Ace of Spades Pet Thread, September 14

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Good afternoon and welcome to the almost world famous Ace of Spades Pet Thread. Thanks for stopping by. Kick back and enjoy the world of animals.

Would you like a treat?

Let's relax a little with the animals and leave the world of politics and current events outside today.

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Posted by: K.T. at 03:44 PM | Comments (72) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Gardening, Puttering and Adventure Thread, Sept. 14

Well, it's feeling fall-ish around here - at night. Not in the daytime. Is fall coming to your garden? The photo above is striking:

This white crape myrtle creates an umbrella of shade on the west side (front yard) of my house. The ground-level copper bird bath is very popular, even attracting a pair of mallards! This time of year it sheds its outer bark, revealing a cinnamon-colored trunk.

Over the winter it hardens off to grey, and over the summer the process repeats. Makes kind of a mess in the garden, though.

I have tried to grow perennials under it, but none survive. So I have put containers of annuals to fill in the area. The Boston fern does well until a hard frost. It seems to have the perfect amount of sun and shade.

Liz953, Maryland

Thanks so much for the great photo and seasonal information, Liz!

I think this tree may be the variety Natchez.

Crape myrtles named after Indian tribes are generally cross-species hybrids chosen for mildew resistance.

Posted by: K.T. at 01:30 PM | Comments (57) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Straight Talk: Kamala's First Solo Post-Biden Interview

From the Daily Tech News Thread this morning:

Now that's what America needs to see more, the Real Kamala. She can't handle friendly questioning, she certainly can't handle adversarial questioning.
Posted by: San Franpsycho at September 14, 2024

***
I laughed at her answer to "how would you reduce prices?"

Laughter aside, it is amazing this is her first solo interview since deposing Biden

Posted by: Huck Follywood at September 14, 2024 07:05 AM

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Collin Rugg:

NEW: The Trump campaign has shared Kamala Harris' entire interview that was released today, saying their "newest ad just dropped."

Brutal.

In the interview, Harris gave confusing answers to a variety of questions:

Gun Control: Harris says she *does* think America needs an "assault weapons" ban despite saying during the debate that Trump was lying when he said she wanted to ban guns.

Economy: Harris responded to a question about bringing down prices by talking about how she was raised in the middle class.

Harris on Unity: Harris said she is the unity candidate and then cited her endorsement of Dick Cheney. She said Trump is the only one who "points fingers."

From the thread:

MUST WATCH!!: Active duty military IN A WAR ZONE are SHOCKED to hear VP Kamala Harris claim they’re NOT in a war zone! One soldier asks, “Where the F*** are we right now?”

Does anything stand out to you from her interview?

Posted by: K.T. at 11:17 AM | Comments (295) | Trackbacks (Suck)

The Classical Saturday Morning Coffee Break & Prayer Revival

Posted by: Misanthropic Humanitarian at 07:56 AM | Comments (371) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Daily Tech News 14 September 2024

Top Story

• OpenAI's new AI o1 is like having an autistic nine-year-old as a personal assistant with all of the expense and none of the comic moments. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Ask it if you need to rent an AirBNB for Thanksgiving to provide more oven space, and rather than telling you that you're an idiot and that you can buy benchtop ovens from Walmart starting at $50, it does the analysis and comes up with a painfully detailed list of pros and cons all of which you already know.
  
  
  
• This drivel is what OpenAI believes will drive it to a market valuation of $150 billion. (Reuters) (archive site)
  
  Bubble? Scam? Delusion? Fraud?
  
  Or all of the above?
  
  
  
• Quick update from yesterday: That offer from Boeing that unionised employees rejected as a bad deal, appears to truly have been a bad deal.
  
  I'm looking for an article that gives the full details that I can link to, but have come up dry so far.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM | Comments (253) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Before Nightfall A Corpse Was All That Was Left Of The ONT

Hello Horde! Boy, I'm glad I remembered to do the ONT earlier. Rehearsals start tonight for a play I'm appearing in in December. It's nothing you've every heard of, it was written by someone local and we're putting it on as a charity event for a local church. My character is “Texas oil man”, but I can't get Gingy (who is doing the costumes) to dress me as Doug Dimmadome, owner of the Dimsdale Dimmadome, which is just a huge letdown. Anyhow, on with the memes!

Posted by: WeirdDave at 10:00 PM | Comments (269) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Flight of the Canards Cafe

This cat is really enjoying the butt-rub.

Young Republican learns new pouncing techniques from Pepe the Frog.

Dogs are so humanized they understand the power of the silent treatment.

Sequel to the Jelly Budgie: He still hates that little plastic duck. All the birds hate that plastic duck.

Dogs get aggro when you turn their favorite cartoon show off.

Silly and harmless grocery store prank.

Volcanic eruption by the most generically named volcano on earth, the "Volcano of Fire." The volcano fire is part of the mountain chain "Chain of Mountains."

I Want a New Duck. Thanks to Bertram Cabot, Jr.

Cynics will say this is CGI. (I suspect it is but I don't know for sure.)

Some IG videos:

Go jump off a cliff. It's fun!

Dogs and babies.

Mom goes shopping with her cub.

Wingsuit buddies.

Trampoline fun.

Posted by: Disinformation Expert Ace at 07:20 PM | Comments (366) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Is "Havana Syndrome" Real?

John Schindler is a controversial figure. He has a background in what we darkly call "intelligence," and he shows his membership in that Elite of Failures by almost always being wrong, but being wrong with utmost confidence.

You probably know of "Havana Syndrome" -- US diplomats and spies in Cuba claim they are being targeted by some kind of unknown directed-energy weapon which attacks their brains and gives them migraine headaches, vertigo, and long-term neurological problems. And not just spies in Cuba -- intelligence operatives around the world complain of similar symptoms, and can guess at the culprit: Russia, using a weapon unknown to us.

You might expect our filthy and corrupt Deep State to hype this threat to the absolute maximum. After all, they now claim that pretty much everything, including the undersea demolition of the North Sea gas pipelines built by Russia for billions of dollars, is the fault of Russia. So why not hype this threat?

And yet they don't. In fact, the reason "Havana Syndrome" isn't talked about in the always-reliable mainstream media is because the Deep State debunks it and claims that the people suffering from "Havana Syndrome" are just malingerers with pre-existing conditions imagining new symptoms, possibly to get a pay day.

That's odd. It's odd that the Russia Russia Russia Deep State suddenly wants to give Russia a pass and throw its own brethren under the bus, accusing them of, basically, insurance fraud.

It's a Mystery of the Dog That Didn't Bark type situation.

John Schindler claims that "Havana Syndrome" is real, and that everyone in the Deep State knows it's real. In fact, he claims, the Deep State even knows the specifics of the "mystery weapon" Russia is using to attack the brains of its enemies.

Below, "AHI" is bureaucratese for "Anomalous Health Incidents."

Seriously-- we pay you for this nonsense?

Let's review what Biden's DNI concluded about AHI in March 2023, as this newsletter explained at the time:

This was [the DNI's] bottom line:

"Most IC agencies have concluded that it is "very unlikely" a foreign adversary is responsible for the reported AHIs. IC agencies have varying confidence levels, with two agencies at moderate-to-high confidence while three are at moderate confidence. Two agencies judge it is "unlikely" an adversary was responsible for AHIs, and they do so with low confidence based on collection gaps and their review of the same evidence."

Unfortunately, it's impossible to independently assess any of that bureaucratese, because the IC redacted the supporting analysis so heavily that it's indecipherable. The accompanying statement from DNI Haines made her position clear: "U.S. adversaries, including Russia, were not engaged in a global campaign resulting in AHIs," adding, "IC agencies assess that symptoms reported by US personnel were probably the result of factors that did not involve a foreign adversary, such as preexisting conditions, conventional illnesses, and environmental factors."

In other words: it's all in your silly heads, folks.

I'm not going to mince words: that DNI statement is a bald-faced lie. The terrible truth is that, for many years, multiple hostile intelligence services have employed a Russian-designed and built acoustic directed energy weapon against Americans to harm and cripple them. The culprits are Russia's Federal Security Service or FSB (for attacks inside or near Russia), the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff or GRU (for attacks further afield) and Cuba's Dirección de Inteligencia or DI, a close Kremlin spy partner since the 1960s (many of the attacks in the Western Hemisphere, including inside the U.S., are the DI's handiwork).

Our Intelligence Community is well aware of what the mystery weapon is and how it works. American spies have possessed fragmentary information about this clandestine Russian spy program for decades. Now, based on extensive intelligence collection and analysis, the IC has identified a half-dozen variants of this unique weapon, which was initially developed by the KGB during the late Cold War. The variants represent improvements in terms of capability, portability, and range. The top-shelf model is customarily deployed in a van and has an effective range of several hundred meters. The smallest weapon is man-portable in a backpack and is employed against close targets at a hundred meters or less. All variants produce similar symptoms and long-term medical harm.

Our enemies are not concerned in the slightest about "collateral damage." Many IC victims of AHI have been struck at their residences when family members are at home. Spouses, partners, and even children have been attacked, experiencing long-term health impacts. Such attacks have occurred inside the United States too. Again, Biden's IC refuses to do anything about this. Somehow this White House is happy to provide Ukraine with tens of billions of dollars' worth of weapons and munitions, to help Kyiv defend itself against Moscow's aggression, armaments which have been used to kill thousands of Russians -- but doing anything to protect Americans from Russian attacks, even on our own soil, is unthinkable.

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There's good evidence that the Russians have been targeting Americans with this weapon for three decades. The 1996 attacks on NSA's Beck and Gubete appear to have been a trial run of sorts for the secret device. My colleague Tom Rogan has presented plausible evidence that Russian intelligence targeted President George W. Bush with the mystery weapon during a 2007 visit to a resort on Germany's Baltic Sea coast. If that sounds crazy, that wasn't the first time the Kremlin has tried to harm top American officials with unconventional weaponry. During a 1959 visit to Moscow, then-Vice President Richard Nixon and his wife, Pat, were attacked by something, apparently a KGB secret weapon, that beamed ionizing radiation at them. The Secret Service covered up this shocking incident for decades, until it was revealed in 1976 by a high school newspaper in the suburbs of the nation's capital.

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It gets worse. A core component of the Top Secret conspiracy executed by Biden's IC regarding AHI is denying that anything is happening while suppressing evidence that something awful keeps happening. A few years ago, two FBI senior special agents took a vacation in Turkey with their families. Both agents had served as legal attaches abroad; known as LEGATs, these are FBI representatives stationed in U.S. embassies all over the world, coordinating investigations and information exchange with host-country law enforcement. Both LEGATs were known to Russian intelligence, and one had served at U.S. Embassy Moscow. While on holiday with their families, as they enjoyed an Anatolian beach week, they were attacked by a Russian intelligence operative, believed to be from GRU (specifically its sinister and shadowy wetwork Unit 29155, which has run amok all around the world in recent years), carrying the backpack version of the mystery weapon. The LEGATs and their families were bathed in invisible toxic waves in plain sight of dozens of bystanders.

Moreover, this attack was caught on film. Turkish intelligence, known as MIT, has what can be charitably termed a frenemy relationship with American intelligence agencies, and MIT was surveilling the FBI agents, suspecting they were in Turkey on a secret mission, employing a beach holiday as cover (in fact, this was just a family vacation). MIT caught the Russian operation on video, offering a good look at exactly how GRU and others employ the backpack weapon.

However, MIT refused to hand the video over when American intelligence learned of its existence and requested to see it. NSA hackers from the agency's elite Tailored Access Operations shop got down to work and stole the video by cracking into MIT classified computer networks.

...

No spooks I've spoken with know what happened to that video. I strongly suspect that -- just like the Top Secret intelligence file on Iran's nuclear program displeasing to the Obama administration which I revealed here last week -- it's being analyzed by "top men" at a classified facility somewhere in the Northern Virginia suburbs, if it hasn't been somehow "misplaced" already.

A document Schindler includes there speaks of the NSA confirming, in 2014, the existence of a weapon using microwaves as its projectile.

Foreign Policy magazine knocks that down, saying "a microwave weapon would be wildly impractical."

That's an absurd statement. A microwave weapon would certainly be impractical as a general use weapon, but as niche weapon that inflicts damage without leaving a bullet (or any other) evidence behind? The CIA and NSA spend fortunes on "wildly impractical" gear including very expensive, powerful batteries smaller than a match-head. They are wildly impractical for general use, but critical for the niche use for which they are custom-made, such as powering tiny listening devices.

Update: Here's something "impractical:" The KGB used to break into safes by bringing big x-ray machines to see through the metal and see the slots the dial needed to be turned to to open them. This x-ray machines flooded the room with radiation. All of the spies who used these machines got serious radiation poisoning and died of cancer. They lost their teeth before death, and were called a Russian nickname that translates to, "Men without teeth."

But oh yeah, a microwave assassination weapon is too "wildly impractical" for the Russians to use it.

It's stupid, truculent deceptions like this that make me think maybe this idiot John Schindler is right.

You might also want to read his previous missive about one Barack Hussein Obama and his determination to find no intelligence on Iran that would hurt his drive to normalize that terror-state.

How did we get to this place, which from any counterintelligence viewpoint looks highly alarming (plus pretty bonkers)? Individuals with ties to FTOs like HAMAS, no matter how tenebrous, are not supposed to possess any security clearances, much less occupy senior security jobs in Washington, DC. Where did this all go wrong?

What happened was Barack Hussein Obama.

It's now painfully clear that since Obama took the oath of office on Jan. 20, 2009, he and his people have been running the Democratic party at the top levels. The mainstream media isn't bothering to elide this any longer. Cadres decide everything, per Stalin's sagacious mantra, and Obama's chosen cadres have run the show during President Joe Biden's presidency (since Biden was suffering from age-related decline from early in his presidency, which became impossible to hide over the last year, it's worth pondering how much Joe was really commander-in-chief at all: but that's another matter for another time). We should expect the same cadres will be running things if we get President Kamala Harris. Obama-Biden will then become Obama-Biden-Harris: OBH, if you like. There's been remarkable continuity in personnel across these administrations, especially in the national security arena, which is no accident.

It's time to confront the difficult reality that Team OBH in its foreign policy has boosted avowed enemies of the United States like the Islamic Republic of Iran plus radical Islamists of many stripes, all of which have ample American blood on their hands. Why? It needs to be asked if such an outcome, which is unquestionably detrimental to the security of the United States, Israel, and the entire West, isn't a bug but rather a feature of Democrat foreign policy since 2009.

...

What we can state confidently about Barack Obama is that he grew up in an international and multicultural milieu where "anti-imperialist" rhetoric was de rigueur. His youthful mentor was a Stalin-loving Communist Party member. During his 1980s student days, Obama engaged in the usual left-wing protesting (apartheid South Africa was a big issue then). He always had an affection for Islam, probably due to the father he never really knew. Obama's political career was launched with the support of a prominent domestic terrorist. In all, from a counterintelligence perspective, it doesn't amount to much except inviting more questions. It's revealing that Obama's own biographer, a Pulitzer-winning liberal, deemed his subject "not normal--as in not a normal politician or a normal human being."

We then must judge Obama based on his policy. That's concrete. Take Iran, a country which loomed oddly large in American foreign policy during Obama's presidency, culminating his 2015 "Iran Deal," formally the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. (It's also the regime that's currently trying to influence our election and assassinate Donald Trump.) JCPOA was the crowning achievement of Obama's foreign policy, at least in his own mind, and his administration sacrificed a great deal on other fronts to get it. It helped that the media was so naïve and pliant. As Ben Rhodes, Obama's mini-me whose main task was selling JCPOA to the media, infamously explained after the Iran Deal was done, reporters are malleable idiots who "literally know nothing." It may not be irrelevant that Rhodes was so anti-Israel that his nickname in the West Wing was "HAMAS."

Here Rob Malley played a pivotal role behind the scenes. The left-wing academic turned diplomatic fixer got JCPOA done for Obama, serving as the administration's mullah-whisperer. Malley returned to the Biden White House, where he was charged with resurrecting JCPOA after President Trump killed it. However, that initiative was cut short last year when Malley had his security clearances suspended, and he was kicked out of the State Department and placed under FBI investigation. We know very little about the Malley case, since the Biden White House has stonewalled Congressional inquiries into this sensitive matter, which reeks of espionage. This newsletter has reported on the Malley case in detail -- more than any mainstream media outlet has, by a wide margin -- and the possibility that he's his generation's Alger Hiss cannot be ruled out. At best, Malley was uncomfortably close to Tehran, flew too near the sun, and got burned. It will come as no surprise to longtime readers of Top Secret Umbra that Rob Malley is a longtime friend of Phil Gordon, who is Vice President Harris' national security guru (Gordon too possesses questionable ties to Iranian intelligence fronts), nor that Malley recommended Maher Bitar for a position on Obama's National Security Council.

Therefore, Obama and Biden's counterintelligence problems with Iran and Islamism will surely carry over into any Harris administration. The current case of Ariane Tabatabai is illustrative. Another Friend of Tehran, Tabatabai still occupies a highly sensitive senior Pentagon position with TOPSECRET//SCI clearances, despite apparently being an agent of Tehran. As this newsletter recently reported, Tabatabai remains on the job inside one of the most secretive Pentagon offices, even though her connections to an Iranian intelligence front were publicly exposed last year. Indeed, Tabatabai visited the White House several times after her dubious connections to Tehran dating back a decade came to light. As usual, the White House is ignoring Congressional inquiries into the case. At this point, I see no reason to doubt that Tabatabai will get a promotion in the Harris administration.

At the dawn of the Obama era, a Pentagon friend and colleague, now of blessed memory, warned me that the new administration was riddled with Islamist sympathizers and related Communist-adjacent types who were seeking to swing U.S. foreign policy in a direction more pleasing to the mullahs in Tehran and jihadists worldwide.

I wonder if he is talking about my friend, the late and much-missed Rich Higgins. I've mentioned him before -- he pointed out that Muslim Brotherhood officials were allowed in the room, indeed to take part in, discussions about handbooks about how to spot an Islamist extremist, among other things. The Muslim Brotherhood are the Islamist extremists we should be on alert about.

When someone at one meeting cautioned about spreading the information they were talking about to outsiders, he wondered, "Who the f*** are we hiding this from? THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD IS IN THE ROOM RIGHT NOW BEING BRIEFED ON IT!

Moreover, he predicted the emergence of a domestic front, an odd alliance of leftist radicals, terrorist fans, LGBT activists, environmentalists, and Islamists, all seeking to change America at a basic "anti-imperialist" level. I pooh-poohed his predictions as unduly alarmist, the output of a brilliant mind that was scattered by too many deployments. I was wrong.

That does sound like Rich. He had a pet theory, which I think was just simply wrong, that the Vegas shooter was some kind of antifa-Islamist plant.

But that's just a detail. In the main, he was right to be worried about our "intelligence" industry's first-name basis friendship with Islamic terrorists.

I realized how wrong I was starting a dozen years ago, and now it's time for me to blow the whistle regarding what demonstrated indelibly in my mind that there was something very wrong with the Obama White House.

He speaks of a pro-American foreign spy and friend he calls "M.," a "spook's spook."

His country's foreign intelligence service had recruited a couple well-placed moles high-up in Tehran. These moles had a track record of supplying accurate intelligence, the one embedded in the upper reaches of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, especially so. They were handled with great caution and counterespionage vigilance. The agent inside the IRGC was a true golden source, a senior officer who had access to nuclear secrets. He knew a great deal about the true status of Iran's program to develop "the bomb."

What M. attempted to brush-pass me with was a dossier of original IRGC documents that were classified Top Secret and provided ample technical information about centrifuges and whatnot. Things I didn't remotely understand, my diffident study of physics having ceased in high school (not to mention that I don't know Farsi), but M. gave me the BLUF, i.e. the Bottom Line Up Front: Iran is further along with their nuclear weapons program than the U.S. Intelligence Community officially assesses, and the Obama administration publicly claims.

"Great!" I explained: "Just pass this package to my guys (i.e. the IC), they'll know what to do with it."

M. at that point went ashen faced. I knew he needed another drink, so I procured one hastily. He explained that his intelligence service had informed the Americans of the existence of the purloined IRGC dossier through standard channels, what spooks term "liaison." They offered to share it immediately. The CIA station located in his country's capital didn't take the bait. Indeed, they seemed to show no interest in the dossier at all.

Mystified, M. took matters into his own hands. He scheduled a meeting with the CIA's Chief of Station in the capital, whom he knew. M. brought the dossier with him and explained that his intelligence service had authenticated the documents. Moreover, they were willing to share information about their mole inside the IRGC, to establish his bona fides, always a risky proposition given counterintelligence concerns (plus the fact that Iran executes traitors). A face-to-face meeting with the mole might even be on the table, given the significance of the intelligence he provided.

The COS appeared wholly nonchalant and bluntly explained that he couldn't take the dossier. Since the COS and M. knew each other, the CIA official explained in hush-hush fashion that he had orders "from higher up" not to take possession of the IRGC's nuclear secrets. "Just following orders," per the Nuremberg testimony.

M. walked out of that meeting thoroughly demoralized. His high opinion of the American way was shattered. Hence his appeal to me to resolve the situation. I understood the stakes and suspected what was going on here. I took the triple-wrapped dossier and got it into U.S. intelligence channels where it would be secure. I appealed to high-up IC authorities to read it and take it seriously. Of course, I was assured that the IC had "top people" on it. In retrospect, I believe that the dossier was placed in a back room of a classified warehouse somewhere in Northern Virginia, if it wasn't immediately burn-bagged.

That detailed IRGC dossier was the Wrong Narrative as far as the Obama administration was concerned, it might jeopardize their precious Iran Deal, thus it had to not exist. Therefore, it never existed. Until I went whistleblower right here.

Schindler is a vain man. He's still claiming that Trump's "Russian connections" were very real, though he now backpedals and says they were also "overblown" by "the media" and "wine-moms." He sounds like a man who played up this hoax for years, and then, when it was all proven to be a disastrous lie, is rushing to say he was always one if its critics/skeptics.

So who knows if any of this is accurate.

I'm always a bit skeptical of people who claim that they've got the goods on just about every hot story floating around. Like: You're really that central in the web that you've got the scoop on everything?

But, for what it's worth.

Posted by: Disinformation Expert Ace at 06:20 PM | Comments (239) | Trackbacks (Suck)

"Brokenism:" The Main Political Battle of Our Time

Alana Newhouse at Tablet wrote in 2022 that the critical issue of our age is not between the left and right per se: It's between those that recognize our institutions are corrupt and hopelessly broken, and those who continue insisting, in the face of all evidence, that everything's fine and Our Precious Institutions have never been better. They just need "preserving" and "protecting" from people who... criticize them.

This reminds me of Mollie Hemingway's observation from around 2017. She said she wanted to do a show called What Time It Is. Not "What time is it?" but What Time It Is, as in, "Do you know what time it is? This is The Time It Is. Are you one of the few who realizes we are much closer to the end of things than the middle?"

The entire rift in the Republican Party was between those who know What Time It Is and those who, like Soyjack Impersonator Seth Mandel, think that everything's fine and the entire 2000s-to-present cycle of Invading the World then Inviting the World is going just great, it's so great to have alien cultures filling our cities with the vibrancy (often blood red) of their devastated shithole homelands.

It goes without saying that all of the people swearing that the institutions are functioning perfectly are directly or indirectly paid by those institutions. They are either employees of the academy, the medical establishment, the government, the Military-Industrial Complex, the Government-Censorship Complex, the propaganda and disinformation mills who repulsively call themselves our "press," or they're throne-sniffing neocon Gollums paid by billionaires to prop up those institutions.

This is why, at this moment, it's so easy for sane conservatives to agree with sane lefties like Jimmy Dore, James Lindsey, or Russell Brand: We do not agree with those people on what the solutions are, but we are all agreed, firmly, that things are hopelessly broken.

It's also why these lefties support Trump to one degree of another: Even if they don't like his policies, they appreciate that he's done what a thousand communist theorists and agitators couldn't do: he finally convinced the masses that the establishment was greedy, selfish, and above all else, incompetent to the core.

Meanwhile, the establishment-suckers of both left and (pseudo-)right are in Fanatic Suicide Pact to defend the rotten institutions upon which they depend for their unnecessary sustenance.

A bit belated, but here is some of Alana Newhouse's essay from 2022.

At one point last year, Ryan [a correspondent] said something that struck a nerve. "I don't know what I identify as these days, because everything has gotten so scrambled," he noted. "I'm not a Democrat or a Republican, I don't even think I could define myself narrowly as either a liberal or a conservative anymore. The one thing I know that I fundamentally do believe is the premise of your piece, that the dominant institutions of American life--in education, in the arts, in politics--are either totally broken or so weak or corrupt that they're becoming irrelevant. In a way, the only thing I know that I believe in is ... brokenness."

Ryan went on to explain that, when he gets into political debates with friends and acquaintances these days, those on the "other side" aren't all liberals or all conservatives or in fact all from any other previously recognizable camp. Instead, they are the people in his life who, regardless of how they vote or otherwise affiliate, remain invested in the institutions and political ideologies that now leave Ryan cold.

Many of them acknowledge that there are problems, even serious ones, with universities, newspapers, nonprofits, both political parties, what have you, but they see these as normal, fixable challenges, not signs of fundamental brokenness. To them, the impulse to consign weighty institutions to the dustbin of history feels impulsive and irresponsible--like arson. To Ryan, staying committed to decrepit structures, and insisting to others that they are fundamentally safe when they're clearly not, is what feels reckless.

Most Americans don't fall squarely into one of these two camps. Around 40% don't even vote. But among the people who do engage in debates about this country's future, the ones doing it most compellingly are not those still stuck in the battle between "Democrats" and "Republicans," or "liberalism" and "conservatism." The most vital debate in America today is between those who believe there is something fundamentally broken in America, and that it's an emergency, and those who do not.

...

At its base, brokenism revolves around the idea that institutions and even whole societies can and do decay--sometimes in ways that are obvious, often in ways that are not.

Now, to observe that a critical mass of American society is broken does not mean that America is falling like Rome or descending hopelessly into chaos like Weimar Germany. This country survived a civil war, the failures of Reconstruction, the Industrial Revolution and its destruction of previous ways of life, plus the political violence of the 1960s and the economic shocks of the 1970s--and arguably came out stronger after these crises.

Which is why many people understandably see our current moment as a wave of change that can be ridden successfully--without overblown diagnoses or radical solutions. These are status-quoists, people who are invested in the established institutions of American life, even as they acknowledge that this or that problem around the margins should of course be tackled. Status-quoists believe that any decline in quality one might observe at Yale or The Washington Post or the Food and Drug Administration or the American Federation of Teachers are simply problems of personnel, circumstance, incompetence, or lack of information. Times change, people come and go, status-quoists believe--this outfit screwed up COVID policy, yes, and that place has an antisemitism problem, agreed. But they will learn, reform, and recover, and they need our help to do so. What isn't needed, and is in fact anathema, is any effort to inject more perceived radicalism into an already toxic and polarized American society. The people, ideas, and institutions that led America after the end of the Cold War must continue to guide us through the turbulence ahead. What can broadly be called the "establishment" is not only familiar, status-quoists believe; it is safe, stable, and ultimately enduring.

On the other side are brokenists, people who believe that our current institutions, elites, intellectual and cultural life, and the quality of services that many of us depend on have been hollowed out. To them, the American establishment, rather than being a force of stability, is an obese and corrupted tangle of federal and corporate power threatening to suffocate the entire country. Proof of this decay, they argue, can be seen in the unconventional moves that many people, regardless of how they would describe themselves politically, are making: home-schooling their children to avoid the failures and politicization of many public and private schools; consuming more information from YouTube, Twitter, Substack, and podcasts than from legacy media outlets; and abandoning the restrictions, high costs, and pathologies of the coasts for freer and more affordable pastures in the Southeast and Southwest.

Brokenists come from all points on the political spectrum. They disagree with each other about what kinds of programs, institutions, and culture they want to see prevail in America. What they agree on--what is in fact a more important point of agreement than anything else--is that what used to work is not working for enough people anymore.

In fact, both brokenists and status-quoists are attracting people from what was formerly known as the left and the right. That's how you get left-wing guests on Tucker Carlson, and lifelong members of right-wing royalty making frictionless transitions into mainstream darlings. Marxist thinker Adolph Reed is a brokenist; Cass Sunstein is a status-quoist. Resistance Democrats like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Never Trumpers like Liz Cheney--these people are status-quoists. Bernie Sanders and Elon Musk are brokenists, as are the famously leftist Glenn Greenwald and the famously capitalist Marc Andreessen. When I was in elementary school, our gym teacher used to split us into two teams and then, midway through class, divide each side and swap the halves to make two new teams. That's kind of like what is happening in America today.

And it's not simply that people are switching affiliations while the political parties largely remain the same. Instead, the parties themselves are changing--and in some cases swapping--what they stand for, a reality that observers from what used to be the right and the left are both starting to grapple with.

I know "It's old," but it was new to me, and maybe to you. Read the whole thing if you like.

Posted by: Disinformation Expert Ace at 05:20 PM | Comments (186) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Study: The New York Times Stoked Fear Over Covid
Plus: GAINZZZ

A perpetually-frightened population is easier to control.

A 2018 Gallup poll found that 62 percent of Americans believe the media is biased. Did such bias affect coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic? I run a research team in the department of epidemiology at the University of California--San Francisco. In our report, the first to analyze a newspaper systematically, we found significant evidence of bias in the New York Times, considered by some to be the newspaper of record, on pandemic coverage--skewed toward overstating the threat posed by the virus.

Our study examined all corrections issued by the New York Times to articles relating to the Covid-19 pandemic. Between 2020 and 2024, the newspaper issued 576 corrections for 486 articles. Naturally, in times of crisis, facing uncertain and evolving information, reporters will get facts wrong. Sometimes they may, for instance, over- or underreport the number of children who have died or misstate the effectiveness of interventions like lockdowns. If news organizations are unbiased, one would expect such errors to occur with relatively equal frequency.

That's not what we found. Instead, the paper's errors tended to exaggerate the harm of the virus (or the effectiveness of interventions). Corrections were made for such errors nearly twice as frequently as for errors that downplayed harms. Fifty-five percent of errors overstated the harm of the virus, while only 24 percent understated (the rest were equivocal). In other words, when the New York Times got things wrong, it tended to do so in a way that falsely stoked fear and encouraged harmful social restrictions.

In October 2021, a particularly notable correction read as follows--inviting questions as to how such a remarkable mistake could make it into print at all:

An article on Thursday . . . misstated the number of Covid hospitalizations in U.S. children. It is more than 63,000 from August 2020 to October 2021, not 900,000 since the beginning of the pandemic.

Glad they could straighten that out.

Not all reporters were equally culpable; some required more corrections than others. One in particular, Apoorva Mandavilli, was responsible for 7 percent of all corrections. When the "science and global health reporter" erred, she tended to exaggerate the risk of the virus:

This same reporter is known for inserting her feelings into her content. In 2021, she tweeted the following: "Someday we will stop talking about the lab leak theory and maybe even admit its racist roots. But alas, that day is not yet here." To my knowledge, the New York Times has not reassigned any reporter on the Covid-19 beat for getting things wrong--even when those errors appear to be byproducts of the author's underlying prejudice.

...

It should concern all of us that legacy media displayed such a strong bias during an unprecedented pandemic. Perhaps our research can prompt an internal audit at the Times to assess the paper's role in intensifying fear and legitimizing harmful social policies.

LOL. I wouldn't hold your breath, dude. Not a single "media" organization has done any kind of review for their gross, election-interference errors on the Steele Dossier, "Russia collusion, Hunter Biden's laptop, or covid.

Because they didn't make "mistakes" -- they told exactly the lies they meant to tell.

Meanwhile, the Regime is hiding information from parents about just how badly children are doing after the Fauci-demanded school lockdowns.

A new study shows that many parents are unaware of their children's academic performance following COVID-19 due to states' failure to provide accessible school data. The lack of transparency hinders parents' ability to evaluate schools and hold them accountable.

Key Details:

A study by Arizona State University found that 35 states received a grade of "C" or lower for transparency in school performance data.

13 states, including Maine, New Mexico, and North Dakota, received an "F" for providing little to no accessible information.

Only 7 states received an "A" for making school performance data easily available to the public.

...

The fallout from COVID-19 extended far beyond school closures, exacerbating existing challenges such as teacher shortages, unequal access to technology, and growing achievement gaps. Student absenteeism soared, graduation rates fluctuated, and proficiency among English learners declined significantly. Yet, despite these concerns, states have largely failed to provide parents with the information needed to gauge their child's educational standing or the effectiveness of their local schools.

Morgan Polikoff, an education professor at USC Rossier and lead researcher for the CRPE study, emphasized the problem, stating, "We've been doing testing and accountability for like two decades, and the fact that you still have so much data that's just missing...is problematic."

Posted by: Disinformation Expert Ace at 04:00 PM | Comments (342) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Reminder: As the Election Approaches, Politicians Are Falling Over Themselves to Brand Themselves as Bigots and Secretly Implement Racist Policies

Guess who's the Bigot?

You'll never guess -- as the election looms, Kamala Harris has declared herself an Open and Proud Bigot, and says she totally supports the border wall!

For, you know, the next sixty days. The day after the election, she will realize that she was right when she previously declared a border wall is "anti-immigrant" and fundamentally "against our values."

But for the next sixty days -- She's on the Trump Train! Whoo-whoo!

Kamala Harris is now running ads showing Trump's border wall and taking credit for it.

This is too much even for CNN's gonzo-Democrat KFile, as John Sexton reports:

There's one big problem with all of that. Kamala Harris has never been a supporter of the border wall. Credit where due, yesterday, CNN's KFile ran a story about what Harris used to say about the wall before she started running for president. She was not a fan.

In her 2019 book, "The Truths We Hold," Harris called the wall "useless" and said it was "nothing more than a symbol, a monument standing in opposition to not just everything I value, but to the fundamental values upon which this country was built."

A CNN KFile review of Harris' social media posts found that she criticized the border wall more than 50 times during the Trump administration, calling it, among other things, "stupid," "useless," and a "medieval vanity project."

Sexton links a lot of Kamala Harris posts decrying the wall. Hit the link to see them.

Harris was a major Democratic campaigner against the wall for years. And notice in the tweet above she said the wall was "not reflective of our values." When challenged, in her only interview so far, about some of her flip-flops on issues like fracking and Medicare for All, Harris claimed her values haven't changed. But comparing her outspoken comments about the wall to that ad above, it looks like her values have changed. That or her campaign is just lying.

It's the latter. Kamala is counting on the matra "My values have not changed" to be understood by her Marxist supporters that she is L Y I N G to the stupid racists about this.

And the KFile story didn't stop there. It points out that Harris has also flip-flopped on asylum.

Harris was one of seven US senators who signed onto an amicus brief in late 2018 supporting a lawsuit filed by asylum seekers challenging a Trump administration rule that effectively barred all asylum claims outside ports of entry...

While running for president in 2019, Harris pledged to respect asylum law and called restricting asylum a "stain on our moral conscience."

"Under a Harris administration, issues like asylum, for example, we are gonna honor the process and not try to circumvent the process and expedite the process for the sake of some political goal as opposed to the sake of justice and fairness," Harris said on the "Pod Save America" podcast in 2019.

But here we are a few years later and the Biden administration is limiting who can claim asylum at the border. And Harris herself has vowed to sign a border bill which would "largely bar migrants from seeking asylum if they crossed the border unlawfully." Again, it sounds like Harris' values have changed quite a bit. It's lucky for her she never gives interviews otherwise someone might ask her about it.

You'll never guess:

A racist, bigoted, far-right country that probably loves Putin is also closing its border, rejecting asylum-seekers, and limiting visas.

That racist, bigoted, far-right country that probably also Hates Women and especially Real Women (by which I mean Trans Women, obviously)? Canada.

Canada is turning away more people at its borders and approving fewer visas, according to new government data obtained by Reuters. This crackdown at the country's borders comes amid growing dissatisfaction among Canadians with how Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's liberal government is handling immigration, especially with an election year approaching.

Weirdest thing -- as open borders became more and more unpopular in the States, and an election approached, the Biden-Harris Administration also began quite-temporarily restricting immigration.

Must be a coincidence!

The data reveals that in July, Canada rejected a record 5,853 foreign travelers -- including students, workers, and tourists -- marking the highest number since at least January 2019. Additionally, border officers deemed 285 visa-holders inadmissible in July, another record high.

The average monthly rejections for the first seven months of 2024 reached 3,727, a 20% increase from the previous year. Immigration data also shows that in June, the ratio of refused visitor visa applications was the highest since the pandemic began. Approvals for study and work permits have declined from previous highs.

...

A spokesperson for the Canada Border Services Agency said that changes in inadmissibility findings could be due to shifting migration patterns or policy updates, although no specific policy changes were mentioned. The spokesperson emphasized that the CBSA's approach to admissibility remains unchanged.

Sure, sure. It's just a coincidence that multiple "record highs" in visa and asylum denials occur in the run-up to an election that Trudeau is likely to lose, largely due to his open-borders policy.

I believe everything a government tells me, especially a foreign government run by the corrupt bastard of Communist dictator Fidel Castro. Or Red Diaper Baby daughter-of-transnational-communists Kamala Harris.

As she always says: "My values haven't changed." Wink!

I notice that ABC "News" didn't ask Kamala Harris about why her pretend support of the border wall isn't "racist."

That's because they know she doesn't support any wall. They understand that "her values haven't changed."

Posted by: Disinformation Expert Ace at 03:00 PM | Comments (336) | Trackbacks (Suck)

The NY Times is Whining About Memes Again. That's a Good Sign. The Last Time the Drearily Pious Atheists Were This Exercised About Memes Was 2016.

By the time the Arizona Republican Party's digital billboards urging Phoenix residents to "EAT LESS KITTENS" and "Vote Republican!" went up on Tuesday, the story they referred to had already been widely debunked.

The Marxist Media claiming something has been "debunked" does not mean it's been debunked. They've lied so many times, and always in the same ways, that people take their claims of "debunking" as confirmation of the claim.

And that's on them.

The previous week, claims that Haitian immigrants were stealing and eating pet cats in Springfield, Ohio, had begun circulating on social media. None of the reports had been substantiated, and local officials in Springfield -- a small city where, in recent years, public services have been strained by a large influx of Haitian migrants -- said they had seen no evidence that any of them were true.

1, governments which are instrumental in allowing this invasion are always lying to protect themselves from criticism of their open-borders, pro-invasion policies, and

2, there are citizen claims this is happening. The citizens claim they've seen this. This is "contested," not "debunked."

Major conservative media outlets had given them only fleeting attention.

But while the story has so far not proved credible, it has proved meme-able -- and that has given it a life far beyond the right-wing internet.

For days, images and videos of former President Donald J. Trump and cats have proliferated online, delivered with a knowing wink and an understood endorsement of Mr. Trump's hard-line immigration message. Their over-the-top imagery gives them the feel of an inside joke. A "just kidding" is implied, allowing political figures who might otherwise have hesitated to circulate debunked material to get in on it. The reality is beside the point.

Memes have been a regular, if enigmatic, feature of American politics since the primordial days of social media. But the early months of the Trump-Harris race have offered a twist on this familiar phenomenon: More than once, memes that are mostly or completely detached from actual events have spilled off the internet into the three-dimensional reality of the campaign itself.

They are now on the billboards in Arizona and were, more significantly, on the debate stage Tuesday night, where Mr. Trump exclaimed: "The people on television say their dog was eaten by the people that went there!"

Mr. Trump's debate remarks have themselves become a meme on the left since Tuesday, as musical remixes of his comments have ping-ponged around Instagram, TikTok and other social platforms, mocking the pet-eating claims while also prolonging their stay in the news cycle.

The attention has been unwelcome in Springfield, where tensions over immigration have flared since an 11-year-old boy was killed last year when a Haitian immigrant driving without a valid license crashed his minivan into a school bus.

"They're killing 11-year-old boys, not cats" is not the winning message you think it is, New York Times.

I denounce the following memes with every ounce of my non-existent atheist soul:

Posted by: Ace at 02:00 PM | Comments (445) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Former Clinton Advisor Mark Penn: ABC "News" Should Submit to a Full Third-Party Investigation to Determine If They Schemed to Fact-Check Only Trump

Clarification:

>>Interesting that former Clinton people seem to be siding with Trump. Are they also former leftists or are they still leftists and just hate Kneepads that much?

I should have said, Mark Penn has a fair few opinions on the rightish side these days. He's not really a "Clinton person" any longer. See the link to David Strom near the end of the post to see him talking about the evil of suppressing free speech, for example.

...

From the very first moment I read that Kamala Harris had been given "assurances" by ABC "News" that she would not be disadvantaged by the turned-off mic rule, what did I tell everyone?

I said, repeatedly, these "assurances" consisted of ABC "News" guaranteeing Kamala Harris that the "moderators" would do the "fact"-checking that Kamala Harris, supposedly, would do if her microphone was on when Trump was speaking.

It was the first thought I had, and was confirmed when the "moderators" began openly debating Trump during the debate.

I'm not sure what Mark Penn is hearing, but he thinks it's "obvious" that ABC "News" had a side-deal with Kamala Harris guaranteeing her "fact"-checking of Trump. And no fact-checking of her dozens of lies.

Former top Clinton adviser calls on ABC to launch internal probe into whether debate was rigged

Veteran Democratic pollster Mark Penn said "I think a review of all their internal texts and emails really should be done [...] to find out to what extent they were planning on, in effect, you know, fact-checking just one candidate and in effect, rigging the outcome of this debate." Penn is not the only one.

By Nicholas Ballasy

Mark Penn, a former top adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton, called Thursday for ABC to launch a formal internal investigation into its news division's planning and execution of this week's presidential debate to determine if there was some effort at "rigging the outcome of this debate."

ABC News came under significant bipartisan criticism because its moderators fact-checked some of Donald Trump's statements but not a single pushback at any made by Kamala Harris.

Trump said Thursday that the debate was three-on-one and declined to participate in another one before the election.

Anchors David Muir and Linsey Davis moderated the first debate between Harris and Trump, which drew 67.1 million viewers, making it the most watched presidential debate since 2008. But it has drawn scorn from both Republicans and Democrats for giving the appearance of bias.

"I actually think they should do a full internal investigation, hire an outside law firm. I don't know how much of this was planned in advance," Penn told the "John Solomon Reports" podcast.

"I don't know what they told the Harris campaign. I think the day after, suspicion here is really quite high, and I think a review of all their internal texts and emails really should be done by an independent party to find out to what extent they were planning on, in effect, you know, fact-checking just one candidate and in effect, rigging the outcome of this debate. I think the situation demands nothing less than that," he added.

Did I call it on what those "assurances" were or did I call it?

...

Other publications have disclosed a questionable coziness between Harris and Dana Walden, co-chairman of Disney and who oversees ABC News. The New York Times quoted Harris as calling their relationship "extraordinary friends," and disclosed that Walden and Harris are neighbors in Brentwood, a wealthy Los Angeles enclave where Ms. Harris and her husband also own a residence. The Times also pointed out that The Waldens have donated money to Ms. Harris's political campaigns since at least 2003, when she ran for district attorney in San Francisco.

Disney is the locus of all evil. I strongly opposed Trump doing this debate on the Disney Groomer News Network, particularly because Kamala Harris refused to do a Fox debate. If she can veto a network, so can Trump.

Trump is way too confident of himself a lot of the time. He thinks he can charm anyone and out-fox anyone.

He can't. They hate his guts. Literally. The media would actually pick up a gun and attempt to assassinate him if they weren't all mewling pussies.

...

Mark Penn is not the only veteran Democratic pollster and advisor to criticize the moderation. In an editorial, Doug Schoen, an advisor to President Clinton and N.Y.C. Mayor Mike Bloomberg, lamented that Harris "was aided and abetted by two ABC News moderators who seemingly felt the need to fact-check virtually everything the former president said."

Mark Penn's demand for a third-party investigation into the Disney Groomer News Network comes at the same time a Twitter account claims that it will be releasing an affidavit from a Disney employing alleging that ABC "News" did in fact give "assurances" to Kamala Harris that they would "fact"-check Trump early and often.

Leading Report
@LeadingReport

BREAKING: ABC whistleblower allegedly will release an affidavit claiming the Harris campaign was given sample questions that were "essentially the same questions that were given during the debate," as well as assurances that Trump would be "fact-checked" and she would not.

I don't think much of "getting the questions in advance." These were pretty obvious questions. I mean, it was strange that in an election in which voters say the top issues are the economy, crime, and immigration, the "moderators" asked one question about each and spent the rest of the time on abortion, January 6th, the environment, and, of course, Trump's racism. But that was entirely predictable.

But who knows-- maybe Kamala was given "assurances" that those topics would dominate.

What is more interesting to me is the claim that they gave her "assurances" that she would benefit from constant "fact"-checks of Trump's statements. Which seemed to me to be the only way to read the situation.

By the way, Kamala's Sorority Sister Linsey Davis admits now that she was determined that she would not allow Trump to win, as CNN had allowed Trump to beat Biden.

Linsey Davis held Trump's feet to the fire. How she became ABC News' rising star
Linsey Davis, an ABC News anchor, provided a showstopping moment while moderating Tuesday's presidential debate.

Presidential debates are remembered for the candidates' pithy one-liners. But in the chaotic political landscape of 2024, a simple statement of fact served as the showstopper on Tuesday's showdown between former President Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris.

"There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it's born," said ABC News moderator Linsey Davis in the matter-of-fact style familiar to viewers who watch her on the Sunday edition of "ABC World News Tonight" and her nightly streaming newscast "ABC News Live Prime."

Her correction was a response to Trump's claim that the Democratic Party's support of abortion rights includes "executing" an infant after it's born, something he has repeatedly said on the campaign trail. In an era in which misinformation spreads fast and furious, Davis' real-time fact check cut through the proceedings like a sharp blade.

With co-moderator David Muir, Davis had studied hours of campaign rallies and interviews to prepare for the much-anticipated event at Philadelphia's National Constitution Center, and were ready to counter the candidates' most egregious statements.

They studied Trump's campaign speeches to "fact"-check him. They did not study Kamala's speeches. Otherwise, they would have been prepared for the "good people on both sides" and "bloodbath" lies. Or perhaps they're so in the leftwing bubble that these "journalists" still think those claims are true.

Davis, wearing pink glasses while speaking to The Times over breakfast at the Ritz Carlton in Philadelphia, said the decision to attempt to correct the candidates was in response to the June 27 CNN debate between Trump and President Biden, whose poor performance led to his exit from the race.

"People were concerned that statements were allowed to just hang and not [be] disputed by the candidate Biden, at the time, or the moderators," Davis said.

Muir and Davis divided up the topics to study, and Davis fully anticipated that Trump's erroneous abortion claim would come up when she questioned him on the issue.

"That was an obvious thing to get on the record," Davis said.

In the weeks before the debate, various scenarios were played out in table read-like settings where the anchors and ABC News producers tested their questions and played out the possible responses.

Davis acknowledged that she and Muir could not nail every misstatement. But they did study each candidate's body of work ahead of time and had an idea of what to expect.

"Politicians tend to say the same things again and again," Davis said.

To prepare, Davis, a 17-year ABC News veteran, reviewed questions in her head for weeks during her daily runs (she and entrepreneur husband Paul Roberts have competed in half-marathons in 46 states). There was a lot of prayer too.

"My husband said a little 30-second prayer before I left for Philadelphia," said Davis, a Christian who has written faith-based children's books. "He was like, 'God give her the words to say.' That's in the Scripture. There were a few praying for, in particular, wisdom, discernment, courage and peace."

A cousin of Davis set up a prayer meeting on Zoom as well.

...

Davis is set to play a critical role in the future at ABC News.

I'll bet.

Note that the moderators were, by rules, not permitted to comment or "fact"-check. Their role was only to keep the debate civil and "facilitate discussion."

Once again, they broke the rules they agreed to.

The media can never be trusted to "moderate" a debate again. No rules worked out with them beforehand will be honored. They will always claim a "higher devotion to 'The Truth (TM)', which only leftwing c*nts can devine.

Via David Strom, who has more from Mark Penn.

Mark Penn
@Mark_Penn

There can be no fair game or debate no matter what the score when the referees put their fingers on the scale.

What ABC did in poorly fact checking one side while letting the other side repeat serial falsehoods meant that one side had to do its own defense.

It robs all sides of a fair event and a clean, uncontested outcome. Shame on ABC

Posted by: Ace at 01:00 PM | Comments (411) | Trackbacks (Suck)

The New Yorker Refuse to Correct Russian Misinformation, Still Claiming That Kamala Harris Never Endorsed Using US Taxpayer Money to Pay for Sex Changes for Illegal Alien Teenagers

The New Yorker, as anyone familiar with the oeuvres of Michael J. Fox and Keifer Sutherland would know, prides itself on the meticulousness of its supposedly-rigorous "fact-checking" department.

But the New Yorker falsely claimed that Trump's statement that Kamala Harris supports taxpayer-funded transgender operations for illegal aliens -- and won't correct the record, even after being shown the report from leftwing CNN, which pointed out that Kamala Harris stated, explicitly, that she supported just this in a 2019 questionnaire submitted by the ACLU to all Democrats running in 2020.

I love all of the institutions burning up their accrued credibility in one giant bonfire of the vanities.

More than 24 hours have passed since the New Yorker published a post-debate column that states "no one knows" what Donald Trump meant when he referred to Vice President Kamala Harris's support for taxpayer-funded gender transition surgeries for illegal immigrants.

The column from staff writer Susan Glasser led the magazine's website after Tuesday evening's debate. It argues that the president said a number of "crazy and unhinged" things during the 90-minute affair including that "the Vice-President 'wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison.'"

"What the hell was he talking about?" Glasser wrote. "No one knows, which was, of course, exactly Harris's point."

But, as CNN reported Monday, Harris explicitly endorsed using "executive authority to ensure that transgender and non-binary people who rely on the state for medical care--including those in prison and immigration detention--will have access to comprehensive treatment associated with gender transition, including all necessary surgical care." Unlike some of her other left-wing positions, neither Harris nor her campaign has disavowed that view, which was first articulated in a 2019 questionnaire from the American Civil Liberties Union.

Users on X, where Glasser posted the column, added a community note to provide "context."

"Kamala Harris told the ACLU she supports this policy," the note states.

Pressed by a Trump campaign official who asked the New Yorker to correct the record, Glasser said she stood by the "view expressed in the column that this was a memorable line and also one that would be hard as heck for someone in the audience to understand what the former president meant by it." She maintained that she was not fact-checking the president's statements but rather "questioning the political advisability of bringing up these things in a national debate."

That same official noted that Time magazine had corrected a piece that included the same error.

"Despite this back and forth I still have no idea what the heck the former president was talking about," Glasser told the Trump official. "Kind of like claiming she is a Marxist. Or saying she supports abortions of babies--after they are born. Are you retracting those claims and correcting the record on them? Thanks."

Yes, it's exactly like claiming Kamala Harris is a Marxist -- both statements are true.

The New Yorker's fact-checking desk is considered world class for allegedly going to great lengths to verify all information in the magazine's stories. A former editor there once described the process as "each word in the piece that has even a shred of fact clinging to it is scrutinized, and, if passed, given the checker's imprimatur, which consists of a tiny pencil tick."

The Free Beacon now follows up: the questionnaire may have been filled out by Harris's campaign manager, one of her highest current aides.

Kamala Harris's campaign manager Julie Chávez Rodriguez wrote the candidate's response to the 2019 American Civil Liberties Union questionnaire in which Harris expressed support for taxpayer-funded transgender surgeries for illegal immigrants, metadata from the document show.

The Washington Free Beacon pulled the questionnaire from the ACLU website, and a review of the document's metadata shows the author as "Julie Rodriguez." The same data indicate the document was created on July 16, 2019. The ACLU published the questionnaire on September 1, 2019, three months before Harris ended her 2020 presidential primary campaign.

The revelation indicates that Harris's responses to the ACLU survey were crafted at the highest levels of her 2019 campaign. Rodriguez served as Harris's California state director before joining her 2020 campaign as national political director. She is now Harris's campaign manager.

Rodriguez's role in crafting answers to the ACLU survey undermines the Harris campaign's efforts to distance itself from the responses provided in 2019, which became an issue when CNN's Andrew Kaczynski resurfaced the questionnaire on Monday.

The Harris campaign has tried to dismiss the report, with a spokesman telling ABC News that "old questionnaires are a complete distraction from the task at hand right now" and arguing that the questionnaire responses are "not what she's proposing ... not what she's running on."

Of course "she's not running on it" -- it's politically radioactive.

But she continues refusing to repudiate this position, and just keeps telling her voters: "My values haven't changed."

Chávez Rodriguez has served alongside Harris for nearly a decade. After a stint in President Joe Biden's White House, she became Biden's and now Harris's campaign manager.

The Harris campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

The ACLU's 2019 questionnaire came as Harris worked to tout her liberal bona fides in a primary field that included Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.). It asked Harris to support left-wing policies such as "reducing incarceration by 50% in the federal prison system" and "ending the use of ICE detainers."

Each question included "Yes" and "No" boxes for the respondent to check. In some cases, Harris did not check either box, opting instead to express her policy position in a written response. In the case of the transgender surgery question, however, Harris checked "Yes."

As mentioned, she also wrote out a full answer. It wasn't just a tick box, which one could claim was a "pencil typo." She wrote out an emphatic defense of using taxpayer funds to pay for transgender surgeries to all of those in prison or in immigration detention.

The garbage-institution New Yorker doesn't care about its credibility any longer. It's blowing it all up for their beloved Marxist-Democrat Party.

Note that Time Magazine pushed the same RUSSIAN Disinformation -- but has now issued a retraction for its completely-false "fact" check:

Posted by: Ace at 12:00 PM | Comments (286) | Trackbacks (Suck)

THE MORNING RANT: Harvard Launches “Introductory” Math Course for its Students Who Can’t Do 9th Grade Math

Harvard has launched an “Introductory” math course for students who don’t belong at Harvard.

Actually, “students who don’t belong at Harvard” isn’t really fair, because whatever Harvard might have once been, there is nothing “elite” about those who get admitted to Harvard any longer. With a student body heavily composed of privileged nepots whose parents purchased their enrollments, affirmative action admits, and Jew-hating foreigners, Harvard is more odious than elite these days.

So it’s not surprising that Harvard is having to introduce remedial math classes to bring its very special student body up to par with the proficiency level expected of 9th graders in a typical American suburb.

“Harvard Launches New Intro Math Course to Address Pandemic Learning Loss” [The Harvard Crimson – 9/02/2024]

The Harvard Math Department will pilot a new introductory course aimed at rectifying a lack of foundational algebra skills among students, according to Harvard’s Director of Introductory Math, Brendan A. Kelly.

He said the Covid-19 pandemic led to gaps in students’ math skills and learning abilities, prompting the need for a new introductory course.

Many thousands of students not accepted into “elite” Ivy League schools are heading off to college without the need for remedial math tutoring. I don’t know for a fact that every student admitted to a Kennesaw State or a Western Kentucky is smarter than the typical Harvard enrollee, but I do know that if I hire a Kennesaw State grad, I won’t likely be dealing with a toxic combination of ignorance, arrogance, and entitlement.

These Harvard students - despite their incapacity for college-level work - will likely graduate with straight-A grades, since that is pretty much the only grade that Harvard gives out.

But back to The Crimson’s article about remedial math tutoring at Harvard…

“The last two years, we saw students who were in Math MA and faced a challenge that was unreasonable given the supports we had in the course. So we wanted to think about, ‘How can we create a course that really helps students step up to their aspirations?’” he said.

“…step up to their aspirations”?? How can we protect the rest of us from credentialed mediocrities being awarded Harvard degrees and imposing their “aspirations” on us?

With their Harvard degrees, these “prestigious Ivy League graduates” will likely be going into “public policy” positions, despite their inability to do the math that I was doing in 8th grade, and that used to be expected of most 9th graders. Therefore, it is reasonable to doubt their capacity to handle municipal budgets, or understand tax law, or comprehend the math required for bond issues, etc. There are abundant roles in the workplace for those who cannot handle high-school level math, but elite-level policy positions should be out of their reach. A ‘participation trophy” degree from Harvard doesn’t make them any smarter.

In addition, there are any number of community colleges that can help these students learn high school-level math – if they have the aptitude for it – but the fact that Harvard has such an abundance of unqualified admits that it must provide remedial math courses is a reminder of how meaningless a Harvard degree is.

To be safe, I am just going to assume that every Harvard enrollee is a special admit who is incapable of handling a college level curriculum without special hand-holding.

“Students don’t have the skills that we had intended downstream in the curriculum, and so it creates different trajectories in students’ math abilities,” Kelly added.

“Different trajectories in students’ math abilities…” Well done, Harvard! The word “remedial” has now officially been deemed offensive and forced through the euphemism treadmill, getting replaced by “different trajectory.”

He said the department “investigated a number of different strategies” used by different schools when assessing how to address students’ skill gaps.

Testing a student’s math proficiency – or “skill gap” - is actually quite simple. You give the student a math test at expected grade level. But our best and brightest at Ivy League universities are instead “investigating a number of different strategies used by different schools.” Harvard is beyond parody.

It’s not my intent to mock those whose education suffered during the imposition of Covid sharia. (My intent is to mock Harvard.) The school closures and the refusal of so many teachers across the country to do their jobs during that social panic certainly had a negative impact on many students who did want to learn. There are many avenues for those students to still obtain high school level math skills and move forward with their educations. But if Harvard is doing the work of community colleges, then Harvard deserves to be mocked.

[buck.throckmorton at protonmail dot com]

Posted by: Buck Throckmorton at 11:00 AM | Comments (394) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Mid-Morning Art Thread

Le mensonge
Félix Vallotton

Posted by: CBD at 09:30 AM | Comments (370) | Trackbacks (Suck)

The Morning Report — 9/13/24

Good Morning Kids. Happy triskaidekaphobia day. Your irrational fear of a 13-sided Triscuit is baseless. As is my Claude Rains shocked face at quite a few of the headlines. Considering the times in which we live and all that we have witnessed, so many things should neither shock nor surprise, but they certainly are nonetheless revolting in the extreme.

I mean, really!

It’s funny just how insanely wealthy our “public servants” are. This is the kind of thing you expect from European royalty, not former American government officials. But how much of a difference is there really?

Jewelry, political mementos and a “stunning collection of American art” once belonging to Sen. Dianne Feinstein are hitting the auction block.

The “Legacy of a Stateswoman” auction from Bonhams, happening Oct. 8 in Los Angeles, will include some of the California Democrat’s most beloved — and glitzy — personal items.

“Legacy of a Stateswoman”. How classy. The legacies of elected officials were supposed to be their deeds. In Feinstein’s case, the legacy was clinging to power and a $65,000 diamond ring.

Among the more than 70 baubles and jewels up for auction is a “dazzling 4.14 carat diamond ring flanked by tapered baguette diamonds,” which is expected to fetch as much as $65,000.

Feinstein, like many Democrats (take a look at the scandal starting to swirl around Eric Adams, Kathy Hochul and others in NYC and state) and quite a few Republicans (Hello Mitch McYertle and his ancient Chinese secret of a wife) are to some extent in the pocket of the Red Chinese. And Feinstein's chauffeur in her employ for decades was an agent of the CCP. Hello Eric Yum-Yum Swalwell! Of course, there's nothing like the perpetual, general domestic graft coming at Congress from K street and elsewhere that can fatten a politician's bank account in no time flat. They either retire or get carried out of the Rotunda in a flag-draped coffin with upwards of five extra zeros at the end of their balance sheets than when they ran for office as mere concerned citizen champions of Joe six-pack and the American dream.

Meh, I wasted way too many pixels on this. Of course I know your jaw will just hit the floor with this revelation that is second only to what we saw watching Geraldo Rivera cracking open Al Capone's vault:

However, there are reports now that an ABC News whistleblower is about to come forward with evidence that Kamala was given sample questions before the debate. . . The reports appear to originate from this post from an X/Twitter user who says he or she will release "an affidavit from an ABC whistleblower regarding the debate." "I have just signed a non-disclosure agreement with the attorney of the whistleblower," the post claims. "The affidavit states how the Harris campaign was given sample question which were essentially the same questions that were given during the debate and separate assurances of fact checking Donald Trump and that she would NOT be fact checked. Accordingly, the affidavit states several other factors that were built into the debate to give Kamala a significant advantage."

Do tell, really?:

A recent fluff piece on ABC’s Lindsey Davis in the LA Times not only proves this to be fact, but she’s bragging about their behind-the-scenes plan to ensure Trump was not able to end Harris’s campaign the same way he did President Joe Biden’s at the CNN debate in June.

“In an era in which misinformation spreads fast and furious, Davis’ real-time fact check cut through the proceedings like a sharp blade,” the LA Times wrote. “Davis, wearing pink glasses while speaking to The Times over breakfast at the Ritz Carlton in Philadelphia, said the decision to attempt to correct the candidates was in response to the June 27 CNN debate between Trump and President Biden, whose poor performance led to his exit from the race.” The outlet added that in the weeks leading up to the debate, everyone involved at ABC played out “various scenarios” in table read-like sessions to ensure their ability to “fact check” in real time to avoid a redo of Trump’s debate against Biden.

And if it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, they're on it like a Haitian on voodoo!

In a media advisory, the secretary of state's office noted, "The office’s Election Integrity Unit recently concluded an investigation into the origins of an illegal voter registration form translated into the Haitian Creole language. The Clark County Board of Elections reported this form to our office after rejecting its submission by a local applicant." 

In a memo to election officials, Hun Yi, director of investigations for the Secretary of State's Public Integrity Division, said, “The Board confirmed they’ve only received one of these unauthorized forms, but they rightly recognized it as illegal and worked with my team to track down its source with the help of a county government assistance office."

“The form was erroneously included among others outsourced to a foreign language translation service. It garnered national attention considering the high number of Haitian refugees that have recently migrated to the Springfield area, and it serves as an important reminder that boards and designated voter registration agencies should be vigilant about the use of forms submitted to their office," Yi added. 

Clark County is home to Springfield, Ohio, where as many as 30,000 Haitians have unexpectedly migrated—most of them semi-legally after the Biden-Harris administration extended Temporary Protected Status to 300,000 Haitian migrants in June. 

The mass migration to Springfield has taxed hospitals, schools, and social services as the population went from around 60,000 to more than 80,000 overnight.

For the life of me, I can't understand anyone having kittens over this. Oh wait, phrasing. Bad Juju (gris-gris?), from me, which makes me a bad Jew Jew. And just before the High Holidays! Oh the humanity.

Have a nice weekend.

ABOVE THE FOLD, BREAKING, NOTEWORTHY
• Lloyd Billingsley: Why did Dems not denounce the shooting of 49er Ricky Pearsall as gun violence?
  Illegal Procedure
  
• Douglas Murray: “Disinformation” is once again in the news. 
  Government censorship is a greater threat than ‘disinformation’

• In a media advisory, the secretary of state's office noted, "The office’s Election Integrity Unit recently concluded an investigation into the origins of an illegal voter registration form translated into the Haitian Creole language. The Clark County Board of Elections reported this form to our office after rejecting its submission by a local applicant." 
  Haitian Voter Fraud Uncovered in Springfield, Ohio

Posted by: J.J. Sefton at 06:24 AM | Comments (466) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Daily Tech News 13 September 2024

Top Story

• Boeing workers, offered a 25% pay rise, have voted instead to go on strike. (Washington Post)
  
  25% doesn't even cover what the government admits to in inflation figures for the last four years, so the motivation is understandable.
  
  The belief that Boeing has the money to pay them more less so. Sure, it's not their fault that the company has no money... Maybe.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM | Comments (111) | Trackbacks (Suck)

That Night On The Marge Of Lake Lebarg, I Cremated The ONT

Greetings Horde! Welcome to Thursday night. Unfortunately, tonight's content was what I could glean from Twitter in some hasty scrolling this afternoon. I tried out a new program to “clean up” my computer, and one of the things it “cleaned up” was the browser I keep open to stash ONT content. It was clean all right, all the history gone and all open tabs closed.

In other news, I've been asked by a friend who is a published author to contribute a short story for an anthology set in his WWIII universe. If they like it, I'll even get paid. I think it'll be cool to be able to refer to myself as a “published author”.

Posted by: WeirdDave at 10:00 PM | Comments (544) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Freaky Deaky Cafe

St. Mary's Graveyard, Whitby, UK
by @Whitbyphotos

I have a theory on why the Cafe "skips around." I think the embedded videos are loading. And I think what you need to do to stop this "skipping around" is to let them finish loading completely, so that they go into your computer's working memory -- so then it doesn't have to reload them any more. I think maybe people are posting before they ever let the site finish loading the embedded videos, so every time they refresh the page, the site tries to finish loading them again.

You can still get your "first" attempts in, but after that, try letting the four embeds finish loading. Maybe that will stop the "skipping around" problem.

Young Republican In Training attempts her very first pounce.

Cat needs you to know he's in agony.

I could book tickets on this plane but I don't feel like it right now. (IG)

When a penguin loves a woman. (IG)

All focus on the phone. (IG)

Aw, let the dog enjoy the fountain.

Another dog that's all about the water.

Family dance.

Don't miss the boat. This is a nightmare I have every week. Doesn't have to be a boat, of course.

Is this Peak Gay Hipster? Dudes, 2003 called and it wants its Ironic Facial Hair back. This is like if OK Go was undergoing gender transition at the same time.

Scenes from the streets of America in just a couple of years.

More Coming Attractions for America.

A piece of conceptual art that actually makes the point it's trying to make.

Runaway truck ramps in use. So that's what they do.

The strange sounds of an icy lake.

Guy cradles and protects his girlfriend in a motorcycle wipe-out. Don't worry, they seem fine.

I guess it's supposed to be his dog's birthday, so he's letting the dog have his greatest fantasy?

Salute to an ailing officer.

Posted by: Disinformation Expert Ace at 07:30 PM | Comments (442) | Trackbacks (Suck)