KEEP ROCKIN’! LA Times Bemoans Death of California Journalism – Fails to Acknowledge It Helped Kill It.

What the Times missed entirely is how newspapers – at least in part – brought this situation upon themselves. When the internet really started going – say, about 15 years ago, the papers decided they needed to get on board and began offering their stories for free on the assumption that people would stick with their trusted news source and they could sell banner ads and the like.

Oops.

In reaction to declining revenue, the papers started slashing jobs, mostly local news jobs.  Papers then found out they had no one to cover local news – go to council meetings, sit through planning commissions and such – and that they had forfeited the one massive advantage they had over tech: typically trusted local news coverage that cannot be found anywhere else.

Oops, again.

And then things got very silly – papers that had literally sold for a billion dollars just a few years before were being bought for their real estate alone and billionaires  – like the Times’ own Patrick Soon-Shiong – started picking them up on the cheap for influence purposes, hoping that they would at least break even.

But the destruction of daily grind local news at the bottom and the plaything mentality at the top only amplified the problems, particularly in the case of the Times which became the domain of Soon-Shiong’s permanent grad student, horrifically woke nightmare daughter Nika.

Her politics, reportedly, drove and drives the news coverage of the Times and that was that.  And yet another mistake was made – and not just by the Times –  that by being so woke, so scolding, so ideologically driven, so pointless, so full of propaganda that the majority of the public that wanted to read a daily newspaper simply turned away because there was no point to it – no point, that is, if you wanted to get relatively unbiased hard news coverage of local issues.

The Times also notes how sad it is that so many “journalists” have been laid off recently. At least it mentioned its own layoffs, no matter how obliquely.

Meanwhile, at America’s Newspaper of Record: Exhausted Journalist Finally Gets To Bed After Long Day Of Copying And Pasting Democrat Talking Points.

(Classical reference in headline.)

WHAT’S WRONG WITH BEING SEXY? Olympics Camera Operators Warned to Avoid ‘Sexist’ Filming of Female Athletes.

According to a report by The Guardian, OBS is responsible for the TV coverage of the Paris Olympics, with its images shared with rights holders around the world.

Exarchos told reporters in Paris that his organization has updated its guidelines for camera operators, most of whom are men, to avoid “sexist” portrayals of female athletes at the 2024 Summer Olympics.

“Unfortunately, in some events they [women] are still being filmed in a way that you can identify that stereotypes and sexism remains, even from the way in which some camera operators are framing differently men and women athletes,” Exarchos says.

“Women athletes are not there because they are more attractive or sexy or whatever. They are there because they are elite athletes.”

“[Equal participation of women] is not enough. It has not been enough for us,” the OBS head adds.

“We wanted to make sure that the actual sports content was also reflecting this equality.”

Exarchos pointed out that the problem primarily stems from “unconscious bias,” which leads to camera operators and TV editors favoring more close-up shots of women than of men.

The 2024 Paris Olympics are the first in the 128-year history of the modern Games to achieve gender parity between male and female athletes, with women’s sport also given more prime-time broadcast spots to help raise its profile.

“The schedules of sporting events have traditionally been biased towards highlighting men’s events, almost always you have women’s competitions in the mornings, then the men’s,” Exarchos tells reporters.

“We have worked during these years together with our partners in the federations and our broadcasters in order to make the schedule, the program of competition of the Games of Paris, as equal as possible.”

So the cameramen are being instructed to make the coverage of female athletes as chaste as possible, while the opening ceremony seemed piped in from Sodom and Gomorrah? Allahpundit used to make jokes about “the Woke Olympics” when the NFL was in its full-on kneeling for the National Anthem phase back in 2017. In 2024, welcome to the real thing.

Classical reference in headline:

UPDATE: What’s the story behind this insane, viral Olympic surf shot?

SEGREGATION NOW, SEGREGATION TOMORROW, SEGREGATION FOREVER! Democrats Still The Party Of Segregation With Whites Only Meetings.

SHOCKING: 2 Children Dead, 9 Injured in Mass Stabbing at UK Taylor Swift-Themed Event.

UPDATE:

Evergreen: “British Muslims Fear Repercussions Over Tomorrow’s Train Bombing.”

—Mark Steyn in 2006 quoting one of Tim Blair’s blog commenters in a post at Steyn Online.com headlined, “Tomorrow’s Civilizational Cringe Today.”

GOVERNOR ON KAMALA’S VEEP SHORT LIST HAS SOME INTERESTING THOUGHTS ON SOCIALISM:

“Don’t ever shy away from our progressive values,” [Minnesota’s Democrat Governor Tim Walz] admonished the “White Dudes for Harris” call on Monday evening. “One person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness,” the radical Democrat asserted. “Just do the damn work.”

Walz has done the work of inflicting radical policies on Minnesotans — turning the North Star State into something of a “cold California” with driver licenses and in-state tuition for illegal aliens, for example — but he talks like someone who hasn’t done his homework on the reality of socialism. More likely, he knows the truth — but is hoping Americans don’t.

In some commentary published by the Heritage Foundation, historian Lee Edwards reminded that socialism “is responsible for the deaths of more than 100 million victims,” citing The Black Book of Communism published by Harvard University Press in the late 1990s.

That work, Edwards underscored, documents how “each and every Marxist socialism regime has prevailed by way of a pistol to the back of the head and a death sentence in a forced labor camp.” This is what Governor Walz calls “neighborliness.”

Shades of then-Reuters chief editor Stephen Jukes’ infamous crack in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 that “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.”

HOW IT STARTED: Next mayor wants NYC to be even more of a ‘sanctuary’ for illegal immigrants.

Every single one of the eight Democrats running for mayor vowed to protect illegal immigrants from deportation, solidifying the Big Apple’s often infamous status as a “sanctuary city.”

* * * * * * * *

Entrepreneur Andrew Yang, the son of legal Taiwanese immigrants, said, “I appreciate anyone who comes to this country or New York City for a better life.”

And Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams said migrants were his neighbors growing up in Queens.

“My mother worked two jobs to provide for the six of us and we had a group of undocumented residents that lived in our community,” Adams said.

The other candidates — city comptroller Scott Stringer, former Obama housing secretary Shaun Donovan and nonprofit leader Dianne Morales — also voiced their support for the Big Apple as a sanctuary city.

—The New York Post, June 2nd, 2021.

How it’s going:

These people were fine with open borders when it was Texas having to deal with it. https://t.co/g5OR6cD89Y

— Karol Markowicz (@karol) July 29, 2024

MARK FELTON: Did A German General ‘Save’ Paris? The True Story of the 1944 Liberation (Video).

Meanwhile, at America’s Newspaper of Record: D-Day Soldier Blissfully Unaware France Will One Day Open Olympics With Naked Blue Smurf Demon.

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:

● Shot:

● Chaser: The 2000 Campaign: The Texas Governor; Bush Calls Himself Reformer; the Record Shows the Label May Be a Stretch.

—The New York Times, March 20^th, 2000.

● Hangover: Romney Accused of Prep School Bullying.

—The New York Times, May 10^th, 2012.

● The D.T.s: One New York Times Columnist Just Can’t Stop Writing About The Dog Romney Once Put On His Car Roof.

—Business Insider, March 8^th, 2012.

TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! Biden says Speaker Johnson is ‘dead on arrival’ in confusing exchange with reporter.

President Biden on Monday declared House Speaker Mike Johnson “dead on arrival” when asked how he planned to get his new rules for the Supreme Court through a Republican-run Congress.

Shortly after arriving in Austin, Texas, where Mr. Biden is scheduled to speak about his plan to overhaul the court, he took a few questions when the odd exchange took place.

Mr. Johnson, Louisiana Republican, said on social media Mr. Biden’s proposed reforms would be “dead on arrival” in the House.

When asked about the speaker’s comments, Mr. Biden responded, “That’s what he is.”

The confused reporter, seeking clarification, said, “He is?”

“He is dead on arrival,” Mr. Biden responded.

Of course, the DNC-MSM would have be pulling all of the fire alarms if President Trump said that, but as usual with the (p)resident, what James Lileks once accurately dubbed “the soft bigotry of Joe expectations” strikes again.

WTF??? @SpeakerJohnson https://t.co/OfhcXsq9f8

— 🌡Mercury 🇺🇸 (@RealestMercury) July 29, 2024

MOVE ALONG, NOTHING TO SEE HERE: Kamala Harris Touted a $5B Electric School Bus Program. Three Years Later, It’s Produced Just 60 Buses.

JIM TREACHER: The Dems Claim the Other Guys Are Weird.

At least the Dems have calmed down a little bit. After months of trying to scare people into believing Trump is Hitler1, they’re making the much more plausible claim that he’s a weirdo.

Which even his biggest fans will admit is true. He’s a weird dude! But not only do they not care, to them it’s a positive.

I mean…

Yep, that’s weird alright. And they love it! They can’t get enough.

Other than the fact that everybody knows it already and his voters don’t care, there’s one other problem with attacking Trump for being weird:

It’s coming from the Democrats.

These Democrats:

Click on over for just a hint of the Star Wars Cantina experience that is the left in 2024.

Related: Keep your eye bleach handy — Libs of Tiktok is pointing out all of the ways that “JD Vance is weird.”

DON’T GET COCKY: Mollie Hemingway: Democrat Swap to Harris Really About Preventing Down Ballot Collapse, Loss of 6, 7 Senate Seats.

HOW IT STARTED: Military Investigating Possible White Power Hand Signal at Army-Navy Game.

Though it resembles an innocuous “okay” sign, the symbol has developed among far-right circles on the internet as a way to signal to others familiar with the imagery of white power, while obscuring the intent in layers of irony. Memes like this symbol “mean to provoke or offend, and the meaning can come later,” Dr. Cynthia Miller-Idriss, an American University professor specializing in far-right youth extremism, told the Times earlier this year, when the hand gesture was designated a hate symbol by the Anti-Defamation League.

Though the ADL warns that that “someone who uses the symbol cannot be assumed to be using the symbol in either a trolling or, especially, white supremacist context unless other contextual evidence exists to support the contention,” it has also been embraced by violent white nationalists, like the Christchurch shooter who threw the sign at his first court appearance after killing 50 people at two New Zealand mosques.

—New York magazine, December 15^th, 2019.

How It’s Going:

Did you catch what Photoshopped Beyoncé is flashing in the lower right-hand corner?

In September of 2019, the Daily Wire reported “Anti-Defamation League Cedes ‘OK’ Hand Gesture To White Supremacists.”

And now the calls for segregation are coming from inside the house! Kamala Harris campaign creating ‘space’ for ‘white dudes’ to ‘be honest’ about role in history.

As Glenn noted in December of 2019 when Rolling Stone got the vapors because someone at the Army-Navy game flashed the OK sign, “The 4Chan trollers have scored again. I remember when ’culture jamming’ was a lefty thing, but the lefty culture jammers never scored at this level.”

So is the left done with this ridiculous attack on the right, or will it magically reappear if Trump wins in November?

GREAT MOMENTS IN KENNEDY-ESQUE CENTRISM: Kamala Harris campaign creating ‘space’ for ‘white dudes’ to ‘be honest’ about role in history.

JUXTAPOSITIONS, GRAUNIAD-STYLE: “I mean, how bad could it be?”

Really bad. Click over and see.

WHEN REALITY INTRUDES ON AUTOMAKERS’ EV-FANTASIES: Carmakers Tripped Up by Choppy Present as They Chase an EV Future.

One particular concern among auto investors has grown louder: The strong pricing power that carmakers have enjoyed in the pandemic era is slowly fading. Several auto executives warned that in the second half of the year, they expect the average price paid by customers will edge lower.

“The results of our competitors are not demonstrating that price pressure is going to vanish,” said Carlos Tavares, chief executive of Stellantis, which also makes Ram vehicles.

Car companies for years have made the case that they are ready to become technology companies, with plans to transform cars into battery-powered smartphones on wheels. Those ambitions, coupled with an unprecedented run of profitability fueled by stout pricing, lifted stocks.

Wall Street’s enthusiasm for that vision has faded, as U.S. electric-vehicle demand hasn’t taken off as expected. Now, with signs that pricing is losing steam as the American car buyer grapples with high interest rates, investors are looking for reasons to stick around.

“The overarching feeling for the auto industry is that the good times can’t last,” said Martin French, managing director at auto consulting firm Berylls Strategy Advisors.

* * * * * * * *

One reason why enthusiasm for electric cars has faded? The election in November: Trump vows to axe Biden’s electric car mandate on ‘day one.’

WILLIAM A. JACOBSON: Media’s Soviet-Style Airbrushing of Kamala Harris’ Problematic History.

As many of you know, I studied in the Soviet Union during college. I traveled extensively throughout the country and I became very friendly with dissident and refusenik families who were being persecuted. So I knew Soviet history very well.

And there’s a joke that I saw on Twitter today, which was that in the Soviet Union, the future was always written, but it’s the past that kept changing. And what they were talking about is Stalin and other Soviet leaders had a habit of changing history. And they would do it in many ways. And one of the ways they would do it as featured in this image.

Stalin was notorious for having a group of Photoshop, before there was Photoshop, of photo editors who could take people out of photos, could airbrush people who were now politically not acceptable. But they also did it by replacing pages in encyclopedias. Beria, the former secret police chief, had his pages replaced in the Soviet encyclopedias so that future generations literally would not know he existed because all they had then was the encyclopedia.

And I felt a little bit of that vibe, a lot of bit of that vibe today when there were stories about how Axios was going back and essentially rewriting its history. As we know for Kamala Harris, one of her big problems is that she was responsible for the border. And we all remember she was called the Border Czar. And you know what? Axios wrote an article today saying that’s not true. She was never called the Border Czar. And then people found from 2021 articles in Axios calling her the Border Czar because she doesn’t want to now take responsibility for the border problems.

So Axios just reinvented it, wrote an addition saying, oh, we were wrong back then. We used it improperly.

And that’s after Biden was ushered out like a late-period Soviet party chairman – which was just last week, astonishingly enough.

But will any voters on the lefthand side of aisle care? Democrats have portrayed Trump as the second coming of Hitler since about 2015 or so, and more recently, along with repeated choruses that “Democracy is on the line in November.” Such superheated rhetoric may be more than enough to overcome the Democrats’ Soviet-style tactics in the eyes of the proverbial low information voters.

UPDATE: And speaking of late-period Soviet vibes:

Pete Buttigieg confirms they were "ALL AWARE" of Biden's obvious cognitive impairment — including Kamala Harris — but lied to the American people anyway.

Kamala led the coverup of the century. pic.twitter.com/EumxSMJoyh

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) July 28, 2024

“Ho-hum; of course we all knew. But more importantly, we didn’t think it was necessary for you to know.”

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Sodom And Gomorrah Set To Host 2028 Olympics.

LEARN THIS TERM: ‘Whole of Society.’

To make sense of today’s form of American politics, it is necessary to understand a key term. It is not found in standard U.S. civics textbooks, but it is central to the new playbook of power: “whole of society.”

The term was popularized roughly a decade ago by the Obama administration, which liked that its bland, technocratic appearance could be used as cover to erect a mechanism for the government to control public life that can, at best, be called “Soviet-style.” Here’s the simplest definition: “Individuals, civil society and companies shape interactions in society, and their actions can harm or foster integrity in their communities. A whole-of-society approach asserts that as these actors interact with public officials and play a critical role in setting the public agenda and influencing public decisions, they also have a responsibility to promote public integrity.”

In other words, the government enacts policies and then “enlists” corporations, NGOs and even individual citizens to enforce them—creating a 360-degree police force made up of the companies you do business with, the civic organizations that you think make up your communal safety net, even your neighbors. What this looks like in practice is a small group of powerful people using public-private partnerships to silence the Constitution, censor ideas they don’t like, deny their opponents access to banking, credit, the internet, and other public accommodations in a process of continuous surveillance, constantly threatened cancellation, and social control.

You may not be interested in the Gleichschaltung, but the Gleichschaltung is interested in you.

GREAT MOMENTS IN AI VOICE MODELLING:

This is amazing 😂
pic.twitter.com/KpnBKGUUwn

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 26, 2024

IN A TIME OF DECEIT TELLING THE TRUTH IS A REVOLUTIONARY ACT: Polish Broadcaster Suspended For Saying John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ Is A ‘Vision Of Communism.’

RICK MORAN: The Paris Olympics Set a Marketing Trap for Us and We Fell Right Into It.

“Wasn’t it a risky move?” one of my friends asked. “Offending a billion people is not the best way to win friends and influence people, or attract viewers, right?”

It wasn’t risky at all. In fact, it was a guaranteed win for marketing the games.

Christians may be offended, but what are they going to do? It’s not like they were offending Muslims, in which case the organizers would soon be competing in the headless horseman competition. Offending Hindus would lead to all sorts of riots and burnings, and that wouldn’t be good for the TV ratings.

So Christians presented themselves as the most eligible target for controversy. And the rest of us fell into the trap set by the organizers.

Right out of the Nike playbook: With Attack on U.S. Flag, Colin Kaepernick‏ Shifts the Goalposts.

CAROL ROTH: First, they disappeared Biden; now they are disappearing his record.

Biden oversaw historic inflation and a collapse in the personal savings rate. In his term, home prices become completely unaffordable for a huge number of Americans. He oversaw deficits-to-GDP more than double the historic average and interest payments on the national debt explode past $1 trillion.

Credit downgrades? Don’t forget about that. The U.S. debt was downgraded for the second time ever under Biden, the first time being when he was Barack Obama’s vice president, and now stands near $35 trillion.

And that’s just part of his economic record. There is also illegal immigration and the border crisis. Merrill Matthews reported in January 2024 that by that time, the number of illegal immigrants in the United States had doubled under Biden. Let’s not forget foreign policy or America’s weakened position on the global stage, especially in the wake of the Afghanistan bugout debacle.

Kamala Harris and the Democrats need their media friends to magically make everyone forget the record, but the reality is that she owns it. She doesn’t get a free pass or a magic wand to make the abysmal record go away.

Biden in the first weeks of his administration put Harris in charge of the immigration crisis. Now the same media that regularly identified Harris as “border czar” is trying to claim that never happened. Axios published a story headlined, “Harris border confusion haunts her new campaign,” written by the same reporter who in 2021 wrote, “Biden puts Harris in charge of border crisis.”

Also being memory holed, Harris’s historically low approval ratings as veep:

Her own party and supporters hate her. There’s a reason Biden chose her other than her sex and color – she was an insurance policy because he knew nobody liked her.

He underestimated how ugly his own party was though …

This is damning —> pic.twitter.com/ekLlGk1cL1

— The🐰FOO (@PolitiBunny) July 28, 2024

Since Harris was nominated to be Biden’s vice president in 2020, the vast majority of the administration’s logos until last week read “Biden-Harris.” But after four years of dismal performance, their track record is being tossed down the memory hole, and as is their wont, the Democrats are now boiling everything down to race and gender:

JONATHAN TURLEY: The most chilling words today: I’m from NewsGuard and I am here to rate you.

Recently, I wrote a Hill column criticizing NewsGuard, a rating operation being used to warn users, advertisers, educators and funders away from media outlets based on how it views the outlets’ “credibility and transparency.”

Roughly a week later, NewsGuard came knocking at my door. My blog, Res Ipsa (jonathanturley.org), is now being reviewed and the questions sent by NewsGuard were alarming, but not surprising.

I do not know whether the sudden interest in my site was prompted by my column. I have previously criticized NewsGuard as one of the most sophisticated operations being used to “white list” and “black list” sites.

My new book, “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage,” details how such sites fit into a massive censorship system that one federal court called “Orwellian.”

For any site criticizing the media or the Biden administration, the most chilling words today are “I’m from NewsGuard and I am here to rate you.”

Conservatives have long accused the company of targeting conservative and libertarian sites and carrying out the agenda of its co-founder Steven Brill. Conversely, many media outlets have heralded his efforts to identify disinformation sites for advertisers and agencies.

Brill and his co-founder, L. Gordon Crovitz, want their company to be the media version of the Standard & Poor’s rating for financial institutions. However, unlike the S&P, which looks at financial reports, NewsGuard rates highly subjective judgments like “credibility” based on whether they publish “clearly and significantly false or egregiously misleading” information. They even offer a “Nutrition Label” for consumers of information.

Of course, what Brill considers nutritious may not be the preferred diet of many in the country. But they might not get a choice since the goal is to allow other companies and carriers to use the ratings to disfavor or censor non-nutritious sites.

Luigi and Dino Vercotti could not be reached for comment, other than insisting that you read the whole thing.

PARIS OLYMPICS: a smug spectacle of wokeness.

Is anyone else bored of ‘queering’? Everything’s getting ‘queered’ these days. We’ve had ‘Queering the Curriculum’. ‘Queering the Arts’. And my personal favourite: ‘Queering Palestine.’ This entails academics ‘unpack[ing] the multiple intersections of queer politics and the Palestinian struggle’. Hot tip for these profs: if Hamas ever invites you to discuss your theories, don’t agree to meet them on the high floor of a building. ‘Queering the Pavement’ is the only thing they’re interested in.

Now, with soul-zapping inevitability, we’ve had the ‘queering’ of the Olympic Games. Yesterday’s rain-sodden opening ceremony in Paris was super LGBTQIAzzz. There were drag acts everywhere. A bearded bloke twerked for the world. A bollock-naked man in blue paint was served on a platter of fruit to a gaggle of diet-dodging drag queens. Look, if I wanted to be exposed to the camp debauchery of drag culture, I’d go to a kindergarten.

* * * * * * * * *

The part of the ceremony that caused the biggest stink was the camp Last Supper. A bunch of drag acts gathered around a buxom woman adorned in an aureole halo crown in an unmistakable mimicking of da Vinci’s painting of Christ and the apostles at their final meal. Wearing the smug look of all glib performance artists who love nothing more than to piss off ‘normies’ – because they lack the talent for anything else – the drag queens giddily got into their disciple positions and heaped holy adoration on the lady Jesus. You could almost hear their thoughts: ‘Ooh boy, this is going to piss off old farts – yes!’

Christians are angry. As well they might be. This was ‘extremely disrespectful to Christians’, said Elon Musk. Now, naturally, there’s a backlash against the backlash. Calm down, the woke are saying. Stop being such prudes and snowflakes, they’re chortling. It’s just a little light mockery, they’re insisting. Which is big talk from a section of society that would be weeping into its keffiyehs and demanding heads on spikes if the ceremony had featured a drag-act Muhammad being served a smurf on a plate of fruit with his cock out.

No, in the land of “épater les bourgeois,” the people who would dare attempt such blasphemy would be dead:

Similarly, America’s terrifying “Christian fascists” delivered NBC, the purveyors of Friday’s mockery of the Last Supper, an absolutely savage, brutal full-on, err, Twitter ratio:

In response to Friday’s debacle, the Olympics’ spokeswoman delivers platitudes that use therapeutic leftist language about 35 years old, and a smug “sorry if you were offended” rejoinder: Paris 2024 official believes opening ceremony goal of showing community tolerance was achieved despite furor.

The ceremony’s segment appeared to resemble a depiction of The Last Supper, famously painted by Leonardo da Vinci. The performance ensemble included drag queens, a transgender model and a naked singer who was stylized to resemble the Greek god Dionysus.

Paris 2024 spokesperson Anne Descamps spoke about it on Sunday.

“Clearly there was never an intention to show disrespect to any religious group. (The opening ceremony) tried to celebrate community tolerance,” Descamps told reporters, via Reuters.

“We believe this ambition was achieved. If people have taken any offense, we are really sorry.”

Their efforts at “celebrating community tolerance” were so effective, the Olympic officials are attempting to burn every last frame of the footage: Video of Paris Olympics opening ceremony is deleted from YouTube after sparking outrage.

UPDATE: Bipartisan support! First lady Jill Biden praises Olympics opening ceremony that mocked Last Supper.

As did that man of legendary taste and decorum, Mitt Romney: