Also on today’s menu:
Franconia Officer Surrenders Certification
Mainstream Media Won’t Admit Mistakes
The Bard Fails Us This Time
The New Hampshire Executive Council has approved the use of $3.5 million in American Rescue Plan Act money for the New Hampshire Emergency Rental Assistance Program.
The council also approved the renewal of a contract with the Institute of Community Alliances of Des Moines, Iowa, to expand the New Hampshire Statewide Homeless Management Program Information System used by the Division of Economic & Housing Stability for the Youth Homelessness Demonstration Program.
The council also authorized two contracts with Waypoint of Manchester, the first a $353,209 payment to provide Rapid Re-Housing programs for rental assistance and supportive services to youths between the ages of 18 and 24 who are experiencing or at risk of homelessness. The contract is retroactive and has an option to renew it for as many as five additional years. The second contract, for $234,308 is for a host homes project providing short-term community and volunteer-based responses to youth homelessness as part of the Balance of State Continuum of Care, also targeting those between 18 and 24 years of age in Strafford and Merrimack counties.
Franconia Officer Surrenders Certification
Police Officer Gary M. Pilotte has resigned from his position with the Franconia Police Department and agreed to voluntarily surrender his certification as a law enforcement officer in New Hampshire, following an investigation into his misuse of the State Police Online Telecommunications Systems (SPOTS) while off-duty to obtain another’s license plate. As a result of his decertification, Pilotte will be placed on a national registry of decertified officers.
As part of his plea agreement with New Hampshire Attorney-General John Formella, Pilotte will not seek future employment as a law enforcement officer in any federal, state, county, municipal, university, or tribal law enforcement agency.
Pilotte also agreed not to have any contact with the registered owner of the number plate queried for a period of two years.
Mainstream Media Won’t Admit Mistakes
We have never understood how the media could focus on the false Russia collusion story and ignore what was revealed in the DNC hacks and Hilllary Clinton’s efforts to discredit Donald Trump with the so-called Steele dossier. The Democratic National Committee was sabotaging the Bernie Sanders campaign to place their favored candidate at the top, and Hillary’s campaign paid for the salacious report to make The Donald look even worse that he actually was. Instead, the press created and ran with stories about alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian President Vladimir Putin, relying on unverified sources and not admitting their mistakes when the truth came out: There was no collusion. Many people still believe in the collusion story even after it was debunked.
Recent revelations about the falsities of Russian interference (most of the “disinformation” came from Americans, not Russians) has now been followed by a four-part analysis of the media’s role in promoting the baseless collusion story in the Columbia Journalism Review. Author Jeff Gerth writes, “Before the 2016 election, most Americans trusted the traditional media and the trend was positive…. The phrase ‘fake news’ was limited to a few reporters and a newly organized social media watchdog. The idea that the media were ‘enemies of the American people’ was voiced only once, just before the election on an obscure podcast, and not by Trump….
“Today, the US media has [sic] the lowest credibility — 26 percent — among forty-six nations, according to a 2022 study by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. In 2021, 83 percent of Americans saw ‘fake news’ as a ‘problem,’ and 56 percent — mostly Republicans and independents — agreed that the media were ‘truly the enemy of the American people…”
The lengthy report covers how the press was duped by its fealty to Clinton into publishing everything it could find to discredit Trump, and its reluctance to admit it was duped. It’s well worth the read.
The Bard Fails Us This Time
Shares in Alphabet sank more than 7% after Google’s artificial intelligence software, Bard, incorrectly answered a question about the James Webb Space Telescope, saying it was the first to take pictures of a planet outside the earth’s solar system when, in fact, it was the European Very Large Telescope that achieved that in 2004 — a mistake quickly noted by astronomers on Twitter. Alphabet stock’s market value dropped by $100 billion.
The BBC reports that, although investors have embraced the push for artificial intelligence, skeptics have warned that rushing out the technology raises the chance of errors.
Google saw Bard AI as its answer to Microsoft’s popular ChatGPT, which has awed the world with its ability to write essays well enough to fool some educators into believing it was student-written.
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