Author: Papa Giorgio

Sen. Tom Cotton Trolls Chuck Schumer w/Chuck Schumer

Published by Papa Giorgio

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) read a past speech by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) against nuking the filibuster.

Here is a portion:

RED STATE has more about Schumer’s admission:

Democrats are doing all they can to upend the filibuster to be able to restrict election integrity bills and pass what they call “voting rights” bills.

Over the weekend, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) attacked Republican election integrity bills, claiming they were a “legislative continuation of Jan. 6.” Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-SC) gave the game away, admitting that the real purpose of their ‘voting rights’ push was a federal takeover of elections. Clyburn claimed that the “federal elections cannot be left up to the states, should not be left up to the states.” It’s all about control.

But now Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is saying the quiet part out loud too, explaining that the Democrats — “every single senator”– are worried that they will lose their races if Democrats don’t control elections.

From The Hill:

“There are many colleagues who are making that comment about their own races. … That’s certainly one of the factors,” Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) told The Hill when asked if Democrats were making the case that they could lose reelection without voting legislation.

“These are being done only in Republican states where Republicans control all the levers … so if it’s our voters that they’re targeting, then we ought to have some responsibility to stand up for those voters,” Kaine added.

Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), speaking about changes to voting laws in various states during a recent interview with CNN, added that nearly every senator in the caucus had been lobbying Manchin and Sinema on voting rights, including “going up to them and saying, ‘I’ll lose my election if … you allow these changes to occur.’”

There’s the truth, and that’s what this has all been about. They’re afraid that people are going to vote them out if the elections are honest. Not to mention if there are election integrity measures in place, they know they will be in deep trouble…….

An Historian Flubs on recent and Civil Rights Era History

Published by Papa Giorgio

My attention was first brought to this via TWITCHY, where they document other errors on top of this one. But I wanted to expand the area a bit the quote was in to show just how racially biased this author is. As a favored lefty professor of mine says… “to be on the side of the angels.”

LEGAL INSSURECTION’S post is an interesting read as well, where he notes:

  • Cooney’s book is virulently anti-white in passages. If I were a parent with a child at UCLA or one who was considering that school as an option, would I really want said child to go to a school where racist screeds are an acceptable form of scholarship?

Here is the fuller quote for those that want the before-and-after sentences:

There can be no better image of the shifting sands beneath our feet than a Black Lives Matter demonstration in St. Louis, Missouri. It passed the marble-clad home of Mark and Patricia McCloskey, two wealthy White lawyers each aiming their precious firearms directly at the crowd: an AR-Is rifle in the arms of Mark, in a pink polo shirt, and a tiny silver handgun held by Patricia, in a striped Hamburglar top. The couple had the weapons cocked and ready to shoot because they believed that the BLM marchers would break into their home, take their things, and do them grave harm. This visualized death threat directed at the protestors was their right, they believed, their privilege to show to society.

Or consider I7-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse, who used his semi-automatic weapon to kill two Black men in Kenosha, Wisconsin, while waging a glorious race war on behalf of his inherited White power. That’s not to mention the White people who rallied behind him to post his bail. Fear has gripped the patriarchy, and the threat of righteous violence—or the lethal use of it—is the patriarchy’s response.

Kara Cooney, The Good Kings: Absolute Power in Ancient Egypt and the Modern World (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Books, 2021), 341.

Here is the other glaring rewriting of history by a historian:

Here is that section — and BTW, no source (FOX NEWS, Kara McKinney, etc), had the page numbers to this section:

If we are to change the patriarchy from within, we’ll have to use dif­ferent tactics from the ones we’ve tried before. Consider the example of the Black Lives Matter movement, whose radical inclusion of all manner of people is the jujitsu move against a more powerful opposition. We all remember that the fight against separate-but-equal segregation — at lunch counters, elementary schools, universities, and public spaces — [<p. 349 | >p. 350] made Rosa Parks a hero when she took a seat in the White section of a public bus and started the Montgomery bus boycott. But the people who led the charge in the I96os were male civil rights activists — Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and John Lewis. In the 1960s, patriarchy combated patriarchy.

Kara Cooney, The Good Kings: Absolute Power in Ancient Egypt and the Modern World (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Books, 2021), 349-350.

TWITCHY continues with its refutation:

She could have, you know, just checked Wikipedia before writing the book:

On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Parks rejected bus driver James F. Blake‘s order to vacate a row of four seats in the “colored” section in favor of a white passenger, once the “white” section was filled.

Kara McKinney’s point about National Geographic having better editor’s should not be lost on the reader. Here is NAT GEOS PAGE on this historical event:

  • Nonetheless, at one point on the route, a white man had no seat because all the seats in the designated “white” section were taken. So the driver told the riders in the four seats of the first row of the “colored” section to stand, in effect adding another row to the “white” section. The three others obeyed. Parks did not.

…AND…

CHARLIE KIRK reiterates the windfall surely to come to Kyle:

….During an interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Rittenhouse said his legal team is in the process of going after individuals who slandered and defamed him in the media.

When Carlson asked Kyle if he planned to hold “liars to account” who defamed him, Rittenhouse responded, “I have really good lawyers who are taking care of that right now.”

“So, I’m hoping one day there will be some, there’ll be accountability for their actions that they did,” Rittenhouse said.

During an interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Rittenhouse said his legal team is in the process of going after individuals who slandered and defamed him in the media.

When Carlson asked Kyle if he planned to hold “liars to account” who defamed him, Rittenhouse responded, “I have really good lawyers who are taking care of that right now.”

“So, I’m hoping one day there will be some, there’ll be accountability for their actions that they did,” Rittenhouse said…..

At least she got the “Semi-Automatic” part of the AR-15 correct. Lol.

Larry Elder rips media for playing the race card in Rittenhouse trial

 

Jake Tapper Slams NYC’s Mayor Adams For Non-Citizens Voting

Published by Papa Giorgio

CNN’s Tapper Slams NYC’s Dem Mayor Adams For Non-Citizen Voting, A “Mockery” Of American Citizenship (WEASEL ZIPPERS hat-tip)

Are Pipelines Safe? (Preger U)

Published by Papa Giorgio

What’s the safest way to transport oil? According to environmentalists, progressive politicians, and the media, it’s anything but pipelines. Are they right? Diana Furchtgott-Roth, adjunct professor at George Washington University, dives into the data for answers.

5-Part Series: Science and God | Stephen Meyer

Published by Papa Giorgio

Can you believe in God and science at the same time? Many claim that belief in religion is at odds with “the science” of today. But is that really true? In this five-part series, Stephen Meyer, Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute, attempts to answer this existential question.

Series “Broken Out”

  1. Are Religion and Science in Conflict? — Science and God | Does belief in God get in the way of science? The idea that science and religion are inevitably in conflict is a popular way of thinking today. But the history of science tells a different story.
  2. How Did the Universe Begin? — Science and God | Was the universe always here, or did it have a beginning? If so, how did it start? Mankind has debated these questions for centuries and has only recently begun to find some answers. And those answers may point to some even more intriguing conclusions.
  3. Aliens, the Multiverse, or God? — Science and God | Even staunch Darwinists have acknowledged that life in the universe displays an appearance of design, rather than being created out of random chance. If that’s true, where did that design come from? In other words, does a design require a designer?
  4. What Is Intelligent Design? — Science and God | Chances are if you’ve heard anything about intelligent design, you’ve heard that it’s faith-based, not science-based. Is that true? Or does modern science, in fact, point us in the direction of a designing intelligence?
  5. What’s Wrong with Atheism? — Science and God | Is there any meaning to life? Or is life nothing more than a cosmic accident? Scientific atheists claim the latter, but ironically, it’s science itself that suggests the former.

Justice Sotomayor Falls For Media Manipulation

Published by Papa Giorgio

These people (lefty judges on the Supreme Court) are just as clueless as the dopey Democrat behind the Starbucks expresso machine.

SOTMAYOR SAYS 100,000 CHILDREN IN HOSPITAL

PJ-MEDIA notes that this this “false claim can be easily fact-checked thanks to data from the Department of Health and Human Services.” Continuin they continue to say:

…which says that the current number of confirmed pediatric hospitalizations with COVID in the United States is 3,342.

Those are hospitalizations with COVID, not from COVID.

How exactly did Sotomayor get it so wrong? How can a Supreme Court justice so irresponsibly spread misinformation? Further, why should the hospitalization rate matter at all? The issue before the court is not the severity of the disease; it’s the constitutionality of Biden’s mandates.

THE CDC FACT CHECKED STATS

EVEN CNN

Even CNN forced to fact check Justice Sotomayor’s astonishingly false Covid lie…!!

RIGHT SCOOP adds to the data coming in showing that the Lefty SCOTUS members are either lying or horribly misinformed — maybe by CNN? MSNBC?

Sotomayor and Breyer lied through their teeth today about Covid. The media, when they aren’t ignoring this or saying the justices were RIGHT are claiming it was simply error or misspeak. But none of that is true, it was deliberate lying, like we see every day from their fellow activist liberal Democrats across the government and media, to include Fauci, Biden, and the rest.

And new hospital data from New York only shows how BAD of liars they are.

That’s right. So much for the “overwhelming hospitals” line of bull. If ICUs are full it’s because of procedure, not people coming in due to covid. And that means it’s not a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” too, by the way.

She’s right. This was treated as a conspiracy theory for TWO YEARS and now we know it to be FACT.

And same in Florida last month.

But we have kids in trunks and Biden still pushing for mandates.

Seb Gorka on Newsmax

Sotomayor: The Stupidest Person to EVER serve on the Supreme Court.

Will The Real [FBI] “Insurrectionist” Please Stand Up

Published by Papa Giorgio

Who is Ray Epps? A mountain of evidence points to him as the lead instigator of the January 6th riots. Yet as the Attorney General’s dragnet sweeps up and indicts innocent Americans, why hasn’t Epps been charged by the FBI? Join Mark as he raises the question that everyone is asking: Is Epps really a federal law enforcement agent?

While I have known about this for some time and posted links on my Facebook Page for my site…. here are some recent videos explaining Ray a bit and why people are MORE THAN curious. Here is a comment comparing the conflicting ideas to note with more about this Grandma and the “Deprogramming” in American reeducation camps that is being enacted:

  • Grandma taking selfies gets raided by 20 FBI agents at 4am but this dude on video inciting a “INsUReCtIoN” is free. That should tell you everything

Here is more on her via LAURA INGRAHAM:

…..Morgan-Lloyd told the court she’s a grandmother from a “very small town” in southern Indiana filled with “simple people who love our country.” She wrote that “Schindler’s List” was very moving, and made her wonder how people could deny that the Holocaust happened or, like her half-German son-in-law claims, according to her report, say that “‘Only’ a million Jews died.”

Morgan-Lloyd wrote that reading “Just Mercy” “makes me reconsider my view on the death penalty” because it “was far too easy for the people to convict a man of a crime that he could not have committed.”

Shaner told the court the process helped Morgan-Lloyd “educate herself and to learn the American history she was not taught in school.” Like any good defense attorney, she paints a sympathetic portrait of her client: pointing out how Morgan-Lloyd lost her job after General Electric shipped it overseas, how she was thrown right into motherhood after marrying her husband, now helps take care of her grandchildren, and how her “husband and family are the world to her.”

[….]

Morgan-Lloyd’s court case will likely be over soon, and it remains to be determined whether she’ll continue her educational process while serving her sentence….

(HUFFPO)

THE ABOVE WAS FOR CLARITY OF COMPARISON MENTIONED BELOW

I found this long video interesting and will follow it up with two more as well as a link to REVOLVER’S story on Ray Epps.

Congressman Matt Gaetz and Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene toured the area of the Capitol Complex where alleged federal informant Ray Epps and his team first breached fencing. Right Side Broadcasting News exclusively interviewed the representatives and discussed the investigative reporting by Revolver.News

To Wit….

Two More Videos:

TUCKER

CROWDER

 

Coercion Made the Pandemic Worse (WSJ + AIER)

Published by Papa Giorgio

I wanted to make sure this WALL STREET JOURNAL article was saved in my feed (Hat-tip to Todd A):

Freedom is the central component of the best problem-solving system ever devised.

By David R. Henderson and Charles L. Hooper

The online Merriam-Webster dictionary defines “anti-vaxxer” as “a person who opposes the use of vaccines or regulations mandating vaccination.” Where does that leave us? We both strongly favor vaccination against Covid-19; one of us (Mr. Hooper) has spent years working and consulting for vaccine manufacturers. But we strongly oppose government vaccine mandates. If you’re crazy about Hondas but don’t think the government should force everyone to buy a Honda, are you “anti-Honda”?

The people at Merriam-Webster are blurring the distinction between choice and coercion, and that’s not merely semantics. If we accept that the difference between choice and coercion is insignificant, we will be led easily to advocate policies that require a large amount of coercion. Coercive solutions deprive us of freedom and the responsibility that goes with it. Freedom is intrinsically valuable; it is also the central component of the best problem-solving system ever devised.

Free choice relies on persuasion. It recognizes that you are an important participant with key information, problem-solving abilities and rights. Any solution that is adopted, therefore, must be designed to help you and others. Coercion is used when persuasion has failed or is teetering in that direction—or when you are raw material for someone else’s grand plans, however ill-conceived.

Authoritarian governmental approaches hamper problem-solving abilities. They typically involve one-size-fits-all solutions like travel bans and mask mandates. Once governments adopt coercive policies, power-hungry bureaucrats often spout an official party line and suppress dissent, no matter the evidence, and impose further sanctions to punish those who don’t fall in line. Once coercion is set in motion, it’s hard to backtrack.

Consider Australia, until recently a relatively free country. Its Northern Territory has a Covid quarantine camp in Howard Springs where law-abiding citizens can be forcibly sent if they have been exposed to a SARS-CoV-2-positive person or have traveled internationally or between states, even without evidence of exposure. A 26-year-old Australian citizen, Hayley Hodgson, was detained at the camp after she was exposed to someone later found to be positive. Despite three negative tests and no positive ones, she was held in a small enclosed area for 14 days and fed once a day. Even the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says quarantine can end after seven days with negative tests. Why didn’t the government let her quarantine at home? And why doesn’t it exempt or treat differently people who can prove prior vaccination or natural infection?

Although U.S. authorities haven’t gone nearly that far, early in the pandemic the Food and Drug Administration used its coercive power to discourage the development of diagnostic tests for Covid-19. The FDA required private labs wanting to develop tests to submit special paperwork to get approval that it had never required for other diagnostic tests. That, in combination with the CDC’s claims that it had enough testing capacity, meant that testing necessitated the use of a CDC test later determined to be so defective that it found the coronavirus in laboratory-grade water.

With voluntary approaches, we get the benefit of millions of people around the world actively trying to solve problems and make our lives better. We get high-quality vaccines from BioNTech/ Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson and Moderna, instead of the suspect vaccines from the governments of Cuba and Russia. We get good diagnostic tests from Thermo Fisher Scientific instead of the defective CDC one. We get promising therapeutics such as Pfizer’s Paxlovid and Merck’s molnupiravir.

With authoritarian approaches, we get solutions that meet the requirements of those in power, regardless of how we benefit. Consider this hypothetical example:

Policy A ends with 1,000 Covid-19 cases, 5,000 people who have completely lost their liberty for two weeks, 1,000 lost jobs, and 300 missed key family events, such as the funeral of a loved one.

Policy B ends with 1,020 Covid-19 cases, 4,000 who have lost some of their liberty for one week, 1,000 who have completely lost their liberty for two weeks, 300 lost jobs, and 100 missed family events.

The government may prefer Policy A because it is focused on one aspect of the problem. You might prefer Policy B because many aspects of life matter to you—not only coronavirus cases—and B is much better on the other dimensions. But your preferences don’t count.

With coercive solutions, you’ll often deal with an official who will absolve himself of responsibility by pinning the rule on those giving the orders. With voluntary solutions, if it doesn’t make sense, we usually don’t do it. And therein lies one of the greatest protections we have to ensure that the solution isn’t worse than the problem.

The supposed trump card of those who favor coercion is externalities: One person’s behavior can put another at risk. But that’s only half the story. The other half is that we choose how much risk we accept. If some customers at a store exhibit risky behavior, then we can vaccinate, wear masks, keep our distance, shop at quieter times, or avoid the store.

Economists understand how one person can impose a cost on another. But it takes two to tango, and it’s generally more efficient if the person who can change his behavior with the lower cost changes how he behaves. In other words, to perform a proper evaluation of policies to deal with externalities, we must consider the responses available to both parties. Many people, including economists, ignore this insight.

By what principle do we throw out the playbook of the more successful country, ours, and adopt one from less successful, more authoritarian countries? The authoritarian playbook has serious built-in weaknesses, while solutions based on free choice have obvious and not-so-obvious strengths. Freedom is beneficial in good times; it’s even more crucial in challenging times.

Mr. Henderson is a research fellow with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He was senior health economist with President Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers. Mr. Hooper is author of “Should the FDA Reject Itself?” and president of Objective Insights, whose clients include pharmaceutical companies.

AIER Bonus

A Perfect Storm of Incentives

It is not yet clear whether history will remember the 2020s more for an outbreak of a deadly virus, or for an outbreak of mass psychosis. No doubt, both were at play, the former because the virus was novel and deadly, the latter because we had no idea how much so. In March of 2020, the World Health Organization estimated Covid’s case fatality rate to be over 3 percent. Some outlets reported case fatality rates above 10 percent. By comparison, the case fatality rate for the common flu is a mere fraction of a percent.

But the early information ranged from sketchy to biased. In the early days, the number of Covid tests was limited, so physicians only tested those who were sick enough to show up at hospitals. This skewed the early data toward showing Covid as being deadlier than it actually was. With no randomized testing, the actual lethality was impossible to know. 

This bias interacted with the media and politicians’ incentives to create a perfect storm of incentives. The media had an incentive to repeat the worst fatality projections and to play down the bias behind the projections because bad news attracts viewers, and viewers attract advertising dollars. Heavy media coverage of the worst Covid projections alarmed voters, and that forced politicians to respond. But the politicians’ incentives were skewed toward a heavy-handed response.

[….]

By late 2020, it became clear that early case fatality rates were overstated, but it was too late for politicians to change course. A feedback loop had ensued wherein the media sold advertising by spotlighting the Covid danger. This made people fearful, and the people pushed politicians to act. Politicians acted and then hid the potential error of unnecessary lockdowns by emphasizing the danger of Covid. This gave the media more material to spotlight and more advertising to sell. Social media then jumped into the fray by anointing itself the arbiter of what was and wasn’t “misinformation.” But social media was as motivated as the mainstream media to attract eyeballs and sell advertising, and so anything that contradicted the official line on Covid was deemed “misinformation.”

The result was mass psychosis in which people’s behaviors toward the real threat of Covid became inconsistent with their behaviors toward other real threats. 

[….]

As with all things, lockdowns do not come without tradeoffs. Some people died of cancer, kidney disease, and other non-Covid causes because they were afraid to go to hospitals out of fear of contracting Covid. In Canada, cancer screening was suspended so that hospital resources could be devoted to Covid care. Early estimates show up to a 10 percent increase in cancer deaths as a consequence. In the US in the early days of Covid, there was a 30 percent decline in the number of people seeking initial treatment for kidney disease.

At the start of the pandemic, calls to suicide hotlines spiked across the country, as did instances of domestic violence. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that the total number of deaths in the US was 450,000 larger than it should have been in 2020. That 360,000 of those were directly due to Covid means that the remaining 90,000 were due to Covid only indirectly or due to the lockdowns themselves.

In addition to the lockdowns costing lives, we expended unprecedented resources maintaining them. These came initially in the form of unemployment and business closures, and later in the form of supply chain problems and inflation and higher taxes to pay for massive stimulus spending. In late 2020, economists estimated that, provided it ended by the fall of 2021, the pandemic will cost the United States around $16 trillion over the next decade. That’s around $40 million for every life saved. 

But how many more lives might we have saved had we done something different with those resources? Around 660,000 people die each year of heart disease in the US. The National Institutes of Health spends around $5 billion each year researching cures for cardiovascular diseases. Americans spend another $330 billion each year for hospitalization, home health care, medication, and lost productivity associated with cardiovascular diseases.

Suppose that, over the next decade, it turns out that the 2020-21 lockdown saved a total of 1.1 million US lives (including people who may have contracted Covid in 2020-21 but died over the subsequent decade from lingering complications). This is three times the 370,000 the lockdown appears to have saved in 2020 alone. We will have spent $16 trillion in direct costs and lost productivity to save those 1.1 million people. But, over the same decade, 6.6 million people will have died of cardiovascular diseases. To save them, we will have spent $3.3 trillion. We are dedicating one-fifth the resources to fighting a disease that kills six times the number of people. That makes no sense.

Of course, Covid and cardiovascular diseases are very different in that heart disease isn’t contagious. And yet, that criticism cuts both ways: because heart disease isn’t contagious, we can’t develop a herd immunity, and so heart disease will remain with us for generations whereas Covid will not.

[….]

As Omicron looms, and as surely as Pi, Rho, and Sigma will follow, voters should meet their fears with reason, view the media with a skeptical eye, and demand that politicians discuss tradeoffs openly and honestly.

Antony Davies is the Milton Friedman Distinguished Fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education, and associate professor of economics at Duquesne University. He has authored Principles of Microeconomics (Cognella), Understanding Statistics (Cato Institute), and Cooperation and Coercion (ISI Books). He has written hundreds of op-eds appearing in, among others, the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, New York Post, Washington Post, New York Daily News, Newsday, US News, and the Houston Chronicle.

Tucker Notes Biden’s “Pandemic of the Unvaccinated” (Updated)

Published by Papa Giorgio

(DAILY WIRE) Leaked Airline Memos: Majority Of Employees With Omicron Are Vaxxed

On Monday, The Daily Wire’s “Morning Wire” podcast revealed that in wake of massive absences due to COVID-19, major airlines such as United and Spirit Airlines are reportedly offering employees more pay to help cover shifts for colleagues out of commission due to the illness. In a memo obtained by The Daily Wire, United specifically cited Omicron as having caused a “significant” increase in pilot illness, making the higher pay necessary to keep flights on track. Despite the airline industry being heavily vaccinated, the Omicron variant has caused an uptick in COVID-19 absences.

As the Morning Wire reported, more than 4,000 flights were canceled just this past weekend. While a massive storm in Chicago was partly to blame, it appears the main driver has been amongst pilots.

Likewise, Delta has bragged that more than 90% of its 80,000 employees are vaccinated. Yet, a Delta memo recently acknowledged that when it comes to “confirmed Omicron cases, including those among airline workers, the majority are occurring in fully-vaccinated individuals,” according to the Morning Wire’s Georgia Howe.

“Not only is omicron making more vaccinated employees sick vs. the unvaccinated, but putting those unvaccinated employees on the street without pay means the airline doesn’t have much wiggle room when their schedules start to fall apart,” Jason Kunisch, co-founder of U.S. Freedom Flyers and a pilot for a major airline told the Morning Wire.

As The Daily Wire’s John Bickley observed, COVID-19 was called the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” just a short while ago but that term may now be obsolete given the latest news…..

RED STATE Update

First Story via RED STATE:

CNN politics reporter and editor-at-large Chris Cillizza has been having some revelations of late when it comes to COVID.

Last month, Cillizza said he was finally realizing, with the onset of the Omicron variant, that the vaccines don’t prevent you from getting the virus. 

INSERT TWITTER REALIZATION:

Cillizza is supposed to be a “journalist.” But somehow this basic reality just went right over his head, when it’s been public knowledge for months. What does that say about his ability to judge the facts and report them honestly, that he’s only getting around to this now?

But yesterday, Cillizza invited a ton of new mocking with his latest realization thread on Twitter — sharing that he realized that people had been afraid of admitting they had COVID out of fear of being shamed earlier but that, suddenly, that had changed.

“I’ve noticed something amid this Omicron surge that’s made me reconsider the first 20 months of this pandemic,” Cillizza wrote. “For months and months, no one I came into contact with admitted they had Covid. Not neighbors. Not co-workers. Not friends. Not acquaintances. No one.”

Cillizza noted that now it was different, with the arrival of Omicron.

Except that, with Omicron surging and lots and lots of people now getting it, I’ve found some of these same people telling me they had it last fall or at the start of the pandemic or whenever. Which is fascinating to me. Because it suggests that they were embarrassed or scared to say they (or their family) had it before.

Why? Probably not one reason for everyone, honestly. But I do think societally we unknowingly turned having Covid into some sort of judgment on your character. Like, getting Covid was a sign you weren’t being responsible or careful enough. Not being a good member of society. The ubiquity — thanks to its contagiousness — of Omicron has changed that dynamic. Some of the stigma of getting Covid has worn off, and made people more comfortable acknowledging that they’ve had it before.

Which is a good thing! We need to recognize that getting Covid isn’t a moral failing! It’s a super infectious disease that you can protect against, sure, but can’t guarantee you won’t get it.

Okay, let’s back up here. “Unknowingly?” No, it was very knowingly. This is a CNN editor — the very network that has been demonizing people with COVID — and just had a guest on demonizing the unvaccinated. CNN has constantly painted the vaccinated as the “good” and the unvaccinated as the “bad,” and acted as though only the unvaccinated can spread the virus. If Americans have been deceived into believing a virus is a moral failing (and many on the left have), media like CNN shares a big part of the blame for that. The only reason that the CNN editor and others are coming to these realizations now is to address the fact that it’s apparent now that the “good” people are getting it, too.

It’s not just CNN the network, but Cillizza himself who played these games that he is now decrying. Who wrote all this, Chris?

[…..]

Most Americans, except Joe Biden and those deluded by media like CNN, knew that it wasn’t a “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” that the vaccinated could spread it, too. It’s one more reason most Americans no longer trust the media and despise it.

People justifiably let Cillizza have it……

(READ THE REST)

Here is RED STATE’S second story (linked in the above story) getting back to the OP:

….Then, of course, there’s this out-and-out lie, where Biden says it “continues to be a pandemic of the unvaccinated.”

If anything, the increase of the Omicron variant hitting so many prominent vaccinated and boosted people shows how untrue that claim is.

Now, this is a dumb comment, even for Joe. “Surround your kids with people who are vaccinated,” Biden urges.

Most kids are unvaccinated. So, your kids should never be around other kids? Is that rational? What is he thinking? Not to mention that it’s least transmissible among young kids.

What the heck is he even saying here about social distancing from a bus? The “actual bus”?

Is the bus going to give the kids COVID now? How far gone is this man? Not to mention: how are you social distancing much on an enclosed bus that you have to walk through?…..

 

The Media’s 5 Most Outrageous Lies of 2021 (MRC)

Published by Papa Giorgio

The media made their fair share of nasty comments and skewed remarks in 2021, but there were also instances where reporters (or entire networks) deliberately misled their audiences. Below is the MRC’S ROUNDUP of some of the worst intentional media deceptions from the past year:

  1. CBS’s 60 Minutes Deceptively Edits Ron DeSantis To Make Him Appear Guilty
  2. The Washington Post Denies Reality At The Border
  3. CNN Claims Joe Rogan Is Treating His Covid With Horse Dewormer
  4. NBC Deceptively Edits A 911 Call While Covering A Police Shooting
  5. Critical Race Theory Isn’t Taught In Schools

Remember, there is a reason for this “narrative building”

Political Correctness Exposed!
Marxism Communism Frankfurt School

At the end of the presentation Bill Whittle via AFTERBURNER recommends a three part series on the Frankfurt School. That can be found combined into one video, HERE.

The N.Y. Times Called Birthirism A “Right Wing Conspiracy”

Published by Papa Giorgio

MIKE B. posted a link to a NEW YORK TIMES story that in the first paragraph reminds me why I cannot stand almost the entirety of the Gray Lady. Here is the first paragraph:

  • When called upon to believe that Barack Obama was really born in Kenya, millions got in line. When encouraged to believe that the 2012 Sandy Hook murder of twenty children and six adults was a hoax, too many stepped up. When urged to believe that Hillary Clinton was trafficking children in the basement of a Washington, D.C., pizza parlor with no basement, they bought it, and one of them showed up in the pizza place with a rifle to protect the kids. The fictions fed the frenzies, and the frenzies shaped the crises of 2020 and 2021. The delusions are legion: Secret Democratic cabals of child abusers, millions of undocumented voters, falsehoods about the Covid-19 pandemic and the vaccine.

So, let’s deal with some of this first paragraph.

BIRTHIRISM

This is included in the NYT’s list of right-wing conspiracies.

Which I find odd.

Because the first time this idea was put into the public’s mind was by Barack’s own publisher. Here is an highlighted portion of the above which was on Obama’s publishers brochure in 1991 (to the right), and found elsewhere online till 2007. And the publisher of “Dreams of my Father” So far from it having a “Genesis” in some right wing “conspiracy” — for over a decade it was viewable by Obama and fans of his book.

I say “the first time this idea was put into the public’s mind” because my belief is that he lied to unlock grants, gain access and recognition at Occidental College, his publisher, etc.… similar to Elizabeth Warren. (Or, Carrie Bourassa up in Canada, or Ward Churchill, or the MANY others. There is some gain to claiming “other”.)

At any rate, that was the first the world heard of the “born in Kenya” idea. It was in the public eye from 1991 until April 2007…

…and then….

Hillary ran for office.

And this story went from public to through the Hillary Clinton “propaganda machine.”

PERCENTAGE OF BELIEVERS
Some of this is from: Comparing Two Conspiracy Theories: Birtherism vs. 9/11 Conspiracies

Since this had it’s origins as an idea via Democrats, it would be safe to assume many Democrats believed it.

Seems logical. While it was half [essentially] of Dems, it is still pretty high. I will combine polls from two conspiracies [Birthers and Truthers] to make a point.

Polls from RASMUSSEN (and others compiled at WIKI) that show an amazing thing. What is this “amazing thing,” you rightly ask?

Democrats in America are evenly divided on the question of whether George W. Bush knew about the 9/11 terrorist attacks in advance. Thirty-five percent (35%) of Democrats believe he did know, 39% say he did not know, and 26% are not sure. 

(RPT)

Not sure? Not sure? To be clear, Democrats by over a majority believed Bush either knew directly or they said they were [basically] “still on the fence.” Here is more:

I’ve been looking for a good analogue to the willingness of Republicans to believe, or say they believe, that Obama was born abroad, and one relevant number is the share of Democrats willing to believe, as they say, that “Bush knew.”

There aren’t a lot of great public numbers on the partisan breakdown of adherents to that conspiracy theory, but the University of Ohio yesterday shared with us the crosstabs of a 2006 poll they did with Scripps Howard that’s useful in that regard.

“How likely is it that people in the federal government either assisted in the 9/11 attacks or took no action to stop the attacks because they wanted the United States to go to war in the Middle East?” the poll asked.

A full 22.6% of Democrats said it was “very likely.” Another 28.2% called it “somewhat likely.”

That is: More than half of Democrats, according to a neutral survey, said they believed Bush was complicit in the 9/11 terror attacks….

(POLITICO)

What is the percentage of Republicans that believed (at it’s height of belief) Obama was not born in America?

  • 31% of Republican think/thought that Obama was not born in the states…

How many Democrats?

  • 15% of Democrats believe the same… [as well as 18% of Independents]

However, a third who believe him to be born out of the country approve of him (ABC-NEWS and my RPT post).

So it is clear the “BIRTHIRISM” is not just a “right-wing” conspiracy.

Various Conspiracies and Ironies

However, I do not believe the New York Times has ever said 9/11 Trutherism is a “left-wing conspiracy.” From the beginning of the next paragraph from the NYT article:

  • While much has been said about the moral and political stance of people who support right-wing conspiracy theories, their gullibility is itself alarming.

This article is for the gullible, as you will see.

ALEX JONES

Some of these listed conspiracies in the paragraph quote from the NYT are via Alex Jones…. whom I have an entire section of my main conspiracy-debunking page (some isolated here)… so I do not know who my friend is thinking is a “big conspiracy/gullible” person, as, I refute many conspiracies on my site.

I think my mom is the only person I know who believes almost every conspiracy named. Flat-earth, energy beams from space starting fires, the pizza “trafficking kids” thing, and the like. But she is getting senile.

SEX TRAFFICKING

What is ironic is that Hillary wasn’t trafficking underage kids… they were being trafficked to Bill Clinton (“Slick Willy”).

  • Clinton’s presence aboard Jeffrey Epstein’s Boeing 727 on 11 occasions has been reported, but flight logs show the number is more than double that, and trips between 2001 and 2003 included extended junkets around the world with Epstein and fellow passengers identified on manifests by their initials or first names, including “Tatiana.” The tricked-out jet earned its Nabakov-inspired nickname because it was reportedly outfitted with a bed where passengers had group sex with young girls. (FOX | See also TOWNHALL)

NEW GEORGIA REVELATIONS

What prompted the NYT post was my posting a story about new video compiled by True the Vote after collecting and going over CCTV of the area around drop-boxes in Georgia. The collecting, viewing, and then isolating these many videos was a time consuming project. Here is a snippet from JUST THE NEWS:

….The group informed the secretary its evidence included video footage from surveillance cameras placed by counties outside the drop boxes as well as geolocation data for the cell phones of more than 200 activists seen on the tapes purportedly showing the dates and times of ballot drop-offs, according to documents reviewed by Just the News.

The group also said it interviewed a Georgia man who admitted he was paid thousands of dollars to harvest ballots in the Atlanta metropolitan area during the November election and the lead-up to Jan. 5, 2021 runoff for Georgia’s two U.S. Senate seats, which were both captured by Democrats and ended GOP control of Congress. The group has yet to identify the cooperating witness to state authorities, referring to him in the complaint simply as John Doe.

Raffensperger confirmed in an interview aired Tuesday on the John Solomon Reports podcast that his office has deemed the allegations credible enough to open an investigation and possibly seek subpoenas from the State Election Board to secure evidence.

Here is BREITBART’S take:

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger announced Tuesday he initiated a probe into possible illegal ballot harvesting in the 2020 election.

While former President Trump lost the state of Georgia by a 12,000 vote margin, True the Vote submitted a complaint to Raffensperger’s office on November 30 that details digital data of 242 people making visits to drop boxes to dump mail-in-ballots, with about 40 percent of the trips occurring between midnight and 5:00 a.m., Just the News reported.

The True the Vote evidence reportedly includes phone data correlated with video that shows individuals dropping ballots at 5,662 ballot drops during the 2020 pandemic. Breitbart News reported on a True the Vote document in August:

In other words, what the document says is that True The Vote was able to take cell phone ping data on a mass wide scale and piece together that several people—suspected ballot harvesters—were making multiple trips to multiple drop boxes, raising potential legal questions in a number of these states.

Raffensperger told Just the News:

We do have some information. And we are going to investigate that. We did deploy drop boxes that were under 24/7 surveillance, and because they were then that really, you know, can indicate who dropped that information off, and we’re really just going through that.

“If people give us, you know, credible allegations, we want to make sure that we do that,” Raffensperger continued. “And we have that right now as an ongoing investigation.” ….

CONVO

When MIKE B. saw a phone screen capture of a Gateway Pundit story on this from their site, he said:

  • Silly tweet

I asked Why – to which he said:

  • because it is not based on fact.

I said:

  • There is video (in fact MANY hours). And someone who was part of delivering these illegal ballots was being paid?

To which MIKE B. notes:

  • all bs. Investigated by republican investigators. Look no further then Arizona recount. 6 months of investigation. Nothing found. And by a biased investigator. Time to move on from 2020. Trump lost.

Apparently, many people believe that the Arizona Audit didn’t find anything. (Many of these same people believe conspiracies about: yellow cake uranium; that we supplied most of Iraq’s weapons; that the Iraq war was over oil; that Halliburton was given “no bid contracts”; that the CIA trained Osama Bin Laden; or that there weren’t WMDs in Iraq — to name a few examples)

I refuted the Arizona Audit not finding anything a while back, which was part of my next comment:

Arizona? Lol. You need to leave the NYT cocoon. Here are two examples from my post:

  • Nearly half of the votes flagged as suspicious — 23,344 — fell into a category called “ballots cast from individuals who had moved prior to the election.” They included 15,035 who moved within the county before the registration deadline, 6,591 who moved to another state before the registration deadline and 1,718 who moved to a different county before the registration deadline.
  • Found 34,448 votes from those who voted more than once in Arizona in the 2020 election. 17,000 votes that NEVER should have been included in the audit!

RPT’s Thoughts on Arizona Audit (9-25-2021)

That is what led him to simply post the URL to the NYT article.

To wit, let’s talk about the NYT a bit.

NEW YORK TIMES Lies About History

One big lie which required the paper supporting the rewriting of history was the 1619 Project. One left leaning professor of history at Northwestern University, Leslie M. Harris, wrote a piece for POLITICO stating essentially after the NYT’s approached her to fact check the article because she is an historian of African American life and slavery, she said she was ignored.

Weeks before, I had received an email from a New York Times research editor. Because I’m an historian of African American life and slavery, in New York, specifically, and the pre-Civil War era more generally, she wanted me to verify some statements for the project. At one point, she sent me this assertion: “One critical reason that the colonists declared their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery in the colonies, which had produced tremendous wealth. At the time there were growing calls to abolish slavery throughout the British Empire, which would have badly damaged the economies of colonies in both North and South.”
 
I vigorously disputed the claim. Although slavery was certainly an issue in the American Revolution, the protection of slavery was not one of the main reasons the 13 Colonies went to war.

The editor followed up with several questions probing the nature of slavery in the Colonial era, such as whether enslaved people were allowed to read, could legally marry, could congregate in groups of more than four, and could own, will or inherit property—the answers to which vary widely depending on the era and the colony. I explained these histories as best I could—with references to specific examples—but never heard back from her about how the information would be used.

Despite my advice, the Times published the incorrect statement about the American Revolution anyway, in Hannah-Jones’ introductory essay. ….

Over time via pressure, the NY Times began correcting the record. NATIONAL REVIEW headlines some major faux pas: Leaving Out Unwelcome Facts about Slavery; Smearing the Revolution; Distorting the Constitution; Misrepresenting the Founding Era; Misrepresenting Lincoln.

A more recent article found at the same place is by Professor Wilfred Reilly, associate professor of political science at Kentucky State University and the author of Taboo: 10 Facts You Can’t Talk About, as well as Hate Crime Hoax: How the Left is Selling a Fake Race War. Both of which I have read.

April of last year was a big “correcting month” for the NYT, as the NEW YORK POST notes:

April was the month the narratives died. 

On April 15, the Biden administration acknowledged there was no evidence that Russia ever offered bounties on American troops in Afghanistan, walking back a report that wounded former President Donald Trump in the run-up to the 2020 election. 

Four days later, the Washington, DC, medical examiner revealed that Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick had not been murdered by rampaging Trump supporters during the Jan. 6 Capitol Hill riot, as reports had claimed, but had died of natural causes. 

Both stories were based on anonymous, unidentifiable sources, but had become deeply enmeshed in the public consciousness. Both confirmed the assumptions of the nation’s left-leaning media and academic elite, while damaging their political enemies. 

And both were driven by The New York Times, where malicious misreporting has been the practice for a century, argues journalist and media commentator Ashley Rindsberg. 

“My research churned up not mere errors or inaccuracies but whole-cloth falsehoods,” Rindsberg writes in “The Gray Lady Winked” (Midnight Oil), out now, which examines how the nation’s premier media outlet manipulates what we think is the news. 

The “fabrications and distortions” he found in the Times’ coverage of major stories from Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia to Vietnam and the Iraq War “were never the product of simple error,” Rindsberg contends. 

“Rather, they were the byproduct of a particular kind of system, a truth-producing machine” constructed to twist facts into a pattern of the Times’ own choosing, he says. 

Rindsberg argues that Times reporters have followed the same playbook since the 1920s. 

Star reporters cite fuzzily identified sources and make sweeping assertions to support a narrative aligned with the corporate whims, economic needs and political preferences of the patriarchal Ochs-Sulzberger family, which has helmed the operation since 1896, he writes. The chosen narrative, reinforced from multiple angles, is entrenched through a network of stories over time. 

“We toss the term ‘fake news’ around as if it’s something whimsical,” Rindsberg told The Post. 

“But creating what I call a false media narrative is really hard,” he said. “It takes coordination, deliberation, and a lot of resources. And there aren’t many news organizations that can do it.” 

With close to $2 billion in annual revenue, the Times has the money, prestige, experience and stature to set the narratives that other news outlets almost invariably follow. 

“When the Times breaks these stories, it’s wall to wall,” Rindsberg said. “MSNBC, CNN — everywhere you look, you’ll get that story. 

“And with the Times, it’s never just one false claim,” he said. “They make a concerted effort over time that they dig into and won’t let go.” 

The paper’s coverage of Adolf Hitler’s Germany in the decade before World War II is an early example of its narrative manipulation, Rindsberg writes. 

So glowing was its picture of the regime that the Nazis regularly included New York Times reports in their own radio programs. 

That’s because the Times bureau chief in Berlin, Guido Enderis, was a Nazi collaborator,” Rindsberg said. ………

See also some audio uploads of mine on the NYT:

NYT’s PULITZER

I have listened to Dennis Prager for years, and this is only the second time I have heard him this mad:

It should also be noted that without the Press, Stalin and Communism would not have had a pristine veneer. The Pulitzer prize winning New York Times writer, Walter Duranty, is quoted in THE WEEKLY STANDARD as an example:

  • “There is no famine or actual starvation nor is there likely to be.”
    –New York Times, Nov. 15, 1931, page 1
  • “Any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda.”
    –New York Times, August 23, 1933
  • “Enemies and foreign critics can say what they please. Weaklings and despondents at home may groan under the burden, but the youth and strength of the Russian people is essentially at one with the Kremlin’s program, believes it worthwhile and supports it, however hard be the sledding.”
    –New York Times, December 9, 1932, page 6
  • “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”
    –New York Times, May 14, 1933, page 18
  • “There is no actual starvation or deaths from starvation but there is widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition.”
    –New York Times, March 31, 1933, page 13

And here is a great recap by NEWSBUSTERS:

The New York Times doesn’t change. The paper is atrociously biased today and it was 85 years ago when columnist Walter Duranty proved himself to be a useful idiot for Soviet propaganda. Talking about a famine that killed millions of Ukrainians, he insisted: “There is no actual starvation… There is no famine.”

Another example from This Week in Media Bias History: CNN founder Ted Turner claimed global warming will kill “most of the people” with the survivors resorting to cannibalism. 

Below are Rich Noyes’s collected tweets from the 14th week of This Day in Media Bias History. To get the latest daily examples, be sure and follow Noyes on Twitter. To see recaps of the first 13 weeks, go here.) 

The blow article is about the real reporter who risked his life to tell the truth. The NYT’s should strip Duranty of the Pulitzer and ask for it to be transferred to Gareth Jones (click pic to enlarge):

More:

Conclusion

So to post a link (URL) to an article that starts off badly and doesn’t touch on the papers conspiracy views of it’s own (another example):

…New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has for years now delved deep into partisan hackery. But now with the election of Donald Trump, he’s plunged headlong into crazy conspiracy theory. It’s amazing to watch.

Forget that Trump incest stuff. This is the real wacky theory, and there’s no chance the New York Times is going to fire him for it, either:

That’s right, he just suggested Donald Trump would intentionally allow a major terrorist attack to kill thousands of Americans, just to raise his approval rating.

This is a tiny step from the old “Bush Knew” 9/11 truther theories out there, and this is from a columnist from a major left-wing newspaper, too. This guy is respected as an expert. Yet he comes up with this stuff. He posts theories like this and nobody pulls him back from the brink…