Running from defamation

The legal team of The New York Times sounds a little… panicked.

The New York Times filed a “Motion to Dismiss” request in an attempt to toss out the lawsuit and evade their wrongdoing.

Maggie Astor, The New York Times reporter who wrote the defamatory article, affirmed in her piece that the Veritas videos have “solely” unnamed sources. 

“The video then claims that Democratic operatives connected to Ms. [Ilhan] Omar’s campaign paid voters to hand over blank mail-in ballots and filled them out. This would be illegal, but the allegations come solely from unnamed people who speak with Project Veritas operatives in the video and whose faces are not shown,” she said.

In an affidavit, Astor said that the videos have “many” unnamed sources.

“Many of the individuals featured in the Video were unnamed, and there was no way for me to verify the claims that the unnamed sources purport to make in the Video,” she said.

Astor said she relied on Project Veritas’ “reputation” when making her unfounded claims.

“I know of Project Veritas and, before writing my articles about the Video, I knew that it had a reputation for publishing deceptively-edited videos and had been publicly criticized many times for doing so,” she said.

While arguing to dismiss the case, The New York Times’ legal team cited Wikipedia.

“Project Veritas bills itself as a ‘prominent independent journalistic organization,’ but it is described on its Wikipedia page (and just about everywhere else) as ‘an American far-right activist group founded by James O’Keefe’ that ‘uses undercover techniques to reveal supposed liberal bias and corruption and is known for producing deceptively edited videos about media organizations, left-leaning groups, and debunked conspiracy theories,’” they said.

Wikipedia themselves admit that their website is not a reliable source of information.

New York Times’ legal team also labelled Astor’s article an opinion piece to avoid Project Veritas’ charges of defamation.

Now, I’m no legal expert, but even a humble consumer advocate knows that if your defense against a charge of defamation involves relying upon Wikipedia, you’re probably in trouble. 

Gamers 1, Bankers 0

Not unlike certain lawyers, bankers are beginning to discover that gamers are really freaking good at playing games once they figure out what the rules are. No matter what the game is.

Investors on Reddit have launched an attack that’s both trolling and serious on Wall Street firms by purchasing shares in GameStop, pushing the stock price up over 480{3549d4179a0cbfd35266a886b325f66920645bb4445f165578a9e086cbc22d08} in a week, costing hedge funds millions of dollars, and skyrocketing young investors’ portfolios and egos.

Popular subreddit r/WallStreetBets (WSB), whose tagline is “Like 4chan found a Bloomberg Terminal,” has over 2 million members reading and posting “stonks” tips and news. Its biggest obsession in recent weeks has been raising the stock price of GameStop, the old-school video game mall retailer.

“They’re digitally doing it in a coordinated attack,” Howard Lindzon at Social Leverage, an early stage seed investment fund, told BuzzFeed News.

Lindzon thinks the investors chatting across Reddit — who tend to be millennial and Gen Z men — are just having a fun time causing trouble for hedge funds who’d bet on shares in the gaming retailer dropping. “They’re just playing a game,” he said. “And they’re having a blast.”

But Wall Street hedge funds, including Citron Research and Melvin Capital, had shorted the stock, meaning they had bet against it and needed it to drop in price in order for their investments to be successful.

Even the cries about “it’s unfair, it’s coordinated” are the same. It’s perhaps worth noting that historically, dating back to the days of Rome, once the people get sufficiently irritated, they have no trouble at all slaughtering the elite whose power is based on the very authority they have been abusing and in which the people no longer believe. 

SJWs destroy baseball Hall of Fame

Convergence has struck at baseball history, as SJW sportswriters vote to keep Curt Schilling out of the Hall of Fame:

Schilling is responsible for one of the great and iconic moments in baseball history. He was one of the all-time great postseason pitchers and had more than 3,000 regular-season strikeouts in his career.

Yet tonight, we’re going to find out if he has been passed over for the ninth time for a spot in the Baseball Hall of Fame. It’s going to be close. About 46 percent of the ballots have been made public and of those, Schilling is getting 75 percent of the vote. That number, 75 percent, is the minimum needed. But in the past, players on the borderline lose a percent or two when the ballots that weren’t made public are added in. 

In other words: Schilling probably won’t make it. And why is that? Because he likes Donald Trump. And because his support of things like what happened at the Capitol on Jan. 6 turns off baseball writers.

(UPDATE: Schilling did not make it. He received 71.1 percent.)

Cancel culture? Yes, if Schilling is canceled. He should definitely be in the Hall of Fame. But the baseball writers who vote on this want to be thought police, too.

This is a big moment for the Hall of Fame, and maybe for the whole idea of cancel culture. The Hall ballot says: “Voting shall be based upon the player’s record, playing ability, integrity, sportsmanship, character, and contributions to the team(s) on which the player played.’’

Voters — longtime baseball writers — have been struggling over the “integrity, sportsmanship, character” part for years. That’s why Pete Rose isn’t in. He bet on the game, which directly affected the integrity of the sport. Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, accused in the steroid scandal, will likely not be voted in tonight either. They cheated the game.

But Schilling? He’s being kept out because the writers don’t like how he votes, how he thinks and how he talks. I’m not just guessing either. In the days before the Hall vote the past few years, this year included, writers have explained why they didn’t vote for Schilling.

As small and petty as this may be, if you haven’t grasped that the society in which you grew up in is now over, this should be another wake-up moment for you. This is not our culture, it is Zero History culture. We cannot live with the converged and they certainly don’t want to live with us.

Conflict is conflict

The Mamba mentality applies to law as well as basketball.

You will be surprised how often people do the same things. … And if you can learn people’s patterns, and you can learn their tendencies and habits, by watching them game after game, you’ll see that they do the same things, and you can take advantage of it. And you can manipulate that. 

– Kobe Bryant

Dementia Joe

If you haven’t figured out that this is a charade yet, you’re not paying attention.

Former White House stenographer Mike McCormick reports Joe Biden has lost 50 percent of his cognitive abilities. McCormick, who worked for Biden for six years, details Biden’s decline in his new book Joe Biden, Unauthorized. After working with Biden up close, McCormick says Biden is not the same man and has suffered at least 50 percent decline.

Google doubles down

Hello,

Thank you for your account suspension appeal. We have decided to keep your account suspended based on our Community Guidelines and Terms of Service. Please visit http://www.youtube.com/t/community_guidelines for more information.

Please do not respond to this email. Replies to this email will not be processed. Please refer to our Help Center for more information.

Sincerely,

The YouTube Team

It’s on! This will not be an arbitration, as the YouTube terms mandate that if one lives in the European Economic Area, or Switzerland, the agreement will be governed by the laws of one’s country of residence, and legal proceedings may be brought in one’s local courts.

Discovery is certainly going to be interesting, given that we have loads of copies of their internal communications about me.

UPDATE: Please to stop with the retardery. I am completely aware that the channels are still up. That is not the point. It is the account access to them has been blocked by YouTube due to its false and defamatory accusation of “spam, scams or commercially deceptive content” having been previously broadcast. I am fairly confident that I know their grounds for the accusation, which is too monstrously stupid to even mention publicly because you would probably not believe it, but which you should be able to ascertain if you watch the most recent video.

Impeachment 2.0

 Did the media forget to tell Congress who is supposed to be the President? Notice that they are charging “President Donald Trump”:

House Democrats walked across the Capitol Monday evening to hand-deliver an article of impeachment to the Senate charging President Donald Trump with ‘incitement of insurrection’ – formally beginning his second impeachment trial.

With solemn expressions on their faces, the House impeachment managers made the journey less than three weeks after a MAGA riot ransacked the Capitol during the electoral count after Trump told supporters to ‘fight.’

In an event carried live on cable news, the managers left Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office at 7.01pm, crossed Statuary Hall and the Capitol Rotunda – some of the same spaces that were invaded by the mob less than three weeks ago.

Outside thousands of National Guard troops remained deployed around the Capitol which the MAGA mob had stormed on Wednesday January 6.  

House Clerk Cheryl Johnson led the nine House managers to the Senate, where Trump’s second impeachment trial will be held. Johnson and all of the managers wore dark masks for the walk.

It was history repeating itself – with a COVID twist: On January 15 2020, nine Democrats had walked the articles of impeachment for his first trial to the Senate. It ended in his acquittal.  

Hey, don’t blame me. That’s the direct quote from the article. 

Why would they fake it?

Well, here is one possible reason:

Less than a week after Joe Biden’s inauguration, California Governor Gavin Newsom is expected to lift the state’s stay-at-home order Monday “based on ICU projections for the next four weeks,” according to media reports out of the state. Dropping the stay-at-home order will allow outdoor dining and indoor services such as barbershops, hair salons and tattoo parlors to return to business, KSEE’s Alexan Balekian reports.

Counties are expected to return to a colored tier system with most returning to a purple level, the top risk level as set by the state health department. In a statement released by the California Restaurant Association, the group said it expects Newsom to make the announcement Monday.

“Late this evening, senior officials in the Newsom administration informed us that the Governor will announce tomorrow that the stay-at-home order will be lifted in all regions of the state,” the release reads…. Friday, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer announced her state will reopen indoor dining starting February 1.

I’m not saying that it is the case, I’m merely observing what is happening in response to “the Biden inauguration”. 

Google wants to fight

Hi Vox Day,

We have reviewed your content and found severe or repeated violations of our Community Guidelines. Because of this, we have removed your channel from YouTube.

We know this is probably very upsetting news, but it’s our job to make sure that YouTube is a safe place for all. If we think a channel severely violates our policies, we take it down to protect other users on the platform – but if you believe we’ve made the wrong call, you can appeal this decision. You’ll find more information about the policy in question and how to submit an appeal below.

What our policy says

 Spam, scams or commercially deceptive content are not allowed on YouTube.

We have permanently removed your channel from YouTube. Going forward, you won’t be able to access, possess, or create any other YouTube channels. 

If you have any further questions, please feel free to reach out to us here.

Sincerely,

The YouTube Team 

And so it begins… Although I have to observe that it is rather a puzzling hill for them to choose to defend. They backed down after posting false claims about the blog, so to make equally false claims about the YouTube channel barely one month later makes me suspect that it’s another low-level SJW abusing his position rather than corporate policy.

However, if they want a fight, then by all means, we will not hesitate to give them one! This is the one skull I’ve long dreamed of adding to my collection. And if you want to help, subscribe to UATV!

The Ride Never Ends.

Mailvox: I don’t care

Several readers have written to ask me to play theology police. One example.

You should have a talk with Owen.  He has fallen into Arianism. In one of his last streams he was ranting about Christ not being God, and never have even claimed to be God.  He said that if he had made such a claim then his death would have been justified since that was against Jewish law and punishable by death.

What part of “I don’t care what other people think” is even remotely hard to understand? While I certainly talk with Owen on a regular basis, I can assure you that theology never, ever, enters into our conversations. I am not the theology police. It is well known that I don’t care what theologians say about theology, so even the reader with the most limited intelligence should be able to grasp that I genuinely don’t care what a freaking comedian says about theology. Either talk to him yourself or leave him to stumble and bumble toward the light as best he can.

Please note that with the exception of a very small number of individuals, such as Steve Keen, Martin van Creveld, and William S. Lind, I also don’t care what Owen or anyone else says about economics or military history, just to give two examples.

Unauthorized is not Owen. It is Owen and Razor and Wranglerstar and David and Rachel and Chuck and everyone else. So, if you don’t approve of Owen, then I suggest subscribing to one of the other UATV subscriptions. And if you’re meanwhile subscribing to Disney or Netflix or ESPN, then just shut up and knock off the purity spiraling already.