NOTHING THAT DAMAGING TO THE DEMOCRATS CAN BE TOLERATED: Dockworkers strike suspended, tentative agreement includes 62% pay raise over 6 years. “The tentative agreement does not resolve differences between the union and shipping companies over the use of automated machinery, sources said. That will be a key focus of negotiations between both sides from now until January 15.” Which is conveniently after the election.
UPDATE: A friend messages: “Haha, the Dems got to them. And all this time the unions thought they were telling the Dems what to do. I bet most longshoremen are Trumpy, tho.”
The groups holding these events are quite openly and publicly telling you who they are and what they believe in. To quote Mandel once more, their “leaders don’t want to wait a day to hold the rally because while any other day could mark the war, no other day could mark the murder and mayhem of Oct. 7. The day is important to them because the massacre of Jews is important to them.” And that’s important information to have.
I disagree with Navarro’s premise here, but so what if she’s right? I’m so old, I can remember last month, where Kamala’s “code-switching” was absolutely endorsed by all of the best people on the left. But then, we are talking the “It’s different when we do it” party here.
CNN polling director Agiesta, who in May completed a one-year term as AAPOR president, declined to be interviewed for this article.
But in a CNN-sponsored discussion before the 2022 midterm elections, Agiesta addressed the question of whether polls are accurate, saying, “I would like to think that they are.”
She said pollsters had been “taking lots and lots of steps to try to correct for the errors that we have seen in past cycles,” adding: “I mean, obviously, the problems that polling had in 2016 and in 2020 were extremely well publicized. Everybody’s aware that there was an understatement of the Republican support in a lot of polling in both of those election cycles.”
Over her right shoulder, on display in the office where she spoke, was a desktop sign that bore this emphatic pronouncement, in capital letters: “ACCURACY FIRST!”
Given that she works for CNN, I’m sure she meant that strictly ironically.
FALLS AND DEMENTIA: “The findings from a team of researchers in the US do not prove falls contribute to dementia (although this can’t yet be ruled out either), but they do suggest that falls could be an early indicator of deteriorating brain conditions that lead to Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias.”
I’m still young enough that when I trip over something (which is common, as I am clumsy), it’s just “he fell.” At some point you cross a line in which people start saying, in hushed tones, “he had a fall.” For me, the upside of being clumsiness is that I’m really good at falling. My dad, on the other hand, was an athlete who almost never fell, but who usually broke a bone when he did.
Politico’s chief Washington correspondent Ryan Lizza is on a leave of absence after his former fiancée Olivia Nuzzi filed a court complaint accusing him of blackmail and harassment.
Just when you thought this story could not get any more awesome…
This all started earlier in the month when Nuzzi was herself placed on leave by New York Magazine, where she was considered their star reporter. Everything fell apart when it was discovered she had been reporting on Robert F. Kennedy Jr. while pursuing a personal relationship with him.
According to various sources, after interviewing Kennedy, who is married to actress Cheryl Hines, Nuzzi got flirtatious during a phone call. Kennedy responded by blocking her number. Through various machinations, she was able to convince him to unblock her once in a while. Then per the source, she would send him sexy pictures of herself. Someone leaked this information to New York Magazine. Nuzzi was put on leave. Lizza announced Nuzzi was now his EX-fiancée. Kennedy is currently looking into suing her.
In her court complaint, Nuzzi says that Lizza “explicitly threatened to make public personal information about me to destroy my life, career, and reputation—a threat he has since carried out.”
Nuzzi also claims “Lizza had stolen a personal electronic device from her, was hacking her devices, then anonymously shopping information about her to the media.” She adds that some of this information might have been “doctored” by Lizza to look worse than it was. She also believes Lizza impersonated “an anonymous campaign operative” to damage her reputation with a political campaign.
Leiter characterizes the Internet as undermining the authority of the mainstream media by injecting false rumors into the public conversation. But that is not how the mainstream media lost its perch.
In the Internet era, a random individual who went by the pseudonym “Buckhead” was able to discredit a report by famed mainstream reporter Dan Rather and CBS news. On Sixty Minutes, Rather had shown a damning letter about George W. Bush’s military service. “Buckhead” pointed out that the letter’s proportional spacing showed that it had been typed using Microsoft Word, which did not exist at the time it was purportedly written. Therefore, it was fake.
The Internet era has seen mainstream media’s flaws exposed again and again. And mainstream journalists have styled themselves as activists rather than truth-tellers. They have been unable and unwilling to try to earn back the public’s trust.
The Enlightenment eroded the epistemic authority of the Church, making beliefs contestable. The Internet has eroded the meta-epistemic authority of the mainstream media, making beliefs even more contestable.
Leiter longs for a new meta-epistemic authority to play the role formerly played by the mainstream media. That is not going to happen. We are not going back to letting the NYT tell people who to believe any more than we are going to go back to letting the Pope tell people what to believe.
In a world of contestable ideas and opinions, the solution is not to choose an authority, meta-epistemic or otherwise. The key is to have in place a process that gives higher status to people who pursue truth using careful reasoning.
What we have now in academia is a process that used to work but has become corrupted. It is gamed by recent generations of professors who have been taught to believe that power trumps truth and have proceeded to live by that belief.
Decline is a choice, and our institutions have made their choice.
When you’ve been defending free speech as long as I have, you’ve heard every bad argument against it about a billion times. And while FIRE and I have responded to these anti-free speech arguments repeatedly over the years, some of them are tougher to kill than a tardigrade. No matter how many times they are rebutted, they just keep coming back up.
In the span of about 30 seconds during last night’s Vice Presidential Debate, Minnesota governor and Democratic candidate Tim Walz managed to bring up the top three:
There is no ‘hate speech’ exception to the First Amendment.
Misinformation and disinformation are protected speech — and should stay that way.
Yes, you can yell ‘Fire’ in a crowded theater.
* * * * * * * *
Walz’s last comment on this during the debate is one of the most popular and enduring defenses of limiting expression, and one of the most frustrating for those of us who know anything about how free speech and the First Amendment actually work: “You can’t yell ‘Fire’ in a crowded theater.”
Yes, Governor Walz, you actually can — as many people, including Christopher Hitchens, have literally demonstrated.
What you can’t do is “falsely shout fire in a theatre and cause a panic.” The emphasis is mine, but the quote comes from an analogy that Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes made in the 1919 case Schenck v. United States.
The most irritating thing about this quote is that the parts I emphasized above are often omitted, but they’re the most important because they illustrate the context of the speech in question. The idea is not that the word “fire” is forbidden in a crowded theater, but rather that attempting to incite behavior that will cause people harm (like, you know, making them think there’s a fire and causing them to freak out and stampede) is not protected speech, and actually falls under the very clearly-defined exception to First Amendment called “Incitement to imminent lawless action.”
Still, there’s even more context that makes this particular cliché irritating to encounter. Holmes’ Supreme Court opinion was one that upheld the imprisonment of two people who argued that military conscription was wrong. The Court justified the ban with Holmes’ dubious analogy, which was meant to tie back to the principle that the First Amendment doesn’t protect speech that incites people to physical violence.
But the Supreme Court abandoned the logic of that case in 1925, and rightly seeing that this line of thinking was being used to justify clearly unconstitutional censorship, outright overruled it in 1969. And yet, the cliché endures, even in the mouths and minds of a candidate for the nation’s second-highest office in 2024.
MARK FELTON: Iran’s Top Guns — The Last F-14 Tomcat Squadrons. In his 2022 review of Top Gun: Maverick,John Podhoretz wrote:
[W]hile Top Gun was basically a school movie—Maverick and Ice and the others are all training to be pilots at the Navy Fighter Weapons School and they compete like they are trying to make the crew team—this new one is an out-and-out war movie. Maverick returns to Top Gun as an instructor, only this time the 12 people he’s teaching are all top naval pilots and weapons officers who have long since graduated from Top Gun. The deadly serious mission is to destroy a uranium enrichment facility in an “enemy” country (though at one point I thought I heard someone say “Iran”) protected by surface-to-air missiles and better fighter jets than America possesses.
I didn’t catch any references to Iran when I saw Top Gun: Maverick, but as Mark Felton notes in his latest video, Iran’s Air Force is flying the last iterations of Maverick’s favorite plane, the Grumman F-14 Tomcat, on the planet:
Near the end of his video, Felton speculates why the Iranians keep flying this 50-year old aircraft:
The real reason why Iran still clings to its antiquated Tomcats may be something completely different from air-to-air combat. F-14s have immensely powerful radar systems, and some analysts suspect that the Iranians use their F-14s as a kind of stop gap airborne early warning platform; Iran lacking any dedicated AWACS aircraft in its fleet. The Tomcat’s ability to fly quite high and fast makes it a good reconnaissance platform. There is nothing the Russians and Chinese currently make that would match these abilities, so that may be the reason Iran keeps a handful of old F-14s flying.
Following Iran’s Tuesday-night attack on Israel – which saw the Islamic Republic launch nearly 200 missiles at Israeli territory – the question is not whether Israel will retaliate but how.
But while strikes may be able to roll back parts of the nuclear programme in the short term, they could ultimately exacerbate the threat and limit options to deal with it in future.
Iran does not currently possess a nuclear weapon and there has so far been no indication that Tehran has made a decision to weaponise the programme.
Nevertheless, the country possesses a near-threshold nuclear capability – meaning that it likely has much of the necessary know-how, technology and materials to develop a nuclear weapon on short notice.
Should Tehran decide to rush towards a nuclear weapon, experts have assessed that it could produce sufficient weapons-grade enriched uranium for a single weapon in under a week.
Actually developing a nuclear weapon would take months. Mounting it on warheads capable of striking an enemy like Israel may take even longer – and not guaranteed to succeed.
In the debate, the candidates were questioned about military recruitment numbers dipping. Cao pointed out that the woke agenda that has permeated the military in recent years is to blame.
“When you’re using a drag queen to recruit for the Navy, that’s not the people we want. What we need is alpha males and alpha females who are gonna rip out their own guts, eat ‘em and ask for seconds,” Cao said. “Those are young men and women that are going to win wars.”
* * * * * * * *
“Do you support mass deportation of all undocumented immigrants?” Cao was asked.
“Immigration is very near and dear to my heart. When Vietnam fell, we had nowhere to go and America brought us in. My parents waited in line for seven, we all did, for seven years, to get our citizenship,” Cao said. “The last thing that my dad had hang over his bed when he passed away two years ago was his naturalization certificate.”
“I love this country so much that I wrote a blank check up to including my life to defend it for 25 years…to anybody who wants to come here, don’t ask for the American dream if you’re not willing to obey American laws and embrace the American culture…that’s the no. 1 criteria coming into the country. If you come here illegally, then you need to leave, especially if you’re a violent crime person,” he said, adding that there are 13,000 convicted murders and 16,000 convicted rapists that came across under the Biden administration’s watch.
* * * * * * * *
The moderators tried to silence the audience again when Cao stated, “never go against an Asian when it comes to math.”
“Honestly, of the 227 bills that Senator Kaine has proposed, only three of them made it through… That’s a 99% failure rate,” Cao said.
“Check the tape on that. That’s completely wrong,” Kaine retorted.
“There’s two truths in the world, okay? Never walk into a target store wearing a red shirt and never go against an Asian when it comes to math. Trust me,” Cao said.
I like the cut of this man’s jib.
LAKE LURE, NC SAYS THEY’RE DOING FINE AND DON’T NEED YOUR HELP. “The Town of Lake Lure greatly appreciates the additional offers of assistance from private organizations; however, at the present time, National, State, and Local authorities are managing the situation effectively.”
Vice President Kamala Harris praised Rev. Al Sharpton—an anti-Semite who has said that “diamond merchant” Jews have the “blood of innocent babies” on their hands—in a birthday shoutout Thursday morning.
“Happy 70th Birthday, Rev! … I celebrate the day you were born,” Harris said in a video aired on MSNBC. “You are a voice of truth, a voice of conscience, a voice of practicality around what we must address and what we can do, and I thank you so much for your friendship.”
Sharpton, a prominent Democratic ally, provoked the 1991 Crown Heights riots—one of the worst eruptions of anti-Semitic violence in American history that inspired chants such as “Let’s get the Jew!” and “Hitler didn’t finish the job!”
Violence broke out in Crown Heights after a Jewish driver accidentally killed a black child. Sharpton called for escalations.
“The world will tell us he was killed by accident,” Sharpton said at the time. “It’s an accident to allow an apartheid ambulance service in the middle of Crown Heights. … Talk about how Oppenheimer in South Africa sends diamonds straight to Tel Aviv and deals with the diamond merchants right here in Crown Heights.” Sharpton said Jews have the “blood of innocent babies” on their hands.
Sharpton also defended an anti-Semitic college professor who blamed “rich Jews” for the slave trade.
It’s the ultimate heckler’s veto: Despite — or perhaps because of — that background, for a quarter of a century, every Democrat presidential candidate is apparently required to very publicly kiss Sharpton’s ring when running for the White House.
A deadly hurricane, a massive labor strike and wars raging around the globe are among the crises engulfing the Biden-Harris administration one month before the election.
Former President Donald Trump is flipping the script on Democrats, who for months have warned voters that he would bring chaos if he returns to the White House.
“It’s a choice between freedom and chaos,” Ms. Harris told her audience at a rally in Milwaukee this summer.
Her argument isn’t resonating with voters as war erupts in the Middle East, illegal immigrants swarm across the southern border, and rural residents in Georgia and North Carolina beg for help from the Biden-Harris administration in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene.
President Biden toured the disaster area in North Carolina by helicopter on Wednesday as the Federal Emergency Management Agency provided aid and rescued people stranded by flooding.
The president and Ms. Harris have been criticized for waiting to visit and failing to provide enough resources as taxpayers spend millions of dollars to shelter illegal immigrants and send $175 billion in aid to Ukraine.
“We’ve given them all we have,” Mr. Biden said this week when asked whether more resources would pour into devastated areas of North Carolina and Georgia.
Mr. Biden has abdicated an active role in resolving a port worker strike that shut down all East Coast shipping on Monday. The walkout threatens economic calamity in the coming weeks. Instead, Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris have endorsed the strike, which is poised to disrupt the nation’s supply chain, leaving store shelves empty and sidelining thousands of workers.
“Presidential campaigns are usually decided by the two P’s — Peace & Prosperity — and right now we have neither,” said Jim McLaughlin, who polls for the Trump campaign. “The world and country are on fire, and where it’s not on fire, it’s underwater.”
Kamala’s line that “It’s a choice between freedom and chaos” should be placed front and center in Trump campaign ads, alongside visuals of the ongoing chaos she and Biden are doing nothing to solve, and in some cases, deliberately set in motion themselves.
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