In this new Jamie Glazov Moment, Jamie focuses on Why is Maoist Van Jones on CNN?, asking: Why exactly does a communist who heroizes a mass murderer get to be a star on a major cable news network?http://jamieglazov.com/2016/12/10/jamie-glazov-moment-why-is-maoist-van-jones-on-cnn-2/ Don’t miss it! And make sure to watch Jamie discuss Soledad O’Brien’s Disgrace on Castro, unveiling the […]
Anyone who doubts that President-elect Donald Trump means business on slaying the “Green Blob” really needs to look at the guy he has just appointed to head the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt is a friend of the fossil fuel industry and an outspoken critic of the EPA’s activist agenda.
Though his academic degrees are in political science and law, Pruitt has been a vocal public denier of the overwhelming consensus of the world’s climate scientists that the Earth is warming and that man-made carbon emissions are to blame. In an opinion article published earlier this year by National Review, Pruitt suggested that the debate over global warming “is far from settled” and claimed “scientists continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind.”
Does Pruitt sound to you like the pick of a president-elect who is having second thoughts on his aggressive stance towards the environmental lobby?
Yet still some people are worried — for understandable reasons.
First, there were reports that Trump had softened his position on global warming: “Trump now believes that climate change is real,” claimed Mother Jones.
Next came the shocking news that Trump — encouraged by his eco-friendly daughter Ivanka — had sat down for a meeting with Al Gore, who claimed afterwards that they’d had an “extremely interesting conversation.”
Then Trump met with yet another green advocate, Leonardo DiCaprio, apparently to discuss “how to create millions of secure, American jobs in the construction and operation of commercial and residential clean, renewable energy generation.”
So what exactly is going on here?
In two words: fake news.
In Reports on Parole and Prison Discipline, the Gray Lady Does Disparate Impact BY AndrewC. McCarthy
Despite investing weeks of time in the production of this week’s lengthy reports decrying racism in the state of New York’s prison administration and parolesystem, the New York Times is unable to demonstrate that racism was the reason for the result in any specific case. You needn’t take my word for it. As the Times’ own investigative team puts it, “[I]t is not possible to know whether race is a factor in any particular parole decision.” That’s after scrutinizing thousands of them.
Nevertheless, in agitprop that barely pretends to be straight news reporting, the Gray Lady flatly accuses the state of systematically using race as the factor that determines which prisoners are detained and which are sprung from confinement. The endemic racism is apparently a secret even to the racists themselves. Drawing on vignettes that are comical in their revelations of incompetence and disinterest on the part of parole commissioners, the Times suggests that the commissioners barely know the race, or much else, about the inmates whose cases they decide. But why let that spoil a good narrative?
In this instance, the narrative is built on the social justice warrior’s favorite artifice: the “disparate impact” theory of discrimination. The idea, of course, is that even though it cannot be proved that racism occurred in any particular case, we can infer that race – and only race – is the dispositive factor if the aggregated outcomes are worse for one race than another. In the disparate impact scheme, two rules are observed at all times: (1) ignore the fact that racial discrimination is an abomination precisely because it is a conscious act, an operation of the mind that does not happen inadvertently; and (2) take as a given that our society is pervasively racist, such that it is irrelevant whether any single one of us harbors racial animus – especially those of us whose allegedly racist decision-making is being analyzed.
Since those are the operating assumptions, is it any wonder that the reader must wade through a full 23 paragraphs before finding the most salient bit of information in the Times’s parole story:
The Times did not have access to the full range of information the [parole] board took into account. This includes inmates’ time in county jail, full arrest histories, complete prison disciplinary records and whether required prison programs were completed.
That’s right. Common sense would suggest that, to find the explanation for any disparities in parole determinations involving felons whose offenses appear similar, one should look first at the factors well known to influence parole decisions heavily: Is one guy’s rap sheet worse than the other’s? Has one guy behaved himself better while in custody and thus shown himself less likely to recidivate if released? But the Times, we learn (after 23 paragraphs), does not have this rudimentary information.
For most people, lack of access to the essential data would be cause to refrain from writing or publishing a high-profile news report – after all, any conclusion would necessarily be unreliable. For social justice warriors and their paper of record, though, it’s an opportunity to scream, “Racism!” Who could pass that up?
The Fact-Challenged Women of ‘The View’ Brag About Their High Fact-Checking Standards By Debra Heine
On “The View” Wednesday, the notoriously fact-challenged women on the panel proudly touted their show’s reputation for being a trusted news source during a discussion about “fake news.”
The women compared their high fact-checking standards to what they say are the low standards of the conservative media website Breitbart.
Newsbusters noticed that Joy Behar, Sunny Hostin, and Whoopi Goldberg were very impressed with their own credibility.
JOY BEHAR: We give opinions but when we give facts it’s checked with ABC News
Whoopi Goldberg and Sunny Hostin agreed, to audience applause:
SUNNY HOSTIN: Absolutely. [claps] Absolutely.
WHOOPI GOLDBERG: Or — you know, we don’t just go to one place. We don’t just go to one place. We actually have — we are held to a different standard. We have to look at many different places before we can say that’s what’s happening.
HOSTIN: Everything is sourced. Everything is sourced.
I don’t watch what PJ Media’s Christian Toto calls “the dumbest show on television,” but I did recently catch Whoopi and Co. on YouTube talking smack about Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey, and Juanita Broaddrick, three women (out of many) who claim to have been sexually harassed and/or assaulted by former President Clinton.
I’m interested to know how many layers of fact-checking they went through in order to be able to confidently proclaim on their show last October that these women (who had never willingly slept with Bill Clinton) were “tramps” who had slept with Bill Clinton.
A Date That Will Live Forever in Infamy
Naval Base Bombed, Shinto Worshipers Fear Backlash – New York Times – December 8 1941
A day after planes passed over their peaceful village on the way to attack the Naval Station at Pearl Harbor, local fishermen are still picking up the pieces.
“I don’t know what any of this is about,” a man who would only give his name as Paji said, holding the remains of a net which he had used to earn a living. “All I know is that the killing has to stop.”
In Washington, government officials urged the public to stay calm and not to jump to any conclusions warning that such reactions might play into the hands of the militant extremists responsible for the attack.
Early copies of President Roosevelt’s upcoming speech to Congress likewise warn the American public of the dangers of overreaction.
“We are not at war with Japan,” it says. “We are at war with a tiny handful of extremists who are attempting to drag the Japanese people into a conflict. But we must keep a cool head and not allow them to win by provoking a war. We will defeat this enemy, but we will do it by not fighting them.”
A profile has emerged of at least one of these attackers. Hideki Nakamura, a graduate of Harvard and a talented oboe player, was shot down and captured. Nothing in his background, which included playing for the Harvard squash team, would have lead anyone to conclude that he was capable of such a thing.
KATANA, a local civil rights organization partly funded by Japan’s war propaganda office, has warned that American foreign policy is responsible for the radicalization of such young men like Nakamura.
“What made this man hate America so much that he wanted to bomb it?” a spokeswoman for KATANA asked. “How did America fail him? And how can we win him back?”
Nakamura’s guards have suggested that the pilot is soft-spoken and has pleasant manners, but that he becomes vocally exercised over the American embargo of Japan and the refusal of many universities to install rice paper doors in dormitories.
“Detaining Nakamura only inspires others to imitate him,” KATANA said, suggesting that he instead be released back to Japan where the government is running an anti-extremism program at the Strategic Institute of War that claims to be able to deprogram extremists with a 97% success rate.
When Elmer Davis, director of FDR’s Office of War Information, observed that “. . . you cannot do much with people who are convinced that they are the sole authorized custodians of Truth and that whoever differs from them is ipso facto wrong” he may well have been speaking about editors of college newspapers who have purposely violated the central purpose of journalism and have allowed one ideology, not facts and alternate opinions, to hijack the editorial composition of their publications and purge their respective newspapers of any content—news or opinion—that contradicts a pro-Palestinian narrative and would provide a defense of Israel.
The latest example is a controversy involving The McGill Daily and its recent astonishing admission that it is the paper’s policy to not publish “pieces which promote a Zionist worldview, or any other ideology which we consider oppressive.”
“While we recognize that, for some, Zionism represents an important freedom project,” the editors wrote in a defense of their odious policy, “we also recognize that it functions as a settler-colonial ideology that perpetuates the displacement and the oppression of the Palestinian people.”
A McGill student, Molly Harris, had filed a complaint with the Students’ Society of McGill University’s (SSMU) equity committee. In that complaint, Harris contended that, based on the paper’s obvious anti-Israel bias, and “a set of virulently anti-Semitic tweets from a McGill Daily writer,” a “culture of anti-Semitism” defined the Daily—a belief seemingly confirmed by the fact that several of the paper’s editors themselves are BDS supporters and none of the staffers are Jewish.
Of course, in addition to the existence of a fundamental anti-Semitism permeating the editorial environment of The Daily, there is also the core issue of what responsibility a newspaper has to not insert personal biases and ideology into its stories, and to provide space for alternate views on many issues—including the Israeli/Palestinian conflict—in the opinion sections of the paper.
At Connecticut College, Professor Andrew Pessin also found himself vilified on campus, not only by a cadre of ethnic hustlers and activists, but by fellow faculty and an administration that were slow to defend Pessin’s right to express himself—even when, as in this case, his ideas were certainly within the realm of reasonable conversation about a difficult topic: the conflict between Israel and Hamas. Central to the campaign of libels waged against Pessin was the part played by the College’s student newspaper, The College Voice.
In August of 2014, during Israel’s incursions into Gaza to suppress deadly rocket fire aimed at Jewish citizens, Pessin, a teacher of religion and philosophy, wrote on his Facebook page a description of how he perceived Hamas, the ruling political entity in Gaza: “One image which essentializes the current situation in Gaza might be this. You’ve got a rabid pit bull chained in a cage, regularly making mass efforts to escape.”
Someone behind an anonymous Twitter account is trying to destroy the influential conservative Breitbart News website by smearing it as “racist” – and he’s already scared at least 47 advertisers away from Breitbart.
In the current atmosphere of left-wing hysteria over the surprise election of Donald Trump as president, this blacklisting project has already earned an impressive return on investment. Breitbart is a target of the wrath of social justice warriors because it reports the truth about the Left and it used to be run by Stephen Bannon, now slated to become chief strategist in the Trump White House. Hurting Breitbart hurts Trump and Republicans in general, the thinking goes.
The campaign takes screenshots of advertisements on Breitbart and then harasses the advertisers, demanding that they stop advertising there. It also encourages people who hate Breitbart or Trump to take screenshots of a target company’s ads placed beside content deemed objectionable and tweet the images at advertisers along with a threat to stop patronizing that company.
The cowardly crusader hiding behind this effort to frighten advertisers away from Breitbart by lying about and mischaracterizing the provocative news website’s content goes by the user name Sleeping Giants.
The user’s identity seems safe for the moment but if Breitbart files a defamation lawsuit, Twitter could be forced to disclose the user’s identity.
So far the identity of the individual or individuals behind Sleeping Giants is not known, except to Shareen Pathak, managing editor at the DigiDay blog.
Pathak reports, “The creator of the account said he would prefer to remain anonymous to avoid being harassed by Trump supporters on the internet. He said he started the account because fake news and disinformation, are, in his opinion, two of the reasons why the election turned out in favor of Trump.”
The creator of Sleeping Giants reportedly told DigiDay, “The biggest way that this disinformation will continue is ad revenue, just like any news source. Beyond really wanting to stop this nonsense, this effort was really born out of the need to inform advertisers about the kind of material that they’re sponsoring. This isn’t supposed to be a boycotting effort as much as an information effort.”
The Sleeping Giants (Twitter handle: @slpng_giants) account was created last month. At time of writing the account had 3,144 tweets and 11,200 followers. Sleeping Giants says “We are trying to stop racist websites by stopping their ad dollars. Many companies don’t even know it’s happening. It’s time to tell them.”
In media land, Donald Trump is a reckless tweeter; Barack Obama’s outreach to GloZell and rapper Kendrick Lamar is just kicking back and having fun (Lamar’s latest album portrayed the corpse of a judge to the toasting merriment of rappers on the White House lawn). In media land, Donald Trump risked world peace by accepting a phone call from the democratically elected president of Taiwan; Barack Obama’s talks with dictators and thugs such as Hugo Chavez, Daniel Ortega, and Raul Castro were long overdue. In media land, jawboning Carrier not to relocate a plant to Mexico is an existential threat to the free market; not so when Barack Obama tried to coerce Boeing to move to Washington State to produce union-made planes, or bullied a small non-union guitar company, or reordered the bankruptcy payouts of Chrysler and essentially took over the company.
In campus land, the election of 2008 was cause for ebullition; in 2016, elections by nature were traumatic as students were reduced to whining toddlers who needed cookies and milk.
(Note that campus post-election micro-parenting is not extended to departing students when they are hit with huge student-loan totals. Then they suddenly morph from helpless teenagers to full-fledged adults who must pay up what they borrowed to the colleges that did not educate them. Offering cookies and “caring” are a lot cheaper than not collecting overdue loans.) In campus land, federal laws should be rendered null and void — as in 1861 (over slavery) or 1961 (over racial integration of schools) — as colleges see fit; Donald Trump is a near fascist for wanting carry out the oath of his office by enforcing all federal statutes against states’-rights subversion.
The university and the media share two traits: Both industries have become arrogant and ignorant. We have created a climate, ethically and professionally, in which extremism has bred extremism, and bias is seen not as proof of journalistic and academic corruption, but of political purity. The recent election, and especially its aftermath, embarrassed journalists and academics alike — and should not be forgotten.
In the aftermath, they have learned nothing and forgotten nothing, as they insist that the popular vote alone should have mattered, that the Russians stole the election, that there was voting fraud, but only in the swing states Trump won, or that Democrats did not emphasize identity politics enough — anything other than the truth that a now municipal Democratic party is run by apartheid coastal elites and fueled by identity politics, and that journalists and professors cannot keep society’s trust.
In this new Jamie Glazov Moment, Jamie discusses Soledad O’Brien’s Disgrace on Castro, unveiling the shame of arguing how there are Cubans who “like” a mass murderer. Don’t miss it! And make sure to watch Jamie focus on Steve Bannon, Keith Ellison and the Left’s Ugly Record on Anti-Semitism, revealing the slander of a noble […]
http://www.aol.com/article/news/2016/12/02/cnn-apologizes-for-producer-s-joke-about-trump-s-plane-crashing/21619540/?icid=maing-grid7%7Cmain5%7Cdl13%7Csec1_lnk2%26pLid%3D1732122350_htmlws-main-bb
CNN has issued an apology after a tape was leaked where one of its producers can be heard joking about President-elect Donald Trump’s plane crashing.
Business Insider reports that the incident occurred on Thursday as national correspondent Suzanne Malveaux was getting ready to broadcast live from the Carrier plant in Indiana.
A video posted to YouTube by FTVLive’s Scott Jones shows Malveaux on screen and an off-camera voice telling her that Trump is expected to be “landing any minute.”
The unidentified woman then indicates signals she plans to use to communicate his progress and jokes at one point, “That means his plane’s crashed.”
But she quickly states, “No, I’m kidding.”
Malveaux can be seen responding with a shocked look before smiling.
