patrick.net

Patrick says

They were assuming something like $100 worth of ingredients from milk to eggs to spices were already in the house.

No beverages, either. Just water. Not even coffee was included, certainly not any cream or sugar for it.

I think I broke it down that everybody would get about 1 oz of peas per person and less than 2" slice of pie, no seconds. Memory might be off, but it was something like that. Slim pickens.

https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/penn-and-telling-on-themselves

it’s easy to mistake the histrionics about “trump will declare martial law” and “trump plans to set up concentration camps for political enemies” (both claims i’ve heard from people i once thought thinkers but who seem to have lost all calibration and discernment) for “just more TDS driven by mistaking CNN for news” but this is an error.

these lockstep talking points erupted everywhere at once. this is how you know they were seeded. every news station and wild eyed pundit does not suddenly invent the same persecution fantasy and pitch it from the same angle using the same words and analogies on the same day by coincidence. this is a talking point. someone released and seeded it. and they did it for a reason.

the reason is this:

trump wants to deport illegal aliens. this is hardly new news. it’s actually popular policy and the people who tried to claim “this is not happening, this is not a problem, well, akshully, it’s a good thing before finally pivoting to ‘then who will mow my lawn and pick the lettuce’” have lost massive credibility on this issue. they have lied over and over and they lost public trust and public opinion.

trump’s policy has widespread support even among latinos.

so how do you thwart it? by saying trump is a dictator who wants military rule and concentration camps. then, when he starts rounding up illegals to ship home, you scream “see! police state! military use on US soil! concentration camps! gathering those in the country illegally and enforcing its laws is literally genocide. ICE facilities are dachau!” and you frame as fascism and power grab what in reality amounts to an end to lawlessness and actual invasion and a return to basic ideas like “borders” and “citizenship.”

this whole thing is designed to make protecting american citizens and society look like an attempt to conquer it. they are seeding the debate to come and seeking to use a false frame as a way to accumulate credibility. it’s cult leader 101 and a way to frighten hispanics with tales of “people who look like you are being put in boxcars!”

they then extend it to “and they are going to deport naturalized citizens and those with green cards and legal immigration too!” so that when some mistake inevitable happens, then can howl “see! told you they were coming for you!”

this is a campfire story intended to make the cub scouts wet their pants at every rustle in the forest tonight.

it’s going to work on a fair few people. this is why it’s so important for the rest to be aware of the trick.

https://slaynews.com/news/elon-musk-reuters-paid-propaganda/

X boss Elon Musk has warned the public that “news” outlet Reuters is actually a paid propaganda operation.

Musk revealed that Reuters has been pushing phony investigations into his businesses on behalf of President Joe Biden’s administration.

He called the purported connection “insane” and said it “explains a lot.” ...

Musk responded to the report by stating that “deep state traitors are coming after me, using their paid shills in legacy media.”

In March, Musk stated: “The legacy media lies as easy as breathing.”

He added that “Reuters is the worst right now.”

https://www.kunstler.com/p/no-the-truth-is-not-just-another

Only over time, the past thirty years especially, our government grew and grew and one of the things that grew out of it was the nefarious “blob” dedicated to protecting the self-enlarging perquisites and interests of that government. Blobs will absorb things they encounter, and in a predatory way, the US government blob absorbed the US news media. The blob transformed the news into an engine for suppressing the facts or spinning them narratively when they could not be suppressed, in order to maximize the advantage of the government and to protect the operations of the blob itself.

It is also a fact that this blob is aligned mostly with Democratic Party, because that party is most avid for the continuing growth of government, and its members overwhelmingly dominate in the officialdom that dwells inside the DC Beltway. The numbers speak for themselves on the DC voter rolls.

So, a new government under Mr. Trump is feared cringingly by the news media. For one thing, the incoming government has tasked itself with reducing government substantially, eliminating many of its perquisites, and surgically excising the nefarious blob that is draining the purpose, meaning, and vitality out of our national life. The news media is terrified of being found-out for having acted as the blob’s chamberlain. We may find out exactly how that worked — how, for example, professional liars such as Joy Reid and Rachel Maddow of MSNBC were paid. What accounted for the amazing coordination of talking-points from day-to-day across all networks and newspapers?

We are about to find out how a whole lot of mystifying things have happened in recent years. For instance, those fantastic vote switcheroos in “Joe Biden’s” favor that occurred visibly right on TV in the wee hours of November 4, 2020? How did William Barr conceal the existence of Hunter Biden’s laptop from Mr. Trump’s defense attorneys in the 2019 impeachment over a phone call to Ukraine? Who really has been making “presidential” decisions behind the false front of “Joe Biden?" Who in White House news reporters’ pool among the Cable News networks, The New York Times, and The Washington Post happened to know which officials were running the White House operation (did they not have sources)? How did the FBI engineer the Jan. 6, 2021, riot and with how many agents and operatives on-site? Who was in charge of the DNC pipe bomb caper? How has George and Alex Soros’s network of money-dispensing NGOs been allowed to buy law enforcement offices all over country? How did Merrick Garland’s errand boys get to New York Attorney General Letitia James and Fulton County DA Fani Willis? What has been done with the billions of dollars sent to Ukraine? Why is the CDC still advertising and promoting mRNA Covid vaccines that they must know have killed and disabled millions of people? Who thought it was a good idea to fill the ranks of the US military with transexuals? How did the order to throw the US-Mexican border wide open move through the chain-of-command, exactly? Things like that.

https://petermcculloughmd.substack.com/p/low-information-people

The conversation reminded me of a thought I’ve frequently had in recent years—namely, that legacy papers like the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post have used their prestige to keep their otherwise educated readers ignorant about the activities of the U.S. government and its influential cronies in finance, the Military-Industrial Complex, and the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex. ...

It reminds me of my experience when I was 36 and I rewarded myself for my first major book deal by buying a (used) Porsche 911 of the 996 Series. Ever since I was a little boy I’d dreamed of owning a Porsche, and at last I had the money to buy one. To be sure, it was a fairly cool car, but only later did I realize that my perception of prestige had caused me to overlook its many shortcomings. ...

A few nights ago at dinner, I was tempted to tell my old friends that “the New York Times is rubbish,” but I knew they wouldn’t believe me. They are still blinded by their perception of the paper’s prestige.

Henry Adams (1938). “Letters of Henry Adams ...: 1892-1918”, New York, Houghton

Henry Brooks Adams (16 February 1838 – 27 March 1918) was a U.S. historian, journalist, novelist and educator. He was the great-grandson of John Adams, grandson of John Quincy Adams and son of Charles Francis Adams, Sr.

https://x.com/BonillaJL/status/1875941885648236974

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/07/business/mark-zuckerberg-meta-fact-check.html



OMGLOLWTF

Does the NY Times have any idea how much they sound like The Babylon Bee now?

Patrick says

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/07/business/mark-zuckerberg-meta-fact-check.html



OMGLOLWTF

Does the NY Times have any idea how much they sound like The Babylon Bee now?

Haven't tried calling women "household objects" on Facebook, but I did try saying "The vaxx is dangerous and ineffective" today and they deleted it instantly.

Censorship of things that matter continues full force on Facebook.

https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/unconditional-saturday-january-11

Although it was completely predictable, the New York Times still ran perhaps its stupidest article in a long series of cognitively compromised columns, this one capped with the stunningly imbecilic headline, “As a Felon, Trump Upends How Americans View the Presidency.” A far more honest headline would have been, “Trump’s Sentencing Proves Liberal Lawfare Complete Waste of Time.” ...

After everything, after spending $80-million-plus (?) and who knows how much political capital to obtain the first criminal conviction of a U.S. president, Judge Merchan bravely sentenced Trump to nothing. No jail, no fine, no probation, not even community service.

Merchan’s unprecedented non-sentence left the Times with very little ammunition to work with, but it did it’s lying best. In the Times’ view, Trump has been punished: politically.

“TrUmP is tHe fIrSt FeLoN pReSiDeNt!!”

“While Mr. Trump was spared jail time or financial penalties,” the Times’s glum reporter noted with the slightest hint of finding a bright side, “he effectively had the word ‘felon’ tattooed on his record for all time unless a higher court overturns the conviction.”

Hahaha! Stop it! It’s too much! The best slam the Times could come up with was this is going on his permanent record. That is, effectively permanent. But not actually permanent! Because Trump’s appeal is still pending, and it’s pending under a whole new regime. So. ...

The reporter scared up an appropriate, if false, quotation from Barack Obama’s former lawyer who sadly said “You have somebody who is an adjudicated felon 34 times over, but you also have a nation that is either so numb or so in shock that it does not know how to react.”

Please. That is a progressive fantasy. Not only do we know exactly how to react, we did react. We re-elected the felon. Nor are we numb or in shock; we are furious. And we’re not going to let sold-out corporate media get away with it this time.

https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/unconditional-saturday-january-11

On Thursday, Fortune published one of the most remarkable articles I can recall, which also remarkably replaced an overheated article published earlier in the day. The replacement article ran under a one-word, all-caps headline: “CORRECTION.” Here is the entire new article:

CORRECTION: On January 9, Fortune published an article titled "Elon Musk is pushing to
remove dates from X posts and planning new $8 sign up fee." After publication, Fortune
learned that a source that was central to this story had intentionally misled our reporter over
a series of exchanges. The sourcing and story do not meet our editorial standards, and the story
has been deleted. We apologize to readers and to Mr. Musk and employees of X.

It sounds hilarious and it was. Fortune figured out that a single X user named “SpaceSudoer” had catfished the corporate media outlet into running a 100% fake story intended to mock Elon Musk. Yesterday, a new ‘Fortune Exposed’ account took credit (it seems SpaceSudoer created the Fortune Exposed account for this purpose):



In a series of posts, SpaceSudoer described how he’d answered a prompt seeking X whistleblowers at the bottom of one of reporter Kali Hays’ articles. So he pretended to be a disgruntled X employee and made up a story about being relocated. When Kali bit, he offered an outrageous tale of getting fired by Elon personally, after he pushed back on Elon’s dumb idea to “remove dates from X posts” and cancel the free account option.

Reporter Hays asked him for some supporting evidence, like an email or screenshot, which SpaceSudoer did not provide, ghosting her. He said he was then “surprised” to see Fortune run with the story, multiplying his fake, anonymous “whistleblowing” report into two anonymous sources:

Musk has floated the idea of nixing date and
time stamps from the timeline to X to
employees in recent weeks, a person familiar
with internal conversations told Fortune. The
suggestion, which has raised worries among
some staffers for its potential to exacerbate
misinformation, comes as X is moving ahead
with a separate plan to begin charging new
users an $8 fee to sign up and begin posting on
the platform, two sources told Fortune.

Ruh roh. Not only did Fortune fall for being journalistically catfished —without evidence— but it also lied about its sourcing.

Lying corporate media is on life support. I keep telling you these articles quoting only anonymous sources are pure propaganda. If it fits the narrative, any bad actor can supply willing corporate media reporters who will neither try to confirm or deny the story, but will merely run with it so long as its politically helpful.

Kali could have emailed X and asked for a comment. I know it’s a lot of work, but still. I’m just saying. She didn’t check because she didn’t want to know.

If we had a functioning corporate media instead of a sold-out, deep-state propaganda operation, Fortune would not have deleted its article in panic. Instead, it would have published a much more introspective follow-up story explaining what went wrong, how it violated its own journalistic standards, and how it plans to fix it to make sure this doesn’t happen again.

Instead, all we got was a “CORRECTION” that blamed everything on the spoofer. As though Fortune has some right to expect anonymous tipsters to be scrupulous with the truth, so that it need not do any journalism work itself.

Remember — we were this close being forced to accept that the only credible sources of information were Fortune and the rest of corporate media.

Is it spreading misinformation when Fortune does it?