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Archive for 2021
December 28, 2021
MEDIA MYTH ALERT: Taking stock: Top mythbusting posts of 2021.
HOW ABOUT WE JUST DEFUND AND ELIMINATE HIS OFFICE, INSTEAD? Rep. Jordan Promises Investigations of Dr. Fauci When GOP Has Majority.
An investigation would be nice but eliminating those levers of power so the next petty tyrant can’t get hold of them would be nicer.
MICHAEL WALSH: How The New York Times abuses the ‘public’s right to know.’
Now the shoe is on the other foot, and it couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of journalists: a judge in the New York State Supreme Court (despite its name, not the top court in the state) has ruled against the Times in its ongoing attempt to destroy independent journalist James O’Keefe and his Project Veritas by publishing private communications with his lawyers regarding a lost diary purportedly belonging to President Joe Biden’s daughter, Ashley. The Times and Project Veritas have been locked in legal combat since O’Keefe filed a 2020 defamation suit against the Times.
In the suit, O’Keefe—who first came to public attention in 2009 with his “sting” videos against the leftist community-organizing group Acorn, now defunct, and which put Andrew Breitbart’s “Big” sites on the national map—alleges that the Times defamed him by claiming he has “a long history of releasing manipulated or selectively edited footage” and that his methods were “deceptive” and “a coordinated disinformation campaign.” (Full disclosure: I was the founding editor of Breitbart’s Big Journalism in 2010; that site has long since been folded into Breitbart.com.)
Well, nothing says “deceptive” like fencing stolen property that serves your ideological needs under the guise of freedom of the press, but here we are. The Times and other legacy media have abused the Pentagon Papers decision for years, often by hiding behind another errant Supreme Court decision involving the Gray Lady, New York Times Co. v Sullivan (1964), which essentially gave newspapers carte blanche to slander their enemies without fear or legal penalty.
The judge in the Ashley Biden diary case, Charles D. Wood, has forbidden the Times to publish the Project Veritas documents—protected lawyer-client material, it should be noted—that it mysteriously obtained, and ordered the return all the physical copies to O’Keefe and the destruction of any and all electronic copies it may have.
This brought an immediate bleat from publisher A.G. Sulzberger, the latest in the long line of Sulzbergers who control the family-run paper: “This ruling should raise alarms not just for advocates of press freedoms but for anyone concerned about the dangers of government overreach into what the public can and cannot know. In defiance of law settled in the Pentagon Papers case, this judge has barred The Times from publishing information about a prominent and influential organization that was obtained legally in the ordinary course of reporting.”
Well, that’s rich. Just how the Times got the material the Times, of course, won’t say—so much for the public’s right to know. Most likely, it was leaked to the newspaper by the FBI, which conducted an intimidating November raid on Project Veritas, including on O’Keefe himself, during which he was reportedly handcuffed.
But why was the FBI acting like the Bidens’ private Praetorian Guard in the first place? No one alleges that Ashley Biden’s diary was stolen, and even if it was, so what? A lost diary, even one belonging to yet another troubled Biden offspring, is not a federal case. And in any event, Project Veritas never published the contents of the diary. The FBI investigation was concerned with “how a diary stolen from President Biden’s daughter, Ashley, came to be publicly disclosed a week and a half before the 2020 presidential election.”
As it turns out, the diary was simply left behind in Florida by a “rehabbing” Ashley, where it was found by a third party and offered around to various outlets.
The press and the FBI are pretty clearly just partners in defending the Democrats by any means necessary. This corruption — because that’s what it is — has already destroyed their reputations, but there should be a much greater reckoning.
SNOWFALLS ARE NOW JUST A THING OF THE PAST: ‘Humiliating:’ 2004 Grauniad Report Peddling Climate Doom By 2020 Frozen Out.
The eco-extremists at the liberal Guardian should realize by now that the internet is forever. The outlet freaked out over 17 years ago about a frosty future thanks to a ridiculously inaccurate Pentagon prediction.
The Guardian published a report in 2004 sounding the alarm bells over a “secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs” and obtained by sister newspaper The Observer. Here was the harrowing message, according to The Guardian: “[M]ajor European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020.”
It’s now 2021, and major European cities are still intact and a Reuters report this year flushes The Guardian’s frets about a little ice age in Britain down the toilet. Reuters trumpeted: “Britain’s climate getting warmer, sunnier and wetter – Met Office.” Travel website Touropia has an updated report headlined, “25 Best Cities to Visit in Europe.” Even the waterway-dominated Venice, Italy is No. 17 on the list. Ouch.
You have to give the Grauniad points for keeping at it though:
● Shot: Artists must confront the climate crisis – we must write as if these are the last days.
—Headline, the Grauniad, November 12th.
● Chaser: President ‘has four years to save Earth.’
—Headline, the Grauniad, January 17th, 2009.
Still though, I’m keeping all the lights on; if only to do my part: ‘Promise?’ Illustrated warning of what Washington, DC might look like if climate change isn’t addressed backfires:
(Classical reference in headline.)
GOOD: Immune response to seasonal coronaviruses may offer protection against COVID-19. So lockdowns that prevented people from getting seasonal colds may have made them more likely to suffer from Covid.
JENNIFER RUBIN, S.E. CUPP, YOUR MOMENT IS NOW! The View is Struggling to Find a New Republican Host.
Since the days of Richard Nixon, you can make a very good living in the DNC-MSM media bubble by being a prominent Republican who never votes for Republicans.
TO BE FAIR, WASHINGTON IS ILL-SUITED TO DEALING WITH MOST PROBLEMS: Ron Klain Said National Government Would Beat COVID.
HMM: China Is Becoming The Soviet Union.
Xi is borrowing from a well-used Chinese playbook. His isolationism and xenophobia evoke policies from the earliest years of the People’s Republic and during the two millennia of imperial rule. As Georgia Tech’s Fei-Ling Wang details in The China Order: Centralia, World Empire, and the Nature of Chinese Power, isolationism is inherent in Chinese totalitarianism.
Chinese rulers, as Arthur Waldron of the University of Pennsylvania told the Hoover Institution, have periodically avoided contact with other societies “lest that lead to disorder, as globalization is doing in China today.” These rulers throughout history relentlessly enforced their geliguojia — “separated country”—system, he points out. Today, Xi Jinping is going back to that approach.
Of course, as Chinese leaders closed off China from time to time, economic stagnation and failure inevitably followed. At the moment, the Chinese economy is probably contracting, mostly the consequence of Xi’s misguided views.
We’ll see. Gordan Chang has been predicting the end of the CCP any time now for more than 20 years, but Xi does seem more dogmatic than his predecessors.
BLAINE GABBERT COULD NOT BE REACHED FOR COMMENT AND LAUGHTER: Has Colin Kaepernick Lost His ‘Halo?’
Mr. Kaepernick balked at requests from Change Co. executives that he sit for an appearance with George Stephanopoulos on “Good Morning America” and declined to participate in interviews as part of the rollout, according to an internal document.
This makes sense. Who would want to do live television interviews after helping to launch such a destructive movement? Mr. Kaepernick began his protests in 2016 while a member of the San Francisco 49ers of the National Football League. In August of that year, Mr. Kaepermick told the NFL: “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color… There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.”
Mr. Kaepernick became perhaps the country’s most prominent advocate for abolishing police forces. Tragically, politicians who then sought to reduce policing have presided over historic levels of bodies in the street.
In San Francisco where Mr. Kaepernick’s movement became famous and where homicides have been on the rise, even radical politicians are now trying to combat the lawlessness they once enabled.
Speaking of which: How Defund the Police backfired.
So anti-police protests take a toll. In 2014, a white police officer in Ferguson killed an unarmed 18-year-old black teenager, causing demonstrations across the US. Afterwards, the police chief in nearby St Louis noted that, “the criminal element is feeling empowered by the environment.” In 2015, the US Department of Justice asked one of the country’s leading criminologists, Richard Rosenfeld, to investigate whether homicides had risen after the incident. At first, Rosenfeld was sceptical, noting that homicides in St. Louis had started to rise before then. But after looking at the evidence, he changed his mind. “The homicide increase in the nation’s large cities was real and nearly unprecedented,” he wrote in his 2016 report. Rosenfeld had found a 17% rise in homicide in the nation’s largest cities, between 2014 and 2015.
Rosenfeld told me, when I interviewed him, that last year’s Black Lives Matter protests had contributed to the homicide increase. “When people believe the procedures of formal social control are unjust,” noted Rosenfeld, “they are less likely to obey the law.” And BLM protestors fail to recognise that the people who suffer most, when the police can’t do their jobs, are black Americans, who are more likely to be victims of violent crime. They are seven to eight times more likely to be homicide victims than white Americans.
But progressives have gone one step further, by undermining the idea that police actually have any power to reduce crime. “Law enforcement is not going to prevent the violence,” claimed Philip Atiba Goff, CEO of the Center for Policing Equity, a few weeks ago. In 2020, then–vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris tweeted, “America has confused having safe communities with having more cops on the street. It’s time to change that.”
Researchers find that negative publicity about the police has a powerful impact on police officers. Little wonder, then, that in 2020, at least two dozen police chiefs or senior officers resigned, retired, or took disability leave in America’s 50 biggest cities. 3,700 beat officers left. Today there are fewer police officers per capita in America than at any time since 1992.
What liberals ignore is that there is good quantitative evidence that more policing can reduce crime. They argue that the police don’t actually prevent crime, they just punish people after the fact. But in 2009, President Obama’s stimulus package offered a billion dollars in grants to struggling American cities, to fund the police; cities qualifying for the grant increased policing by 3.2% and experienced a 3.5% decline in crime.
And there’s another inconvenient truth that liberals ignore: the evidence suggests that fewer cops may mean more police misconduct, because the remaining officers must work longer and more stressful hours. Working a 13-hour, rather than 10-hour, shift means cops are far more likely to experience public complaints against them, while back-to-back shifts quadruple the likelihood.
Still, progressives are busy gaslighting the public about their efforts to defund the police. A progressive columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle recently wrote, “while there is continuing debate about what is driving the violent crime increases … we know for a fact that defund had nothing to do with it. Because defund never actually happened.” This is patently untrue. After the Black Lives Matter protests, more than 20 big cities reduced police budgets by at least $870 million. The LAPD’s budget was slashed by $150 million in July, for instance. It’s just that homicides rose so quickly that most cities reversed their defunding budgets. “From New York City to Los Angeles,” noted the Associated Press at the end of last month, “in cities that had some of the largest Black Lives Matter protests … police departments are seeing their finances partially restored in response to rising homicides, an officer exodus, and political pressures.”
Hence the Oceania-style pivot this year, as a form of triage with the midterms looming large:
● Frisco mayor: By golly, what this city needs is “aggressive” policing instead of “bull****.”
● Councilwoman wants to offer $50K for officers to work in Oakland.
● Spike of Homicides Causes Oakland Mayor to Reverse Course on Diverting Funds From Police.
DO NOT TAUNT HAPPY FUN 2022: Massive New Bird Flu Outbreak Could Be 2022’s Deadly Pandemic.
Israel’s National Security Council has assumed control of a massive bird flu outbreak in the Galilee, which scientists warn could become a “mass disaster” for humans.
Over half a billion migrating birds pass through the area every year, heading for warm African winters or balmy European summers, making this a catastrophic location for a major bird flu outbreak—right at the nexus of global avian travel.
The virus can be deadly if it infects people. The World Health Organization says more than half of the confirmed 863 human cases it has tracked since 2003 proved fatal. Most strains or variants of avian flu, H5N1, are relatively difficult to transmit to people.
“There could be a mutation that also infects people and turns into a mass disaster,” said Leshem, a zoologist at Tel Aviv University and director of the International Center for the Study of Bird Migration at Latrun.
So far, at least 5,400 wild cranes have died infected with the new H5N1 avian flu, which Israeli authorities fear could expand into a global emergency.
I don’t know what happens next, but I do know that the Daily Beast is eager to keep the lockdowns and the spirit of 2020 going for as long as possible.
(Classical reference in headline.)
VODKAPUNDIT PRESENTS YOUR WEEKLY INSANITY WRAP: School Closures: CBS Censors Own Reporter for Telling the Truth.
Plus:
- Our nation’s mental health crisis explained in 13 seconds
- The most recent, bestest news about omicron
- It’s up to you, New York, New York developers
So much more at the link, you’d have to be crazy to miss it.
JAN 6 PROTESTOR STRUCK 40 TIMES BY CAPITOL POLICE: Newly released video shows a Minnesota woman getting a beating, with a baton and fists, by a Capitol Hill Police officer. Her lawyer calls for a special prosecutor. I know lots of Capitol Hill Police officers who are dedicated, honorable professional law enforcement personnel. But there’s clearly some rotten apples.
MATT WELCH: RIP, ‘Pandemic of the Unvaccinated.’
The problems with the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” message pre-date the variant that rendered it factually ludicrous. On September 16, one week after Biden reversed serial administration promises by announcing an employer vaccine mandate (while using language such as “We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin. And your refusal has cost all of us”), science writer Yasmin Tayag penned an Atlantic piece headlined “Stop Calling It a ‘Pandemic of the Unvaccinated.'”
“Bullying the unvaccinated into getting their shots isn’t going to work in the long run,” Tayag predicted, in a piece surveying a field of study (behavioral science) to which the White House seems oblivious. “The way the mandates are being presented is driving a wedge between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated. If the goal is to inoculate enough people to reach herd immunity, this approach may eventually backfire.”
So how have mandates worked in practice? The New York Times on December 18 published a survey of all 50 states and the country’s largest 100 cities, and concluded that the government orders “have not provided the significant boost to state and local vaccination rates that some experts had hoped for.” To the contrary: “In most locations, the number of adults with at least one shot grew at a slower pace after states and cities announced mandates than it did nationwide in the same time periods.”
Clearly, the efficacy of the vaccines has been oversold. That’s particularly true about omicron, which spreads like nothing else — but isn’t that bad, either.
The mandates are about getting people to accept an unAmerican level of submission to arbitrary authority.
SCIENCE: Fit people drink more than those who don’t exercise: Study finds higher fitness levels associated with greater alcohol consumption. One of my very fit friends was once asked why he drank beer when he worked out so much. His response: “I work out so I can drink beer, not so I can’t.”
HOLIDAY READING: Meat Illustrated: A Foolproof Guide to Understanding and Cooking with Cuts of All Kinds. #CommissionEarned
MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE: Republicans move to ban federal funds to states, cities that allow non-citizens to vote.