Category: Uncategorized

Fake News is very, very fake

In fact, it’s considerably more fake than even the average skeptic imagines:

I didn’t have any experience as a war reporter. Then I arrived in Baghdad. I was fairly quickly sent along in a bus by the Iraqi army, the bus was full of loud, experienced war reporters, from such prestigious media as the BBC, several foreign TV-stations and newspapers, and me, poor newbie, who was sent to the front for the first time without any kind of preparation. The first thing I saw was that they all carried along cans of petrol. And I at once got bad consciousness, because I thought: «oops, if the bus gets stuck far from a petrol station, then everyone chips in with a bit of diesel’. I decided to in the future also carry a can before I went anywhere, because it obviously was part of it.

We drove for hours through the desert, towards the Iraqi border. Approx. 20-30 kilometers from the border, there really was nothing. First of all no war. There were armored vehicles and tanks, burned-out long ago. The journalist left the bus, splashed the contents of the cans on the vehicles. We had Iraqi soldiers with us as an escort, with machine guns, in uniform. You have to imagine: tanks in a desert, burned out long ago, now put on fire. Clouds of smoke. And there the journalists assemble their cameras.

It was my first experience with media, truth in reporting.

While I was wondering what the hell I was going to report for my newspaper, they all lined up and started: Behind them were flames and plumes of smoke, and all the time the Iraqis were running in front of camera with their machine guns, casually, but with war in their gaze. And the reporters were ducking all the time while talking.

So I gathered courage and asked one of the reporters: ‘I understand one thing, they are great pictures, but why are they ducking all the time? ‘

‘Quite simply because there are machine guns on the audio track, and it looks very good at home.’

That was several decades ago. It was in the beginning of my contact with war. I was thinking, the whole way back:’Young man, you didn’t see a war. You were in a place with a campfire. What are you going to tell?’

It’s entirely obvious that the world is very different than we were taught to believe, and is actually very different than even the cynical and the skeptical observe it to be.

Jordan Peterson is a mirror

He reflects back to the insufficiently aware precisely what they want to see:

You can pretty safely judge someone’s politics from his attitude toward Jordan Peterson.  We on the right listen to see if he makes sense.  That’s because our attitudes are shaped by reality.  Leftists, unimpressed by reality and anticipating something they don’t like, shout him down.  Media interviewers stumble over their own assumptions, struggle with their biases, and leap to conclusions rather than grasp that the world is complex and simplistic answers just don’t cut it.  As a result, they regularly end up looking shallow, uninformed and foolish.

Clearly this gentleman of the Right has not listened closely enough to Jordan Peterson or he would realize that Mr. 12 Rules for Meth does not make anything that even remotely approximates sense. Not that his Christian fans have noticed that he’s not on their side.

In a joyful ceremony, Christian leaders gathered to grant Jordan Peterson the status of honorary Christian. Though the Canadian professor has never identified as a Christian and does not attend any church, a vote was taken and the decision was made unanimously that Peterson had earned his salvation and could be drafted into heaven by popular vote.

The Junior Classics, 2020 edition

The purpose of The Junior Classics is to provide, in ten volumes containing about five thousand pages, a classified collection of tales, stories, and poems, both ancient and modern, suitable for boys and girls of from six to sixteen years of age. The boy or girl who becomes familiar with the charming tales and poems in this collection will have gained a knowledge of literature and history that will be of high value in other school and home work. Here are the real elements of imaginative narration, poetry, and ethics, which should enter into the education of every child.

This collection, carefully used by parents and teachers with due reference to individual tastes and needs, will help many children enjoy good literature. It will inspire them with a love of good reading, which is the best possible result of any elementary education. The child himself should be encouraged to make his own selections from this large and varied collection, the child’s enjoyment being the object in view. A real and lasting interest in literature or in scholarship is only to be developed through the individual’s enjoyment of his mental occupations.

CHARLES ELIOT
PRESIDENT EMERITUS OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY
1918

This is an essential action to help preserve the hard-worn knowledge of Western civilization. To back the campaign to revive the Junior Classics by REDACTED PRESS, please visit the crowdfunding campaign page.

All print editions will ship to the USA, Canada, Europe, and Australia. The shipping cost is included. The digital editions – EPUB and MOBI formats – are included with all of the print edition sets.

The neoclown narrative

The neoclowns are desperately trying to spin the situation in Syria to their advantage:

President Trump’s acquiescence to Turkey’s move to send troops deep inside Syrian territory has in only one week’s time turned into a bloody carnage, forced the abandonment of a successful five-year-long American project to keep the peace on a volatile border, and given an unanticipated victory to four American adversaries: Russia, Iran, the Syrian government and the Islamic State.

Rarely has a presidential decision resulted so immediately in what his own party leaders have described as disastrous consequences for American allies and interests. How this decision happened — springing from an “off-script moment” with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, in the words of a senior American diplomat — likely will be debated for years by historians, Middle East experts and conspiracy theorists.

But this much already is clear: Mr. Trump ignored months of warnings from his advisers about what calamities likely would ensue if he followed his instincts to pull back from Syria and abandon America’s longtime allies, the Kurds. He had no Plan B, other than to leave. The only surprise is how swiftly it all collapsed around the president and his depleted, inexperienced foreign policy team.

The fact of the matter is that there wasn’t a damn thing the president could do about Turkey’s decision to send troops into Syria. As it stands, given that Turkey is a NATO ally attacking an “American adversary”, the United States would appear to have a military obligation to aid the Turks in their incursion into Syrian territory regardless of who happens to be their target.

The idea that the 50 nukes at Incirlik Air Base are being “held hostage” by Turkey is nothing more than shamelessly manipulative rhetoric. They are at no risk and can be utilized or withdrawn at will; the Turks have no ability to interfere with them in any way. But it’s just another way of trying to make the God-Emperor look inept and foolish, and scare the uninformed into supporting the neoclown program for sending American troops to the the Middle East.

President Trump is just doing what he does best, breaking the unwritten rules and gentleman’s agreements in order to lay the foundation for a substantive change of an untenable situation.

Sony converges Cinderella

No tale is too classic for the Devil Mouse Sony to resist its urge to destroy:

Actor and LGBTQ activist Billy Porter has confirmed that he will play the role of the Fairy Godmother in James Corden’s forthcoming live-action movie musical Cinderella.
“I have a couple of movies that I’m working on,” Porter announced on the New Yorker‘s Instagram Stories. “I’m gonna be playing the fairy godmother in the new Cinderella movie with Camila Cabello.”

E! News reports that the 22-year-old Cabello will play the role of Cinderella while also helping to write the film’s music. Porter and Cabello are currently the only two actors announced for the remake, which is described as a “modern re-imagining of the classic fairytale.”

See, he’s a FAIRY godmother. Get it! So clever. So brave. Thank you for this.

Inside CNN

The upcoming Project Veritas release promises to be very interesting indeed, as the investigators are being investigated:

This week, a CNN insider will blow the whistle and through Project Veritas will release dozens of recordings made of officials at the highest levels of CNN, revealing a political agenda, bias and misconduct hidden from public view.

This series of tapes — which we think will be the biggest story of the year for Project Veritas — blends two extraordinary series of events; a brave insider secretly recording at work and a hard-hitting piece of hidden camera muckraking into one of the supposed “most trusted names in news.”

As the revelations about the disgraced Matt Lauer have demonstrated, the media tends to be considerably worse behaved and more degenerate than the people at whom they point and cluck.

Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.

Nothing works anymore: construction edition

Forget bridges, highways, and high-speed trains. Major US cities can’t even build simple buildings without drama anymore:

A large portion of a Hard Rock Hotel under construction in New Orleans collapsed Saturday morning, killing at least two people and injuring 20 others, authorities said. The building bordering the city’s historic French Quarter is considered unstable and officials said further collapse is possible.

Three people were initially reported missing, though one has since been found, according to the New Orleans Fire Department. Authorities said no one on the ground was injured in the collapse.

According to Mayor LaToya Cantrell, 112 people were in the building at the time of collapse. Though the search for those missing was suspended for the evening, Cantrell confirmed that rescuers found two bodies but were unable to retrieve them.

VFM Bear said it best: it’s the indoor plumbing that I’m going to miss the most.

Import the Third World, become the Third World. This really isn’t that hard. Ain’t immigration and diversity grand?

So it turns out the guy behind the collapsed Hard Rock hotel, Praveen Kailas  was previously convicted of ripping off the state, and was allegedly cutting corners by employing unqualified labor.

The collapse of science

Illustrating once more that science is dependent upon technology rather than the other way around, a petty Python script bug may force the retraction of more than 100 published scientific studies:

Scientists in Hawaiʻi have uncovered a glitch in a piece of code that could have yielded incorrect results in over 100 published studies that cited the original paper.

The glitch caused results of a common chemistry computation to vary depending on the operating system used, causing discrepancies among Mac, Windows, and Linux systems. The researchers published the revelation and a debugged version of the script, which amounts to roughly 1,000 lines of code, on Tuesday in the journal Organic Letters.

“This simple glitch in the original script calls into question the conclusions of a significant number of papers on a wide range of topics in a way that cannot be easily resolved from published information because the operating system is rarely mentioned,” the new paper reads. “Authors who used these scripts should certainly double-check their results and any relevant conclusions using the modified scripts in the [supplementary information].”

Yuheng Luo, a graduate student at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, discovered the glitch this summer when he was verifying the results of research conducted by chemistry professor Philip Williams on cyanobacteria. The aim of the project was to “try to find compounds that are effective against cancer,” Williams said.

To help understand how devastating this sort of thing could be for the profession and practice of science, consider the very frightening possibility that modern science increasingly relies upon the sort of people responsible for enhancing your user experience of Skype and manning Twitter “customer support”.

It is worse than you IMAGINE

You might look at the terrible events described in The Last Closet and thank your lucky stars that nothing like that has ever happened around you. And you might be wrong:

Dozens of predators, 100s of kids: Decades of trained stars and scorched lives at Children’s Theatre.

Shortly after Children’s Theatre Company was founded in 1965, critics were calling it the greatest children’s troupe in the world. The extraordinary feats of its cast and crew, bright kids from across America, afforded the Twin Cities a reputation for artistic excellence.

The Minneapolis company was an insular institution with mysterious methods, helmed by the brilliant and volatile John Clark Donahue. He was also a predatory abuser of children. It was common knowledge that the boys in starring roles tended to be those who serviced Donahue sexually.

When Donahue was finally caught in 1984, Judge Charles Porter skewered the Twin Cities arts community for its complicity.

“‘Genius has to be given their idiosyncrasies, or genius has its funny side, and you have to forgive those sort of things. The theater would have collapsed if anything happened to John Clark Donahue, and the Twin Cities could not afford to have that happen.’ I have heard that so much,” Porter said at sentencing.

“Large family and company money, Dayton’s, Pillsbury, etc., supports the theater, and that they would not allow this to happen. The allegations would be squelched to protect their reputations.”

The judge understood that Donahue was just the spearhead of a larger deceit.

Underneath him were dozens of other staffers who sifted freely through the company’s turnstile of children. Some predators were friends Donahue hired to teach. Others were former students who’d been raped when they were very young, in an earlier decade, and raised in a boundaryless reality to become perpetrators in another.

But because many within the company worked to deflect probing questions from the outside world, the institutional nature of the abuse was hidden for decades. The company survived. It scoured its history.

My parents were patrons of the Children’s Theatre and we attended every show there for years, including at the height of this period of rapacious abuse. Neither they nor I had any idea about any of this, of course; I knew nothing of it until Spacebunny brought my attention to it this weekend.

And it is an object lesson in understanding that the murky depths of evil may lurk considerably closer to you than you would ever assume.