ANNALS OF #FAKENEWS: A note from the editor of the Houston Chronicle.
Archive for 2018
September 10, 2018
AT AMAZON, save in Tools and Home Improvement.
Plus, Emergency Food Supplies.
THE WORKING CLASS VS. THE POWERFUL: Umpires may boycott Serena Williams matches after outburst at US Open final. A friend on Facebook comments, “I stand with the people who are getting paid $600 a match over those who get paid $2 mill.”
AT AMAZON, deals in Hurricane Preparedness.
Plus, save on Generators and Portable Power.
And don’t forget the Water Bob emergency water storage system.
QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: Why is it supposed to be sexist and racist that 20-year-old half-Haitian Naomi Osaka wiped the floor with 37-year-old Serena Williams?
Because for the “Progressive” left, time stands still. And as Glenn wrote last year, “see, the narrative was set in 1963, and modern lefties — suffering from ‘Selma Envy’ — can’t seem to get past it. Weirdly — or perhaps not so weirdly — my dad, who was actually at Selma, took a much less rigid view of such things.”
GOOD, BECAUSE THIS STINKS TO HIGH HEAVEN: Prosecutor suggests stronger charge against Dallas officer who killed neighbor. “Police have not detailed the interaction between the officer and Jean, but officials said that she admitted to entering his apartment by mistake and at some point, shooting him, prompting her to call 911.” She was tested for drugs and alcohol, but so far no word of the results.
ELECTION MEDDLING: ‘Silent Donation’: Corporate Emails Reveal Google Executives’ Efforts to Turn Out Latino Voters Who They Thought Would Vote for Clinton. “An email chain among senior Google executives from the day after the 2016 presidential election reveals the company tried to influence the 2016 United States presidential election on behalf of one candidate, Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton. . . . The four page email begins with Murillo claiming she and others at Google were engaged in non-partisan activities not designed to help any one candidate or another—only to undercut her own commentary in later passages in the emails by openly admitting the entire effort to boost Latino turnout using Google products with official company resources was to elect Clinton over Trump. The critical miscalculation, Murillo wrote in a stunning admission in the email, was that Latino voters backed Trump by higher margins than any experts had forecast in the lead-up to the election. Trump’s 29 percent among Hispanics nationally blew prognosticators away, and he hit even higher numbers—about 31 percent—in the key battleground state of Florida, Murillo admitted.”
HOUSTON CHRONICLE REPORTER ACCUSED OF FAKING SOURCES RESIGNS.
A Houston Chronicle reporter has resigned after questions arose about the existence of persons quoted in one of his stories.
Austin bureau reporter Mike Ward had been with the Chronicle since 2014 after a long career with the Austin American-Statesman.
In a statement posted Monday on the Chronicle website, Executive Editor Nancy Barnes wrote that another Chronicle reporter raised questions about whether persons quoted in one of Ward’s stories existed.
As the late Michael Crichton wrote:
Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
Layers and layers of fact checkers and editors.
TROLL LEVEL: DONALD TRUMP.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 10, 2018
One of Obama’s conceits is that if he’d been running, he would have easily beaten Trump. Watch this and think about that.
OPEN THREAD: Do your worst.
ALTERNATE HEADLINE: 10 THINGS MADE OBSOLETE BY THE IPHONE AND CLOUD STORAGE: 10 Technological Marvels from the 20th Century that Today’s Kids Don’t Know What to Do With.
CONSIDERATIONS ON COST DISEASE:
So, to summarize: in the past fifty years, education costs have doubled, college costs have dectupled, health insurance costs have dectupled, subway costs have at least dectupled, and housing costs have increased by about fifty percent. US health care costs about four times as much as equivalent health care in other First World countries; US subways cost about eight times as much as equivalent subways in other First World countries.
I worry that people don’t appreciate how weird this is. I didn’t appreciate it for a long time. I guess I just figured that Grandpa used to talk about how back in his day movie tickets only cost a nickel; that was just the way of the world. But all of the numbers above are inflation-adjusted. These things have dectupled in cost even after you adjust for movies costing a nickel in Grandpa’s day. They have really, genuinely dectupled in cost, no economic trickery involved.
And this is especially strange because we expect that improving technology and globalization ought to cut costs.
Read the whole thing. Related item here.
ANARCHIST GROUP MARKS ANNIVERSARY OF PRESIDENT MCKINLEY ASSASSINATION WITH TWEET LAUDING KILLER.
It’s a good article, but I’m waiting to hear what Teen Vogue has to say on the topic.
WAS IT OVER WHEN THE [THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK] BOMBED PEARL HARBOR?! Battlefield V, A Game About World War II, Censors The Word ‘Nazi.’ A beta version of the game is confusing players in the name of reducing “toxicity.”
SENATOR BOOKER QUOTES VIOLENT RACIST WHO URGED MURDER OF JEWS, WHITE PEOPLE: “When Senator Booker casually quotes a violent anti-Semitic racist, there’s a serious racism problem.”
Read the whole thing.
LONDON’S RAHM EMANUEL: Sadiq Khan’s popularity sinks after long summer of violent crime.
HURRICANE: Southern Virginia Beach should prepare to evacuate for Hurricane Florence, city manager says. Getting away from the coast is a good idea, but folks inland need to be ready too. Joe Bastardi thinks there’s a strong chance the storm will stall out over North Carolina and dump ungodly amounts of rain.
UPDATE: Hurricane Florence threatens to unleash catastrophic inland flooding in Carolinas, Virginias. They’re saying we’ve got a chance of tropical-storm winds here in Knoxville.
KAROL MARKOWICZ: ‘Feminist’ denial on all the ways women have it better.
TENNESSEE: Strategists huddle to help Marsha Blackburn widen appeal. She’d be beating any other Dem candidate like a drum, but Phil Bredesen is popular. She can beat him, but it won’t be easy.
Related: Pence to headline Knoxville fundraiser for Blackburn’s US Senate bid.
WELFARE STATE, OR MULTICULTURAL DIVERSITY: CHOOSE ONE. “To translate these findings: people will tolerate large, invasive, redistributionist states so long as they think people more or less like themselves are benefiting; that is, provided that the public sector is perceived as an overlord of a large family. However, when conditions change, and the population loses its collective demographic characteristics, people don’t like their tax dollars funneled to people too much unlike themselves. They will fight that one of two ways: dismantling the welfare state or kicking out those perceived to be interlopers. In short, all data indicate that the mix of the two – high diversity and high welfare – is not politically sustainable.”
YOUR DAILY TREACHER: British Cops, on the Lookout for Trolls, Ask Public to Report ‘Non-Crime Hate Incidents.’
As a wise woman once wrote, “There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals one makes them.”
Update: As ex-pat Charles C.W. Cooke tweeted in April when British cops were threatening social media critics after the NHS banished 23-month-old Alfie Evans to the Spartan hillside, “Michael Brendan Dougherty pointed out to me that police in the U.K. spend all their time on Twitter threatening people with jail time for frivolous things, and now I can’t stop seeing it.”
WOMEN WHO WENT TO WAR IN THE GREAT WAR: Scroll down to the long post on women at war during World War One– below the long post on World War One’s “assumptions” that made August 1914 an optimal time to go to war (a good read, too).
From the “Women Who Went to War” in the Great War post:
Lyubov A. Golanchikova (d. 1961), a stage actress and vaudeville dancer known as “Milly More”, received a flying certificate in 1911 from a Tsarist military aviation school. In 1913 she set a women’s altitude record of 7,218 feet in a Fokker Eindecker, gaining considerable attention and apparently helping convince the German Army to adopted the Eindecker for their air service. Early in the war she performed reconnaissance missions for the Russian Army using her own plane. She later flew for the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War, but eventually fled Russia. Golanchikova eventually settled in New York, where she worked as cab driver.
Read the whole thing.