Category: Journalism

Parallel New York universes

by philg

The front page of the New York Post right now has no fewer than four stories about Daniel Penny, the man on trial for murdering the mostly peaceful Jordan Neely. Penny’s fate is currently being decided by a jury.

The front page of the New York Times right now has zero stories. In the parallel universe of the NYT, Jordan Neely was never killed and Daniel Penny was never put on trial.

Photos from May 2023:

Separately, what are people thinking about the Manhattan murder of Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare CEO? A customer whose relative died after claims were denied for a treatment that, in the killer’s mind, might have saved the relative’s life? A disgruntled former employee? It can’t be an unhappy long-term shareholder. Before adjusting for inflation, the stock is up 100X compared to 30 years ago (outperforming Apple and NVDIA? (tougher to compare with NVIDIA because the company didn’t go public until 1999)):

Related:

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Did Doug Emhoff hit a woman with Hunter Biden’s laptop?

by philg

I don’t know if we’ll be without power and Internet due to Hurricane Milton so I’m scheduling this non-hurricane-related post in advance in order to deliver on my “posting every day” promise/threat.

A Deplorable posted “Kamala Harris’s husband Doug Emhoff ‘forcefully slapped ex-girlfriend for flirting with another man’ in booze-fueled assault after date to star-studded gala” (Daily Mail) on Facebook with the comment “Another post election day story for the Times.” In fact, a Google search restricted to “site:nytimes.com” shows that the Newspaper of Record (TM) hasn’t seen fit to cover the story of this Democratic National Convention featured speaker slapping anyone.

In a separate discussion about this story, a Big Law partner (closeted Republican) wrote that all members of the Party of Independent Thought would transition from “Kamala is so brat because look at Doug” to “Doug has nothing to do with this election; he’s not running for anything”. Just a few hours later, his prophecy was confirmed when a Minneapolis Democrat in a discussion about the above story posted “Who is this guy? Is he running for something?”

New York Times, about 1.5 months ago:

Speaking of husbands, “Kamala Harris and the Influence of an Estranged Father Just Two Miles Away” (NYT):

Friends of both say the estrangement, set in motion by her parents’ split when Ms. Harris was a child, may have as much to do with traits father and daughter share as it does their decades of differences. … It upset Ms. Harris that her father did not attend Shyamala Harris’s funeral in 2009. … Dr. Harris’s spectral presence in Ms. Harris’s life began when he and her mother separated in 1969, when Ms. Harris was 5. The couple divorced in 1972 after he lost a bitter custody battle that brought his closeness to Ms. Harris and her younger sister “to an abrupt halt,” Dr. Harris wrote in a 2018 essay. The sealed divorce settlement, he said, was “based on the false assumption by the State of California that fathers cannot handle parenting.”

Note that the New York Times covers a lawsuit with a plaintiff and a defendant as a mutual activity (“her parents’ split”). Reading between the lines, it looked like Kamala’s mom sued Kamala’s dad and won the winner-take-all fight that the California Family Court set up. And then Kamala was upset that her dad didn’t want to go to his plaintiff’s funeral. (We know a guy in Maskachusetts whose plaintiff died of cancer after winning the house, the kids, the cash, most of his income going forward, etc. On hearing the news, he was ready to throw a huge party to celebrate her death and the return of his kids not shed crocodile tears at the successful litigant’s funeral.

Addendum: We never did lose power thanks to the heroic engineering efforts of Florida Power and Light as well as the grid-hardening initiative approved by Ron DeSantis in 2019 over the objections of Democrats (see Tough questions from reporters for Ron DeSantis). In other hurricane news, combat veteran Tim Walz tells Floridians to evacuate at 6:32 pm, roughly two hours before landfall. This is apparently not the kind of “misinformation” that Democrats seek to outlaw and suppress, though it contradicts government advice to “shelter in place” once winds exceed 45-50 mph. The “mandatory” evacuation orders on the Florida west coast generally required evacuation by 9:00 am on Wednesday and officials told people who hadn’t evacuated to “shelter in place” after the winds picked up. From the war hero now fighting misinformation:

From the National Weather Service, 4.5 hours earlier (“It’s time to shelter-in-place”):

From Sarasota County, where Hurricane Milton hit:

An hour before Tim Walz suggested evacuation, the county was saying “shelter in place”:

The above tweets, combined, are good examples of the motivation for Why not a simple web site or phone app to determine whether one must evacuate?

Related:

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New York Times features an expert on parenting…

by philg

… who has never been a parent.

“I Love the Kids in My Life. And I’m Raising None of Them.” (Glynnis MacNicol, NYT, 9/7/2024):

I have no children of my own…

In America, there is a persistent, pernicious belief that the only way to be invested in a child’s life is to be a parent — and, for women, to give birth to that child. (Ella and Cole Emhoff, among others, would like a word.) In a country that offers so little support to parents, this often feels like a not-so-covert argument for taking women back to a time when they lacked control over their bodies and their finances.

To understand the extraordinary commitment it takes to parent — because you see it firsthand — and decide to direct your own time elsewhere…

If he/she/ze/they has never been a parent, how can he/she/ze/they be sure that he/she/ze/they “understand” anything about being a parent?

Separately, I love that the editors allow “a country that offers so little support to parents” to be presented as a statement of fact. The U.S. provides 13 years of free education/daycare to parents who don’t want to deal with their kids. The U.S. also provides taxpayer-funded breakfast and lunch at school for parents who choose to not work or, as in Palm Beach County, to all parents. The U.S. forces the childless to work longer hours and pay higher taxes to subsidize parents with lower tax rates. The childless are even forced, under threat of imprisonment, to pay taxes to subsidize college and, new with the Biden-Harris administration, loan “forgiveness” (transfer to the general taxpayer). How is that “little support”? What more could the childless do for us parents? Buy us a new Honda Odyssey or Toyota Sienna every 3 years?

Circling back to the main theme, we’re informed that we should defer to experts selected by the legacy media and not commit the sin of “doing our own research”. And it turns out that the NYT-selected expert on parenting has some experience… as a babysitter.

Here’s the author in 2018 (a childless cat lady with no cats?):

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NYT versus WSJ coverage of Yusef Salaam at the Democratic National Convention

by philg

My favorite article today illustrating the magic of politics, from Axios:

Pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian Democrats attending the Democratic National Convention agree on at least one thing: Kamala Harris is on their side. … Pro-Israel Democrats who spoke to Axios at the convention rejected the notion that there is any daylight between Harris and Biden on the issue. … Abbas Alawieh, a leader of the pro-Palestinian “uncommitted” movement, said he is “hearing from a lot of folks that are closer to her that she personally is sympathetic, maybe even more than other presidents we’ve seen in our lifetime.”

Let’s turn our attention to another example of how humans on the same planet can also dwell in parallel universes…

“Members of ‘Central Park 5’ Say Trump Is Too Dangerous for Second Term” (NYT, yesterday):

The five Black and Latino teenagers accused in the attack — Korey Wise, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, Kevin Richardson and Antron McCray, known as the Central Park Five — served years in prison before being cleared in 2002 by DNA evidence and the confession of another man.

“[Trump] called us animals. He spent $85,000 on a full-page ad in The New York Times calling for our execution,” Mr. Wise said. “We were innocent kids, but we served a total of 41 years in prison.”

Asked in 2019 at the White House why he would not apologize in spite of the exonerations, Mr. Trump said, “They admitted their guilt.” The men have said that police officers coerced them into falsely confessing to the attack at the time.

Yusef Salaam was completely innocent, in other words. He and his friends were cleared and exonerated.

In another NYT article on the same glorious event, Yusef Salaam is “an Innocent Man”:

Chicago is the perfect place for an entirely innocent man who has been wrongly accused of a serious crime since that’s where vascular surgeon Dr. Richard Kimble was convicted of murdering his wife and sentenced to death (documentary film).

Let’s check into the alternative universe of the Wall Street Journal circa 2019… “Netflix’s False Story of the Central Park Five” (by former prosecutor Linda Fairstein):

At about 9 p.m. April 19, 1989, a large group of young men gathered on the corner of 110th Street and Fifth Avenue for the purpose of robbing and beating innocent people in Central Park. There were more than 30 rioters, and the woman known as the “Central Park jogger,” Trisha Meili, was not their only victim. Eight others were attacked, including two men who were beaten so savagely that they required hospitalization for head injuries.

That a sociopath named Matias Reyes confessed in 2002 to the rape of Ms. Meili, and that the district attorney consequently vacated the charges against the five after they had served their sentences, has led some of these reporters and filmmakers to assume the prosecution had no basis on which to charge the five suspects in 1989.

Ms. DuVernay depicts suspects Yusef Salaam and Korey Wise being arrested on the street. In fact, two detectives went to the door of the Salaam apartment on the night of the 20th because both had been named by other rioters as attackers in multiple assaults.

Ms. DuVernay would have you believe the only evidence against the suspects was their allegedly forced confessions. That is not true. There is, for example, the African-American woman who testified at the trial—and again during the 2002 re-investigation—that when Korey Wise called her brother, he told her that he had held the jogger down and felt her breasts while others attacked her. There were blood stains and dirt on clothing of some of the five. And then there are the statements of more than a dozen of the other kids who participated in the park rampage. Although none of the others admitted joining in the rape of Trisha Meili, they admitted attacking male victims and a couple on a tandem bike, and each of them named some or all of the five as joining them.

Nor does the film note that Mr. Salaam took the stand at his trial, represented by a lawyer chosen and paid for by his mother, and testified that he had gone into the park carrying a 14-inch metal pipe—the same type of weapon that was used to bludgeon both a male schoolteacher and Ms. Meili. Mr. Reyes’s confession changed none of this. He admitted being the man whose DNA had been left in the jogger’s body and on her clothing, but the two juries that heard those facts knew the main assailant in the rape had not been caught. The five were charged as accomplices, as persons “acting in concert” with each other and with the then-unknown man who raped the jogger, not as those who actually performed the act. In their original confessions—later recanted—they admitted to grabbing her breasts and legs, and two of them admitted to climbing on top of her and simulating intercourse. Semen was found on the inside of their clothing, corroborating those confessions.

Mr. Reyes’s confession, DNA match and claim that he acted alone required that the rape charges against the five be vacated. I agreed with that decision, and still do. But the other charges, for crimes against other victims, should not have been vacated. Nothing Mr. Reyes said exonerated these five of those attacks. And there was certainly more than enough evidence to support those convictions of first-degree assault, robbery, riot and other charges.

In the world of the NYT (and Netflix), Yusef Salaam is “cleared”, “exonerated”, and “innocent”. As of 2019, by contrast, the Wall Street Journal characterized Mr. Salaam as at least guilty of “first-degree assault, robbery, riot and other charges”.

Where it gets interesting is the Wall Street Journal’s world of 2024. “Central Park Five Reunite to Denounce Trump” (WSJ, yesterday):

Five men who were wrongfully convicted as teenagers for a brutal attack on a jogger in Central Park took the stage …

Among the men was Yusef Salaam, who last year was elected to represent Harlem in the New York City Council. “He wanted us dead. Today, we are exonerated because the actual perpetrator confessed, and DNA proved it,” Salaam said.

The misalignment has been eliminated and Americans of all political persuasions can agree that Yusef Salaam was and is a model citizen who happened to be out for a mostly peaceful evening stroll (pipe in hand?) in Central Park on a night when nine people were attacked.

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NYT: Man of peace killed in Tehran by Israel

by philg

“A Top Hamas Leader Is Killed in Iran” (NYT):

Ismail Haniyeh, one of the most senior Hamas leaders, was assassinated in Iran, the country’s Revolutionary Guards Corps and Hamas said on Wednesday, a severe blow to the Palestinian group that threatens to engulf the region in further conflict.

Without this mostly peaceful man there could be “further conflict”, say the experts at the New York Times. If Ismail Haniyeh had lived there would be peace for our time.

The man was a “leader”. He was “a key figure in … negotiations” (i.e., a negotiator and certainly not someone we might expect to endorse violence). According to the New York Times, he was a nonviolent person killed by a violent nation.

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NYT: Being shot is part of a “narrative”

by philg

From the Newspaper of Record:

If getting shot is part of a “narrative” then “be the author of your own story” seems like either pretty good or truly terrible advice, depending on whether being shot is a required part of any narrative.

Separately, let’s have another look, courtesy of the New York Post, at the threat to a single human that overwhelmed the Biden administration’s $3 billion/year Secret Service:

Then recall that we are informed by the media that the same administration is more than qualified to tackle what it says is an “existential threat” to all humans.

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New York Times elite admits to having no better access to information than peasants have?

by philg

We’re supposed to follow the guidance of the New York Times because the people on their editorial board have better access to information than we do. We wear cloth face coverings as PPE against aerosol viruses if they tell us to because they have direct access to the Science. We vote for whomever the NYT recommends because they have direct personal contact with America’s top politicians. We buy Teslas because they tell us that they’ve done the analysis and concluded that a 4,750 lb. electric car will heal our planet while a 2,500 lb. gas-powered car will destroy it.

We’ve been getting guidance from the NYT for at least five years regarding Joe Biden, a man whom an immigrant physician friend, after reviewing what was available to the masses, characterized as a “senile puppet” back in 2020. Using their elite connections, the NYT found “a professor of psychology and neuroscience and the director of the Dynamic Memory Lab at the University of California, Davis” to tell peasants to ignore what they might be seeing in videos. “I’m a Neuroscientist. We’re Thinking About Biden’s Memory and Age in the Wrong Way.” (February 2024):

As an expert on memory, I can assure you that everyone forgets. … age in and of itself doesn’t indicate the presence of memory deficits that would affect an individual’s ability to perform in a demanding leadership role. … Many of the special counsel’s observations about Mr. Biden’s memory seem to fall in the category of forgetting, meaning that they are more indicative of a problem with finding the right information from memory than Forgetting. … Mr. Biden is the same age as Harrison Ford, Paul McCartney and Martin Scorsese. He’s also a bit younger than Jane Fonda (86) and a lot younger than the Berkshire Hathaway C.E.O., Warren Buffett (93). All these individuals are considered to be at the top of their professions, and yet I would not be surprised if they are more forgetful and absent-minded than when they were younger.

NYT reminded peasants again in March that age is an irrelevant number when you’re propped up by elite advisors… “The Overlooked Truths About Biden’s Age”:

The presidency isn’t a solo mission. Not even close. It’s a team effort, and the administration that a president puts together matters much, much more than his brawn or his brio. … But he’s not Atlas; he’s POTUS. And the president of the United States is only as good as the advisers around him, whose selection reflects presidential judgment, not stamina. … Yes, Trump is about three and a half years younger and often peppier than Biden. Biden is about 300 times saner and always more principled than Trump.

While I was traveling back to the U.S. from Portugal yesterday, the NYT’s Editorial Board published a radical about-face:

Based on their elite access, they had full confidence in Joe Biden until Thursday morning. After watching a TV show intended for peasants on Thursday evening, they’ve decided that their great leader should retire to a Memory Care unit. Doesn’t this undermine their claim to having better information than the masses? If they wanted to throw Genocide Joe under the bus, shouldn’t they had said that their withdrawal of support was based on private conversations with top officials who requested anonymity?

(The Wall Street Journal did this right. “Behind Closed Doors, Biden Shows Signs of Slipping” (June 4, 2024). Their journalists got behind doors that are closed to peasants, at least via interviews with the elite, and brought back the truth. Ergo, if you want to know what is really happening in the U.S. and elsewhere you need to keep paying for a WSJ subscription. You can’t just watch TV.)

Who would you all like to see as a replacement? My dream is Michael Avenatti with Hunter Biden as VP. “Avenatti’s actions on potential presidential run speak louder than his words” (CNN):

Michael Avenatti, the boisterous lawyer who has risen to national fame in recent months by publicly pestering Donald Trump, will continue his public flirtations with running for President in 2020 by headlining two more Democratic Party events this weekend, sources tell CNN.

Avenatti’s near constant presence at Democratic events over the last two weeks has caused some Democrats to reconsider their belief that the lawyer’s run is a publicity stunt aimed at annoying the President.

After each speech, he has been asked to speak at more Democratic functions. He will follow up that appearance on Sunday – after an early morning flight – by appearing at “Hillsborough County Democrat’s Summer Picnic” in New Hampshire, a crucial state for presidential contenders.

Avenatti has made two trips to Ohio in as many weeks, where he met with David Betras, the chairman of the Mahoning County Democratic Party, and had dinner with Rep. Tim Ryan, another possible 2020 Democratic contender who represents Youngstown.

“I think he is a phenomenal guy and I have gotten to know him a bit in the last week. We went to dinner last week, he was in Youngstown and I really like him,” Ryan told CNN after commending Avenatti’s work against Trump over the last few months.

So that’s a President that Democrats can love and follow. What about Hunter Biden as VP? Americans love recovery stories. See half of Hollywood films (The Lost Weekend (1945); Flight (2012)) plus tons of books (see Dave Pelzer, for example). Hunter Biden has already written a bestseller about his “years-long battle with drug and alcohol addiction” that was favorably reviewed in the New York Times as “ineffably sad and beautifully written” and it “tears the tabloid face off the story about an American family that has experienced the highest of highs and the lowest of lows” (i.e., if you don’t pay for a NYT subscription and buy the book you might be mislead by headlines from the Daily Mail suggesting that $millions were collected from China and Ukraine because of and for “the big guy”).

If I had to use a wish from an omnipotent being before choosing a dream Democrat line-up I would wish that the most-frequently-praised-by-Democrats American be resurrected and selected as the Democrat presidential nominee:

If I got a second wish and had to use it, I would wish that the Constitution be changed so that someone born outside of the U.S. could serve as President and that Palestinian leader Yahya Sinwar be selected as the Democrats’ VP candidate. A Floyd/Sinwar candidacy would encapsulate the dreams of Democrats who’ve taken to the streets since 2020.

Related:

I asked claude.ai to write a pitch:

Dear Supporter,
President Biden needs your help to continue fighting for our shared Democratic values. While some have raised questions about the President’s age, what truly matters is his decades of experience, unwavering commitment to progressive policies, and the strong team he has assembled.
The role of President is about leadership, vision, and surrounding oneself with capable advisors – not about personal cognitive ability alone. President Biden has demonstrated he can effectively delegate and lean on the expertise of his administration to govern.
Your donation will help ensure we can continue pursuing vital priorities like combating climate change, protecting reproductive rights, and expanding access to healthcare. Every contribution, no matter the size, makes a difference.
Stand with President Biden and donate today to keep moving America forward.

I think Anthropic AI did about as well as a human fundraiser! Note that Americans love to hear promises to “fight” from their politicians and this ends up in the first sentence.

Those closest to Joe Biden say that he’s the smartest person in the room. Here’s the open border guy:

Update, July 2: the New York Times NOW tells us that they have inside information and Biden is on a mental decline. “Biden’s Lapses Are Increasingly Common, According to Some of Those in the Room” (they’re in the room with the President of the U.S. and don’t have to rely on watching TV as the rest of us do):

People who have spent time with President Biden over the last few months or so said the lapses appear to have grown more frequent, more pronounced and, after Thursday’s debate, more worrisome.

In the weeks and months before President Biden’s politically devastating performance on the debate stage in Atlanta, several current and former officials and others who encountered him behind closed doors noticed that he increasingly appeared confused or listless, or would lose the thread of conversations.

The most serious lapse:

On June 10, he appeared to freeze up at an early celebration of the Juneteenth holiday.

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New York Times: Cash-strapped consumers get “relief” via higher prices

by philg

“Inflation Moderated Slightly in April, Offering Some Relief for Consumers” (NYT, May 15):

The Consumer Price Index climbed 3.4 percent in April from a year earlier, down from 3.5 percent in March, the Labor Department said on Wednesday. The “core” index — which strips out volatile food and fuel prices in order to give a sense of the underlying trend — rose 3.6 percent last month, down from 3.8 percent a month earlier. It was the lowest annual increase in core inflation since early 2021.

The report followed three straight months of uncomfortably rapid price increases that rattled investors and worried policymakers at the Federal Reserve. Economists cautioned that one month of encouraging data was far from enough to put those worries to rest. But they said that the data should ease concerns, at least for now, that inflation is re-accelerating.

If you couldn’t afford stuff previously, therefore, you’ll be “relieved” to learn that prices are yet higher.

Even more confidence-inspiring… an 81-year-old who never took an economics class is tackling what non-NYT readers might perceive as a problem:

“I know many families are struggling, and that even though we’ve made progress we have a lot more to do,” Mr. Biden said in a statement released by the White House. He called bringing down inflation his “top economic priority.”

If you don’t like higher prices, it’s “progress” when prices are higher every month. Maybe it doesn’t matter that the president hasn’t taken economics because he/she/ze/they is advised by expert economists? Let’s look at the chair of Joe Biden’s Council of Economic Advisors:

Bernstein stated he grew up in a “musical family” and aspired to be a professional musician as a young person. Bernstein graduated with a bachelor’s degree in music from the Manhattan School of Music where he studied double bass with Orin O’Brien. Throughout the ’80s, Bernstein was a mainstay on the jazz scene in NYC.

He also earned a Master of Social Work from Hunter College as well as a DSW in social welfare from Columbia University’s school of social work

(He’s so old that he could get to class at Columbia without pushing through a thicket of tents and Palestinian flags!)

The NYT deceptively charts CPI since 1965 without noting that the definition has changed dramatically over this period. The reader is left with the impression that things were far worse during the Jimmy Carter “malaise years”:

Larry Summers and friends, though, show us what the chart would look if you simply undid the big change from 1983 to use a fictitious rent measure rather than actual housing costs. In fact, Bidenflation is roughly comparable in intensity to the inflation that Americans suffered as a consequence of the Kennedy/Johnson expansions of the welfare state and the Kennedy/Johnson decisions to enter the Vietnam War (Carter gets blamed for this, but the seeds were sown in the 1960s).

Mostly I find the above fascinating as an example of journalism that purports to be neutral and skeptical yet in fact is primarily propaganda about the great job that our rulers are doing.

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The fraud in GDP growth statistics continues

by philg

New York Times, today:

The U.S. economy remained resilient early this year, with a strong job market fueling robust consumer spending. The trouble is that inflation was resilient, too.

Gross domestic product, adjusted for inflation, increased at a 1.6 percent annual rate in the first three months of the year, the Commerce Department said on Thursday. That was down sharply from the 3.4 percent growth rate at the end of 2023 and fell well short of forecasters’ expectations.

The word “population” doesn’t occur in the article, though it is critically important. If the population is growing at a 1.7 percent annual rate, for example, Americans are currently on track to become poorer on a per capita basis.

How much did the population grow? It’s almost impossible to say because our population growth is driven by undocumented migration and the error bars on estimates are huge (see “Yale Study Finds Twice as Many Undocumented Immigrants as Previous Estimates”).

Separately, the GDP of Harvard Square is growing. An “essential” marijuana retailer seems to have opened up on Church Street. Photos from this evening:

It’s also a great time to be a tent retailer. The “Free Palestine” encampment in Harvard Yard, view from outside Harvard’s police-guarded border wall:

Here are the stickers that supporters of Hamas/UNRWA/Palestinian Islamic Jihad have added to Harvard’s “the Yard is closed” signs:

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Why did NPR hire a white person as its new CEO?

by philg

Katherine Maher, the former head of Wikipedia and recently hired CEO of state-sponsored NPR, has been in the news lately. Christopher Rufo has been highlighting her years of progressive-themed tweets. This one is my favorite:

(It’s actually a prompt of exclusion since the password does not include “Ze”)

What I can’t figure out is why NPR hired this white native-born 40-year-old. Here’s the NPR diversity policy:

If diversity is their core value, as they say, why couldn’t they find a CEO who fits into more corners of the “big tent” that they’ve identified? A Black gay transgender poor religious old disabled conservative undocumented immigrant, for example. And why did she take the job? She says that she wants to help sex workers, Black and brown people, Muslims, “LGBTQ+ folks”, et al. Shouldn’t she have rejected the offer and told NPR to hire someone who fit into one of those categories?

Some more tweets from the head of the taxpayer-funded radio network:

(It’s a “man’s world”, but someone with only a bachelor’s degree was able to get the top jobs at Wikipedia and NPR without identifying as a “man”?)

Don’t have kids, but invite 100 million migrants and their kids into a high-carbon society from their low-carbon societies? Hearing about the possibility that immigrants destroyed the natives (Anglo-Saxons moving into present-day Britain) makes her more confident that open borders are the correct choice for current Americans:

In case the original of my favorite tweet goes into a memory hole:

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