SHORTLY AFTER PARTYING MASKLESS: AOC Is Latest Member of Congress to Get Sick With COVID.
Archive for 2022
January 9, 2022
THE TIK-TOK KIDS AREN’T IMPRESSED WITH THE PUBLIC HEALTH COMMUNITY:
@treynkennedy Omicron spreading faster than a gender reveal forest fire
OPEN THREAD: Just remember I love you.
IT’S CLEARLY TIME TO ABOLISH PUBLIC SCHOOLS AND REPLACE THEM WITH VOUCHERS: Chicago teachers go door to door to sign families up for COVID testing while students are shut out of classrooms.
CNN’S MARY KATHARINE HAM’S EPIC VIRAL RANT AGAINST HER NETWORK:
Conservative CNN pundit Mary Katharine Ham slammed her network for its blatantly biased coverage in a series of Twitter posts that went viral.
Ham, in response to criticism by New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis for saying that media coverage of the congressional baseball shooting was minimal.
“He’s arguing the shootings didn’t get much coverage? Pretty sure they were a huge story,” Haberman claimed.
She was wrong, and Ham pointed that out.
“I lived a block from the baseball field. Under 48 hours, the news vans were gone. I was on TV, live from the baseball field where they played the game a day later, after almost being canceled by mass murder, but my topic was ‘Mike Pence reportedly hired a lawyer,’” Ham tweeted. “You’re welcome to talk yourself into idea that a similar murder attempt on an entire team of Democrats would have gotten the same treatment. I think the shooting of Gabby Giffords is pretty analogous and disproves that theory. Even without that data point, it’s just not true.”
Read the whole thing, which features CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski jumping into the fray against Ham.
Flashbacks:
● ‘The Single Biggest Misconception Is That We Are Lying:’ CNN Contributor.
● Bernie Bro James T. Hodgkinson, Attempted Assassin Of Steve Scalise, Already Being Erased From History. And additional examples of leftist violence and eliminationist rhetoric at the link.
IT IS NOT, HOWEVER, PARTICULARLY REWARDED: Why Discovering ‘Nothing’ in Science Can Be So Incredibly Important.
What we don’t usually hear about is the years of back-breaking, painstaking hard work that delivers inconclusive results, appearing to provide no evidence for the questions scientists ask – the incremental application of constraints that bring us ever closer to finding answers and making discoveries.
Yet without non-detections – what we call the null result – the progress of science would often be slowed and stymied. Null results drive us forward. They keep us from repeating the same errors, and shape the direction of future studies.
There is, in fact, much that we can learn from nothing.
Often, however, null results don’t make it to scientific publications. This not only can generate significant inefficiencies in the way science is done, it’s an indicator of potentially bigger problems in the current scientific publication processes.
WHEN YOU LIVE IN A BUBBLE: Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg surprised by ‘push back’ — defends policies. People unhappy with crime in NYC should protest in mobs outside his home and hound him out of restaurants. Because the left has taught us that this is how to respond to criminal justice policies you don’t like. And what’s he going to do, put you in jail? He’s stopped that. . . .
Related: Fellow NYC district attorneys not embracing Alvin Bragg’s policies.
- The Navy will add two weeks of training to its boot camp program that focusing on suicide and sexual assault prevention, hazing and extremism
- Navy Officials said it would tackle the problems the agency has faced involving the rise of suicides and sexual assaults, as well as fires and deadly ship collisions
- It also includes the rise of extremism after several former and active military members took part in the January 6 Capitol riot
- The changes were first suggested after the Navy found crew members were ill-prepared to stop a fire that destroyed a $1.2 billion ship in 2020
And possibly more:
What could go wrong?
Meanwhile, at the House of Stephanopoulos: ABC’s This Week Uses Jan 6 Anniversary to Smear Military As ‘Extremists.’
OCEANIA HAS NEVER BEEN AT WAR WITH MINNEAPOLIS: Liberal Elites Want Us to Care About Jan. 6. But They Don’t Care When Our Cities Burn.
I remember the call from my husband on May 31. It was our anniversary, and he was out running errands before he came home—not because we had plans, but because there was a curfew in place in Minneapolis. He called to tell me he had to drive to a nearby suburb to pick up a medical prescription. “Our Walgreens on Hennepin Avenue isn’t there anymore,” he said. “It was burned to the ground.”
Over the spring and summer of 2020, thousands of businesses were looted, damaged, or totally destroyed during the George Floyd protests—especially here, where Floyd was killed. Every day we read heartbreaking stories of business owners begging and pleading with rioters to spare their livelihoods, many of them uninsured, pleas that went unheeded. There was over $2 billion in property damage.
And yet, to follow the mainstream news, you’d be forgiven for thinking the destruction of cities across the country—the decimation of small businesses, many of them owned by lower income people of color—wasn’t the biggest story of violence in recent history. That honor, to hear the media tell it, is reserved for an hours-long mobbing of the Capitol in Washington, D.C. The Capitol riot on January 6, 2021 has been the lead story in the liberal mainstream media all week long.
This breathless, week-long commemoration—along with the sacrosanct solemnity with which January 6 is discussed in elite liberal circles—exposes whose lives really matter: the elites in D.C. ivory towers and Manhattan newsrooms. And it exposed whose lives don’t.
It’s up to voters to remind them in November.
AN IDEA SO CRAZY IT JUST MIGHT WORK: “Yesterday, on younger son’s advice I decided to try something new: sleep when tired.”
“TWO YEARS LATER HARDLY ANYTHING HAS CHANGED:” Dems Back to Shoving COVID Cases Into Nursing Homes. “If Cuomo’s downfall showed anything, it’s that there is still zero accountability for shoving COVID cases into nursing homes, resulting in a significant portion of the deaths during the pandemic. So why should the Dems stop doing it? Ask Gov. Ned Lamont over in Connecticut. New York and New Jersey showed why putting COVID patients into nursing homes is a horrifying act of eugenics. Is that going to change anything right next door. Nope.”
MEET THE NEW BOSS: Eric Adams caves, won’t oppose bill to let non-citizens vote in NYC elections after 30 days’ residence.
Remember that this guy has loudly proclaimed himself the moderate new face of the Democratic Party, the pragmatist with the guts to tell the wokesters to pipe down. He was true to his brand after the City Council approved a bill last month allowing legal immigrants (green-card holders, DACA enrollees) to vote in all New York City elections so long as they’ve resided in the city for 30 days. Adams didn’t like that last part for understandable reasons. If you’re going to have a say in the political direction of your community, you should prove first that you have a long-term interest in it. Requiring citizenship to vote serves the same purpose, demanding a commitment of full allegiance to the United States for a say in shaping its policies.
Speculation began that Adams might try to block the new law, viewing it as an opportunity to establish his brand as a different kind of Democrat. After all, no major city in the United States allows non-citizens to vote in all municipal elections. Some smaller cities in blue states do, and San Francisco allows them to vote in school-board elections. It would be bizarre if the brash new centrist mayor of NYC let his hometown be the first to radically reimagine the civic requirements for democratic participation.
But now it’s happened. Last night came the announcement: Adams surrenders.
Between Adams and Soros-backed DA Alvin Bragg, I’m sure New Yorkers will appreciate what amounts to Bill DeBlasio’s third term. As John Podhoretz wrote last week, “Bragg is the DA in the most important borough in the most important city in the United States, and if he has his way, the 1974 movie ‘Death Wish’ will soon seem like today’s newscast rather than a piquant period piece.”
LIVING A FANTASY: Sailing Jibsea.
RIP: Michael Lang, co-creator of 1969 Woodstock music festival, dies aged 77.
Michael Lang, a co-creator and promoter of the 1969 Woodstock music festival, has died.
Michael Pagnotta, a spokesperson for Lang’s family, said the 77-year-old had non-Hodgkin lymphoma and died on Saturday at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York.
“He was absolutely an historic figure, and also a great guy,” Pagnotta said. “Both of those thing go hand in hand.”
With partners Artie Kornfeld, John Roberts and Joel Rosenman, Lang put together the festival billed as “three days of peace and music” in the summer of 1969, as the Vietnam war raged and led disaffected young Americans to turn away from traditional mores and embraced a lifestyle that celebrated freedom of expression.
Around 400,000 people descended on the hamlet of Bethel, about 50 miles north-west of New York City, enduring miles-long traffic jams, torrential rain, food shortages and overwhelmed sanitary facilities.
More than 30 acts performed on the main stage at the base of a hill on land owned by farmer Max Yasgur, concertgoers treated to famous performances from artists including Jimi Hendrix, Carlos Santana, The Who and Jefferson Airplane.
Lang, sporting a head of bushy brown hair, is seen throughout Michael Wadleigh’s 1970 documentary that chronicled the festival.
Lang also played a role in organizing and appeared in the documentary that chronicled a somewhat less successful open-air 1969 rock festival — Altamont.
Flashback: Allison Williams joins the Daily Wire after leaving ESPN over vaccine mandate.
Williams, who joined ESPN in 2011, has been vocal about her decision not to get the vaccine. She announced via Twitter on Sept. 9 that she would not be on college football sidelines in 2021 considering ESPN mandated that live-event staffers must get the vaccine. She said she made the decision as she and her husband try to conceive a second child.
As Bethany Mandel tweets, “In a sane world [Williams] gets her @espn job back along with an apology. But this isn’t that world.”
THERE ARE A LOT OF PROGRESSIVE FANTASIES: First, Do No Harm: Dispelling Progressive Fantasies About a World Without Guns.
IT’S LIKE EVERYTHING THEY SAY IS, AND ALWAYS HAS BEEN, OPPORTUNISTIC BULLSHIT:
LAWFARE DONE RIGHT: THIS COULD BE A MAJOR CRACK IN THE DAM. As the Good Professor noted earlier today, shareholders in Google and YouTube are pressing the tech giants to disclose any requests they have received from the Biden administration to scrub politically “problematic” information from the platforms, according to a copy of a shareholder proposal obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
The article mentions in passing that Supreme Court rulings have held that private entities may not engage in suppression of speech at the behest of government, as it has the same effect as direct government censorship. Although I don’t think the shareholders have standing to sue on anything but the thinnest of corporate governance rules, let me explain how this may open the floodgates and create accountability for BigTech’s censorship.
We know that as “private actors” (a debatable proposition, but let’s accept it for the moment) BigTech cannot be held liable for violating First Amendment rights. But there have been notable cases where the media worked so hand-in-hand with government in violating constitutional rights, they were considered “government agents” for the purposes of 42 U.S. Code § 1983, which allows a private right of action for the violation of established constitutional rights when the “private” entity is “acting under color of law.”
The case that came most quickly to my mind was called Hanlon v. Berger, where CNN did a ride-along in coordination with the United States Fish and Wildlife Service and an assistant United States attorney who raided a Montana ranch. The rancher had allegedly violated Federal wildlife protection laws by poisoning endangered wildlife, including eagles, in an effort to protect their livestock. Citing earlier case law, Justice Stevens noted that:
“There we [held] that police violate the Fourth Amendment rights of homeowners when they allow members of the media to accompany them during the execution of a warrant in their home.” (Emphasis added).
While the feds were excused in Hanlon on qualified immunity grounds based on unrelated facts, CNN was not dismissed from the case, because the rancher had stated enough factual basis to assert that CNN was acting “under color of law.” But private actors cannot assert qualified immunity like law enforcement can.
As is usually the case when corporate media are caught out and face likely loss in court, CNN settled out. (As a result, news organizations have since then severely restricted what we used to call “ride-alongs” with law enforcement).
The rancher suffered a violation of his Fourth Amendment rights, which implicate privacy rights by way of unreasonable search and seizure. This is where it gets interesting: 42 U.S. Code § 1983 allows citizens to sue for the violation of any enumerated constitutional right, and it’s unquestionable that the First Amendment is such an enumerated right.
If, in the matter Glenn referred to, The National Legal and Policy Center can produce evidence showing that the content by specific speakers was scrubbed by BigTech at the behest of the Biden Administration, then it’s “game over” because those censored speakers have the same argument against Google and FB as did the Montana rancher and can use Section 1983 to file suit.
Moreover, even if The National Legal and Policy Center does not produce such evidence of media-government collaboration, conservative and civil libertarian groups can on their own, file FOIA cases to seek that evidence, and the censored groups (*Paging Mr. Prager*) have a legitimate way around the “we’re private entities, so go f*ck yourself” defense.
All they need is the means and the will.
ROGER KIMBALL: What was Ted Cruz thinking? “I do believe that Tucker Carlson was right when he observed that no one chooses his words more carefully than Ted Cruz. He must have known what the rhetorical effect of his words would be. I suspect he now rues what he said. But that does not excuse it. I wish he hadn’t given such aid and comfort to the people posing the real threat to what Nancy Pelosi likes to call ‘our democracy.’”
TO SAVE HUMANITY, WE MUST RETURN TO CP/M: AI’s 6 Worst-Case Scenarios: Who needs Terminators when you have precision clickbait and ultra-deepfakes?