Archive for 2022
May 30, 2022
DEMOCRACY DIES IN SELF-AGGRANDIZEMENT: How ‘alone’ was WaPo in reporting emergent Watergate scandal? Not very.
It’s long been a misleading element of media lore that the Washington Post was mostly alone in reporting the unfolding scandal of Watergate, which broke nearly 50 years ago and eventually brought down the corrupt presidency of Richard Nixon.
The claim reemerged yesterday in a commentary by the newspaper’s media columnist, Margaret Sullivan. She referred to the Post‘s lead Watergate reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, declaring that they “were almost alone on the story for months.”
Not exactly.
Read the whole thing.
Earlier: “There are two reasons the Clinton story isn’t a bigger one in the public consciousness. One is admitting the enormity of what took place would require system-wide admissions by the FBI, the CIA, and, as Matt Orfalea’s damning video above shows, virtually every major news media organization in America. More importantly, there’s no term for the offense Democrats committed in 2016, though it was similar to Watergate.”
LIONFISH UPDATE: Here is a picture of one of the two lionfish I saw during an entire week of diving on Cayman.
Their population has plummeted. I’d like to say this is because of people hunting and eating them, but they appear to have just fallen off an ecological cliff, as invasive species sometimes do. They have become much scarcer all over the place. That’s nice, though I do miss their deliciousness.
It’ll be interesting to see how they fare over time. Now that they’re scarce, of course, it’s an especially good time to kill off the ones that are left.
Overall, the much lower level of diving due to Covid and Cayman’s absurdly restrictive policies doesn’t seem to have made a huge difference in the state of the reef. It was good before and it’s good now but there wasn’t some surge of new life. We did see a lot of fish species, turtles, and rays there, but not significantly more than last time, nearly three years ago and pre-covid.
(Yes, this post is a bit late, but I had to hit the ground running when I got home and I’m still playing catch-up.)
WHEN YOU’RE A LEFTIST WHO’S LOST “POLITIFACT:”
● Shot: Biden Insists 2nd Amendment Isn’t Absolute: When it Was Passed ‘You Couldn’t Buy a Cannon.’
—Mediaite, today.
● Chaser:
Biden said, “You weren’t allowed to own a cannon during the Revolutionary War as an individual.”
The campaign was unable to come up with an example of a law banning private ownership of cannons, and historians of the period doubt that any existed. To the contrary, there are documented instances of privateers, or privately owned vessels, setting sail with cannons during the period.
We rate the statement False.
—“Fact-check: Could individuals own cannons during the Revolutionary War?”, “Politifact,” reprinted in the Austin American-Statesman, June 30th, 2020.
HOW’S THAT WELCOME WAGON PROGRAM COMING ALONG? Sun Belt cities boom as major cities bleed population.
THIS IS THE INSTA-WIFE’S POINT: Focusing on Cultural Pathologies That Lead to Mass Shootings Reveals Difficult Truths…So Instead, We Talk About Guns.
Related: We overlook a significant factor in mass shootings: fatherlessness.
Also, via a friend:
I NEED TO DONATE AGAIN: The best time to donate blood for a disaster is before it happens.
WHAT COULD GO WRONG? North Korea Will Soon Chair U.N.’s Nuclear Disarmament Body.
WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Using a robotic shoulder to grow tendon tissue.
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Obama Encourages Americans To Pause This Memorial Day To Remember The Sacrifice Of George Floyd.
FROM SKYNET, A TEENY-TINY SMILE: Northwestern engineers develop smallest remote-controlled walking robot.
DERMATOLOGISTS HATE THE SUN: Survey shows dangerous rise in sun tanning as myths persist. “A new survey of more than 1,000 U.S. adults by the American Academy of Dermatology (AAD) found a sharp rise in both tanning and number of sunburns last year, compared to 2020.”
Maybe people don’t trust health “experts” as much after the last couple of years. And maybe they shouldn’t: “Avoidance of sun exposure is a risk factor of a similar magnitude as smoking, in terms of life expectancy.” That’s right, the increased health risks from insufficient Vitamin D vastly outweigh the risks of a bit of sun exposure. It’s not that the sun is risk-free, but the dermatologists have made avoiding it a religion, rather than a matter of science.
More background here.
KURT SCHLICHTER: The New Normal Is Failure.
The clusterfark in Uvalde is just a symptom of a much bigger pathology. It is a symbol of the failure of every institution in our society. And the solution is never to revamp the institutions and eject the parasites heading them. It’s always – always – to take power from us and give it to the people who screwed up in the first place.
Show of hands – who was shocked to hear that this creep was on law enforcement’s radar before his killing spree?
I see a distinct lack of hands.
But the failure is not limited to being unable to stop murderers. It’s not even the only failure involving schools. The schools are churning out a generation of quasi-literates and have been turned into a Grindr for perverted weirdos to use for grooming their prey. We got a good view of the failure during another epic failure, the COVID response.
This is systemic.
Everything is failing.
Go try to get baby formula.
See if you can afford gas. Hell, roll up to a Mickey D’s drive-thru and try to roll away with lunch for four under $30.
The courts don’t work, the Congress doesn’t work, and our alleged president is a borderline clinical moron who is lying when he’s not merely stupid. This human sex toy got up at Annapolis and told the Naval Academy grads that he had been accepted there. It was a lie – of course, he’s senile so maybe he believed it – and the regime media skipped over it like they skip over everything else that offends the official narrative.
Failure, failure, failure.
What is one institution that works? Just one.
Or to put it another way, “does the Biden administration actually want to see middle-class Americans reduced to poverty and privation? Or is it just too stupid to foresee the obvious consequences of its own actions? At this point, I’m not even sure which is worse.”
SNOWFALLS ARE NOW JUST A THING OF THE PAST: Mona Lisa is attacked with custard pie by man disguised as elderly woman in a wheelchair screaming ‘think of the planet!’… before he’s dragged away by security. “The man, who wore a dark black wig and lipstick, turned out to be an artist and climate change activist who said he pied the prized painting in protest. ‘Think about the Earth. People are in the process of destroying the Earth!’ he declared as he was led away by security guards. ‘Artists think about the Earth, that’s why I did this. Think of the planet!’”
As Karol Markowicz tweets, “An environmental activist trying to destroy the Mona Lisa is in line with what leftism is right now. They think their righteous cause means all of their behavior is OK and this is reinforced by a friendly media who covers riots as if they are peaceful protests. It’s wrong.”
(Classical reference in headline.)
FORWARD DEPLOYED: The USS Higgins launches a torpedo in the Philippine Sea.
REMEMBERING, THEN AND NOW: Thoughts For Memorial Day 2022
Four days a year a special American flag flew from a tall loblolly pine in my family’s front yard.
Every Memorial Day, Flag Day, Independence Day and every Veterans Day, my father would get up early then wake me, my sisters and younger brother.
We would traipse into the front yard, yawning in Houston’s early morning humidity, in summer standing barefoot on St. Augustine grass, on Veterans Day wearing shoes in November’s cooler weather.
Then Dad would tie the flag to the rope, one of us would give the rope a pull, and the huge wall of red, white and blue cloth would rise and billow as it rose, the only sound a pulley 35 feet up the pine creaking with each tug…
…I didn’t realize it at the time, but my father’s flag-raising pageants were my first taste of veterans memorials. Our short front-yard ceremony was a very local Arlington.
Check it out.
YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BLOG: Kamala Harris’s awkward moments, a nonexhaustive list. “When we talk about the children of the community, they are a children of the community.”
TEACHERS LIKED WORKING FROM HOME, THOUGH: Harvard professor finds remote school led to massive learning loss.
I’m quite sure that the solution isn’t increased funding.
LESS ACCURATE THAN A STOPPED CLOCK: Opponents of Georgia’s Election Law: You’ll Have to Wait Until November for the Voter Suppression.
TO BE FAIR, THAT’S JUST BECAUSE THEY’RE TERRIBLE: Bill Maher criticizes campus liberals, American university system in scathing monologue.
NOW OUT FROM ALEX EPSTEIN: Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas–Not Less.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Memorial Day Reflections. “Now that we’re mired in Let’s Go Brandonland, I’ve been thinking this weekend about what those who gave their lives defending this country would think about what’s going on now. I wouldn’t presume to speak for the fallen but I also know I can’t be the only one pondering such things.”