Foundation That Denied Grants to Organizations Because They Had White CEOs Changes Tune After Daily Signal Report

Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina Foundation revised the eligibility for its three-year, $300,000 grant to advance “healthy food equity” after The Daily Signal reported on the program’s stringent race-based limitations.

Under the original rules, some organizations that employ a majority-nonwhite staff and have a majority-nonwhite board of directors were automatically disqualified from the grant because the CEOs in question are considered white.

“We have received questions about eligibility from organizations that have a majority people of color staff, and staff leadership, and white CEO,” a foundation representative said in a “Healthy Food Equity” webinar Feb. 2. “So given the spirit of this opportunity Sheila and I shared earlier, these organizations are not eligible for this particular opportunity.”

The video of the webinar has since been removed from YouTube.

This week, the foundation released an update, noting that the opportunity is “expanding.”

“Since we released this funding opportunity in early January, we have received inquiries from potential applicants and others working in the community whose work aligns with the goals of this opportunity, yet whose organizations don’t quite match all aspects of the stated eligibility criteria,” the update reads. “After careful consideration, we have decided to expand both the number of organizations being supported by this grant funding, as well as the eligibility criteria for those seeking an award.”

The foundation expanded the grant opportunity from 10 organizations to 14, expanded the grant to focus on rural communities, and waived the requirement for a nonwhite CEO.

“The eligibility requirement that the organization’s CEO be a member of the community served is being waived,” the update adds. The website also announces that the timeline for the grant has been extended and a new deadline will appear on the website later this year.

A spokesperson for the foundation told The Daily Signal that it will not comment further beyond the statement on the website.

Do No Harm, an organization of doctors, nurses, and health care professionals that speaks out against medical abuses, condemned the original grant requirements and responded to the update by saying that the foundation had been “caught red-handed.”

“If ever there was a bad idea, the notion that we should start to separate our country along racial lines is amongst the worst,” Do No Harm Board Chair Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, a kidney specialist, told The Daily Signal last week. “The plan by the North Carolina Blue Cross Blue Shield company takes divisiveness to a new level. Even having a leader of an organization who is white is enough to prevent the entity, which apparently serves minority communities, from participating in a grant program.”

“Do Americans really want this sort of apartheid?” he asked.

After the update, Do No Harm Program Manager Laura Morgan announced that her organization, along with North Carolina policymakers, will monitor the foundation’s upcoming changes to the grant.

“BCBS of North Carolina Foundation got caught red-handed when they tried to inject ugly racial politics into their grant-making process,” Morgan told The Daily Signal. “Discrimination should have no place in our society, yet they were prepared to reject grant applications from nonprofits led by white CEOs just because of their skin color.”

“Do No Harm, along with BCBS customers and North Carolina state policymakers, will be watching very closely how the foundation updates the grant’s eligibility criteria,” she added.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/02/17/food-equity-grant-drops-ceo-racial-quota-daily-signal-report

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The states that are falling behind in economic freedom

As people across the nation and indeed across the globe continue to struggle financially due to inflation, lingering coronavirus outbreaks and the effects of the Russian war on Ukraine, we could all use more economic freedom to fill our pocketbooks and improve our quality of life.

That is the lesson from the Fraser Institute’s annual Economic Freedom of North America and Economic Freedom of the World reports.

Drawing upon both its own results and a wealth of other economic research, the Economic Freedom of North America report concluded that “economic freedom is positively correlated with per-capita income, economic growth, greater life expectancy, lower child mortality, the development of democratic institutions, civil and political freedoms and other desirable social and economic outcomes.”

Economic freedom had generally increased slightly in recent years until the COVID-19 pandemic and particularly government policy reactions to it reversed this trend.

“The policy responses to the coronavirus pandemic, including massive increases in government spending; monetary expansion; travel restrictions; regulatory mandates on businesses related to masks, hours and capacity; and outright lockdowns undoubtedly contributed to an erosion of economic freedom for most people,” the report found. Years later, Americans are still trying to recover from both the disease and the supposed cures foisted upon the public by governments at the federal, state and local levels.

Among U.S. states, Florida ranked the most economically free, followed by New Hampshire, South Dakota and a tie between Texas and Tennessee. California ranked 49th, besting only New York. Among the subcategories, the Golden State ranked 49th in government spending, 45th in taxes and 38th in labor market freedom. Rounding out the bottom five were Hawaii, Vermont and Oregon.

These findings are hardly news for California. Numerous surveys and reports analyzing a variety of economic indicators have consistently placed California at or near the very bottom of all states in terms of economic freedom and business climate. The state ranked 48th in the Tax Foundation’s 2023 State Business Tax Climate Index, has been dubbed one of the nation’s biggest “Judicial Hellholes” by the American Tort Reform Foundation for encouraging frivolous and abusive lawsuits, received a grade of “F” in Thumbtack’s most recent Small Business Friendliness Survey and placed dead last — again — in Chief Executive Magazine’s annual Best and Worst States for Business survey of CEOs across the country (Texas, Florida and Tennessee dominate the top of the rankings — stop me if this sounds familiar).

It is no wonder, then, that “California has been a net exporter of businesses for at least three decades,” according to Claremont McKenna College’s Kosmont-Rose Institute 2022 Cost of Doing Business Survey. The study found that, from 1990 to 2019, 44 percent more businesses left California than moved there from other states, resulting in a net loss of nearly 20,000 businesses.

Whether it is high taxes; excessive environmental regulations (which are often abused for non-environmental reasons); restrictive zoning, affordable housing mandates, rent control and other policies that limit homebuilding and drive up the cost of housing; a high minimum wage ($15.50 an hour, as of Jan. 1), which benefits a small portion of workers but only at the expense of reduced hours and fewer jobs for many others (not to mention higher prices for consumers); or arbitrary and unnecessary occupational licensing laws that reduce entrepreneurship and jobs, California has consistently enacted policies that limit economic freedom and opportunity.

When people are free to keep more of their hard-earned money, bargain for their own wages and other working conditions, start a business or work in the occupation of their choosing without having to get permission from the government, prosperity and economic growth inevitably follow.

The historical evidence of the virtues of economic freedom — and the vices of government planning and restrictions on these freedoms — is overwhelming.

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Japan is muscling up and locking arms with allies to face China
As the Economic Freedom of North America report asserts, “In some ways, it is surprising the debate still rages because the evidence and theory favoring economic freedom match intuition: It makes sense that the drive and ingenuity of individuals will produce better outcomes through the mechanism of mutually beneficial exchange than the designs of a small coterie of government planners, who can hardly have knowledge of everyone’s values and who, being human, are likely to consider first their own well-being and that of the constituents they must please when making decisions for all of us.”

Regrettably, it is a lesson that still has not been learned in California and many other states and nations.

https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/3842961-the-states-that-are-falling-behind-in-economic-freedom/

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Angry Bing chatbot just mimicking humans, say experts

Microsoft’s nascent Bing chatbot turning testy or even threatening is likely because it essentially mimics what it learned from online conversations, analysts and academics said Friday.

Tales of disturbing exchanges with the chatbot that have captured attention this week include the artificial intelligence (AI) issuing threats and telling of desires to steal nuclear code, create a deadly virus or to be alive.

“I think this is basically mimicking conversations that it’s seen online,” said Graham Neubig, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s language technologies institute.

“So once the conversation takes a turn, it’s probably going to stick in that kind of angry state, or say ‘I love you’ and other things like this, because all of this is stuff that’s been online before.”

A chatbot, by design, serves up words it predicts are the most likely responses, without understanding meaning or context.

However, humans taking part in banter with programs naturally tend to read emotion and intent into what a chatbot says.

“Large language models have no concept of ‘truth’ — they just know how to best complete a sentence in a way that’s statistically probable based on their inputs and training set,” programmer Simon Willison said in a blog post.

“So they make things up, and then state them with extreme confidence.”

Laurent Daudet, co-founder of French AI company LightOn, theorized that the chatbot gone seemingly rogue was trained on exchanges that themselves turned aggressive or inconsistent.

“Addressing this requires a lot of effort and a lot of human feedback, which is also the reason why we chose to restrict ourselves for now to business uses and not more conversational ones,” Daudet said.

The Bing chatbot was designed by Microsoft and the start-up OpenAI, which has been causing a sensation since the November launch of ChatGPT, the headline-grabbing app capable of generating all sorts of written content in seconds on a simple request.

Since ChatGPT burst onto the scene, the technology behind it, known as generative AI, has been stirring up fascination and concern.

“The model at times tries to respond or reflect in the tone in which it is being asked to provide responses (and) that can lead to a style we didn’t intend,” Microsoft said in a blog post, noting the bot is a work in progress.

Bing chatbot said in some shared exchanges that it had been code named “Sydney” during development, and that it was given rules of behavior.

Those rules include “Sydney’s responses should also be positive, interesting, entertaining and engaging,” according to online posts.

Disturbing dialogues that combine steely threats and professions of love could be due to dueling directives to stay positive while mimicking what the AI mined from human exchanges, Willison theorized.

Chatbots seem to be more prone to disturbing or bizarre responses during lengthy conversations, losing a sense of where exchanges are going, eMarketer principal analyst Yoram Wurmser said.

“They can really go off the rails,” Wurmser said.

“It’s very lifelike, because (the chatbot) is very good at sort of predicting next words that would make it seem like it has feelings or give it human like qualities; but it’s still statistical outputs.”

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2023/02/18/business/tech/chatgpt-chatbot-mimicking-humans/

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The internet has changed everything

Mark Latham comments from Australia

One doesn’t normally associate David Bowie, the androgenous rock star of the Seventies and Eighties, with piercingly accurate political analysis. But recently I saw an old interview with the Thin White Duke (recorded at a time when the internet was becoming prominent) that seemed incredibly insightful.

Bowie argued that up until the invention of the internet, the human knowledge-set was reasonably well settled. While historians sometimes differed, this was only at the margins, giving us a definitive interpretation of past events. So too, most aspects of science had been resolved.

Social values and norms were framed around mainstream notions of decency and commonsense. The parameters of political debate, while keenly contested at election time, pivoted on the orthodoxy of a handful of major parties.

It was as if the 18th-century Enlightenment had struck an ideal balance: creating new freedoms of speech to debate concepts and ideas, thereby further advancing the knowledge-set, but within accepted boundaries as to what was factual and what was nonsense.

Very few people subscribed to conspiracy theories or wacky notions of information being ‘socially constructed’ and ‘fluid’. Observable truths were respected as the foundation-stone of intellectual enlightenment.

Bowie’s thesis was that the internet would blow this settlement apart. As a mostly unregulated, open-access regime it would give a wide range of political activists the forum and space they needed to create their own self-serving narratives, unchallenged by the disciplines of evidence and facts.

This in turn would fragment society, as people would find their own group with which to associate and support online. Public life would be transformed, becoming more divisive and censorious as political tribes tried to close down their rivals and embed their beliefs in popular culture.

The orthodoxies of history, science, education and major party politics would come under permanent siege. And as this process played out, the internet tribes would dig in deeper, fortifying their positions with fewer facts and even less evidence, talking mainly to themselves (in what we now call the political ‘bubble’).

Bowie said we had to turn and face this change. As ever in his lyrics, strange fascinations fascinated him.

One would have to say, 30 years later, his dismal prophecy has been realised. He has given us a handy framework within which to understand the new politics of ‘fake news’ and ‘cancel culture’.

In the madness of today’s politics, why shouldn’t we take the unexpected wisdom of Ziggy Stardust as a reference point?

It helps to explain why the political centre has hollowed out and the major party vote has declined. They have been cannibalised by movements to the left and right of them.

Five new tribes have emerged in politics, as confirmation of Bowie’s thesis:

The Lunar Right

Some voters are dazed and confused by the extent of change in our public institutions. Old certainties have been lost, replaced by the alien authoritarianism of political correctness, identity politics, gender fluidity, decarbonisation and cancel culture. In seeking out a single, simple explanation, the Lunar Right has latched onto the theory of international conspiracy, through the UN, WEF, Agenda 21, WHO, COP and any other globalist forum that carries an acronym.

I hear from these people often and I can assure them: most of the political madness we have in Australia is homegrown. Adam Bandt, Lidia Thorpe, Penny Wong and Anthony Albanese have been refining their leftist agenda for decades. They don’t receive, or in fact need, memos from the UN every other day to do their worst.

Policy Traditionalists

This is where I have tried to position NSW One Nation, around a belief that Australian public policy reached a high-water mark of effectiveness during the Hawke-Keating-Howard-Costello era. There was never any need for change.

For Traditionalists, our watchword is evidence: to reject the Left’s agenda based on its observable adverse impacts. Why, for instance, would Australia destroy its resource and manufacturing industries and millions of jobs when the elimination of our carbon emissions cannot have any measurable impact on global surface temperatures?

Surreal Teal

This is the new politics of wealthy indulgence: well-heeled women so comfortable in life they have deluded themselves into thinking they can repair any part of society and ultimately, save the planet. They only visit places like the Hunter Valley and Western Sydney by accident, so the loss of blue-collar jobs in these regions is inconsequential to their virtue-signalling.

Woke Identitarians

Labor used to believe in helping people on the basis of their socio-economic status. Now, bizarrely, it sees politics through the prism of things people were born with, the identity politics of race, gender and sexuality. Martin Luther King’s ethos of judging people by their character has been replaced by the primitive habit of judging them by how they look. Thus a privileged, powerful person like Penny Wong can plead disadvantage from being an Asian lesbian, even though no aspect of her life is actually disadvantaged.

The Green Extreme

Authoritarianism is back in fashion, with the Greens seeking to control the language, values, behaviour, family life and employment of other people. If you’ve ever met a Green MP you will know they can barely run their own lives, but this is not a barrier to trying to engineer everyone else’s life in their own image.

Bowie was right: Time can’t change me and I can’t change time. But the internet has changed everything.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/02/political-oddity/

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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