Extra, Extra
Peaceful Uneasy Feeling: “They were part of SCORPION — an acronym for Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods — a specialized squad of 40 officers formed in 2021 to address the city’s rising crime rate by targeting ‘hot spots’ of illegal activity.” The unit just got disbanded. But what were they doing in a relatively peaceful neighborhood in the first place? Buzzfeed: The Unit Was Formed to Target High Crime Areas, but Locals Say His Neighborhood Was Peaceful. And from The New Yorker: The Police Folklore That Helped Kill Tyre Nichols. “The study’s core lesson about the imperative to dominate dovetailed with a nineties-era turn in law-enforcement culture toward what was known as a ‘warrior mind-set,’ teaching officers to see almost any civilian as a potentially lethal assassin.”
+ Pace Yourself or Brace Yourself: “The surge of attention around ChatGPT is prompting pressure inside tech giants including Meta and Google to move faster, potentially sweeping safety concerns aside, according to interviews with six current and former Google and Meta employees, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak.” The race to win the AI wars will leave no time to reflect on what role we think this tech should play in society. We’ve seen this story before. The difference is that this story will make the last one seem like it was in slow motion. WaPo (Gift Article): Big Tech was moving cautiously on AI. Then came ChatGPT.
+ Cox Sure? “Governor Cox was one of two Republican governors last year to veto a bill that would have barred transgender students from participating in girls’ sports. At the time, he cited the high rates of suicide among transgender youth and acknowledged the concerns of transgender advocates that the bill would adversely affect the mental health of transgender children. After that measure had been passed by the Legislature, Mr. Cox addressed the transgender community in a news conference, saying: ‘We care about you. We love you. It’s going to be OK.'” Well, maybe not. NYT: Utah Bans Transition Care for Transgender Youth.
+ If You’re Being Bombed, Press One: “‘What do I do?’ he asked the U.S. military team member, far away at a base in southeastern Poland. ‘What are my options?'” How to fix a howitzer: US offers help line to Ukraine troops.
+ Class Ring: “‘It is up to us to ensure our children know him for the deceitful, dishonest, riot-inciting negro he actually was,’ the administrator of the network’s Telegram channel wrote, alongside a downloadable lesson plan for elementary school children. ‘He is the face of a movement which ethnically cleansed whites out of urban areas and precipitated the anti-white regime that we are now fighting to free ourselves from.'” Welcome to MLK Day Inside a US Neo-Nazi Homeschool Network With Thousands of Members.
+ Here We Go Again: Even serious media can’t keep from elevating Trump to presidential status. Who cares what a racist, deranged, seditionist has to say about a Tyre Nichols? AP apparently.
+ Near Beer Here: “Somehow, with all the immense sales growth and large-scale investment in craft beer across the late 20th and early 21st centuries, nonalcoholic beer remained staid—a drinking culture castaway relegated to an afterthought produced by only the largest beermakers. Any consumer of nonalcoholic beer can share a war story or two from those days: the askance looks from a skeptical barkeep, forced to fish a lonely Clausthaler from the back of some dusty storeroom. You’d be lucky to get one cold, if you could get one at all.” Now Entering the Golden Age of N/A Beer.
+ Woke Screen: When she named her breakfast cafe Woke, a conservative backlash followed. (This seems like a small, meaningless story. But it’s actually a pretty good example of the way modern media (mostly social) has enabled the stupidity once reserved for unpublished letters to the editor to seep into mainstream discourse, and then onto main street itself.)