Nikki Haley was right

The Civil War was not fought over slavery.  This is trivial to demonstrate.

Consider the Corwin Amendment:

The Corwin Amendment is a proposed amendment to the United States Constitution that has never been adopted, but owing to the absence of a ratification deadline, could still be adopted by the state legislatures. It would shield slavery within the states from the federal constitutional amendment process and from abolition or interference by Congress. Although the Corwin Amendment does not explicitly use the word slavery, it was designed specifically to protect slavery from federal power. The outgoing 36th United States Congress proposed the Corwin Amendment on March 2, 1861, shortly before the outbreak of the American Civil War, with the intent of preventing that war and preserving the Union. It passed Congress but was not ratified by the requisite number of state legislatures.

Yeah, yeah - Wikipedia.  But the article plays it straight up.

So if the war was about slavery, why did both houses of Congress pass this amendment, and why did the President sign the bill, sending it to the States for ratification?  And oh by the way, Congress passed this without the Representatives from the seceding States.

And Abraham Lincoln - the "Great Emancipator" himself did not oppose the Amendment.

So the War was all about slavery, but Congress was playing 6-dimension chess or something, right?

[rolls eyes]

I'm no fan of Haley, but she is also right that the question was a liberal plant.  Her response might have been bad politics in 2023, but she is 100% correct on the facts.

But while facts are stubborn things, so is the ignorance and arrogance of the media (including the ostensibly conservative media). Remember, the history of that war as taught today is retarded.

More old climate records

When we point out that things aren't as hot as expected (predictions of 5 or more degrees increase being more like half a degree), we are told that the climate is changing in a way that we will experience more extremes.  The problem is that we're not seeing these extremes.  Case in point, the Great Blue Norther of 1911:

On November 11, temperatures in Kansas City had reached a record high of 76 °F (24 °C) by late morning before the front moved through. As the cold front approached, the winds increased turning from southeast to northwest. By midnight, the temperature had dropped to 11 °F (−12 °C), a 65 °F (36 °C) difference in 14 hours.[5] The next day would have a record low of 6 °F (−14 °C) and a high of only 21 °F (−6 °C).[10] In Springfield, the temperature difference was even more extreme. Springfield was at 80 °F (27 °C) at about 3:45 p.m. CST (21:45 UTC), before the cold front moved through. Fifteen minutes later, the temperature was at 40 °F (4 °C) with winds out of the northwest at 40 mph (64 km/h). By 7:00 p.m. CST (01:00 UTC 12 November) the temperature had dropped a further 20 °F (−7 °C), and by midnight (06:00 UTC), a record low of 13 °F (−11 °C) was established. It was the first time since records had been kept for Springfield when the record high and record low were broken in the same day. The freak temperature difference was also a record breaker: 67 °F (37 °C) in 10 hours.

And it wasn't just Kansas City, it was all over - Tulsa, Oklahoma City, Dallas, Peoria, Columbus, Lexington KY.  So these records are really old.  If the climate were getting more susceptible to extreme weather events, where are the new records?

It's almost like what you read in the Press is biased or something.

Ron DeSantis and hurricane preparation

While the media try to pin hurricane deaths on Gov. DeSantis, here's what they are not telling you:

Linemen have reportedly restored power for roughly two million customers in Gov. Ron DeSantis’s (R) Florida in the aftermath of Hurricane Ian last week, the governor said on Sunday.

45,000 linemen from all over the country* were pre-positioned before the storm hit.  In 4 days (Friday - Monday) they're restored ~ 80% of all outages.

The media are biased jerks who have changed Mark Twain's old addage.  It used to be "If you don't read the newspaper you're uninformed; if you do read the newspaper you're misinformed."  Now you're uninformed no matter what, but you're only misinformed if you read the paper.

* I saw one in the last day or two from Kansas City.  That's a long way to come to help out, and we appreciate it. 

So Mikhail Gorbachev est mort

The Press is falling over themselves to talk about what a guy he was, and how the Soviet system was (in the WaPo's term) "a seven-decade experiment born of Utopian idealism". Well OK then.  Remember, I did not read Pasternak but I condemn him ...

Oh, and the cartoon at that last link?  The one with two Gulag prisoners working in the snow and with the caption that said I won the Nobel Prize in Literature.  What was your crime?  You know, the cartoon that won a Pulitzer Prize?

Yeah, the WaPo would never publish it today.  Scratch a journalist, find a commie.

And so, here's a (err) toast to Mikhail Gorbachev, from back in the day when truth could still be spoken.

Quitting the news

Chris Lynch has an interesting post up about the mental health benefits of quitting the news - ignoring the feeds rather than obsessing on them.  I did that last weekend in Key West and felt MUCH better.

Quitting the News is the new Quitting Cigarettes. 

It's time for some Common Sense Media Control laws

So the Highland Park shooter recorded rap songs about doing a mass shooting.  Gosh, why would he rap about that?  Could it be all the media coverage about mass shootings?  Could he be motivated by the chance to be famous?

Every time there's a mass shooting, the media carpet bombs the airwaves with coverage.  It's easy to see why they do so - if it bleeds, it leads and all that.  It's about ratings, which means that they're in it for the money.

The Supreme Court has been clear that commercial speech has less First Amendment protection than political speech.  And we're constantly reminded by the liberals in every Second Amendment case that "no right is absolute".  Well, allrightee then.

It's high time to restrict the ability of the media to report on mass shooting events, because they are clearly encouraging this sort of behavior.  Some Common Sense restrictions seem to be pas due here.  For example:

• Waiting periods before publishing, to discourage "copy cat" killers.  A 1 or 2 week wait will allow information to get out to the public but will provide a "cooling off" period.
• A one story a month limit on stories will allow publishing the story to the public but will prevent the saturation of the airwaves that leads to copy cat events.  I mean, nobody needs an arsenal 24x7 never ending wave of stories.
• Licensing of news media, to include showing of "Good and Substantial" reason for publishing.

I could go on, but you get the idea.  I mean, no right is absolute - especially when it's not political speech but rather commercial speech.

Feel free to leave your suggestions for Common Sense Media Control laws in the comments.

Don't listen to "Studies" of gun crime

AWA over at Gunfreezone posts about a new study showing that increased Concealed Weapon permitting leads to increased gun crime:

Concealed-carry laws boost gun crime by a third, study finds

A new study finds concealed-carry laws lead to a boost in gun crime by between 29% and 32%, mostly by triggering a surge in gun theft.

The study comes on the heels of a Supreme Court ruling that struck down New York’s attempt to limit the ability to carry a gun outside their homes. That ruling was seen as particularly significant as other states have sought to restrict concealed-carry permits.

Oh, it isn’t people being shot. It is guns being stolen.

He recommends clicking through to read the whole thing. I don't. I've seen enough studies about gun control.  As the old saying goes, if you torture the data enough it will confess to anything.

Many years ago, Eric Raymond wrote a detailed post about how the gun control study sausage is made.  It was brutal, and is a must-read for everyone in our community.  He gives example after example of malfeasance in the academic literature, from "Arming America" which made up its data to the AMA "43 times more likely to die from a gun" that refused to release their data.  Go RTWT, but this sums up the top dirty tricks that they use:

I described the errors as “systematic” before the jump because there is a pattern of distortions in the anti-gun literature that have been repeated over decades even though they violate known good practice in the social and medical sciences. These include but are not limited to:

Failure to control for socioeconomic differences between star and control groups, even when the differences are known to correlate with large differences in per-capita rates of criminal deviance

Choice of study periods that ignore well-documented trends that run contrary to the study’s conclusions immediately before or after the period.

Selective use of suicide statistics, counting them only in star but not control groups and/or ignoring massive evidence that would-be suicides rapidly substitute other methods when firearms are not available.

Tendentious misapplication of Uniform Crime Report data, for example by ignoring the fact that UCR reports of homicides are entered before trial and therefore fail to account for an unknown but significant percentage of findings of misadventure and lawful self-defense.

And I described this pattern as “fraud” before the jump because the magnitude of these errors would be too great and their direction too consistent for honest error, even if we did not in several prominent cases have direct evidence that the fraud must have been intended.

My guess is that the new study falls into the second of his categories (selective choice of study periods) at the very least, and probably the misapplication of UCR data.  Quite frankly, the last 20 years simply do not show any obvious corollary of relaxed CCW laws and crime - or they show a corrolation between relaxed CCW laws and lower crime.  A 30% increase is simply not what I've seen at all.  My suspicion is that the data were tortured for a long time before they confessed to this.

Tagged "Junk Science" because, well, you know.

The Democratic Party loses the signal

Electronic communications rely on the concept of a Carrier Wave.  Basically, this is a well-defined electronic signal that all devices can "tune" into, and upon which the actual message is transmitted.  If you lose the carrier, you lose your connection and you can't communicate with anybody.

You Old Farts will remember the old dial-up modem days.  You see, most houses back in the paleolithic age (say, the 1990s) only had one phone line.  Hen Junior wanted to jump on Compuserve (or, Lord forbid, America Online), his biggest worry was often that Mom would pick up the phone to call a friend.  When the phone went off-hook, the carrier signal went all skew-wumpus* and the modem connection dropped.  There was even a long running BBS joke Hey! Wait! Don't pick up the ph{#`%${%&`+'${`%&NO CARRIER

Good times, good times.

Well, the Democratic Party has had control of the carrier wave to the American people for a long, long time.  The first post I tagged Biased Media was way back in 2008, and it was obvious even back then.  They've been used to jamming the Republicans access to the Carrier for a long time.  This has given the Democrat's a big advantage for a long, long time.

That's been going away for a long, long time.  Reagan beat Carter, and then whats-his-name from Minnesota.  The Republicans swept control of Congress in the 1990s.  The whole "Bush lied" (about Iraq) dates back to Hillary Clinton who needed Media air cover for her vote to authorize the Iraq invasion in 2003.  Sure, Obama won in 2008 but the 2010 elections decimated the Democratic Party, as the country reacted in revulsion to the far left-wing policies of his administration.

In my counting, that's 40 years of increasing rejection of the Democratic Party's narrative pushed by an increasingly weak and irrelevant media.

And so here we are at today.  We've had two mass shootings in as many weeks, and three or four in the last couple of months.  It's so perfectly set up to support the Democratic narrative that people are wondering if this is yet more FBI instigation**.  And yet, it's not moving the needle in the Democrat's favor.  Consider:

• Senate Majority Leader (Democrat) Chuck Schumer has refused to move forward with a gun control bill.  This is despite all the recent mass shootings.  Schumer may be a jerk but he knows how to count votes, and he knows how to look at what the polls say about issues.  The American people are entirely uninterested in more gun control, and forcing his party to put their necks on that chopping block is something that he (wisely) will not do.
• Covid is over, and every time a (Democrat) politician or bureaucrat suggests further lock downs or restrictions this "news" disappears from the media in a day.  It's political suicide, any why the Democrats would love to ride that crisis further, they know they'd just ride it into the ditch.
• Russia! Russia! Russia! is over.  Polls are starting to show that people want sanctions to end so we can import oil from them to drop gas prices.  The joke is I can't believe that it's MonkeyPox season!  I still have my Ukraine decorations up!
  

• Oh, yeah - I forgot all about the riots.  And MonkeyPox?  Bitch, please.

Each of these has had a shelf life measured between 2 months and 2 days, but the lifetime is shortening.  And as this has played out, Joe Biden's approval ratings have continued sinking.  He's now the least popular "President" since Harry Truman.  That's 70 years.  If you actually remember Harry Truman, you're really, really old.  Polls repeatedly show that people would prefer Republican candidates over Democrat ones by 5, or 8, or 10 points.

My point is that the media and the Democrat Party (but I repeat myself) is that crisis after crisis after crisis, all blamed on the Republicans, or Vladimir Putin, or White People have had precisely zero effect.  Nada. Nichto.  ничто.  无.

So to my point - The Democrats are very unpopular, and are getting increasingly unpopular.  The Media has lost all ability to change this trajectory.  We will leave for another day the question of whether the Republicans will be any better, but in all honesty - could they possibly be worse?***

We will also leave for another day the question of how legitimacy is established in a "Western Democracy" when elections are repeatedly stolen.  There's no question that both the Democratic and Republican Parties are up to this, and since "free and fair elections" are the bedrock of the American sense of political legitimacy, what happens when this is under minded needs to be explored in more detail.****

I shall endeavor to address these open items this weekend.  But I maintain what I said ten years ago after another notorious mass shooting: no new gun control laws are on offer.  And if Republican s are smart, after the Supreme Court strikes down Roe v. Wade they should counter all gun control proposals with "Common Sense" abortion control proposals.  You'd have to pop popcorn to enjoy the meltdown that would induce.

* Technical term in computer networking, I was told.

** Remember the jury that refused to convict the people who were "plotting to kidnap" the Michigan Governor because almost all of the folks who were involved were FBI? 

*** Spoiler alert: maybe.

**** Spoiler alert: nothing good.

Don't ever change, WaPo

Pretty much everyone is mocking Taylor Lorenz' WaPo article about how EVIL conservatives scuppered the new Ministry of Truth. You remember Taylor, don't you?  She's the one who doxxed the woman who ran the Libs of TikTok account and then sobbed about how mean everyone was to her.

Anyhow, this is the bit from her article that is the most jaw droppingly stupid:

Jankowicz’s case is a perfect example of this system at work, said Emerson T. Brooking, a resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. “They try to define people by these single, decontextualized moments,” Brooking said. “In Nina’s case it’s a few TikTok videos, or one or two comments out of thousands of public appearances. They fixate on these small instances and they define this villain.”...

Okay, Taylor - now do Roseanne.

The Czar of Muscovy wrote a long, long time ago that you will understand the media perfectly if you just think of them as mean middle school girls.  Jealous. not very smart, but mean.

Justified use of force

Brother Dwight emails to point out this example of how there's one set of rules for us, and a different one for those in Police uniform:

Two Buffalo police officers who shoved a 75-year-old man to the ground during a protest in 2020 have been cleared by an arbitrator, who said the use of force was “absolutely legitimate” because the man, who was hospitalized with a head injury, was “not an innocent bystander.”

Non-paywalled article here.

So it's an example of a justified use of force, at least for the police.  My reply to him was overly snarky, that if it had been at a Black Lives Matter protest the city would have burned to the ground.  I should have read the article first.  It was at a BLM protest, and the city didn't burn.

Now a few points:

1. This was a Police Department administrative hearing.  The cops got off in the same way that cops who shoot homeowner's dogs, or do no-knock raids on the wrong house, or throw flash-bang grenades into baby cribs get off.  The Blue Wall of Silence, and all that.

2. The man is going to sue the police department, and the city will almost certainly settle out of court.  The taxpayers will lose but the cops will be fine.

3. If you or I roughed up a 75 year old man, we'd be looking at multiple felony charges.  Know your place, peasant.

4. I'd be a lot more supportive of the police if they cleaned up the bad cops.  Everyone knows who those are, but the Blue Wall of Silence tars the good cops with the bad.  This is probably the biggest tragedy of the whole situation.

5. The Queen Of The World disagrees with me on this, and thinks that the cops are being railroaded by a biased media.  She thinks the guy was screaming into their faces and they pushed him back rather than cuffing him, and he tripped when he fell back.  I'm less certain here, and would be more sympathetic to them if there were not a different set of rules for us (#3 above) and covering for bad cops (#4 above).

Oh, and you do read Dwight every day, don't you?  He's your go-to guy for obituaries and which coach just got fired.  

UPDATE 12 April 2022 19:37:  Dwight is going to post Gilbert Gottfried's obit tomorrow.

Quote of the Day - Conspiracy Theories edition

Francis Porretto thinks that we are entering the Golden Age of conspiracy theories and that it's all the Media's fault:

Now, whatever the truth of the matter – and it may be quite a long time before we have it, if we ever do – the proliferation of wild theories is a direct consequence of the loss of trust in the major media. The dynamic is fairly straightforward:

• The organs of information have proved themselves un-trustworthy, and the fora for discussion arbitrarily silence persons who deviate from the “official truth.”
• Thereafter, conversation will admit any and every thesis that might explain why we’re being force-fed a steady diet of lies.
• Since there are innumerable possible explanations for such a thing, they will multiply and proliferate without limit.
• The “zero plausibility threshold” was set by the major media, which have demonstrated indifference to the truth.

     Perhaps this would be beyond the comprehension of a small child. However, I’d expect a teenager to get it without a beat. Look at how much crap the “authorities” in their lives feed them.

I think he's right.  When all the media's legitimacy got sucked out of the room, something was going to fill the vacuum.  I guess we're seeing what that is.

Vladimir Putin is the worstest ever!!!!11!!!eleventy!!

There is a *ton* of propaganda about what's happening in Ukraine right now, maybe 80% of it from the Ukranian side.  This makes it hard to know what is actually, you know, happening there.  This is a very long and very interesting analysis of (a) current situation, (b) Ukraine.Gov motives, (c) Russia.Gov motives, and (d) US.Gov/NATO motives.

Highly, highly recommended.

And this part seems to me to hit center mass:

In my analysis, the Ukrainians are mass mobilizing their civilian population to use them as human shields, and then parade their bodies on Western media. These forces will be poorly armed and trained, and have little military usefulness. They will make it more costly for Russian forces to enter Ukrainian cities, but as I mentioned previously, the Russian solution to this problem is the simply level the city. In the end, all of these armed civilians will die, their cities destroyed, with nothing gained. I believe this is in fact the goal of the Ukrainian leadership, who are being cheered on towards this end either consciously or not by Americans and other Westerners. I think Ukrainian leadership is hoping for Russia to flattened cities and inflict mass deaths among the civilian population for PR purposes. With their mass mobilization of urban populations, the Ukrainian leadership is putting the Russian forces in a similar position that Hamas puts Israel’s IDF in. What Hamas does, is hide their forces in dense urban centers from where they stage attacks on Israel. The Israelis are faced with a dilemma, either they tolerate Hamas’s attacks, or they shoot back which will inevitably inflict civilian casualties. The Palestinians in turn show dead civilians and destroyed building on Western news media with the intention of ruining Israel’s international reputation. Both Hamas and Ukraine are using their civilians as human shields. Civilians throwing Molotov cocktails at Russian tanks will achieve nothing, other than getting themselves killed. This should be obvious. As America is weaponizing its “cancel culture” for foreign policy objectives, Russia will be endless maligned in Western media if the Ukrainian strategy succeeds. Personally I find it quite sick that Westerners are cheering the Ukrainians on with this strategy. What they are doing, whether consciously or not, is to sacrifice endless Ukrainian lives all for a narrative to be built of Ukrainian martyrdom.

Take a half hour to read the whole thing which is best described as (ahem) Borepatchian in length.  Or maybe even longer.  But there's a ton of food for thought, at least for folks who don't appreciate being manipulated by increasingly transparent propaganda.

And when I say "increasingly transparent propaganda" I really, really mean increasingly transparent propaganda.  For example, the "New York Times" journalist who was just killed.  The headline?  

BREAKING: Award-Winning AMERICAN Filmmaker and Journalist Shot Dead By Russian Troops...Here Are The Details

Wow, just wow.

Except, not so fast.  Here's the interesting graf from that very article:

Daily Mail reports – Initially, he was thought to have been on assignment for The New York Times because he was carrying a press badge that listed the newspaper as his publication but it has since emerged he was working on a global film about refugees.

So was he or wasn't he covering things for the NYT?  Like I said, increasingly transparent propaganda that is increasingly disconnected from facts.  Certainly this is a tragedy for him and his family - actually the whole damn war is a tragedy for millions and their families - but wartime journalism is known to be a dangerous profession.  Remember the 15 journalists killed in the opening weeks of the Iraq war?

Like I said, I would love a higher caliber of news reporting from Ukraine.  It feels like the original link to Alexander's Cartographer is providing what used to be provided by regular journalists.  Is it, or is it a more subtle and less obvious propaganda?  Who can say?

But it seems that most of what you read is clearly drivel.  I'd like a higher caliber drivel, please.  Go read the whole thing which does not feel to me like drivel, but rather reasoned discussion.

Inflation impoverishes the poor

So says The World Bank:

Using polling data for 31,869 households in 38 countries and allowing for country effects, Easterly and Fischer show that the poor are more likely than the rich to mention inflation as a top national concern. This result survives several robustness checks.

Also, direct measures of improvements in well-being for the poor - the change in their share of national

income, the percentage decline in poverty, and the percentage change in the real minimum wage - are negatively correlated with inflation in pooled cross- country samples.

High inflation tends to lower the share of the bottom quintile and the real minimum wage - and tends to increase poverty.

So record inflation (remember that the Fed.Gov changed the way that inflation is measured so that food and energy prices are no longer counted - meaning that the "Highest inflation in 40 years" actually means "Highest inflation ever") is driving people into poverty at a record rate.  Because the resident of the Oval Office has a "D" after his name I don't expect this to be reported in the Media, but keep this in mind when anyone tells you nonsense like "the Democrats are the only ones to do anything for the poor."

Yeah, they do something, all right.  Good and hard.

We have always been at war with East Asia

A fish doesn't notice the water it swims in.  The Western populations swim in a sea of State sponsored propaganda.  Perceptions are carefully shaped so that only Approved® preferences emerge.  Unfortunately for the "Elites" they have pushed the envelope so far from most people's perceived reality that propaganda collapses.  It seems that the American public remains sane:

The Economist/You Gov poll showed that despite a barrage of pro-war media coverage only 19% of Americans support "sending soldiers to Ukraine to fight Russian soldiers."

54% oppose.

You have to dig very deep in its poll story to find this gem. It is almost as if they were trying to manipulate the public.

So you have to dig to find out that Americans oppose World War III.  The "Elites" trying to shape public opinion have a long way to go still.  Good.

And the scare quotes around "Elites" is well earned.  A great post at Liberty's Torch lays out the case against them:

Rule by moral midgets is the rule now. The posturing Trump could not contain his feverish wish to bomb Syria in 2017 and Clinton before him inexplicably took it upon himself to bomb Serbia relentlessly for over 70 days. Obama chose groveling on the international stage as his signature gesture and his Secretary of State wet herself with glee at the death of Gaddafi. The entire political class of the United States has chosen to chase will-o’-the-wisps fueled by arrogance and delusions. Denial of fundamental biological reality is now an integral part of the mental processes of said class, superbly “educated” to a man but ignorant of life’s most precious truths.

It’s not only an American phenomenon. All but a few European leaders desire anything but national suicide by immigration to vindicate the most vaporous and sappy sentiments of compassion, fairness, and historical retribution. A mere 104 years after the massive slaughter of The Great War and not a one of that lot could summon the courage let alone vision to lift a finger to derail the asinine U.S. encroachment on Russia or question its inherent assumption of some unique Russian depravity or willful nonobservance of civilized norms. Slavic brutes!! Lessons learned from the reckless slide into the massive slaughter of modern industrial warfare? None.

Top.  Men.  Good thing the People still retain some common sense.

The first casualty of war is the truth

There's a lot of news coming from Ukraine right now.  I'm not sure what is fact and what is propaganda.  It looks like Ukraine is winning the propaganda war so far, for whatever that's worth.  I guess we'll know when the smoke clears.

In the meantime, this post gives you a grounding in Ukraine-Russia politics. 

January 6: we've seen this play before, done a whole lot better

History repeats itself: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.

- Friedrich Engels

The airwaves are filled with huffing and puffing about an "insurrection" a year ago.  Ignore that literally none of the hundreds of those arrested and held without bail have been charged with actual insurrection - this is political theater.  It's political theater that the Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) think will help them win a great political victory.  As political theater, the facts are entirely beside the point - what's important is the drama that can be stirred up.

Alas for them, it's a wet firecracker.  In our divided Republic, nobody remains unconvinced (either pro or con), and this will not move that needle.  And in any case, the "drama" (such as it is) is underwhelming.  You want drama?  Look at the Catiline Conspiracy in the death throes of the Roman Republic.  That comes down to us via Cicero, so it's top shelf drama.

Catiline was a Roman Senator, bitter that he lost his bid to be elected Consul (kind of sort of President).  He was said to have organized a band of ne'er-do-wells to overthrow the Senate and take power for himself.  Cicero gave a famous address to the Senate laying out his plan, and as he spoke the Senators one by one got up and moved away from Catiline, who came to a bad end.

Now that's drama.  Unfortunately, the drama of the story has overpowered the actual facts of the matter.  We only have Cicero and Sallust as sources and both of them are highly biased against Catiline.  There's a very good chance indeed that Catiline was railroaded by the finest orator of his day, and smeared for the last 2000 years by a biased media.

Does that remind you of anything?

And so today is rather a bore.  The story is certainly hyped, very likely manufactured (hello, FBI!), and the "drama" pales in comparison to not just what we've seen before, but what we've seen 2000 years ago.  I hate to break it to the media, but they're no Ciceros.  Or even Sallusts.

Why we don't trust the media, vol. MMCIX

They just make stuff up:

From "The First Thing We Do, Let’s Kill All the Leaf Blowers" (NYT). 

And there's this: "hydrocarbon emissions from a half-hour of yard work with the two-stroke leaf blower are about the same as a 3,900-mile drive from Texas to Alaska in a Raptor." 

 Raptor = Tricked out F-150.

And this isn't just "the media" - This is the NEW YORK TIMES.  It's supposed to be the Gold Standard of journalism, and they come out with this Bravo Sierra.  And it's not even good Bravo Sierra.

Dumbasses.

Afraid of the 'Rona? Take up smoking

Seriously.  Quite frankly, I didn't expect that. Maybe smoking is healthy after all ...

UPDATE 5 August 2021 14:49:  It seems that Bear Bussjaeger posted data confirming this last December (!!!).  It seems an interesting media blackout that word just isn't getting around.  But the data are the data, and this looks legit.

Hank Williams Sr. - Your Cheatin' Heart

So the news media lies to us on purpose.  Here's a news flash: there have been country music songs about liars and cheaters basically since there's been country music.  This was perhaps Hank's biggest hit, recorded in his last recording session before his death.  It sings the song of crashing media TV ratings and reduced subscribership.  See ya, suckas!

Your Cheatin' Heart (Songwriter: Hank Williams, Sr.)

Your cheatin' heart
Will make you weep
You'll cry and cry
And try to sleep
But sleep won't come
The whole night through
Your cheatin' heart will tell on you...

When tears come down
Like falling rain
You'll toss around
And call my name
You'll walk the floor
The way I do
Your cheatin' heart will tell on you...

Your cheatin' heart
Will pine some day
And crave the love
You threw away
The time will come
When you'll be blue
Your cheatin' heart will tell on you...

When tears come down
Like falling rain
You'll toss around
And call my name
You'll walk the floor
The way I do
Your cheatin' heart will tell on you...

If you don't read the newspaper you are uninformed ...

... if you do read the newspaper you are misinformed.

Mark Twain's quote is justly famous but is in need of renovation after 130 years.  Adam Piggott has a post explaining why:

From The Other McCain, a report that journalists at a press conference in Minnesota wildly objected to the police chief’s use of the word riot to describe the behaviour of certain groups of individuals who had taken to lobbing large chunks of concrete in the general direction of bystanders, police and numerous pieces of private property. The term riot is obviously appropriate and accurate based on the footage of the events. And when you consider that the business of journalism is to report on events using common vocabulary as a communication tool, then the outraged objections of these journalists to correct word usage is particularly illuminating.

The whole post makes the case that journalists are Public Enemy number 1.  And so, back to Mr. Twain's comment which we can rewrite as follows:

If you don't follow the media, you are uninformed.  If you do follow the media you are both uninformed and misinformed.