patrick.net

Narrative alert! Bloomberg ran a narrative-baking story yesterday deceptively headlined, “US Suspends Wuhan Institute Funds Over Covid Stonewalling.” ...

Bloomberg also reported that HHS’s Office of Inspector General conducted an audit earlier this year that determined the NIH failed to effectively monitor its awards and subawards, harming the agency’s “ability to understand the nature of research conducted and identify problem areas.” In other words, Bloomberg is setting up an excuse for NIH to “not know” what was going on with the money it gave Wuhan.

See? The NIH wasn’t deliberately funding gain-of-function research. They just trusted the Wuhan lab and forgot to check what it was using the money for.

In other words, the NIH is admitting to the lesser crime of negligence, rather than of being up to its filthy neck in gain-of-function research and being nabbed in a Chinese biolab bathroom with its pants down.

This was a narrative-crafting article. Bloomberg is helping stitch together a fairytale about how the virus leaked from a shoddily-run lab. It was negligence all around, just one of those things. The conclusion will be that we need to tighten up the procedures and fund the agencies even more so that they can do their jobs properly.

Did you hear about the officer who stopped a heavily-armed man named Mohamad from shooting up a street fair in Fargo last week?

Did you hear about the shooting in North Dakota? No? Why not?

Don't we have national news corporations?

RFK Jr. Exposes Big Pharma’s Control Over the TV News

There are only two countries that allow pharma ads on TV: one is the United States, and the other is New Zealand.

“75% of the advertising revenues in the nightly news come from pharmaceutical companies,” reported Kennedy.

Kennedy produced a documentary about vaccines and presented it to Fox News. Then Fox News executive Roger Ailes told Kennedy, “This is like a red line for us.” “If one of my hosts, like Cavuto or Sean, allowed you on to talk about this issue, I would have to fire them.” ...

“Anderson Cooper is getting a $13-million-a-year salary. But if you actually look at the revenues, probably 70 or 80% of that is coming from Pfizer,” commented Kennedy.

“So, who is he really working for? Is he working for the public interest? I don’t think so. And it’s not that Pfizer is writing his scripts and dictating stuff, but he knows where the boundaries are of what he can and cannot say.”

This interview was censored and taken down by YouTube, but you can still watch it here:

https://twitter.com/VigilantFox/status/1685397533315526656

What modern journalism has become. The internet’s digital tsunami of information and emancipation of authorship shattered the traditional newspaper business model and the elite-controlled dispensation that had long endowed newsrooms with a sacrosanct authority as a gatekeeper to knowledge with a monopoly over dissemination and agenda-setting. To survive, the mainstream media has pivoted from journalism to tribalism; the goal isn’t to inform readers, it’s to confirm what they already believe.

the goal isn’t to inform readers, it’s to confirm what they already believe.

Leftist corporate media outlet the Washington Post has issued a “fact-check” on Democrat President Joe Biden’s false claim that his son Hunter never took money from China.

The Post’s “fact-checker” Glenn Kessler slapped President Biden with “Four Pinocchios” over his false claim about Hunter’s shady foreign business deals.

According to the Post’s “fact-checking” scale, “Four Pinocchios” is the highest rating for a false claim, which it refers to as “whoppers.”

Kessler begins Tuesday’s fact-check of Biden by revisiting comments he made in both presidential debates in 2020 when he repeatedly denied claims that Hunter did business with China.

“But now, nearly three years later, Biden’s assertions have been directly rebutted by Hunter himself,” Kessler writes.

Armed with all kinds of economic, cultural and political power, we support policies that help ourselves. Free trade makes the products we buy cheaper, and our jobs are unlikely to be moved to China. Open immigration makes our service staff cheaper, but new, less-educated immigrants aren’t likely to put downward pressure on our wages.

Like all elites, we use language and mores as tools to recognize one another and exclude others. Using words like “problematic,” “cisgender,” “Latinx” and “intersectional” is a sure sign that you’ve got cultural capital coming out of your ears. Meanwhile, members of the less-educated classes have to walk on eggshells because they never know when we’ve changed the usage rules so that something that was sayable five years ago now gets you fired. ...

Elite institutions have become so politically progressive in part because the people in them want to feel good about themselves as they take part in systems that exclude and reject.

It’s easy to understand why people in less-educated classes would conclude that they are under economic, political, cultural and moral assault — and why they’ve rallied around Trump as their best warrior against the educated class. He understood that it’s not the entrepreneurs who seem most threatening to workers; it’s the professional class. Trump understood that there was great demand for a leader who would stick his thumb in our eyes on a daily basis and reject the whole epistemic regime that we rode in on.

@KanekoaTheGreat
#5 Between 2013 and 2019, the New York Times and the Washington Post increased their usage of "white privilege" and "racial privilege" by 1,200% and nearly 1,500%, respectively.

The New York Times ran a highly-encouraging story from the counter-revolution yesterday, headlined, “Teacher Is Fired for Reading Book on Gender Identity in Class.”




The book in question is titled “My Shadow is Purple,” and as is obvious from its cover, above, it depicts a little boy imagining his shadow is dressed in a tutu. Obviously he’s thinking he must be a girl.

The Times never mentions that unpleasant fact, apart from admitting the book is generally about “gender identity.”

What happened was, Cobb County’s Board of Education, located in a suburb northwest of Atlanta, voted 4-3 on Thursday — on partisan lines — to approve its superintendent’s recommendation to terminate teacher Katherine Rinderle’s contract, for disobeying clear instructions not to use transsexual materials in the classroom.

But according to the New York Times, Rinderle was unfairly fired by radical rightwing reactionaries just for reading a few paragraphs from a perfectly innocuous book mostly about colors, although it did admit “the book centers on a gender nonbinary theme.”

A tutu isn’t “nonbinary,” assuming I understand what “nonbinary” means. And I readily admit I might not understand the term.

Anyway, more progress in the counter-revolution.

Tablet Magazine ran an impressive article back in March that is worth a re-mention, if you are looking for something solid to read this weekend. At 48 printed pages, it’s more like a small book, but it is outstanding. The long-form article, which includes a table of contents after an 8-page introduction, is headlined, “A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century (Thirteen Ways of Looking at Disinformation).”

The article goes into great detail about how U.S. intelligence agency termites have hollowed out Establishment Media, making them wholly-owned fascist subsidiaries of the United States government, bent on one laser-focused, teensy-weensy objective: total world political domination:

The American press, once the guardian of democracy, was hollowed out to the point that it could be worn like a hand puppet by the U.S. security agencies and party operatives… If the underlying philosophy of the war against disinformation can be expressed in a single claim, it is this: You cannot be trusted with your own mind.

Well. Some people shouldn’t be trusted with their own minds. Such as a lot of county health directors. But I digress.

As I said, the article is a big bite, and a lot of folks will be put off by its length. But it is exceptionally well-written, and jam-packed with evidence and compelling logic. In case you don’t have time, bookmark it for later, and read this paragraph from the introduction, which will give you a good idea of the piece’s perspective:

(Edited for brevity):

Something monstrous is taking shape in America. Formally, it exhibits the synergy of state and corporate power that is the hallmark of fascism. What is coming into being is a new form of government and social organization that is as different from mid-twentieth century liberal democracy as the early American republic was from the British monarchism it grew out of. A state organized to protect the sovereign rights of individuals is being replaced by a digital leviathan that wields power through opaque algorithms and the manipulation of digital swarms. It resembles the Chinese system of social credit and one-party state control, and yet that, too, misses the distinctively American and providential character of the control system. In the time we lose trying to name it, the thing itself may disappear back into the bureaucratic shadows, covering up any trace with automated deletions from the top-secret data centers of Amazon Web Services, “the trusted cloud for government.”

Again, if you have time, this article is worth the investment. Enjoy.

But while there’s no question that the media has utterly disgraced itself, it’s also a convenient fall guy—by far the weakest player in the counter-disinformation complex. The American press, once the guardian of democracy, was hollowed out to the point that it could be worn like a hand puppet by the U.S. security agencies and party operatives.

It would be nice to call what has taken place a tragedy, but an audience is meant to learn something from a tragedy. As a nation, America not only has learned nothing, it has been deliberately prevented from learning anything while being made to chase after shadows. This is not because Americans are stupid; it’s because what has taken place is not a tragedy but something closer to a crime. Disinformation is both the name of the crime and the means of covering it up; a weapon that doubles as a disguise.

The crime is the information war itself, which was launched under false pretenses and by its nature destroys the essential boundaries between the public and private and between the foreign and domestic, on which peace and democracy depend. By conflating the anti-establishment politics of domestic populists with acts of war by foreign enemies, it justified turning weapons of war against Americans citizens.

Emeryville police had to call for reinforcements from neighboring law enforcement agencies during the four-hour incident involving hundreds of young people fighting.

At approximately 4:30 p.m., police received a call from a business at the Bay Street mall about a group of about 50 young adults inside a store causing a disturbance. Officers arrived and escorted them out.

Police said in a statement that, at about 5:15 p.m. while patrolling the area, officers saw another group of about 100 young people arriving at the mall. Over the next 30 minutes, an additional 100 to 150 young adults showed up at the mall.