MEDIA Comments turned off

The Co-Founder Of Snopes Wrote Dozens Of Plagiarized Articles For The Fact-Checking Site “You can always take an existing article and rewrite it just enough to avoid copyright infringement.”Dean Jones

Posted By on August 16th, 2021

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/deansterlingjones/snopes-cofounder-plagiarism-mikkelson?scrolla=5eb6d68b7fedc32c19ef33b4

David Mikkelson, the co-founder of the fact-checking website Snopes, has long presented himself as the arbiter of truth online, a bulwark in the fight against rumors and fake news. But he has been lying to the site’s tens of millions of readers: A BuzzFeed News investigation has found that between 2015 and 2019, Mikkelson wrote and published dozens of articles containing material plagiarized from news outlets such as the Guardian and the LA Times.

After inquiries from BuzzFeed News, Snopes conducted an internal review and confirmed that under a pseudonym, the Snopes byline, and his own name, Mikkelson wrote and published 54 articles with plagiarized material. The articles include such topics as same-sex marriage licenses and the death of musician David Bowie.

Snopes VP of Editorial and Managing Editor Doreen Marchionni suspended Mikkelson from editorial duties pending “a comprehensive internal investigation.” He remains an officer and a 50% shareholder of the company.

“Our internal research so far has found a total of 54 stories Mikkelson published that used appropriated material, including all of the stories Buzzfeed shared with us,” Marchionni and Snopes Chief Operating Officer Vinny Green said in a statement.

“Let us be clear: Plagiarism undermines our mission and values, full stop,” Marchionni added. “It has no place in any context within this organization.”

Snopes’ editorial staff disavowed Mikkelson’s behavior in a separate statement signed by eight current writers. “We strongly condemn these poor journalistic practices. … we work hard every day to uphold the highest possible journalistic and ethical standards.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Afghanistan’s Unraveling May Strike Another Blow to U.S. Credibility Allies may understand the desire to give up on a failed project, but the retreat heightens the sense that America’s backing is no longer unbounded.By Steven Erlanger

Posted By on August 16th, 2021

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/13/world/europe/afghanistan-eu-us-credibility.html

Afghanistan’s rapid unraveling is already raising grumblings about American credibility, compounding the wounds of the Trump years and reinforcing the idea that America’s backing for its allies is not unlimited.

The Taliban’s lightning advance comes at a moment when many in Europe and Asia had hoped that President Biden would reestablish America’s firm presence in international affairs, especially as China and Russia angle to extend their influence. Now, America’s retreat is bound to sow doubts.

“When Biden says ‘America is back,’ many people will say, ‘Yes, America is back home,’” said François Heisbourg, a French defense analyst.

“Few will gang up on the U.S. for finally stopping a failed enterprise,” he said. “Most people would say it should have happened a long time ago.’’ But in the longer term, he added, “the notion that you cannot count on the Americans will strike deeper roots because of Afghanistan.’’

The United States has been pulling back from military engagements abroad since President Obama, he noted, and under President Trump, “we had to prepare for a U.S. no longer willing to assume the burden of unlimited liability alliances.”

That hesitation will now be felt all the more strongly among countries in play in the world, like Taiwan, Ukraine, the Philippines and Indonesia, which can only please China and Russia, analysts suggest.

“What made the U.S. strong, powerful and rich was that from 1918 through 1991 and beyond, everybody knew we could depend on the U.S. to defend and stand up for the free world,” said Tom Tugendhat, chairman of the British Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee.

“The sudden withdrawal from Afghanistan after 20 years and so much investment in lives and effort will see allies and potential allies around the world wondering whether they have to decide between democracies and autocracies, and realize some democracies don’t have staying power anymore,” he added.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

China’s Xenophobic Plan to Shut Out the World by Gordon G. Chang

Posted By on August 16th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17647/china-plan-shut-out-world

Moreover, crackdowns in Xi Jinping’s China never really end. They are more than just “wiggles,” as superstar hedge-fund manager Ray Dalio called them in a July 30 LinkedIn posting, as he attempted to explain away Beijing’s harsh moves against business.

The announcement follows a series of stunning attacks on private business.

Xi’s moves to force China’s companies off foreign exchanges could be in preparation for an expropriation of foreign shareholdings in Chinese businesses.

On August 11, the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee and the central government’s State Council issued what the official Xinhua News Agency called “an outline on promoting the building of a rule of law government from 2021 to 2025, on the basis of the successful implementation of a previous 5-year plan.”

The Chinese party-state’s announcement included a promise to enact a series of laws on, among other things, national security, tech innovation, monopolies, education, health and quarantines, food and drugs, and foreigners.

“The announcement,” Reuters stated, “signals that a crackdown on industry with regard to privacy, data management, antitrust, and other issues will persist on through the year.”

Just “through the year”? By its own terms, the announcement makes clear that the crackdown will continue until at least the end of the ongoing 14th Five-Year Plan, in 2025.

Moreover, crackdowns in Xi Jinping’s China never really end. They are more than just “wiggles,” as superstar hedge-fund manager Ray Dalio called them in a July 30 LinkedIn posting, as he attempted to explain away Beijing’s harsh moves against business.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

We Once Waltzed in Kabul The U.S. abandoned my friends. Now they are trapped in Afghanistan and hiding from the Taliban. Kathy Gilsinan

Posted By on August 16th, 2021

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/we-once-waltzed-in-kabul?token=

Catastrophe. Calamity. Chaos. Humiliation. Tragedy.

All words that can be used to describe what we are witnessing right now in Afghanistan, 20 years since the attacks of September 11, 2001.

You can believe, as many people I respect do, that this war should have ended long ago. You can believe that it was always unwinnable and should have never started in the first place. You can believe that it was utterly naive that America ever thought that something resembling human rights could take root in this foreign land.

But the disgraceful, haunting scenes we are now witnessing— were those also a fait accompli? Of course not.

And I cannot look away from them. From the helicopters evacuating Americans from the U.S. embassy. From the Taliban flag flying over the presidential palace; and from the terrorists who hoisted it hosting a press conference inside. From the supposed leaders of the free world beseeching medieval barbarians to recognize “the international community,” warning them that “the world is watching.”

Saad Mohseni @saadmohseni
Another Saigon moment: chaotic scenes at Kabul International Airport. No security. None.

The most shameful and dishonorable part of this shameful and dishonorable exit is Washington’s abandonment of those Afghans who helped us, trapped by American bureaucracy and now by the Taliban itself.

The email inbox for emergency visa requests for Afghans who worked with American forces has reportedly crashed. “This is murder by incompetence,” said one former sergeant trying to get apply for Special Immigrant Visa on behalf of his Afghan counterpart.

Richard Engel @RichardEngel

There is so much to say about this unfolding catastrophe. In the coming days I will have pieces from the likes of Gen. H.R. McMaster, Justin Amash, Thomas Joscelyn, Nikky Haley and others explaining what this unraveling means for America and the world. If you haven’t yet subscribed, now is a great time to lend us your support:

But before the day was out I wanted to share this moving essay by the journalist Kathy Gilsinan, whom I have long admired, about her friends trapped in Kabul.

We hear a lot about privilege these days in America. Reading Kathy’s moving essay, I am overwhelmed by my own.

I am a free woman — a freedom hard-won and so very far from inevitable.

It’s a freedom that Afghans tasted and will now lose. A freedom that so many of them sacrificed to secure. Surely we owe them something more than abandonment? — BW

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

THE SCALE OF HUMILIATION: MARK STEYN

Posted By on August 15th, 2021

https://www.steynonline.com/11598/the-scale-of-humiliation?fbclid=IwAR1881cNi_fEzOQEDQwjU0Rqrral052ftbIJH3o4MrEO96lSk_Hxthij0sc

To reprise a line from a decade-old column of mine:

Afghanistan is about Afghanistan – if you’re Afghan or Pakistani. But, if you’re Russian or Chinese or Iranian or European, Afghanistan is about America.

That’s the point to remember: if you’re an Afghan schoolgirl, today is the fall of Kabul; elsewhere, in the chancelleries of allies and enemies alike, it’s the fall of America. Even by their usual wretched standards, the world’s most somnolent media are struggling to stay up to speed on the story. Here’s the scoop from USA Today:

Taliban’s Afghanistan Advance Tests Biden’s ‘America Is Back’ Foreign Policy Promise

You don’t say! Did he misread the prompter, or mishear the guy in his ear? “America is on its back”, surely?

But don’t worry, the world’s most lavishly over-funded “intelligence community” is on the case:

Kabul Could Fall To The Taliban Within 90 Days, U.S. Intelligence Warns

Thank you, geniuses. That was Thursday. So it turned out to be well within ninety hours – which is close enough for US intelligence work.

Was this the same “seventeen intelligence agencies” who all agreed Russia had meddled in the 2016 election – and with whose collective intelligence only a fool would disagree?

Or perhaps it was only one intelligence agency – most likely the crack agents of the highly specialized Federal Unitary Central Kabul Western Intelligence Tracking Service.

To modify Hillary Clinton, what difference at this point would it make if the US government simply laid off its entire “intelligence community”?

Indeed, what difference would it make if it closed down its military? Obviously, it would present a few mid-life challenges for its corrupt Pentagon bureaucracy, since that many generals on the market for defense lobbyist gigs and board directorships all at once would likely depress the going rate. But, other than that, a military that accounts for 40 per cent of the planet’s military spending can’t perform either of the functions for which one has an army: it can’t defeat overseas enemies, and it’s not permitted to defend the country, as we see on the Rio Grande.

So what’s the point?

Oh, oh, but, if a nation doesn’t have an army to defend it, a quarter-of-a-million foreign invaders could just walk into the country with impunity every month!

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Medical First, Israeli Doctors Freeze Out Cancerous Bladder Tumors By Pesach Benson

Posted By on August 15th, 2021

https://unitedwithisrael.org/in-medical-first-israeli-doctors-freeze-out-cancerous-bladder-tumors/?utm_source=newsletters_

Doctors at Haifa’s Rambam Hospital are hopeful the procedure will eventually become an outpatient treatment.

Doctors at Haifa’s Rambam Hospital removed cancer tumors from the bladders of four patients by freezing them out rather than by cutting. The procedure has never been tried before and offers tremendous potential to reduce bleeding, infection, pain and other risks.

All the patients were discharged without side effects and will be monitored over several weeks.

“Normally, the tumors are frozen by injecting the freezing agent using needles, but this can’t happen with bladder cancer,” said aide Dr. Isaac Hoffman, who operated with his colleague Prof. Gilad Amiel.

Instead, an Israeli medical company, Vessi Medical, based near Nahariya, developed a process to spray a freezing agent on the cancerous cells. Ice forms around and within the cancerous cells without damaging the bladder muscles.

The bladder is unlike other organs, explained Eyal Kochavi, CEO of Vessi Medical. “It’s mostly muscle and very flexible. It has the ability to change its volume in a way that we don’t pay attention to. So, for example, we don’t feel any urge to urinate until it fills to almost half a liter.”

Said Hoffman, “Here we are actually spraying liquid Co2 instead of cutting out the tumor, a process that causes scarring of healthy tissue…

“We are very happy that we succeeded in freezing the tumor, after which the cancerous cells die off without them needing us to cut them out.”

Hoffman added that the procedure could eventually be administered as an outpatient treatment. “The aim is to release the patient from the hospital on the same day as the procedure.”

Bladder cancer affects around two million people globally. According to the Mayo Clinic, risk factors for bladder cancer include family history, a personal history of chronic bladder irritation or infection, age, smoking and exposure to certain chemicals used to manufacture dyes, rubber, paint and other textiles.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

America’s Great Awokening Daryl McCann

Posted By on August 15th, 2021

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2021/07-08/americas-great-awokening/

“What, exactly, has gone awry in the Land of Lincoln? For starters, America’s liberals-cum-progressives, including Maher himself, have discarded traditional liberal notions about the sovereignty of the individual. American-style liberalism has committed the Aggregations Fallacy of indiscriminately combining one “good” with another “good”—the rights of the individual with the rights of the group. In an earlier revolutionary era, explained Roger Scruton in The Uses of Pessimism, the Jacobins fervently promoted liberté and égalité without appreciating the conflicting nature of the two concepts, and so ended up with Robespierre’s “despotism of liberty”. Today, extrapolating from Scruton, we are witnessing a “despotism of identity”. 

Today not even the stalwarts of American liberalism-cum-progressivism are safe from what television pundit Bill Maher calls the “woke mob”. In an episode of his HBO program Real Time, for example, Maher cited the circumstances of Emmanuel Cafferty, who last year lost his job at San Diego Gas & Electric after being photographed in the vicinity of a Black Lives Matter protest “allegedly flashing a white power gesture”. Cafferty, as it turns out, had been making his way home from work in a company truck when a (white) BLM supporter, David Bentley, snapped a picture of Cafferty’s hand formulating—or seeming to formulate—the OK gesture out of the open cabin window.

Bentley, a quintessential keyboard social justice warrior, posted the offending hand gesture, construed as a sign of white power, on Twitter. He next contacted San Diego Gas & Electric with a link to the “evidence” that one of its employees was a white supremacist. Management terminated Cafferty’s employment. Cafferty, as it happens, is a person of colour and a supporter of BLM, who has a lifelong habit of extending an arm and cracking his knuckles one finger at a time. Irritating, yes, but not exactly an endorsement of white supremacism. Maher concluded his diatribe against the injustice of Emmanuel Cafferty’s sacking and an assortment of other cancel-culture incidents with this barb: “Memo to social justice warriors. When what you’re doing sounds like an Onion headline, stop.”

I doubt that Maher understands the root cause of cancel culture, but he at least appreciates its brutal potential. America’s self-styled Defender of Liberal Principles is aghast that a good and honourable person—that is, a person who shares his progressive feelings—should find himself the target of public shaming for not always having been so enlightened: “Think about everything you’ve ever texted, emailed, searched for, tweeted, blogged or said in passing, or now even just witnessed. Someone had a Confederate flag in their dorm room in 1990—and you didn’t do anything.” The fanaticism of the woke mob, empowered by the omnipresence of social-media platforms, makes everyone a potential victim: “Andy Warhol was wrong … In the future, every­one will not experience fifteen minutes of fame, but fifteen minutes of shame.” Not even the Great Emancipator himself is safe. “[Lincoln] is now cancelled in San Francisco. And they’re thinking about it in Illinois. Yes, the Land of Lincoln might cancel Lincoln.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Vanishing Legacy of Barack Obama On the road from stirring symbol of hope and change to the Fat Elvis of neoliberalism, birthday-partying Barack Obama sold us all out by Matt Taibbi

Posted By on August 15th, 2021

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-vanishing-legacy-of-barack-obama

It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.

— Leo Tolstoy

“Even Scaled Back,” wrote Vanity Fair, “Barack Obama’s Birthday Bash Is the Event of the Season.” Not even the famed glossy Bible of the unapologetic rich seemed sure of whether to write Obama’s Birthday bash straight or as an Onion headline: what did the “Event of the Season” mean during a pandemic?

A former president flying half the world’s celebrities to spend three days in a maskless ring-kissing romp at a $12 million Martha’s Vineyard mansion, at a moment when only a federal eviction ban prevented the outbreak of a national homelessness crisis, was already an all-time “Fuck the Optics” news event, and that was before the curveball. Because of what even the New York Times called “growing concerns” over how gross the mega-party looked, not least for the Joe Biden administration burdened with asking the nation for sober sacrifice while his ex-boss raised the roof with movie stars in tropical shirts, advisers prevailed upon the 44th president to reconsider the bacchanal. But characteristically, hilariously, Obama didn’t cancel his party, he merely uninvited those he considered less important, who happened to be almost entirely his most trusted former aides.

Cast out, the Times said, were “the majority of former Obama administration officials… who generally credit themselves with helping create the Obama legacy,” including former top aide David Axelrod, who’d just called Obama an “apostle of hope” in the Washington Post and sat for a three-hour HBO documentary deep-throat of his ex-boss. Remaining on the list were celeb couples Chrissy Teigen and John Legend, as well as Dwyane Wade and Gabrielle Union, along with Steven Spielberg, George Clooney, Tom Hanks, Bruce Springsteen, Questlove, Jay-Z, Beyoncé, Don Cheadle, and other Fabulous People, who drank “top shelf liquor,” puffed stogies, and hit the links at the Vineyard Golf Club (membership fee: $350,000). An early report that Pearl Jam had been hired to perform was later refuted. Eddie Vedder would just be there, but not to play.

One attendee called it the “party of all parties,” while another added, “Y’all never seen Obama like this,” by which he might have meant Obama reportedly dancing as Trap Beckham, performing live, substituted “Prez” for “Bitch” in this classic:

It’s all about you
Girl tonight it’s about you…
Fuck it up if it’s your birthday bitch!

There’s a glorious moment in the life of a certain kind of politician, when either because their careers are over, or because they’re so untouchable politically that it doesn’t matter anymore, that they finally get to remove the public mask, no pun intended. This Covid bash was Barack Obama’s “Fuck it!” moment.

ANTI-SEMITISM, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Mischaracterisation of Conservatism Kevin Donnelly

Posted By on August 15th, 2021

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/society/2021/08/the-mischaracterisation-of-conservatism/

“An inheritance drawing on unique concepts such as the inherent dignity of the person, equality and freedom for all, popular sovereignty, free will and a commitment to social justice and the common good.  An inheritance that has evolved over thousands of years that must be nurtured, conserved and never taken for granted.”

B. Yeats in his poem the Second Coming writes “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world”.  While written in 1919, soon after the death and disillusionment of the First World War and the Easter Uprising in Dublin, Yeats’ lines also describe the world of today: a time of radical change where established institutions and long-held beliefs are misrepresented as conservative, elitist and characterised by inequality and injustice.  A time where the most grievous crimes one can commit are to question the need for radical change while arguing there is much in the past worth celebrating.

Instead of being seen as beneficial or worthwhile societies, like Australia they are condemned as inherently racist, sexist, heteronormative and guilty of oppressing and marginalising ‘the other’.  Western civilisation, instead of being valued even as its faults are acknowledged, is attacked as ‘Eurocentric’ and riven with ‘white supremacism’. At universities in England academics argue European science that grew out of the Enlightenment can never be “objective and apolitical”, that it is guilty of being “a fundamental contributor to European imperialism”. Across the English-speaking world academics and radicalised students argue a curriculum based on a liberal view of education reinforces capitalist hierarchies and that it must be “de-colonised” to ensure the disadvantaged and oppressed are no longer marginalised and ignored.

Inspired by neo-Marxist-inspired critical theory, cultural-left activists argue the way forward is to reject the past and to embrace their brave new world — a socialist utopia, as summed up by the Italian philosopher Augusto Del Noce, where “all contradictions have been solved” and where “there is a perfect harmony between virtue and happiness”. As Del Noce details, such radical calls for “total revolution” can be traced  to Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Karl Marx and their desire to generate a future “in which nothing resembles the old history”. Ignored, since the time French revolutionaries took to the streets promising liberty, equality and fraternity, is the subsequent reign of terror epitomised by Madame Guillotine. Every violent revolution since has ended in the imprisonment, torture, starvation and death of countless millions.

De Noce writes, as a result of denying “the very idea of virtue in the traditional sense”, one is left with “every cruelty and every violation of the moral order for the (supposed) sake of future happiness”. Or, as noted by Pope John Paul

When people think they possess the secret of a perfect organization that makes evil impossible, they also think they can use any means, including violence and deceit, in order to bring that organization into being.  Politics then becomes a ‘secular religion’ which operates under the illusion of creating paradise in this world.

BOOKS Comments turned off

Wrath: America Enraged Hardcover by Peter W. Wood (October 2021-Pre-order)

Posted By on August 15th, 2021

Wrath: America Enraged Hardcover – October 12, 2021
by Peter W. Wood

https://www.amazon.com/Wrath-America-Peter-W-Wood/dp/1641772190/ref=sr_1_4?dchild=1&keywords=peter+wood&qid=1629058157&s=books&sr=1-4

Anger now dominates American politics. It wasn’t always so. “Happy Days Are Here Again” was FDR’s campaign song in 1932. By contrast, candidate Kamala Harris’s 2020 campaign song was Mary J. Blige’s “Work That” (“Let ‘em get mad / They gonna hate anyway”). Both the left and right now summon anger as the main way to motivate their supporters. Post-election, both sides became even more indignant. The left accuses the right of “insurrection.” The right accuses the left of fraud. This is a book about how we got here―about how America changed from a nation that could be roused to anger but preferred self-control, to a nation permanently dialed to eleven.

Peter W. Wood, an anthropologist, has rewritten his 2007 book, A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America, which predicted the new era of political wrath. In his new book, he explains how American culture beginning in the 1950s made a performance art out of anger; how and why we brought anger into our music, movies, and personal lives; and how, having step by step relinquished our old inhibitions on feeling and expressing anger, we turned anger into a way of wielding political power. But the “angri-culture,” as he calls it, doesn’t promise happy days again. It promises revenge. And a crisis that could destroy our republic.