A new slant on feather day (is that a racist comment?)
AKA “How It Started”
How it’s going:
“Relax all you narrow minded religious bigots. It’s not like we’re coming into classrooms to talk your children into being gay/transexuals.”
We’re thinking more along the lines of a drag queen satanic goddesses. Any more questions about that slippery slope “fallacy”?
NOTE: gradually regaining strength. Had my first cup of coffee in over a week this morning, so that’s a good sign!
My winner of this week’s headline contest:
The Washington State Senate passed a sweeping law on Thursday that permits juveniles to undergo transgender surgery without parental consent.
Quick update: I’ve been out of service this week due to an “unexpected” hospital stay. No, neither of the Big Cs, but norovirus…with complications of course: ischemic colitis. I’ll spare you the gory details but I am home now recuperating. I’m enjoying the last of the beautiful weather we’ve had all week while I was squirreled away in a windowless ED room (no private rooms available and I was considered too contagious for anything else.) I received some beautiful flowers from the MOTI just after I got home and that made my whole week. So thanks for that! And now I have to run off to get more blood sucked, have a good Caturday.
The Open Thread Monday Thought Of the Day:
I’m certain you are more than capable of identifying your own human examples.
WARNING: This is a long read about an even longer read. Proceed at your own peril. How I hope the old bard was correct
Specifically, this is about an article of supreme importance to the future of the planet. No, not Greta Thunberg’s manifesto on the end of the world; it’s about what Matt Taibbi has called the Grand Opus on the Anti-Disinformation Complex: it is a 13,000 word article by Jacob Siegel at Tablet, A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century. Given the Anti-Disinformation machine’s recent and egregious prosecutorial abuse, it is both timely and terrifying.
As John Sexton at Hot Air put it:
It attempts to tie together everything from the 2016 election to the Russia collusion story to the push against internet so-called disinformation by government entities with the cooperation of giant social media companies.
Taibbi’s interview with Siegel is enlightening:
It’s notable that the Anti-Disinformation machine, a clear sequel to the Military-Industrial Complex, doesn’t trumpet the virtues of the “free world” but rather the “rules-based international order,” within which (as Siegel points out) people like former Labor Secretary Robert Reich talk about digital deletion as “necessary to protect American democracy.” This idea of pruning fingers off democracy to save it is increasingly popular; we await the arrival of the Jerzy Kozinski character who’ll propound this political gardening metaphor to the smart set. [Ed. note: Jerzy Kozinski is the author of Being There, the Chance Gardner story.]
I. Russophobia Returns, Unexpectedly: The Origins of Contemporary “Disinformation”
II. Trump’s Election: “It’s Facebook’s Fault”
III. Why Do We Need All This Data About People?
IV. The Internet: From Darling to Demon
V. Russiagate! Russiagate! Russiagate!
VI. Why the Post-9/11 “War on Terror” Never Ended
VII. The Rise of “Domestic Extremists”
VIII. The NGO Borg
IX. COVID-19
X. Hunter’s Laptops: The Exception to the Rule
XI. The New One-Party State
XII. The End of Censorship
XIII. After Democracy
Appendix: The Disinfo Dictionary
Here are just a few snippets to entice you.
COVID-19:
By 2020, the counter-disinformation machine had grown into one of the most powerful forces in American society. Then the COVID-19 pandemic dumped jet fuel into its engine. In addition to fighting foreign threats and deterring domestic extremists, censoring “deadly disinformation” became an urgent need. To take just one example, Google’s censorship, which applied to its subsidiary sites like YouTube, called for “removing information that is problematic” and “anything that would go against World Health Organization recommendations”—a category that at different points in the constantly evolving narrative would have included wearing masks, implementing travel bans, saying that the virus is highly contagious, and suggesting it might have come from a laboratory.
Hunter’s laptop:
The story of the laptops has been framed as many things, but the most fundamental truth about it is that it was the successful culmination of the yearslong effort to create a shadow regulatory bureaucracy built specifically to prevent a repeat of Trump’s 2016 victory.
It may be impossible to know exactly what effect the ban on reporting about Hunter Biden’s laptops had on the 2020 vote, but the story was clearly seen as threatening enough to warrant an openly authoritarian attack on the independence of the press.
The NGO Borg:
Virtually overnight, the “whole of society” national mobilization to defeat disinformation that Obama initiated led to the creation and credentialing of a whole new class of experts and regulators.
The modern “fact-checking” industry, for instance, which impersonates a well-established scientific field, is in reality a nakedly partisan cadre of compliance officers for the Democratic Party. Its leading organization, the International Fact-Checking Network, was established in 2015 by the Poynter Institute, a central hub in the counter-disinformation complex.
The counter-disinformation Complex:
Since 2016, the federal government has spent billions of dollars on turning the counter-disinformation complex into one of the most powerful forces in the modern world: a sprawling leviathan with tentacles reaching into both the public and private sector, which the government uses to direct a “whole of society” effort that aims to seize total control over the internet and achieve nothing less than the eradication of human error…
Perhaps it is not a coincidence that the fields that have been most aggressive in cheerleading the war against disinformation and calling for greater censorship—counterterrorism, journalism, epidemiology—share a public record of spectacular failure in recent years. The new information regulators failed to win over vaccine skeptics, convince MAGA diehards that the 2020 election was legitimate, or prevent the public from inquiring into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, as they tried desperately to do.
And there’s even a bone for the I-Hate-Meghan-Markle brigade:
How is it that so many people could suddenly become experts in a field—“disinformation”—that not 1 in 10,000 of them could have defined in 2014? Because expertise in disinformation involves ideological orientation, not technical knowledge. For proof, look no further than the arc traced by Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, who pivoted from being failed podcast hosts to joining the Aspen Institute’s Commission on Information Disorder. Such initiatives flourished in the years after Trump and Brexit.
Then there’s the Uni-party:
In February 2021, a long article in Time magazine by journalist Molly Ball celebrated the “Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election.” Biden’s victory, wrote Ball, was the result of a “conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes” that drew together “a vast, cross-partisan campaign to protect the election” in an “extraordinary shadow effort.” Among the many accomplishments of the heroic conspirators, Ball notes, they “successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears.” It is an incredible article, like an entry from the crime blotter that somehow got slipped into the society pages, a paean to the saviors of democracy that describes in detail how they dismembered it.
It is likewise noteworthy that the Patriot Act was used to accomplish much of this mischief; yes, I think it’s okay, although useless, to say “I told you so.”
Siegel wraps it with this thought:
A siren song calls on those of us alive at the dawn of the digital age to submit to the authority of machines that promise to optimize our lives and make us safer. Faced with the apocalyptic threat of the “infodemic,” we are led to believe that only superintelligent algorithms can protect us from the crushingly inhuman scale of the digital information assault. The old human arts of conversation, disagreement, and irony, on which democracy and much else depend, are subjected to a withering machinery of military-grade surveillance—surveillance that nothing can withstand and that aims to make us fearful of our capacity for reason.
Definitely worth the effort to read, Siegel’s article is behind a paywall but easily worth the price of a month sign up, but it’s also available for a free 7 day trial period.
It is somewhat ironic that in the month that 3 of the world’s largest religions celebrate 3 very different holidays of faith that the world appears to falling under thrall of the godless who would be gods themselves. Pray for us dear Lord.
Ah, Andrew: How We Miss You
Note: I have another early appointment so I’m posting overnight, would someone please post the new link for me?
Holy Week is shaping up to be a bit rough and busy around here, so I’ll just drop an open thread and hope things begin to clear by Wednesday.
This is what we call a sucker hole around these parts.
You can see there’s light out there but the storm isn’t done with you just yet.
I thought Woody Allen’s Bananas was funny when it was released in 1971. Of course at the time I didn’t know Woody was a sex obsessed pervert, nor did I think there was any possibility that the USA could ever degenerate into the sort of banana republic depicted in the kitschy movie.
But here we are, 50 years hence, and it doesn’t seem so funny now that it’s more a reflection of truth. We have a “justice” system that is not simply two-tiered but completely bent, and decaying fast.
Perhaps the woke amongst us will point out that devolving into a banana republic is actually cultural appropriation which, as I understand it, is offensive.
And possibly sexist as well
Just as The Simpsons has predicted every major event in 21st century America, Bananas somehow managed to provide the sound track for the Trump indictment:
Witness: I'm sorry to disappoint you, but I've known Fielding Mellish for years and he's a warm, wonderful human being.
Fielding Mellish: Uh, would the clerk read that statement back please?
Court Clerk: "I've known Fielding Mellish for years and he's a rotten, conniving, dishonest little rat."
Fielding Mellish: Ok, I just wanted to make sure you were getting it.
Come to think of it, Woody’s Bananas provided the soundtrack for the entire Biden administration. Starting with the old perv himself:
Fielding Mellish: I'm doing a sociological study on perversion. I'm up to Advanced Child Molesting.
Fielding Mellish: Fellas, I don't wanna be President. You're making a big mistake. You gotta be smart to be a President. Let me be Vice President. That's - that's a real idiot's job.
To the Biden State Department:
Fielding Mellish: You cannot bash in the head of an American citizen without written permission from the State Department.
The Biden Foreign Relations team, who thinks we should all be eating bugs to save the planet:
Fielding Mellish: Although the United States is a very rich country, and San Marcos is a very poor one, there are a great many things we have to offer your country in return for aid. For instance, there...there are locusts. We have more locusts. There are locusts of all races and creeds. These, these locusts, incidentally, are available at popular prices.
The Woke Judiciary:
Fielding Mellish: I move for a mistrial! Do you realize there's not a single homosexual on that jury? Judge: Yes there is.
And finally, the Biden administration’s conundrum with respect to Trump:
Fielding Mellish: The Americans won't recognize us; because, they think we're Communists. The Communists won't recognize us; because, they think we're American puppets. The one person in the world who would recognize us was arrested yesterday.
I can’t help but feel that, if he were still with us, Rush might advise that now is the time to panic. I know he promised it would never come to that, but I think he meant in his lifetime.
Hands up! Don’t Shoot! We give up.
A penguin, technically a feather day entry, tea cups, probably from China, and oranges. Down by the riverside.
And that reminds me of a song…
Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river
You can hear the boats go by, you can spend the night beside her
And you know that she's half-crazy but that's why you want to be there
And she feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China
When we were all so impossibly young.
This marketing miracle should be filed under the"We lose a little on every sale, but make it up in volume!" strategy.
Ford's Chief Executive Engineer unveils the Ford F-150 Lightning in 2021, in Dearborn, MI
DETROIT — Ford Motor Co.'s electric vehicle business has lost $3 billion before taxes during the past two years and will lose a similar amount this year as the company invests heavily in the new technology. – Detroit Free Press
Ford said it plans to be producing 2 million of the e-vehicles by late 2026, at which time it should be profitable. Then again, the world should have succumbed to the perils of global warming and/or climate change by then according to Greta-damus, so it may all be moot.
For many electric vehicles, there is no way to repair or assess even slightly damaged battery packs after accidents, forcing insurance companies to write off cars with few miles - leading to higher premiums and undercutting gains from going electric.
Battery packs can cost tens of thousands of dollars and represent up to 50% of an EV's price tag, often making it uneconomical to replace them.
Lessons of a long life: it seldom pays to be an early adopter.
I’ve never aspired to be a laggard before.
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