It’s taking a while for the WP Mom to get used to the different TV channel numbers, for the most part she doesn’t have too much trouble as she uses the voice remote to navigate.
One thing that’s no different is the bombardment of Christmas movies on Hallmark Channel, Hallmark Movies & Mysteries, WE, and a number of other channels the WP Mom frequents. (I am more of a streamer.) I don’t need to indulge in any sweets when those are on because they’re already too sugary and sweet. If I truly paid attention to them I would probably go into a diabetic coma from the sugary sweetness.
I figure I can put up with it for the few more weeks. Once we get past New Years I expect the Valentine’s Day movies to start. I can hear my pancreas screaming just at the thought.
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It doesn’t surprise me in the least that when our institutions of higher ‘learning’ talk about diversity, they are only talking about diversity of race and/or culture, not diversity of thought or ideology. That kind of diversity is strictly verboten. That kind of diversity will be punished.
Colleges and universities are obsessed with racial diversity. But a new analysis provides even more proof that our higher education system has a different and arguably more important diversity problem: a woeful dearth of intellectual diversity.Colleges and universities should be encouraging diversity of thought and ideology, not suppressing it. At that point they are no longer institutions of higher learning but centers of indoctrination and any thinking outside that allowed by such indoctrination will not be allowed.
The College Fix analyzed a sample of 65 academic departments across seven universities and found that more than half of the departments had zero Republican professors. All told, 92% of the professors at these departments identified as Democrats, meaning there was an 11-1 ratio of Democratic to Republican professors.
This analysis can’t necessarily stand in for all colleges, but it’s quite similar to the figures other analyses have come up with. The general takeaway is clear: Higher education is overwhelmingly dominated by ideological liberals, with a real shortage of differing perspectives on most campuses.
“These results should be another wake-up call that higher education is severely biased and broken,” concluded College Fix editor-in-chief Jennifer Kabbany. “Higher education is one of the most important battlegrounds for the heart, soul and mind of this nation.”
(H/T Instapundit)
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By way of PJ Media comes the continuing saga of Twitter’s subservience to government, more specifically to the Democrats/Deep State in the US government, delving a deeper into Twitter acting as an agent of the government.
Friday night, journalist Matt Taibbi provided the first installment of internal Twitter communications. The first dump focused on the suppression of information during the 2020 Election, specifically the censorship of Hunter Biden’s laptop. According to Twitter CEO Elon Musk, there is more to come about shadow banning and other forms of censorship as thousands more pages are released. Still, taking what we have already learned at face value, some former Twitter executives have quite a bit to answer for.The linked post includes other incidents where Twitter’s suppression of free speech had major consequences, not just for the US but other places in the world.
--snip--
Let’s begin with the premise that suppressing the content of Hunter Biden’s laptop affected the outcome of the 2020 Election. The Media Research Center (MRC) conducted one of the only polls about how the information on the computer would have affected the way people voted. MRC’s analysis found that full awareness of the Hunter Biden scandal would have led 9.4% of Biden voters to abandon the Democratic candidate. This would have flipped all six of the swing states Biden won to Trump, giving the former President 311 electoral votes.
This illustrates the Law of Unintended Consequences coming into play yet again, creating distrust, havoc, and at its worst, death and destruction.
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My thoughts when I heard there might be a walkout by personnel in the New York Times newsroom over a pay dispute?
Would anyone notice...or care?
Probably not.
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As an engineer one of my biggest pet peeves when it comes to test equipment, computers, smart phones, tablets, and other equipment is the user interface.
Some are great, are easy to use, and don’t require looking in the user manual to figure out how to turn on the power. Others are awful, make little sense, have circular work flows that mean you can get from one screen to another eleventy-eleven different ways, but never the same way twice in a row.
Our engineering department has a UI/UX (User Interface/User Experience) engineer, someone who designs, develops, and tests the user interfaces for functionality and ease of use. In her I have a kindred spirit because she dislikes poor user interfaces as much as I do and we have, one more than one occasion, evaluated user interfaces on competitors’ equipment and rated them. Some have been very good, in some cases intuitive and easy to use. Others have been awful. Yet others have been somewhere in-between those two extremes. When we have disagreed about one element or another, it’s usually been a matter of degree, not magnitude.
This is an interesting treatise on user interfaces which delves into the good, the bad, the ugly, and the deceptive, and not just in the interfaces on equipment, but in places like retail shops and ads.
It doesn’t get too technical, looking more into the psychological aspects of UI design, but it does give a good look into why UI’s work or don’t work.
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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee where preparations for Christmas continue, decorations abound, and where Christmas will arrive all too soon.