“Oh nothing, honey, she’s just really happy.”
Your Moral And Intellectual Superiors
Facts are stubborn things.
Washington Post columnist Meghan McArdle ripped the community of fact-checkers who have tried to hold former President Trump accountable during his political career, admitting they’ve ultimately failed to hamper his support and have hurt their own institutions.
The author, a staunch critic of Trump, accused those of trying to prevent the spread of Trump’s “disinformation” of being arrogant and mistaking their own opinion with objective fact. She even accused them of censorship. All of this, she wrote, has ultimately led to voters questioning them and other institutions more than they’ve ever questioned the former president.
“After eight years of all-out disinformation warfare, Trump’s approval ratings are holding up better than public trust in academia and journalism,” McArdle lamented.
The columnist began her piece by describing the idealized mission of the Trump era fact-checkers, saying they “devote themselves to checking the internet for bad facts and bad actors — and especially for the malevolent impulses of Trump.”
However, they didn’t save the world in her estimation. At best, they dinged Trump on some of his bragging and, at worst, they censored true facts in their thirst to correct him.
“Some of their efforts have been useful, including their fact-checking of Trump’s more frenetic flights of fancy,” she said, adding, “But the larger effort has been repeatedly marred when the disinformation experts have acted as censors, suppressing information that turned out to be true and spreading information that was false.”
McArdle provided some of the major examples of this suppression, examples that most of the media participated in at the behest of these fact-checkers.
“Recall when it was ‘misinformation’ to suggest the pandemic might have started in a Wuhan lab. Recollect how a bevy of putative experts assured us that Hunter Biden’s laptop was probably a ‘Russian information operation’ rather than … Hunter Biden’s laptop.”
She added a more recent one, stating, “If these memories have faded, remember that just a couple months ago, we were hearing that videos of President Joe Biden’s obvious decline were actually expert-certified ‘cheap fakes.’”
Related: Journalist Resigns After Being Exposed for Fake, AI-Generated Quotes
Our Chinese-Installed Government In Ottawa
Knuckles rapped: Joly was warned by the CCP in her trip to China that Canada’s probe into “overseas police stations” has harmed China’s CORE INTERESTS, and is seen as damaging to improving bilateral relations. They believe there’s still room for negotiation on the issue.
“You had one job”
More here.
Y2Kyoto: South Africa Waves Hello
There’s an old joke about weaning the dog off food by reducing his ration by a kibble each day, until one day, he didn’t need food at all.
As summer heat strikes, the US grid increasingly relies on a kind of invisible weapon — the “virtual power plant” — to prevent blackouts.
Each VPP brings together large numbers of homes and businesses whose owners have agreed to use less electricity when needed — or even send some of their own back to the grid — in exchange for a financial incentive.
Participants just have to let the operators take control of their usage to balance supply and demand when the system’s under stress, usually by setting the thermostat a few degrees higher or tapping electric vehicles and on-site batteries.
Pool enough customers, and it makes a big difference. Energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie says the VPPs already deployed or under development in the US will be able to save as much juice as 33 nuclear reactors can produce.
The Libranos: Comfy Fur For Adler
SEN. TALK RADIO — Imagine telling CHARLES ADLER as he first walked off his Sun News Network set in 2011 that he’d one day sit in the Senate — and JUSTIN TRUDEAU, then a rookie opposition MP, would be the man to put him there.
Head-exploding emoji.
But the Ottawa fishbowl woke up Saturday to a press release. Trudeau had nominated Adler for a Manitoba seat and TRACY MUGGLI, a healthcare executive and two-time Liberal candidate, for a spot next door in Saskatchewan.
— Prairie discontent: Playbook reached out to Northern Affairs Minister DAN VANDAL, Manitoba’s only man in Cabinet, in case he had a view.
Vandal did, in fact, express an opinion.
“There are many eminently qualified Manitobans who are better suited to represent our province than Charles Adler,” read a short statement from his office.
OK, then.
h/t Mike
Where Can I Donate?
DNC welcome party crashed by pro-Palestinian agitators.
Honey, I Finished The Internet
UKSF Operator at the 2019 SAS Hotel siege in Nairobi. But first, start here.
Don’t Worry, It’s Transitory
A lie gets halfway around the world before the revision has a chance to get its pants on.
On Wednesday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics will downward revise jobs for the April 2023-March 2024 period by up to 1 million. This means that all “beats” recorded in the past year will have been misses and the US job market is in far worse shape than the admin would admit.
If It Weren’t For Fake Hate
Last week, a tent occupied by Rupinder was set on fire in what was reported as a racially motivated hate crime. The incident, which occurred early Saturday morning, saw four people inside the tent at the time. As luck would have it, Rupinder managed to capture the event on film for TikTok.
I, Napoleon
The Supreme Court on Friday rejected the Biden administration’s request to be allowed to temporarily enforce most of an April 2024 rule implementing Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which prohibits sex discrimination in education programs that receive federal funding, while its appeals continued.
Friday’s ruling leaves in place for now decisions by federal appeals courts that barred the Biden administration from enforcing any portion of the rule, including three provisions that target discrimination against transgender people in schools. The Biden administration had not asked the Supreme Court to intervene with regard to two of those provisions. […]
The orders came in two separate challenges – one filed in Kentucky by six states and one in Louisiana by four states. Both challenges focused on three provisions of the April 2024 rule that target discrimination against transgender people. The first provision recognizes that Title IX’s ban on sex discrimination includes discrimination based on gender identity. A second provision at issue in the case makes clear that schools violate Title IX when they bar transgender people from using bathrooms and locker rooms consistent with their gender identity. And a third provision defines “hostile-environment harassment” to include harassment based on gender identity, which the states say could require students and teachers to refer to transgender students by the pronouns that correspond to their gender identity.
A Stern Warning And A Wink
The NYT said it took “disciplinary action”…
Breaking: A NYT reporter shared 900 pages of content in a private WhatsApp chat of Jewish professionals.
As a result, hundreds of the group chat participants were met with online and in-person harassment that escalated to the point where some were forced to leave their homes.
The Libranos: Comfy Fur For Adler
Saturday Morning News Dump:
Prime Minister Trudeau announced the appointment of Charles Adler and Tracy Muggli as independent senators for Manitoba and Saskatchewan, respectively.
Well, this didn’t take long.
When The FBI Does It, That Means That It’s Not Illegal
The audio file is a recording of a June 6 telephonic interview that Jessica did with Nick Tartaglione, Jeffrey Epstein’s former cellmate in the Brooklyn Metropolitan Detention Center. Tartaglione was recounting some of his conversations with Epstein.
As Tartaglione tells it, Epstein returned to their shared cell after a meeting with the federal prosecutors. He told his cellmate that the prosecutors were fishing for a plea deal with him if he would provide damaging information about Trump that would support his impeachment. It didn’t matter whether it was true or not.
Tartaglione asked whether Epstein knew Trump. Epstein acknowledged that although he did know Trump, they didn’t like each other. When Tartaglione asked why, Epstein described how Trump had kicked him out of Mar-a-Lago because he, Epstein, was there with an under-aged girl. Here is Tartaglione’s description of the conversation…
[…]
He [Epstein] said, ‘I don’t know anything. . . . But the government told me I don’t have to prove what I say about Trump as long as Trump’s people can’t disprove it.’ I [Tartaglione] said ‘Yes, he’s the President of the United States. His people are the FBI.’ He [Epstein] said, ‘That’s what I said, and they said, no, the FBI’s our people, not his people.’
I, For One, Welcome Our New Self Driving Overlords
Trust the technology: Hackers may have stolen every American’s Social Security number
Scratch A Leftist
“Never again” always came with an expiry date.
Honey, I Finished The Internet
Earl Scheib’s exclusive estimator takes the guesswork out of auto body repair estimates!
Margin Of Fraud
“In late June or early July, a candidate for office of Assessor named December Cox met with me, Supervisor Cavanaugh. Cox came to my home because what he had to say couldn’t be said over the telephone. Cox reported to me he had met an employee from inside the Elections Office who said he was being paid ‘hush money’ and ‘knew it wasn’t right.’” Cox lost his race for county assessor by 42 points to incumbent Douglas Wolf.
Cavanaugh and his wife are accountants who worked with two statisticians examining the drops of ballots that were counted. He found that in six local races — sheriff, county attorney, three supervisor races, and assessor — the number of ballots that came in during the election in batches appeared to be artificially manipulated. Instead of each candidate in those races getting varied numbers of ballots each time, their numbers stayed the same, flatlining — meaning the candidate who won generally got the same percentage of ballots in each successive drop, while the candidate who lost also received the same percentage of ballots in each successive drop, but a lower number.
In contrast, the other races in Pinal County showed varying percentages in each ballot dump for all the candidates.[…]
He explained, “The common observation was that each time the vote totals were updated each race demonstrated the exact same percentage splits between the candidates. This is possible, but to have it occur more than a couple races in a county is rare, to have it occur in six races among 13 candidates is statistically ‘impossible.’ The anomalies only occur in county, not state races, yet the same voters filled out the ballots.”
The Pinal County Supervisor added, “Normal distributions show a differentials between around 4 and 10%, the Abnormal distributions have a very low differential, from 0% to 1.6% in the examples shown. No differential means that voters all over the county would be voting in the exact same percentages, it isn’t possible.” Cavanaugh labeled the anomalies the “‘Flying Purple Rhinoceros’ that doesn’t exist in real life.”
Two members of the Conelrad Group, a think tank based in southern Arizona that investigated election anomalies in Pinal County’s 2022 election and concluded there was “deliberate malfeasance,” spoke to The Sun Times after reviewing Cavanaugh’s report.
Keir Starmer’s Britain
Where the foxes caper unmolested, the government packs your school lunch and “People will forgive you for being wrong, but they will never forgive you for being right“.
Things You’re Gonna See At The CBC
The Canadian Press take the jobs their employees can’t do.
The Canadian Broadcasting Corp. paid out $18.4 million in bonuses this year after hundreds of jobs at the public broadcaster were eliminated.
Documents obtained through access to information laws show CBC/Radio-Canada paid bonuses to 1,194 employees for the 2023-24 fiscal year.
More than $3.3 million of that sum was paid to 45 executives.
That means those executives got an average bonus of over $73,000, which is more than the median family income after taxes in 2022, according to Statistics Canada.