September 8, 2024

SENSORY DEPRIVATION: Study of older patients suggests 1 in 5 cases of dementia may be attributable to vision impairment. “Prior research has found that there may be a connection between hearing loss in aging people and the onset of dementia. In a new study, a team of health care researchers and geriatric specialists affiliated with Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the University of Michigan and the Duke University School of Medicine surveyed patient health care records and reported that approximately 1 in 5 cases of dementia could also be attributable to vision impairment in community-dwelling U.S. adults aged 71 years or older.”

Posted at 6:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

ANALYSIS: FALSE.

There was a time — from roughly 2017 through Jan. 20, 2021 — when Iran was too heavily sanctioned to get into this kind of mischief.

Posted at 5:16 pm by Stephen Green

DON’T GET COCKY: The New York Times Writes Eulogy for Kamala’s Momentum.

On top of that, despite Kamala branding her candidacy as a “new way forward,” Cohn says that Trump, not Kamala, is “seen as the change candidate in a nation that wants change.”

While President Biden’s departure from the race lifted the spirits of many Democrats, the national mood still isn’t great. An overwhelming majority of voters still say that the economy is poor and that the nation is heading in the wrong direction. And a clear majority — 61 percent — of voters say they want the next president to bring a “major change” from Mr. Biden, compared with 34 percent who want “minor change” and 3 percent who don’t want change.

In the poll, only 40% of likely voters view Kamala Harris as representing “change,” while 55% see her as offering “more of the same.” In contrast, 61% of voters perceive Donald Trump as representing “change,” with just 34% saying he embodies “more of the same.”

Cohn tries hard to give Democrats hope, but there’s no way to spin this poll as anything but bad news for Kamala Harris.

More from Jeffrey Blehar at NRO’s Corner: The New NYT/Siena Poll Hammers Home the Reality that Harris Is Running Out of Gas.

The most interesting number in the poll — the one that may tell the tale in November — came from NYT/Siena’s questions to likely voters: (1) Do you want a “major change” in this election? (2) Between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, which candidate “represented a major change” from Biden? On the first, over 60 percent said yes — a staggering number. And then in answer to question 2, only 25 percent of likely voters said Kamala Harris represented that change. Fifty-three percent said Trump did.

The ruse isn’t working. The media can try to continue selling Harris as a “fresh start,” but voters are smart enough not to buy it for a second — if for no other reason than that she utterly refuses to tell voters what she actually is for in any way they are allowed to query. Voters want change, and if the race remains where it is now, they are about get it in the strangest way possible: heading back to the future with Donald Trump.

If you want “major change,” why would you vote for the vice president who’s currently in power?

But yeah, don’t get cocky. As Glenn wrote in July, “If you’re not donating and volunteering to phone-bank and drive people to the polls, then you’re not in this race. No, commenting on blogs doesn’t count.”

Posted at 2:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

RICHARD FERNANDEZ: “Nothing is ever meant to get solved…What’s important the marching, shouting, controlling, the self importance and the power:”

And the reliance on DoorDash. Don’t forget about that:

Posted at 1:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

BERNIE SAYS THE QUIET PART OUT LOUD:

During the Obama era, Jim Geraghty was fond of saying that “All Barack Obama statements come with an expiration date. All of them.” Kamala never explicitly walks backs her earlier promises to ban everything (plastic straws, cars, fracking, the police, whatever is the subject of the left’s two minute hate du jour), so one can safely assume some or most of these are still her goals.

Posted at 1:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

IT WAS 50 YEARS AGO TODAY: Push the Button. Remembering Evel Knievel and his Snake River Canyon jump 50 years ago:

Imagine being in such a situation as Knievel was then, knowing that the X-2 would likely fail—it had failed its two tests—and going through with it anyway. He had created an epic around his canyon jump, built a whole career on it, really, and now it was time to face the deed. He’d even gotten Bob Arum, the boxing promoter managing the event, to agree to a ruse: posing at a press conference with a fake check for $6 million, supposedly Evel’s purse. (In reality, his guarantee was only $225,000, plus a cut from the gate, but the bluster worked again, both short-term and long: in its 2007 obituary for Knievel, the New York Times uses the $6 million figure.) If he cancelled now, he would spare his life but lose everything else. The expression “a fate worse than death” exists for a reason. Better to explode into eternity, with the consolation that all you have created will live on after you—now shrouded in the mystic—along with a slim alternative hope that, just maybe, something would happen and you would get lucky.

Something happened. He got lucky—so lucky as to be almost inconceivable. The X2 blasted off as intended in a roar of white steam, but the parachute deployed almost immediately, far earlier than it was supposed to. It’s generally been regarded as a system malfunction, though it can never be known for sure whether Evel himself might have prematurely pulled the latch to deploy the parachute.

Whatever happened inside the cockpit, the rocket, with its parachute out so early, soon slowed—helped by 20-mile-an-hour headwinds that blew it backward. A rarely seen angle from ABC’s postmortem coverage shows the Skycycle poised to clear the canyon when it slows up, dragged by the parachute; it drifts backward, back out over the canyon, and then begins a nosedive, its white steam now replaced by reddish smoke, like something out of the Batman television series of the late sixties. POOF! Except now Evel seemed headed for a SPLAT! as the rocket drifted downward to the canyon floor—and the Snake River.

He missed the river, Montville says, by a few feet. If he had landed there, he would have drowned; they wouldn’t have been able to get to him in time. Instead, the Skycycle, after colliding with the canyon wall on its way down, came to rest in some brush, out of view of the overhead cameras. Maybe the cushion on the Skycycle’s nose really was effective, though it’s hard to conceive of how the X-2, which looked about as sturdy as a discarded canister from an amusement park ride, could crash-land without breaking up and killing its passenger. Never mind: somehow, Knievel was soon visible again, riding on a rescue craft, waving to the crowds. He hadn’t achieved the goal, but he had gone through with his impossible try—and lived to tell. A life defined by dares had climaxed by carrying out the grimmest, gravest dare of all.

That wasn’t how the media saw it. They derided Snake River as a fizzle, and some who had paid to watch it called it a “rip off,” a term that already resonated with 1970s youth culture: Vietnam, Watergate, the end of many illusions. A rip-off it was definitively not. For one thing, the X-2 could launch only when Evel pressed a button in the cockpit that would release 5,000 pounds of steam pressure. He pressed it. Some may have been dissatisfied because the event offered so little pleasure for the eyes—and wallet, with $10 charged at the closed-circuit theaters and $25 at the canyon site itself. There was enough, though, if you knew where to look: like the stomach-grabbing moment when Evel is lowered into the cockpit, snug as a screw drilled into hardwood; his body settles into the tiny slot in a way that makes it seem like he can never get out.

Figuratively, he never could.

Knievel’s self-created myth, and desire to keep topping his own exploits led him to an impossible place. But for a while, he was a dominant part of American culture in a decade where the nation itself seemed determined to crash into a brick wall. In other words, he was perfect for the cynical decade of the 1970s.

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

IT WAS 20 YEARS AGO TODAY: Rathergate at 20.

When the film Truth premiered in 2015, only a little over ten years after the events depicted, film critics seemed to take the movie as a historical account. Based on Mary Mapes’s memoir Truth and Duty, the film was something else again. It prompted John and me to revisit the story in the Weekly Standard article “Rather shameful.” On Power Line I itemized “problems” with the film in “Lies of Truth.”

Today is the twentieth anniversary of the CBS News broadcast that we helped expose as a fraud in the run-up to the 2004 presidential election. I find that even those who vaguely recall the scandal know next to nothing about it. I like to say that we contributed to Dan Rather’s early retirement from CBS News. We foolishly thought that a corner had been turned.

However, Dan Rather lives! He is celebrated as a lion of truth, justice, and the American way. Earlier this year Netflix broadcast a documentary that is illustrative of the continuing descent in which we find ourselves. This is what I wrote about it on Power Line.

When Rathergate broke, even the then-Washington Post-owned Slate in September of 2004 described him as Dan Rather: The anchor as madman. And as Glenn wrote at the time, Rather’s implosion was a reminder not to trust what was being presented by old media (or by an media, for that matter):

The world of Big Media used to be a high-trust environment. You read something in the paper, or heard something from Dan Rather, and you figured it was probably true. You didn’t ask to hear all the background, because it wouldn’t fit in a newspaper story, much less in the highly truncated TV-news format anyway, and because you assumed that they had done the necessary legwork. (Had they? I’m not sure. It’s not clear whether standards have fallen since, or whether the curtain has simply been pulled open on the Mighty Oz. But they had names, and familiar faces, so you usually believed them even when you had your doubts.)

The Internet, on the other hand, is a low-trust environment. Ironically, that probably makes it more trustworthy.

That’s because, while arguments from authority are hard on the Internet, substantiating arguments is easy, thanks to the miracle of hyperlinks. And, where things aren’t linkable, you can post actual images. You can spell out your thinking, and you can back it up with lots of facts, which people then (thanks to Google, et al.) find it easy to check. And the links mean that you can do that without cluttering up your narrative too much, usually, something that’s impossible on TV and nearly so in a newspaper.

(This is actually a lot like the world lawyers live in — nobody trusts us enough to take our word for, well, much of anything, so we back things up with lots of footnotes, citations, and exhibits. Legal citation systems are even like a primitive form of hypertext, really, one that’s been around for six or eight hundred years. But I digress — except that this perhaps explains why so many lawyers take naturally to blogging).

You can also refine your arguments, updating — and even abandoning them — in realtime as new facts or arguments appear. It’s part of the deal.

This also means admitting when you’re wrong. And that’s another difference. When you’re a blogger, you present ideas and arguments, and see how they do. You have a reputation, and it matters, but the reputation is for playing it straight with the facts you present, not necessarily the conclusions you reach. And a big part of the reputation’s component involves being willing to admit you’re wrong when you present wrong facts, and to make a quick and prominent correction.

When you’re a news anchor, you’re not just putting your arguments on the line — you’re putting yourself on the line. Dan Rather has a problem with that. For journalists of his generation, admitting an error means admitting that you’ve violated people’s trust. For bloggers, admitting an error means you’ve missed something, and now you’re going to set it right.

What people in the legacy media need to ask themselves is, which approach is more likely to retain credibility over time? I think I know the answer. I think Dan Rather does, too.

Presumably, now that CNN has resurrected the television career of Brian Stelter, one of his favorite guests will return as well. Will Stelter’s new show still be called “Reliable Sources?”

Related: What Dan Rather paved the way for: VDH on A decade of untruth: Adding up the media’s lies about Trump and Biden.

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll

ROBERT SPENCER: Tucker’s Historian Wasn’t There to Talk History — He Was Making Policy Points for Today.

[Darryl] Cooper’s point is that the Israelis are like the Germans, launching a war without a plan and ending up committing genocide. This analogy outrageously ignores the fact that Hamas started the war with Israel by invading the country and murdering 1,200 Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023. Did the Soviet Union invade Germany before the German tanks rolled into Russia on June 22, 1941? No. In fact, Stalin was scrupulously keeping to the terms of his pact with Hitler, and studiously ignoring the many signs that the Germans were about to break that agreement.

Also, the Israelis are not committing genocide, either by accident or design. It is false that they had “no plan to care for the millions and millions of civilians and prisoners of war.” West Point Professor John Spencer says that Israel has, in fact, “created a new standard for urban warfare” In a March 25 article in Newsweek, Spencer stated that as of that date, “some 18,000 civilians have died in Gaza, a ratio of roughly 1 combatant to 1.5 civilians. Given Hamas’ likely inflation of the death count, the real figure could be closer to 1 to 1. Either way, the number would be historically low for modern urban warfare.”

Cooper ignores all that, as demonizing Israel is the entire point of his discussion with Tucker Carlson. Cooper wants us to think that Hitler was pushed reluctantly into war and ended up killing Jews out of grim necessity and even worse, a desire to be humane. Then he wants us to see Israel as the new Hitler, committing genocide not out of malice but out of an abject failure of planning, but either way, the point is clear: the U.S. should abandon Israel and stop aiding its allegedly imperialist and genocidal enterprise. By making Hitler seem more reasonable, Cooper attempts to make betraying an ally seem more reasonable as well. And Tucker Carlson, to his everlasting discredit, earnestly played along.

Tucker morphed into Pat Buchanan so slowly, I hardly even noticed.

Posted at 10:14 am by Ed Driscoll

LULA IS A CRIMINAL AND A DICTATOR: Brazilians Take to Streets to Protest Ban on Elon Musk’s X.

Tens of thousands of supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro took to the streets of Brazil’s biggest city Saturday on the country’s Independence Day to rally against the government and protest the Supreme Court’s ban of Elon Musk’s social-media platform X.

Scores of conservative politicians joined the demonstrations, many accusing the court of trying to censor the right-leaning opposition ahead of municipal elections on Oct. 6, when voters will pick mayors and local representatives in thousands of cities and towns.

The protest served as something of an indicator on whether Bolsonaro, whose term ended 20 months ago, still has the ability to draw support as the opposition prepares for the coming vote and future elections.

Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes banned X on Aug. 30 after a monthslong battle with Musk over the tech mogul’s refusal to take down accounts by conservatives that the judge accused of spreading hate speech and misinformation online.

As always, “spreading hate speech and disinformation” basically means “telling the truth about the regime.”

Posted at 9:55 am by Glenn Reynolds

WHAT DOES JOE BIDEN THINK ABOUT DICK CHENEY ENDORSING KAMALA? Let’s ask him!

Also, let’s ask him about the massive amount of plastic surgery he’s had done since this debate in 2008. And why isn’t he stuttering in this clip?

Posted at 8:14 am by Ed Driscoll

JEFFREY CARTER: Sovereign Wealth Funds: A Dumb Idea. “Trump and the Democrats have come up with the idea that America should have a sovereign wealth fund. Plenty of other countries have them. However, just because plenty of other countries have them doesn’t mean America should have one. It’s a dumb idea.”

Posted at 7:30 am by Glenn Reynolds