May 22, 2025

HMM: Target’s Sales Dented by DEI Boycott.

The retail company said a laundry list of problems dragged down its quarterly sales, including a boycott by shoppers who disagreed with its decision this year to end some diversity programs.

Target’s sales have been tepid for years.

Did anyone stop and wonder if maybe Target’s sales have been tepid because the company went all-in on DEI, woke, and “pride” — even in the children’s clothing department?

Posted at 3:51 pm by Stephen Green

HMM: Syria’s new leader ‘open’ to joining Abraham Accords, normalizing relations with Israel, US reps who met him say.

Syrian leader Ahmed al-Sharaa has privately expressed openness to joining the Abraham Accords and normalizing relations with Israel in a move that would dramatically shake up the Middle East, according to two congressmen who met with him last month.

In exchange, al-Sharaa wanted assurances that Israel would stop bombing Syria, stop fomenting sectarian divisions and reach a renegotiated arrangement regarding the Golan Heights, Reps. Cory Mills (R-Fla.) and Martin Stutzman (R-Ind.) told The Post.

“He said, ‘We’re open to not only recognizing Israel, but also to try and join the Abraham Accords, but they must stop bombing within our nation,’” Mills recounted.

Previously: Syria faces renewed sectarian violence as government fails to deliver inclusivity.

al-Sharaa has to clean up his act before the bombings can stop.

Posted at 2:49 pm by Stephen Green

NOW WHY WOULD THEY WANT TO DO THAT?

Posted at 2:43 pm by Stephen Green

BEN RHODES SMILES:

In 2016, the failed novelist turned Obama’s Middle Eastern policy “expert” (in)famously told the New York Times, “The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”

And as Steve wrote earlier, regarding Thompson and Tapper themselves, “they seem to think that anonymously and belatedly telling some of the truth gets them off the hook:”

Posted at 2:36 pm by Ed Driscoll

RESEARCH THAT CHAT GPT CAN’T DO: Archaeologist sailing like a Viking makes unexpected discoveries. “The sailing boat—an open, square-rigged clinker boat similar to the boats used during the Viking Age (800–1050 AD)—traveled from Trondheim up to the Arctic Circle and back in 2022. Since then, Jarrett and his team have sailed over 5,000 kilometers along Viking trade routes (see map). His research shows that the likely routes of the Vikings took them farther from land than previously thought.”

Posted at 2:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

SO? JUST HAVE AI WRITE THE BOOKS: Chicago Sun-Times Published A.I.-Generated Summer Reading List With Books That Don’t Exist.

An AI-generated list of recommended reading for the summer, published by the Chicago Sun-Times, included several books that don’t exist.

Per NPR, at least one edition of The Philadelphia Inquirer used the same flawed list, titled “Summer reading list for 2025.” Suggested titles included “Tidewater Dreams,” purportedly authored by Chilean American novelist Isabel Allende, which was described as her “first climate fiction novel.” Allende is a real person, but the suggested novel is not a book she or anyone else published.

Another suggestion was “The Rainmakers,” which is described as a story set in a “near-future American West where artificially induced rain has become a luxury commodity.” This faux novel was said to be written by 2025 Pulitzer Prize winner Percival Everett.

The outlet noted that only five of the 15 books suggested were real titles.

Related: Politico’s Newsroom Is Starting a Legal Battle With Management Over AI.

Politico’s contract stipulates that the publication needs to use AI in a manner that follows the company’s standards of journalistic ethics. “We’re not against AI, but it should be held to the same ethical and style standards as our political journalists,” says Arianna Skibell, the union’s vice chair for contract enforcement, who writes Politico’s energy industry newsletter. Some union members question whether there’s always appropriate human oversight over the AI content Politico publishes.

In one case, an AI-generated live summary used language around immigration that human writers are not permitted to use, publishing phrases like “criminal migrants” as it covered the vice presidential debates.

“There were also factual errors that the AI inserted that night,” alleges Skibell. For example, she says, the AI credited actions taken by the Biden Administration as things Kamala Harris did. That post was later swapped for replacements without the errors, according to screenshots reviewed by WIRED. “At Politico, you can’t just wholly take down articles written by human reporters without going through a series of approvals, all the way up to newsroom leadership. That did not happen for the AI live summaries,” Wittenberg claims. (Politico did not comment on the specifics of the union’s allegations.)

Union members say they believe the AI-generated posts were handled in a way that violates Politico’s correction and takedown policies. They also allege that one of Politico’s paid premium AI tools for generating policy reports has spewed out incorrect information in the past. Politico’s human reporters broke the news in 2022 that the Supreme Court had voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, but a report on abortion rights generated by the Policy Intelligence Assistance tool in March 2025 was written as though the constitutional right was still in effect.

So AI is now covering events as well as human Politico journalists – that’s real progress!

Finally, an oldie but a goodie: DON’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT HISTORY: Politico illustrates story about race and the modern GOP with a picture of Democrat George Wallace standing in the schoolhouse door. Even more amusingly, it’s labeled “History Dept.”

Exit question:

(Fixed an HTML bug — Charlie)

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

HE’S NOT WRONG:

Palmer Raids redux? I’m starting to rethink those . . .

Posted at 1:58 pm by Glenn Reynolds

MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE: ICE makes major TdA arrests in Chicago.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have arrested the men they believe to be responsible for a mass shooting at a December Chicago house party – members of the foreign terrorist organization Tren de Aragua.

The first major arrests were made in January and February in Chicago and Raleigh, N.C. Over the last few weeks, 16 TdA members and associates of the shooters were arrested in Chicago by ICE HSI Chicago on immigration charges, ICE announced Tuesday.

On Dec. 2, eight people were shot, three fatally, at a house party primarily attended by Venezuelan nationals in the Chicago Lawn neighborhood. Chicago Police said they’d been called to the home multiple times before the shooting occurred but no arrests were made, ABC 7 News reported.

Exit quote: “Under the Biden administration, federal agents were instructed not to apprehend illegal foreign nationals solely based on illegal entry and implemented a ‘catch and release’ policy.”

Posted at 1:47 pm by Stephen Green

SEX FIENDS AND SCARED MOTHERS:

Two horrifying stories in California newspapers in June and July of 1955, stories that help us understand that, in the 1940s and 50s, “sex fiend” was the phrase most commonly used to describe what we might call a “sexual predator”, or even a “serial killer”.

As far as I can tell, having searched the archives of Central Valley newspapers, this is the only letter to the editor Norma Thomas ever wrote, evidence that she was powerfully agitated by what she was reading in the newspapers. But she was not the only one. Letters expressing worry about “sex fiends” were common that summer in newspapers across the country, proof of a wider moral panic kicked off by stories like the two above.

Curiosity…

I also tell my students that a historian must have the logic, tenacity and curiosity of a great detective, because historians, like detectives, try to answer questions about past events.

So, now, having read Norma Thomas’s letter to the editor and those two terrible stories, your curiosity should be engaged. Why? What was happening in America in the decade after the Second World War that brought on this moral panic about sexual predators? Were there actually more sex crimes in the 1950s than in previous decades?

One thing we can say, is that 1955 was a remarkably safe year in America, with a homicide rate more than half of what it had been just 20 years earlier.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND UNEXPECTEDLY GOING GREEN: Kermit the Frog set to deliver University of Maryland commencement address: ‘I’ll be there!‘

The University of Maryland (UMD) is welcoming an unlikely commencement speaker on Thursday to usher off the class of 2025: a bright-green Muppet.

Kermit the Frog, a famous family favorite and self-proclaimed “Amphibitarian,” announced the momentous occasion in a YouTube video posted by the university.

In the video, the speaker was hailed as an “environmental advocate,” “best-selling author,” “Peabody Award winner,” “international superstar,” “friend to all creatures” and “champion of creativity, kindness and believing in the impossible.”

The camera then sharply panned to the awkward Muppet with a screeching sound as Kermit stood in front of a red curtain and announced, “Uh, I guess it’s me.”

To be fair, the university could certainly do much worse: Orwellian: Women’s College Honors Inveterate Foe of Women’s Rights.

Smith College, which presents itself as a women’s college, just granted an honorary degree to a man, and not just any man, but one of the most influential campaigners against women’s rights.

Yes, in a piece of fresh Orwellian insanity, a women’s college granted an honorary degree to Rachel Levine, a man who has fathered children and who has weaponized his medical position as a doctor to attack fairness in women’s sports, privacy in women’s intimate settings, and a generation’s ability to have children.

Levine received the honorary degree at the Smith College commencement Sunday.

And: Gazpacho? Geppetto? Gestapo? A Lying, Tongue-Tied Tim Walz Says ICE Agents are a Modern-Day ‘Geskapo.’

Leave it to failed Democrat Governor Tim Walz to find a way to lie while tongue-tied. He gave a commencement speech at the University of Minnesota on Saturday and warned graduates that President Donald Trump was sending out ‘Geskapo’ agents to round up people.

Speaking of a different kind of muppetry at commencement ceremonies: Scan and Go: Is AI Turning Graduation Ceremonies into Grocery Store Self-Checkout Lanes?

It’s academia in 2025, so once again, it could be worse:

Exit question:

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll