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‘Cheap fakes’? Biden’s defenders are getting desperate The liberal media are going out of their way to silence concerns about his health. Tom Slater

Posted By on June 22nd, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/06/21/cheap-fakes-bidens-defenders-are-getting-desperate/

Do you think Joe Biden might be a bit… doddery? Are you worried about the leader of the free world appearing to fade out during public events, mix up the names of politicians and accidentally say explosive things – only for them to be contradicted by his carers (sorry, staffers). Then I regret to inform you that you’ve been fooled – you poor, low-info soul – by right-wing ‘cheap fakes’.

This is the new coinage the White House is using to dismiss allegedly selectively edited videos of Joe Biden, 81, already the oldest US president in history, apparently showing his age at a series of public events. Over recent weeks, a string of clips have gone viral of Biden appearing to ‘freeze’. There was Biden at a Juneteenth celebration, looking like a cardboard cut-out of himself as people bopped beside him. There was Biden at the G7 summit in Italy, wandering in the wrong direction during a world-leader photo-op. Then there was Biden onstage at a Hollywood fundraiser, being gently led off stage by Barack Obama.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre slammed the clips earlier this week as partisan disinformation. ‘They are cheap fakes’, she said, ‘and they are done in bad faith’. Her claim, and that of the ‘fact-checkers’, is that conservative tweeters and journalists made these incidents look much worse than they actually were by editing or cropping out key context. ‘The right-wing critics of the president have a credibility problem because… the fact-checkers have repeatedly caught them pushing misinformation, disinformation’, Jean-Pierre said. She even used the phrase ‘deepfakes’ at one point, thus falsely suggesting the clips might have been outright digital fabrications. (With more than a little irony, Jean-Pierre later had to clarify her misleading comments.) The left-leaning media have also leapt to Biden’s defence, with CBS News running a stern segment on the ‘cheap fakes’ and liberal sites amplifying the White House’s rebuttals.

On social media, liberal and conservative accounts have naturally been poring over these videos like they are mini Zapruder films, arguing the toss and accusing one another of misrepresenting Biden’s behaviour. That this is what political debate has been reduced to is frankly a bit depressing. For what it’s worth, the viral G7 clip definitely did misleadingly crop out a parachutist, who Biden was walking towards to give him a thumbs up, thus making it look like he was just aimlessly wandering off. But at the risk of being labelled a Trumpist wingnut, I dare say Biden doesn’t look exactly sprightly in any of these videos, whatever way they are spliced. Sure, maybe he was just taking in the applause onstage in Hollywood, as his defenders have suggested, but he was then led off stage by his old boss. Okay, he may not have fancied dancing on Juneteenth, which is his aides’ explanation for that bit of ‘freezing’, but he did go on to slur his words during his speech.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

In Case You Think Someone Has The Answer To New York’s Looming Energy Disaster Francis Menton

Posted By on June 22nd, 2024

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2024-6-19-in-case-you-think-someone-has-the-answer-to-new-yorks-looming-energy-disaster

In this post last week, I took note that New York’s electric grid system operator, NYISO, has recently issued some clear, if muted, warnings of the impossibility of the energy transition mandated by the state’s 2019 Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA). In a November 2023 Report, NYISO stated (deeply buried at page 52) that “DEFRs are needed to balance intermittent supply with demand,” and those DEFRs must be “significant in capacity.” DEFRs are the elusive and not-yet-invented “dispatchable emissions-free resources.” At a conference the following month, NYISO’s VP for System Integration Planning, Zachary Smith, reiterated the need for these DEFRs in large amounts. Smith presented charts quantifying the capacity of DEFRs needed for New York to “balance” its prospective intermittent wind/solar supply as something in the range of 30+ GW. 30 GW is close to the peak electricity demand for the entire state, and is approximately equivalent to the existing capacity of New York’s fleet of natural gas plants, all of which are mandated to be closed by 2040.

So what is the answer to the great DEFR conundrum? New York’s Public Service Commission, operating from its usual playbook, has initiated a proceeding, under the name Proceeding 15-E-0302, to uncover the answer. My New York co-blogger Roger Caiazza calls this the “DEFR Proceeding,” although I don’t find the PSC using that name. Everybody gets to submit their brilliant thoughts and ideas. So far there seem to be well over 22,000 items entered in the docket — more than any human being can ever read.

In just the past few days, some big comments from important players have floated in. On Monday (June 17), a comment appeared on this DEFR docket co-signed by two environmental NGOs, Earth Justice and the Sierra Club. These are two of the very biggest, best funded, and most vociferous advocates of the urgent necessity of an immediate energy transition away from fossil fuels. With their hundreds of millions of dollars of annual revenue and scores of staffers, surely these guys must have found the answer to the DEFR conundrum.

MEDIA Comments turned off

Ethics and Hypocrisy: Turmoil at The Washington Post The Washington Post faces a contentious power struggle over appointing Robert Winnett as editor, revealing ethical and ideological rifts among its journalists.By Stephen Soukup

Posted By on June 22nd, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/06/22/ethics-and-hypocrisy-turmoil-at-the-washington-post/

For the time being, at least, it appears that the inmates at The Washington Post have gained the upper hand, forcing management to terminate plans to put British journalist Robert Winnett in charge of the asylum. Much to the inmates’ chagrin, one supposes, this entire episode in American journalism has been far less a dramatic battle for the future of one of the nation’s greatest institutions than a modestly entertaining reenactment of the Iran-Iraq War, in which many outside observers are hoping to see both sides lose.

Perhaps the most entertaining—if also somewhat dispiriting—aspect of the Washington Post slap fight has been the insistence by the paper’s old guard that Winnett simply could not be their new editor because he lacks the requisite “ethical” standards to do so. He is, as the Post’s long-timers fear, too morally compromised to be the leader they so richly deserve. For example, NPR reported that David Maraniss, a “highly regarded Post writer and associate editor,” penned a Facebook post in which he “expressed disgust” at Winnett’s lack of character. Maraniss went so far as to say that “the scandal that has erupted this spring around [Post publisher Will] Lewis and Winnett is worse than the revelation that a Pulitzer Prize-winning account was fabricated by Janet Cooke, a junior Post reporter fed by the hunger of her editors to land a story.”

That’s quite a charge from Maraniss, who, as NPR noted, is among The Washington Post’s most respected and beloved longtime employees. It’s also, one might conclude, an invitation to examine other examples of journalistic ethics as they are practiced at the Post by its old guard, perhaps starting with David Maraniss.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Mayorkas Claims Global Warming Makes Him Better at Dealing With Crises The only thing FEMA learned from the big lie of “global warming” was to lie. by Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on June 22nd, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/mayorkas-claims-global-warming-makes-him-better-at-dealing-with-crises/

FEMA, which has been drained by being redirected to deal with Biden’s open borders invasion, needs money to smuggle more migrants around America.

The city government of El Paso, Texas, is busing illegal migrants to the Big Apple on the dime of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Deputy City Manager Mario D’Agostino told the DCNF Monday. The federal agency covers the travel costs of illegal migrants through a grant program.

But, according to the as yet unimpeached Secretary Mayorkas, global warming has prepped him to deal with hurricanes.

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said during an interview with the Associated Press that the U.S. is prepared to go into an intense hurricane and wildfire season, but he did raise concerns about budget shortages.

Mayorkas said that the department is well equipped to deal with hurricanes and other natural disasters this summer, adding that more intense national disasters, partially due to climate change, have allowed the agency to gain experience in dealing with crises.

“As the impacts of climate change have been more and more evident, we have seen and experienced increasing frequency and gravity of extreme weather events,” Mayorkas said.

“Extreme weather events” are much of a myth as FEMA’s competency.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

California Legalized Drugs. Cartels Took It Over. by Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on June 22nd, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20723/california-legalized-drugs-cartels

Six years after California legalized marijuana, the bodies keep piling up. Earlier this year, six men were murdered in the Mojave Desert. Four of the men had been burned after being shot with rifles. In 2020, seven people were killed at an illegal pot operation in Riverside County.

Violence like this was supposed to disappear after legalization. Legalization advocates argued that making the drug trade legal would end the grip of the cartels. Instead, the legal market has failed, and the cartels are taking over sizable parts of California and the rest of the country.

California’s legal drug revenues have fallen consistently, as have those in other legal drug states including Colorado, whose model helped sell the idea that drug money would fix everything.

Despite falling revenues, Colorado legislators brag about $282 million in drug revenue. That number may sound high, but it’s a drop in the bucket considering the money that the state and cities like Denver are spending on homelessness, drug overdoses and law enforcement.

While the legal drug business is also collapsing in California, the state is spending a fortune fighting marijuana even as it tries to tax it. Gov. Gavin Newsom paradoxically promised to close the budget deficit with $100 million in drug revenue, meant to be used to fund law enforcement and fight substance abuse. The state seized over $300 million in illegal pot this year and uses satellite imagery and heavily-armed raids to fight untaxed marijuana.

But despite all those efforts, illegal marijuana has won and legal marijuana has lost.

MEDIA Comments turned off

Is Wikipedia Politically Biased?by David Rozado

Posted By on June 22nd, 2024

https://manhattan.institute/article/is-wikipedia-politically-biased

Executive Summary
This work aims to determine whether there is evidence of political bias in English-language Wikipedia articles.
Wikipedia is one of the most popular domains on the World Wide Web, with hundreds of millions of unique users per month. Wikipedia content is also routinely employed in the training of Large Language Models (LLMs).
To study political bias in Wikipedia content, we analyze the sentiment (positive, neutral, or negative) with which a set of target terms (N=1,628) with political connotations (e.g., names of recent U.S. presidents, U.S. congressmembers, U.S. Supreme Court justices, or prime ministers of Western countries) are used in Wikipedia articles.
We do not cherry-pick the set of terms to be included in the analysis but rather use publicly available preexisting lists of terms from Wikipedia and other sources.
We find a mild to moderate tendency in Wikipedia articles to associate public figures ideologically aligned right-of-center with more negative sentiment than public figures ideologically aligned left-of-center.
These prevailing associations are apparent for names of recent U.S. presidents, U.S. Supreme Court justices, U.S. senators, U.S. House of Representatives congressmembers, U.S. state governors, Western countries’ prime ministers, and prominent U.S.-based journalists and media organizations.
This trend is common but not ubiquitous. We find no evidence of it in the sentiment with which names of U.K. MPs and U.S.-based think tanks are used in Wikipedia articles.
We also find prevailing associations of negative emotions (e.g., anger and disgust) with right-leaning public figures; and positive emotions (e.g., joy) with left-leaning public figures.
These trends constitute suggestive evidence of political bias embedded in Wikipedia articles.
We find some of the aforementioned political associations embedded in Wikipedia articles popping up in OpenAI’s language models. This is suggestive of the potential for biases in Wikipedia content percolating into widely used AI systems.Wikipedia’s neutral point of view (NPOV) policy aims for articles in Wikipedia to be written in an impartial and unbiased tone. Our results suggest that Wikipedia’s NPOV policy is not achieving its stated goal of political-viewpoint neutrality in Wikipedia articles.
This report highlights areas where Wikipedia can improve in how it presents political information. Nonetheless, we want to acknowledge Wikipedia’s significant and valuable role as a public resource. We hope this work inspires efforts to uphold and strengthen Wikipedia’s principles of neutrality and impartiality.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Bragg drops trespassing charges against nearly all Columbia protesters Of the 46 charged, 14 were undergraduate students at Columbia, nine were graduate students, and two were employees. Misteri Severi

Posted By on June 22nd, 2024

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/education/bragg-drops-trespassing-charges-against-nearly-all-columbia-protesters

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg dropped charges on Thursday against most of the Columbia University protesters who were arrested for trespassing in Hamilton Hall in April.

Nearly 50 people were charged with criminal trespassing after they staged a multi-day protest on the Manhattan campus of the Ivy League school. But 31 of those cases were dismissed on Thursday due to a lack of evidence, according to NBC News. Prosecutors said another 14 of the 46 cases will be dismissed if the defendants do not have any other arrests in the next six months.

The court said the person who will remain charged is James Carlson, who has two other separate cases opened against him. One of those charges is flag burning, and he is not associated with Columbia University.

Hundreds of protesters initially engaged in the protests, which was centered on the U.S. response to the war in Israel. But the 46 who were charged had illegally occupied Hamilton Hall towards the end of the protest, despite warnings that they were trespassing. Of the 46 charged, at least 14 were undergraduate students at Columbia, nine were graduate students, and two were employees. 

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Biden’s Fiscal Crisis Is Far Worse Than We Thought

Posted By on June 22nd, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/06/21/bidens-fiscal-crisis-is-far-worse-than-we-thought/

Nothing should shock us anymore, but the latest Congressional Budget Office report did. Released this week, the report shows that the nation is in vastly worse financial shape than anyone thought just a few months ago. And the report makes clear who is to blame.

The CBO’s latest “Budget and Economic Outlook” projects that the federal deficit this year will top $1.9 trillion. That’s $408 billion higher – a 27% increase – than what the CBO thought it would be just four months ago.

This will make the 2024 deficit the biggest ever recorded in American history – not counting the two years of panic-induced COVID-19 spending sprees – and will mark the third consecutive increase in deficits under Biden. (See the chart below.)

It’s also highly unusual for the CBO to make such a huge correction to its forecast.

The nonpartisan office routinely produces a budget and economic forecast at the start of the year, and then an update mid-year. Normally, these don’t vary much. In Trump’s first three years, for example, the average variance between the first forecast and the final deficit was just $73 billion.

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Europe: Nazis’ ‘Do Not Buy from Jews’ 2.0 by Robert Williams

Posted By on June 20th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20713/europe-nazis-boycott-israel

Since October 7, when Iranian proxies Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad committed unspeakable atrocities against men, women, children and babies in Israel, large parts of the international community have been in a frenzy over the Jews’ puzzling inclination to defend themselves.

This is the same French government [which banned Israel from participating in Eurosatory 2024 defense industry trade fair] so obsessed with appearing inclusive and non-discriminatory that it recently supported a bill that outlaws discrimination based on hair texture, length, color or style.

Meanwhile, the French government did not think it necessary to ban the participation of China, presently indulging in two genocides – against Tibetans and against Uyghurs – from participating in Eurosatory. China’s representation at the trade fair counts around 61 defense companies.

The French government also did not ban… Turkey, which has been taken to the International Criminal Court for committing crimes against humanity against hundreds of thousands of opponents of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ruthless regime…

When there are no Jews to blame, evidently, crimes against humanity, genocide and human rights abuses are perfectly acceptable.

Since October 7, more than 19,000 rockets have been launched into Israel, a country smaller than New Jersey, primarily by the terrorist groups ruling Gaza, as well as from another of Iran’s terrorist proxies, Hezbollah in Lebanon

Never mind that John Spencer, Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point, determined that Israel has consistently implemented more measures to prevent civilian casualties than any military in the history of warfare.

“The Middle East does not need more weapons, it needs more peace,” said Spanish Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Albares. The remark, oddly, did not appear to be addressed the entities that started the war: Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran and Qatar.

Iran, the Middle East’s warmonger par excellence, and — along with major funding from Qatar, which seems never to have met an Islamic terrorist group it did not finance or promote — was the originator of the current war in Gaza.

Iran’s terrorist proxies span the region — Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza; Hezbollah in Lebanon; the Houthis in Yemen, and various proxy militias in Syria and Iraq — well-funded because of the Biden administration’s lifting sanctions. Yet Albares has nothing but praise for Iran.

The submission to the Islamic regime by European leaders such as Albares, who knows full well that Iran is behind the war in Gaza, tells us more about them than about Israel.

In April, however, the EU imposed sanctions on Israeli “settlers.” Regrettably, to many Palestinians, all of Israel is “one big settlement” that needs to be uprooted, and everyone there, a “settler.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

How California’s Paradise Become our Purgatory How and why did California end up as a warning to Western civilization of what might be in store for anyone who followed its nihilism? By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on June 20th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/06/20/how-californias-paradise-become-our-purgatory/

California has become a test case of the suicide of the West. Never before has such a state, so rich in natural resources and endowed with such a bountiful human inheritance, self-destructed so rapidly.

How and why did California so utterly consume its unmatched natural and ancestral inheritance and end up as a warning to Western civilization of what might be in store for anyone who followed its nihilism?

The symptoms of the state’s suicide are indisputable.

Governor Gavin Newsom enjoyed a recent $98 billion budget surplus—gifted from multibillion-dollar federal COVID-19 subsidies, the highest income and gas taxes in the nation, and among the country’s steepest sales and property taxes.

Yet in a year, he turned it into a growing $45 billion budget deficit.

At a time of an over-regulated, overtaxed, and sputtering economy, Newsom spent lavishly on new entitlements, illegal immigrants, and untried and inefficient green projects.

Newsom was endowed with two of the wettest years in recent California history. Yet he and radical environmentalists squandered the water bounty—as snowmelts and runoff long designated for agricultural irrigation were drained from aqueducts and reservoirs to flow out to sea.

Newsom transferred millions of dollars designated by a voter referendum to build dams and aqueducts for water storage and instead blew up four historic dams on the Klamath River. For decades, these now-destroyed scenic lakes provided clean, green hydroelectric power, irrigation storage, flood control, and recreation.