THIS IS MOSTLY ABOUT TAX REVENUE: Ghana warns against illegal Starlink services. “Ghana is the latest country in Africa to warn against using Starlink before it issues licenses for SpaceX’s satellite broadband service. The National Communications Authority (NCA), Ghana’s telecoms regulator, cautioned the general public Dec. 7 against using services purported to be from Starlink following reports of equipment being sold and operated in the country. . . . Regulators in South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Senegal have recently issued similar warnings to the public and Starlink resellers operating without permission.”
Archive for 2023
December 11, 2023
JIM TREACHER: Mondays, Am I Right? I am right.
Deadspin has now quietly rewritten that terrible blog post defaming a nine-year-old child as a racist, and the author has protected his Twitter account. I hope that kid’s parents sue them anyway.
Especially since Deadspin is lying about it. Here’s their “editor’s note:”
“We regret any suggestion that we were attacking the fan.”
Oh, really? This is the first paragraph of the original piece:
“It takes a lot to disrespect two groups of people at once. But on Sunday afternoon in Las Vegas, a Kansas City Chiefs fan found a way to hate Black people and the Native American at the same time.”
That sure sounds like an attack to me. They accused a little kid of racism for dressing up as his favorite team’s logo.
Deadspin deleting what their writer said, and then lying about what was deleted, sure seems like cognizance of guilt. They defamed a blameless child, they know it, and now they’re scrambling to cover their asses.
Bring on the lawsuit!
I look forward to the day when Deadspin is tossed on the scrap heap, right next to Gawker and Jezebel. Clickbait hacks, beware.
Earlier: Sports journalism utterly sucks: Deadspin ‘blackface’ debacle proves it.
#HIMTOO? Famed L.A. DJ accused of sexually assaulting 6 teen girls: Rolling Stone.
Influential Los Angeles radio DJ Rodney Bingenheimer has been accused of sexually assaulting six underage girls decades ago, including two who went on to successful music careers.
On Monday, Rolling Stone published a report detailing Go-Go’s guitarist Jane Wiedlin’s allegation that Bingenheimer, believed to be 27 at the time, assaulted a then-15-year-old Wiedlin at his club, English Disco, in 1974.
“It was weird; it never occurred to me that that had been a crime. I didn’t know what to think. It wasn’t until the #MeToo movement started when I realized I was sexually assaulted by [an adult] when I was 15,” Wiedlin told the magazine.
Why did Wiedlin wait until six years after the #MeToo phenomenon began to come forth about Bingenheimer?
Flashback to October of 2017: The sexual predators everyone still worships. “What do we do about predators we actually think are cool?…What is the point at which it becomes necessary for us to channel our inner Savonarolas and just start burning? Is one confirmed incident enough? How many Station to Stations or Physical Graffitis are worth the assault of a single woman or child? Are we affirming or materially contributing to their crimes when we watch films or listen to music made by abusers?”
ELDERLY SOCIALIST TACITLY ADMITS THAT HER WORLDVIEW IS TO THE LEFT OF STALIN: Taylor Lorenz Says NYT Only Allows Right-Wing Opinions At Newspaper.
On Monday, journalist Taylor Lorenz shared a story about The New York Times’s coverage of the Israel-Hamas war and explicitly stated that the newspaper only allows right-wing opinions to be showcased in its publication.
The piece Lorenz shared blasts the Gray Lady as alt-right for condemning antisemitism and Hamas while noting “the left-wing tilt of higher education is not only wrong but dangerous.”
We here at Not The Bee have covered many of these right-wing moments at The New York Times, such as the instance where The Times lamented the lack of “kink” in The Little Mermaid remake.
There was also the story where the NYT promoted the traditionally conservative value of polyamorous sexual relationships.
The alt-right paper is also known for it’s very conservative headline about elections being bad for democracy.
Far more so than Woodward and Bernstein and Watergate, we must give credit to the WaPo’s Lorenz for finally exposing one of the greatest and carefully crafted long cons in American history:
● In the 1930s, Timesman Walter Duranty won a Pulitzer for whitewashing Stalin’s terror famine in Ukraine.
● In 1953, the Times published an obituary for Joseph Stalin which should be in the dictionary as the very definition of “fawning:” Stalin Rose From Czarist Oppression to Transform Russia Into Mighty Socialist State.
● More recently, then-editor “Pinch” Sulzberger was quoted by New York magazine as saying in 1991, “[A]lienating older white male readers means ‘we’re doing something right.'”
● It was during that era that former Timesman Peter Boyer described the atmosphere in Sulzberger’s newsroom as “moderate white men should die,” according to William McGowan in his exceptional 2010 book Gray Lady Down. The following decade, then-editor Howell Raines, who was responsible for serial fabulist Jayson Blair joining the paper’s staff, described his preference towards diversity over a quality product in a classic Kinsley gaffe: “This [hiring] campaign has made our staff better and, more importantly, more diverse.”
● In 2004, the Gray Lady’s then-ombudsman Daniel Okrent famously wrote, “Is the New York Times a Liberal Newspaper? Of course it is.”
●This past October: NYT: A Week Later, Hamas “Fails to Make Case” that Israel Struck Hospital; UPDATE: “Editors Note”?
Marry yourselves to terrorists in haste, repent at leisure? The New York Times has all but redefined ‘leisure’ in this old axiom with its ever-so-slow retreat from its initial report that Israel bombed a hospital in Gaza.
A week ago, the NYT and every other American media outlet swallowed that Hamas claim without question while sourcing it from “Gaza’s health ministry. Even after Israel provided video of the failed rocket launch by Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and radio communications from Hamas confirming the incident as friendly fire, American news media declared that the IDF hadn’t “proven” their case.
Now, a week later, the ‘Paper of Record’ grudgingly admits that the claim came from Hamas and never did have any evidence supporting it. The headline itself is a marvel in the annals of modified limited hangouts (via Power Line):
As America’s Newspaper of Record reported in mid-October: New York Times Patiently Awaiting Zoom Call From Hamas To See What They Should Print Today.
That’s nearly a century of subterfuge, as the Times spent article after article building a nearly impenetrable false front that it was a leftist “Progressive” newspaper. Fortunately, one woman at the Washington Post has finally managed to crack one of the greatest and most brilliantly conceived scams in journalistic history
STONE AGE PIONEERS: Homo erectus’ High-Altitude Life 2 Million Years Ago.
FOR HEALTH AND LONGEVITY, EAT MORE MEAT:
Worldwide, bivariate correlation analyses revealed that meat intake is positively correlated with life expectancies. This relationship remained significant when influences of caloric intake, urbanization, obesity, education and carbohydrate crops were statistically controlled. Stepwise linear regression selected meat intake, not carbohydrate crops, as one of the significant predictors of life expectancy. In contrast, carbohydrate crops showed weak and negative correlation with life expectancy.
The science is settled. You don’t want to be a science-denier, do you?
GREAT GIFT FOR SOMEONE WHO SITS A LOT: KINGSMITH Electric Standing Desk, Adjustable Desk. #CommissionEarned
HIGHLY RESISTANT TO GEN-Z CARJACKERS: 2024 BMW Z4 M40i Manual Transmission First Drive.
READER FAVORITE: DMoose Forearm Exerciser. #CommissionEarned
MAYBE ON AN AIRPLANE: Would You Trust Frangible Ammunition in Your EDC Gun?
MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: The China Trap (And Ours). “You need to see how China has become so deeply weird — a still-developing economy with all the baggage of a fully developed economy like ours.”
STILL NOT READY FOR PRIME TIME: EV Push Worries Car Dealers Facing Disillusioned Buyers.
As inventories of electric cars grow faster than sales, car dealers are feeling increasingly discouraged by their prospects, according to a quarterly survey from Cox Automotive, the parent company of Kelley Blue Book. A dealer sentiment index derived from the survey shows sales expectations haven’t been lower since at least 2021, when Cox first started asking about EVs.
“The excitement that existed a year ago around EVs has definitely faded,” Cox Automotive Chief Economist Jonathan Smoke said in a news release last week. “The EV transition is requiring more effort from dealers than before, so it makes sense that enthusiasm has declined.”
Electric vehicle sales are growing — a record of over 300,000 vehicles represented a 50% increase in the third quarter — but they still make up less than 8% of total car sales in the U.S., according to Cox. In interviews with the Wall Street Journal, auto dealers said customers are reluctant to switch to all-electric cars over concerns about price, reliability and a dearth of charging stations.
Biden wants EVs to make up half of all new car sales by 2030 — and if he can crush gas-powered sales down hard enough, he might just make it!
THE GLOBAL BABY BUST: Tracking the Population Crisis.
MICHAEL WALSH: Make Like Henry: Dissolve the Ivy League.
But what if Henry was in part right, and that what Britain needed was the abolition of the institutional hotbeds of sedition and moral inversion that he considered Catholic monasteries to be? England and the United Kingdom went on to have some of their best innings as a nation after his reign, a winning streak that started in earnest with Good Queen Bess ended in the disaster of World War I, when German princelings resident in London fought German princelings resident in Berlin, who were fighting German princelings resident in St. Petersburg, and everybody lost.
What if we follow his lead, then, and abolish not the monasteries — the current incarnation of the post-Vatican II Catholic Church is taking care of that all by itself — but the Ivy League and a few other “elite” universities, the nests of “progressive” saboteurs who have inflicted incalculable damage on the United States since the arrival of the Frankfurt School on these shores just before World War II.
Surely, the stunning, clueless malfeasance of three female Ivy League presidents would indicate that a thorough housecleaning is in order. The ritual self-immolation of one of the most egregious offenders, Penn’s Liz McGill, was a good start, but let’s face it there’s lots more work to be done, boys and girls.
Calls to nationalize one industry or another have been coming from the Ivy League for most of a century. Turnabout is fair play! Not that this will ever happen, but it’s worth thinking about what to do with an industry now widely regarded as toxic.
IT’S GOOD FOR THE PLANET: 4 east African countries are going for nuclear power—why this is a bad idea.
If climate change is as big a crisis as they say, the other considerations don’t matter. My advice: Finance it with Chinese loans, then stiff ’em.
Since the first silo-based Minuteman went on alert at Montana’s Malmstrom Air Force Base on Oct. 27, 1962 — the day Cuba shot down a U-2 spy plane at the height of the Cuban missile crisis — the missile has “talked” to its operators through thousands of miles of hard-wiring in cables buried underground.
Those Hardened Intersite Cable Systems, or HICS, cables carry messages back and forth from the missile to the missileer, who receives those messages through a relatively new part of the capsule — a firing control console called REACT, for Rapid Execution and Combat Targeting, that was installed in the mid-1990s.
It’s a closed communication loop, and a very secure one that brings its own headaches. Any time the Air Force wants to test one of the missiles, it literally has to dig up the cables and splice them, to isolate that test missile’s wiring from the rest. Over decades of testing, there are now hundreds of splices in those critical loops.
But it’s also one of the Minuteman’s best features. You would need a shovel — and a lot more — to try to hack the system. Even when missile crews update targeting codes, it is a mechanical, manual process.
Minuteman is “a very cyber-resilient platform,” said Col. Charles Clegg, the Sentinel system program manager.
Clegg said cybersecurity for the software-driven Sentinel has been a top focus of the program, one that has all of their attention.
“Like Minuteman, Sentinel will still operate within a closed network. However, to provide defense in depth, we will have additional security measures at the boundary and inside the network, enabling our weapon system to operate effectively in a cyber-contested environment,” Clegg said.
Here’s to hoping we don’t end up missing HICS and all those eight-inch floppies.
CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Gun-Banning NM Governor Smacked Down Again. “By actually applying the Bruen test, and using it to strike down half of the remaining decree, the courts have giving gun owners at least three-fourths of a loaf here.”
A MODEST PROPOSAL FROM MICHAEL WALSH: Make Like Henry: Dissolve the Ivy League.
But what if [Henry VIII] was in part right, and that what Britain needed was the abolition of the institutional hotbeds of sedition and moral inversion that he considered Catholic monasteries to be? England and the United Kingdom went on to have some of their best innings as a nation after his reign, a winning streak that started in earnest with Good Queen Bess ended in the disaster of World War I, when German princelings resident in London fought German princelings resident in Berlin, who were fighting German princelings resident in St. Petersburg, and everybody lost.
What if we follow his lead, then, and abolish not the monasteries — the current incarnation of the post-Vatican II Catholic Church is taking care of that all by itself — but the Ivy League and a few other “elite” universities, the nests of “progressive” saboteurs who have inflicted incalculable damage on the United States since the arrival of the Frankfurt School on these shores just before World War II.
Surely, the stunning, clueless malfeasance of three female Ivy League presidents would indicate that a thorough housecleaning is in order. The ritual self-immolation of one of the most egregious offenders, Penn’s Liz McGill, was a good start, but let’s face it there’s lots more work to be done, boys and girls. Writes Andrew Sullivan:
It may be too much to expect that the Congressional hearings this week, starring the three presidents of Harvard, MIT, and Penn, will wake people up to the toxic collapse of America’s once-great Ivy League. But I can hope, can’t I? The mediocrities smirked, finessed, condescended, and stonewalled. Take a good look at them. These are the people who now select our elites. And they select them, as they select every single member of the faculty, and every student, by actively discriminating against members of certain “privileged” groups and aggressively favoring other “marginalized” ones. They were themselves appointed in exactly the same way, from DEI-approved pools of candidates. As a Harvard dean, Claudine Gay’s top priority was “making more progress on diversity,” i.e. intensifying the already systemic race, sex and gender discrimination that defines the place.
Read the whole thing.
“WE CAN BUILD A UNIVERSITY IN THREE YEARS, BUT IT TAKES THREE HUNDRED YEARS TO REBUILD A REPUTATION,” to paraphrase Admiral Cunningham. What happens to the presidents of Harvard and MIT, and what’s happened to the president of Penn, is small ball. The big news is the trashing of literally centuries-old reputations at institutions whose chief capital is reputational. Sure, they have big endowments, but that’s not where their clout comes from.
Bear that in mind.
JOSH BLACKMAN: The Rotten Core of College Campuses.
PRIORITIES: ‘Pathological Liar’ or ‘Brave’ Victim? The Curious Case of the ‘Islamophobic Hate Crime’ at Stanford. “It took the university president’s office four days to condemn the Hamas terrorist atrocities on Israel, but within 20 hours of the attack on Omira, Stanford’s president and provost had condemned the drive-by Islamophobic hate crime in a statement.”