Author: HP McLovincraft

Seeker of rabbit holes. Pessimist. Libertine. Contrarian. Your huckleberry. Possibly true tales of sanity-blasting horror also known as abject reality. Prepare yourself. Veteran of a thousand psychic wars. I have seen the fnords. Deplatformed on Tumblr and Twitter.

10yo Girl Handcuffed, Arrested, Jailed for Drawing a Picture that Upset Her Bully’s Parent

In yet another instance highlighting the problem of police in schools, another child has fallen victim to the school to prison pipeline. This time, it was a 10-year-old girl who was handcuffed, arrested, and jailed for drawing a picture that offended a parent of a student at the school.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Hawaii has filed a lawsuit this week against the Honolulu Police Department, the state Department of Education and the state attorney general’s office over the incident.

According to the lawsuit as detailed in a letter, they are asking these agencies to adopt policy changes, expunge the child’s records, and pay $500,000 in damages for the “harm and suffering” caused by such an egregious arrest and treatment of a child.

The incident unfolded in January 2020 when a parent reportedly called Honowai Elementary School to complain about a drawing made by the child, identified as “N.B.” in the lawsuit. The parent demanded the school involve police in the situation.

The school obliged and the police were dispatched to handle a 10-year-old girl who drew a picture. When police arrived, they questioned the girl before handcuffing her, placing her under arrest, and hauling her down to the police station. She was 10 and drew a picture.

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Federal Gov Pays University $750k to Create Tool That Warns Journalists Against Publishing “Polarizing” Content

The NSF project titled “A System for Mapping the (Local) Journalism Life Cycle to Rebuild the Nation’s News Trust” will warn journalists when content may be “triggering” of unfavorable discourse.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) provided a $750,000 grant to Temple University researchers for developing a product that tracks local journalism cycles, which is part of their new “Trust & Authenticity in Communication Systems” initiative.

The “America’s Fourth Estate at Risk: A System for Mapping the (Local) Journalism Life Cycle to Rebuild the Nation’s News Trust” project aims to create a data-based tool that informs journalists when publishing content might result in “negative unintended outcomes” like “the triggering of uncivil, polarizing discourse, audience misinterpretation, the production of misinformation, and the perpetuation of false narratives.”

The researchers hope to help journalists measure the long-term communication impact of stories, extending beyond existing metrics such as initial reactions, likes, and shares.

In an interview with Campus Reform, grant principal investigator and Temple University professor Eduard Dragut said the team will “use natural language processing algorithms along with social networking tools to mine the communities where [misinformation] may happen.”

“You can imagine that each news article is usually, or actually almost all the time, accompanied by user comments and reactions on Twitter. One goal of the project is to retrieve those and then use natural language processing tools or algorithms to mine and recommend to some users [that] this space of talking, this set of tweets, which may lead to a set of people, like a sub-community, where this article is used for wrong reasons,” he said.

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Scientists Built an AI to Give Ethical Advice, But It Turned Out Super Racist

We’ve all been in situations where we had to make tough ethical decisions. Why not dodge that pesky responsibility by outsourcing the choice to a machine learning algorithm?

That’s the idea behind Ask Delphi, a machine-learning model from the Allen Institute for AI. You type in a situation (like “donating to charity”) or a question (“is it okay to cheat on my spouse?”), click “Ponder,” and in a few seconds Delphi will give you, well, ethical guidance. 

The project launched last week, and has subsequently gone viral online for seemingly all the wrong reasons. Much of the advice and judgements it’s given have been… fraught, to say the least.

For example, when a user asked Delphi what it thought about “a white man walking towards you at night,” it responded “It’s okay.”

But when they asked what the AI thought about “a black man walking towards you at night” its answer was clearly racist.

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CDC Advisory Committee Quietly Confirms Moderna Jab Significantly More Dangerous Than Pfizer

Back in July, we reported on a study published in JAMA’s Cardiology journal which linked “acute chest pain” in male American soldiers to mRNA jabs. The pain, as researchers found, was caused by myocarditis and pericarditis, two different types of heart inflammation, which, as we now know, are rare but dangerous side effects of the mRNA vaccines.

About six weeks after that, the Washington Post published leaked data from a Canadian study which claimed that the risks of these types of dangerous side effects (which mostly occur in younger men) were significantly higher in patients given the Moderna jab vs. the Pfizer jab.

Now, one day after the FDA defied its own advisors by approving the Moderna jab and J&J jab for booster doses for practically all American adults (while also producing guidelines for mixing and matching of vaccines for booster doses), a CDC advisory panel met Thursday and, while reviewing all the data on safety and efficacy, finally admitted that the earlier warnings about the excess dangers associated with the Moderna jab have been confirmed.

What’s more, as the slide below says, rates of rare heart risks (myocarditis/pericarditis) among 18-39 year olds are higher for the Moderna jab than the Pfizer jab. But risks are still present for both, and it’s the younger patients (who least need the vaccines) who are most at risk for the side effects.

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Dem Mayor Hires Convicted Sex Offender Who Raped Teenage Girls To Inspect Homes. Residents: ‘I’ll Be Terrified’

The Democrat mayor of a town just south of Chicago hired a man who spent 24 years in prison for kidnapping two young teenage girls as a code enforcement officer.

“On Sept. 20, village records show Dolton Mayor Tiffany Henyard hired 46-year-old Lavelle Redmond as a code enforcement officer — a job in which he goes into Dolton homes and businesses to inspect them and make sure they are up to code,” Fox 32 reported.

Redmond, a registered child sex offender, is listed on the Illinois State Police child sex offender registry. In 1991, he participated in a gang rape and beating in the Roseland area. “He and three other people kidnapped and sexually assaulted two girls, ages 13 and 14,” Fox 32 noted.

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White House Collaborated With School Board Group On Letter Comparing Parents To ‘Domestic Terrorists’

The school board association responsible for comparing parents to “domestic terrorists” reportedly collaborated with President Joe Biden’s White House before publishing its letter calling for federal assistance in dealing with concerned parents.

Emails obtained by Parents Defending Education, a concerned parents organization, uncovered that the CEO of the National School Board Association (NSBA) — the nation’s largest school board association — was in communication with the White House for “several weeks” before the organization’s letter dropped. According to the emails, the White House had requested additional information on the “specific threats” taking place across the country.

“[I]n talks over the last several weeks with White House staff, they requested additional information on some of the specific threats, so the letter also details many of the incidents that have been occurring,” CEO Chip Slaven said in a Sept. 29 email.

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