Live from Music Row, Monday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael to the studio for another edition of Crom’s Crommentary.
CROM CARMICHAEL:
Michael, in order for a person to have wisdom, they have to have understanding. In order for them to have understanding, they have to have knowledge, which means they have to have the facts. And that doesn’t mean that if you have the facts, you’ll necessarily have understanding, and therefore you’ll necessarily have wisdom.
But it does mean that if you don’t have the facts, then you’re not going to have understanding, and therefore you’re not going to have wisdom. There was an interesting long-form article in The Wall Street Journal written by Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, and Daniel Huttonlocker.
Now, everybody knows who Henry Kissinger is. Eric Schmidt used to be the head of Google or Alphabet. That’s the name of the company that owns Google. And Daniel Huttenlocher is a dean at MIT. And the article was about the intellectual revolution that is coming in with AI.
And they were talking specifically about ChatGPT. Now, we kind of made a joke about this because there was a dean at Vanderbilt who has been suspended because she wrote an email using ChatGPT. And then at the bottom of the email, it actually said, this came from ChatGPT, which means the email was generated by a computer, not by her.
But here’s what’s interesting. This article talks about what this form of AI means. And that is that you can ask a question. Now, if you do a DuckDuck Go or Google, Bing, or any of these other kinds of search engines, Bing now, but these other searches, historically, would give you a list of places to go to click on to get information.
They will give you paragraphs with the answer. In other words, they give you the final answer. But the final answer comes from a database that has billions and billions and billions of data points of information. And when they give you the answer, there are no citations.
So if you read a book and you want to know the footnotes, you want to know, where did that come from, you can look at the footnotes and you can see where it came from so that you can determine if you agree that the facts that the knowledge that you’re getting is actually true.
But with AI, there are no citations. And even the machines themselves don’t know exactly where they got what they’re putting in the paragraph, because sometimes it’s synthesized from a whole bunch of different facts. Well, that’s why this push by the Biden administration to control information is so incredibly dangerous.
And that is if AI is going to pull information from only databases that are approved by the government, then you’re going to get government-approved facts, which could very well be lies. But AI doesn’t care. It doesn’t have a moral compass. It doesn’t have a philosophy. It doesn’t study philosophy.
It just goes into its data and spits back, from its perspective, a completely neutral answer, which could very well be wrong. Well, we learned not that long ago that the Biden administration or the government paid Twitter. Actually, I don’t even think it was Biden. I think it was the Trump government, without Trump’s knowledge, was paying Twitter millions of dollars to suppress information that might have been the Biden administration before the midterms, but $3.4 million they paid to Twitter.
And we now know that the big tech firms suppressed information about the Hunter Biden computer. We know that the tech firms have suppressed information about the ineffectiveness, and there is now study after study coming out showing the ineffectiveness of masks to protect people from COVID.
And we now are seeing more and more information about the downside effects of vaccines. So the question is, in the future world of AI, where’s the information going to come from that AI pulls from to give answers?
That is an unknown. The answer is unknown. But it should be of enormous concern because, once again, if you start with a false premise, the likelihood of you coming to a good conclusion is almost nil.
Listen to today’s show highlights, including this Crommentary:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Man Using Phone” by NordWood Themes.
Live from Music Row, Friday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael to the studio for another edition of Crom’s Crommentary.
CROM CARMICHAEL:
Michael, there were three stories in three different publications that really caught my eye in they are they’re all related to our children. One of them is Stephen Moore’s column in BizPac Review, and the title of it is It’s Now or Never for School Choice Everywhere. But here’s what he points out and I’m going to give a few quotes here.
This story could bring tears to your eyes. In Baltimore, Maryland, there are 23 schools in which not one single student tested proficient math. Twenty-three schools and not one and Hogan, who was the Republican governor of Maryland, actually thinks that he’s qualified to be president.
And here he is, the governor of the biggest city, 23 schools. Not one single student is proficient in math. And by the way, Baltimore spends $21,000 a student, which is college tuition for some colleges. But if you think that’s bad, it can actually get worse.
In Illinois, according to the data from the Illinois State Board of Education, reviewed by WIREPOINTS, an investigative journalism center, there were 30 schools last year, 22 of which are in the Chicago area, that failed to lift even one student to grade level reading. Not even one student in 22 schools in the Chicago area.
Now, if you can’t read and you can’t do math, well, I take that back. If you can’t read or you can’t do math at any level that would be competitive with anything, your chances of being successful and happy in life are extremely remote. And these are institutions, by the way.
People talk about racism and whatnot, institutional racism, The 1619 Project, and whatnot. Well, these are government institutions where the data is known, and they won’t change anything. In fact, they promote their own people within the organizations because that’s all they care about.
And don’t blame the shortage of money in Chicago. Many of the Chicago schools are spending up to $30,000 a child. He concludes, though, he says, that there is a silver lining in that there are some states that are rapidly expanding school choice.
And he lists among those: Arizona, Florida, Iowa, and West Virginia. And then, he also mentions kind of as honorable mention, Texas, Tennessee, and Utah. So that’s good. But then you read in The Wall Street Journal. Headline: To Increase Equity, School Districts Are Eliminating Honor Classes.
What you have now in these liberal areas across the country, AP, Advanced Placement, where children in those classes have an opportunity to excel and learn more in order to have equity in the schools, these liberal school districts and school boards are eliminating the opportunity to actually excel.
And mediocre is the ultimate opportunity in these school districts. And my last one, Michael, is this is a headline from and this is Lee Smith. You know Lee Smith at The Epoch Times. Why is CDC Pushing the Vaccine on Children When Fauci Already Said it Failed?
And we talked the other day about how in Florida that the Vars database is showing a 4,400 percent increase in bad reactions to the vaccine. Four thousand four hundred percent. And yet our government continues to try to force its will on children where the risk of serious problems from COVID is next to none. The liberal institutions and their bureaucracies continue to do harm and they don’t care.
Listen to today’s show highlights, including this Crommentary:
– – –
Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Student” by Katerina Holmes.
Live from Music Row, Wednesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael in studio for another edition of Crom’s Crommentary.
CROM CARMICHAEL:
Michael, there was a great column in The Wall Street Journal Headline: The 1916 Project on Hulu Vindicates Capitalism. And what the article points out. If you think about what The 1619 Project alleges, it alleges certain things that are false, but it also says certain things that are actually factually true.
And if you think about what they claim to be factually true supports their side, it actually doesn’t. So let me give you a few examples that are cited in this article. I’m doing some quotes here throughout the commentary. The article starts by saying the series gives many examples of government intervention that undercuts free markets and property rights.
Eminent domain, racial redlining on mortgages, and government support and enforcement of union monopolies figure prominently, and this is in The 1619 Project’s Hulu documentary. The final episode opens by telling how the federal government forcibly evicted black residents of Harris Neck, Georgia during World War II to build a military base. The army gave residents three weeks to relocate before bulldozers moved in.
After the war, the government refused to let the former residents return. Violating their property rights is the opposite of market capitalism. And this was by the way, under FDR. The federal government took a whole bunch of black people in Georgia and just told them got three weeks to get out of there.
And then after the war was over, they wouldn’t give them their property back. That is the government doing that to black people, not the free market. The series also highlights the noxious role of the FHA in redlining. The FHA discriminates against minority neighborhoods by classifying them as too hazardous for lending.
The writers could have strengthened their case by citing Richard Rothstein’s 2017 book The Color of Law. And in that book, he points out that in the 1930s, once again, under FDR and the completely Democrat-controlled federal government, the FHA redlined and would not let private lenders with any federal support at all loan money into areas that were black neighborhoods.
Economic historians have long known about discrimination against white-only labor unions. Jimmy Carter’s Labor Secretary, Ray Marshall, a labor economist, chronicled the discrimination in his academic work. The Wagner Act of 1935, once again, FDR and the Democrats gave white unions bargaining power under federal law over unions that were mixed, black unions, or black-owned companies were discriminated against.
The series recognizes the discriminatory effects of FDR’s legislative agenda once again government, which depended on the Democrat machine that operated in the Jim Crow South. The narrator states that the New Deal represented the first affirmative action policies for white people. We couldn’t have said that better, is what the story says now.
But the point of all this is that even with all of this evidence showing that the true discrimination against black people is always institutional in the form of government policy that hurts black people, we can move forward to today and look at our educational system and how black children are forced to go to terrible schools, these are in Democrat control cities, usually in Democrat control states, and under federal policy. And under Biden, it’s getting worse by the day.
Listen to today’s show highlights, including this Crommentary:
– – –
Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Wall Street Journal Sign” by BrokenSphere. CC BY 3.0.
Live from Music Row, Monday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael to the studio for another edition of Crom’s Crommentary.
CROM CARMICHAEL:
Michael, at the very end of your segment with Representative Barrett, he gave the things that for him, why he’s here. Do we need to spend this money? If we do need to spend this money, how are we going to pay for it? Why are we even doing it in the first place?
Those are all extremely valid reasons for an elected person to go through that process before deciding to spend money. But that’s not how it’s done in Washington now. In fact, in Washington, it’s pretty much the opposite of that. And the train wreck in Ohio, for me, is kind of a metaphor for the Biden administration.
The whole thing. Myorkas apparently was on with Chris Wallace and couldn’t even define a secure border as what it is that’s secure. He just says what it’s not, but then he calls the border secure. But you look at how the Biden administration has handled this train wreck, and the answer is they ignored it for two weeks.
Now they’re trying to figure out what to do about it. All of the damage that could have been done has now already been done, apparently by decisions from the Biden administration officials who were on the scene. And Buttigieg is completely absent from the scene. He’s absent from the discussion.
And his answer is, there are three derailments a day. I can’t be responsible for every derailment. Well, there are derailments that don’t matter, and they’re derailments that are catastrophes. A catastrophe is a catastrophe, not just merely a derailment.
And so Buttigieg has no sense of what should be a great concern. I look at the national economy, and that’s why the metaphor on the train wreck is so appropriate. The automobile payments are a really good indicator of how the economy is and which direction the economy is headed in.
And the quintile of lower income, more credit risk, car payment, that population, when that starts to spike, it’s not a good sign for the economy. The rate of delinquency in the worst quintile of creditworthiness is spiking at a rate that we have literally never seen.
It’s even worse than the rate of ascent. And ascent is bad when you get up to a 9, 10, 11, or 12 percent delinquency when it moves from 5 percent delinquency to 9 percent delinquency, and it does it in a period of 120 days, that’s much faster than the rate of increase in 2009 and 2010.
And so the signs for our national economy, the cracks are beginning to appear. Now, here are a few other little tidbits that are really interesting. First of all, first-time mortgage applications are at a 40 or 50-year low. So people are not applying for mortgages because they can’t afford them.
This is from a friend of mine who sends this out every Friday and would-be homebuyers. 87 percent do not have the income to afford the average home in their market. 50 percent of Americans say their finances have gotten worse, versus a year ago, versus 35 percent who say they’ve gotten better.
New car prices in 2020, a new car costs $33,500. This past December, $47,000. And then the interest rates on a car payment have doubled. And so what you have is you have these terrible trends within the economy, especially for the bottom half of income earners, and that has to do with car payments and even if they’re not delinquent in the amount, they’re having to pay home payments.
Young people are getting killed by the Biden policies. But what does Biden care about? What does he care about? Because he says, this is what he cares about, diversity and inclusion within his own administration. All he talks about is that his administration is the most inclusive, the most diverse administration ever.
It’s not about competence. It’s not about policy. It’s about what you look like or what your essence is that determines whether or not you have a chance to be beneficial within the administration. So automatically, as soon as you’re hired, automatically, the bar of low expectations is already there because you’re not hired.
Because Biden says, I’m looking for the most competent people. He says I’m looking for the most unusual people. I’m looking for people who fit all these unusual categories. Remember that fellow that really enjoyed using his spare time stealing luggage at airports?
He was in a very, very important position, but he was picked because I’m not sure exactly how you describe his essence, but he was a weird guy, but he just liked to steal bags. And as far as the Biden administration was concerned, they didn’t care whether or not he was competent.
And so if we look at what we have in store for us economically and nationally over the next six to nine months as we go into this next election season, the data and the trends are just not good.
Listen to today’s show highlights, including this Crommentary:
– – –
Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Joe Biden” by The White House. Background Photo “East Palestine Train Wreck” by City of East Palestine, Ohio.
Live from Music Row, Friday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael to the studio for another edition of Crom’s Crommentary.
CROM CARMICHAEL:
Michael, the Biden administration has submitted its budget and the CBO, which I generally disregard because they are required by law to avoid dynamic scoring. And what dynamic scoring means is really simple. If the current tax rate is 50 percent and Congress were to increase the tax rate to 100 percent under the CBO requirements, they have to say that revenue will double.
Now, as Dr. Arthur Laffer has said, there are two tax rates that generate zero revenue. One is a zero tax rate, and the other is a 100 percent tax rate. And so if you don’t include dynamic scoring, you’re not going to get a good result. So it’s biased toward bigger government, but even then, the Biden budget calls for spending to increase to 25 percent of our economy.
To give you just a sense of things, from 1973 to 1922, that’s a 50-year period, the average was 21 percent. And so this is 3 percent more of the whole economy, which the whole economy at a $29 trillion economy, what you’re looking at is almost a trillion dollars a year of extra spending.
And that just won’t work. What I’m saying is, when you spend that much money at the federal level, all the wheels will come off. And we’re talking about here over the next 10 years. Now, just to try to give some perspective, in 1970, total Medicare spending, total Medicare spending was 7.5 billion, in 1970.
This figure has grown to almost 900 billion. It’s grown almost 100 times since it started 50 years ago. In 1966, Medicaid was just under $1 billion. That’s when the program started. Now it is over $650 billion. And the federal government is now trying to say that food should be part of Medicaid.
So the people who are on Medicaid can get free food under Medicaid. There’s no top on how much is spent once the benefit itself is defined. And so as we merrily go along talking about balloons and all kinds of issues that are important, but compared to Biden’s budget that he has given the Congress, anything else that we’re talking about right now for the next few years, this issue is the one that should be top of mind.
I see almost no reporting on it whatsoever by the media. They just have said he’s introduced his budget, and that’s about all they’ll tell you. And it does have in it, in his own budget, $2 trillion deficits as far as the eye can see. And that’s just unsustainable. Any reasonable person would say that’s unsustainable. But nobody in the media seems to be complaining.
Listen to today’s show highlights, including this interview:
– – –
Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Joe Biden” by President Joe Biden. Background Photo “” by U.S. Capitol. CC BY-SA 2.0.
