Tag: media

A cure for gay?

It would appear that publicly taking a certain political position is sufficient to render an internationally famous gay activist the equivalent of a straight white conservative Christian male in the eyes of the mainstream media, an evil to neither be heard, seen, or spoken of.

Russian gay activist Nikolai Alexeyev, who until now was considered
Russia’s top lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) advocate,
appears to have ended his political career tonight in a series of
anti-Semitic Facebook and Twitter posts that have even his most ardent
supporters calling out his ongoing anti-Semitism….

In apparent anger over cancellation of his participation in a
conference call hosted by human rights group Human Rights First
tomorrow, Alexeyev responded via Twitter and Facebook with a slew of hateful anti-Jewish comments, since he is now convinced that “the Jewish mafia” did him in, rather than his own rank prejudice….

He had an illustrious career.  And it’s now finished.

Let me see if I have this straight. It is now observably safer for an activist to criticize Vladimir Putin and the KGB than to criticize a non-existent mafia that has no influence with the media. Furthermore, if one’s career is forcibly ended as a result of criticizing something that does not exist and has no influence with the media, that should not be considered evidence that said mafia does, in fact, exist, but rather, as the inevitable karmic consequences of one’s prejudice.

I find this puzzling. How would the end of the gay activist’s career, such as it is, prove that he is wrong? And what color is the logic in your world?

Mailvox: an automated response

I just received this in my inbox in response to the 15-page document I sent them this morning:

This is an automated acknowledgment.

Thank you for making your complaint to the Press Complaints Commission about the article published in the The Guardian on the 30/08/2013.

Please note that we require you to supply a copy of the article or articles under complaint; this can take the form of a link or links to the publication’s website. If you have already provided a copy, or if you are aware that the PCC has already received a large number of complaints about the article or articles, please disregard the following.

If you have not already provided a copy of the article and we do not receive a copy within seven days we will assume you do not wish to pursue the matter further.  You can email a copy  of the article or link to complaints@pcc.org.uk, or send a hard copy in the post to Press Complaints Commission, Halton House, 20/23 Holborn, London EC1N 2JD.

If you require any further assistance please do not hesitate to contact us by email at complaints@pcc.org.uk or by telephone 0845 600 2757.

However, it isn’t the only response my complaint has already triggered.  You may recall that back in February, the author of the article, Tor Books’s David Barnett, exchanged tweets with SFWA member Damien Walter.

@davidmbarnett Well done for doing that piece without linking to the bigot. *applauds*

@damiengwalter Well, I figured anyone who wanted to could trawl back through @Scalzi’s site, and if I’d named him I’d have to get a quote…

Within minutes of my retweeting his tweet and mentioning that I’d fired off a complaint to the Press Complaints Commission, I noticed that Mr. Barnett had belatedly decided to delete his tweet.  I tend to doubt his action is going to help his cause in the slightest; in fact, at this point, it may even be seen as an implicit admission of his malicious intent.  Especially since his action was far from unpredictable and I would have been remiss had I failed to capture the screen.

This is just the first stage.  How I proceed from here will depend, to a certain extent, upon what the Commission determines concerning the two Guardian articles.  The second article is potentially quite useful as the Guardian can’t even try to plead ignorance this time. This is because, in addition to the articles, the comments, the list of Mr. Scalzi’s public attacks on me dating back to 2005, and the aforementioned tweets, I also sent the Commission copies of several emails that were exchanged between me and the Guardian editor.

It’s possible that the PCC will be just as fair and balanced as the SFWA Board, but if nothing else, I don’t think they’ll be as likely to make their determination on the basis of Mr. Scalzi’s threats.  And I find it rather telling how eager people like the SFWA Board and Mr. Barnett are to try to hide their actions from public view.

Ideology or cash-credit decoupling?

The way I see it, the decision of the New York Times to sell the Boston Globe for a 93 percent loss – or rather, a 103% loss if the pension liabilities are considered, indicates one of two things:

After purchasing the Boston Globe in 1993 for a then-record $1.1 billion, the financially troubled New York Times just announced that it sold the 141-year-old paper to Boston Red Sox owner John Henry for a mere $70 million. That’s a straight 93% loss. Figuring in two decades of inflation would only make it worse — as does the fact that the Times retains the Globe’s pension liabilities, estimated at over $100 million.

The Times announced in February that it was putting the Globe up for sale. News reports claimed that bids had been as high as $100 million. What might have sweetened the lower offer for the Times is that Henry offered a straight cash deal, which is expected to close sometime in September or October.

In 2011, the Times turned down a $300 million offer from Aaron Kushner, CEO of Freedom Communications, Inc., publisher of the Orange County Register and other newspapers in California. This offer even included the assumption of pension liabilities, which are currently estimated at $110 million. 

Either it was worth $340 million to the owners of the New York Times to keep the Boston Globe out of the conservative-leaning hands of Freedom Communications or the value of $70 million in cash trumped $410 million in non-cash.  If the real reason was not ideological, this tends to indicate that we are proceeding faster into the deflationary scenario than even most deflationists understand.

In inflationary environments, stock is worth more than cash and credit is fully exchangeable with cash.  In deflationary environments, cash is worth more than stock or credit due to the expectation that the former will decline and the latter will be worth less than its nominal value.

Moving the goalposts

One of Steve Sailer’s readers makes a perceptive observation concerning the media’s behavior in the Trayvon affair:

Has anyone outside the Steve-o-Sphere noticed that, in typical fashion, the grounds for outrage keep subtly shifting?

Month 1- “A crazed white vigilante murdered an innocent, angelic boy!”.
Then it turned out that Martin wasn’t so innocent or angelic, and was
for all practical purposes a man, not a boy. Zimmerman was also revealed
to be not so crazed and not so white. So that angle was dropped.

Later- “It’s those awful ‘Stand your Ground’ laws, that’s what’s
wrong!”. But the defense didn’t even need to mention that law at trial,
because was totally irrelevant to the case….

This kind of “outrage distillation” is common when the press push a
bull***t narrative and then discover that they were mostly wrong. The
can’t continue lying, but they can focus the same amount of anger and
opprobrium onto smaller and smaller sins.

The anger remains the same, it’s the justification for it that remains a moving target. That process does sound rather familiar, for some reason.  I can’t quite seem to place it, though.

NSA whistleblowers back Snowden

More importantly, they note that his approach was more successful than theirs:

USA Today has published an extraordinary interview with three
former NSA employees who praise Edward Snowden’s leaks, corroborate some
of his claims, and warn about unlawful government acts….

In other words, they blew the whistle in the way Snowden’s critics suggest he should have done. Their
method didn’t get through to the members of Congress who are saying, in
the wake of the Snowden leak, that they had no idea what was going on.
But they are nonetheless owed thanks.
And among them, they’ve now said all of the following:

  • His disclosures did not cause grave damage to national security.
  • What Snowden discovered is “material evidence of an institutional crime.”
  • As
    a system administrator, Snowden “could go on the network or go into any
    file or any system and
    change it or add to it or whatever, just to make sure — because he
    would
    be responsible to get it back up and running if, in fact, it failed. So
    that meant he had access to go in and put anything. That’s why he
    said, I think, ‘I can even target the president or a judge.’ If he knew
    their phone numbers or attributes, he could insert them into the target
    list which would be distributed worldwide. And then it would be
    collected, yeah, that’s right. As a super-user, he could do that.”
  • “The idea that we have robust checks and balances on this is a myth.”
  • Congressional overseers “have no real way of seeing into what these agencies are doing. They are
    totally dependent on the agencies briefing them on programs, telling
    them what they are doing.”
  • Lawmakers “don’t really don’t understand what the NSA does and how it
    operates. Even when they get briefings, they still don’t understand.”
  • Asked
    what Edward Snowden should expect to happen to him, one of the men,
    William Binney, answered, “first tortured, then maybe even rendered and
    tortured and then incarcerated and then tried and incarcerated or even
    executed.” Interesting that this is what a whistleblower thinks the U.S.
    government will do to a citizen. The abuse of Bradley Manning worked.
  • “There is no path for intelligence-community whistle-blowers who know
    wrong is being done. There is none. It’s a toss of the coin, and the
    odds are you are going to be hammered.”

What a tremendous surprise to learn that the government isn’t telling the truth about Snowdon and his revelations!

The 157 visits of IRSgate

I think the time has arrived to officially tack -gate onto the growing Obama IRS scandal:

Publicly released records show that embattled former IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman visited the White House at least 157 times during the Obama administration, more recorded visits than even the most trusted members of the president’s Cabinet. Shulman’s extensive access to the White House first came to light during his testimony last week before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Shulman gave assorted answers when asked why he had visited the White House 118 times during the period that the IRS was targeting tea party and conservative nonprofits for extra scrutiny and delays on their tax-exempt applications.

By contrast, Shulman’s predecessor Mark Everson only visited the White House once during four years of service in the George W. Bush administration and compared the IRS’s remoteness from the president to “Siberia.” But the scope of Shulman’s White House visits — which strongly suggests coordination by White House officials in the campaign against the president’s political opponents — is even more striking in comparison to the publicly recorded access of cabinet members….

Attorney General Eric Holder, President Obama’s friend and loyal lieutenant, logged 62 publicly known White House visits, not even half as many as Shulman’s 157. Former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, to whom Shulman reported, clocked in at just 48 publicly known visits. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton earned a cool 43 public visits, and current Secretary of State John Kerry logged 49 known White House visits in the same timeframe, when he was still a U.S. senator.

Even the mainstream media isn’t buying the “Obama didn’t know anything” line any longer.  And the fact that many of the most liberal institutions are now refusing to attend the Attorney General’s off-the-record meeting tends to indicate the severity of the threat to the administration.

Is turnabout not fair play?

Setting aside the absurd and provably unscientific attempt of many vaccine advocates to blame whooping cough deaths on vaccine critics, it is informative to see the difference in the way the media covers the death of a child killed by an infectious disease versus the way it covers the death of a child killed by a reaction to a vaccine:

On March 9, 2009, four-week-old Dana McCaffery’s heart stopped after whooping cough left her tiny lungs unable to breathe…. Little did they know then that Dana’s death from whooping cough, and the media coverage that followed, came to represent a very inconvenient truth to the anti-vaccination lobby – and thus began an extraordinary campaign against this grieving family.

The McCafferys are today breaking their silence on the cyber bullying,the anonymous letters and the cruelty of some members of the anti-vaccination movement.

The couple has been accused of being on the payroll of drug companies; they have had their daughter’s death questioned and mocked; they have even been told to “harden the f . . . up” by an opponent of vaccination.

“The venom directed at us has just been torture and it’s been frightening, abhorrent and insensitive in the extreme,” says Toni, who has not had the strength to talk about this until now.

First, let’s do what the Australian Telegraph article failed to do and address the facts.  The child’s death from whooping cough was not likely the result of anti-vaccination campaigns or unvaccinated children.  The increased incidence of whooping cough in the United States, and therefore the death of Dana McCaffery, is primarily due to the reduced effectiveness of the current pertussis DTaP vaccine, which replaced the more effective, but less safe DTP vaccine in the 1990s.

As evidence, I again cite Science magazine to prove that the scientists, unlike the vaccine advocates, believe that it is the vaccines and not the anti-vaccination campaign that is responsible for what is described as “the return of the disease”.

Whooping cough, or pertussis, has exploded in the United States in recent years. A new study confirms what scientists have suspected for some time: The return of the disease is caused by the introduction of new, safer vaccines 2 decades ago. Although they have far fewer side effects, the new shots don’t offer long-lived protection the way older vaccines do.

Pertussis bacteria colonize the upper airways, causing a severe cough and shortness of breath that can be fatal in babies. The disease seemed to have mostly disappeared from the United States by the late 1970s—in fact, scientists believe, it continued to spread, undiagnosed, among adults—but over the past 2 decades the disease has bounced back with a vengeance, with strong outbreaks among school-aged children in 2010 and last year, when the United States reported 40,000 cases. Many European countries have also seen increases.

Researchers have long suspected that new vaccines might have something to do with it….  Physicians at Kaiser Permanente of Northern California compared the protective effects of these vaccines with the old ones when included in a four-dose series of shots called DTP (for diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis), given to children before the age of 2. They studied children born between 1994 and 1999, years in which Kaiser Permanente gradually introduced the new vaccines. As a result, some children had received only the old-style shots, some only the new ones, and some a mixture of both. Of the 1037 children included in the main part of the study, 138 got pertussis during a massive epidemic in California in 2010 to 2011.

Children who had received only the acellular vaccine were more than 5.6 times more likely to get sick than those who received the old, whole-cell vaccine, the team will report next month in Pediatrics. Those receiving one or more of each type had an intermediate risk.

The results confirm other recent research. In August, a study published in The Journal of the American Medical Association found that acellular vaccine-vaccinated children in Australia were six times more likely to get sick than those receiving the old vaccine. And a study of another California population, published online in March by Clinical Infectious Diseases, showed an eightfold increased risk of illness associated with the new vaccine.

“We’re now finding out that the acellular vaccine’s doesn’t offer protection for as long,” says the first author of the new study, pediatrician Nicola Klein. “It does work well in the short term. But there was definitely a tradeoff in phasing out the whole-cell vaccine.”

Now, it is certainly impolitic to criticize, even by implication, grieving parents.  But that impolity and lack of respect for parental grief has been an aspect of the vaccine debate for years thanks to the vaccine advocates viciously attacking parents who have lost children to vaccine reactions.  Moreover, the media’s dishonest reaction to the McCaffery child’s death, including the linked Telegraph article, demonstrates that the vaccine critics were entirely correct to express their doubts about the child’s death and attempt to get more detailed information on it.

As the head of the Australian Vaccination Network stated: “To my mind, while an entire community of conscientious objectors
were being victimised by the government and the media and being blamed
for the death of a child who was too young to be vaccinated, I had every
right to ask for this information.”

The complaints of the mother, “they were just tearing apart everything we had just witnessed and lived through”, are totally misplaced.  She lost her right to private grief the moment that she permitted her child’s death to be used as pro-vaccine attack propaganda.

Every family, the McCafferys included, have the right to private grief so long as their grief remains private.  It does not have a right to use their grief as propaganda without expecting skepticism and criticism, much less to hide behind the emotional rhetoric of their child’s death to avoid legitimate, science-based criticism of their spurious attacks on vaccine skeptics.

And it is the height of hypocrisy for pro-vaccine advocates to object to the use of their very arguments against parents actively campaigning for vaccines:

Like the McCafferys, he went public to raise awareness about vaccination. In 2010 he did three television interviews and he left his phone number with each network for other parents to get in touch.  Soon after, he received a call from a woman who claimed she was from the AVN. He does not recall her name.

She accused him of doing the community a disservice, saying he should not be promoting immunisation.

“Then she went on saying my son was obviously weak and the weakest of the herd are not meant to survive, I should just get over it,” he says. Kokegei was gobsmacked. “I didn’t think someone could be that cold, to belittle what happened to my son in such a heartless way,” he says.

And yet, is this not the very argument that pro-vaccine arguments implicitly make when they argue that it is worth permitting some children to die in the interest of herd immunity?  For every sob story the vaccine advocates have to offer, the anti-vaccine advocates can cite a dozen that are equally rhetorically effective.  And they will never be won over, because all the statistical studies in the world will never convince a parent who has seen, with his own eyes, an infant scream and slump unconscious in immediate reaction to a vaccine injection.

Mailvox: on the importance of doll faces

GV notes that IGN cares an awful lot more about Disney princesses than pretty much anyone who reads it:

I wasn’t going to send this until I saw this story up at IGN three times.  First they reported the new redesign of Merida then they reported two stories on how Disney would not cave in to pressure to go back to Merida’s orignal design.  Here is a link to the third article. 

Basically, Disney decided to change Merida’s goofy appearance into a prettier and more royal looking doll for her coronation as a Disney Princess doll.  It appears that IGN has posted this story a third time to try to bring attention to this issue.  Of course IGN is a video game website where most of their audience is male and it appears to have backfired since most of the comments are making fun of this or saying this is a non-issue.  Now in my opinion there is an obvious reason Disney won’t back down despite a petition of about 205,000, and it’s not because they are against feminism, but instead because most little girls would rather buy the prettier and royal-looking doll as oppose to her original goofy appearance in the movie despite the admittedly great but absurd feminist propaganda that is Brave.

Honestly they would most likely lose a lot of money since most little girls and their mothers would prefer to buy a prettier doll despite all the feminist complaint.  If they were to release a goofy-looking doll of Merida, most little girls and there mothers would most likely just buy a pretty doll from a competitor. 

I wonder if the feminist will get so angry at their failure at altering little girls preconceived notions and desires that they will demand that they play with cars just so they can get them to stop thinking of appearance despite the fact that most women’s natural and honest inclination is to try to look good and put on make-up to look pretty.  I guess in the end Merida’s mother has a happy ending since in the real world most little girls, (because of what they want to buy and play with), are forcing her to be pretty and royal as an actual princess.

Who knows maybe next they will come out with a doll that is her husband which will really make feminist head explode.  What to you bet that he won’t look goofy.

I think the feminists at IGN are in the process of discovering that they’re not going to find a lot of concern over what women think about the appearance of a doll on the part of either a) male gamers, or, b) a lavender corporation.  While Disney cheerfully pays lip service to the Female Imperative, all it really cares about is money and pushing whatever happens to be the lavender agenda at the moment.

And since both little girls and gays like pretty dolls, not goofy ones, we can expect that the pretty doll will prevail.  The primary thing to take away from this: IGN is officially irrelevant.

I’m trying to picture CGW publishing three articles about this issue of vital importance to hard core gamers….

Perhaps this will wake up the media

The Obama administration is spying on them too:

As it turns out, the big Friday story of Bloomberg journalists snooping on its clients was just amateur hour compared to what the AP was about to serve. In fact, the Watergate affair may soon appear like a walk in the park compared to the First Amendment shitstorm that is about to be unleashed following the just reported news that the US Department of Justice had “secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative’s top executive called a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into how news organizations gather the news.” First amendment? Freedom of speech and press? Surely not when it comes to the Nobel-peace prize winning President and those who dare to expose his secret ways. And what’s worst, is that the AP breach has all the makings of a spiteful hack driven by personal vengeance against one of America’s premier news outlets.

Probably not.  La carte noire, don’t you know. The media will find it very difficult to turn on Obama unless he starts sending killer drones after AP reporters, and even then, the likes of Eleanor Clift will be babbling about how targeted media assassinations are popular moves that make the president look “decisive”.

This comment at Zerohedge cracked me up: “Obama has a free ride from the press and he is even going to fuck that up….classic.”