THEY KNOW THEIR TARGET AUDIENCE: Portland’s Desperate Tourism Ad Campaign Looks More Like Rioter Recruitment Agitprop.
Archive for 2021
June 22, 2021
WHOSE PHONE IS IT, ANYWAY? Even creepier COVID tracking: Google silently pushed app to users’ phones. “Over the weekend, Google and the state of Massachusetts managed to make creepy COVID tracking apps even creepier by automatically installing them on people’s Android phones. Numerous reports on Reddit, Hacker News, and in-app reviews claim that ‘MassNotify,’ Massachusetts’ COVID tracking app, silently installed on their Android device without user consent.”
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Flashback: We should own the gadgets we buy.
SCIENCE! Anti-gay statements trigger elevated stress in lesbian, gay and bisexual study participants.
“What about attacks on white males, do they trigger stress?” “Yeah, but we want them to die.”
HAD LUNCH WITH A FRIEND WHO OWNS A RESTAURANT. He said that just this week their food costs have skyrocketed — cooking oil more than doubled, everything else up substantially. Just one data point, but not an encouraging one.
I THINK THIS IS ACTUALLY ABOUT THE MESSAGING: We Need to Manage a Careful Retreat From Climate Change, Scientists Urge.
Related: Tax the Blue Zones!
BATTLESWARM BLOG: Assholes And Losers. “Scott Adams says that labeling ‘Marxist’ or ‘anti-white’ isn’t getting the job done persuasion-wise. He suggests boiling down the poison of Critical Race Theory into something far more readily understandable: losers and assholes.”
GEORGE KORDA: UT’s Critical Race Collective’s five tenets – and the questions they raise.
1. Centrality of Race and Racism in Society: CRT asserts that racism is a central component of American life.
2. Challenge to Dominant Ideology: CRT challenges the claims of neutrality, objectivity, colorblindness, and meritocracy in society.
3. Centrality of Experiential Knowledge: CRT asserts that the experiential knowledge of people of color is appropriate, legitimate, and an integral part to analyzing and understanding racial inequality.
4. Interdisciplinary Perspective: CRT challenges ahistoricism and the unidisciplinary focuses of most analyses and insists that race and racism be placed in both a contemporary and historical context using interdisciplinary methods.
5. Commitment to Social Justice: CRT is a framework that is committed to a social justice agenda to eliminate all forms of subordination of people.
More at the link.
LIES, DAMNED LIES, AND CNN: CNN Uses Ashli Babbitt to Paint Trump Supporters As Terrorists.
WHAT DIFFERENCE, AT THIS POINT, DOES IT MAKE? 25% of young adults most likely won’t get COVID-19 vaccine, CDC survey shows. “Among respondents who reported that they would likely refuse the immunization, just under 57% cited ‘lack of trust in COVID-19 vaccines’ as the reason, while another 36% believed the vaccines were unnecessary.”
I can’t imagine what the public health community might have done to undermine its trust base.
WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Israel Has Shot Down Drones With An Airborne High-Power Laser.
REVIEW BY WILFRED REILLY: “One ‘Maverick’ Documents Another–Jason Riley’s Biography of Thomas Sowell.” So one maverick documents another documenting yet another. Sowell should now write about Reilly thus making the circle complete.
VODKAPUNDIT PRESENTS YOUR DAILY INSANITY WRAP: Republicans Pounce on Gay Pride Parade Attack, Bad Reporting.
Plus:
- Sex Ed. is even worse than you thought
- Now dieting is racist
- Brian Stelter and his dead-eyes smile get savaged on live TV
So much more at the link, you’d have to be crazy to miss it.
THE ‘TERRORIST ATTACK’ THAT WASN’T: Politicians and pundits spread misinformation about a car accident at a Pride parade.
In a tragic traffic accident at the Wilton Manors Stonewall Pride march near Fort Lauderdale, a driver lost control of his vehicle and careered into members who were marching. One person was killed and another was hospitalized. This was of course not how social media saw it, as rumors of a terrorist attack rocketed around Twitter, aided in no small part by irresponsible comments from Fort Lauderdale mayor Dean Trantalis.
The mayor claimed on camera that the incident was a ‘terrorist attack against the LGBT community’. He then seemed to hint that the intended target was Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz: ‘Hardly an accident. It was deliberate, it was premeditated and it was targeted against a specific person. Luckily they missed that person, but unfortunately, they hit two other people.’
Fueled by the mayor’s statement, several activists and journalists on Twitter began to speculate. Once the official statement was released and the mayor had recanted his account, mainstream journalists like New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman and CNN’s Reliable Sources host Brian Stelter turned their ire towards a usual target — Fox News — for simply reporting on comments made about the accident.
For years in academia, the will to power has derived from victimhood, aka “safetyism.” As with the New York Times staffers’ reaction to Tom Cotton’s op-ed last year and the Atlantic’s crybully meltdown over Kevin Williamson in 2018, it’s no surprise to see that mindset seep further into the DNC-MSM.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Private colleges across America can’t pay their bills. “There’s a reckoning coming in higher education — especially for smaller, private liberal arts schools — that’s been years in the making. In obvious ways, COVID-19 accelerated some of the trends, but college finances have been hurting for a while. . . . Colleges can’t file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy the way insolvent companies can because they would lose their accreditation and student access to federal loans.”
Plus: “Students don’t usually evaluate a school’s wherewithal to pay its bills when choosing a college — but they’re the ones who stand to lose the most from closures. The earlier schools deal with their problems, the more likely they’ll be able to provide a smooth path for students to finish their degrees.”
All is proceeding as I have foreseen.
NEW YORK: The Berserk End of the Campaign.
The big story of the race’s final days was the alignment of Yang and Garcia, designed to keep the news on both of them but also to hurt Adams on at least two fronts.
First, they hoped to hold his numbers down in the initial round of balloting. An Ipsos poll from Monday had Adams at 28 percent, which is roughly in line with where other public and private polls put him. The key in a multi-candidate ranked-choice election is to keep the front-runner below 35 percent or so on the first count — anything higher than that, and he is likely to be ranked second or third on enough ballots to push him over the 50 percent threshold required to declare victory. The margin between Adams and whoever is second or third matters less than keeping the front-runner in the low 30s or less. And so while the bulk of the attention was focused on Yang enthusiastically endorsing Garcia for No. 2, keeping Adams lower-ranked on as many ballots as possible, or off of them altogether, gives Yang an advantage too.
Second, Adams’s rivals hoped that the alliance would bait Adams into calling the gambit a racist attack against him, potentially turning off some of the conservative white voters who, while supportive of Adams’s law-and-order platform, may be wary of someone willing to play up charges of racism.
This primary is a real test of whether New Yorkers are ready to reject De Blasio’s city-destroying progressivism.
KEVIN DOWNEY JR: Deep Diving the Facts and Fiction of Anti-Trans Murders. “The Washington Times reported that the trans murder rate is 1.48 per 100,000. This is less than a third of the overall murder rate of about 5 per 100,000, far less than the rate for men in general (6.68), and a mere fraction of the rate for black people (18.8). Also, most of the killings aren’t hate-related.”
OOPS, I GUESS THERE SHOULD HAVE BEEN 17 ITEMS ON THAT LIST: Georgia hospital system hit with ransomware attack following Biden-Putin summit.
PJ MEDIA VIP ROUNDUP: Don’t forget that VODKAPUNDIT promo code if you’ve been thinking of joining us.
Bryan Preston: Game Changer? Eva Guzman Announces Run for Texas Attorney General. “In recent years, though, the Texas attorney general has taken on an additional and far more high-profile duty: battling Democrat [presidential] administrations. It’s on this ground that the campaign for attorney general will be fought in 2021 and 2022.”
Matt Margolis: Five Things Democrats Could Do To Convince Us They Don’t Want Widespread Voter Fraud. “When a Republican wins the election was stolen, and when a Democrat wins it was a secure election.”
Yours Truly: Revenge of the Laptop: DOJ Looking Into Hunter Biden, Firm, for Illegal Lobbying. “The president’s son working clandestinely for foreign officials suspected of corruption seems to be kind of a big deal.”