Quick Hits

Squad member and insurrectionist Jamaal Bowman has been censured over the criminal act of pulling a fire alarm in order to stop a House vote (which is a Constitutional act). Apparently the DOJ will not be prosecuting him.

Only three Democrats voted to censure him. 105 Republicans, on the other hand, voted to expel George Santos. One side is doing this right and one side is doing it wrong and it doesn't matter which -- both sides must act the same way, no matter who is right and who is wrong. We cannot go on perpetrating 2-tier justice on ourselves.

The "journalists" and other "workers" at the Washington Post staged a very, very symbolic one-day walkout.

Why. Even. Bother.

They got me all excited about a strike, but then they all returned to their, and I use this term advisedly, " " " jobs " " " within 24 hours.

The Babylon Bee walked out in solidarity with their fellow fake-news providers:

Speaking of fake news: The hot new concept in " " " journalism " " " is the "duty to not report."

Specifically, to not report on the immigration status of criminals and terrorists. (And race, of course. And transgender status. And affiliation with the Democrat Party or leftwing causes.)

Yes, they've been doing that for over a decade, but now they've made it into an acknowledged and explicit code of Fake Journalism.

We have been discussing the latest Irish law to crackdown on free speech. Yet, even with the criminalization of speech, there is apparently still the danger of citizens reading or hearing facts from reporters that are best kept from them. Thus, Kitty Holland, a correspondent with the Irish Times, is defending the media's decision to suppress stories that would "incite hatred" and undermine journalistic viewpoints.

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Holland... said that they had to be suppressed in the best interests of the public:

"I think elements of them were not good,. They were incitement to hatred, and I think that's why the media left out aspects of them. I think they were right to not include [Casey's full comments in news reports]. I don't think that they were helpful, and this is the kind of thing that the far right latches on to."

What was striking was the ease with which Holland moves directly into the suppression of a story as the guardian of the public good. Some news is simply "not helpful" so the media should not allow the public to be exposed to it.

Holland previously won the Journalist of the Year, News Reporter of the Year, and the Overall winner of the Justice Media Awards.

Holland's view is consistent with many in the media in the United States today.

I have long been a critic of what I called "advocacy journalism" as it began to emerge in journalism schools. These schools encourage students to use their "lived expertise" and to "leave[] neutrality behind." Instead, of neutrality, they are pushing "solidarity [as] 'a commitment to social justice that translates into action.'"

For example, we previously discussed the release of the results of interviews with over 75 media leaders by former executive editor for The Washington Post Leonard Downie Jr. and former CBS News President Andrew Heyward. They concluded that objectivity is now considered reactionary and even harmful. Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, editor-in-chief at the San Francisco Chronicle said it plainly: "Objectivity has got to go."

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[A]merican politicians (including Barack Obama) have called upon the media to actively frame news to shape public opinion. This includes support for the widespread censorship of opposing views on social media.

The Holland interview shows how matter-of-fact the cause of censorship has become for reporters. The immediate question is not whether it was news to report (which it certainly was), but whether the news would further the cause or narrative of the media.

There has always been media bias, but it is now openly acknowledged and embraced by reporters. They view themselves now as the guardians protecting citizens from harmful information or news that they cannot put into the proper perspective. Information is treated like sugary drinks under the Big Gulp laws, you are better off having others decide what is healthy for you to consume . . . or to know.

And yet they continue to insist that they are objective, and in fact that they are so objective that they should be the only voices permitted in the public sphere.

Instapundit: Why aren't we talking about the real vectors of disinformation? The real pool of the ignorant easily infected by stupid nonsense?

The "elite," in other words?

In modern America, after all, very few important matters are put to the voters.

They're decided by unelected administrators: government bureaucrats, college administrators, corporate executives.

After George Floyd's death, we didn't have a national election on what to do. Institutions just executed a simultaneous turn to the same policies -- defunding police, for example -- most of which wouldn't have passed muster with voters and have been disastrous.

But everything from TV commercials to civil-rights policies to educational curricula changed all at once, in the same way.

And the armor is thinner.

Educated people, trained in school, tend to believe what they're told.

Working-class people tend to be more cynical about media and "experts."

Our ruling class is a monoculture of people educated in the same schools, in the same ways and with the same values.

Whatever fools one of them will probably fool all of them or enough to make a difference.

And they can be easily bought. Not just our political class but the entire upper stratum is for sale.

You can buy universities with donations, grants and institutes, you can buy politicians with campaign donations and jobs and consulting fees for families (see, e.g., Hunter Biden), you can buy off corporations even more directly.

They're for sale, and they're not even ashamed of it anymore.

Our ruling class mostly believes Israel is an "apartheid state" committing "genocide" -- it's not, and it's not -- capitalism produces poverty (rather the reverse, actually), "Western colonialism" is responsible for the ills of the Third World (nope) and whether one is male or female is purely a matter of social construction (also nope).

It thinks the only way to defeat racism is by being racist and the way to end urban violence is to disarm people in the suburbs.

So we need to look at armoring the top of our society against bad ideas instead of trying to limit what ordinary people can read online.

That would require limits on foreign funding, the cultivation of strong moral and patriotic values in our leadership and the reduction of top-level influence on society as a whole.

Breaking up big businesses and shrinking big universities and big government would make them less appealing targets and take away some of their power.

But doing that would reduce the amount of graft available, and it's hard to imagine our leadership class going along.

One in four people's bodies created unexpected "nonsense proteins" in reaction to the non-vaccine covid vaccines.

They claim that none of the gibberish proteins created by people's bodies were harmful at all. Not a single adverse effect, not one! Not one in all the hundreds of millions of cases!

How they could possibly know that will remain, forever, a mystery. Just more of that Magical Godscience we'll just have to pour all of our Faith into.

More than a quarter of people injected with mRNA Covid jabs suffered an unintended immune response created by a glitch in the way the vaccine was read by the body, a study has found.

No adverse effects were created by the error, data show, but Cambridge scientists found such vaccines were not perfect and sometimes led to nonsense proteins being made instead of the desired Covid "spike", which mimics infection and leads to antibody production.

mRNA jabs, such as the ones created by Moderna and Pfizer, use a string of genetic material to tell the body to create a specific protein that safely imitates an infection.

Research in the field, spanning decades, had been slow work. It often stalled because RNA itself is often attacked by the body as a foreign invader.

But in 2023, the Nobel Prize for Medicine went to the pair of scientists who had spent years working to fix the problem. It was done by taking one of the RNA bases, uridine, and swapping in a very similar synthetic alternative.

This breakthrough allowed scientists to create proteins in the body without the immune system attacking the jab.

It allows for quick and precise vaccines that are highly effective and was the backbone of the Covid vaccine response.
Not a perfect fit

It was thought the minor tweak to uridine caused no problems in cells, but a team of researchers at the University of Cambridge's Medical Research Council (MRC) Toxicology Unit have now found when this partially synthetic code is read, the protein-making machine in the body sometimes struggles with the uridine analogues.

Because it is not a perfect fit for what is expected, there can be a momentary pause which causes the process to stutter and a letter in the code can get skipped, much like a bike slipping a gear.

This process, called frameshifting, throws out the way the code is interpreted as it relies on groups of three bases, known as codons, being read in the right order.

500 Parisians line up to sample the wares at the country's first Krispy Kreme shop. Good. I can't wait till these f***ers all get fat so they can drop the superiority act.

Just kidding, they'll never drop the superiority act.

[T]o succeed in its 39th foreign market, Krispy Kreme's director general for France, Alexandre Maizoue, has pulled out all the stops: home delivery starting early next year, opening a production site in the eastern suburb of Creteil in 2024, and reaching 500 stores within five years.

"I think we have some great years ahead of us," he said. The company has already invested more than two million euros ($2.2 million) in its first store and production facility.

To ensure buzz, Krispy Kreme launched a huge publicity campaign -- with the Paris City Hall even accusing it of illegal postering -- and handed out some 100,000 doughnuts at various places around Paris.

A deejay and a red carpet welcomed clients to the Wednesday opening of the new store in the Halles shopping centre in central Paris.

According to Maizoue, around 400 people were in line at 8 am for the opening, with a total of 3,000 coming the first day.

The chain's first French store is offering 13 varies of doughnuts, or "donut" as it known in France, with clients able to observe the production behind a glass wall -- a hallmark of the brand.

I don't think I've seen it called a "doughnut" in America since I was a wee lad.

This is France24's English language unit. Must be staffed by Britishers.

Microsoft's making deals with Chinese communist party propaganda outlets, naturally. Probably coaching the Chinese communists on how best to censor their political enemies.

Microsoft helped Chinese state-run media outlets disseminate propaganda as part of previously unreported partnership agreements, documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon show.

The nation's second largest corporation signed collaboration deals with state-run Chinese media outlets including China Daily and People's Daily, the latter of which is the official newspaper of the Central Committee of the Chinese government. Summaries of the deal state Microsoft would provide China Daily with technology that lets the paper target potential readers and gave the People's Daily access to an artificial intelligence bot specially designed to be controlled and censored by the Chinese Communist Party.

The deals have not been widely reported outside of China, nor have the financial terms been disclosed. A spokeswoman for Microsoft said both agreements "expired years ago and were not renewed." But experts say the fact that Microsoft inked the deals at all is a major win for the Chinese Communist Party.

"These are major propaganda outlets that publish outright falsehoods attacking the ideas of democracy, attacking the very concepts that undergird our society, and yet an American company is working to spread this," said Geoffrey Cain, policy director at the Tech Integrity Project, which fights Chinese Communist Party influence in American tech companies. "The purpose of all this is to show the Chinese Communist Party that it's firmly on the side of China and the Chinese system," Cain added.

"Anti-racist" "scholar" Henry Rogers, who LARPs under the fake name Ibram X. Kendi: White people can't connect with humanity. Please give me more money so I can further develop theories of anti-racism.

Please teach me how to be anti-racist, Absolute Moral Authority

Washington State asked a scientist to evaluate whether its cap and trade scheme would raise gas prices. He concluded that it would, in fact, raise gas prices.

So they demanded he falsify the science, and when he refused, they forced him to quit.

From King5.com:

For the last five years, Scott Smith of Tumwater was a transportation planner for the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT). He was the primary WSDOT employee tasked with forecasting fuel consumption, pricing and revenues from gas taxes and fees. After 35 years working as a public sector economist, Smith said his career was ruined for his refusal to lie about how a new state policy, according to his mathematical calculations in early 2023, would jack up prices at the pump by 45 to 50 cents per gallon. He said the retaliation and pressure were so great he felt forced to resign.

Remember, when leftists say "Trust the Science," this is what they mean -- they mean "Trust the leftist consensus, which has rigged the science to say whatever the leftist consensus has demanded it say."

This is happening more and more: Child mask mandates were just proven, again, to be ineffective at stopping the spread of covid, or any virus.

Monica Gandhi MD, MPH @MonicaGandhi9

Child mask mandates for COVID-19: a systematic review -"current body of scientific data does not support masking children for protection against COVID". Hope MDs and public health officials will always be willing to change minds with evidence & data

But when Dr. Jay Battacharya told Ron DeSantis that, accurately describing the state of the science, his left-leaning fellow "scientists" banded together to smear him:

Jay Bhattacharya @DrJBhattacharya

100+ of my medical school colleagues, including the chair of epidemiology @Stanford, circulated a secret petition (leaked to me) asking the president of the university to silence me for the crime of telling @GovRonDeSantis that no good evidence supported child masking.

"The Science" is not science. "The Science" is "elite" leftwing political opinion in a white lab coat.

I missed these two stories:

CNN has demanded "carbon passports," limiting the number of plane trips we can take in our lives. Presumably rich media and governmental liberals would be exempted, because they fucking live on private jets.

The negative impacts of tourism on the environment have become so severe that some are suggesting drastic changes to our travel habits are inevitable. In a report from 2023 that analyzed the future of sustainable travel, tour operator Intrepid Travel proposed that "carbon passports" will soon become a reality if the tourism industry hopes to survive.

The idea of a carbon passport centers on each traveler being assigned a yearly carbon allowance that they cannot exceed. These allowances can then "ration" travel.

This concept may seem extreme. But the idea of personal carbon allowances is not new.

The concept of Naziism may seem extreme. But the idea of an Aryan empire is not new.

A similar concept (called "personal carbon trading") was discussed by UK Parliament in 2008, before being shut down because of to its perceived complexity and the possibility of public resistance.

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Some European countries are beginning to take measures to reduce air travel. As of April 1, 2023, passengers on short-haul flights and older aircraft in Belgium have been subject to increased taxes to encourage alternative forms of travel.

Less than two months later, France banned short-haul domestic flights where the same trip can be made by train in two-and-a-half hours or less. Spain is expected to follow suit.

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It's not just air travel that's being criticized. An investigation by the European Federation for Transport and Environment in 2023 found that cruise ships pump four times as many sulphuric gases (which are proven to cause acid rain and several respiratory conditions) into the atmosphere than all of Europe's 291 million cars combined.

Statistics like these have forced European destinations to take action against the cruise industry. In July, Amsterdam's council banned cruise ships from docking in the city center in a bid to reduce tourism and pollution -- an initiative that has shown success elsewhere.

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Holidaymakers should prepare to change their travel habits now, before this change is forced upon them.

One man who will definitely not be reducing his private aircraft use, or even shifting to commercial airflight, is alleged global envoy for climate change John Kerry, who has declared that it's a "persistent lie" that he owns a private jet.

No, no one ever said you owned it. Your rich bitch meal-ticket wife owns it.

According to flight tracking data obtained by Fox News Digital in July 2022, a Gulfstream GIV-SP jet owned by Kerry's family made a total of 48 trips that lasted more than 60 hours and emitted an estimated 715,886 pounds, or 325 metric tons, of carbon over the course of the Biden administration's first 18 months.

The plane was registered to Flying Squirrel LLC, a charter company owned by Kerry's wife, Teresa Heinz-Kerry.

Kerry has declared that private airflight is the only means of travel that "makes sense for a person like me."

And so last week, our special envoy for practically living on private jets John Kerry signed America up to shut down 20% of our domestic electricity production.

The Biden Administration announced Saturday that the United States is committed to phasing out coal power plants nationwide and not building new ones as it moves ahead with its green agenda.

U.S. Special Envoy for Climate John Kerry announced at the annual United Nations climate change summit in Dubai, called COP28, that America is joining 56 other nations that comprise the Power Past Coal Alliance.

"We will be working to accelerate unabated coal phase-out across the world, building stronger economies and more resilient communities," Kerry said in a statement.

"The first step is to stop making the problem worse: stop building new unabated coal power plants."

It's unclear when existing U.S. coal plants would have to shut, but other Biden regulatory actions and international commitments already in play have targeted 2035 as a coal-free deadline.

Biden and Kerry are fond of announcing shut-downs in American energy production, but never announce any start-ups, except for nonsense wind farms.

If John Kerry wants to eliminate toxic atmospheric discharges, he should start by flying commercial for once in his life.

And laying off rich foods.

posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 06:30 PM

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