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Amazon is seeking to use artificial intelligence cameras to monitor whether warehouse employees are complying with social distancing guidelines to stand 6 feet apart during shifts.

Jim Carrey may be a few fries short of a Happy Meal.

Now the former funnyman, who mostly dropped out of acting to become a painter and fulltime political commentator on Twitter, has a new theory about President Trump.

“Be wary of diplomatic missions to Moscow prior to the Nov elections,” Carrey wrote Monday on Twitter, posting a painting of Russian President Vladimir Putin holding a tiny Air Force One in his hands. “Given the list of possible indictments he faces, Traitor Trump may be the first American President to defect.”

Be wary of diplomatic missions to Moscow prior to the Nov elections. Given the list of possible indictments he faces, Traitor Trump may be the first American President to defect. pic.twitter.com/JberHOoXaE

— Jim Carrey (@JimCarrey) June 15, 2020

That’s right, Carrey is saying that if Trump takes a trip to Russia, he might just stay there. Yup, Carrey might just be the “Dumber” guy from his famed movie, “Dumb and Dumber.” The actor, 58, is suggesting that Trump could well be indicted after the November election, especially if he loses to Democrat Joe Biden in the presidential election.

Like many other celebrities who claimed they’d be leaving the U.S. if Trump got elected — and then didn’t — Carrey, too, has gone back on his word. In January, he publicly declared that he would not be sharing his political paintings anymore.

“To me, that was like a time, and it’s been a time, where I just wanted to be the lighthouse that was saying, ‘Hey, stay off the rocks, you’re headed for the rocks,'” he told Yahoo Entertainment in January. “We’re still headed for the rocks, but I’ve decided, ‘You understand my message, I don’t need to be steeped in it anymore.’ I think after a while … you get stuck in that kind of stuff.”

Carrey has been getting weirder and weirder over the years. He believes the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine causes autism, and he’s into a whole new-age Zen thing (“There is no me. There is just things happening.”). He’s vehemently against guns — even though he’s starred in several movies with lots of gun violence — and has repeatedly blasted the National Rifle Association.

Meanwhile, his political leanings have become increasingly overt. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter in August 2018, Carrey explained that his political cartoons were his response to “the uncomfortable things that I see in this world.” While he said that he had generally tried to stay out of political activism in the past, he was looking into ways he could get more involved, at least on the local level.

“I try to avoid Hillary’s fundraising parties up in the hills around me,” he said. “Every once in a while, I’d hear one of them. She pretty much covered the clock. It was like, ‘Oh, Hillary’s over there now? Yeah, standing by the pool, making the pitch?’ That kind of world doesn’t appeal to me.”

“But I’m gonna be supporting the local guys here and making sure that [House Majority Leader] Kevin McCarthy doesn’t get back in,” he added. “I’d like to get [Congressman] Devin Nunes out of there forever. Trey Gowdy and Jim Jordan? I mean, what a f***ing collection of ne’er-do-wells, man. It’s just the worst of us encouraging the worst in us.”

As for his frequent lampooning of Trump, Carrey described it as his attempt to warn people on the Trump “train” about his rapidly approaching destruction at the hands of Robert Mueller, who ultimately let Carrey down.

“When it’s all said and done and the Feds finally close in and he hands over the keys to Trump Tower and Mar-a-Lago and whatever else he has, there’s going to be a celebration in this country such as has never been seen before,” Carrey predicted. “I guarantee it.”

The Daily Wire, headed by bestselling author and popular podcast host Ben Shapiro, is a leading provider of conservative news, cutting through the mainstream media’s rhetoric to provide readers the most important, relevant, and engaging stories of the day. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a member.

In a letter posted Monday, the National Executive Committee for the Boy Scouts of America announced a new badge related to “diversity and inclusion” in conjunction with the far-left, anti-cop Black Lives Matter movement.

The new badge will be a prerequisite to becoming an Eagle Scout, according to the committee.

Though Black Lives Matter is clearly political, calling for the national defunding of police departments and the disruption of the nuclear family, the Scouts claim the move is apolitical and about mere anti-racism.

“We condemn the murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and all those who are not named but are equally important,” the letter to scout families reads. “We hear the anguish, feel the heartbreak, and join the country’s resolve to do better.”

“The Boy Scouts of America stands with Black families and the Black community because we believe that Black Lives Matter,” the executive committee emphasized. “This is not a political issue; it is a human rights issue and one we all have a duty to address.”

“That is why, as an organization, we commit to [i]ntroducing a specific diversity and inclusion merit badge that will be required for the rank of Eagle Scout,” the letter continues. “It will build on components within existing merit badges, including the American Cultures and Citizenship in the Community merit badges, which require Scouts to learn about and engage with other groups and cultures to increase understanding and spur positive action.”

The Scouts will also be “[r]equiring diversity and inclusion training for all BSA employees starting July 1,” and “[c]onducting a review of property names, events, and insignia, in partnership with local councils, to build on and enhance the organization’s nearly 30-year ban on use of the Confederate flag and to ensure that symbols of oppression are not in use today or in the future.”

The organization noted that these moves are only their “next steps but certainly not our last.”

Read the full letter, below (via CBS 11 News):

Dear Scouting family,

As our country reckons with racial injustice, we all must consider our role and our failures and commit to meaningful action.

The twelve points of the Scout Law that define a Scout are all important, but at this moment, we are called on to be brave. Brave means taking action because it is the right thing to do and being an upstander even when it may prompt criticism from some. We realize we have not been as brave as we should have been because, as Scouts, we must always stand for what is right and take action when the situation demands it.

There is no place for racism – not in Scouting and not in our communities. Racism will not be tolerated.

We condemn the murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and all those who are not named but are equally important. We hear the anguish, feel the heartbreak, and join the country’s resolve to do better.

The Boy Scouts of America stands with Black families and the Black community because we believe that Black Lives Matter. This is not a political issue; it is a human rights issue and one we all have a duty to address.

That is why, as an organization, we commit to:

Introducing a specific diversity and inclusion merit badge that will be required for the rank of Eagle Scout. It will build on components within existing merit badges, including the American Cultures and Citizenship in the Community merit badges, which require Scouts to learn about and engage with other groups and cultures to increase understanding and spur positive action.

Reviewing every element of our programs to ensure diversity and inclusion are engrained at every level for participants and volunteers by applying a standard that promotes racial equality and denounces racism, discrimination, inequality and injustice.

Requiring diversity and inclusion training for all BSA employees starting July 1 and taking immediate action toward introducing a version for volunteers in the coming months.

Conducting a review of property names, events and insignia, in partnership with local councils, to build on and enhance the organization’s nearly 30-year ban on use of the Confederate flag and to ensure that symbols of oppression are not in use today or in the future.

These are our next steps but certainly not our last.

We will also continue to listen more, learn more and do more to promote a culture in which every person feels that they belong, are respected, and are valued in Scouting, in their community, and across America.

As a movement, we are committed to working together with our employees, volunteers, youth members, and communities so we can all become a better version of ourselves and continue to prepare young people to become the leaders of character our communities and our country need to heal and grow.

Yours in Scouting,

The Boy Scouts of America, National Executive Committee

Dan Ownby – National Chair

Roger Mosby – President and CEO

Scott Sorrels – National Commissioner

Devang Desai

Jack Furst

Skip Oppenheimer

Nathan Rosenberg

Alison Schuler

Michael Sears

Thear Suzuki

Brad Tilden

Jim Turley

The Daily Wire, headed by bestselling author and popular podcast host Ben Shapiro, is a leading provider of conservative news, cutting through the mainstream media’s rhetoric to provide readers the most important, relevant, and engaging stories of the day. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a member.

Contact tracing—notifying people who might have been exposed to disease—will be key to controlling the covid-19 pandemic until a vaccine is available, but the tactic raises obvious privacy concerns. Now a team led by MIT researchers and including experts from many institutions is developing a system called Private Automatic Contact Tracing (PACT) that augments the efforts of public health officials without compromising privacy. 

The system relies on short-range Bluetooth signals emitted by people’s smartphones. These signals represent random strings of numbers, likened to “chirps” that other nearby phones can remember hearing. Institute Professor Ron Rivest and Daniel Weitzner, a principal research scientist in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), are principal investigators on the project.

People who test positive for covid-19 can upload the list of chirps their phone has put out in the past 14 days to a database. Other people can then scan the database to see if any of those chirps match the ones picked up by their phones. If there’s a match, a notification will inform those who may have been exposed to the virus, giving them advice from public health authorities on next steps to take. But none of the chirps will be traceable to a specific person. “We’re not tracking location, not using GPS, not attaching your personal ID or phone number to any of these random numbers your phone is emitting,” Weitzner says.

This approach to contact tracing benefited from the early work of Safe Paths, a citizen-centric, open-source set of digital tools and platforms being developed in a cross-MIT effort led by Media Lab associate professor Ramesh Raskar with input from many other organizations and companies.  

The Safe Paths platform, currently in beta, comprises both a smartphone application, PrivateKit, and a web application, Safe Places. The PrivateKit app will enable users to match the personal diary of location data on their smartphone with the anonymized, redacted, and blurred location history of infected patients. The PACT Bluetooth protocol will also be available through Safe Paths. 

Maintaining privacy has been a guiding principle for the project. “User location and contact history should never leave a user’s phone without direct consent,” Raskar says. “We strongly believe that all users should be in control of their own data, and that we should never need to sacrifice consent for covid-19 safety.”  

After various scientific institutions pledged support during the strike against racism in science, many Black academics want to see real action

EPIDEMIOLOGY IS HOPELESSLY POLITICIZED AND COMPROMISED: NYC COVID-19 Contact Tracers Not Asking About George Floyd Protest Participation, Despite Fears of New Virus Wave.

Leftists want the George Floyd riots to be Trump's Hurricane Katrina. This will backfire on them.

On Saturday, the Colorado state legislature passed a massive police reform package, which will go to Democratic Governor Jared Polis to sign.

The legislation, SB20-217 “Enhance Law Enforcement Integrity,” proposes several key reforms, according to the bill summary.

Beginning in mid-2023, “all local law enforcement agencies and the Colorado state patrol to issue body-worn cameras to their officers and requires all recordings of an incident be released to the public within 21 days after the local law enforcement agency or Colorado state patrol receives a complaint of misconduct,” states the summary.

Exceptions to body-cam usage include undercover work, as well as “to avoid recording personal information that is not case related,” among others. Additionally, there will be penalties for “failing to activate” a body-cam.

In protest situations, officers cannot shoot “kinetic impact projectiles” at a civilian’s “head, pelvis, or back,” or send them “indiscriminately into a crowd.” Additionally, they cannot employ chemical irritants unless a warning has been made clear and time has been provided for the protesters to leave.

The bill “allows a person who has a constitutional right secured by the bill of rights of the Colorado constitution that is infringed upon by a peace officer to bring a civil action for the violation.” The summary notes that “qualified immunity is not a defense to the civil action.”

If an “officer is convicted of or pleads guilty or nolo contendere to a crime involving the unlawful use or threatened use of physical force, the P.O.S.T. board shall permanently revoke the peace officer’s certification.” The P.O.S.T. (Peace Officer Standards and Training) board cannot reverse the decertification unless the officer is “exonerated by a court.”

Chokeholds will be prohibited. Officers will also need a “legal basis for making a contact,” and the rules surrounding the “use of deadly force” will be altered, according to the summary.

Perhaps the most inventive part of the legislation “requires a peace officer to intervene when another officer is using unlawful physical force and requires the intervening officer to file a report regarding the incident.”

A punishment for failing to intervene when necessary is a decertification from P.O.S.T.

In a series of tweets on Saturday, Governor Polis said of the passage of the bill:

This is about a pattern of injustice and unfair treatment that Black Americans and communities of color have endured, not only in our criminal justice system but also in aspects of every day life. (2/4)

— Governor Jared Polis (@GovofCO) June 13, 2020

I am honored to be here at this moment of time, alongside so many passionate Coloradans on the journey towards a more equal, more just, and more peaceful society as I sign SB20-217 when it reaches my desk. (4/4)

— Governor Jared Polis (@GovofCO) June 13, 2020

I commend the sponsors and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle for their efforts to pass this landmark reform bill. This is about a pattern of injustice and unfair treatment that Black Americans and communities of color have endured, not only in our criminal justice system but also in aspects of every day life.

Coloradans should be proud our state is leading the way to make policing more accountable, restore trust in law enforcement, uphold an individual’s civil liberties, and lay the groundwork for future discussions of criminal and juvenile justice reform.

“I am honored to be here at this moment of time, alongside so many passionate Coloradans on the journey towards a more equal, more just, and more peaceful society as I sign SB20-217 when it reaches my desk,” Polis concluded.

The issue of police reform has gained traction across the country in the aftermath of the killing of 46-year-old African American man George Floyd, who died after a Minneapolis police officer used his knee to pin Floyd’s neck to the ground for nearly nine minutes.

Following Floyd’s killing, protests broke out in major American cities, including Los Angeles, New York, and Minneapolis. Unfortunately, the protests also led to rioting and looting, which has destroyed numerous small businesses and other stores.

The Daily Wire, headed by bestselling author and popular podcast host Ben Shapiro, is a leading provider of conservative news, cutting through the mainstream media’s rhetoric to provide readers the most important, relevant, and engaging stories of the day. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a member.

My book Lost in Math was published two years ago, and this week the paperback edition will appear. I want to use the occasion to tell you why I wrote the book and what has happened since. In Lost in Math, I explain why I have become very worried about what is happening in the foundations of physics. What is happening, you ask? Well, nothing. We have not made progress for 40 years. The

A bipartisan group of lawmakers including Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Ben Sasse (R-NE) have written a letter to Zoom CEO Eric Yuan asking for answers after the teleconferencing company disabled accounts of two U.S.-based activists who were commemorating the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. The disabling of the accounts came at the request of China’s communist government.

“We write with deep concern regarding reports that Zoom, a U.S.-based company, deactivated the accounts of two U.S.-based, pro-democracy Chinese activists after they held a Zoom meeting on the June 4th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre,” said the Friday letter. “Your company has admitted that it did so at the request of the Chinese government to comply with the laws of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), because some of the participants resided inside the PRC.”

Zhou Fengsuo, one of the two U.S-based activists, participated in the original Tiananmen Square protests as a student and has accused Zoom of collaborating with the Chinese regime, reports CNBC News.

“It seems possible ZOOM acted on pressure from the CCP (Communist Party of China) to shut down our account. If so, ZOOM is complicit in erasing the memories of the Tiananmen Massacre in collaboration with an authoritarian government,” said Zhou.

The death toll from the massacre is not known, but on the day of the crackdown, The New York Times reported student protesters as believing that “at least 500 people” were killed after Chinese troops rolled into the area.

In a blog post the previous day, Zoom revealed that it had taken “adverse actions” against three activists, two in the United States and one based in Hong Kong. Zoom made the decision after China informed them the Tiananmen Square meetings were “illegal in China” and demanded the company ban the meetings and terminate the accounts.

“Our response should not have impacted users outside of mainland China,” said the company, which explained that three accounts were terminated or suspended, but they have all since been reinstated.

The company also suggested that instead of shutting down the accounts, they should have blocked access to the meetings by country, a feature Zoom does not currently have at their disposal. The teleconferencing company plans to develop this technology in the coming days, and said that they won’t let requests from the Chinese government “impact anyone outside of mainland China” in the future.

Toward the end of the Senate’s letter to Zoom, the lawmakers requested the company answer questions about its relationship with China and the recent incident banning activists, including a request that Zoom identify the laws China cited and whether Zoom pushed back against them.

Lee Cheuk Yan, the Hong Kong-based activist, told NPR on Friday that his meeting was the third in a series of talks about authoritarianism in China.

The Daily Wire, headed by bestselling author and popular podcast host Ben Shapiro, is a leading provider of conservative news, cutting through the mainstream media’s rhetoric to provide readers the most important, relevant, and engaging stories of the day. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a member.

If you're a leader, you've likely heard of Amazon's 14 leadership principles. If you haven't, now's the time to the look into it. What exactly can you learn from those leadership principles? A lot.  It’s difficult to go wrong with being a leader who is obsessed over customers, thinking long-term, and embracing new challenges even if the task isn’t “their job,” finding ways to simplify, recognizing talent and developing them, along with thinking big. What if I told you these qualities are only a handful of principles implemented by Amazon. Clearly, Amazon isn’t your average organization, especially in what they do best: lead. No wonder the Wall Street Journal has labeled Amazon America’s CEO factory((Wall Street Journal: Amazon Is America’s CEO factory)) Forbes contributor Peter Cohan believes that Amazon is the world’s best business((Forbes: 3 Reasons Amazon Is The World’s Best Business)). He goes further and states that “Amazon has a sustainable competitive advantage." Amazon has an efficient supply chain able to handle and fulfill orders with ease yet maintains a stellar level of customer support, he adds. Remarkable, isn’t it? Associate Editor for the Leader To Leader magazine, Peter Economy, goes further to say that Amazon’s 14 leadership principles can help a business to achieve remarkable success((Inc magazine: The 14 Amazon Leadership Principles That Can Lead Your Business To Tremendous Success)) because Amazon’s DNA has a desire to innovate and deliver results and earn customer trust in the process. In this article, you will learn how leaders can leverage Amazon’s 14 leadership principles((Amazon: Amazon Leadership Principles)) to become better leaders themselves and act as a catalyst in their organization.

What Are Amazon’s 14 Leadership Principles?

According to Amazon’s website, they are:

1. Customer Obsession

Amazon pays attention to other retailers, but they obsess over their customers. Customer trust is important to Amazon’s leadership.

2. Ownership

Amazon encourages its employees to act like leaders. The team needs come second to the needs of the organization at large.

3. Invent and Simplify

It’s an expectation for Amazon employees to invent and simplify. Being misunderstood is part of the process of greatness for them.

4. Are Right a Lot

Amazon looks to hire leaders with diverse perspectives, with good judgement and instincts.

5. Learn and Be Curious

Improvement and exploration is encouraged.

6. Hire and Develop the Best

In short, Amazon recognizes exceptional talent and creates mechanisms to discover the very best.

7. Insist on the Highest Standards

Amazon insists on continuously raising the bar in order to achieve a sustainable degree of excellence. Problems are solved ahead of time and are rarely repeated.

8. Think Big

Leaders are encouraged to create and think outside the box.

9. Bias for Action

Risk-taking and speed is encouraged by leaders at Amazon.

10. Frugality

Accomplishing more with less is Amazon’s way of constantly reinventing their operation and increasing their rates of self-sufficiency.

11. Earn Trust

Treating others with respect, speaking their minds, and listening are three ways in which Amazon builds trust in their organization.

12. Dive Deep

Amazon’s leaders are detail oriented and pay close attention to the reaction between the actual numbers and anecdotal data.

13. Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit

Disagreement is welcomed. Social cohesion isn’t a practice that Amazon leaders adopt.

14. Deliver Results

Amazon leaders are expected to always rise to the occasion.

How to Put the Leadership Principles into Practice

In order to develop your leadership skills, experiment with the following combination of Amazon principles and pay attention to which one works best for you in your organization.

1. Think Big, Create, and Simplify

Albert Einstein once said, “Creativity is more important than knowledge.” When I served as an Interim Department Chair at Jackson State University, we were able to create a document arguing for why the department needed to be a school of journalism and media studies in the state through a “think big” mentality and simplification of delivery. We made it simple for the Institutions of Higher Learning (IHL) of Mississippi, which is the governing body that approves and rejects proposals for turning departments into schools and more, to understand our petition by taking out language complexity yet showing a bold proposal for the creation of the third school of journalism. Six months after our petition was submitted to IHL, the department was approved to start operations as a “school” by the organization. By thinking big and creating a simple yet persuasive document with hard data proved to be effective in the creation of a new school of journalism in the south. By applying the same tactics in your organization, you can leverage these principles to achieve your own success and create something new.

2. Invent, Earn Trust, Deliver Results

Great leaders invent, earn trust, and deliver results. Ford invented the assembly line in 1913 and changed the way we produce cars today. Percy Spencer revolutionized our society by introducing the microwave oven in 1946. Jonas Salk invented a vaccine that reduced the number of polio cases in the world from a bit over 28 thousand a year in 1955 to 22 in 2017. More recently, Apple invented a tech gadget that can make phone calls, surf the internet, take photos… they called this device ”the iPhone” in 2007. We can now print in three dimensions with 3D printing, thanks to invention! It’s no accident that many of us drive Ford cars, have a microwave in our homes, don’t have polio, have an iPhone, and perhaps own a 3D printer. Leaders who invent eventually earn trust if they deliver the results promised. As a leader, you must do the former religiously. In 2010, my wife and I decided to invent a company called “I Do Therapy.” It is still a company that offers massage therapy services in a post industrial northern town in Pennsylvania. Our actual invention wasn’t the techniques that my wife used to treat clients with head and body aches but a completely new system of customer service that allowed everyone to get a massage for a reasonable price in a luxury spa environment — “I Do Therapy: For EVERYbody.” Our innovation was our strategy. We invented our way of doing business that was foreign in that town. We ended up earning the trust of a large number of townspeople because we delivered what we promised. Three years after I Do Therapy’s inception and almost 300 clients in our books, we sold the business for a profit in 2015. The business lives by its name and is still operational to this day.

3. Frugality, Ownership, and Curiosity

Jeff Bezos once said, “Frugality drives innovation just like other constraints do.” I want to start this section with this quote because I’ve seen the former working wonders in a recent organization that I lead here in Tennessee. Although my presidency at the Cleveland Media Association (CMA) has been cut short due to a recent job offer, CMA is now in much better shape financially because of my insistency on frugality. At the beginning of this year, I inherited an organization with a very low cash position. Under my leadership, the board immediately took a look at our fixed expenses, membership, and resources, and in a semi-crisis mode, we decided to reinvent our operation and cut non-essential expenses in order to bring the organization to a better monetary position. In a period of a few months, new members joined our organization and old members renewed their yearly memberships. The organization now has a healthy cash position and is growing again. The thought process I used to bring back organizational stability was literally based on Amazon’s 14 leadership principles. By encouraging an enthusiastic VP and other members of the executive leadership team to be curious about operating to capacity and by looking at CMA as something bigger than ourselves, we found a solution to our financial challenges and helped the organization to get on its feet gain. Through an exploration of possible ideas and curiosity, CMA is a better organization now than yesterday. We were able to accomplish more with less with our diversity of perspectives.

Final Thoughts

Amazon didn’t become a Fortune 5 company by accident. The leadership principles introduced by Jeff Bezos has made amazon.com what it is((Wharton Magazine: Learn From Amazon’s Leadership Principles)).

“You can’t solve today’s problems with yesterday’s solutions,” said Einstein((Business News Daily: Albert Einstein Business Tips)).

Leaders have much to learn from Amazon. Focusing on the customers' needs, encouraging invention, creativity and simplification, along with the need to be frugal and develop trust are a must in the current landscape of our modern economy. Thinking big, developing curiosity, and allowing a team member to disagree freely are principles that should be incorporated into every organization. Higher standards emerge from such principles, and success follows the results. Amazon's 14 leadership principles will make you into a stronger leader if you take the time to implement them.

More Leadership Tips

• What Makes a Good Leader: 9 Critical Leadership Qualities
• 7 Ways to Improve Your Management Leadership Skills
• Leadership vs Management: Is One Better Than the Other?

The post Effort Underway to Get Legal Insurrection’s William Jacobson Fired From Cornell After Criticizing BLM appeared first on The Bongino Report.

Gov. Cuomo signed the new bills into law in a press conference Friday, making disciplinary records public, banning chokeholds and banning false race-based 911 calls.

Bubba Wallace wore his 'I Can't Breathe' t-shirt as he got behind the wheel of his Black Lives Matter-themed Chevrolet for a race Wednesday night after NASCAR banned the Confederate flag.

IBM has said that it will withdraw certain face-recognition systems from the market, a move that acknowledges the well-documented racial biases in this kind of technology

Americans should show more respect for Russia's space program after relying on it for nine years as the only way to send U.S. astronauts into orbit, the head of Russia's space agency said.

A group of House and Senate Democrats knelt in solidarity with anti-racism protesters Monday as they unveiled a sweeping police reform bill called the “Justice in Policing Act” at a morning press conference.

After an opening prayer from Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), Democrats, led by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), took a knee for 8 minutes and 46 seconds — the length of time a Minneapolis police officer knelt on George Floyd’s neck, leading to Floyd’s death.

WATCH:

House and Senate Democrats kneel in silence in Emancipation Hall for 8 minutes and 46 seconds in remembrance of George Floyd https://t.co/RwRF3r3dVK pic.twitter.com/clQwQEBgxk

— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) June 8, 2020

“Today we gather here in solemn reverence to not just mark his tragic death but to give honor to his life,” Booker said in his opening prayer. After the silence, Booker added the names of several black individuals killed in confrontations in recent weeks.

“George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor. May we honor those dead by protecting all who are alive,” Booker said.

House and Senate Democrats worked over the weekend on sweeping law enforcement reforms aimed, they say, at curbing police violence. The bill, unveiled Monday morning, would ban chokeholds and so-called “no-knock” warrants on a federal level, according to NBC News.

The bill takes its cue from bipartisan criminal justice reform efforts on the table for nearly a decade and also requires “local police departments to send data on the use of force to the federal government,” creates a grant program to fund state-level use of force and police misconduct investigations, and makes it easier for “people to recover damages when police departments violate their civil rights,” per the outlet.

“They, like so many Americans, want to do something,” Booker told media. “And we all know we’re all working on legislation but the conversations that led to this was because people feel, in my opinion, that we need to do more.”

“For all of us, this would be a moment of solidarity and sort of sharing common spirited grief so it was very moving to me to see everyone,” he added.

Nancy Pelosi, not one to miss an opportunity to speak, added that “[t]he martyrdom of George Floyd gave the American experience a moment of national anguish as we grieve for the black Americans killed by police brutality today.”

“This moment of national anguish is being transformed into a movement of national action as Americans from across the country peacefully protest to demand an end to injustice,” Pelosi said. “Today, with the justice and policing at the Congress is standing with those fighting for justice and taking action.”

The bill’s unveiling marked the first time that House and Senate legislators have met together in months since the start of a coronavirus-related lockdown which kept Congressional legislators working from home.

The Daily Wire, headed by bestselling author and popular podcast host Ben Shapiro, is a leading provider of conservative news, cutting through the mainstream media’s rhetoric to provide readers the most important, relevant, and engaging stories of the day. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a member.  

During a White House press conference on Monday, President Donald Trump’s press secretary Kayleigh McEnany expressly stated that the president is “appalled” by the current far-left movement to defund the police amid the riots and protests that have rocked the United States.

“What is the president’s thinking on this growing movement to either defund or dismantle the police forces across the country, and what reforms does the president think would be appropriate in the week of the George Floyd killing?” a reporter asked McEnany on Monday.

“It’s a really good question,” McEnany responded. “The president is appalled by the defund the police movement. The fact that you have sitting congresswomen wanting to defund the police, notably Rashida Tlaib, notably Biden advisor Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a former Clinton and Eric Holder spokesperson Brian Fallon, wanting to defund our police across this country, it is extraordinary. And when you think the Left has gone far, and they couldn’t possibly go farther, because we all remember the defund ICE movement, and now they want to defund the police. This is extraordinary.”

As multiple conservative commentators have already noted, McEnany highlighted that defunding the police will leave people vulnerable to criminals.

“This is rolling back the protective layers that protects Americans in their homes and their places of business. He is appalled by it. And it’s remarkable to hear this coming from today’s Democrat party,” she said. “As for solutions, he’s talking through a couple of proposals, no announcements on that yet, but he definitely recognizes the horrid injustice done to George Floyd and is taking a look at various proposals.”

.@PressSec: “The President is appalled by the ‘Defund the Police’ Movement.” pic.twitter.com/QdbQC0cV3a

— Benny (@bennyjohnson) June 8, 2020

Defund The Police became wildly popular among the far-left when the group “Black Lives Matter” joined the incendiary hashtag by issuing a list of demands.

“We call for an end to the systemic racism that allows this culture of corruption to go unchecked and our lives to be taken,” said the organization. “We call for a national defunding of police. We demand investment in our communities and the resources to ensure Black people not only survive, but thrive. If you’re with us, add your name to the petition right now and help us spread the word.”

In Minneapolis over the weekend, the city where George Floyd was killed after being handcuffed by police, the city council voted to defund the police with a veto-proof majority; Democratic Mayor Jacob Frey has said he will oppose it.

“I’ll work relentlessly with Chief [Medaria] Arradondo and alongside community toward deep, structural reform and addressing systemic racism in police culture,” Frey said in a statement. “We’re ready to dig in and enact more community-led, public safety strategies on behalf of our city. But, I do not support abolishing the Minneapolis Police Department.”

The Daily Wire, headed by bestselling author and popular podcast host Ben Shapiro, is a leading provider of conservative news, cutting through the mainstream media’s rhetoric to provide readers the most important, relevant, and engaging stories of the day. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a member.  

The post Norwegian Scientist Claims to Have Proof Coronavirus Was Created in Lab appeared first on The Bongino Report.

NPR ADVISES READERS TO ’DECOLONIZE” THEIR BOOKSHELVES BY REMOVING WHITE AUTHORS:

NPR suggests that “decolonizing your bookshelf” is about “about actively resisting and casting aside the colonialist ideas of narrative, storytelling, and literature that have pervaded the American psyche for so long.”

They posit:

If you are white, take a moment to examine your bookshelf. What do you see? What books and authors have you allowed to influence your worldview, and how you process the issues of racism and prejudice toward the disenfranchised? Have you considered that, if you identify as white and read only the work of white authors, you are in some ways listening to an extension of your own voice on repeat? While the details and depth of experience may differ, white voices have dominated what has been considered canon for eons.

Curiously though, I doubt NPR wants to replace John Maynard Keynes with Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell, or Pauline Kael with Armond White. In any case, as Ray Bradbury wrote in the introduction to the 50th anniversary edition of Fahrenheit 451, “There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running around with lit matches.”

• The coronavirus pandemic has left many at an interesting crossroads in terms of mapping out the future of their respective fields and industries. For schools, that may mean a total shift not only in how educators teach, but what they teach.
• One important strategy moving forward, thought leader Caroline Hill says, is to push back against the idea that getting ahead is more important than getting along. "The opportunity that education has in this moment to really push students and think about what is the right way to live, how do we do it and how do we do it in a way that doesn't hurt or rob the dignity of other people?"
• Hill also argues that now is the time for bigger swings and for removing the barriers that limit education. The online space is boundary free and provides educators with new opportunities to connect with students around the world.

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This video is part of Z 17 Collective's Future of Learning series, which asks education thought leaders what learning can and should look like in the midst and wake of the coronavirus pandemic.

Brandon Saenz, 26 of Dallas; Leslie Furcron, 59, of La Mesa, California; and Justin Howell, 20, of Austin, Texas suffered severe injuries from non-lethal crowd control rounds during protests.

In the last few months, millions of people around the world stopped going into offices and started doing their jobs from home. These workers may be out of sight of managers, but they are not out of mind. The upheaval has been accompanied by a reported spike in the use of surveillance software that lets employers track what their employees are doing and how long they spend doing it.

Companies have asked remote workers to install a whole range of such tools. Hubstaff is software that records users’ keyboard strokes, mouse movements, and the websites that they visit. Time Doctor goes further, taking videos of users’ screens. It can also take a picture via webcam every 10 minutes to check that employees are at their computer. And Isaak, a tool made by UK firm Status Today, monitors interactions between employees to identify who collaborates more, combining this data with information from personnel files to identify individuals who are “change-makers.” 

Now, one firm wants to take things even further. It is developing machine-learning software to measure how quickly employees complete different tasks and suggest ways to speed them up. The tool also gives each person a productivity score, which managers can use to identify those employees who are most worth retaining—and those who are not. 

How you feel about this will depend on how you view the covenant between employer and employee. Is it okay to be spied on by people because they pay you? Do you owe it to your employer to be as productive as possible, above all else?

Critics argue that workplace surveillance undermines trust and damages morale. Workers’ rights groups say that such systems should only be installed after consulting employees. “It can create a massive power imbalance between workers and the management,” says Cori Crider, a UK-based lawyer and cofounder of Foxglove, a nonprofit legal firm that works to stop governments and big companies from misusing technology. “And the workers have less ability to hold management to account.”

Whatever your views, this kind of software is here to stay—in part because remote work is normalizing it. “I think workplace monitoring is going to become mainstream,” says Tommy Weir, CEO of Enaible, the startup based in Boston that is developing the new monitoring software. “In the next six to 12 months it will become so pervasive it disappears.” 

Weir thinks most tools on the market don’t go far enough. “Imagine you’re managing somebody and you could stand and watch them all day long, and give them recommendations on how to do their job better,” says Weir. “That’s what we’re trying to do. That’s what we’ve built.”

Weir founded Enaible in 2018 after coaching CEOs for 20 years. The firm already provides its software to several large organizations around the world, including the Dubai customs agency and Omnicom Media Group, a multinational marketing and corporate communications company. But Weir claims to also be in in late-stage talks with Delta Airlines and CVS Health, a US health-care and pharmacy chain ranked #5 on the Fortune 500 list. Neither company would comment on if or when they were preparing to deploy the system.

Weir says he has been getting four times as many inquiries since the pandemic closed down offices. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” he says.

Why the sudden uptick in interest? “Bosses have been seeking to wring every last drop of productivity and labor out of their workers since before computers,” says Crider. “But the granularity of the surveillance now available is like nothing we’ve ever seen.”

It’s no surprise that this level of detail is attractive to employers, especially those looking to keep tabs on a newly remote workforce. But Enaible’s software, which it calls the AI Productivity Platform, goes beyond tracking things like email, Slack, Zoom, or web searches. None of that shows a full picture of what a worker is doing, says Weir⁠—it’s just checking if you are working or not.

Once set up, the software runs in the background all the time, monitoring whatever data trail a company can provide for each of its employees. Using an algorithm called Trigger-Task-Time, the system learns the typical workflow for different workers: what triggers, such as an email or a phone call, lead to what tasks and how long those tasks take to complete.

Once it has learned a typical pattern of behavior for an employee, the software gives that person a “productivity score” between 0 and 100. The AI is agnostic to tasks, says Weir. In theory, workers across a company can still be compared by their scores even if they do different jobs. A productivity score also reflects how your work increases or decreases the productivity of other people on your team. There are obvious limitations to this approach. The system works best with employees who do a lot of repetitive tasks in places like call centers or customer service departments rather than those in more complex or creative roles.

But the idea is that managers can use these scores to see how their employees are getting on, rewarding them if they get quicker at doing their job or checking in with them if performance slips. To help them, Enaible’s software also includes an algorithm called Leadership Recommender, which identifies specific points in an employee’s workflow that could be made more efficient.

For some tasks, that might mean cutting the human out of the loop and automating it. In one example, the tool suggested that automating a 40-second quality-checking task that was performed by customer service workers 186,000 times a year would save them 5,200 hours. This meant that the human employees could devote more attention to more valuable work, improving customer-service response times, suggests Weir.

Business as usual

But talk of cost cutting and time saving has long been double-speak for laying off staff. As the economy slumps, Enaible is promoting its software as a way for companies to identify the employees who must be retained—“those that are making a big difference in fulfilling company objectives and driving profits”—and keep them motivated and focused as they work from home.

The flipside, of course, is that the software can also be used by managers to choose whom to fire. “Companies will lay people off—they always have,” says Weir. “But you can be objective in how you do that, or subjective.” 

Crider sees it differently. “The thing that’s so insidious about these systems is that there’s a veneer of objectivity about them,” she says. “It’s a number, it’s on a computer—how could there be anything suspect? But you don’t have to scratch the surface very hard to see that behind the vast majority of these systems are values about what is to be prioritized.”

Machine-learning algorithms also encode hidden bias in the data they are trained on. Such bias is even harder to expose when it’s buried inside an automated system. If these algorithms are used to assess an employee’s performance, it can be hard to appeal an unfair review or dismissal. 

In a pitch deck, Enaible claims that the Dubai customs agency is now rolling out its software across the whole organization, with the goal of $75 million in “payroll savings” over the coming two years. “We’ve essentially decoupled our growth rate from our payroll,” the agency’s director general is quoted as saying. Omnicom Media Group is also happy with how Enaible helps it get more out its employees. “Our global team needs tools that can move the needle when it comes to building our internal capacity without adding to our head count,” says CEO Nadim Samara. In other words, squeezing more out of existing employees.

Crider insists there are better ways to encourage people to work. “What you’re seeing is an effort to turn a human into a machine before the machine replaces them,” she says. “You’ve got to create an environment in which people feel trusted to do their job. You don’t get that by surveilling them.”

A four-legged robot that wades through water and climbs over obstacles can detect when the concrete in underground sewerage tunnels needs repair

Applying an electric current to the wrist can lessen the frequency of tics associated with Tourette’s syndrome, because it stimulates brainwaves that keep us motionless

Dilbert readers - Please visit Dilbert.com to read this feature. Due to changes with our feeds, we are now making this RSS feed a link to Dilbert.com.

The Hunt is a movie that intended to use the familiar, vicious fiction trope of the rich hunting the poor for sport to offer a satirical take on modern politics. The hunters in this case (led by a brittle, vengeful Hilary Swank) are liberal urban elites. The victims are so-called "deplorables" (yes, the term is used) who espouse populist conservative rhetoric.

A dozen of these Trumpists are kidnapped and forced to run or fight for their lives. Most participants end up brutally killed, with Crystal (Betty Gilpin) as the final "red state" survivor attempting to bring the whole sick scheme down.

The movie was supposed to be released in August 2019, but the trailers drew fire from conservatives (including President Donald Trump), who believed The Hunt was deliberately fostering hatred toward them. It finally got its theatrical release in March.

The outrage was undeserved; the right-wing critics missed the point of this apparent product of the Hollywood leftists they hate and fear. It is very clear in The Hunt that we're not supposed to be rooting for the petty, whiny, privileged hunters, who talk in the language of social justice buzzwords and are, indeed, the villains of the story. The deplorables may be under-educated blowhards who believe in conspiracies, but they are obviously the victims. Crystal—partly because she eschews politics entirely—is the only character worth rooting for.

"There could be 125 billion internet-connected devices by 2030. As these devices become more prevalent, abusers will have more tools to manipulate their victims," says IBM.

Lori Loughlin's daughters are 'devastated' their parents are going to jail for paying $500,000 to get the girls places at the University of Southern California last year.

The following is a brief roundup of some of the latest scientific studies on the novel coronavirus and efforts to find treatments and vaccines for COVID-19, the illness caused by the virus.