PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS: Governor Murphy Refuses to Accept NYC Migrants after Vowing to Make New Jersey ‘Sanctuary’ State.
Archive for 2023
September 1, 2023
One reason Americans don’t trust the media is that politically biased reporters routinely adulterate the news with tendentious language and prepackaged opinions. The result is crude propaganda—lousy opinion writing and unreliable information rolled into one and deceptively packaged as straight news.
Here’s an example from CNN (emphasis mine): “Justice Clarence Thomas disclosed Thursday that Republican megadonor Harlan Crow paid for private jet trips for Thomas in 2022 to attend a speech in Texas and a vacation at Crow’s luxurious New York estate, as ethics questions continue to rock the Supreme Court.”
What actually happened is too mundane to rock anything: The Judicial Conference of the U.S., which regulates judges’ financial disclosures, changed its rules regarding “transportation that substitutes for commercial transportation.” A private plane trip is now considered a gift, which is subject to disclosure, rather than “personal hospitality,” which isn’t. The rule took effect in March, and Justice Thomas complied with it for his 2022 form.
This week’s coverage is another demonstration that disclosure is a mug’s game. If you follow the rules perfectly, “ethics experts” will fault you for failing to disclose when it isn’t required and for what you disclose when it is. Gabe Roth, who heads an outfit called Fix the Court, tells CNN that although Justice Thomas “says he plans on more closely following the disclosure laws moving forward, his penchant for living a lifestyle few of us can only dream of [sic] is not reflected in today’s report.” Mr. Roth adds that the justice “should go back and amend earlier disclosures to recount the full extent of the lavish gifts he’s received over the years.” The connection with judicial ethics is unclear: As CNN notes in passing, Mr. Crow has never had business before the court.
Justice Thomas’s 2022 disclosure form also vindicates my reporting last April on a real-estate transaction that ProPublica—which styles itself “an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism with moral force”—attempted to spin into a scandal. In 2014 a company established by Mr. Crow purchased three Savannah, Ga., properties—two empty lots and Justice Thomas’s childhood home, where his mother still lives and which Mr. Crow intends to turn into a museum. Justice Thomas had inherited a one-third share of the properties when his maternal grandparents died. ProPublica’s April 13 story was titled “Billionaire Harlan Crow Bought Property From Clarence Thomas. The Justice Didn’t Disclose the Deal.”
As I found in April, ProPublica’s headline was true as far as it went. Justice Thomas’s disclosure acknowledges: “Filer inadvertently failed to realize that the ‘sales transaction’ for the final disposition of the three properties triggered a new reportable transaction in 2014, even though this sale resulted in a capital loss.”
But the story erred in insinuating that Justice Thomas had committed other failures of disclosure. ProPublica led readers to believe Justice Thomas had previously disclosed his ownership of his mother’s home, then unaccountably dropped it from his form. In fact, as I surmised from the disclosures and Justice Thomas now officially reports, the ownership of that house didn’t need to be disclosed because it generated no rental income. ProPublica mixed it up with a different house, in Liberty County, Ga., which Justice Thomas properly stopped reporting when the meager rental income dried up.
ProPublica has yet to issue a correction.
The purpose of ProPublica is to launder lefty propaganda into fake journalism, which other outlets — like NPR or the AP — that are funded by lefty foundations and groups will then recycle as if it means something.
And I’ve written at length in the past about how the “Ethics Establishment” serves as a cover for, and enabler of, all sorts of unethical stuff. Not by accident, but by design.
A SMALL MEASURE OF WALKBACK: Dodge Might Not Drop Internal Combustion for Next-Gen Charger After All.
REMOTE HEALTHCARE: At-home saliva test detects cancer with 90% accuracy.
An AI-based home screening test to detect oral and throat cancers from saliva samples is now available in the United States with the hope of transforming oral and throat cancer detection.
Based on a technology approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as a “breakthrough device,” the saliva test can detect early symptoms of oral and throat cancer with more than 90 percent accuracy.
Due to a lack of effective diagnostic tools, these cancers often go undiagnosed until they have reached an advanced stage, resulting in low survival rates.
More like this, please.
THIS LOOKS USEFUL: Kindle Scribe (64 GB) the first Kindle for reading, writing. #CommissionEarned
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The broke-woke-stroke convergence: Why professors lower standards.
“Broke” colleges and universities “scramble to attract and retain students, whatever their intellectual readiness,” they write. Faculty are under pressure to please the customers. If too many switch to an easier major, the professor could lose his or her job.
“Woke” sensibilities have politicized student performance disparities, especially by race, they write. A Boston University teaching guide on the “hidden curriculum” suggests it “may not be fair or even valid” to hold marginalized students to such expectations as doing the readings, arriving to class on time, participating in class discussions or using “standard English.”
“Stroke” refers to the need to stroke the egos of “students viewed as increasingly likely to push back for higher grades or others perceived as too vulnerable to receive stringent appraisals of their work.”
The corrupt universities and the crybully students deserve one another.
MAKE ‘EM WORK BETTER: Digging deeper into how vaccines work against parasitic disease.
CANADA: No human remains found 2 years after claims of ‘mass graves’ in Canada.
After two years of horror stories about the alleged mass graves of Indigenous children at residential schools across Canada, a series of recent excavations at suspected sites has turned up no human remains.
Some academics and politicians say it’s further evidence that the stories are unproven.
Minegoziibe Anishinabe, a group of indigenous people also known as Pine Creek First Nation, excavated 14 sites in the basement of Our Lady of Seven Sorrows Catholic Church near the Pine Creek Residential School in Manitoba during four weeks this summer.
The so-called “anomalies” were first detected using ground-penetrating radar, but on Aug. 18, Chief Derek Nepinak of remote Pine Creek Indian Reserve said no remains were found.
Well, good — but you can be sure certain people will be upset by the good news.
TREASON OF THE SCIENCE JOURNALS: How Anthony Fauci manufactured consensus on the origins of COVID-19 with the help of science writers and the media.
New emails released in a congressional probe show that Fauci helped direct the publication of “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” an influential scientific paper published in Nature Medicine on March 17, 2020, that claimed COVID-19 could not have leaked from a laboratory. Fauci then cited the paper—in effect quoting himself, since he coordinated the article behind the scenes and was given final approval before it published—as if it was an independent source corroborating his assertions that COVID could only have come from a bat and not from a lab.
Read the whole thing.
RIP: Gil Brandt, pioneering Cowboys exec who helped create ‘America’s Team’, dies at 91.
Brandt was the antagonist in Skip Bayless’ fist book, God’s Coach. As I wrote in 2020, “Bayless’s book should be called ‘God’s Vice President of Player Personnel,’ but that wouldn’t have the same ring to it on the cover — and wouldn’t have sold nearly as many copies. Not surprisingly, having made Brandt the main scapegoat for the Cowboys’ demise in the 1980s, in 2019, Bayless was shocked that his bête noire, the then-85-year-old Brandt became the last of the Cowboys’ original triumvirate to reach the NFL Hall of Fame.”
THE ROT GOES ALL THE WAY TO THE TOP: Emails Show Hunter Biden Had Close Ties to High-Level Obama Officials.
CARS ARE RACISTS, MUST BE ABOLISHED: No, that’s not merely the declaration of some looney lefty lecturer at Harvard or Yale. It’s the declaration of “transportation nerd” Veronica Davis, one of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s latest appointees to the transportation equity advisory committee, according to the Washington Free Beacon. Davis is not a lone voice on this panel that Trump abolished by Buttigieg has revived. They are serious, and they are looking for ways to come take away all of our cars and all of our trucks. Oh and all of our freedoms, too.
IS THIS A REFLECTION ON AMERICAN WOMEN? Rates of vasectomies rise among American men. You know if roles were reversed one of the takeaways would be that men need to raise their game.
GERMANY WAS A GOOD PLACE FOR ROCKET SCIENCE IN 1939, TOO:
I visited the brand new Research Palace & Garden (RPG) @HKUChemistry for the first time this morning. It has taken @HKUniversity less than 3 months to plan and craft this beyond state-of-the-art facility. I find it difficult to find words to describe my feelings. Amazing!
— Fraser Stoddart (@sirfrasersays) August 31, 2023
A REMINDER THAT SANCTIONS RARELY WORK AND EVEN LESS OFTEN AS INTENDED: Russian LNG exports to Europe surge. “Just yesterday, we looked at how the sanctions on Russia largely seem to be failing and potentially backfiring, at least thus far. Now, more evidence of this trend is coming to light. One of the biggest issues involved in waging economic warfare against Russia has been the complications caused by Russia’s position in the global energy market. Energy exports are a huge part of the Russian economy, so cutting them off would put significant pressure on the Kremlin. But as one of the world’s leading suppliers, particularly when it comes to natural gas, there aren’t enough replacements for those products available so we’ve largely had to leave them alone. As a result, not only are Russian exports failing to be dampened, they’re actually increasing and the country is on track to set an all-time record for Liquified Natural Gas exports.”
WELCOME BACK, CARTER! Biden Emulating The Failed Middle East Policies Of Carter.
LIGHTNING DEAL: JiaSifu 40×60 High Definition Monocular Telescope with Smartphone Adapter. #CommissionEarned
TO BE FAIR, IT WAS NEVER ACTUALLY ABOUT HELPING WOMEN: How the #MeToo movement abandoned women.
MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Need to Report a UFO? There’s a New Government Website for That. “Washington being Washington, there has to be an office for everything, and every office must have all the excitement of a mandatory-attendance retirement dinner for the Second Assistant to the Deputy Director of the Deluth Field Office for the Interior Department’s Agency for the Protection of Super 8 Movies of Barns.”
SLOWLY TURNING INTO NORTH KOREA: China Is Closing in on Itself: The absence of foreigners in the country is a symptom of China’s restrictive, security-driven view of the world. “The feelings and impressions I heard from people whom I had never known to be particularly political were grim with discouragement. For their safety, I must withhold their names, but they quickly offered up the impression that their country had recently been closing in on itself, and the resulting sensation, one said, was like suffocation. One of them told me that I had lived in China during its heyday, a feeling I immediately understood but had never formulated myself.”
Related: Leaving China: Why expatriates like me abandoned the futures we planned in China.
“SECRETARY BOOTYJUICE:” Booty What?! Bahaha! Biden accidentally gives Pete Buttigieg hilarious new nickname (watch).