YOU’RE COPING, BUT ARE YOU COPING WELL?   Shock and Stress.

PURE COINCIDENCE, I’M SURE:   White House Spokesperson Jen Psaki Gets Very Nervous When Questioned About Joe Biden Financial Conflicts of Interest in Russia, Ukraine and China.

DESPITE THE AUTHOR’S SKEPTICISM ABOUT FRAUD IN 2020*:  Mail Voting And Election Legitimacy.

I will point out that every state that goes all vote-by-mail stops electing anything but Democrats, some openly communist.

It’s an amazing coincidence.

*Which only proves his mathematical and probability illiteracy. Also psychological stupidity. No one runs a Potemkin campaign unless they think they can make up enough ballots to get them in, regardless.

BUT IT’S NOT GOING TO HAPPEN TILL WE MAKE THEM STOP:  Child Abuse: ‘I Just Want Them to Stop Transing the Children’.

WHEN I WAS A KID, I THOUGHT NASA WAS AMAZING:  The Climate Change Spiral is Back.

Of course, I also thought that the CIA was competent and the FBI honest.  Kids believe the darndest things.

ABOLISH THESE AGENCIES. SALT THE EARTH:  The Stench of Spygate.

They owe Nixon’s ghost and abject apology.

THIS:  Five Quick Things: The Lies of the Times.

IF YOU CAN’T TAKE YOUR KIDS OUT OF PUBLIC SCHOOL, MAKE IT AN HABIT OF DROPPING BY UNANNOUNCED:  Wisconsin schools: keeping parents in the dark.

IN 2020 WE DROPPED INTO THE WORLD OF THE WHITE RABBIT:  With Iran Deal 2.0 we are fully in Looking Glass World.

We haven’t been allowed to wake up.

IT’S ONLY HIDDEN BECAUSE WE LET IT BE:  A Hidden History of Evil.

Also, anyone out there who can check machine translations from the Russian? Because there are decent, non-pricey services. I think a group of us should organize an effort to bring these out. The hammer and sickle should be as unacceptable as the swastika and Mao and Che should not more be on t-shirts than Hitler.

MAYBE THEY DON’T FEEL IT’S THEIR COUNTRY ANYMORE? Why are so few Americans willing to defend their country?

I mean, look at the current government and tell me that’s crazy.

OPEN THREAD: There’s a calm before the storm.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: China is developing new solid rockets to boost overall space capabilities.

IMPORTANT SAFETY TIP, THANKS, EGON: Please stop putting COVID-19 test solution in your eyes and nose, FDA says.

SHOCKER: Inflation is bad and about to get worse.

Related: Blame Biden for High Gas Prices.

SCIENCE: The Science Is in – You Should Leave Your Filthy Shoes Outside The House.

SPACE: SpaceX aims for late night Starlink launch. “Elon Musk’s SpaceX plans to launch 53 Starlink satellites from Florida late on Friday night, days after the company marked its 20th anniversary. The company aims to launch the spacecraft on a Falcon 9 rocket at 11:23 p.m. EDT from Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Liftoff time is instantaneous, meaning any problems could prompt a delay of about 24 hours to Saturday night.”

BLAMING WOMEN FOR THE CRIMES OF MEN:

For a solid five minutes this week, I believed that an elderly woman in New York City had killed and decapitated another elderly woman. I believed it because it was in the papers. It was there in black and white. In the apartment of this ‘83-year-old Brooklyn woman’, the New York Times reported, cops found the decapitated head of Susan Leyden, a 68-year-old lady who had gone missing. Police became suspicious of the 83-year-old woman and so they ‘searched her apartment’, the BBC said, wherein they found ‘a human head’. A few days later, not far from this seemingly evil woman’s apartment, they also found Ms Leyden’s leg and torso. Grim. And surely unprecedented. When was the last time a very old woman was alleged to have killed and then gruesomely dismembered another woman?

Then it hit me. I got to the very final line of the BBC report and saw these words – this 83-year-old ‘now identifies as a transgender woman’. I got further into the NYT piece, too. Its headline may have said ‘She Killed Two Women. At 83, She Is Charged With Dismembering a Third’, but then came this killer line: ‘[she] was listed as male in earlier court records but now identifies as a woman.’ So it wasn’t a woman. It wasn’t an 83-year-old lady who somehow summoned up the wickedness and the power to allegedly kill and horrifically mutilate a 68-year-old woman. It was a man. The NYT’s headline was a flagrant lie. So was the BBC’s entire account of this ‘woman’, she, allegedly killing Ms Leyden and then brutalising her corpse. I had been told, in no uncertain terms, that a woman killed a woman, and it was completely untrue.

This is the horrifying story of Harvey Marcelin (the name should have been a giveaway), who has been charged with second-degree murder and concealment of a human corpse in relation to the death of Susan Leyden. Mr Marcelin has killed before. Women, of course. In 1963, he was convicted of first-degree murder for shooting to death his girlfriend in Harlem (‘she was convicted of first-degree murder’, the New York Times lies). In 1985, less than a year after he was released from jail, Mr Marcelin stabbed another woman to death (‘she pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter’ in that case, lies the NYT). And now he – he – is charged with murdering a third woman and scattering the poor lady’s body parts across Brooklyn. . . .

This case is horrifying for two reasons. First and foremost because a woman has been killed and dismembered. That is appalling and it is essential that justice is done. But it’s also horrifying because the media are refusing to tell us the truth about it.

Informing readers takes a back seat to tribal signaling.

AT AMAZON, Augason Farms Enriched Unbleached All Purpose Flour.

MAYBE IT WASN’T WORTH IT FOR A FREE TRIP TO NYC:  I was the official naysayer for a pre-recorded television show that will be aired on CNN+ next month.  The subject was race-preferential admissions.  I barely got a word edgewise.

I’m not sure how many college students were in the audience, but, if memory serves, it was 50 to 100.  If it was 100, I was outnumbered 103 to 1, since all of them purported to favor race-preferential admissions policies.  Don Lemon was the host, and Ibram Kendi, a woman from Tufts, and I were the so-called experts.  Most of the talking seemed to come from the audience.

One student’s statement was  particularly silly.  He said that as an Asian American he didn’t mind being turned down by Harvard on account of his race and that most Asian Americans support this kind of affirmative action.  I countered with the story of the defeat of Proposition 16 in which Californians overwhelmingly rejected an effort to amend the state constitution to allow California state universities to go back to race-preferential admissions.  I noted that Asian Americans in California were overwhelmingly on my side in that campaign.  Most of our most dedicated volunteers were Asian American.

The student responded by saying that it was RICH Asian immigrants who opposed Proposition 16.  Alas, I never got a chance to respond.

For the record, that is [expletive deleted] absurd.  We were outspent 16 to 1, and we still killed ’em.  If there were any rich Asians backing our campaign, they sure didn’t make themselves known.

In this article, Alex Heideman and I catalog the electoral and polling data on race-preferential admissions.  Bottom line:  Americans oppose them.  And the more clearly the question is presented, the more clearly they register their opposition.

I did get some awesome Indian food while in NYC.

SHOCKING NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: Study: Using emojis in work email, texts may damage standing with colleagues. “They’re cute and expressive, but using lots of emojis in your communications at work could lower your standing among your colleagues, a new study suggests. The researchers conducted a series of experiments with hundreds of Americans and found that employees who use pictures and emojis in emails, Zoom profiles or even company logos on T-shirts are perceived as less powerful than those who stick to using words only.”

Well, that’s because words are used by adults.

FLASHBACK: Biden acts much more like Putin’s puppet than Trump ever did.

I’m talking, of course, about Joseph Robinette Biden Jr., who at his shambolic Wednesday press conference gave Russia the go-ahead to invade Ukraine, though it was quickly walked back by backwalker-in-chief Jen Psaki, his press secretary.

The last time something like that happened was in 1950, when Secretary of State Dean Acheson gave North Korea what appeared to be a green light to invade South Korea. The result was the Korean War. One hopes Biden’s blunder will not bear similar consequences.

Oops.

HMM: Study suggests lithium may decrease risk of developing dementia.

OH, NOW THEY BELIEVE US: The New York Post points out in this story that:

“People familiar with the investigation said prosecutors had examined emails between Mr. Biden, Mr. Archer and others about Burisma and other foreign business activity,” the Times writes. “Those emails were obtained by The New York Times from a cache of files that appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop. The email and others in the cache were authenticated by people familiar with them and with the investigation.” […] But wait, it doesn’t end there. In October 2020, the Times cast doubt that there was a meeting between Joe Biden and an official from Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company for which Hunter was a board member. “A Biden campaign spokesman said Mr. Biden’s official schedules did not show a meeting between the two men,” the Times wrote, acting as a perfect stenographer.”

Jonathan Turley’s post last year about the mainstream media stealthily admitting that yes, the material found on Hunter Biden’s laptop was the real thing. We’ve known ( and by “we” I mean anyone with a good sense of skepticism) for months that the lapdogs in DC and NY newsrooms made sure the laptop was toxic: Russian disinformation, a GOP trick, you name it. If there was a reason to ignore it and make it toxic to even talk about, they did it. Professional liar and shameless mutant Jen Psaki continued to push the narrative as far and as hard as she could, from the bully pulpit of the White House.

The facts about the final, inevitable but snail’s crawl to acceptance of its accuracy speaks volumes about the way DC newsrooms operate. In fact, few folks know that John Solomon’s “JustTheNews.com” had revealed the laptop and its contents’ authenticity as far back as 2020. I know this first hand, because I performed the legal review and “backread” of the story. This episode highlights a deeper, more persistent problem: the toxification of center-right, right-leaning or other news organizations that are designed for more conservative (or open minded) readers.

How many times in raising a point with someone have you cited Fox News or OAN only to be met with dismissal: “Oh, Fox, yeah, right.” It’s a form of deflection, and it works. Once the source has been broadbrushed as “unreliable” the substantive conversation stops.

Herein lies the problem with that latest play toy of the media crowd, namely “disinformation.” To be sure, people from across the social and political spectrum have posted knowingly false or at best, poorly researched stories. But even though I am not a classical scholar, I’ll bet you that during elections in the Rome of Octavian (around 27 B.C.) there were whispering campaigns accusing candidates of terrible things. It’s old wine in a new bottle. We’ve just developed louder, faster, and broader ways of spreading falsities. (Gratuitous plug for Glenn’s book that touches on this topic).

Reporting about disinformation has become a cottage industry. Several newsrooms have assigned reporters (usually very young, very inexperienced, and very liberal) to a “disinformation beat.” Eventually, Parkinson’s Law will come into play. Work and personnel expand to consume the available resources. To keep their beat (and their jobs) there is a built-in incentive to “over-label” other newsrooms (especially those with a conservative readership).

Worse yet, leave it to old time dead-tree publishers to try to cash in on the “disinformation” business. Veteran publisher Steve Brill (with whom I admit having a few unpleasant exchanges) has come up with NewsGuardTech.com, a website that touts itself as the be-all and end-all of cataloging “bad” news organizations. Imagine Snopes on steroids with a journalism degree.

A look at the advisors and investors is used as a selling point for why the public should trust them, and why corporations should pay for their reporting service. In fact, I think it does the opposite. One of their advisors is Jimmy Wales, the creator and Lord Ruler of Wikipedia. Res ipsa loquitur. Another is Retired General Michael Hayden, who as head of the CIA expanded the agency’s surveillance on American citizens, including members of the U.S. Senate. He seems nice. 

The ownership and advisors are also chock full of people straight from the C-suites of the advertising and lobbying industry. Advisor Israel Mirsky describes himself as “a Madison Avenue technologist with a background in computer science.” And oh yeah, among the investors is Publicis Groupe, a vampire squid among “governmental relations” and advertising agencies. Incidentally, Publicis gave Joe Biden almost $100,000 in campaign donations. And we’re supposed to believe there is an ethic of neutrality (let alone honesty) there? If enough ad agencies can be persuaded that a newsroom is “fake” then you have successfully executed them.

I’m kind of hoping that this latest fad dies out. It’s the latest iteration of everyone screaming “FAKE NEWS” and until mainstream media starts to admit and publish facts that they don’t like, this is going nowhere.

I’m not holding my breath, though.

**CORRECTION: Lede updated to show NYT’s recent admission was reported in the NYP yesterday and Turley’s post was from last year. I apologize for the confusion.***

STILL POPULAR: Made in USA Can Opener. #CommissionEarned