19th October 2022
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19th October 2022
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18th October 2022
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18th October 2022
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17th October 2022
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16th October 2022
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15th October 2022
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15th October 2022
NPR.
The headline tells you everything you need to know about the Narrative media attitude toward facts.
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14th October 2022
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14th October 2022
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13th October 2022
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13th October 2022
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13th October 2022
Read it.
Look! Up in the sky: it’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a woke bisexual guy in tights! Except he’s not going to be there much longer. According toBrittany Bernstein at National Review Online, DC Comics announced at the New York Comic Con that it’s canceling Superman: Son of Kal-El because it turned out nobody was really interested in an excruciatingly woke comic book. Go figure. Don’t ask me how comic book fans can pass up riveting story lines about Clark and Lois’s light-in-the-tights teenage son fighting climate change and other progressive bugaboos, but the series was less popular than CNN+. “The fourth issue of the series sold just 37,500 copies, earning it an abysmal 55th place in October 2021 sales,” Bernstein reported. So what the hell was DC thinking when it dreamed up this dud? According to the series author, “The idea of replacing Clark Kent with another straight white savior felt like a missed opportunity.” So this was an expensive exercise in virtue signaling. Lot of that going around.
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12th October 2022
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12th October 2022
Read it.
These banner ads have become very lucrative for the NGO that collects the money — the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit based in San Francisco. Every year the NGO responsible for the fundraising adds tens of millions of dollars to its war chest. After a decade of professional fund-raising, it has now amassed $400 million of cash as of March. It created an endowment, managed by the Tides Foundation, which now holds well over $100 million of that. The Foundation wanted to hit that figure in ten years, but found it had sailed past it in just five. In 2021, the appeals raised a total of $162 million, a 50% year-on-year increase. Yet the running costs of Wikipedia are a tiny fraction of the amount raised each year.
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11th October 2022
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11th October 2022
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10th October 2022
Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #523
Work therapy: can a climate campaigner help a coworking space go green? (The Guardian)
‘Steam loops’ under many cities could be a climate change solution (NPR) Uh-huh. The two I know about run on burning coal.
A small Fairbanks company wants to build Alaska’s biggest wind farms (Anchorage Daily News) Using the same technology as what crapped out during the February Freeze in Texas? What a brilliant idea!
“Jaw-Dropping” New Clues to Future Ice Sheet Change From Ancient Ice Age Valleys (SciTechDaily)
Fed Up British Drivers Unglue Climate Protestors the Hard Way
New Push to De-Platform Climate Dissent Fueled by JunkScience Tweets
Cities Need More Native Bees—Lots and Lots of Them (Wired ‘Science’) Apparently urban bees are needed for urban gardens, and urban gardens are needed so that we ALL DON’T DIE from global warming.
Hurricane Hype, Lies, Censorship – and Reality
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10th October 2022
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10th October 2022
Steve Sailer points and laughs.
Ever since the first half of 2020, when pandemic fears and the racial reckoning led to the releasing of prisoners and the decline of policing, dangerous lunatics have been running amok. This has led to calls to finally rebuild the asylum system that long ago removed vicious crazy men from the streets.
One of the many reformers to come out of Massachusetts in the 1840s was Dorothea Dix. She made her cause better treatment of lunatics, whose triumph led to the construction of publicly-funded insane asylums, typically in restful surroundings.
For example, Los Angeles’s mentally ill were served by the Camarillo State Mental Hospital in a serene location in a superb climate a few miles from the Pacific. After his 1946 drug freakout led to him spending six months at Camarillo, Charlie Parker did not at all appreciate his record company naming his comeback track “Relaxin’ at Camarillo.” But still …
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9th October 2022
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8th October 2022
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8th October 2022
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8th October 2022
Read it.
A specter haunts the Western world today and it is not that of fascism, semi- or otherwise, as President Biden among others demagogically claims. Fascism is a circumscribed historical phenomenon, most distinctive to Italy in the period 1922 to 1945. It combined authoritarianism marked by the cult of the Duce or leader, radical nationalism and neo-pagan idolatry, militarism, and economic corporatism. In blustery speeches in the late 1920s, Benito Mussolini proclaimed the necessity of a “totalitarian” party-state, although in practice he was forced to tolerate both the existence of the Italian monarchy and a Catholic Church under Pope Pius XI (the Roman pontiff from 1922 until 1939) that vigorously challenged the totalitarian pretensions of the fascist state.
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7th October 2022
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7th October 2022
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7th October 2022
Axios.
Writers for a D.C.-based media operation run by prominent Democratic operatives are behind a sprawling network of ostensible local media outlets churning out Democrat-aligned news content in midterm battleground states, Axios has learned.
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6th October 2022
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6th October 2022
Read it.
In earlier times, a journalist’s biography might have read, “After a stint in the Army, he began his career by covering local events for a small-town newspaper. Later, he made a name for himself covering the civil rights movement before being hired as a national correspondent.” Nowadays, the bio for most journalists is, “Formerly worked in the communications office of (Democratic Politician) or (Left-Wing Activist Group).”
Journalists are increasingly drawn from the ranks of the wealthiest and most privileged. Seriously, there’s no way someone in the middle or working class could work an unpaid media internship in DC or New York while they wait for the break they won’t get because their family has no powerful connections. Twitter ne’er-do-well “Fear the Floof” dug into the backgrounds of some of these Trustafarian media operatives, and got his account suspended for his troubles.
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5th October 2022
The Nord Stream pipelines have stopped leaking. But the methane emitted broke records (NPR) What ‘records’? Is somebody having a competition in re gas leaks?
Utility climate pledges amount to ‘greenwashing,’ report says (Washington Post) A report! That proves it!
China’s climate push could spawn new global players, even if Beijing falls short on its pledge (CNBC)
Environment sector has failed to become more inclusive, study suggests (The Guardian) Perhaps because the only people who give a shit about ‘climate change’ are rich white liberals.
Napa Valley’s vineyards are in “climate crisis,” winemaker says (Marketplace) Oh, and send us money.
Energy giants return to fossil fuels like coal as Europe braces for winter (CNBC)
Oil and gas methane emissions could be solved this decade, experts say (Reuters)
Meet the California farmers awash in Colorado River water, even in a drought (NPR)
World Bank criticised over climate crisis spending (The Guardian)
The Pacific Is Destined to Vanish as Earth’s Continents Meld Into a New Supercontinent (ScienceAlert)
Hope amid climate chaos: ‘We are in a race between Armageddon and awesome’ (The Guardian)
California’s three-year drought continues with no relief in sight (The Guardian)
‘This is part of our world now’: can TV shows adequately reflect the climate crisis? (The Guardian)
Saving the Environment from Environmentalists
Florida Leaders Rejected Major Climate Laws. Now They’re Seeking Storm Aid. (N.Y. Times) There is, of course, no incongruity here, but the Times wants you to think that there is. That’s what Narrative is all about. (Ghoulish NYT Suggests Florida Deserves Hurricanes for Not Supporting Climate Agenda)
Exploding Electric Bicycles
Shellenberger: Media Is Lying About Climate & Hurricanes
The market for property insurance vs. climate change
Sweden Braces For A Winter Of Power Shortages
The Last 12,000 Years Show a More Complex Climate History Than Previously Thought
Waxworm’s spit shows promise in puncturing plastic pollution
More Bad News For Europe: Forecasters Predict Colder Winter, Less Renewable Power
A Few Graphs Say It All for Weather-Dependent “Renewables”
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5th October 2022
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4th October 2022
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3rd October 2022
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2nd October 2022
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2nd October 2022
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2nd October 2022
Read it.
Timed to extract maximum donations from liberal Jews around the High Holy Days, PBS is airing “The U.S. and the Holocaust” not to set the record straight, but to cover it up yet again by whitewashing the FDR administration and exploiting the Holocaust to call for open borders.
It’s all about the Benjamins.
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1st October 2022
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30th September 2022
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30th September 2022
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30th September 2022
Read it.
Stop hating your readers.
One of the silliest ideas to infect mainstream journalism in recent years is the notion that when journalists produce work about a bad person, they must signpost that work, seemingly every moment, with explicit indicators that that person is bad. You need to hold readers’ hands tightly, because they are moral idiots, and the moment your grip slips, they’ll race off and return in a Klansman’s hood or something.
This is now a thoroughly mainstream view in journalism, and it is applied to coverage not just to actual fascists, but to an ever-growing variety of right-wing (or otherwise disfavored) figures.
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29th September 2022
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29th September 2022
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28th September 2022
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28th September 2022
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28th September 2022
Read it.
America’s corporate press is out of control. It claims to be an institution essential to successful self-government—and it would in fact be so, if it did its job responsibly. But all too often the American press seeks not to facilitate democratic deliberation by informing the voters but instead to shape political outcomes by dealing in hysteria and misinformation. More specifically, the corporate media routinely seeks to pull the nation’s politics leftward by using defamation to render prominent figures on the right odious to the public.
The case of Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz is only the most recent example. For much of the last two years, Gaetz has been the target of “news” stories, based on anonymous sources, that he was under investigation by the Department of Justice for sex trafficking. Now, we are told, career prosecutors are recommending against charges because of concerns about the credibility of the witnesses. This is another version of the same treatment given to Donald Trump before and during his presidency. For years Trump was subjected to innumerable breathless stories that he had “colluded” with Russia to steal the presidency. But when the investigation was over it turned out that Trump was guilty of no such thing.
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28th September 2022
Read it.
The partisans running the House January 6 Committee would like you to believe there’s a controversy over an ex-Republican coming out with his own “unauthorized” January 6 book the day before their last scheduled committee hearing. Would your average cynical reporter buy this “going rogue” story line? Or does it look conveniently designed to put the Pelosi-picked panel back in the headlines?
Liberal media outlets lose all the cynicism when the Democrats are in power. CBS’s 60 Minutes pushed out one of those “bombshell” interviews with Denver Riggleman, the former GOP congressman from Virginia who worked on the committee at Liz Cheney’s urging. CNN and MSNBC were pushing this story in heavy rotation. Their appetite for the January 6 narrative is ravenous.
The 60 Minutes tick-tock was predictably partisan on September 25. A week after Scott Pelley’s soft-soap interview with President Biden, Pelley conducted another soft-soap interview with Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Even there, January 6 came up, as Pelley asked Blinken “Given January 6th, given the fabricated controversy over the election results, do you find that countries around the world are worried about the stability of the United States?”
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27th September 2022
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27th September 2022
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26th September 2022
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