PAGING SCOTT MOE: Quebec can unilaterally modify part of the Canadian Constitution, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Tuesday.
h/t Lev
Comrade! Comrade! Comrade!
That the Kremlin had taken over American political institutions through its blackmail control of former President Donald Trump was a media conspiracy theory as pervasive as it was deranged. This once-exciting script was excavated from the CIA’s Cold War basement, dusted off by their operatives, and then kicked off by the intelligence community’s purposeful dissemination of the now-debunked Steele Dossier. And once this fairy tale was launched, there were seemingly no limits on the depths to which media figures would sink to promote it.
Journalists published best-selling books and column after column hyping this melodrama of international intrigue. In what was just one of many low points, MSNBC’s host Chris Hayes earnestly interviewed New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait about the latter’s 2018 cover story speculating that Trump may have been groomed as a Russian intelligence asset since 1987. “Unlikely but possible” declared the on-screen cable graphic as Hayes spoke, summarizing the media’s Trump-era renunciation of all standards of rationality and evidence for disseminating unhinged conspiracies to their audience, at great profit for themselves but great harm to everything and everyone else.
[…]Just imagine what would be happening right now if it were Trump, rather than Biden, who just handed Putin his underwater natural gas pipeline just days after Russian hackers allegedly caused serious gas shortages in the U.S. Jingoistic op-eds would fill the pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post warning of Kremlin control of the U.S.; CNN and MSNBC would convene panel after panel of their former FBI and CIA operatives to accuse Trump of treason for subordinating U.S. interests to Russian interests; Rachel Maddow would be on the verge of righteous and indignant tears as she devoted her 20-minute monologue to decrying the tragedy that we were all living under Putin’s rule; and Nancy Pelosi would be holding a press conference to spread more innuendo about Putin’s blackmail control over Trump while demanding a DOJ investigation.
Biden: Russia Can Have a New Pipeline, but America Can’t
Covid Quiz Time!
SDA readers are smarter than the average bear but how will they do in Tom Woods new covid quiz? Masks? Lockdowns? State vs State? How did the experts do? Test your knowledge
Then share it with all your lefty friends and see how they do.
Wood’s free eBook Covid Charts that CNN forgot is also excellent. It’s available at the same link.
May 19, 2021: Reader Tips
What Really Happened at the Oroville Dam Spillway?
Thread’s open for tips.
Butt Cheeks Clenched in Arizona
Election auditors found all the deleted files.
Another Fauci Flip-Flop
So, is Rand Paul getting an apology?Let’s compare!
They Wouldn’t Do That…
White Men Need Not Apply
The racist policies of Wilfrid Laurier University continue unabated. Of course it’s all spun in a positive, progressive manner but others beg to disagree:
Reserving academic positions for members of specific racial, ethnic, cultural or other groups is a violation of the merit principle, the principle that academic decisions should be made on academic grounds only. By requiring candidates for academic appointments to possess certain nonacademic characteristics, Wilfrid Laurier will disadvantage promising scholars for no reason related to their academic accomplishments, abilities or promise. Declining to consider on their academic merits all interested and qualified scholars cannot be a sound way to build an excellent faculty.
Taking group membership into account when hiring can have the effect of harming individual scholars because others may see them in stereotypical ways and wrongly undervalue their work. In addition, because scholars want to be valued for the quality of their research, their teaching, and their contributions to intellectual life rather than for their racial or other identity, having them specify their colour or heritage forces them to suppress their dignity or forgo applying. Finally, recruitment based on a non-academic criterion can undermine respect for the ideal of dispassionate inquiry, as summoning people by race or heritage tends to confuse scholarship with advocacy and to create consensus around dogma.
“A Psychological Nudge”
Sounds almost benign doesn’t it? Much better than weaponizing behavioral psychology at any rate.
Liberal Spyware
Hey kids we’ve got a cool new app to help keep you safe! Don’t worry it’s perfectly secure and totally safe and we will like totally respect your privacy.
It’s Probably Nothing
Via JoNova: “Nobody saw the KP Index hitting 7. […] when I say nobody, I mean nobody predicted this: not NASA, NOAA, ESA or IPS in Australia.”
h/t Adrian
Team Trudeau Training
Meanwhile Over In Switzerland
You’ll need to use something like google translate for this one.
A criminal complaint has been filed against Martin Ackermann, the head of the Swiss National Covid-19 Science Task Force and “possibly other parties involved”
The plaintiffs accuse Martin Ackermann of the following crimes, among others:Repeated publication of implausible horror prognoses regarding the occupancy of the intensive care beds, with the aim of terrifying the public and implementing more stringent measures. Repeated and systematic manipulation of past ICU bed data, presumably with the aim of making the current situation appear more dramatic. False statements about hospitalizations and deaths. On the occasion of the Federal Council’s press conference on October 27, 2020, Martin Ackermann said of the current situation: “Switzerland has more hospitalizations and deaths per day than in mid-March. And the numbers keep increasing. ” The statement was wrong at this point. However, the numbers were later corrected upwards due to late registrations (which were debatable in themselves). Constantly changing reasons for tightening or maintaining the measures, depending on which indicator fits best into the desired narrative.
That would never happen here.
The Sound Of Settled Science
Did climate change cause societies to collapse? New research upends the old story.
A report recently published in the journal Nature argues that an obsession with catastrophe has driven much of the research into how societies responded to a shifting climate throughout history. That has resulted in a skewed view of the past that feeds a pessimistic view about our ability to respond to the crisis we face today.
“It would be rare that a society as a whole just kind of collapsed in the face of climate change,” said Dagomar Degroot, an environmental historian at Georgetown University and the lead author of the paper. The typical stories of environmentally-driven collapse that you might have heard about Easter Island or the Mayan civilization? “All those stories need to be retold, absolutely,” he said.
Details? You don’t need No Stinkin’ Details
VANCOUVER—Governments across Canada have been withholding COVID-19 data in an exercise of “paternalistic” information-hoarding likely meant to regulate public reaction to the pandemic, says an access-to-information advocate.
Sean Holman, an access to information expert and journalism professor at Mount Royal University in Calgary, said uproar in British Columbia Friday over revelations the provincial government was only releasing a fraction of its COVID-19 data to the public is just one example of such secrecy.
Unthinkable Reciprocation
On the kinds of “microaggressions” that one really mustn’t mention:
Curiously, the terms “black microaggressions” and “microaggressions by black people” yield few pertinent Google results and the phenomenon of, say, overtly contemptuous teeth-sucking, a common enough occurrence in some classrooms, is not, it seems, widely discussed. Except, of course, when exalted as a great accomplishment.
“And we’re not going to apologize for it.”
Over the weekend, America cheered as the Israelis flattened the building housing the Associated Press in Gaza. This led to widespread laughter and high-fives among American patriots. And we were even happier when we later found out that the same high-rise had also housed some Hamas military HQs.
American journalists informed us this was terrible, but they never quite explained why. After all, the Gaza branch of the media is not a bunch of Middle Eastern Woodwards and Bernsteins digging up the truth and not caring whose toes they step on. They are dedicated Palestinian propaganda transcriptionists who play a central role in facilitating the terrorists’ information operations against the only free country in the region. They chose a side, and it was the other one. So, don’t ask us to care when they get treated like it.
May 18, 2021: Reader Tips
Help me out, here.
Normality?
Vegas playoff hockey! pic.twitter.com/yFAekXnCOw
— gary lawless (@garylawless) May 16, 2021
The Few. The Proud. The Mommies.
More.