"Nobody wants our intel agencies to be used like the Stasi in East Germany; the secret police spying on its own citizens for political purposes. The prospect of our own NSA, CIA and FBI becoming politically weaponized has been shrouded by untruths, accusations and justifications.
You’ll recall DNI Clapper falsely assured Congress in 2013 that the NSA was not collecting “any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans.”"
AI Just Made Guessing Your Password a Whole Lot Easier - Slashdot: "sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: The Equifax breach is reason for concern, of course, but if a hacker wants to access your online data by simply guessing your password, you're probably toast in less than an hour. Now, there's more bad news: Scientists have harnessed the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to create a program that, combined with existing tools, figured more than a quarter of the passwords from a set of more than 43 million LinkedIn profiles..." Read on!
A new Brooking Institution survey finds that 19% of undergraduate students support using violence to shut down controversial speakers.
Another 51 percent supported the use of the so-called "heckler's veto" to shout down speakers that are opposed by protesters.
A new survey published by The Brookings Institution finds that about one-in-five undergraduate students approve of using violence to shut down controversial speakers. A majority of undergraduate students at U.S. four-year colleges and universities also agreed with a hypothetical protest in which a group “opposed to the speaker disrupts the speech by loudly and repeatedly shouting so that the audience cannot hear the speaker...”
"A Texas woman has been getting ridiculed online for being “too sensitive” after she blasted the arts-and-crafts chain Hobby Lobby for selling faux raw cotton stalks — which she found offensive."
You will recall that Northwestern University investigated Kipnis after she wrote an essay about campus sex politics for The Chronicle of Higher Education. Students claimed her article had violated Title IX, the federal statute ostensibly dealing with gender equality on campus. One of those students has also filed a defamation suit against Kipnis for her book Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus, which cast aspersions on the student's sexual harassment claims against a former professor. But that's not all: Unbeknownst to the public, Kipnis has been dealing with another Title IX investigation. Several Northwestern graduate students—including the one who is suing Kipnis—filed a Title IX complaint against the professor last May. The details, according to The New Yorker's Jeannie Suk Gerson, are insane:
Kipnis told me that she was surprised when Northwestern once again launched a formal Title IX investigation of her writing. (A spokesperson from Northwestern did not respond to a request for comment by press time.) Kipnis said that investigators presented her with a spreadsheet laying out dozens of quotations from her book, along with at least eighty written questions, such as "What do you mean by this statement?," "What is the source/are the sources for this information?," and "How do you respond to the allegation that this detail is not necessary to your argument and that its inclusion is evidence of retaliatory intent on your part?" Kipnis chose not to answer any questions, following the standard advice of counsel defending the court case.
She did submit a statement saying that "these complaints seem like an attempt to bend the campus judicial system to punish someone whose work involves questioning the campus judicial system, just as bringing Title IX complaints over my first Chronicle essay attempted to do two years ago. In other words, the process was the punishment. Possible evidence of retaliatory purpose, she learned, included statements in the book that aggressively staked out her refusal to keep quiet, expressed in her trademark hyperbole. Her prior Title IX investigation, she writes, "has made me a little mad and possibly a little dangerous....I mean, having been hauled up on complaints once, what do I have to lose? 'Confidentiality'? 'Conduct befitting a professor'? Kiss my ass. In other words, thank you to my accusers: unwitting collaborators, accidental muses." Also presented as possible evidence was her Facebook post quoting a book review—"Kipnis doesn't seem like the sort of enemy you'd want to attract, let alone help create"—on which Kipnis had commented, "I love that."
As Ken White of Popehat tweeted in response to this news:
...In any case, it should be obvious that the text of Title IX does not empower university officials to investigate tenured professors for criticizing Title IX, nor was the law intended to weaponize students' grievances..."
History for September 22 - On-This-Day.com: John Houseman 1902, Tommy Lasorda 1927 - Baseball manager, Pat (Chiyoko) Suzuki 1930 Andrea Bocelli 1958 - Opera singer, Joan Jett 1960, Scott Baio 1961 - Actor ("Happy Days," "Joanie Loves Chachi") 1862 - U.S. Republican President Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. It stated that all slaves held within rebel states would be free as of January 1, 1863. 1903 - Italo Marchiony was granted a patent for the ice cream cone. 1914 - Three British cruisers were sunk by one German submarine in the North Sea. 1,400 British sailors were killed. This event alerted the British to the effectiveness of the submarine. 1949 - The Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb successfully. 1964 - "The Man From U.N.C.L.E." debuted on NBC-TV. 1980 - A border conflict between Iran and Iraq developed into a full-scale war. 1988 - Canada's government apologized for the internment of Japanese-Canadian's during World War II. They also promised compensation.
1998 - U.S. President Clinton addressed the United Nations and told world leaders to "end all nuclear tests for all time". He then sent the long-delayed global test-ban treaty to the U.S. Senate.
"Looking at some of the early Christmas gifts buried deep on the National Defense Authorization Act for both liberals like Elizabeth Warren and our enemies like North Korea and Iran, it’s almost hard believe Republicans won an election in November.
Somehow, deep in the fine print almost no one in Washington ever reads, are a series of provisions snuck in to the NDAA by Senator Warren and Obama Administration holdovers at the Defense Department that will actually make America less safe and grow government bureaucracy."
"Nobody wants our intel agencies to be used like the Stasi in East Germany; the secret police spying on its own citizens for political purposes. The prospect of our own NSA, CIA and FBI becoming politically weaponized has been shrouded by untruths, accusations and justifications.
Woman freaks out over Hobby Lobby’s raw cotton display | New York Post:
"Looking at some of the early Christmas gifts buried deep on the National Defense Authorization Act for both liberals like Elizabeth Warren and our enemies like North Korea and Iran, it’s almost hard believe Republicans won an election in November.
