Category: Journalism

Manufacturing Discontent

by philg

A California Democrat posted “Holocaust book, Maya Angelou’s autobiography among nearly 400 items pulled from Naval Academy library in DEI purge” (CBS) to a group as an example of an outrage committed by Donald Trump. His introduction to this article: “Ahhhh…shades of the Mao Tse Tung-led purge by the Chinese Communist Party of books they didn’t like during the “cultural revolution”…”. From CBS:

Books on the Holocaust, histories of feminism, civil rights and racism, and Maya Angelou’s famous autobiography, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” were among the nearly 400 volumes removed from the U.S. Naval Academy’s library this week after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s office ordered the school to get rid of ones that promote diversity, equity and inclusion. … In addition to Angelou’s award-winning tome, the list includes “Memorializing the Holocaust,” which deals with Holocaust memorials..

Some Jewish Democrats in the group agreed with him that these book removals were an outrage on a similar scale to what happened in China during the Cultural Revolution.

Let’s have a look at the very first book of the headline, Memorializing the Holocaust. According to Amazon, the full title includes the word “Gender“, a word that appears 15 times on the selling page, and the book is properly categorized in “General Gender Studies”. The author is “Professor of Sociology and Women and Gender Studies”. Here’s the Amazon description:

How do collective memories of histories of violence and trauma in war and genocide come to be created? Janet Jacobs offers new understandings of this crucial issue in her examination of the representation of gender in the memorial culture of Holocaust monuments and museums, from synagogue memorials and other historical places of Jewish life, to the geographies of Auschwitz, Majdanek and Ravensbruck. Jacobs travelled to Holocaust sites across Europe to explore representations of women. She reveals how these memorial cultures construct masculinity and femininity, as well as the Holocaust’s effect on stereotyping on grounds of race or gender. She also uncovers the wider ways in which images of violence against women have become universal symbols of mass trauma and genocide. This feminist analysis of Holocaust memorialization brings together gender and collective memory with the geographies of genocide to fill a significant gap in our understanding of genocide and national remembrance.

The book is so important to our wider culture and has touched its readers so deeply that, after 15 years on Amazon, it has garnered exactly zero reviews. (Maybe it is required reading in some college-level gender studies courses? The book is “57,829 in Books” for sales, much higher than Queer Black Dance, featured in an independent bookstore.)

I find the CBS article and the reaction to it interesting because they show how easily discontent can be manufactured by our media. Nobody in the group, other than me, bothered to find out whether the “Holocaust book” was about the Holocaust. All of the Democrats accepted CBS’s headline characterization of the book and reflexively condemned Trump and Hegseth.

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What we’re losing as we say goodbye to Joe Biden

by philg

From the New York Times, immediately before the election, “Biden Wanted to Fix Immigration, but Leaves Behind a System That Is Still Broken”:

President Biden’s legacy will largely be limited to his success in lowering border crossings. But his approach has drawn criticism, and some of his actions have moved the problem deeper into the country.

Today we can say goodbye to Joe Biden, the president who, according to the fair- and tough-minded journalists of the New York Times, was responsible for “lowering border crossings” (i.e., reducing undocumented migration compared to previous administrations). It isn’t clear why this is a “legacy” of which to be proud since we are reminded by the NYT that low-skill immigrants make us all better off. Why is it “success” to lower border crossing when diversity and immigration are our strength?

Government data via Newsweek:

Note that the number of encounters appears to have fallen from 2023 to 2024 in the chart below, but that may be because the 2024 bar is for only part of the year (through July 2024).

A screen shot of the above article:

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Spontaneous combustion for Spinal Tap drummers and Tesla Cybertrucks

by philg

The New York Times right now:

According to the Newspaper of Record (TM), the Cybertruck spontaneously combusted like a Spinal Tap drummer.

(Wikipedia says “the vehicle was discovered to be filled with firework materials and gas canisters” and, therefore, the incident could have been equally described as “a car bomb explosion”.)

In other news regarding attacks by car, the President of the U.S. says, regarding an attack by Shamsud-Din Jabbar in a rented truck on which he had mounted an ISIS flag, “The FBI is taking the lead in the investigation and is investigating this incident as an act of terrorism“:

The ISIS flag wasn’t a sufficient clue?

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The New York Times says that low-skill migrants generate homelessness for the native-born

by philg

Without noting that this contradicts everything that they’ve been telling Americans for 20 years, the New York Times suddenly says that bringing in welfare-dependent low-skill migrants exacerbates homelessness among native-born Americans (full article):

What will happen next in this New Age of Wonders? Will the NYT tell us that buying an electric car won’t reduce CO2 emissions from India and China? That Kamala Harris’s laughter/joy in situations that appeared to call for neither was not a sign of hypercompetence and fitness for high office but instead a sign of dementia, consistent with “Observing conversational laughter in frontotemporal dementia” (J Neurol Neurosurg Psychiatry; 2017)?

Speaking of immigration and Indians, here’s a highly Deplorable tweet on the subject of reducing H-1B “nonimmigrant” visas (that somehow produce a huge number of permanent immigrants to the U.S.):

also

Elon Musk now says that he wants only the top 0.1% of engineering talent as H-1B-style migrants (tweet). But how could this be implemented with the bureaucrats that we have? What stops 100 percent of potential migrants from writing down on their applications that they scored in the top 0.1% of an exam that Americans have no way to verify?

Related:

  • “PhD dropout to OnlyFans model” (YouTube video from Zara Dar, holder of a Master’s in Computer Science from University of Texas-Austin; she’ll need to be replaced in the tech workforce)
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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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