HMM: Histamine-suppressing drugs found to reduce benefits of exercise. “A team of researchers from Ghent University and the University of Copenhagen has found that antihistamines such as Allegra or Pepcid can reduce the benefits of exercise. In their paper published in the journal Science Advances, the group describes two experiments they conducted—one short range, the other long range—that involved giving volunteers antihistamines before they engaged in exercise regimens.”
Archive for 2021
April 16, 2021
A LIE TRAVELS AROUND THE WORLD BEFORE THE TRUTH IS OUT OF BED. There are *still* people who think W. Bush served a “plastic turkey” to troops in the Middle East. And who could forget Harry Ried out and out lying about Mitt Romney “not paying taxes”? A rare few called him out on it. His response? “Romney didn’t win, did he?”
And so to today. Matt Taibbi (on Substack, the platform that is terrifying the media elite) published a “Master List Of Official Russia Claims That Proved To Be Bogus.” Among the gems (still believed by many):
- The “Back Channel to Russians” story, Yahoo! September 23, 2016. Yahoo! published a story by Michael Isikoff called, “U.S. Officials Probe Ties Between Trump Adviser and Kremlin.” The piece identified Trump advisor Carter Page as a “possible back channel to the Russians,” and claimed he passed information from the Kremlin to figures higher up in the Trump food chain, like former campaign chair Paul Manafort […] This proved incorrect on all fronts, with no evidence of any Page meetings with either man. In fact, the irregularities involved with the Isikoff story – particularly the use of information from British ex-spy Christopher Steele, identified as a “well-placed Western intelligence source” – became a bigger story than the alleged improper relationship between Page and Russians.
- “US investigators corroborate some aspects of the Russia dossier,” CNN, February 10, 2017. Jim Sciutto and Evan Perez of CNN reported that “multiple current and former US law enforcement and intelligence officials” have “corroborated some of the communications detailed in a 35-page dossier compiled by a former British intelligence agent,” i.e. the “Steele Dossier.” […] This was a significant and apparently deliberate piece of misinformation. We know, from the report of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz, that the CIA months before had already dismissed the Steele reports as “Internet rumor,” while the FBI had already done several rounds of attempts to corroborate its independent reporting, coming up with negative results each time.
And now “disinformation” like a new toy, a bow-and-arrow play set for media mavens. But the arrows all seem to fly in the same — and often wrong — direction.
21ST CENTURY HEADLINES: Why the FCC Keeps Shooting Down Requests From Companies That Want To Shoot Down Drones.
DON’T GET COCKY: The Democrats Are Flirting with Suicide in the Midterms.
IMPORTANT NEWS FROM SCIENCE: Study: 2.5 billion T. rex roamed Earth, but not all at once.
WHEN AMERICAN “PROGRESSIVES” HAVE LOST THE GERMANS…Berlin’s Disastrous Rent Control Law Gets Scrapped.
GOD, SCHMOD, I WANT MY MONKEY-MAN! Scientists grow human-monkey chimeric embryos in lab.
YOU’RE GONNA NEED A MUCH BIGGER BLOG: The Top Seven Most Ridiculous Hate Crime Hoaxes.
THAT’S ABOUT THE SAME PERCENTAGE AT RISK AS PEOPLE WHO HAVE BEEN VACCINATED WITH PFIZER OR MODERNA: Study: Up to 10% of young adults who recover from COVID-19 at risk for reinfection.
I mean, I’m still waiting to see evidence that the vaccine immunity is clearly better than natural immunity, though a lot of people seem to assume that it is.
Likewise, this headline, Past COVID-19 infection does not fully protect young people from reinfection could just as easily be rewritten with “Vaccination” in place of “Past COVID-19 infection.”
Which is fine, no vaccine is 100%. But why pretend, without evidence, that the vaccine is vastly more protective than natural immunity?
TO BE FAIR, THAT WAS PRETTY MUCH THE KREMLIN’S DEFINITION AS WELL: BLM co-founder: I practice Marxism by getting rich and supporting my family.
Flashback: “In a famous Soviet joke, then-leader Leonid Brezhnev shows his mother his luxury apartment, his limousine, his fancy country house and his helicopter only to have her object: ‘But what if the communists come back?'”
QUESTION ASKED: How Do Big Media Outlets So Often “Independently Confirm” Each Other’s Falsehoods?
There were so many false reports circulated by the dominant corporate wing of the U.S. media as part of the five-year-long Russiagate hysteria that in January, 2019, I compiled what I called “The 10 Worst, Most Embarrassing U.S. Media Failures on the Trump-Russia Story.” The only difficult part of that article was choosing which among the many dozens of retractions, corrections and still-uncorrected factual falsehoods merited inclusion in the worst-ten list. So stiff was the competition that I was forced to omit many huge media Russiagate humiliations, and thus, to be fair to those who missed the cut, had to append a large “Dishonorable Mention” category at the end.
That the entire Russiagate storyline itself was a fraud and a farce is conclusively demonstrated by one decisive fact that can never be memory-holed: namely, the impetus for the scandal and subsequent investigation was the conspiracy theory that the Trump campaign had secretly and criminally conspired with the Russian government to interfere in the 2016 election, primarily hacking into the email inboxes of the DNC and Clinton campaign chief John Podesta. And a grand total of zero Americans were accused (let alone convicted) of participating in that animating conspiracy.
In their all-out effort to finally get The Bad Orange Man, a whole lot of corruption at the heart of the DNC-MSM was exposed: The New York Times’ ‘Russian Bounties’ Story Just Unraveled.
UPDATE: Liz Cheney Was A Primary Culprit Of Spreading Fake News On Russian Bounties To Undermine Trump.
(Updated and bumped.)
MESSING WITH TEXAS: Woke capitalism’s Texas showdown.
Texas, improbably for a pro-free market state, has its own component of woke capitalists. American Airlines, which headquarters in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, has declared itself ‘strongly’ against the Senate’s legislation.
‘Voting is the hallmark of our democracy,’ AA insists, ‘and is the foundation of our great country. We value the democratic process and believe every eligible American should be allowed to exercise their [sic] right to vote, no matter which political party or candidate they [sic] support… At American, we believe we should break down barriers to diversity, equity, and inclusion in our society — not create them.’
Well, duh. Who says otherwise? The Republicans promoting the bill? In what context? What provision of the bill would overthrow Americans’ sense of American ideals?
Wherein lies the problem. Critics of voter reform legislation unfailingly fail to show how measures meant to entrench honesty at the polls undermine the democratic process — unless we need a little less honesty around here, recognizing as we should that crooks and cheats deserve representation too
The Texas legislation is going to pass, given Republican control of the legislature; the governor is going to sign the bill; and then the legal fraternity is going to get busy, filing lawsuits, doubtless in the aggrieved language test-driven during the current debates. Given the present composition of the US Supreme Court, you are entitled to hope the new law will largely survive — that a little more honesty will somehow show its face around American polling places. But the background racket in our present so-called debate over reform isn’t a sign of encouraging things to come.
Flashback: Trump Won Heavily Latino Texas Border County He Lost to Clinton by Huge Margin. Meanwhile, I’m pretty sure I’ll still have to show ID when getting on American airliner.
THE BANNINGS WILL CONTINUE UNTIL MORALE IMPROVES: Social media again silences the Post for reporting the news.
Once more unto the breach.
On Thursday, Facebook decided its users should not be able to share a New York Post article about the property buying habits of one of the founders of Black Lives Matter.
This is the third time we’ve tangled with social media giants in the past year. In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, we published a column that suggested the virus could have leaked from a Chinese virology lab. Facebook’s “fact checkers” decided this was an opinion you weren’t allowed to have, and blocked the article. Today, it’s a commonly discussed theory, with officials from former CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield to CNN’s Sanjay Gupta saying it can’t be discounted. Even the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) has said it can’t be ruled out.
In October, we published a series of articles about a laptop Hunter Biden left at a Delaware repair shop. Twitter suspended our account. You probably know how that ended. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey admitted to lawmakers months later it was a “total mistake.”
We were right both times. We’re right this time, too.
Earlier: The Morning Briefing: Area Fascist Jack Dorsey Purges James O’Keefe From Twitter.
IT’S SHOTS ALL THE WAY DOWN: Pfizer and Others Are Planning for Covid Vaccine Boosters. “Vaccine makers are getting a jump-start on possible new rounds of shots, although they sound more certain of the need for boosters than independent scientists have. Pfizer’s chief executive said on Thursday that a third dose of the company’s Covid-19 vaccine was ‘likely’ to be needed within a year of the initial two-dose inoculation — followed by annual vaccinations.”
QUESTION OF THE YEAR: Issues & Insights asks “why is everyone swallowing Biden’s lies”? Well, I must hasten to note that I’m not and I doubt that many Instapundit readers are, either.
That said, Biden’s approval rating is riding high in the latest survey, even though, as I&I notes: “He lies about the filibuster (National Review called them “brazen beyond belief”). He lies about the border crisis. He lies about his role in getting vaccines distributed. And everyone falls into lockstep.
“Now, we know why the mainstream press parrots everything Biden says. They are nothing more than Democratic operatives with bylines, as Glenn Reynolds puts it on his Instapundit blog. But why are corporate executives falling for it? Why are officials with sports leagues? Why are politicians in both parties bending to Biden’s reality distortion field?”
MR. FANG FANG FACES PLENTY OF STURM UND DRANG: Eric Swalwell Learns a Hard Lesson After Picking a Fight With Marjorie Taylor Greene.
NO. NEXT QUESTION? Should pro-Trump, anti-mask teacher be fired?
IT WAS NEVER RAVELED: The New York Times’ ‘Russian Bounties’ Story Just Unraveled.
RELIGION OR RELATIONSHIP: Shane Morris, on Colson Center’s latest “What Would You Say,” explains the big difference between Christianity and the major religions like Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism. It’s one of those basic facts that critics often miss, which then leads them to critiquing straw men.