patrick.net

Trollhole says

The internet has eclipsed TV, I think.

Internet allows us to learn, just about anything, television doesn't.

Philo Farnsworth invented the television expecting it to be an educational tool. He saw it as a failure to such an extent that when his son asked him why they didn't have one, he supposedly said:

There's nothing on it worthwhile, and we're not going to watch it in this household, and I don't want it in your intellectual diet.

He was a true genius, it's a pity he died in 1971. I doubt he even know ARPANet was invented. The Internet can be as bad as television, but ONLY as bad. It can't be worse, provided it's 2 way. Anything you encounter which is one way, is just the same old shit, if you can't comment, and you can't learn from other independent people, it's worthless.

Commenting is the best thing ever. I learned more about the world from individual people commenting on news articles than I could have ever learned just reading news articles. People will point out bullshit in a second when they see it.

https://twitter.com/iamyesyouareno/status/1677714524009385984

In Iowa, Tucker Carlson Did The Job The Decaying Media Monolith Won’t

https://thefederalist.com/2023/07/18/in-iowa-tucker-carlson-did-the-job-the-decaying-media-monolith-wont/

Patrick says

Yep, as warned by Lewis Carol long ago:

https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/triple-standards-wednesday-july-19?publication_id=463409&post_id=135273232&isFreemail=true

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.

https://notthebee.com/article/did-you-hear-about-the-officer-who-stopped-a-muslim-terrorist-from-shooting-up-a-street-fair-in-fargo-this-week

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?

https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/reasonableness-tuesday-july-25-2023

Israeli journalism also captured:

https://vigilantfox.substack.com/p/rfk-jr-exposes-big-pharmas-control

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

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Toss+Salad

https://www.euphoricrecall.net/p/32-ideas-for-32-years?publication_id=323684&post_id=135485126&isFreemail=true

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.

Patrick says

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

Correct, it is not "Get this out quickly, the people have a right to know," but rather "Get this out quickly, people want their opinions validated."

https://slaynews.com/news/washington-post-biden-four-pinocchios-false-claim-hunter-never-took-money-china/

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.

Kessler is risking his job by telling the truth.

Patrick says

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/02/opinion/trump-meritocracy-educated.html

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.

But then he plunges back into the slime by accusing Trump of being a "monster". Weird abandonment of true introspection right at the last moment. Maybe he has to do that to keep his job.

https://twitter.com/KanekoaTheGreat/status/1654982143918100482

@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.

Patrick says

Well, at least they didn't call us "dead maritime chattels of the Crown Colony".

https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/handwashers-saturday-august-19-2023

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.