Archive for 2022

WATCH: Journalist Tries to Crash Uvalde Victim’s Funeral, Bikers Have a Different Idea.

If you watch the video, you’ll see the reporter hassle the bikers, saying he’s “just trying to do” his job by entering and taking pictures. They try to explain to him that they are there to help provide space for the family that is mourning. The reporter, not ready to take no for an answer, shoves his phone in one of the biker’s faces, bumping into him. That led to a bit of a verbal escalation before the reporter eventually backed down.

As to the details, the bikers in the video are not part of a “gang,” but rather they are part of a non-profit called “Guardians of the Children.” The group provides security for traumatized children and their families. In this case, they were likely asked to help keep the press at bay, so that the families of the deceased kids could grieve in peace.

Julian Gill, the [Houston Chronicle “health reporter”] in question, lashed out on social media after the incident, asserting that it was crazy that members of a “biker gang” were helping the police. Many in the replies also expressed dismay, as if someone who rides a motorcycle is somehow inherently dangerous or something.

How do you report on or simply in Texas without understanding the ubiquity of motorcycles and their clubs here? Exit quote: “I don’t know who in the journalism profession needs to hear this, but you aren’t special. You do not have a right to invade people’s privacy, and your story is not more important than those grieving.”

RIP: Sophie Freud, Critic of Her Grandfather’s Gospel, Dies at 97.

Sophie Freud, who fled the Nazi onslaught in Europe and escaped to the United States, where, as a professor and psychiatric social worker, she challenged the therapeutic foundation of her grandfather Sigmund’s theories of psychoanalysis, died on Friday at her home in Lincoln, Mass. The last surviving grandchild of Sigmund Freud, she was 97.

Her daughter Andrea Freud Loewenstein said the cause was pancreatic cancer.

Professor Freud, who taught psychology at Simmons College (now Simmons University) in Boston, devoted her career as a psychosociologist to the protection of children and to introducing feminism into the field of social work.

One of the few surviving members of her family to have known Dr. Freud personally, she was raised in what her mother called an “upper-middle-class Jewish ghetto” in Vienna in a turbulent household in which her parents led separate lives and her grandparents, aunts and other relatives from all sides mingled.

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“I’m very skeptical about much of psychoanalysis,” she told The Boston Globe in 2002. “I think it’s such a narcissistic indulgence that I cannot believe in it.”

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While he often challenged the Victorian era’s patriarchal view of female sexuality, she wrote, “he mirrored in his theories the belief that women were secondary and were not the norm.” As for his conclusion that “women are forever falling in love with their male therapists,” she said, he sanitized such attachments as transference.

“He said it doesn’t matter, women get over it afterward,” Professor Freud said, “but I disagree. Women then go to another therapist to get over that one.”

She ratcheted up her criticism in an interview for a Canadian television film, “Neighbours: Freud and Hitler in Vienna” (2003), saying, “In my eyes, both Adolf Hitler and my grandfather were false prophets of the 20th century.” They shared, in her words, “the ambition to convince other men of the one and only truth they had come upon.”

“Never could he be wrong,” she said.

Exit question: What would the world have been like if Marx or Freud had never lived?

FOLLOWING BIDEN’S GUN CONTROL SPEECH, AN INCONVENIENT STORY SURFACES:

To give context to the fundamental errors in Biden’s speech, overnight another, seemingly unrelated news story surfaced. It tells of the end of a manhunt for a convicted murderer who had escaped from a prison bus in Texas on May 12.

The fugitive, Gonzalo Lopez, was killed in a shootout with Texas lawmen late Thursday night after he crashed the truck he had presumably stolen from a residence in Centerville, Texas. An adult and four children were found dead in that residence.

So far, none of the stories I’ve seen about this incident indicate how the family was slain, or whether Lopez, who had been on the run for three weeks, already had a gun when he broke into their vacation cabin. Some reports say that, in addition to the pickup truck, Lopez had stolen firearms from the home, but this belief has not been confirmed.

I doubt that too many more details of this story will be forthcoming. In fact, I predict that this story will fade away in short order. It’s an inconvenient story, coming as it does on the heels of Biden’s appeal for stricter limits on gun ownership and on the type of firearms that citizens should be permitted to keep and bear.

Related: Biden gun control speech pushes four empty solutions.

21st CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Is swinging back? “In 1974 I was living in San Francisco when I got a phone call from a man who said, ‘I’m having a few people over to have sex with my wife, would you care to join us?’ Back in the 1970s, people like this were called swingers. I politely declined. To my amazement I was recently invited by a couple in their sixties to go to one of London’s secret swinging parties with them. This one, they assured me, was for the ‘older swinger.’ (I didn’t think there were any still alive!) To swing or not to swing? That is the question I never thought I’d ever face again. It was a kind offer, but frankly I’m too old for those sorts of sexual shenanigans. And besides, the thought of all that drooping, flapping flesh and those dangling wobbly bits bumping and bouncing in a bed — and that’s just me naked! — put me off. So again, I politely declined.”

TAYLOR LORENZ STILL KNOCKING IT OUT OF THE PARK AT THE WAPO: Washington Post issues two corrections after stealth-edit scrubbed false claim from Taylor Lorenz report.

The Washington Post issued two lengthy corrections to its report from its “internet culture” columnist Taylor Lorenz, which was previously stealth-edited.

Lorenz wrote an article Thursday about how content creators were the real winners of the explosive Johnny Depp-Amber Heard defamation lawsuit that concluded this week due to larger followings and spikes in revenue during the six-week trial.

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After Fox News previously reached out for comment and published its story about the stealth-edit, the Post issued a correction at the bottom of Lorenz’s report.

“A previous version of this story inaccurately attributed to Adam Waldman a quote describing how he contacted some Internet influencers. That quote has been removed,” the Post wrote. “The story has also been amended to note The Post’s attempts to reach Alyte Mazeika and ThatUmbrellaGuy for comment. Previous versions omitted or inaccurately described these attempts.”

The Post later followed with an even lengthier correction, this time at the top of Lorenz’s article that read, “The first published version of this story stated incorrectly that Internet influencers Alyte Mazeika and ThatUmbrellaGuy had been contacted for comment before publication. In fact, only Mazeika was asked, via Instagram. After the story was published, The Post continued to seek comment from Mazeika via social media and queried ThatUmbrellaGuy for the first time. During that process, The Post removed the incorrect statement from the story but did not note its removal, a violation of our corrections policy. The story has been updated to note that Mazeika declined to comment for this story and ThatUmbrellaGuy could not be reached for comment. A previous version of this story also inaccurately attributed a quote to Adam Waldman, a lawyer for Johnny Depp. The quote described how he contacted some Internet influencers and has been removed.”

Late on Friday, the Post quietly changed “correction” to “editor’s note” while maintaining the text of the errors.

And the hits just keep on coming:

Earlier: The Washington Post and Taylor Lorenz Lie to Smear (and Maybe Deplatform) Law YouTubers Who Got the Amber Heard Defamation Story Right.

THE ESTABLISHMENT TAKES CARE OF ITS OWN: Molotov cocktail lawyers finally plead guilty. Again.

Here are a couple of names that we haven’t seen in the headlines for a while. Urooj Rahman and Colinford Mattis are the two (former) New York City lawyers who constructed Molotov cocktails and firebombed a police vehicle during the summer of love back in 2020. They were identified almost immediately and arrested, leading to a series of plea deals that were announced and then rejected or withdrawn. The two could have been facing 30 years in prison or even life sentences under domestic terrorism charges. But this week they both entered a guilty plea (again) and will now very likely face far less time behind bars than had been originally anticipated.

In the end, the court accepted guilty pleas from each of the defendants on a single charge of conspiracy to construct an explosive device. The maximum sentence for that is just five years but prosecutors don’t expect them to receive more than one to two years and a fine. They will also be permanently disbarred in New York.

Does that really seem like enough? Rahman was caught on video throwing the bomb, as well as driving away from the scene. Colinford Mattis had a pile of firebombs in his vehicle and was recorded as he attempted to hand them out to other rioters, encouraging them to ramp up the destruction. They admitted doing it multiple times in public, so there was never any question of guilt. As to motive and intent, one week after the attack, Urooj Rahman famously told reporters that “the only way they hear us is through violence.” . . .

From the beginning, the media has played up the image of the bomb makers, describing them as “young and idealistic.” If this case had gone to trial, the press would no doubt continue doing it, claiming that the two were being “persecuted” by a racist system or whatever.

Compare the treatment of the January 6 protesters.

CAREER SUICIDE TO LEAK SUPREME COURT DRAFT? Maybe, maybe not, according to The Washington Free Beacon’s Kevin Daley. He asked six top law firms about this issue and all six declined to respond. But they are hosting Drag Queen Bingo nights, so there’s that.

PETER NAVARRO ARRESTED: “And, of course, you remember when the FBI arrested Holder and put him in leg irons on the same charge that is being brought against Navarro. No, wait… Navarro told the court today that he would represent himself rather than hiring a lawyer. But the biggest problem he faces is not the absence of counsel, it is the fact that his case will go before a jury of D.C. Democrats.”

JOHN STOSSEL: The US ‘Has the Most Mass Shootings’—and Other Bogus Gun Research.

Last year, they claimed that there were school shootings at “hundreds of schools.” It was “an almost daily occurrence” in the U.S., some said.

This was nonsense. NPR reporters looked into the 235 shootings reported by the U.S. Department of Education and were only able to confirm 11 of them.

It turned out that schools were added to the list merely because someone at a school heard there may have been a shooting. Good for NPR for checking out the Education Department’s claims.

Economist John Lott, president of the Crime Prevention Research Center (and the father of one of my producers), spends much of his time researching gun use and correcting shoddy studies.

A few years ago, much of the media claimed that the U.S. has “the most mass shootings of any country in the world.” Then-President Barack Obama added it’s “a pattern now … that has no parallel anywhere else … .”

CNN and the Los Angeles Times wrote about “Why the U.S. Has the Most Mass Shootings.” (“The United States has more guns.”)

But the U.S. doesn’t have the most mass shootings, says Lott. It’s a myth created by University of Alabama associate professor Adam Lankford, a myth repeated by anti-gun media in hundreds of news stories.

“Lankford claimed that since 1966, there were 90 mass public shooters in the United States, more than any other country,” says Lott. “Lankford claimed ‘complete data’ were available from 171 countries.”

But how could that be? Many governments don’t collect such data, and even fewer have information from before the days of the internet.

A shooting in say, India, would likely be reported only in local newspapers, in a local dialect. How would Lankford ever find out about it? How did he collect his information? What languages did he search in?

He won’t say.

“That’s academic malpractice,” says Lott in my video about the controversy.

I’m not surprised that Lankford didn’t reply to Lott’s emails. Lott is known as pro-gun. (He wrote the book “More Guns, Less Crime.”) But Lankford also won’t explain his data to me, The Washington Post, or even his fellow gun control advocates.

When Lott’s research center checked the data, using Lankford’s own definition of a mass shooting—“four or more people killed”—the center found 3,000 shootings around the world. Lankford claimed there were only 202.

Lankford said he excludes “sponsored terrorism,” but does not define what he means by that. To be safe, Lott removed terrorism cases from his data. He still found 709 shootings—more than triple the number Lankford reported.

It turns out that not only did the U.S. not have the most frequent mass shootings, it was No. 62 on the list, lower than places like Norway, Finland, and Switzerland.

There was also no relationship between the rate of gun ownership in different countries and the rate of mass shootings.

If journalists had just demanded Lankford explain his study methods before touting his results, his “more mass shootings” myth would never have spread.

But they wanted it to spread.