JUST WHEN YOU THINK …: Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-Texas) recently told America that the country would have suffered fewer COVID-19 cases if reparations had been paid for slavery. The Lid’s Joe Newby points out that Jackson-Lee didn’t just make it up, she was citing a study by Harvard Medical School.
Archive for 2022
November 19, 2022
WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG? Major update to driverless taxi service in San Francisco that will change how you hail a cab. “Cruise self-driving cars have been in nine hit-and-run accidents this year in San Francisco. And a couple of patterns from these collisions may surprise you. Almost all nine of Cruise’s 2022 self-driving accidents have led to the collision’s human driver fleeing the area, San Francisco Examiner reports.”
IF THE TECH LORDS WON’T DO THE ESTABLISHMENT’S WORK VOLUNTARILY, THE ESTABLISHMENT WILL FORCE THEM: FEC seeks ‘biggest expansion’ of internet regulation.
I’ll believe the FEC is serious when it investigates Google and Facebook for swinging the election.
GREAT MOMENTS IN JOURNALISM: Yesterday, Forbes published a piece headlined “‘Queen Caroline’: The ‘Fake Charity Nerd Girl’ Behind The FTX Collapse,” which was promoted with this tweet:
Here’s the passage from the article on how Ellison is “a new darling of the alt-right:”
In recent days, Ellison has faced a barrage of particularly nasty criticism from crypto boosters who blame her for overseeing the downfall of Alameda. But amid the vitriol she has found some defenders in an unlikely group of people who have celebrated the musings about race science and imperialism on a blog she allegedly wrote in college. Some of her defenders, who call her “Queen Caroline,” are followers of Curtis Yarvin, a neoreactionary political theorist and far right darling. Many of the people who have flocked to Ellison’s defense gather on Urbit, a peer-to-peer platform created by Yarvin, one of her online supporters told Forbes. They think Ellison was set up to be the fall person, and claim that former co-CEO Sam Trabucco, who they derisively call “Sam Tabasco,” is behind Alameda’s implosion. Trabucco didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.
“I definitely think she’s innocent,” one said. “I think Caroline can be saved.”
And here’s how it got into the article:
More from David Strom at Hot Air: FTX now right-wing according to Forbes.
What is hilarious about this–actually there are many things hilarious about this–is that FTX is actually a darling of Forbes Magazine, who helped it vault to the top of the crypto world. Forbes hyped the company, hyped Sam Bankman-Fried as a genius, and along with the New York Times turned SBF into a hero, genius inventor. To the extent that Caroline the fraud was enabled, Forbes, Fortune Magazine, and the New York Times were the chief enablers.
The Times even listed Fried right alongside Janet Yellen, Zelensky, and Mark Zuckerberg as a speaker at a conference to be held…next week. After the collapse of the company–and their coverage of the firm’s collapse has been pathetic and sycophantic to SBF. The Times is covering its own ass, and Forbes has decided to do the same.
Much of that great PR that SBF and FTX received was purchased by distributing very large sums to a variety of publications: Sam Bankman-Fried’s media outlets must come clean.
The coverage of Bankman-Fried and the FTX collapse, which has resulted in the disappearance of millions of dollars invested into FTX and crypto currencies, must be called into question, given his connections and donations to corporate media outlets. A media storyline is forming that while Bankman-Fried did lose billions almost overnight of FTX user and investment money, his heart is still in the right place when it comes to fighting for the same global causes that liberal editorial boards agree with.
Putting it bluntly — every media organization that accepted funding from Bankman-Fried should come clean and offer full transparency as to the nature of their agreement with him and their financial arrangements. As Semafor’s Max Tani reported, these grants and their funding mechanisms have been put on hold. ProPublica announced that they had received “the first tranche of the $5 million grant in February of 2022. The remaining two-thirds of the grant are due, respectively by April 1, 2023 and by April 1, 2024.” Happy April Fools’ Day indeed.
But to get back to the Forbes article, as Jim Treacher likes to say:
BOB MENENDEZ: Dem Senator and Wife Under Scrutiny in Federal Corruption Investigation.
Sadly, I now assume that pretty much anyone who’s under federal investigation has been politically targeted.
DON SURBER: It is the painting they protest, not the oil.
We call this the cancel culture without realizing the accuracy of the phrase. The communists or whatever you wish to call the elitists and their brain-washed masses are turning the founding fathers of our constitutional republic into villains because that makes it easier to replace the God-given rights enumerated and protected by the Constitution with nonsense about the right to abortion and transgendering.
Perhaps there is a blowback.
The Daily Caller reported, “A leaked scene from the new film Tár went viral on social media on Thursday, largely as a result of the inherently anti-woke scripting from Todd Field.
“The scene shows leading lady Cate Blanchett’s character sitting at a piano with a young musician, seemingly in front of a class of students, as he completely misses whatever point she is trying to make about the power of music (or so one can assume without the full context of the storyline).
“‘Nowadays, white, male, cis composers, just not my thing,’ the young student says to her of Bach, one of the greatest and most famed composers of all time.
“‘Don’t be so eager to be offended,’ Blanchett’s character says back — not in a cruel or aggressive way, but seemingly as a way of pushing the young student to expand his mindset to accommodate Bach. ‘The narcissism of small differences leads to the most boring conformity.’
“As the scene goes on, the script calls out the hypocrisy and history of music as it relates to the modern woke cultural movement. ‘If Bach’s talent can be reduced to his gender, birth country, religion, sexuality and so on, then so can yours,’ Blanchett continues.”
***
The problem with her “so can yours” argument is that they are untalented. All they have is their gender, birth country, religion, sexuality and so on.
They seek entitlement because they have no merit. They can only destroy — with cans of soup.
Speaking of the “Starting from Zero” mentality that Surber refers to in his post: Founder of Climate Group Vandalizing Famous Paintings Said Holocaust was ‘Normal Event.’
ON THIS DAY IN 1993, A JURY OF HIS PEERS ACQUITTED DALE AKIKI, A VOLUNTEER NURSERY SCHOOL ASSISTANT AT HIS CHURCH, OF CHARGES OF CHILD ABUSE AND KIDNAPPING: I guess that means justice was done. Except that it wasn’t. Dale Akiki should never have been tried in the first place. He spent 2 ½ years in jail awaiting trial.
But let me back up for a minute. When daycare moral panic of the 1980s hit, I didn’t have any trouble keeping my head. Many of the allegations of sexual and Satanic ritual abuse were obviously false. Sometimes they were utterly fantastic—like the allegations of the McMartin Preschool children that they rode in hot-air balloons, saw witches flying and were taken through underground tunnels beneath the preschool. I remember people saying, “Children don’t lie about these things” (presumably they meant the sexual abuse, not the witches and tunnels). But that’s a joke. Children lie about everything, especially when they think they are telling adults what they want to hear.
Then came the Dale Akiki case. Despite my earlier skepticism, when I first saw the local television coverage of the Dale Akiki trial here in San Diego, my initial kneejerk reaction was (to my great shame), “Good grief, they finally got one.” Why? Because Dale Akiki was unusual looking. He was born with Noonan syndrome, a congenital disorder that sometimes results in a large head and drooping eyelids and a number of other developmental problems. Also the television crew held the camera at a sharp angle (the “Dutch angle”), so as to emphasize his unusual appearance. I was an idiot.
But not for long. When the local news reported on the prosecution’s evidence the following day, it was not very impressive. I thought to myself, “Well … maybe they’ll get to the real evidence tomorrow.” But they didn’t. And the next day was no better. Eventually, the prosecution rested. They didn’t have anything on this poor guy—just a bunch of implausible accusations by nursery school children who had been prodded into making accusations by therapists convinced that Akiki was a monster. The children accused him of bringing an elephant and a giraffe to class, killing them as a warning to the children not to tattle. They also accused him of dunking them in toilets, drinking blood, and killing a human baby. Sheesh. Fortunately, there was evidence of therapists’ coaching in the form of videos of the interrogations.
I was terrified that the jury would convict. But, unlike the juries in some of the other daycare cases, the 12 San Diegans on that jury did their job right. Bless them.
Why did the District Attorney allow the case to go forward, despite recommendations to the contrary from prosecutors experienced in child abuse cases? He was being pressured by Jack Goodall, then-CEO of Jack-in-the-Box. Convinced of Akiki’s guilt, Goodall—a contributor to the D.A.’s campaign—urged him to assign the case to a different prosecutor. (Yes, that sort of thing happens in America.) The job went to Mary Avery, who was the founder of the San Diego Child Abuse Foundation. Goodall and his wife were the largest financial contributors to that organization.
By the way, San Diego voters did their job right too. The D.A. lost re-election in 1994, largely due to the Akiki case.
But here’s the part of the story I like best: During his incarceration, the deputies at the jail got to know Dale Akiki. They thought he was a sweetheart of a guy, and they knew intuitively that he was being railroaded. Twenty of them pooled their resources and had a limo ready to take him from the courthouse on the day of his acquittal. Purr.
(This is a re-post from four years ago. I was thinking about Dale Akiki a few days ago and couldn’t resist posting it again. I still regret my initial knee-jerk reaction.)
DO YOU THINK THIS IS A PENDULUM-SWING, OR JUST A LEGAL CHANGE? Will the world abort women’s rights after death of Roe v Wade?
Lastly, what about the Warren Court’s decisions on reproductive rights in Griswold v. Connecticut (striking down laws against birth control for married people), Eisenstadt v. Baird (doing the same for singles), and Roe v. Wade (finding a constitutional right to abortion)? These decisions were written against a background of hysteria about a “population explosion,” but now the United States — like many other countries — faces not a population explosion but a baby bust, with birth rates too low to sustain population, or to produce enough workers to fund retirement programs for the elderly. These decisions were also followed by a breakdown in family structures that continues to get worse. I can imagine a “living Constitution” conservative concluding that, whatever the logic of these decisions is, experience has shown them to be too flawed to survive.
I mean, if it’s a pendulum-swing, maybe people around the world are re-evaluating the impact of feminism.
IRANIAN PROTESTERS SET FIRE TO AYATOLLAH KHOMEINI’S HOUSE. “Protesters in Iran have set fire to the ancestral home of the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Images posted on social media show part of the structure in the city of Khomein being set ablaze. News agencies have verified the videos’ location, but regional authorities denied there had been an arson attack.
Ayatollah Khomeini is said to have been born in the house, which is now a museum that commemorates his life.”
BLACK FRIDAY DEAL: VTOMAN V4000 Car Jump Starter. #CommissionEarned
November 18, 2022
FOR REASONS: This is a free short story collection.
It’s probably full of typos. I was left unsupervised to assemble it and every piece of software was actively fighting me. But it’s free. And I hope it’s fun. It contains two of my favorite written-by-me stories.
Oh, yeah. I’m taking the night off. Don’t worry about it.
OPEN THREAD: Discourse widely.
THE NEW SPACE RACE: Boots on Mars: Artemis 1 launch and heat shield test take NASA closer.
THE SCIENCE WAS SETTLED: ‘Extinct’ Clam From 30,000 Years Ago Turns Up Just Fine in California.
ESCALATE UNTIL THE LAST MULLAH IS STRANGLED WITH THE ENTRAILS OF THE LAST REVOLUTIONARY GUARD: Iran protests escalate as children reportedly killed by regime mourned.
ANOTHER FAKE BUSINESS BUOYED FOR YEARS BY LEFTY PREENING: Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos Founder, Sentenced to More than 11 Years for Fraud, Conspiracy Convictions.