FREE ENQUIRY AND PURSUIT OF TRUTH SHOULD HAVE NO WALLS: When science’s walls start crumbling down.
October 4, 2024
HE’S JUST HOPING WE’LL FORGET HIS BEHAVIOR WHEN THE HELICOPTERS FLY: Zuckerberg Says He Regrets Censorship, So Why Is Meta Still Trying to Interfere With the Election?
In minecraft.
OY, DO YOU ‘AVE A LICENSE TO SAVE THOSE LIVES? A NOTAM has been issued by the FAA that won’t allow anyone not approved by the state to fly aid missions.
they want us to die. They’re not even hiding it.
October 3, 2024
I REMEMBER WHEN THEY PITCHED KEIR STARMER AS THE CAUTIOUS MODERATE: No Time Like the Present for the UK to Give Away *gulp* Diego Garcia.
GRAB THAT CASH WITH BOTH HANDS AND MAKE A STASH: Pink Floyd Sells Music Rights to Sony for $400 Million.
Sony has spent more than a billion dollars on catalogs from Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan and Queen’s non-North American rights in the past few years (with backing from investment firms like Eldridge Industries), and has never officially comment on the deals. Variety and others reported just two weeks ago that the Pink Floyd transaction was nearing closure.
The catalog had been in play for several years with a reported asking price of $500 million, and the group was close to a deal in 2022, but the bitter infighting between the band’s members — primarily over main songwriter Roger Waters’ controversial political statements against Israel and Ukraine, and in favor of Russia — have complicated the deal enormously and scared off a number of suitors. There seems little question that Waters’ incendiary comments, which have made him a pariah from all but his biggest fans and cost him his solo record deal, devalued the catalog.
Billboard asks: Could the Floyd’s publishing rights be up next? “While Luminate doesn’t track global album sales, Pink Floyd’s on-demand global streams averaged 2.37 billion over the last three years. Consequently, if the group owns all of its publishing, Billboard estimates that the band’s recorded masters bring in about $11 million in publishing royalties annually. If the band eventually decides to sell and can achieve a 20-times multiple — the going rate for superstar songwriters — it could bring in another $200 million-plus for the band’s songwriters. In general, music publishing asset trade at a higher multiple than recorded music assets, although the latter is catching up on that front.”
UPDATE: David Gilmour Will “Absolutely Not” Perform with Roger Waters Again. “I tend to steer clear of people who actively support genocidal and autocratic dictators.” “Gilmour and Waters have been at odds for decades. In 2023 alone, Gilmour blasted Waters as a ‘misogynistic, antisemitic, Putin apologist’ and shared a documentary detailing Waters’ alleged antisemitism. The paid last shared the stage together during Roger Waters’ ‘The Wall’ tour in 2011.”
TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! Joe Biden inadvertently writes the epitaph for his administration:
Reporter: “What do the states in the storm zone need — after what you saw today?”
Biden: “Oh, storm zone? I didn’t know which storm you’re talking about"
Holy crappic.twitter.com/qdXRBzcr68
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) October 4, 2024
NOTHING THAT DAMAGING TO THE DEMOCRATS CAN BE TOLERATED: Dockworkers strike suspended, tentative agreement includes 62% pay raise over 6 years. “The tentative agreement does not resolve differences between the union and shipping companies over the use of automated machinery, sources said. That will be a key focus of negotiations between both sides from now until January 15.” Which is conveniently after the election.
UPDATE: A friend messages: “Haha, the Dems got to them. And all this time the unions thought they were telling the Dems what to do. I bet most longshoremen are Trumpy, tho.”
Safe bet.
OPEN THREAD: Disport yourselves in the comments.
SOMEBODY SET UP US THE BOMB: Jennifer Aniston Addresses Rumors She’s Wooing Obama And Rubs Fish Sperm On Face.
—Headline, the Huffington Post, today.
WHEN PEOPLE TELL YOU WHO THEY ARE, BELIEVE THEM: Campus Pro-Hamas Events on October 7: What Should be Done?
The groups holding these events are quite openly and publicly telling you who they are and what they believe in. To quote Mandel once more, their “leaders don’t want to wait a day to hold the rally because while any other day could mark the war, no other day could mark the murder and mayhem of Oct. 7. The day is important to them because the massacre of Jews is important to them.” And that’s important information to have.
THE NEW SPACE RACE: Commercial space’s critical role in the race to outpace adversaries.
I disagree with Navarro’s premise here, but so what if she’s right? I’m so old, I can remember last month, where Kamala’s “code-switching” was absolutely endorsed by all of the best people on the left. But then, we are talking the “It’s different when we do it” party here.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Why CNN is changing up its polling for 2024.
CNN polling director Agiesta, who in May completed a one-year term as AAPOR president, declined to be interviewed for this article.
But in a CNN-sponsored discussion before the 2022 midterm elections, Agiesta addressed the question of whether polls are accurate, saying, “I would like to think that they are.”
She said pollsters had been “taking lots and lots of steps to try to correct for the errors that we have seen in past cycles,” adding: “I mean, obviously, the problems that polling had in 2016 and in 2020 were extremely well publicized. Everybody’s aware that there was an understatement of the Republican support in a lot of polling in both of those election cycles.”
Over her right shoulder, on display in the office where she spoke, was a desktop sign that bore this emphatic pronouncement, in capital letters: “ACCURACY FIRST!”
Given that she works for CNN, I’m sure she meant that strictly ironically.
FALLS AND DEMENTIA: “The findings from a team of researchers in the US do not prove falls contribute to dementia (although this can’t yet be ruled out either), but they do suggest that falls could be an early indicator of deteriorating brain conditions that lead to Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias.”
I’m still young enough that when I trip over something (which is common, as I am clumsy), it’s just “he fell.” At some point you cross a line in which people start saying, in hushed tones, “he had a fall.” For me, the upside of being clumsiness is that I’m really good at falling. My dad, on the other hand, was an athlete who almost never fell, but who usually broke a bone when he did.
FIVE BIG NUCLEAR BOMBS: Explosion As Powerful as Five Nuclear Bombs: Hidden Trigger of Hunga Tonga Eruption Revealed.
JOHN NOLTE: Politico’s Ryan Lizza on Leave over Olivia Nuzzi’s Harassment and Blackmail Claims.
Politico’s chief Washington correspondent Ryan Lizza is on a leave of absence after his former fiancée Olivia Nuzzi filed a court complaint accusing him of blackmail and harassment.
Just when you thought this story could not get any more awesome…
This all started earlier in the month when Nuzzi was herself placed on leave by New York Magazine, where she was considered their star reporter. Everything fell apart when it was discovered she had been reporting on Robert F. Kennedy Jr. while pursuing a personal relationship with him.
According to various sources, after interviewing Kennedy, who is married to actress Cheryl Hines, Nuzzi got flirtatious during a phone call. Kennedy responded by blocking her number. Through various machinations, she was able to convince him to unblock her once in a while. Then per the source, she would send him sexy pictures of herself. Someone leaked this information to New York Magazine. Nuzzi was put on leave. Lizza announced Nuzzi was now his EX-fiancée. Kennedy is currently looking into suing her.
But now, Now, NOW(!) things are even more juicy…
"Smells to me like a left-wing honeypot operation" https://t.co/10ldUmul7n
— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) September 23, 2024
In her court complaint, Nuzzi says that Lizza “explicitly threatened to make public personal information about me to destroy my life, career, and reputation—a threat he has since carried out.”
Nuzzi also claims “Lizza had stolen a personal electronic device from her, was hacking her devices, then anonymously shopping information about her to the media.” She adds that some of this information might have been “doctored” by Lizza to look worse than it was. She also believes Lizza impersonated “an anonymous campaign operative” to damage her reputation with a political campaign.
Meanwhile, with RFK Jr. accused of having additional affairs with “at least” three more women over the last year (it’s October of a presidential election, so the opposition researchers are out in full force), Cheryl Hines reaches her breaking point – her husband’s bromance with the Bad Orange Man: Cheryl Hines may divorce RFK Jr. — but it’ll be over Donald Trump more than Olivia Nuzzi.
Leiter characterizes the Internet as undermining the authority of the mainstream media by injecting false rumors into the public conversation. But that is not how the mainstream media lost its perch.
In the Internet era, a random individual who went by the pseudonym “Buckhead” was able to discredit a report by famed mainstream reporter Dan Rather and CBS news. On Sixty Minutes, Rather had shown a damning letter about George W. Bush’s military service. “Buckhead” pointed out that the letter’s proportional spacing showed that it had been typed using Microsoft Word, which did not exist at the time it was purportedly written. Therefore, it was fake.
The Internet era has seen mainstream media’s flaws exposed again and again. And mainstream journalists have styled themselves as activists rather than truth-tellers. They have been unable and unwilling to try to earn back the public’s trust.
The Enlightenment eroded the epistemic authority of the Church, making beliefs contestable. The Internet has eroded the meta-epistemic authority of the mainstream media, making beliefs even more contestable.
Leiter longs for a new meta-epistemic authority to play the role formerly played by the mainstream media. That is not going to happen. We are not going back to letting the NYT tell people who to believe any more than we are going to go back to letting the Pope tell people what to believe.
In a world of contestable ideas and opinions, the solution is not to choose an authority, meta-epistemic or otherwise. The key is to have in place a process that gives higher status to people who pursue truth using careful reasoning.
What we have now in academia is a process that used to work but has become corrupted. It is gamed by recent generations of professors who have been taught to believe that power trumps truth and have proceeded to live by that belief.
Decline is a choice, and our institutions have made their choice.
GREG LUKIANOFF: How Tim Walz got free speech very wrong at the Vice Presidential Debate.
When you’ve been defending free speech as long as I have, you’ve heard every bad argument against it about a billion times. And while FIRE and I have responded to these anti-free speech arguments repeatedly over the years, some of them are tougher to kill than a tardigrade. No matter how many times they are rebutted, they just keep coming back up.
In the span of about 30 seconds during last night’s Vice Presidential Debate, Minnesota governor and Democratic candidate Tim Walz managed to bring up the top three:
- There is no ‘hate speech’ exception to the First Amendment.
- Misinformation and disinformation are protected speech — and should stay that way.
- Yes, you can yell ‘Fire’ in a crowded theater.
* * * * * * * *
Walz’s last comment on this during the debate is one of the most popular and enduring defenses of limiting expression, and one of the most frustrating for those of us who know anything about how free speech and the First Amendment actually work: “You can’t yell ‘Fire’ in a crowded theater.”
Yes, Governor Walz, you actually can — as many people, including Christopher Hitchens, have literally demonstrated.
What you can’t do is “falsely shout fire in a theatre and cause a panic.” The emphasis is mine, but the quote comes from an analogy that Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes made in the 1919 case Schenck v. United States.
The most irritating thing about this quote is that the parts I emphasized above are often omitted, but they’re the most important because they illustrate the context of the speech in question. The idea is not that the word “fire” is forbidden in a crowded theater, but rather that attempting to incite behavior that will cause people harm (like, you know, making them think there’s a fire and causing them to freak out and stampede) is not protected speech, and actually falls under the very clearly-defined exception to First Amendment called “Incitement to imminent lawless action.”
Still, there’s even more context that makes this particular cliché irritating to encounter. Holmes’ Supreme Court opinion was one that upheld the imprisonment of two people who argued that military conscription was wrong. The Court justified the ban with Holmes’ dubious analogy, which was meant to tie back to the principle that the First Amendment doesn’t protect speech that incites people to physical violence.
But the Supreme Court abandoned the logic of that case in 1925, and rightly seeing that this line of thinking was being used to justify clearly unconstitutional censorship, outright overruled it in 1969. And yet, the cliché endures, even in the mouths and minds of a candidate for the nation’s second-highest office in 2024.
And then there’s the dog that didn’t bark: Tim Walz Endorsed Censorship In Front Of Millions Of Americans And No One Cares.
Why would Democratic Party operatives with bylines object to something they completely agree with?
SERIOUSLY, DON’T GET COCKY: Landslide, HO! Pollsters Suggest Trump Could Pummel Harris in November.
MARK FELTON: Iran’s Top Guns — The Last F-14 Tomcat Squadrons. In his 2022 review of Top Gun: Maverick, John Podhoretz wrote:
[W]hile Top Gun was basically a school movie—Maverick and Ice and the others are all training to be pilots at the Navy Fighter Weapons School and they compete like they are trying to make the crew team—this new one is an out-and-out war movie. Maverick returns to Top Gun as an instructor, only this time the 12 people he’s teaching are all top naval pilots and weapons officers who have long since graduated from Top Gun. The deadly serious mission is to destroy a uranium enrichment facility in an “enemy” country (though at one point I thought I heard someone say “Iran”) protected by surface-to-air missiles and better fighter jets than America possesses.
I didn’t catch any references to Iran when I saw Top Gun: Maverick, but as Mark Felton notes in his latest video, Iran’s Air Force is flying the last iterations of Maverick’s favorite plane, the Grumman F-14 Tomcat, on the planet:
Near the end of his video, Felton speculates why the Iranians keep flying this 50-year old aircraft:
The real reason why Iran still clings to its antiquated Tomcats may be something completely different from air-to-air combat. F-14s have immensely powerful radar systems, and some analysts suspect that the Iranians use their F-14s as a kind of stop gap airborne early warning platform; Iran lacking any dedicated AWACS aircraft in its fleet. The Tomcat’s ability to fly quite high and fast makes it a good reconnaissance platform. There is nothing the Russians and Chinese currently make that would match these abilities, so that may be the reason Iran keeps a handful of old F-14s flying.
But now, the Iranians have a much more powerful, albeit not very sophisticated long range detection system: President Biden Assures Iranian Air Defense: ‘Nothing Going to Happen Today.’
Iran is an American enemy. Iranian-backed militaants have killed and wounded American military personnel. Iran supported terrorists and insurgents in Iraq that killed Americans in uniform.
You would think that an American president would not merely be cheering on Israeli actions that eliminate Iranian-backed terrorist threats, he would be lending all possible aid. Instead, the Biden administration is emphasizing that it offered no assistance and played no role in the strike that killed Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah.
And now the president apparently thinks it’s a good idea to blurt out what he’s heard about Israeli response plans.
Q Would you support Israel striking Iran’s oil facilities, sir?
THE PRESIDENT: We’re in discussion of that. I think — I think that would be a little — anyway.
Biden got a question about Jack Smith, and then:
Q (Inaudible) response to the retaliation? Will you let Israel retaliate? What are the plans to allow Israel to strike back against Iran?
THE PRESIDENT: First of all, we don’t allow Israel. We advise Israel. And there’s nothing going to happen today. We’ll talk about that later.
This is how President Biden helps, by announcing to the world that Israeli retaliatory strikes aren’t coming today.
Who needs AWACS, or even F-14s, when you have the patented Trunalimunumaprzure early warning system?
UPDATE: “Ayatollah Frantically Googles ‘How To Build Iron Dome Thingy FAST,’” America’s Newspaper of Record reports.
ISRAEL CONTINUES TO SETTLE ALL THE FAMILY BUSINESS: “The IDF announced the death of Rawhi Mushtaha, head of the Hamas government in the Gaza Strip, on Thursday.”
BARRY AND BEN RHODES SMILE: Iran is months from the bomb – stopping it may not be easy.
Following Iran’s Tuesday-night attack on Israel – which saw the Islamic Republic launch nearly 200 missiles at Israeli territory – the question is not whether Israel will retaliate but how.
Calls to militarily target the Iranian nuclear programme are neither new nor surprising.
But while strikes may be able to roll back parts of the nuclear programme in the short term, they could ultimately exacerbate the threat and limit options to deal with it in future.
Iran does not currently possess a nuclear weapon and there has so far been no indication that Tehran has made a decision to weaponise the programme.
Nevertheless, the country possesses a near-threshold nuclear capability – meaning that it likely has much of the necessary know-how, technology and materials to develop a nuclear weapon on short notice.
Should Tehran decide to rush towards a nuclear weapon, experts have assessed that it could produce sufficient weapons-grade enriched uranium for a single weapon in under a week.
Actually developing a nuclear weapon would take months. Mounting it on warheads capable of striking an enemy like Israel may take even longer – and not guaranteed to succeed.
But it will be Biden-Harris approved as this 2022 Legal Insurrection headline spotlights: Biden Waives Sanctions on Iran’s ‘Civilian’ Nuclear Program in Bid to Restore 2015 Deal. Iranian foreign minister says Biden’s nuclear waiver “is not enough” as regime rushes to build a bomb.
HEADLINE OF THE DAY: Blue Party Blues Over Blue Collar Going Red.
