KEVIN DOWNEY JR: Military Notes a Spike in Myocarditis Cases — Wonder Why?
Author Archive: Stephen Green
July 24, 2023
HMM: Putin Raises Elderly Army as Ex-Serviceman Up to 70 Deemed Eligible. “The State Duma said Tuesday it had adopted a law raising the maximum age by half a decade for those who had already completed military service.”
Positive Spin: Raising the eligibility age by five years isn’t actually all that much.
Negative Spin: It was already at 65?
JUST A FEW WEEKS AGO THIS WAS A CONSPIRACY THEORY FOR RIGHT-WING NUT JOBS: First, They Came for Your Gas Stove. Now They’re Coming for Your Hot Water Heater.
July 21, 2023
FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY [VIP]: Meet the Coolest Gator Attack Survivor Ever. “This week, we have the old guy who joked his way through a gator attack, the stolen firetruck that ran out of gas, and Colorado Man absolutely failing to make it stay in Vegas.”
SLEEPING WITH THE ENEMY: Fox News whistleblowers expose company’s support for far-left charities. “While on its face, this appears to be little more than an attempt at corporate beneficence, the company is willing to match donations to the Satanic Temple, the Trevor Project, Planned Parenthood (and local Planned Parenthood branches), and the Southern Poverty Law Center – radical leftist groups antipathetic to conservatives and the values they hold most dear.”
RIOTING FOR FUN AND PROFIT: Riot Act! NYPD Ordered to Pay Mad $tacks to George Floyd Insurrectionists.
THAT HARDLY SEEMS POSSIBLE AND YET…: The Disinformation Police Are Even More Incompetent And Dishonest Than You Imagine.
The Federalist recently got an email from “NewsGuard Technologies” — a relatively new service that’s popped up in the last few years that purports to rate websites on their credibility based on some established criteria. It then sells its ratings services to schools, various corporate entities, and advertisers looking for someone to tell them what news outlets they can supposedly trust or what websites they don’t want to advertise on for fear of damaging their brand.
So how does NewsGuard go about making those ratings for websites? Well, it starts with firing off a series of hostile questions to the editors of a website about weirdly specific aspects of its coverage and demands you answer them in a vain attempt to improve whatever rating NewsGuard’s going to give you. Now it’s bad enough that this is an extortion racket, but it’s downright insulting to see NewsGuard’s team wheel around a website that publishes over a million words a year, cherry-pick some example of what they think is problematic coverage, and still demonstrate an inability to think critically or fairly about what they’re reading. If it questions a dominant narrative, it does not compute with these people.
That’s because progressive extortion rackets like NewsGuard exist to enforce the narrative.
THERE GOES JOE BIDEN AGAIN, RESTORING MORE HONOR AND DECENCY TO OUR “DEMOCRACY”: Bombshell Bribery Revelations Prompt Calls to Impeach Biden.
HOW’S THAT TWITTER-KILLER COMING ALONG? Threads User Engagement Continues to Drop, Adding Urgency for New Features.
For a second week in a row, the number of daily active users declined on Threads, falling to 13 million, down about 70% from a July 7 peak, according to estimates from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower.
The average time users spend on the iOS and Android apps has also decreased to four minutes from 19 minutes. The average time spent for Android users in the U.S. dropped to five minutes from a peak of 21 minutes on launch day, according to SimilarWeb, a digital data and analytics company.
Twitter’s daily active users remain steady at about 200 million, and average time spent is at 30 minutes a day, according to Sensor Tower estimates.
Threads’ user engagement peaked on its third day of operations at 21 minutes.
If you’re going to launch a competitor to an existing product, it had better have all the same features, plus something new, starting on Day One. Threads has nothing new, and is missing direct messages, hashtags, desktop availability, and its algorithm is geared to downplay “serious or political content” to make it “a friendly place.”
Other than the format then, Threads isn’t really a Twitter replacement at all.
MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: ‘If We Never Meet Again…’ Tony Bennett Passes at 96. “‘For my money, Tony Bennett is the best singer in the business,’ no less than Frank Sinatra told Life magazine in 1965. ‘He moves me. He’s the singer who gets across what the composer has in mind, and probably a little more.'”
BUMPED! Link was wrong before, now fixed.
WELL, THAT’S BECAUSE THEY’RE COMMIES: Ben and Jerry Co-Founder Blames NATO ‘Military Industrial Complex’ for Ukraine War.
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Russia Says Patients Infected With Deadly Bacteria Have Escaped.
It sounds like the plot of an infectious disease thriller: on the arid plains of Siberia, a dinner party partakes of horse meat that secretly harbors a rare and deadly bacteria. Once guests start showing signs of an infection, they are sent to the hospital, but some escape their sick beds — panicking local officials who send out an alert.
That’s how it allegedly went down in Tuva, a republic in Russia’s southern Siberian region in late June, and the bacteria that made everybody sick is anthrax, according to TASS, a Russian state-run news agency.
Anthrax has a long shelf life but it isn’t really contagious the way a viral infection is.
NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: The White House Is Now Hiding Joe Biden’s Trips Up and Down Stairs on Air Force One.
“Trips” is the operative word here.
THIS IS HOW THE HORROR MOVIE BEGINS: Computer chip with built-in human brain tissue gets military funding.
Last year, Monash University scientists created the “DishBrain” – a semi-biological computer chip with some 800,000 human and mouse brain cells lab-grown into its electrodes. Demonstrating something like sentience, it learned to play Pong within five minutes.
The micro-electrode array at the heart of the DishBrain was capable both of reading activity in the brain cells, and stimulating them with electrical signals, so the research team set up a version of Pong where the brain cells were fed a moving electrical stimulus to represent which side of the “screen” the ball was on, and how far away from the paddle it was. They allowed the brain cells to act on the paddle, moving it left and right.
Then they set up a very basic-reward system, using the fact that small clusters of brain cells tend to try to minimize unpredictability in their environment. So if the paddle hit the ball, the cells would receive a nice, predictable stimulus. But if it missed, the cells would get four seconds of totally unpredictable stimulation.
If you were experimenting with ways to build a resentful AI, this might be a good start.
HMM: ‘Putin Fears Losing Power’ – Russians React to New National Guard Heavy Weapons Bill.
Russian lawmakers passed a bill on Wednesday, July 19, that would allow its National Guard to deploy heavy weapons – including tanks – on the streets of the country in the wake of the short-lived insurrection by the mercenary group Wagner.
Since it was formed in 2016 its original role, as a means of controlling and stopping public demonstrations has since taken on a broader role including, participation in Moscow’s full-scale war on Ukraine launched in February last year.
According to the legislation passed by parliament’s lower house, the force, which answers directly to Putin, will be able to be armed with military-grade weapons, including heavy weapons.
To be fair, beefing up the czar’s personal guard and slaughtering the occasional group of undesirables are standard Russian succession protocols.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Maybe 2024 Will Give Us Some Third-Party Madness Just for Fun. “We’re still approximately 1700 months away from the 2024 United States presidential election. I may be exaggerating a bit, but I think most people feel me. I’ve written on a few occasions that this election cycle is either going to be the worst slog ever, or the most entertaining hot mess we have ever had to enjoy in American politics.”
UNEXPECTEDLY: Transgender Triple Murderer Harassing Women in California Prison, Inmates Say.
Dana Rivers shares a cell with several female inmates at Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla, where he was incarcerated last month. Women in Rivers’s housing unit say he ogles them, speaks demeaningly to them, and demands they push him around in his wheelchair.
“Rivers has been a problem since he rolled in the door,” one inmate said in a message reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon. “He is trying to control the women saying he gets to bypass everything—special treatment.”
California is one of several U.S. states, along with Connecticut, Maine, and Massachusetts, that have enacted laws in recent years presumptively incarcerating criminals based on their gender identity rather than their sex. Other states have encouraged, if not mandated, the practice even as a growing number of female inmates have spoken out to say the men make them feel unsafe and, in some cases, harass or assault them.
The greatest trick the patriarchy ever pulled was convincing the world they were feminists — and convincing women that they deserve the abuse.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: After Riley Gaines Incident, College Mom Says SFSU is Off the Table for Her Children.
IMPRESSIVE: Sound of Freedom breaks $100 million in box office sales.
The film details the true story of how former Homeland Security agent Tim Ballard quit his DHS job and risked his life to journey into the jungles of Colombia in an effort to save children from sex slavery.
On Wednesday, Sound of Freedom grossed $4.7 million, which pushed it to $101 million in total ticket sales, according to box office reports.
Angel Studios Senior Vice President of Global Distribution Jared Geesey told the Washington Examiner that Sound of Freedom is “dominating the box office as the result of a ground-up, grassroots movement of everyday people who are making this an historic success.”
“This is the opposite of the top down system developed by Hollywood gatekeepers,” Geesey added. “We are empowering people to be part of choosing, funding, and sharing stories that amplify light and impact culture.”
Sound of Freedom continues to beat Sony Pictures’s Insidious: The Red Door overall, in addition to besting Disney’s latest Indiana Jones film on a daily basis for more than a week.
IMDB estimates that Sound of Freedom cost about $15 million to produce — just 5% of Indiana Woke’s production budget.
July 20, 2023
CHRISTIAN TOTO: Woke ‘Barbie’ Drowns In Feminism, Lectures.
The film runs on hate, not affection.
“Barbie,” inspired by the Mattel toy dating back to 1959, loathes men to a degree that would make a Women’s Studies major blush. It hates the Barbie toy itself, dubbing it “fascist” and worse throughout the film.
“Barbie” also hates women with sweet memories of the doll. Just know you supported the “Patriarchy” all those years ago. And maybe even now.
That leaves an ambitious film, scattered with well-earned laughs, that disintegrates during a disastrous third act.
The movie’s marketing has been wise enough to keep the woke stuff under wraps, so it’ll probably have a huge opening. What happens after that is anyone’s guess, but I suspect the word-of-mouth is going to be brutal — unless enough of the largely-female target audience goes for the woke stuff.
NO WONDER PRIGOZHIN WAS UPSET ENOUGH TO MUTINY: Wagner Reveals Massive Death Toll Figures for Mercenaries Fighting in Ukraine.
The unverified numbers, posted on Telegram by several Wagner-affiliated channels, claim that in all operations from the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion up until the “capture of Bakhmut” on May 20:
·Wagner had 78,000 thousand fighters in total.
·49,000 of these were convicts.
·22,000 were killed.
·40,000 wounded
This leave just 16,000 that made it through the fighting without being killed or injured.
You can find a lot of good info on Telegram, but there’s disinfo there, as well. That said, these Wagner figures align with third-party estimates that have been published by reliable sources elsewhere.
ESCALATION: Ukraine updates: Russia threatens Black Sea grain transport.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said it would consider all ships traveling to Ukrainian ports on the Black Sea as potential carriers of military cargo from midnight on Thursday morning Moscow time (2100 GMT on Wednesday), following the end of the Black Sea grain deal.
In a statement posted on the Telegram messenger app, the ministry said that it was declaring southeastern and northwestern parts of the Black Sea’s international waters as unsafe for navigation, and that the flag states of ships travelling to Ukrainian ports would be considered parties to the conflict on the Ukrainian side.
Moscow’s statement comes as Kyiv has urged other countries in the Black Sea region to intervene and assure the safe passage of cargo ships.
The “tanker war” during the Iran-Iraq War prompted Reagan to reflag Kuwaiti tankers as American, and basically dare either side to draw in the full weight of the US Navy, but I’m not sure the Navy is quite the deterrent that it once was, and I’m sure that Biden is no Reagan.