The pro-Hamas protests spreading across college campuses around the nation recently reached Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, with more than 100 activists gathered on campus.

Local reports stated that police arrested at least 28 protesters on Thursday. The Georgia Department of Public Safety noted that the Emory Police Department would issue any and all charges. The Atlanta Police Department also assisted in breaking up the protest.

Videos posted online capturing the unruly demonstrations appeared to show law enforcement using tasers and pepper balls to disperse the crowd.

The rowdy group used large protest signs to shove law enforcement officers. Some activists appeared to throw their signs at police.

— (@)

Caroline Fohlin, a professor at the university, was among those detained by police. A video of the arrest showed Fohlin refusing to get on the ground and yelling at arresting officers, “I’m a professor!”

An individual, presumably partaking in the anti-Israel protest, can be heard shouting at the police, “You people are fascists! You are Hitler!”

— (@)

Philosophy Department Chair and president-elect of the Emory University Senate, Noëlle McAfee, was also among those detained.

— (@)

James Hoesterey, an assistant professor of religion at the university, was seen tearing down caution tape put up around a lawn, according to a video posted to social media. Pro-Israel students confronted the professor, who then called the university “fascists.”

— (@)

In another video, law enforcement officers appeared to use pepper balls to break up the crowd by firing toward the ground. Others, frustrated by the shutdown of the protest, claimed that rubber bullets were fired at students.

Emory University said in a statement to Fox News, “Several dozen protesters trespassed into Emory University’s campus early Thursday morning and set up tents on the Quad.”

“These individuals are not members of our community. They are activists attempting to disrupt our university as our students finish classes and prepare for finals. Emory does not tolerate vandalism or other criminal activity on campus. The Emory Police Department ordered the group to leave and contacted Atlanta Police and Georgia State Patrol for assistance,” the statement continued.

Following the morning arrests, some protesters returned to campus in the evening, congregating at the university’s Candler School of Theology building, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

The demonstrators, carrying Palestinian flags and holding protest signs, chanted, “Move cops, get out the way.”

Emory Police Department Commander Thomas Manns told the news outlet, “The ones that were arrested, there wasn’t anything peaceful about what was going on.”

The state patrol said, “During the encampment protest response, Troopers deployed pepper balls to control the unruly crowd but did not use tear gas.”

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A 27-year-old substitute teacher repeatedly punched a Las Vegas high school student and knocked him to a hallway floor amid their fight caught on video Thursday — and KLAS-TV reported that it occurred after the student allegedly used a racial slur against the teacher.

What are the details?

Sources told the station that the Clark County School District Police Department is using video recorded inside Valley High School as evidence.

— (@)

KLAS, citing sources, noted in its video report that the student used a racial slur against the teacher, and that it all allegedly started in a classroom when the teacher asked the student to leave after he used the N-word.

A longer raw video of the fight shows the smaller student continually going after and swinging at the larger teacher, even though the teacher easily knocks the student to the floor not once but twice. Other students intervene, and the teacher walks away amid a throng of onlookers.

Another raw clip offers a close-up of the teacher knocking the student to the floor for the final time, hovering over him, hitting him in the head, and yelling, “Are you crazy?” After schoolmates bring the student to his feet, the teacher — whose shirt is torn open — hollers, “You lost your motherf***ing mind, boy!” But the apparently dazed student hollers what sounds like, “You’re goin’ to jail, [N-word]!” at the teacher and actually laughs before a campus security monitor leads the student away.

School district police identified the teacher as 27-year-old Re’Kwon Smith, KLAS said.

Smith is charged with battery resulting in serious bodily harm, assault on a school pupil on school property/vehicle/activity, threatening to do bodily harm to a public school student, and interfering with a student from attending school, the station said.

KLAS said Smith is being held at the Clark County Detention Center on $9,000 bail, and he’s scheduled to appear in court Friday.

The district hired Smith in November and assigned him to the high school, the station said, adding that police said the district will remove Smith from the substitute pool, and he’s no longer eligible to serve as a substitute in the district.

While KLAS said the student also was arrested, KNTV-TV said its sources said the student is recovering in a hospital.

Another student told KNTV that the student in the video — a close friend — is “in the hospital right now, but he said he doesn’t remember that good what happened … he has a concussion, and he has scratches all over his face.”

KLAS said the district issued a statement Thursday: “Violence in any form is unacceptable and goes against the fundamental principles of education and respect. Any altercation between a teacher and a student is thoroughly investigated, and appropriate disciplinary action is taken.”

This story has been updated.

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Democrats and other radicals across the country appear keen to enable ideologues to both socially and medically transition children behind parents’ backs despite warnings from scientists, indications that such barbaric practices are based on pseudoscience, and other Western nations beginning to pump the brakes.

In New York, for instance, voters will be given the option on Nov. 5 to sign off on an amendment to the state constitution, which critics suggest would require medical providers to “facilitate a child’s request to make permanent, life-altering ‘gender affirming’ decisions” without first consulting with parents.

On Tuesday, Maine Gov. Janet Mills (D) ratified LD 227, dubbed the “Transgender Trafficker Protection Act” by critics. Blaze News previously reported that the controversial law codifies the right to sex-change mutilations and abortion in Maine, shields sex-change surgeons from consequence, and bars authorities from notifying parents of the locations of their kidnapped children if those kids are said to be seeking “gender-affirming care” in the state. Republican Attorneys General from various states have indicated they will take legal action against Maine over the law.

Amid this controversial campaign to expose confused children to regrettable genital mutilations, Republicans in Tennessee have mounted a counter-offensive — a sword in response to Democrats’ so-called transgender shield laws.

The state legislature passed Senate Bill 2782 this week, which is effectively an anti-trafficking bill that creates a civil cause of action against any adult who recruits, harbors, or transports someone else’s unemancipated child out of state without the consent of the kid’s parents or guardian for the purpose of getting them sex-change medical procedures.

State Sen. Mark Pody (R), one of the bill’s sponsors, reportedly indicated the legislation originally would have included criminal penalties for surgery-seeking traffickers, but those were dropped in committee.

The amended bill passed the Tennessee Senate in a 26-4 vote along party lines earlier this month. The state House, which had a mirror version, gave its final approval to the legislation Thursday in a 63-16 vote.

Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee (R), who previously ratified a law barring health care providers from mutilating children’s genitals and administering them puberty blockers, is expected to ratify the legislation.

Human Rights Campaign, a powerful LGBT activist outfit, condemned SB 2782 ahead of Thursday’s vote, suggesting it was part of a “tsunami of discriminatory legislation follow[ing] a brutal cadence of discriminatory laws enacted in recent years.”

The HRC cited a number of other recent Republican legislative successes in the Volunteer State such as “the business bathroom sign law and the drag ban,” noting also that “Tennessee has repeatedly banned transgender students from playing school sports, forbidden students from using the correct bathroom at school, allowed government contractors providing child welfare services to discriminate with taxpayer dollars, restricted transgender youth from accessing age-appropriate, medically necessary health care, attempted to undo marriage equality, and more.”

SB 2782 may ultimately deter prospective traffickers from exposing children to treatments that Britain’s National Health Services are now reevaluating. The NHS is taking a step back in the wake of a damning investigation it commissioned, which revealed:

there is “no clear evidence that social transition in childhood has any positive or negative mental health outcomes”;
puberty blockers compromise bone density and have no apparent impact on “gender dysphoria or body satisfaction”;
there is “a lack of high-quality research assessing the outcomes of hormone
interventions in adolescents with gender dysphoria/incongruence, and few
studies that undertake long-term follow-up”;

clinicians are incapable of determining which prospective child victims might alternatively grow out of their confusion; and
an absence of “good evidence on the long-term outcomes of interventions to manage gender-related distress.”

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You know what they say about karma …

Well, some people don’t, including Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass.

For those who don’t remember, about a year ago Mayor Bass complained about Los Angeles’ surplus of prisoners.

“It’s really an embarrassment on our country that we have more people locked up in the United States than any place in the world, and if you look at the many, many, many people who are locked up, they’re locked up because they’re poor, because they can’t afford bail, or they can’t afford proper legal defense,” she said, adding that “if you dealt with the poverty aspect, you could probably reduce the [incarcerated] population by 50%.”

“She let out all sorts of criminals in L.A.,” says Dave Rubin.

And now, she’s reaping the consequences.

Shortly after the incident, the New York Post released the following report:

A suspect was arrested after breaking into Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass’ home early Sunday morning.
…
Getty House is Bass’ official home, and is located on South Irving Boulevard in Windsor Square, nearly five miles west of Los Angeles City Hall.
…
The incident comes as crime continues to rise amid the LA district attorney’s soft-on-crime approach to court cases.
…
As the county’s top prosecutor, Gascón also enacted a series of criminal justice directives since taking office in 2020 that have drawn scorn from opponents and many in law enforcement, such as barring prosecutors from attending parole hearings, promoting zero-cash bail and efforts to end the prosecution of juveniles as adults, even for violent crimes.

“I should note that George Gascón was the DA of San Francisco — the Soros-backed DA … who destroyed San Francisco,” says Dave, adding that what happened to Bass is “kind of a funny story,” especially considering that “no one got hurt.”

“This is how brazen criminals are in L.A.,” adds Spencer Klavan. “They’re not afraid of the Los Angeles Police Department. … They know they’re not gonna get prosecuted.”

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Anti-Israel radicals across America have taken over several college campuses where they have erected pro-Hamas encampments, attacked police, made foreign policy demands, and parroted genocidal rhetoric. Their efforts to signal solidarity with the Islamic terrorists who massacred thousands of Israelis and dozens of Americans in October — the same terror organization that has since plotted attacks on Western nations — have not gone unnoticed overseas.

Two Palestinian terrorist groups announced their support this week for the student protesters, even referring to them as their own.

Endorsed by terrorists

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a Gaza-based terrorist group that combines Marxist-Leninist ideology with Arab nationalism, released a statement Tuesday condemning Israel and celebrating the students who have condemned the Jewish state’s self-defense.

“At a time when all peace-lovers in the world stand by the Palestinian people in their just struggle to regain their usurped rights, the ugly face of Zionist racism is clearly visible,” said the terror group, according to an online English translation tool. “While our students at American universities were looking forward to the support and solidarity of the administration of universities whose interests, profits and investments prevailed over noble human values.”

The PFLP decried the “punitive measures” taken against students, alleging that professors and school administrators have threatened and blackmailed students “simply because they stand by the Palestinian people and support their just struggle for freedom and human dignity.”

The PFLP extended the ACLU’s November complaint against Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis and Florida education officials to other officials who have ordered the breakup of pro-terror student organizations.

According to the terrorists, those who have taken action against fellow travelers on campus operate “under the illusion that they are capable of suppressing the struggle of our students in universities in the United States.”

“We … affirm our unwavering support for the student struggle,” said the terror group, singling out the George Soros-funded “Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM) at Columbia, Rutgers, Yale, Stanford universities, and others.”

Extra to championing the student groups and underscoring their value to the terrorist cause, the PFLP gave them marching orders: “We call for strengthening the unity of students and their struggle to withdraw the investments of American universities from the Zionist entity, and to sever all forms of relations with them,” emphasizing the need for the “escalation of their struggle.”

Izzat Al-Rishq, reportedly a Hamas Political Bureau official, issued a statement Wednesday similarly signaling support for the student radicals on American soil, reported the New York Sun.

“The American administration, led by President Biden, violates individual rights and the right to expression, and arrests university students and faculty members because of their rejection of the genocide that our Palestinian people are subjected to in the Gaza Strip at the hands of the neo-Nazi Zionists, without the slightest sense of shame about the legal value represented by the students and university professors,” said the terrorist.

Perhaps recognizing the resonance of the anti-Israeli rhetoric with elements of the Democratic Party, Hamas added, “Today’s students are the leaders of the future, and their suppression today means an expensive electoral bill that the Biden administration will pay sooner or later.”

Pro-Hamas radicals by any other name

Palestinian terrorists clearly understand what the student radicals mean to accomplish, but the Associated Press appears keen to pretend students’ intentions are alternatively benign.

The liberal media outfit has begun referring to the pro-Hamas protests as “antiwar protests” despite their participants’ genocidal slogans — such as “long live intifada” or “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” — and the violent verve that animates them.

This rhetorical switch aligns the publication with Progressive Democrats, such as anti-Israel Rep. Cori Bush (Mo.), who similarly refer to the pro-Hamas students as “anti-war protesters.”

Natalie Sanandaji, a New Yorker who survived the Nova music festival massacre, expressed disgust this week over the Associated Press’ strategic wordplay, telling “Just the News, No Noise,” “When people are chanting in their protests, ‘intifada now,’ simply look up the definition of ‘intifada’ — that is not anti war.”

“To downplay it is to make these people feel like what they’re doing is okay,” continued Sanandaji. “We need to talk about how serious it is. Downplaying it is just putting more people at risk.”

“Nobody is pro-war. To call this an anti-war protest is absurd,” Dan Schneider, vice president of Media Research Center’s Free Speech America told Just the News. “This is not about war. This is about the extermination of Jews and the elimination of Israel as a legal state.”

Human rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali suggested on X that it would even be deceitful to refer to the protesters as pro-Palestinian, noting, “They are not pro Palestinian. They are anti-Jewish and anti-American. They are flexing their Islamist muscles. Incompetent and weak university students who allowed this problem to get out of hand will not stop them.”

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The more I read and write about AI, the firmer I get in my conviction that Big Tech incumbents absolutely must strangle the decentralized AI in its cradle before it wrecks everything.

Take a look at this interview Ben Thompson did with OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott. I call your attention to this part in particular:

From Microsoft’s perspective, is this going to be a funnel into new products or do you see it as an end goal in and of itself, winning search?
KS: So I think you hit on a very important point which is even if the ad economics of this system doesn’t have the same economics that “normal search” has, if we gain share, it’s just great for Microsoft. I think we have a lot of ability here, partially because we’ve done so much performance optimization work and we’re really confident around costs, that we can figure out what the business model is. The thing that I know having been a pre-IPO employee at Google is the search business that you have now is very different from the search business that we had twenty years ago, and so I really think we’re going to figure out what the ad units are, we will figure out what the business model is, and we have plenty of ability to do all of that profitably at Microsoft.
SA: There’s so much value here, it’s inconceivable to me that we can’t figure out how to ring the cash register on it. [Emphasis added]

I recently said the same thing to an interviewer who asked me about search and Google. The point I made was that Google was here before with search the first time — there was no business model for it until it hit on one (by acquisition, no less). Don’t assume, I argued, that it won’t hit on another profitable model for whatever kind of user experience BingGPT and Bard evolve into.

But I also made another point to the interviewer that’s not at all captured in the above but that’s critically important for everyone thinking about tech policy in the current moment: to make any business model work for them, they will first have to kill decentralized AI.

Centralized vs. decentralized

There’s a set of assumptions implicit in Scott and Altman’s vision of how they might eventually “ring the cash register” on AI-backed chat as the new query interface for most information:

Users go to their centralized servers and type text into a box that they host.Advertisers go to those same servers to get in front of all the users.Somehow, the advertisers and the users can be connected to one another, with Microsoft acting as a middleman.Or, maybe the users pay Microsoft directly for the queries via a subscription or micropayment scheme.

In other words, Microsoft’s ability to squeeze profits out of the experience of interacting with an LLM presumes that billions of users will continue to flock to a handful of centralized services to get their queries answered. This is a vision, then, predicated on a world of centralized AI.

But what if we end up in a world of decentralized AI instead? What if I can download an app that will answer current questions from all of Wikipedia and Reddit, in some cases going out to both of those sites and pulling in fresh data?

What if some of the data sources are my favorite news websites and forums, all of which have signed up to provide data to the app and which get a cut of whatever revenue it generates?

Or, what if multiple such apps are powered by open-source language models and kept fresh by access to current data sources via an API? I could certainly see the New York Times publishing such an app all by itself, with the ability to answer any question from its vast archives of past issues.

Decentralized AI is a real threat

To give some technical context for why the vision of app-based, decentralized AI I’ve described above is quite possible, consider that the size of the models needed to do this might be on the order of a few gigabytes each. For instance, the Stable Diffusion model file that powers its image generation is from 2.5 to 4.5 GB, depending on the version, and it was trained on 240TB of image data. That’s an astonishing level of compression.

So, it may be possible that the average size of the models that we need to answer, say, 75% of our random questions about the world is roughly 3GB or so — about the size of a large mobile game download.

If I can download models that can reliably answer questions about their training data, why do I need to visit a Microsoft- or Google-hosted website and type queries into their text boxes? If I want recipes from my favorite recipe site, maybe I visit their site instead and talk to their model. If I want the current NYT or WaPo consensus on Ukraine, why won’t I just go to those sites and chat with their bots? Why does a Microsoft or a Google need to be involved in any of this?

The answer, of course, is that they don’t need to be involved. Decentralized AI can and will cut them out entirely, assuming it’s allowed to.

But that’s a big assumption because the future of decentralized AI is by no means guaranteed.

But before we go into who’s trying to kill decentralized AI and why, some caveats:

Using the models to answer questions requires quite a bit of computing power. But these inference costs can and will be reduced with innovation, as this is an active area of research. Also, have you seen mobile phones, lately? There’s no shortage of computing power, and phone makers are always looking for ways to use it. After a few product cycles of optimizing the hardware for running queries, it’s not hard to imagine very fast local performance on many kinds of models.Yes, the models still make up facts. This hallucination is a big problem, but it’s also one that everyone is working on. The models will get better at faithfully representing the facts in their data sources.

We’ll have to fight for a decentralized future

I’ve written at length on my Substack about the forces arrayed against decentralized AI, so I won’t repeat that here. But to summarize: The aforementioned model files representing the “brains” of an AI like Stable Diffusion or ChatGPT could very easily be treated like digital contraband and wiped from the internet.

Everyone from Googlers to Google-hating former Googlers to indie artists to profiteering lawyers are hard at work constructing rationales for why these model files should be subject to the same censorship as child porn, 3D-printed gun files, pirated movies, SPAM, and malware.

Here are some of the rationales currently being explored for banning decentralized AI:

All the model files are full of copyright violations because they were trained on copyrighted data.Generative text models can cause harm to the marginalized because “hate speech” can be coaxed out of them.Generative text models will catastrophically increase the threat of “disinformation.” Generative image models will be used for non-consensual fake porn of real people, many of them children.

We wouldn’t even have to pass any new laws to have these model files banned. All it would take was an agreement among a handful of large players that these files and any apps or sites based on them pose a threat. I imagine the following platforms can and probably will come together to effect what amounts to an effective ban on decentralized AI:

Google PlayApple’s App StoresAmazon Web ServicesCloudflare

This means a world where everyone gets to host their own models backed by their own data sources, and facts are by no means guaranteed. Going by the lessons of history, I’d say it’s probably unlikely.

It seems increasingly likely to me that the forces of centralization will succeed in getting unauthorized model files treated like contraband, and in five years, we’ll still be running all of our queries on servers hosted by one of the Big Tech platforms.

I hope I’m wrong about this, but I do know that if we’re going to have decentralized AI, then we’re going to have to fight for it.

​Ai, Ai regulations, Artificial general intelligence, Google, Microsoft, Big tech censorship, Big tech, Artificial intelligence, Return 

Eva Edl is an 88-year-old woman who is no stranger to political persecution.

When she was just 10 years old, Edl was sent to a concentration camp in communist Yugoslavia — and now, in America, she’s been arrested for violating the FACE Act, which restricts pro-life protests in front of abortion clinics.

Edl originally faced up to 11 years in prison and $350,000 in fines, which has now been lowered to six months in prison and $10,000 in fines.

While she was prepared to die in prison for standing up for the unborn in America, Glenn Beck is well aware that she shouldn’t be going to jail at all.

“She spent several years in refugee camps, made it to the United States, only to be arrested by Joe Biden’s jackbooted thugs,” Glenn says. “She’s now making peace with her death in prison for defending the lives of the biggest cohort of dehumanized people, slaughtered by the tens of millions globally every single year.”

The Justice Department charged her and ten other pro-life activists after they staged a peaceful protest inside the abortion clinic in Mount Juliet, Tennessee. The activists were singing and praying.

“They were thinking about giving her up to a decade in prison, but I don’t know, maybe they saw this 88-year-old frail woman who had been in a concentration camp, is maybe not a threat really, so they only gave her six months,” Glenn says.

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“She’s beautiful, oh, she’s beautiful! Mabel’s beautiful. She’s a baby, oh, she’s a puppy!”

The way bare-knuckle boxing legend Bobby Gunn dotes on my 7-month-old French Bulldog/Boston Terrier mix makes me regret we’re not in the same room; I have a feeling they’d get along great. But even through the screen of my laptop, his genuine affection is clear.

I showed Gunn Mabel after finding out he has a French Bulldog of his own, a 12-year-old named Max who accompanies him everywhere. Gunn is just as enthusiastic when offering up this tidbit about Mabel’s terrier side: “Man, them dogs were bred for hunting rats, you know.”

It’s as if he can’t resist recognizing a fellow fighter beneath the cuteness. According to writer Stayton Bonner, whose book “Bare Knuckle: Bobby Gunn, 73-0 Undefeated. A Dad. A Dream. A Fight Like You’ve Never Seen” came out Tuesday, Gunn’s gentle side is never far from the surface, even in the most forbidding environments.

“When I first met Bobby, I went to see him train at Ike and Randy’s gym in Patterson, New Jersey,” recalls Bonner. “This was not an Equinox. You had to go through like a chain-link fence, past a couple of pit bulls. It was an old auto body shop. But he would bring this little dog with him, set him up with his little bowl, his food.

“And I would talk to the other fighters there, who told me Bobby would tell [a fighter], ‘When the ref’s not looking, here’s how to really take a man down.’ Give him all these little tips. But then he would set him down afterwards and ask him if he’d accepted Jesus into his heart.”

This is apparent during the 40 minutes I talk with Gunn, who speaks quickly and has a thick Irish accent (he’s an Irish Traveller who grew up in Canada). He addresses me as “sir” and makes frequent reference to God. More than once he chokes up as he marvels at how far he’s come.

Raised in crushing poverty by his volatile father, who taught him to fight. The same father who had him squaring off against grown men in motel parking lots for money by the time he was eleven. Today’s he settled down, retired from fighting, with a loving wife and a beautiful daughter, and dedicated to giving them the kind of life he never had.

And now, with the help of former Rolling Stone editor Bonner, he’s telling his life story, just as the underground sport he dominated makes its way to mainstream legitimacy — and potentially huge revenues.

Blackstone

Gunn fought in the first legally sanctioned bare-knuckle match in 2018. Since then, the sport has grown into a $411 billion business.

As we speak, Philadelphia-based Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship, which bills itself as “the first promotion allowed to hold a legal, sanctioned, and regulated bare knuckle event in the United States since 1889,” is gearing up for its latest pay-per-view brawl, Knucklemania IV, which happens this Saturday in Los Angeles. Gunn will serve as one of the commentators.

While Gunn’s bare-knuckle career has seen him fighting in front of Russian mafiosi as well as biker gangs, he maintains it was more pleasant than his stint in mainstream pro boxing.

“The underground world, sir, was better than the boxing world. The boxing world was way more corrupted. Corruption, oh, believe me, I had to fight referees and judges. It was enemies against you. The underground world was way more fair. A fair shake. That’s the truth.”

And although the spectacle of men pummeling each other with their bare fists does have an undeniable shock value appeal, Gunn points out that it’s actually safer than boxing. For one thing, matches seldom go the distance; early knockouts are common.

Also, when you wear a boxing glove, “you’ve got a weapon on your hand,” says Gunn. “You punch hard as you can because your hand’s protected. … I don’t hit as hard in bare knuckle, sir. I only hit 30%, 40% shots, way more lighter shots. I’ll go with the body harder, because I don’t want to break my hand.”

Not that he hasn’t sustained some damage along the way. Gunn takes his hand and pushes his nose against his face; he turns so he’s showing his profile. It’s completely flat. “Do you think I care about a little cut in my nose?” he laughs.

Gunn seems to be approaching this phase of his life with the same calm determination that brought him his 73-0 record. “I fear no man, but I respect every man,” Gunn tells me. “When I go to fight, there’s a light switch that goes right off. When that happens, you gotta kill me to beat me. That’s all I am.”

Click here for an excerpt of “Bare Knuckle” courtesy of Blackstone Publishing.

​