Archive for the 'Axis of Drivel — Adventures in Narrative Media' Category
The inmates are in charge of the asylum.
10th May 2021
Read it, if you care to.
Sorry, but the Meghan&Harry Show are not my go-to people for mental health advice.
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9th May 2021
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8th May 2021
The Other McCain peeks behind the curtain.
Ace of Spades points out that The Dispatch, “[f]ounded by conservative thought leaders Steve Hayes, Jonah Goldberg, and David French,” has been avidly defending Facebook’s ban of President Trump, without disclosing that The Dispatch “has a financial relationship” with Facebook.
In case you’ve forgotten, The Dispatch was launched in late 2019 and, by early 2020, had acquired something north of $6 million in investment capital from . . . Well, who, exactly? Good luck on finding news reports with that information, but suffice it to say that it came from rich people who hate Trump voters, and according to Ace, this includes Facebook.
What this means is that Facebook and other rich liberals are paying David French to smear you (and the other 70+ million Americans who voted for Donald Trump) as an extremely dangerous “white supremacist” who should be prohibited from using the Internet at all.
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8th May 2021
Scott Johnson at PowerLine.
The Star Tribune drew on the work of three reporters and its collaboration with “Frontline” (through its Local Journalism Initiative, funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting) for Andy Mannix’s story on the federal indictment of Derek Chauvin and his three former colleagues on federal civil rights charges in the death of George Floyd.
With all hands on deck, I thought the Star Tribune (and its collaborators) might find someone to comment on the redundancy of the federal prosecution or otherwise to provide the rationale, but no. The Star Tribune team finds nothing to see here.
Students of pattern recognition may detect a certain sameness to the theme of the quotes offered on the federal case (not to mention the ancient hatred for which both Keith Ellison and Al Sharpton have both fanned the flames).
Basically, Federal ‘civil rights’ laws give the government a way around the Constitutional bar against trying somebody twice for the same crime, as well as a second bite of the apple when the first trial doesn’t go the way they want it to. This would have certainly struck the Founders as the sort of tyranny against which the American Revolution was fought.
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7th May 2021
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7th May 2021
Severian looks at the ‘news’.
Y’all know, of course, that under Stolinism — which is Stalinism with late-stage dementia — there’s no truth in the news and no news in the truth. So with everything put out by The Media, you have to ask yourself, not “What part of this is true?,” but “Why did The Regime choose to publish this?” Everything in The Media is a worked shoot, as they say in rasslin’, an attempt to set an agenda. So you must always ask yourself, what agenda are they setting up?
Here’s an example. It’s from a sports site called “Outkick the Coverage” — recently acquired by Fox Media, which should be your first clue — but it cites reports from The New York Times and “The Daily Wire”… which is Ben Shapiro’s outfit, in case you had any doubts that this is a grift, but the important thing for our purposes is that “The Daily Wire” sells itself as not just “conservative,” but “edgy.” In other words, this must be a serious problem, if the Old Gray Lady of respectable bourgeois Leftism and the most radical of rightwingers agree it’s a problem!!
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6th May 2021
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6th May 2021
Read it.
A single mistake in journalism can be forgiven. Perhaps the story was based on faulty information from a bad source and rushed through without a thorough vetting — probably due to a desire to be first to report — and then transparently corrected for the audience. But if the same mistake is repeated, over and over again, by the same news outlets who have taken leave of their basic journalistic duties, then alternative motives have to be explored. Something nefarious on behalf of these organizations and their sources may be afoot.
Since Joe Biden’s election, there have been three major instances of journalists publishing a story, watching it trend for days on social media and be discussed on cable news, only for it to be partially or completely retracted later. Damage done. The latest case involved Rudy Giuliani allegedly being warned by FBI sources that he was briefed on being a target for Russian intelligence campaigns. Like other similar stories it followed a particular pattern — story breaks, other news outlets ‘confirm’ story with anonymous sources, story falls apart, outlets suffer reputational damage. NBC News, the Washington Post and the New York Times were the perpetrators this time (as they so often are).
They don’t consider it a mistake, any nore than Goebbels considered any of his lies a mistake, They are pushing a political agenda, which means eyeballs and clicks, and they know (as many do not) that everybody reads the news but nobody reads ‘corrections’ except white supremacists.
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5th May 2021
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4th May 2021
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4th May 2021
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Well, he’s done more for the Republican party, and the people of the U.S., than Meghan McCain ever did.
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3rd May 2021
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2nd May 2021
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1st May 2021
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30th April 2021
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30th April 2021
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Minutes before Derek Chauvin was convicted on all three counts of murder and manslaughter, Ma’Khia Bryant, a black teenage girl in Columbus, Ohio, was shot dead by police. Almost immediately, enraged protestors gathered outside police headquarters. “Say Her Name!” they chanted. The New York Times reported that the girl’s grieving mother, Paula Bryant, had told WBNS that her daughter was “a very loving, peaceful little girl.”
In an attempt to correct a tendentious version of events immediately promoted by civil rights attorney Ben Crump (and uncritically repeated by the Times) in which the young victim was described as unarmed, the Columbus police department took the unusual step of releasing the officer’s body-worn camera video the same day. During a briefing at which the footage was exhibited for the press, police played the video twice, the second time in slow motion—because events on the ground escalated with such rapidity that it’s the only way to follow what happened.
The police officer gets out of his squad car and approaches a group of people milling about in the driveway in front of a suburban home. Amid much yelling and cross-talk, Bryant suddenly lunges at a girl, knocking her to the ground, before turning on another dressed in pink and charging at her with a knife in her fist. The officer’s repeated shouts of “Get down!” are ignored and he shoots Bryant four times as she swings the blade at her intended victim. Only 10 seconds elapse between the moment the officer first asks “What’s goin’ on?” as he approaches the scene and the fourth shot. The shooting required split-second decision-making to save the girl in pink from being stabbed.
I’m thinking never.
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30th April 2021
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Last night, Joe Biden repeated the absurd claim that, according go our intelligence agencies, white supremacists are our number one terrorist threat. Let me know when white supremacists burn down a city or two; until then, I am going with Antifa.
Concur.
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29th April 2021
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29th April 2021
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Lest we forget, it was less than a year ago that hundreds of thousands of unvaccinated people poured into the streets after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. The protests lasted all summer long and caused something of a credibility crisis for public health officials, who largely refused to condemn the gatherings even as they continued to insist that other crowded outdoor events including church services, sporting events, funerals and even protests for other causes were too dangerous to be permitted. Thirteen-hundred public health experts signed a letter declaring their support for the Black Lives Matter protests and only the Black Lives Matter protests: ‘We do not condemn these gatherings as risky for COVID-19 transmission,’ they wrote.
Crucially, this was all happening at a moment when social-distance shaming had become America’s favorite pastime. Hey, it beats baseball. People freaked out on a weekly basis over photos purporting to show dangerously crowded parks, playgrounds, beaches, or pools. One July gathering at Missouri’s Lake of the Ozarks was described in headlines (erroneously and without evidence) as ‘a star-spangled super-spreader event’. Government officials in New York vowed to pull people out of the water at Coney Island; a man dressed as the Grim Reaper shamed beachgoers in Florida to widespread acclaim.
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29th April 2021
The Antiplanner reports.
“A new MIT study found that not only do rideshares increase congestion, but they also made traffic jams longer, led to a significant decline in people taking public transit, and haven’t really impacted car ownership,” reports Gizmodo. As noted here previously, transit advocates blame ride hailing for all sorts of problems in order to justify taxes and other restrictions to limit competition.
The new study from MIT is frankly unpersuasive. First of all, it says very little about the methodology used to come up with its results: page 1 of the study is an introduction and page 2 immediately begins to present the results. It appears the writers compared data in 44 urban areas before and after the introduction of ride hailing into those areas between 2012 and 2016.
Second, the writers appear to have made no effort to correct for or even consider any other variables. Although Uber began operating in San Francisco in 2010, ride hailing didn’t really begin growing until 2014. But the other thing that happened in 2014 was a huge drop in gasoline prices — prices fell by 50 percent in some areas. This isn’t even mentioned in the paper even though that drop could have most of the same effects the paper attributes to ride hailing.
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28th April 2021
Read it.
Iceberg A68a has been on a slow journey toward cataclysm.
The mass broke from the Antarctic peninsula’s Larsen C ice shelf in July 2017 and headed slowly for the open ocean, sliding through the water for over two years until it hit the powerful Antarctic Circumpolar Current circling the southernmost continent.
From Wikipedia:
By 16 April 2021 no significant fragments remained.
Your Climate Change at work.
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28th April 2021
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28th April 2021
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When Democrats get caught in a political pickle, they can count on the borrowed authority of “journalists” and “fact-checkers” to bail them out. Take failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams’ pressuring corporations to put a financial squeeze on Georgia.
She began a March 31 op-ed in USA Today by writing: “Boycotts work. The focused power of No, trained on corporate actors used to being told Yes, can yield transformative results. As a Black person, a Southerner, an American, I respect and defend the right to boycott—and the advancement of civil rights has relied heavily on economic boycotts.”
On April 2, Major League Baseball announced it was yanking the All-Star Game out of Atlanta, and activists such as Abrams suddenly wanted to sound less like boycott boosters.
Twitter’s sidebar came to the rescue on April 22. One of its article headlines read, “Stacey Abrams encouraged Americans to invest in Georgia-based businesses after new voter laws were passed, according to journalists and fact-checkers.” That sounds contrary to the spirit of what Abrams wrote.
The world would be a better place were there not so many fat ugly black women stirring up hate & discontent.
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28th April 2021
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Ahead of President Biden’s address to Congress tomorrow, NBC Nightly News spent part of its Tuesday newscast gaslighting the American people about the President’s foreign policy successes in his first 100 days and trying to memory hole former President Trump’s seismic moves around the globe. At one point, they pushed the lie that Trump had never confronted Russia in any way and then lashed out at Israel while protecting Iran.
Yeah, apparently all those sanctions were a covert mash note.
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27th April 2021
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27th April 2021
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And people who prefer mea,t throwing up.
You will note that nobody is trying to develop meat-based fake plants.
Humanity evolved to eat meat as well as plants. Vegetarians are science-deniers.
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27th April 2021
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It’s the constitutional duty of the Census Bureau to track the population growth and shifts between the states and appropriate House seats accordingly, which feeds into the Electoral College calculation (House seats plus Senate seats). But according to the suggestions of CNN Prime Time host Chris “Fredo” Cuomo and fellow CNN host Michael Smerconish, the bureau exclusively helps Republicans and increases their disproportionate representation in U.S. politics.
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26th April 2021
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There are days when you wonder whether the New York Times editorial staff is working overtime to amuse us, or whether it comes naturally. They’re keeping alive the stale old sixties cliche, “Any country that can land a man on the moon can solve. . .” Of course, it is the perfect cliche for a president who hails from liberalism’s mesozoic era.
I’ll just point out that nobody is expending any effort to create meat-based fake plants.
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25th April 2021
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24th April 2021
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24th April 2021
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Two different topics, but the same problem: 1. There is no crisis at the border. 2. And “authorities say (Ma’Khia Bryant) was wielding a knife.”
Thus reported, successively, Politico and NBC News produced two vivid examples of exactly why millions of Americans no longer trust the mainstream liberal media.
The first example comes from Politico, caught in the act by The Washington Examiner with this headlined story: “Politico forbids ‘crisis’ when describing border surge, despite Biden’s own use.”
One of the advantages of having the Internet is that it has never been easier for anyone who goes to a minimal amount of effort to find out the truth that there is a Media Narrative, that said Narrative supports a partisan political agenda, and that said political agenda is Not Your Friend if you are one of the Dirt People.
The disadvantage is that it allows lazy people to become Low Information Voters and assist each other in doing the Lemming Leap off the cliff, screaming ‘No, I didn’t want that!’ all the way down.
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24th April 2021
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thics. Objectivity. These things are not high priorities for CBS. One continuing example of that is Gayle King, a Democratic donor and cheerleader for her preferred political party. The fact that she co-hosts CBS This Morning and interviews powerful politicians, as well as reports on politics, doesn’t seem like a problem for the network. Four years ago this week that fact came into view, yet again. It turns out that King had been vacationing with the Obamas.
See the image at above right of the three on Hollywood producer David Geffen’s yacht.
CBS had no comment on the “ethical quandaries” of King vacationing with the Democratic power couple. When finally asked about it on April 21, 2017 by Access Hollywood, the co-host ridiculously insisted, “My vacations are not political and so I went on vacation with a great group of people and, to me, that’s not a political statement.”
A black ‘journalist’ goes on vacation with The Magic Negro & Woke Wife. No, not political at all….
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23rd April 2021
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23rd April 2021
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Like being called ugly by a pond full of frogs.
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23rd April 2021
America’s biggest environmentalists and their private planes
Why the World Can’t Trust America on Climate (New York Magazine)
Changes to giant ocean eddies could have ‘devastating effects’ globally (The Guardian)
Climate change has altered the Earth’s tilt
“Agricultural Disaster” – Frost Blast Decimates French Vineyards, May Slash Total Wine Output By Third
John Kerry Unveils America’s Latest War… On Carbon Dioxide Put tape over his mouth. That will lower carbon dioxide production by a bunch.
Biden’s Climate Denialism
How Global Warming Isn’t
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22nd April 2021
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22nd April 2021
Paul Graham lectures you on morality.
When intellectuals talk about the death penalty, they talk about things like whether it’s permissible for the state to take someone’s life, whether the death penalty acts as a deterrent, and whether more death sentences are given to some groups than others. But in practice the debate about the death penalty is not about whether it’s ok to kill murderers. It’s about whether it’s ok to kill innocent people, because at least 4% of people on death row are innocent.
Or, in other words, 96& of people on death row are guilty.
Far from being rare, wrongful murder convictions are very common.
This is a use of ‘very common’ with which I am unfamiliar. Since when is 4% ‘very common’? At the very least, ‘very common’ ought to mean ‘over 50%’.
This circus of incompetence and dishonesty is the real issue with the death penalty. We don’t even reach the point where theoretical questions about the moral justification or effectiveness of capital punishment start to matter, because so many of the people sentenced to death are actually innocent. Whatever it means in theory, in practice capital punishment means killing innocent people.
Yes, it does, occasionally. Totally absent from this analysis, however, is the number of ‘innocent people’ who die because murderers are put back into circulation. Surely that matters, if we’re counting up ‘innocent people’?
This is the great flaw in all of the bleeding-heart hand-wringing about ‘killing innocent people’. No system is error-proof. But a 4% error rate would be miraculous in any other field of human endeavor. The instrumental justification for the death penalty is that when a murderer is made dead, he (or she) doesn’t go on to murder again. So the lack of potential future victims is certainly a relevant piece of information.
There is a case to be made for eliminating the death penalty, but this isn’t one of them.
I had always respected Paul Graham’s insights, until now. But apparently he’s Just Another Woke Weenie.
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22nd April 2021
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Here’s the most read “news” story in the Washington Post right now, another example of upside-down article construction in which the facts are withheld until long after most readers have moved on.
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21st April 2021
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20th April 2021
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19th April 2021
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If you’re the sort of person who buys and reads books about human behavior, then it is likely you have recently encountered an exciting, counterintuitive new psychological idea that seems as if it could help solve a pressing societal problem like educational inequality, race relations, or misogyny. Maybe you came across it in a TED Talk. Or, if not there, in an op-ed or blog post or book.
It is, after all, a golden age for popular behavioral science. As the University of Virginia law professor Gregory Mitchell, a keen critic and observer of the field, wrote in 2017, ‘With press releases from journals and universities feeding a content-hungry media, publishing houses looking for the next Gladwellian bestseller, governments embracing behavioral science, and courts increasingly open to evidence from social scientists, psychologists have more opportunities than ever to educate the public on what they have learned about why people behave as they do.’
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19th April 2021
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Bias? What bias?
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19th April 2021
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President Joe Biden waited longer to hold his first press conference than any other president in the past 100 years. After waiting 64 days, the media had a chance on March 25 to ask the president about his agenda.
Tim Murtaugh, communications director for President Donald Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign, was disappointed by what he saw.
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19th April 2021
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On Friday’s NBC Nightly News, they focused on recent political violence against the Capitol Police, but they were obviously more interesting in tagging the “far right” for recent violence, and not the “far left.” When the April 2 Capitol cop killing came up, the assailant Noah Green was not named, and his love for Louis Farrakhan was also spiked.
Lester Holt touted “a milestone today in the investigation of the deadly riot at the US Capitol, the first guilty plea.” He turned to NBC Justice Department correspondent Pete Williams, and they were naming names and applying labels.
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18th April 2021
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18th April 2021
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Notice that there is no mention of the race of either the shooter or the victims.
Under the Coulter Rule, this suggests that the shooter, and maybe he victims, are black.
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17th April 2021
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16th April 2021
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15th April 2021
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15th April 2021
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If you have the misfortune to follow the dreary climate change business, you’ll know that one of the fine points is which long-term emissions forecast to plug into your model. Never mind the accuracy of the models for now—even a good model is vulnerable to the age-old GIGO problem—”garbage in, garbage out.” In climate model forecasting, if you have an absurd emissions forecast, you’ll get absurd (but headline-grabbing) results.
People who follow this subject have long known that the emissions forecast that generates most of the scary headlines of the last few years is known as RCP 8.5 (short for “Representative Concentration Pathways”—never use plain language when you can use forbidding jargon), and most experts agree that its very high emissions forecast is bunk.
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