

Right-wing ADHD and left-wing OCD are always battling each other, and the OCD tends to win. Persistence vs protean excitability is a predictable contest.

Isn’t it curious, though, that the proponents of changeable, flighty fluidity are like pitbulls with a bone regarding everything they want while the defenders of stability are malleable and movable?

The terrible impact of COVID mitigation on learning at every level is a very important topic. However, in what concerns the linked article, I’m overwhelmed by the learned helplessness and extreme entitlement of everybody involved. COVID looks like a tiny blip on the surface of a much bigger problem.

The new post on the Ukrainian blog is about my favorite Soviet spy novel. Plus, I added everybody’s favorite comment panel and a couple other things for the ease of use. I also got my first two visitors from Russia, which is weird but what are you going to do?

Douglas Murray is great, and I highly recommend his recent article about the British civil service scandal. Here’s a little quote:

When I survey the current state of Britain, apart from needing to lie down, I always face one question. When was it that the grown-ups disappeared, or otherwise chose to vacate the room? How is it that the party of Gordon Brown is simulating horror at the throwing of a cherry tomato? That civil servants complain if someone doesn’t like their homework? That the trial of the Deputy Prime Minister is being carried out by a man who boasts about commendations for his written work and for being ‘kind’? When did we all become such drips?

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/where-have-all-the-grownups-gone/

When one hears the accusations of bullying advanced by the complaining civil servants, one does think it’s a bad comedy show. That adult people would think it’s ok to infantilize themselves to such a degree is extraordinary.

But their affected childishness isn’t the real problem. Remember how I recently posted about the meeting agenda with pre-planned feelings? “We leave this meeting energized and confident…” Remember also the budget meeting that the administration tried to open with a conversation about our feelings over the Memphis video?

Here’s the deal: the moment you decide to start bringing your feelings to the workplace, you become a sitting duck. It will be deployed against you endlessly. Your energy will be sucked out of you by daily masturbatory conversations about how you feel. You will be stripped of authority and treated like an infant.

There’s a price to pay for everything. Expecting your job to heal (or arrange itself around) your emotional wounds will make you poorer and easier to exploit.

Folks, did you know that TikTok is a gambling platform? I had no idea. I’ve obviously never used it myself, so I thought it was one of the social media, like Twitter, Facebook, etc but for kids. Turns out, it’s nothing of the kind. It’s very straightforward gambling.

Apparently, there’s an algorithm that chooses a particular video to beam to the public. Such a video can garner tens of millions of views, making its creator a mega star instantly. It’s like winning the lottery. But the mechanisms of the algorithm are unknown. So people make a lot of completely meaningless videos in hopes that one of them will be chosen by the algorithm. Unlike YouTube, Twitter, etc. where views and likes reflect the quality of your work, TikTok is arbitrary. This reinforces the idea that hard work and effort are useless, that reality is chaotic and unpredictable, and that success is the result of stupid luck.

By any measure, the roughly $30 billion, and counting, that we’ve spent on Ukraine is real money. But it’s a little more than a third of what President Joe Biden is spending on new IRS enforcement, and about a fifth of unspent funds from federal pandemic relief. It is a fraction of a fraction of the defense budget.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/02/08/republicans-ukraine-russia-00081832

The rest of the article is good, too.