NEWS YOU CAN USE: 4 Tell-Tale Signs of Low Testosterone You Shouldn’t Ignore.
Plus, #5: You work for Buzzfeed.
Archive for 2022
December 30, 2022
THE LATEST STRATEGYTALK ON CHINA: The Emperor Backed Down: The COVID Lockdown Explosion And Fallout. Runs 28 minutes. Includes new theme music!
VERY RELATED: Xi’s China faces push back from everyone and everywhere. The December 9 China update — background for the podcast.
JAMES BOVARD: FBI Cointelpro is Back and Worse Than Ever.
Elon Musk has opened the floodgates to expose the FBI’s latest war on Americans’ freedom of speech. The FBI massively intervened to pressure Twitter to suppress accounts and tweets from individuals the FBI disapproved, including parody accounts. The FBI and other federal agencies also browbeat Facebook, Instagram, and many other tech companies.
Thus far, most of the American media has ignored or downplayed the story, known as the Twitter Files. Since many of the individuals who the FBI got squelched were pro-Trump, the violation of their rights is a non-issue – or a cause for quiet celebration. At this point, it is difficult to know whether the scant reaction to the Twitter Files is the result of political bias, collective amnesia, or simply a total ignorance of American history.
The history of the FBI provides perhaps the best guide to the abuses that may be now occurring. From 1956 to 1971, the FBI carried out “a secret war against those citizens it considers threats to the established order,” a 1976 Senate report noted. The FBI’s Operation COINTELPRO involved thousands of covert operations to incite street warfare between violent groups, to get people fired, to portray innocent people as government informants, to destroy activists’ marriages, and to cripple or destroy left-wing, black, communist, white racist, and anti-war organizations. The FBI let no corner of American life escape its vigilance; it even worked to expose and discredit “communists who are secretly operating in legitimate organizations and employments, such as the Young Men’s Christian Association and Boy Scouts.”
While many people are aware of how the FBI hounded Martin Luther King, Jr., and pressured him to commit suicide, that was not even the tip of the iceberg of the FBI’s racial persecution.
I think the media folks are ignoring the story because they’re complicit.
Meanwhile, note what appears at the top if you search it on Google:
Compare Bing:
And DuckDuckGo:
MERRY CHRISTMAS, JAY: You da man. Thanks for saving two dozen lives during the Buffalo snowstorm. As a torts professor, I can tell you that you committed no legal wrong by breaking into a school during an emergency (Ploof v. Putnam), but that (technically at least) the school can force you to pay for any damage you caused (Vincent v. Lake Erie Transportation Co.). But don’t worry, they won’t. Today, they love you. (And if they do try to make you pay, I’ll cover it.)
A MEASURE OF SANITY: MIT faculty adopt free expression statement that protects ‘offensive’ speech.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty have adopted a resolution that defends freedom of speech and expression — even speech some find “offensive or injurious.”
The “Free Expression Statement,” approved by the faculty senate Dec. 21, states that “Learning from a diversity of viewpoints, and from the deliberation, debate, and dissent that accompany them, are essential ingredients of academic excellence.”
The statement was approved by a vote of 98 to 52, a source close to MIT told The College Fix.
“We cannot prohibit speech that some experience as offensive or injurious,” the statement reads.
It wasn’t close, but it should have been less-close.
LIGHTENING DEAL: EUREKA All in One Wet Dry Vacuum Cleaner and Mop for Multi-Surface Self-Cleaning System. #CommissionEarned
THE CUP THAT CHEERS:
In one study, over 700 male and female social drinkers were divided into groups of three strangers and instructed to drink for 36 minutes.
The participants thought the drinks were a prelude to the experiment, but researchers were observing what they did at the table. Initially, the strangers did not smile much. But as they consumed their vodka cranberry drinks, their expressions changed. They not only smiled more, but also caught each other’s smiles, and spoke more in succession. And they shared more of what researchers called ‘golden moments’ when all three strangers smiled as one.
As Edward Slingerland notes in his magisterial book, Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization, alcohol and the social bonding it creates may be the reason for civilization.
XI JINPING TAKE NOTE: The Year Putin’s Imperial Dream Became a Nightmare of Destruction
We know why Vladimir Putin wants Ukraine. Once upon a time (as recently as late February 2022), Vlad dreamed a splendid dream of imperial Russian glory restored.
In Vlad’s grand reverie, the architect, commander and instrument of this repair of the Russian Empire’s Soviet Union-era crackup would be… Vlad.
As grandiose, narcissistic hallucinations go, Vlad’s brain fever empire did have self-serving calculations and semi-informed parameters. I’m sure he’s read the great historical theoreticians or, since he was an intelligence agent, at least had an aide give him the bullet points.
Was that last sentence a shot at big ego intel officers? You bet it was. Look at all the U.S. intel types who called Hunter Biden’s laptop disinformation. Sneaky usually aligns with sleazy and that goes triple in the so-called intelligence communities.
Read the entire essay to get the theoretical gist.
WE ARE GOVERNED BY CROOKS AND MORONS:
THIS CAN BE FIXED: The ABA is trying to strong arm Hofstra University’s law school into hiring faculty by race and sex. The same thing is happening here at the University of San Diego. The Supreme Court won’t be able to stop this kind of overreach just by issuing a strong opinion in the Harvard and UNC cases. But in the future Congress can stop it.
(By the way, dear readers, if you know of other cases, in the last ten years or so, of accreditors attempting to dictate diversity to the schools they accredit, please let me know. I am trying to collect that information.)
SO MANY MYTHS: The Myth of American Income Inequality.
IT’S GOOD TO BE JOE BIDEN, Caribbean vacation edition. “Holy schamoly, have we ever had a president as disengaged as this?”
REPORT FROM THE BLUE ZONES: Of all places, how did Buffalo, NY not know what WINTER STORM meant?
It’s a characteristic of today’s Democrat-run jurisdictions that most people don’t do their jobs very well. If at all.
FOLLOW THE SCIENCE!!! Nearly 50% of participants in ‘Monkeypox in women’ study were biological men.
Maya Forstater took to Twitter to point out that it was hardly surprising that the findings showed women having similar clinical features as males when almost half the ‘women’ studied were male. . . . Others suggested that publishing such a study would undermine the public’s trust in the medical world.
“Same people doing these studies are the folks angry that people are not trusting medical authorities and consuming ‘misinformation’,” tweeted Jeremy Carl, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute.
Right?
MATT TAIBBI ON THE TWITTER FILES:
These next few pieces are the result of looking at two discrete data sets, one ranging from mid-2017 to early 2018, and the other spanning from roughly March 2020 through the present. In the first piece focused on that late 2017 period, you see how Washington politicians learned that Twitter could be trained quickly to cooperate and cede control over its moderation process through a combination of threatened legislation and bad press.
In the second, you see how the cycle of threats and bad media that first emerged in 2017 became institutionalized, to the point where a long list of government enforcement agencies essentially got to operate Twitter as an involuntary contractor, heading into the 2020 election. Requests for moderation were funneled mainly through the FBI, the self-described “belly button” of the federal government (not a joke, an agent really calls it that).
The company leadership knew as far back as 2017 that giving in to even one request to suspend this or that set of accused “hostile foreign accounts” would lead to an endless cycle of such demands. “Will work to contain that,” offered one comms official, without much enthusiasm, after the company caved for the first time that year. By 2020, Twitter was living the hell its leaders created for themselves.
What does it all mean? I haven’t really had time to think it over. Surely, though, it means something. I’ve been amused by the accusation that these stories are “cherry-picked.” As opposed to what, the perfectly representative sample of the human experience you normally read in news?
Charges like this are more revealing than they are damning.
IT WAS FILED PRE-MUSK: Twitter Lawsuit Against Ken Paxton Dismissed. “Musk might want to order his Twitter employees to go ahead and comply with Paxton’s records requests. After releasing so many details of Twitter’s censorship regime, Musk might think about releasing the memos behind Twitter’s lawsuit strategy under the previous regime.”
THERE ISN’T ONE, BECAUSE IT’S BASICALLY A FAKE BOYCOTT: What does the endgame look like for law schools refusing to participate in USNWR rankings? “I openly asked whether schools ‘boycotting’ intended to ‘boycott’ the surveys sent around to law schools. It’s apparent that answer is no. ‘Boycotting’ law schools submitted promotional material to prospective USNWR reputation survey voters (including me) even after announcing the boycott.”
TODAY’S DEALS at Amazon. #CommissionEarned
WE ARE GOVERNED BY CROOKS AND MORONS: Department of Homeland Security Can’t Even Secure Its Buildings Against People It Fired. “A new report by Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General shows that the department is systemically failing to revoke tens of thousands of ‘personal identity verification’ cards that allow staff to enter sensitive, secure facilities and access internal data networks, despite being warned about the problem for 15 years. The issue is made worse, the report continues, by the fact that Homeland Security’s internal record-keeping is so shoddy that it was impossible to determine how many ex-staffers have working access cards they aren’t supposed to.”
BADLY, BUT NOT AS BADLY AS IT USED TO: Just How Badly Does Apple Need China?
Faster decoupling, please.
SOCIALISTS HATE THE FUTURE AND PROSPERITY: The Faux Urgency of The Climate Crisis Is Giving Us No Time or Space To Build A Secure Energy Future.