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There is no doubt that Paul Pelosi, husband of Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the US House of Representatives, has been the victim of a vicious assault. There is no doubt that the person who carried out this attack was David DePape. There is widespread doubt about many other aspects of the story. The most common theory is that far from breaking into to the Pelosi residence as an assassin, DePape was invited in as a male prostitute, only for the two men to quarrel over payment or drugs. I will not rehash the arguments put forward in support of this theory, which are available to be read all over the internet. I do wish to stress that if all or any of this is true, it in no way excuses the crime. It would, however, make it a different type of crime from the one the media say it is.
The media would have you believe that these doubts come only from mad conspiracy theorists. They are not helping their case by silently changing details of their own reporting.
Look at these screenshots of two Politico accounts of this story, presented side by side by Stephen L. Miller under the apt caption “Seriously WTF”.
The screenshot on the right takes you to a Politico story about the attack on Paul Pelosi written by Jeremy B. White and Nicholas Wu. I was familiar with this version because I had read it myself a few hours earlier. The title is “Police offer new details in Paul Pelosi assault” and the dateline (in American format) is given as 10/28/2022 09:46 PM EDT. The URL is https://www.politico.com/news/2022/10/28/police-pelosi-attack-intentional-00064098. Do I labour the point? That’s because I think this version of the story will disappear soon. Read it while you can. It says:
→ Continue reading: The attacks on Paul Pelosi and Gabby Giffords: some parallels
“The bird is freed”, says Elon Musk after buying Twitter.
“In Europe, the bird will fly by our 🇪🇺 rules”, replies Thierry Breton, the EU Commissioner for Internal Market.
In New York Times, John Leland asks,
Real-world ethics question: In a well-used city park, a man with a history of erratic behavior attacks a dog and its owner with a stick; five days later, the dog dies. The man is Black, the dog owner white; the adjoining neighborhood is famously progressive, often critical of the police and jail system. At the same time, crime is up in the neighborhood, with attacks by emotionally disturbed people around the city putting some residents on edge.
In a dog-loving, progressive enclave, where pushing law and order can clash with calls for social justice, what’s the right thing to do? How do you protect the public without furthering injustice against this man?
The question is not theoretical. On August 3rd, Jessica Chrustic and her dog Moose were attacked in Prospect Park, Brooklyn by a homeless man.
According to Ms. Chrustic, he started yelling about immigrants taking over the park,
Had he not been black, that detail would have answered Mr Leland’s question in short order.
then grabbed a bottle of what she later concluded was urine and sloshed it at her and her dog. She tried to run away, but Moose, her 80-pound golden retriever mix, was straining toward the man, trying to protect her.
The man started swinging the stick, she said. One blow hit her, not seriously. Another connected solidly with the dog’s snout. Mary Rowland, 56, a hospital manager who was walking her dog nearby, said she heard the crack of wood on bone and came running toward them, screaming at the man to get away.
The man fled, but the next weekend, Moose developed sepsis from a perforated intestine. Emergency surgery was not enough to save him.
What was done about this unprovoked attack on a woman and her dog? Nothing.
She was especially frustrated that the man, who was well known to people in the park, had not been arrested. “You have a person who is walking around the park who is violent and needs to be removed,” she said. “He’s known by the community. It’s disheartening.”
It was a random incident that might once have been discussed by a group of dog owners. But now it had a forum for a much wider community, with arguments about policing, vigilantism, homelessness, mental health care and progressive obstinacy all feeding into a conversation that evolved beyond the crime that set it off.
“It’s complicated,” said S. Matthew Liao, a professor of bioethics, philosophy and public health at New York University. “It’s a conflict of values, between wanting security and social justice. Everybody has a responsibility in some ways.
All together now… WE ARE ALL GUILTY! Dr Heinz Kiosk has been reborn, but not as funny this time.
I disagree with Professor Liao. It is not complicated at all.
Regarding Mr Leland’s question, “In a dog-loving, progressive enclave, where pushing law and order can clash with calls for social justice, what’s the right thing to do?”, Suzy Weiss of the New York Post described what some of the residents of this dog-loving, progressive enclave did do: “Bizarre meeting of Park Slopers over how to handle murdered pooch”.
I have written here about the #GamerGate phenomenon before, which was a series of rolling online flash mobs, events and activist commentary mostly doing its thing circa 2014-16. This was kicked off by something specific but quickly evolved into a far wider reaching grassroots pushback against rampant corruption, collusion and ever more woke politicisation in games ‘journalism’ and indeed games themselves.
Naturally the gaming press harrumphed with indignation, howling that GamerGater was an unconscionable harassment campaign; its largely nameless supporters all racist/sexist/homophobic. And much to their shock it didn’t work. GamerGaters ridiculed their evolving official narratives. And to the PR wonks working for MSM publications and their assorted vassals, none of it made any sense, which is why they still make sure the preposterous Wikipedia entry conforms to the official narratives (i.e. very little relation to reality). Too bad guys, you can’t bomb a hashtag.
GamerGate was something that drove (and still drives) many people insane, living rent free in their heads for years. Even now, the mere sight of GamerGate mascot Vivian James (video games, geddit?) can cause hilarity and rage in certain people.
Fast forward to 2022 and behold #NAFO: the North Atlantic Fellas Organisation.
And who are ‘the fellas’? A large and growing online pack of attack dogs countering, dare I say smothering, official Russian troll factory output, as well as other pro-Kremlin talking heads online. And their mascots are daft cartoon dogs (variations of a Shiba Inu to be precise). If journalistic collusion was a constant target of #GamerGate, the Russian troll farms are the modern analogy to that, constantly targeted and smothered by NAFO posting either pro-Ukrainian counter-narratives or just ridiculing or flagging up pro-Russian ones.
Many people, particularly those operating within institutions, don’t understand #NAFO for same reason PR departments of various video games companies & press outlets didn’t (and still don’t) understand #GamerGate.
Is #NAFO engaged in ‘information warfare‘? Absolutely. They even get a shout out from the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence. But they are not managed out of an office in Langley, Virginia nor by some adjunct of the Ukrainian intelligence services. #NAFO is a hashtag, a phenomena, it isn’t “run” by anyone, because it doesn’t need to be. Like GamerGate, NAFO is a confluence of the motivated willing in every timezone on the planet.
And just as GamerGate had a single original trigger, which was then largely forgotten as the ‘movement’ grew and started attacking larger more juicy prey, NAFO started as a fund raising effort for the Georgian Legion (a now battalion sized unit of about 600 within the Ukrainian army made up mostly of Georgian volunteers). At blinding speed, NAFO rapidly morphed into a wider distributed online effort supporting Ukraine in the “information space”.
NAFO… daft, puerile, bonkers, pervasive. But it works.
A retired and now ennobled supreme court judge writes in the Times that the decisions of the government during a crisis were wise and good and that if, perchance, any slight errors were made, fear not, lessons will be learned.
Bzzt. Click. System error. Commence program reset.
A retired and now ennobled supreme court judge – Lord Sumption – writes in the Times that “Little by little the truth of lockdown is being admitted: it was a disaster”.
In a remarkably candid interview with The Spectator, Rishi Sunak has blown the gaff on the sheer superficiality of the decision-making process of which he was himself part. The fundamental rule of good government is not to make radical decisions without understanding the likely consequences. It seems obvious. Yet it is at that most basic level that the Johnson government failed. The tragedy is that this is only now being acknowledged.
Sunak makes three main points. First, the scientific advice was more equivocal and inconsistent than the government let on. Some of it was based on questionable premises that were never properly scrutinised. Some of it fell apart as soon it was challenged from outside the groupthink of the Sage advisory body. Second, to build support, the government stoked fear, embarking on a manipulative advertising campaign and endorsing extravagant graphics pointing to an uncontrolled rise in mortality if we were not locked down. Third, the government not only ignored the catastrophic collateral damage done by the lockdown but actively discouraged discussion of it, both in government and in its public messaging.
Lockdown was a policy conceived in the early days by China and the World Health Organisation as a way of suppressing the virus altogether (so-called zero Covid). The WHO quickly abandoned this unrealistic ambition. But European countries, except Sweden, eagerly embraced lockdown, ripping up a decade of pandemic planning that had been based on concentrating help on vulnerable groups and avoiding coercion.
At first Britain stood up against the stampede. Then Professor Neil Ferguson’s team at Imperial College London published its notorious “Report 9”. Sunak confirms that this was what panicked ministers into a measure that the scientists had previously rejected. If No 10 had studied the assumptions underlying it, it might have been less impressed. Report 9 assumed that in the absence of a lockdown people would do nothing whatever to protect themselves. This was contrary to all experience of human behaviour as well as to data available at the time, which showed that people were voluntarily reducing contacts well before the lockdown was announced.
I find myself in the odd position of being slightly more in sympathy with the government than is a former supreme court judge. Frightened men make mistakes. I also find myself slightly more in sympathy with Rishi Sunak than I was yesterday. However, I have to ask why he did not voice his doubts at the time.
Journalism is something you do, not something you are.
– Glenn Reynolds
‘End Of Quote, Repeat The Line’: Biden Reads Teleprompter Instructions Out Loud During Speech
With Joe more voicemail than man and Boris only just clinging to the wreckage, at least the Anglosphere is demonstrating that it can get by without anyone in charge. Though we have much to learn before we can challenge the true masters of the art of doing without a government.
Politico on Twitter said,
Clarence Thomas claimed in a dissenting opinion that Covid vaccines are derived from the cells of “aborted children.”
No Covid vaccines in the U.S. contain the cells of aborted fetuses.
2,061 Retweets. 1,537 Quote Tweets. 5,676 Likes. Dozens of sneering replies.
And two egregious falsehoods in one tweet.
As Egon Alter (@AlterEgon75) put it in their reply,
This is a gross mischaracterization of Thomas’ words.
HE is not making the claim, the plaintiffs in the case are.
And he said they object because aborted fetus cells were used in the development of the vaccine, which your reporting verifies, not that the vaccine contains them.
UPDATE:
You can see a screenshot of Justice Thomas’s exact words in this tweet from AGHamilton29. Thomas said,
They object on religious grounds to all available COVID-19 vaccines because they were developed using cell lines derived from aborted children.
Firstly, note that he is paraphrasing the opinion of the petitioners, not giving his own opinion. Secondly, note that the petitioners themselves did not claim that the vaccines were made from aborted foetuses, they claim that foetal cells were used in the development process, which they were. As one would expect from a judge, Thomas has noted this crucial distinction.
Again via the estimable AGHamilton29, I see that it was not just Politico spreading this false story.
Axios: Clarence Thomas suggests COVID vaccines are made with “aborted children”
NBC News: Justice Thomas cites debunked claim that Covid vaccines are made with cells from ‘aborted children’
Of course, once the fake news seed is sown, it sprouts up everywhere.
The Daily Mail: Clarence Thomas cites debunked claim that Covid vaccines are created with cells of ‘aborted children’ in dissent on SCOTUS decision upholding New York state’s vaccine mandate for healthcare workers
The Independent: Clarence Thomas wrongly suggests ‘aborted children’ cells are used in Covid vaccines
SECOND UPDATE: The Politico tweet has now been disappeared, and the story to which it linked corrected. It is now mostly accurate and completely pointless, a breathless account of a Supreme Court judge doing a normal part of his job.
Julian Assange is on the verge (as he has been for ten years, but this time for real) of being extradited from the UK to the US. The question I ask is, has he done anything wrong?
If it were the case that he had supplied information that would have been useful to a hostile power then I would say hang the bastard. But that is not what the US government is accusing him of. The accusation is that he helped to steal the information. Now, if someone steals my stuff, I want them to have their hands cut off. Along with a few other appendages. But Assange “stole” information not stuff. And remember the US government is not claiming that that information would have been useful to a foreign power.
Which puts a rather different gloss on things. US government information is – if we are to take the US government’s own position seriously – owned by the US people. They have every right to see it. More or less. As well as military secrets there may be commercial contracts which – possibly – they don’t want to disclose. For instance, one of my frustrations in the UK was that you couldn’t inspect the contract of a Train Operating Company because it was deemed to be “commercially confidential”. Whatever, it doesn’t apply in this case.
So, it would appear that all Assange has done is to supply the US population with something it already owned and had every right to have.
Have I got that right?
“Top Biden aide prods big tech to crack down on climate change misinformation”, Axios reports.
Gina McCarthy, President Biden’s top domestic climate adviser, said tech companies should do more to prevent the spread of inaccurate information about climate change and clean energy.
Driving the news: “The tech companies have to stop allowing specific individuals over and over again to spread disinformation,” she told Axios’ Alexi McCammond at a virtual event that aired Thursday.
“We need the tech companies to really jump in,” McCarthy said.
Who is “we”?
And what the [fossil fuel] industry is now doing is seeding, basically, doubt about the costs associated with that and whether they work or not.”
Expressing doubt about the cost of a proposed government measure, and whether it will actually work as promised? How dare they! Such dangerous speculation cannot be allowed.
Hat tip: Iain Murray.
“Protect women from chilling effect of misogyny, Ofcom urges tech firms”, the Times reports:
Ofcom has told social media companies to stamp out misogyny, arguing that it is having a “chilling effect” on women’s freedom of expression online.
Emphasis added.
The media regulator, which is preparing to police tech firms under powers granted by the Online Safety Bill, said that companies have a duty to protect women from harmful content.
Ofcom spoke to 6,000 people for its Online Nation study, and found that over the past month women were more likely than men to have seen content that “objectifies, demeans or otherwise negatively portrays” their gender.
Of the women surveyed, 43 per cent said they were likely to be distressed by harmful content, compared with 33 per cent of men. Some 60 per cent of women highlighted trolling as being particularly concerning, whereas only 25 per cent of men were anxious about online abuse.
Ofcom said that women spent more time online than men, but felt less able to express an opinion or be themselves on social media platforms.
The Guardian has acknowledged there might be an elephant a mule in the room.
Trump’s ‘big lie’ hits cinemas: the film claiming to investigate voter fraud
2000 Mules has been resoundingly debunked by factcheckers, but the film has earned praise from Trump and other Republicans
Not having seen 2000 Mules, I will offer no opinion on how convincing it is. But I do have some advice for the Guardian, and other media outlets too, and it is advice that would be exactly the same whether the claims made in Dinesh D’Souza’s film turn out to be right or wrong. If you genuinely want the truth to come out, allow comments.
The Guardian‘s opinion section used to be called Comment Is Free, taken from the words of C.P. Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian from 1872 until 1929, “Facts are sacred but comment is free”. CiF was great. Although the majority of the commenters were left wing, they were kept on their toes by a strong minority who were not. Equally important, the Guardian‘s writers were kept on their toes. A badly researched or tendentious article would not go unchallenged. For instance, see the comments to this article about the George Zimmerman case. After she became the paper’s first female editor, Katharine Viner replaced “Comment is Free” by an initiative called “The Web We Want”. The web she wanted was one in which comment was no longer free: ever since then, comments have been disallowed on most articles, especially those where the response was likely to be hostile to the Guardian worldview.
Their gaff, their rules. But didn’t Ms Viner’s birthing parent ever tell her that what we want is not always good for us? As I argued in a post called “It pays to brief your own side properly”,
The mainstream media has passed a milestone in its decline to irrelevance when someone who wants to successfully argue for the same things the MSM argues for must use other sources besides the MSM.
Since CiF became TWwW in April 2016 the repose of the Guardian-reading classes has been disturbed by some unpleasant shocks. Among them were Brexit, the election of Donald Trump in the US, and, ten days after I wrote the post on briefing your own side properly, the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse. A reader in 2021 who relied on the Guardian alone would have had no idea that was coming. A reader in 2013 who kept half an eye on the below-the-line comments to stories like this and this would have certainly known that George Zimmerman’s acquittal was a strong possibility.
So? No one asked me to be the guardian of Guardian readers from nasty surprises. Maybe they prefer the curtains of their mansion drawn, even if that does mean that trouble in the street only becomes apparent when a brick comes through the window. But that is to assume the worst of them. Judging from the number who took part in the arguments back when comment was free, there were plenty who, quaint though it might seem, wanted to know the truth. And it seems to me that vigorous, uncensored argument between people from all political tribes would be an excellent tool in itself to settle the truth or falsehood of the claims made in 2000 Mules. What’s this about the accuracy of geolocation data? The Guardian has an educated readership. Ask the audience.
Sadly, saying that a factchecker working for the Associated Press has deemed the documentary to have “gaping holes” does not impress as much as it once did. Here is what the Associated Press said in 2020 about Hunter Biden’s laptop: “AP Explains: Trump seizes on dubious Biden-Ukraine story”:
ARE THE NEW EMAILS AUTHENTIC?
The actual origins of the emails are unclear. And disinformation experts say there are multiple red flags that raise doubts about their authenticity, including questions about whether the laptop actually belongs to Hunter Biden, said Nina Jankowicz, a fellow at the nonpartisan Wilson Center in Washington.
Nina Jankowicz? That name sounds familiar. Well, the AP did get it right when their fact-checkers called her a “disinformation expert”.
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