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Broken civilizations get rebuilt at the local community level as families, businesses, churches and small civil governments begin to learn what those local institutions can be. That is happening right now in the US, primarily in rural counties.

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Here lies the student essay—RIP, old friend—slain by OpenAI.

A college professor grades 95 student essays. Then writes this:

"Miraculously, in the last year, mistakes of spelling and grammar have mostly disappeared—poof!—revealing sparkling error-free prose, even from students who speak English as a second or third language. The writing is getting better.

"The ideas are getting worse.

"There’s a new genre of essay that other academics reading this will instantly recognize, a clumsy collaboration between students and Silicon Valley. I call it glittering sludge.

"At the same time, in a totally unrelated development, some students have adopted a bold academic strategy: citing books and articles that do not exist.

"(In one particularly amusing example, a student cited me in an essay, drawing from my book, Fluke. The only problem: the alleged author of the cited text in the bibliography was not listed as Brian Klaas, but one “Benjamin Fluke.” Right title, wrong author, wrong publisher, wrong year. Well played, ChatGPT).

"The death of the student essay is not merely an academic concern. It is not just a problem for young people hoping to get good grades, nor is it only relegated to the realm of my fellow elbow-patched nerds. Instead, the rapidly improving ability to impressively mimic human language poses an existential threat to traditional methods of crafting smarter minds—which thereby challenges the future of human cognition."

Professor Brian Klass

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Is Anyone Interested in Stopping the Invasion of Britain?

Fixing immigration policy will require intelligence, delicacy and patience. A government truly determined to stop the boats and to deport illegal entrants will need to derogate, at least in part, from numerous international treaties – not just the ECHR, but all those cited by pro-immigration judges, including the Refugee Convention and possibly the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. It will need to scrap a mass of domestic laws, including the Human Rights Act and the Equality Act. It will need to override the current system of judicial review and create a mechanism to remove partisan judges.

Doing these things will make Brexit look straightforward. The human rights Blob will fight tooth and nail to maintain, not just its influence, but its livelihood. Overcoming that resistance will consume most of a new government’s energies for an entire Parliament and will require immense tactical dexterity.

The trouble is that almost no one is interested.

-- Daniel Hannan, UK House of...

Is Debt a Blessing or a Curse?

According to a barely-publicized Treasury report, the actual grand total of Uncle Sam’s obligations is more than $151 trillion.

That huge discrepancy springs from the fact that the federal government doesn’t hold itself to the same accounting standards it imposes on businesses. Rather than using accrual accounting — which recognizes expenses when they’re incurred — our Washington overlords self-servingly use simple cash accounting, only recognizing expenses when they’re paid. As a result, discourse on federal obligations solely focuses on the national debt, comprising Treasury bills, notes and bonds.

-- Brian McGlinchey

AI Creates Empty Human Memory Networks

ChatGPT Eroding Critical Thinking Skills, According to a New MIT Study:

"Of the three groups, ChatGPT users had the lowest brain engagement and 'consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.'

Over the course of several months, ChatGPT users got lazier with each subsequent essay, often resorting to copy-and-paste by the end of the study.

"The task was executed, and you could say that it was efficient and convenient," Kosmyna says. "But as we show in the paper, you basically didn’t integrate any of it into your memory networks."

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