HEADLINES FROM 1900: Why Every Photographer Should Try Film.
Archive for 2022
March 17, 2022
JACK SHAFER: Why Journalists Love War.
WHY ARE LEFTIST MONOPOLY AREAS SUCH CESSPITS? Crime, Grime, and Greed at BART. Key Recommendations to Improve the Bay Area Rapid Transit System.
Read the whole thing to see the lengths of dishonesty to which lefty “activists” — and their press enablers — will go. Suing them is absolutely the right thing to do, both for itself and to make an example for others.
YALE LAW STUDENTS DISRUPT DISCUSSION ABOUT FREEDOM OF SPEECH. FIRE is looking into this, but it bears repeating: the cure to speech you don’t like is more speech, not silencing the person you don’t like. Yale has committed itself to this principle, but seems to have done little or nothing to explain why “equal justice under law” on free speech is the only protection the protesters have for their own speech, should a mass of people take a dislike to what they have to say. Lawyers (and law students), of all people, need to understand this principle.
LIVE AT 4:00PM EASTERN: ‘Five O’Clock Somewhere’ with Kruiser, VodkaPundit, Special Guest Megan Fox.
BE PREPARED: Electric Jar Opener, Bottle Opener Restaurant Automatic Jar Opener. #CommissionEarned
WELL, GOOD: Americans’ support for ‘no fly zone’ declines once they know what that is. “Supporters of the no-fly zone were at 40 percent of those polled, while opponents were at 25 percent. However, Yahoo! News reports, the numbers switched once respondents were told that a no-fly zone means that NATO would engage in war with Russia, shooting down their planes over Ukrainian air space.”
On the other hand: Washington Is Ramping Up Its Campaign To Draw NATO Into War With Russia.
In a letter sent Tuesday to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, a half-dozen top Republican lawmakers called for the Biden administration to provide Ukraine with “Soviet- or Russian-made strategic and tactical air defense systems and associated radars to Ukraine.”
That means long-range surface-to-air missiles, like the Soviet-made S-300 system, which is designed to shoot down enemy aircraft and intercept ballistic missiles. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has urged the United States to help Ukraine acquire S-300 air defense systems from countries that have them, like North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) members Bulgaria, Greece, and Slovakia, and he might do so again on Wednesday when he addresses Congress.
The provision of such heavy weaponry to Ukraine, whether by the United States or our NATO allies, would represent an unprecedented level of direct military support for Ukraine that would undoubtedly — and rightly — be interpreted by Moscow as a sharp escalation by the West.
The S-300 is not a “heavy” weapon. It’s purely defensive.
If Putin doesn’t want his missiles and aircraft shot down, he should stop targeting them at Ukraine.
THE GRAY LADY WILL SELL NO BAD NEWS ABOUT DEMOCRATS UNTIL ITS TIME: Almost Two Years after 2020 Election, the New York Times Discovers Hunter Biden Laptop and Corruption Investigations Are Real.
If you are really industrious, you can dig 20 pages into the A section of today’s New York Times and find a 1,700-word news story by three of its top reporters, relating that the Justice Department’s investigation of President Biden’s son, Hunter, is not merely a tax-matter. Turns out that prosecutors are probing his penchant for cashing in on his father’s political influence, through payments by overseas entities for which he did not register as a foreign agent.
Well, I’ll be damned!
Even better, if you wade 23 paragraphs into the story, you will learn that prosecutors are examining emails between Biden and his business associates that come from “a cache of files that appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. [Hunter] Biden in a Delaware repair shop.”
You don’t say.
Funny how this keeps happening at the Times whenever there is bad news involving a prominent Democrat. As Byron York wrote on September 24th, 2008:
Today is a red-letter day for the New York Times. For the first time, the paper has reported in its news section that the Rev. Jeremiah Wright once uttered the phrase “God damn America.” Wright’s comments were widely reported and widely discussed beginning with an ABC News report six months ago. Barack Obama even had to give a much-publicized speech because of those words, and others. But the newspaper of record has never seen fit to publish Wright’s quote in its news pages. Until today.
Similarly, it took the Gray Lady a whole year to discover the “Luv Guv’s” crimes and misdemeanors in 2020:
The Times’ article on Cuomo preceded his defenestration by New York’s attorney general. It will be curious to see what becomes of their reporting on Hunter.
UPDATE: On his Facebook page, Michael Walsh writes, “It’s important for you civilians to know how to read the secret messages encoded in Pravda’s ‘news’ stories. Its admission that — surprise!! — the Hunter Biden laptop stories were all, of course, true is a signal to Dems that the Big Guy is now expendable.”
(Updated and bumped.)
I SAY, JUST KILL THE MOSQUITOES OUTRIGHT: Surprise findings suggest mosquito odor sensors are sensitive to molecular regulation to avoid insect repellants. “This ‘expression’ process apparently makes the bugs able to ignore common insect repellants.”
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Chris Cuomo’s $125M CNN Lawsuit Contains Stunning Corruption Allegations.
But then things get sexy and revealing… The way I’m reading it is that in order to prove he did not violate CNN’s standards and practices and was therefore unlawfully terminated, Cuomo pretty much comes out and says CNN has no professional ethics. To make this case, he basically says, Hey, everyone was doing it, including the people in charge!
CNN has a long-established pattern and practice of selectively enforcing its policies based on cynical calculations of public perception. Indeed, CNN fostered a culture in which “exceptions” to the network’s standards and practices were routinely sanctioned, and that culture began at the top with Zucker and Gollust. As long as CNN’s ratings would not be hurt, Zucker and Gollust were more than willing to overlook major transgressions by CNN personalities such as Don Lemon and Jake Tapper, or even to engage in blatant misconduct themselves.
Cuomo then — tee hee — names names…
Read the whole thing.
FOLLOW THE SCIENCE! Twitter Suppresses Published Results of a Peer Reviewed Study.
ELITE STANDARDS: LSAC Announces New Undergraduate Pathway To Law School Without Taking The LSAT/GRE. The purpose of this, of course, is to make affirmative action less obvious and less transparent.
CHRISTIAN TOTO: How Jane Campion Stepped into a Woke Trap of Her Own Making. “Jane Campion went from Oscar favorite to ‘insidious’ white feminist in record time.”
Wokism is the Left’s favorite tool for kneecapping lefty rivals.
HACKS COVER TRACKS: Maura Healey, Rachael Rollins escape scrutiny in Violence in Boston Inc. scandal.
Two people who shouldn’t get a pass on the Violence in Boston Inc. indictment are Attorney General Maura Healey and U.S. Attorney Rachael Rollins — both of whom should have been monitoring VIB founder Monica Cannon-Grant more closely.
Healey’s office is in charge of overseeing all nonprofit organizations and there’s no evidence she raised any flags with Cannon-Grant, who was charged by the feds with misusing hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants and donations, and along with her husband, defrauding the federal government of $100,000 in pandemic unemployment benefits.
Obviously, Healey was too busy filing dozens of lawsuits against former President Donald Trump to notice alleged corruption like this, especially when it came to a darling of the media.
This isn’t the first time Healey, the Democrats’ leading gubernatorial candidate, has taken a pass on prosecuting corruption right under her nose, leaving it to the feds to do the dirty work. She’s been especially light on state political misdeeds.
She should now launch an internal review to figure out how Violence in Boston Inc. escaped scrutiny from her office. Was it untouchable for ideological and political reasons?
Rollins, in her previous job as Suffolk District Attorney, handed Cannon-Grant a $6,000 no-strings-attached grant that the feds now claim paved the way for use on personal expenses like meals, rent, trips and nail salons.
Rollins clearly should have done more to track the grant and make sure it was being spent properly on a youth retreat to Philadelphia. It was a serious lapse in judgment on her part.
The new district attorney now says he will do more to track grants from the office’s asset forfeiture division.
Maybe taking asset forfeiture money and handing it out to political crooks should be illegal.
Should Covid rear its head in the US again, the White House would do itself a favor by keeping Fauci sidelined. He hasn’t done much to help the country react rationally to the possibility of a rising case rate — and he has remained defensively stubborn on the possible origins concerning the virus in China (he still claims the likely origin is zoonotic, despite a lack of evidence to support that thesis).
Most likely, the next time we will hear from Fauci will be when Congress convenes a 9/11-style commission on the pandemic, which was suggested earlier this week. He will get his talking points in about speaking for “the Science,” combative senators like Rand Paul will get their soundbites, the media will have a field day with the food fight. None of it will get us any closer to answers about how the pandemic happened, or why the CDC and Fauci changed their message in the name of science, sometimes almost overnight.
Anthony Fauci has quietly returned to the shady world of gain-of-function and dual-use-of-concern viral research, at least until the next pandemic. Don’t complain about him being gone.
More changes from President Klain’s White House: Pandemic over, cont’d: Biden COVID czar out. “Jeffrey D. Zients, an entrepreneur and management consultant who steered President Biden’s coronavirus response through successive pandemic waves and the largest vaccination campaign in American history, plans to leave the White House in April to return to private life, President Biden said in a statement…Zients was an odd choice from the start. By appointing Zients to that position and Xavier Becerra to run Health and Human Services, Biden picked two men without any medical background to run his administration’s policies for the worst pandemic in a century. Under their management, COVID-19 policies became even more politicized than before, especially when it came to schools and interventions. That politicization infected even the supposedly hard-science bastion of the CDC, which calculated its guidelines on political lobbying from teachers unions until this day. Appointing Ashish Jha is at least a signal that the White House has belatedly figured out that their credibility has evaporated on the pandemic as a result.”
LEARN TO BEND THE KNEE: Adam Carolla Reveals the Real Reason Kids Were Forced to Mask in Schools.
A POSSIBLY UNFORESEEN CONSEQUENCE: Advanced prostate cancers rates rose as use of PSA tests fell. Though I always found the about-face on early detection of many cancers suspicious, given that it happened just as ObamaCare came in.
NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: Another Day, Another BLM Leader Indicted For Fraud.