Better in their words…

Google. No transparency. Users are losers. (You lose your privacy.) All Gov’t agencies tell us with hours there is nothing to see RE: AT&T’s outages; that’s a clue that there IS something going on and they don’t want ‘us’ to know. How about a judge that rules against Illegal Aliens voting [in NY]?! And El Salvador president ‘shows the way’ at CPAC.

M ROSSOL

Source: FROGGYCRATS ☙ Friday, February 23, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS

WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY

📞 We still don’t know what caused yesterday’s mysterious national outages. Early yesterday, Chron magazine ran a story on its website wondering, “Did a strong solar flare cause the AT&T outage?” The sub-headline explained, “Two of the most powerful type of solar flares exploded overnight, just hours before the outage.” Apparently the Sun expelled two X-class solar flares yesterday, and right after that the nation’s cell phone services blanked out. Not even a dial tone for AT&T, and spotty coverage for many other carriers.

Cell service yesterday was even worse than Joe Biden struggling to finish an off-teleprompter thought. Uh, uh, uh, oh nevermind, it wasn’t that, just, anyway.

So out of the gate, there was a tantalizing correlation between the giant solar flares and the timing of the cell network’s outages. It wasn’t just Chron. Early yesterday, Space.com also asked the obvious question in an article on its website:

But shortly thereafter, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association’s Space Weather team pooh-poo’d the notion that solar flares could possibly have caused ten hours of problems with cell services. Well, NOAA said it was “unlikely.” There was no evidence. I initially accepted that, thinking it was more likely a massive cyber-attack:

I also thought I was on the right track when, showing unparalleled alacrity and agility, within just a few hours, every law enforcement arm of the federal government and our top political leaders all sprang into action, opening urgent investigations into the “AT&T Outage.” Clearly, I wasn’t the only one suspicious of cyber hijinks.

For example, this Business Insider headline understated the case, leaving off the FCC and the CISA, which also instantly opened investigations:

The citizens of East Palestine would love to know how to get the feds to react so fast. Maybe they should have suggested Putin derailed that train. Maybe that would have done it. But I digress!

Three hours after starting their initial investigations yesterday, showing yet more diligence, acumen, and ability, the feds wrapped it up and tied it with a bow. Guess what, it was nothing! It was caused by, wait for it, an “incorrect process” — a process that happened while helpful, customer-focused AT&T employees were just trying to improve the network for everybody!

Further muddying the waters, ABC reported anonymous government sources said the outage was caused by a “software update.” You know how pesky those dang updates can be! I suppose AT&T opened up its corporate computer yesterday got the dreaded prompt. The technician should have snoozed the update till later, but he was in a hurry, and for some reason he thought it would only take a second. Instead it took like ten hours and he had to reboot the main server six times.

Or at least, that’s what they want us to believe.

And that right there, ladies and gentlemen, is a win-win-win narrative. Everybody looks good! AT&T was just trying to help, just a harmless error that could’ve happened to anyone, and sixteen federal agencies closed their cases in about four hours, and the White House supervised the whole thing so … there’s nothing to see here, move along. No solar flares, no cyber attacks, no anything.

So that was that. But then it turned out there were a lot of other problems besides AT&T’s network. Like pharmacies:

And, how about the other carriers, besides AT&T? Did they also have misfiring software updates?

Lots of folks reported problems with other big services besides cell phones, like Google and Apple Support — all at the same time (the charts show users’ outages reports):

Besides those, it also hit online services like Tesla, a popular multiplayer video game Fortnite, Twitter, Cox Cable, and YouTube, which went unresponsive for me during several hours yesterday afternoon. I have no idea what really happened — how could I? — but I definitely do not believe it was a poorly-timed software update or an “incorrect process.”

That’s the dumbest explanation ever and the feds are obviously lying again. I suppose for our own good.

Personally, given the broad, multi-platform scale of the outages, I’m now much more interested in the solar flares, which after all were never ruled out, just labeled as “unlikely” to be the cause. And I’m also much more interested in why the government was so quick to cover up what really happened yesterday. All those feds looking at it surely discovered the other outages.

But media and government is silent.

Why?

🔥 Oh, Google. Those of us in media and politics have long discarded the company’s infamous, biased, completely-unreliable search engine. And as I’m sure you heard by now, the company’s recently-rebranded AI platform caused massive controversy yesterday when users noticed the AI, called “Gemini”, formerly “Bard,” is more biased against white folks than the Black Panthers’ Grand High Wizard, or whatever he’s called these days.

In case you missed the fun somehow — Gemini’s concept of Popes:

Users went wild exploring the boundaries of Gemini’s reprehensible racism. It wasn’t just that Gemini would draw unwanted, historically-inaccurate — but diverse! — characters, it actually refused to draw any historically accurate ones, so long as it was asked to draw white folks, that is:

Google’s AI hilariously produced pictures of diverse historical figures in the most unlikely configurations. The story quickly broke into corporate media, producing many uproarious, side-splitting headlines. Here’s just the top of yesterday’s list of headlines from Google News. The final one was my favorite, though NBC’s was a close runner-up:

Now they’ve shut it down. I tried this morning, and at first Gemini refused to draw any pictures of any people, citing its highbrow standards of ethics and personal privacy instead of just admitting it’s racist. (To be fair, we’ve already seen that AI’s ethical standards can change from day-to-day, which probably makes them something different from standards, per se.)

But within an hour or so the deflated AI had thrown in the towel, and now meekly says its bosses claim it’s under improvement.

Remember, the developers don’t fully understand how the large language models work. They probably aren’t tinkering with the software code to make it more liberal. Plus, they are lazy. So how do they inject their goofy Neo-marxist biases and repugnant racism into the AI? It’s not even the programmers doing it. It’s safety specialists who do it using something called prompt injection. That means when you enter a prompt, like “draw a pope,” the interface adds behind-the-scenes instructions before it sends your prompt on to the AI.

So, the ‘prompt’ the AI gets is different from what you typed. If you type, “draw a pope,” the AI will get “draw a pope from the perspective of a speed-addled Black Panther activist being chased by a pack of KKK hangmen. And make sure the result makes trans people feel more like real women.”

I asked ChatGPT to explain ‘prompt injection’ and it actually gave me an honest response:

Slipping a note, lol. But the problem is, we users aren’t allowed to see the true, modified prompts that get sent to the AI. That’s a secret. To its credit, ChatGPT admitted it:

The AI community barks about safety and transparency all the time. But they are just as secretive and non-transparent as any government skunkworks biolab. However, it seems sort of fundamental, for trust and confidence in the AIs, that we be allowed to see how our questions are being modified before being submitted to the computer.

Google’s racist chatbot just opened up that conversation, big time. Let’s have it. Transparently.

💉 Yesterday, Variety ran a familiar-sounding story headlined, “Wendy Williams Diagnosed With Aphasia and Dementia.”

Wendy, 60, hosted a popular daytime talk show, “The Wendy Williams Show,” often described as a potential Oprah competitor. But sometime in 2021, Wendy’s brain started slipping gears, and now she has been diagnosed with full-blown aphasia and early-onset dementia.

Oddly, it’s the same diagnosis as actor Bruce Willis.

Hilariously, breaking their chimeric ethical standards about privacy,’ media is trotting out Wendy’s entire health history trying to prove she was injured some other way. Tragically, Wendy was initially totally opposed to the vaccines, “I don’t trust it,” she emphatically told Dr. Oz. But the relentless pressure obviously wore her down:

It’s so weird that celebrities like Wendy and Bruce have the same early-onset, atypically-presenting, disabling neurological injuries right after the shots. But don’t start with all your crazy anti-vaxxer nonsense, because there is no evidence the shots hurt anybody.

🔥 The Hill ran a very encouraging elections story on Wednesday headlined, “Appeals court rules NYC law allowing noncitizens to vote in local elections violates state constitution.” Ruh-roh! If they can’t even vote, now what is New York supposed to do with all those extra migrants?

Bless the diligent plaintiffs, including state representative Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY), who challenged “Local Law No. 11 of the City of New York, which created a new class of voters eligible to vote in municipal elections who are not United States citizens.”

Appeal Court Justice Paul Wooten struck down the insane law, writing that, “We determine that this local law was enacted in violation of the New York State Constitution and Municipal Home Rule Law, and thus, must be declared null and void.”

The goofy, irrational 2022 law, supported by New York City Mayor Eric Adams, also lost at the trial court level. The City appealed that earlier decision, and has now lost again. Back in 2022, the Associated Press estimated Local Law 11 would create over eight hundred thousand new non-citizen voters.

Who knows how high that number has now climbed?

The Hill reported the City is carefully considering its next move. In other words, despite crying in public about all the illegal migrants infesting the City, behind the scenes it is doing everything it can think of to turn them into low-information voters.

🔥 Finally, here’s your uplifting video clip, from this week’s CPAC conference. The speaker is El Salvador’s new conservative president Nayib Bukele, who famously solved his country’s record murder rate by jailing a record number of gang members. Now El Salvador has one of the lowest murder rates in South and Central America. (Liberals quickly pointed out that correlation does not prove causation. It could have just been a coincidence.)

CLIP: El Salvador President Nayib Bukele warns us frogs to get out of the warm water (1:42).

President Bukele began encouragingly by announcing that globalism is dead in El Salvador. But then he warned that globalism is alive and well here in the United States. He explained, “These dark forces are already taking over your country. You may not see it yet, but it’s already happening.”

Oh, we see it, Nayib. Don’t you worry about that.

Sometimes I wonder whether South America is trending conservative because they are shipping all their marxist agitators northward. Here’s another terrific two minutes of President Bukele explaining how they turned the crime rate around in El Salvador.

Bukele obviously likes the boiling frog story. Ironically, that old story turns out not to be true, because frogs will, in fact, try to jump out of overhot water. The problem is that, in the pursuit of diversity, a spring surplus of dumb but virtue-minded tree frogs elected banded hawks, cottonmouths, and alligators, who won’t let them get out of the pot.

And now, when you ask it to draw pictures of frogs, Google’s AI only draws birds, snakes, and carnivorous reptiles.

Anyway, enjoy President Bukele’s encouraging words, as he brings news of the conservative counter-revolution from South of the Border.  Maybe since South America was first on board the communist express, this is a predictive trend. Maybe the conservative turnaround is on its way here, too.

Have a fabulous Friday! Once you’re done enjoying the warm water, jump out and come back here tomorrow morning for a delicious and invigorating Weekend Edition.

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