Archive for 2022
December 12, 2022
THE NYT IS A RELIABLE SHILL FOR TYRANNY, GOING BACK TO WALTER DURANTY: NY Times Says Most Gun Owners are Law-Abiding, AR-15s are in Common Use, and Confiscation is Futile…Then Calls for 1st Amendment Limits on Gun Makers.
THIS IS BASICALLY EVIL: Hochul and other Dems want to normalize violent crime.
LAUGHING WOLF ON THE POWER STATION ATTACKS (AND OTHER THINGS): Very Interesting. “Domestic, foreign, or other, don’t expect corporate media to fall all over themselves to provide context or put any pieces together. Particularly if it is domestic or domestic acting for foreign. Also, keep in mind the reports over the last few years about outside support and training for various groups here in the U.S.”
WHEN NONIRONIC DIVINE REFLECTION APPEARS IN THE NYT, ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: “I think it’s funny that this is the only story about Twitter on the front page of the NYT. It exudes a desire for Twitter to just disappear. It’s hurting us, don’t you know? Well, it’s surely hurting elite media, which seem to long for the days when they could speak and the people would listen.”
MEGAN FOX: Montana Family Court Corruption Runs Deep in Gallatin County. “Millions of Americans love tuning into Yellowstone on Paramount, a drama starring Kevin Costner that not only highlights the natural beauty of Montana but also exposes a seedy underbelly of corruption, murder, and intrigue that stretches from the ranchers to the politicians and even into the courts. But fiction may not be so far from reality when it comes to the family court system in Montana. One name continues to come up in my inbox repeatedly: Standing Master Magdelena Bowen.”
FUN GIFT: GEREFEREN Telescope for Astronomy Beginners. #CommissionEarned
WHY PAY BIG MONEY TO LIVE IN A S***HOLE DOWNTOWN? Why no one is buying downtown San Francisco’s luxury condos. “He added that an increase in homelessness and crime in downtown areas has affected the ‘quality-of-life ambiance’ for people in those areas, presumably buyers who are reluctant to live among the city’s unhoused populations.”
JON GABRIEL: Arizona Democrats forced Sinema out of their party.
BETTER LUCK NEXT YEAR, ROGER WATERS! Anti-Semitism Watchdog Names Kanye West ‘Antisemite of the Year.’
FUN GIFT: 2022 Apple iPad Air. #CommissionEarned
NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Adventures in nanotech: Growing a metallic snowflake.
TWITTER CLOWNWORLD IS NOW BEYOND PARODY: “Apparently former head of Trust & Safety at Twitter had a ‘secret dirty twitter account’ which has since been scrubbed.” The head of “trust and safety” at a multi-billion dollar media corporation ought to be the most boring, fair-minded, and pecadillo-free type imaginable. They could afford someone off the Supreme Court shortlist, for crying out loud.
THE PROBLEM WITH THE INEVITABLE IS THAT IT ALWAYS SEEMS TO HAPPEN: China Is Facing A COVID-19 ‘Nuclear Winter’. The CCP Can’t Stop It.
Perhaps as many as 90% of China’s 1.41 billion people will come down with COVID-19, said Feng Zijian, former deputy chief of China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention, to Bloomberg News. Feng predicts 60% of the population will be infected in the first wave.
China did not have to wait long. There is now a fast-moving wave ripping through Beijing.
The capital city was not prepared. “We have a child with a high fever but all the pharmacies are out of ibuprofen,” said a Beijing resident surnamed Lin to the Financial Times. “It came too fast, we didn’t have time to prepare.” Shortages are widespread. “Beijing is running out of medical supplies,” the London paper notes.
The situation is so bad, Peking University’s Michael Pettis reports on Twitter, that Beijingers are thinking of deliberately exposing themselves to the disease, so they won’t get it later when the public health care system has completely broken down.
Meanwhile, in a country that never locked down: Sweden — Once Mocked for Its COVID Strategy — Now Has One of the Lowest COVID Mortality Rates in Europe.
A San Francisco resident recorded a group of drug users gathered indiscreetly around an open manhole appearing to collect hidden drugs.
In the video one of the four men was hunched over the manhole, with its cover shifted to the side, as another three stood and watched.
Older images of that same stretch of sidewalk show that in recent years it has become a destination for drug-users in the city, which is experiencing escalating issues with a fentanyl epidemic.
Data organized by the San Francisco Chronicle shows that within just one block of the manhole 24 people died from drug overdoses in 2020 and 2021.
Between January and October of this year, 501 people have died in San Francisco, according to the city’s accidental overdose report.
In 2020 fentanyl was involved in 73 percent of overdose deaths in the city.
San Francisco’s last Republican mayor left office at the beginning of 1964.
DISPATCHES FROM GROUND ZERO OF THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Finally, The Gibson’s Bakery Family Has Been Paid By Oberlin College.
FREDDIE DE BOER ON The Twitter Files and Writing for the Maw.
While I’m not really interested at all in the Twitter files as such, I am always interested in the meta-discursive details of how the media talks to itself. The large majority of our media that is not explicitly conservative seems to have fallen into almost total unanimity that the Twitter files are not worth paying attention to, that Musk’s leadership is bad, and that the people reporting on the Twitter files are bad as well. And I’m interested in how these orthodoxies develop within media. I’m interested, in other words, in the Maw.
The Maw is, broadly speaking, the expression of the culture war as operationalized by the consensus opinions of media. The Maw is the aggregate of opinions of paid-up journalists and writers and pundits and, specifically, the opinions they will allow. When a big story breaks, there’s an initial feeling-out period where the media talks to itself and decides what the consensus opinion will be. As time has gone on, this process has gotten faster and faster, so that now the media consensus and the expectation that all decent people will glom onto it develop in a matter of minutes. What’s interesting about the Twitter files is that both an inciting incident (the Hunter Biden laptop story and its censorship by Twitter) and an eventual consequence of it (the release of the Twitter files) fell into the Maw with incredible speed. Immediately, in 2020, the enforced consensus within media was that there was no story to speak of regarding the Hunter Biden laptop story; it was not only not worthy of influencing the election, it should not have been reported on at all, and Twitter’s decision to artificially limit its spread was justified. So too with the Twitter files: as soon as Matt Taibi started tweeting about them, it seems, most in newsmedia were convinced they were unimportant. This is the Maw at work – it’s the expression of culture war in what the media sees as a respectable position to hold. In the Maw, nothing independent survives. . . .
Levitz, like most people in the media who are not explicitly conservative, must play a delicate game. The game is to engage in enough nuance and care in your writing to still be able to look yourself in the mirror, to preserve some integrity, without getting right-coded in the culture war. Once a person finds himself on the wrong side of culture war debates enough times, they will be regarded as a reactionary no matter what their actual beliefs. They fall into the Maw. I am in almost every matter of substance you can think of a generic leftist. It’s difficult to name a single left-right issue on which I don’t land comfortably on the left. But I’m right-coded by the Maw. This has been financially remunerative for me but makes little sense as a matter of basic political intelligibility. The Maw shreds nuance and destroys complexity and, more than anything, forces everyone to constantly arrange their self-presentation in a way that ensures they don’t fall on the wrong side of the culture war faultline. I think there are a lot of interesting conversations to be had about the Twitter files and how they are being reported. The Maw insists that there’s nothing there at all.
Think of them as paid Democratic Party operatives and you won’t go far wrong. In fact, you won’t go wrong at all.
HMM: CDC says Jynneos vaccine offers strong protection against mpox. Mpox is The Virus Formerly Known As Monkeypox, which was renamed because monkeys are racist or something.
TWO BUTTIGIEGS IN ONE! Sec. Pete Buttigieg: We need to act to reverse the worst effects of climate change.
And this is how we’ll do it: Pete Buttigieg often flies on taxpayer-funded private jets, flight data show. Biden Cabinet member has taken at least 18 flights on taxpayer-funded private jets, despite calls to curb carbon emissions.
I’ll believe global warming is a crisis, when the people who tell me it’s a crisis start to act like it’s a crisis themselves, to coin an Insta-phrase. In the meantime, I don’t want to hear another word about Glenn Reynolds’ carbon footprint.
OUT: CONSPIRACY THEORIES. IN: CONSPIRACY FACTS. Not so crazy after all.
JOE DID THAT: Jeep lays off 1,350 workers in Illinois, moves factory to Mexico due to Biden’s war on climate change. “According to the company, the industry ‘has been adversely affected by a multitude of factors like the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the global microchip shortage, but the most impactful challenge is the increasing cost related to the electrification of the automotive market.'”