LICENSE TO STEAL: Pueblo Police Chief: Thefts under $2,000 cannot result in jail time. “In 2021, theft and larceny in Pueblo is up 11%. Auto theft has almost doubled in the city, going up 46%.”
Blame it on the COVID.
Archive for 2021
December 6, 2021
ABOUT TIME: “Ongoing genocide”: Biden orders diplomatic boycott of Beijing Olympics. “If there was any doubt about the U.S. staging some sort of protest at the Games, the disappearance of Peng Shuai early last month and the hostage crisis that’s been playing out ever since settled it. It would have been queasy to proceed in a business-as-usual diplomatic manner towards China after they covered up the initial outbreak of COVID, subjugated Hong Kong, and continued their mass internment of Uighurs. But Peng’s kidnapping is an unusually brazen and visible example of China silencing someone who’s made trouble for the regime; it’s a case study of CCP ruthlessness directed at a prominent athlete just months before the Games will open, in full view of western media. It can’t be ignored the way most international developments are, especially with the WTA bravely refusing to keep quiet about Peng’s treatment.”
That said, I’d favor a full boycott.
47,000 MORE PEOPLE DIED OF THIS DISEASE IN 2020 DUE TO LOCKDOWNS, WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION REPORTS:
Governments around the world took drastic measures in 2020 in hopes of slowing the spread of COVID-19, in many cases locking down economies and confining people to their homes for months on end. The extent to which these measures actually helped contain the COVID-19 pandemic is highly dubious. But the death toll from the unintended consequences of lockdowns continues to mount.
The World Health Organization (WHO) just reported that pandemic measures delayed and disrupted medical care for the global malaria crisis, leading to tens of thousands of additional deaths. An astounding 14 million additional malaria cases were recorded in 2020 compared to 2019, the WHO says. So, too, we saw 69,000 more malaria deaths in 2020 compared to 2019, 47,000 of which the organization says are directly attributable to disrupted diagnosis and treatment stemming from government pandemic restrictions.
If only there was a proven method to fight malaria. If only.
INSERT HENRY KISSINGER IRAN-IRAQ WAR JOKE HERE*: Chris Cuomo claims CNN boss Jeff Zucker knew about involvement in gov scandal.
Canned CNN host Chris Cuomo has fired back at the network — accusing his boss of knowing everything about his involvement in trying to quash ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s sex scandal.
In a new statement, a spokesman for the fallen TV star threw his longtime ally CNN President Jeff Zucker under the bus, while insisting the journalist “has the highest level of admiration and respect” for him.
“They were widely known to be extremely close and in regular contact, including about the details of Mr. Cuomo’s support for his brother,” the spokesman told the Wall Street Journal Sunday of Chris Cuomo’s shady support for his big brother as the governor’s sex scandal unfolded.
“There were no secrets about this, as other individuals besides Mr. Cuomo can attest,” the spokesman added.
* Or not. As Jim Treacher writes, “I don’t doubt Zucker knew what Cuomo was up to, just like he knew what Matt Lauer was doing for years. And I assume there’s plenty of blackmail material to prove it. For the first time ever, I’m rooting for Chris Cuomo to defeat his enemies.”
WELL, THEY AREN’T. BUT I’D LIKE TO KNOW MORE ABOUT WHO WAS RESPONSIBLE. Nevada Supreme Court Finds Gun Makers Not Liable for Las Vegas Massacre. We never got many details about that case, which is suspicious.
THE CLINTON MONEY MACHINE: Ethics Experts Alarmed By 93% Decrease In Clinton Foundation Donations Since $250 Million Peak In 2009. “Money was pouring in when Hillary Clinton was a senior official and a candidate for president. The fact that foundation donors received special access to the Secretary of State isn’t surprising, nor is the fall in foundation funding after her 2016 election loss. Many people thought people were supporting the former president, but it really looks like they were cozying up to who they thought was going to be the future president — a situation that can’t be repeated.”
FINGERS CROSSED! Will a Disgruntled Chris Cuomo Take CNN Down With Him?
STILL POPULAR: New Apple AirPods Pro. #CommissionEarned
CONSERVATIVES POUNCE! Right-wing activists are openly ‘weaponizing’ Twitter’s new private media policy.
Twitter acknowledged on Friday that a new policy it unveiled this week to protect users from harassment is being abused by malicious actors — days after journalists, left-wing activists and self-described “sedition hunters” reported their accounts had been locked for sharing publicly available images of anti-maskers, anti-vaccine protesters and suspected Capitol insurrectionists.
The acknowledgment highlights how Twitter has been caught flat-footed by what it described in a statement as “a significant amount of coordinated and malicious” activity that led to “several errors” in Twitter’s enforcement.
“We’ve corrected those errors and are undergoing an internal review to make certain that this policy is used as intended — to curb the misuse of media to harass or intimidate private individuals,” Twitter said.
Unveiled on Tuesday, Twitter’s new policy prohibits the sharing of images of private individuals without those people’s consent. The rule was created, Twitter initially said, in a bid to prevent its platform from being abused to harass and intimidate people, particularly women, activists and minorities.
But right-wing groups and anti-mask activists have quickly determined that the new Twitter policy offers an opportunity to strike back at those who might draw attention to their real-world identities. And in a matter of days, they established a coordinated campaign to flood Twitter with complaints that left-wing activists, Jan. 6 investigators and journalists covering rallies have published their faces without consent in violation of the new rule.
The problem is that lefties didn’t think Twitter’s new rules applied to them.
But that’s lefties and rules, generally.
OUR BLOOD AND HIS GUTS: Anthony Fauci and the Creation of the Bio-Security State.
A new populist spirit, represented by Donald Trump, among others, has led to a reshuffling of seemingly settled ideological alliances.
The reshuffling is ongoing.
I know this because I find myself approving of at least parts of “The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health,” the new bestseller book by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
It is odd indeed that I find myself in nodding agreement with an anti-vax, climate warrior named Kennedy, but there you are—or, rather, here we are.
Towards the end of a long and riveting interview with Tucker Carlson about his book, Kennedy reflects on the extraordinary—indeed, “totalitarian” is not too strong a word—government impositions upon individual liberty in the name of battling the COVID pandemic and issues a critical admonition that we forget at our peril.
“We have to love our freedom,” he said, “more than we fear a germ.”
Can we pause for a round of applause?
The risks of COVID to the general population were and are wildly exaggerated.
Everyone knows that now, though not everyone is yet ready to admit it.
QED: NYC employers must soon mandate proof of COVID-19 vaccine, de Blasio announces.
QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED ‘Has CNN Lost Trust?’ Brian Stelter Explores the Consequences of the Chris Cuomo Scandal for His Network.
Flashbacks: CNN Host Angry Conservatives Don’t Trust the Media, But Here’s a Few Examples Why.
It wasn’t that long ago that CNN was falsely trying to tell you that Joe Rogan was treating his COVID-19 sickness with horse de-wormer and now a host on the same network is complaining that the right is somehow in the wrong for not believing the media.
This is, of course, right after they dedicated a segment advocating that the mainstream media should, indeed, discriminate against the right when it comes to reporting.
To give you some background, the drama started when Florida Governor Ron DeSantis appeared on Fox News and told Maria Bartiromo that the corporate media lies its head off that it’s pretty much a given at this point to not believe much of what they say.
This apparently upset the host of CNN’s ironically named “Reliable Sources,” Brian Stelter, who began ringing the alarm bell about the “GOP’s anti-media streak and made it seem as if people should be aghast that a leader of conservatives should be telling conservatives that the biased media controlled by the left lies about conservatives.
Gee, Brian, where to begin?
Dana Loesch: How CNN Set Me Up For The Near-Riot Parkland Town Hall.
And of course, even Stelter doesn’t believe what CNN tells him, particularly involving global warming:
And then there’s one of Stelter’s favorite guests on a show called “Reliable Sources:” A gentleman named Dan Rather.
As Glenn wrote in the aftermath of Rather’s meltdown in 2004:
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.
That seems like pretty good advice. Naturally, Stelter completely ignores it, week after week.
YEP: From the Editor: Warning lights are blinking in Austin. Nashville should pay attention. You absolutely do not want to emulate Austin city government.
BOTTOM STORY OF THE DAY: Alec Baldwin and wife Hilaria delete Twitter accounts days after Rust interview.
Flashbacks:
● Alec Baldwin Quits Twitter Again Amid Fallout From Gillian Anderson Dig.
—The Huffington Post, March 4th.
● Alec Baldwin leaves Twitter after uproar over wife’s heritage.
—CNN, January 19th.
● Alec Baldwin quits Twitter permanently after row with Daily Mail reporter.
—The Grauniad, July 3rd, 2013.
ANALYSIS: TRUE.
A CORROLLARY TO REYNOLD’S MAXIM: Teach women not to lie about rape, too:
The University of Maryland, Baltimore County will pay three former baseball players a combined $450,000 to settle a defamation case they brought against the college after they said they were wrongly accused of rape and had the false allegations printed in the college’s newspaper.
Truth be told, I don’t think $450,000 has quite enough “sting.”
52 YEARS AGO TODAY: Altamont: 6 December 1969.
From your humble narrator, last month: 52 Years Before the Astroworld Concert Disaster, There Was Altamont.
RUN AWAY: Democrats Fleeing Biden’s Sinking Ship. “Just to show you how desperate Democrats are right now, they’re putting the blame on the lamest of all political excuses: ‘Bad messaging.'”
EPIC DAILY DEAL: BLACK+DECKER 20V Max Handheld Vacuum, Cordless, Grey. CommissionEarned
MY NECK OF THE WOODS: Bear spotted in West Knoxville as hibernation season approaches. “At around 2:30 a.m. neighbors in West Knoxville spotted something new in their community — a black bear walking through the area. Home security footage in the Riverbend area near Lakeshore Park caught the bear as it approached a home before it walked back into the night. It smelled a home’s outdoor trash can before stepping away.”
This isn’t even very far out — it’s like 10 minutes from downtown. David Baron, call your office!
WHEN YOU’VE LOST THE WASHINGTON POST…:Washington Post Mocks DCCC for ‘Worst Defense’ of ‘Biden Administration Yet.’