How much of Salesforce’s motivation is crime v. not waiting for the Millennium Tower to fall against their building?
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Nice to hear a woman who appears to know about cars.
Interesting car. He kind of did what Shelby did to make a 427 Cobra, only he used more original parts.
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Toronto’s public school board is considering replacing its compulsory Grade 11 English course, which typically focuses on William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens and other literary classics, with one that is centred on the works of Indigenous writers in Canada.
Trustees with the Toronto District School Board will vote on the matter at a Wednesday night board meeting. If it passes, the new mandatory course would be gradually implemented so that it can be rolled out across all high schools and teachers have time to undergo training. While one trustee praised the shift in focus away from Eurocentric content, concerns were raised that the proposed changes would push the classics to the sidelines and put traditional English education in second place.
But Isaiah Shafqat, the Indigenous student trustee who’s been the driving force behind the proposal, stressed the importance of revamping the course content.
“Education is the starting point for a lot of critical and transformative change,” said the Grade 12 student, who attends Kâpapâmahchakwêw—Wandering Spirit School.
“When we educate students on the lived realities and experiences of Indigenous Peoples is when we as a society can become more aware of the injustices that have taken place, and continue to take place, and that leads towards reconciliation and truth,” he told the Star.
Heck, you’re never going to learn to spell “Kâpapâmahchakwêw” by studying the Bard!
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Horse pucky!
Learning “the classics” is learning your heritage, you idiot Canucks! Nothing says you can’t add an elective course on indigenous writers, but coercion in studying “non-Eurocentric authors” is just plain stupid.
Just don’t know what’s gotten into people these days.
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Here is the “Senator”'s press release, “Bill to safeguard youth seeking protected health services clears Senate”.
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Surely this is part of Chaos GPT’s effort to destroy humanity.
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She must really hate JetBlue:
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Gotta stop eating all those Fritos.
Anheuser-Busch CEO Brendan Whitworth issued this fine example of the “non-apology apology” on 2023-04-14.
Let’s go Brendan! GPT-4 almost certainly could have done a better job.
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Who knew that “proud” is what we’re supposed to feel after drinking some buds? Has that become a synonym for crapulous? Am I missing something?
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Have to wonder what that real man of genius, Mr. Toilet Paper Roll Changer, thinks about the latest Bud Light campaign? Probably not that this Bud’s for him
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What ho! P. G. Wodehouse is latest to fall victim to the “sensitivity readers”.
Original passages in the comic novels have been purged or reworked for new editions issued by Penguin Random House.
Trigger warnings have also been added to revised editions telling would-be Wodehouse readers that his themes and characters may be “outdated”.
One warning states that the writer’s prose has been altered because it was judged to be “unacceptable” by Penguin, a publishing house which enlists the services of sensitivity readers.
The disclaimer printed on the opening pages of the 2023 reissue of Thank you, Jeeves states: “Please be aware that this book was published in the 1930s and contains language, themes and characterisations which you may find outdated.
“In the present edition we have sought to edit, minimally, words that we regard as unacceptable to present-day readers.”
The warning adds that the changes “do not affect the story” of the novel, which is the first full-length work to feature the famed comic creations of idle gentleman Bertie Wooster and his resourceful valet Reginald Jeeves, a pair portrayed by Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry in a 1990s ITV adaptation.
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It is understood that trustees of the writer’s literary estate control the bulk of the copyrights for Wodehouse, who lived from 1881 to 1975, and became noted as a prolific author of more than 90 books, a body of work which is often hailed as the funniest in the English language.
The story does not indicate whether the copyright holder approved of the changes or if their contract with the publisher allows the publisher to make them without approval. Some of the earlier examples of woke Bowdlerisation were approved by the estates of their authors. It’s going to be important for authors who will their copyrights to an estate, foundation, or trust include an unbreakable covenant that requires any publication of their work to be in its original form, perhaps with a poison pill providing that violation causes the work to be immediately placed in the public domain.
I wonder how many people are going to find themselves re-reading Wodehouse in these new editions and remarking, “Gee, they don’t seem as funny as when I first read them years ago.”
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Presumably the price of earlier unexpurgated editions will go up in the used book market, since it is quite likely that the kind of person who wants to read Wodehouse wants to read real Wodehouse rather than a contemporary knock-off. The impact on book prices would be an interesting project for an economics student to investigate.
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A chunk of them are out of copyright, at least in the US. Alas, it is never that simple when the government giraffes [1] stick their necks in:
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Which could be a way to avoid royalties, just change a few words without approval
Because today’s readers can only handle predigested woke pablum?
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This would be a provision in the contract between the executor of the literary estate and a publisher to whom the copyright was assigned. If the publisher modified the work without permission of the estate (or even better, modified it at all), rights would immediately revert to the estate which would be free to find another publisher. What I was suggesting was that the author also could specify that if the estate modified the work, it would be contributed to the public domain. This would prevent what happened, for example, to the Dr Seuss books when the Geisel estate authorised the publisher to remove some works from the market and modify others.
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(Click on image to add your vote to the poll.)
Is the wisdom of the crowd correct in this case? Click below to reveal spoiler.
Yes. On 2023-04-07, “Scientific” American published an opinion piece by one Eden McLean titled “Fascism’s History Offers Lessons about Today’s Attacks on Education” containing the quote and going on to say “Similarly, DeSantis’s calls to censor content under the pretense of returning lessons to ‘the facts’ ignore the findings of the people qualified to articulate those “facts” unless they support the desired narrative.”
But then, I suppose that since Scientific “American” has been German-owned since 1986, they speak with some authority on the subject of fascism.
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The Brecon Beacons are to be renamed over concerns that the word “beacon” is out of step with the fight against climate change.
The national park will now be officially referred to as the “Bannau Brycheiniog” National Park, granting the landscape a Welsh name, and steering clear of any associations with historical signal fires.
Officials said the symbol of a flaming beacon emitting carbon “does not fit with the ethos” of the national park as an eco-friendly organisation.
However, on Sunday night, a senior Conservative source attacked the decision as “pure virtue signalling” that would “do nothing to actually help the environment”.
The park aims to reach net zero in greenhouse gas emissions by 2035. Catherine Mealing-Jones, the chief executive of Brecon Beacons National Park, said: “We’re an environmental organisation. We’re trying to cut carbon and push to net zero. So, having a carbon burning beacon just isn’t a good look.”
There is no definitive historical evidence of warning beacons ever being lit on the peaks.
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