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Home » Open thread 6/17/21

Open thread 6/17/21

The New Neo Posted on by

Stark. Simple. Classic.

No photo, no video. Today’s open thread is just an open thread.

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Open thread 6/17/21 — 38 Comments

  1. So, pray tell, who is even remotely surprised that Jeffrey Toobin has been brought back by CNN?
    Anybody?

    As for NY State’s governor, Andrew Mengele Cuomo, it seems the efforts to remove him from office have faded.
    The worst that will happen to him is that he will eventually retire on a fat, taxpayer funded govt. pension.
    He too will be resurrected one day and will be seen as an “expert commentator” on CNN or MSNBC or ABC or CBS (as will DeBlasio).

    One thing about “public service;” no matter how badly one F**ks up (provided the individual is a liberal progressive / socialist / communist – but I repeat myself) they will eventually be resurrected and treated (and paid) as if they had never done anything wrong or as if their actual record in office was exemplary.

    Just look at Bill Clinton; the folks at Davos (and other “influential” places) can’t get enough of him.

  3. Stark. Simple. Classic.

    Shades of the early days of Yahoo! or Alta Vista.

    Reminds me of pals of mine that used the ARPANet a great deal for work. The rest of us were ooohing and aahhing over Mozilla and MPEG videos and those guys were grinding their teeth. One literally said, “Just wait. The whole damn Internet will get plastered advertisements.” Why would that happen? I said in complete ignorance.

  4. Our host neo has pointedly asked why the Left Corporate Media has revised it’s story on Covid-19s origins so quickly. Was it CYA for Fauci? The Sainted savior who’s since been shown a liar and furthering corrupt interests? If not even China’s totalitarian CCP?

    Possibly. Ruling Class interests have blocked covering the spreading blame belonging to these failed institutions. But in particular this past week, credit for critically re-examing the out from nature hypothesis against the Wuhan Virology Institute’s lab theory by an online crowdsourced group of 20 known as DRASTIC, or Decentralized Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating COVID-19, using open sources to refine the story.

    First Post.com from India has the details, posted June 8th:

    These may not be the investigative tools one has in mind to unravel the mystery of the decade, if not the century. But a crack team of amateur researchers have managed to use these services to amass evidence that has now compelled media and intelligence communities around the world to sit up and take notice of the hypothesis that the novel coronavirus may have emerged from a lab in China. There is no conclusive proof, but what these internet sleuths have managed to put together is a strong argument, based on research, that there has to be a proper effort to get to the bottom of the COVID-19 pandemic.

    What IS DRASTIC?

    Short for Decentralized Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating COVID-19, it is an informal amalgam of experts and lay researchers from across the world who painstakingly pieced together various strands of data and information to understand how the 2019 SARS coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) or the novel coronavirus, emerged and raced through the globe.

    The website that this group has now launched says that the team comprises more than 20 people from across the world. Among them are a few from India. Many of these amateur sleuths have chosen to remain anonymous, like the one who describes himself as the ‘Seeker’. In fact, the website adds that “many DRASTIC members, especially “China experts” and scientists prefer to operate anonymously…

    https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.firstpost.com/india/covid-19-origin-how-drastic-a-group-of-internet-sleuths-compelled-world-to-relook-wuhan-lab-leak-theory-9696051.html/amp

    Of course, we now know that WHO used a self-interested authority to be on the investigative team who’s report vmcame out in the Spring, Peter Droszek — the sane man Fauci funded to keep gain if function (ie, enhanced infectiousness) research going at the Wuhan lab — the sane man who covered up his conflicts if interest while shilling for China’s innocence in the Lancet in May of 2020 — and the same man who claimed WIV kept no bats, a claimed now conclusively refuted by video evidence.

  5. so who won in the Philadelphia v. Catholic adoption agency case at the Supremes? We should’ve suspected that with all the left justices voting for the decision, it was meaningless. Sure enough. Roberts strikes again. Here’s what Gorsuch wrote in his opinion:

    “The particular appeal before us arises at the intersection of public accommodations laws and the First Amendment; it involves same-sex couples and the Catholic Church. Perhaps our colleagues believe today’s circuitous path will at least steer the Court around the controversial subject matter and avoid ‘picking a side,'” Gorsuch wrote. “But refusing to give CSS the benefit of what we know to be the correct interpretation of the Constitution is picking a side. Smith committed a constitutional error. Only we can fix it. Dodging the question today guarantees it will recur tomorrow. These cases will keep coming until the Court musters the fortitude to supply an answer. Respectfully, it should have done so today.”

  6. We need to correct the natural right of citizens to directly govern themselves. Now, the governing power is expressed in so many indirect avenues such that there are large dilutions of this power and uncountable nefarious ways to subvert power. City-councilman; water district board member; US Senator; Fed Open Market Committee member….et al ad infinitum.

    Because power surrogates are so easily expressed by money, and because government so thoroughly watches and controls money, this seems a particularly apt target for a hidden revolution in governance: people need to take over money. They need to create it. To save it. To invest it. To keep it secret from government. To give it voluntarily to government without it being seized. Nobody has a right to see your bank balance (as in HR1) or know what you are doing with the emergent results of your work and ingenuity, money.

    We need a new encrypted Peoples Bitcoin.

  7. JohnTyler,

    “who is even remotely surprised that Jeffrey Toobin has been brought back by CNN?”

    A dog returns to its vomit.

    “The worst that will happen to him is that he will eventually retire on a fat, taxpayer funded govt. pension.”

    But will he live to enjoy it? The democrats are working diligently to bring back vigilante justice.

    BTW, Cuomo didn’t f**k up. Premeditated mass murder doesn’t qualify as a f**k up.

    TJ,

    “Ruling Class interests have in the MSM blocked covering the spreading blame belonging to these failed institutions.”

    Half of America does not trust or limit its gathering of information to the MSM… the great majority of that half of America knows where the blame lies. And many realize that Peter Droszek is at least as guilty of mass murder as is Fauci.

  9. Middlemen:

    https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=24134

    “Running a skim is nothing new, but even the mafia understood that you can shear a sheep many times, but you can only skin him once. The modern mafia, the managerial elite, entangled with the powerful, are moving from sheering to skinning. They have busted out everything, so now they are busting out the bust outs. The hedge funds robbing the real estate bandits is like a bank robber robbing drug dealers, in that it says the criminal ecosystem is out of balance.
    .
    .
    Of course, the bizarre fads vomited up by the Cloud People is another sign that we have too many people standing around looking for something to do. Idle hands to the Devil’s work and Old Scratch is spoiled for choice these days. We simply have too many middlemen with time on their hands. The system is overstocked with them, so they sit around dreaming up new ways to horn in on the life of the productive. Now the middlemen have middlemen and that cannot go on forever.”

  10. One literally said, “Just wait. The whole damn Internet will get plastered advertisements.” Why would that happen? I said in complete ignorance.

    TommyJay:

    I know good writing when I see it.

  11. Ace had a photo up of Macron wagging his pointer finger in Biden’s face about something. Anyone know what that was about? Don’t tell me it was photoshopped. Who knows these days, right?

    My flag collection seems to be complete for the foreseeable future – got the last one on my list in the mail today. In the course of looking up a certain historical date, I was surprised to find how little seems to be solidly known about Johannes Gutenberg; the year of his birth is disputed, the date often given as that of his decease is supposedly rooted in a pronouncement by a chronic* forger, and even his gravesite is lost at this point. It is puzzling.

    * pun!

  13. dnaxy on June 17, 2021 at 3:38 pm “We need a new encrypted Peoples Bitcoin.”

    With the stories of how powerful quantum computing is going to be, such that it can/ will break any form of potential future encryption, I remain skeptical that such bitcoin schemes can survive long term. But if it is possible, perhaps an encryption key based on personal DNA information in some form would be promising? Or a summary of our personal antibody complexes?

  15. Zaphod on June 17, 2021 at 10:59 pm said:

    Learn something new every day:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCYaiRmcYVI

    Didn’t know that black powder cap and ball revolvers could be a handy legal loophole in some jurisdictions.”

    Oh .. yeah … go ahead and broadcast it why don’t you. LOL

    By the way, if anyone here knows about that other conversion thing which I shall not mention; don’t you mention it either.

    Of course, a regular revolver is cheaper anyway.

  16. @DNW:

    Probably get me 15-20 years out here to even think about knowing the other thing… But yeah.

    In other unrelated news, your next printer shouldn’t come from HP.

  18. @R2L:

    If they can pull off the Quantum Supremacy thing and start cracking NP-Hard Problems without having to resort to heuristics, then the entire financial system and all privacy bets are off and who knows where we’ll end up as you rightly surmise.

    “But if it is possible, perhaps an encryption key based on personal DNA information in some form would be promising? Or a summary of our personal antibody complexes?”

    — Nope — Then you’ll find out just what it’s like to be an Albino in vast swathes of Africa where Albino body parts are believed to be medically efficacious 😀

    I figure we’re headed back to clubs and rocks via the short path, but some kind of Techno-priesthood guarding the Nilometers might be another way. Hopefully won’t live to see either.

  19. “Sometimes an open thread is just an open thread.” – huxley

    I bow to the master of multiple level aphoristic satire.

  20. How to Cope in 5 Easy Steps:

    1. Try to ward off even discussing the issue in the first place.

    2. Deny the issue exists, downplay its significance or scope. Find ways to explain it away as nothing out of the ordinary.

    3. Try to reverse the issue back on the person who raises it. “This is a ‘you’ problem.”

    4. Accept the issue exists, but then try to point to some other causal factor which minimises and normalises the issue.

    5. When all else fails, resort to the Complex complex, and claim the issue is so irreducibly complex that we’ll never understand it.

    (Credit: The Academic Agent)

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilAV94Bnah4&t=3186s

  21. Among the claims at the RS post about the Chinese defector is a list of what he has supposedly revealed.
    More than enough to inspire the Democrats to start getting ahead with their “Well, of course it was a lab leak, and remember we told you first!! about all the conflicts of interest, so China can’t possibly be blackmailing any of the people that covered for them last year. And Orange Man Bad, so we had to do it.”

    https://redstate.com/jenvanlaar/2021/06/17/breaking-chinese-defector-confirmed-as-top-counterintelligence-official-n398374

    In addition, Dong has provided DIA with the following information:

    Early pathogenic studies of the virus we now know as SARS-CoV-2
    Models of predicted COVID-19 spread and damage to the US and the world
    Financial records detailing which exact organizations and governments funded the research on SARS-CoV-2 and other biological warfare research
    Names of US citizens who provide intel to China
    Names of Chinese spies working in the US or attending US universities
    Financial records showing US businessmen and public officials who’ve received money from the Chinese government
    Details of meetings US government officials had (perhaps unwittingly) with Chinese spies and members of Russia’s SVR
    How the Chinese government gained access to a CIA communications system, leading to the death of dozens of Chinese people who were working with the CIA

    Dong also has provided DIA with copies of the contents of the hard drive on Hunter Biden’s laptop, showing the information the Chinese government has about Hunter’s pornography problem and about his (and Joe’s) business dealings with Chinese entities. Some of the files on Dong has provided shine a light on just how it was that the sale of Henniges Automotive (and their stealth technology) to Chinese military manufacturer AVIC Auto was approved.

    But wait, there’s more! I’m going to skip to the end, though.

    As we initially reported, DIA has high confidence in the veracity of Dong’s claims. The fact that since our original report, which was pooh-poohed by Langley apologists, the New York Times published a rare interview with Dr. Shi Zhengli (the WIV “Bat Woman”), ABC News has started an “investigation” into COVID-19 origins, and now the actual name of the defector has been published in an anti-Trump, CIA-friendly blog, demonstrates what sources told RedState today: “This defector has the rest of the intelligence community and the LEO community scared sh**less.”

    And I suspect there is even more that the sources haven’t yet leaked to Red State.
    Finally, the Right gets to play the same games as the Left.

  23. On another tangent, some synapses clicked tonight connecting the Jon Stewart post yesterday, and Firesign Theater comments today.

    Back when the Daily Show was new (Wikipedia says it first aired in 1996), my right-winger friends all thought it was hilarious. They certainly didn’t take it seriously.
    However, it seems that a lot of viewers consider it a legitimate source of news, perhaps with some reason.

    A 2006 study published by Indiana University tried to compare the substantive amount of information of The Daily Show against prime time network news broadcasts, and concluded that when it comes to substance, there is little difference between The Daily Show and other news outlets. The study contended that, since both programs are more focused on the nature of “infotainment” and ratings than on the dissemination of information, both are broadly equal in terms of the amount of substantial news coverage they offer.
    …
    In July 2009, Time magazine held an online poll entitled “Now that Walter Cronkite has passed on, who is America’s most trusted newscaster?”[158] Jon Stewart won with 44% of the vote, 15 points ahead of Brian Williams in second place with 29%.

    Conflicting polls in 2004 claimed both that comedy show viewers were the least informed about news items, and that they were the most informed. (shrug)

    In April 2007, viewers who watch both Tucker Carlson Tonight and The Daily Show tend to be more knowledgeable about news than audiences of other news sources. Approximately 54% of Tucker Carlson Tonight and The Daily Show viewers scored in the high knowledge range, followed by Jim Lehrer’s program at 53% and Bill O’Reilly’s program at 51%, significantly higher than the 34% of network morning show viewers

    The audiences for Tucker and Jon may not have been quite so partisanly divided in 2007 as they are now, but I bet the cleavage was already pretty wide.

    I’m surprised there aren’t any newer polls, but I doubt the substance has changed much: regardless of the viewer’s “knowledge” about the news (and that word is subject to bias in polling), the point is that those on the Left get theirs from a comedy show.

    Add this datum:

    The program is popular among young audiences. The Pew Research Center suggested in 2010 that 74% of regular viewers were between 18 and 49, and that 10% of the audience watched the show for its news headlines, 2% for in-depth reporting, and 43% for entertainment

    Many viewers were therefore somewhat (ahem) younger than my cohort, as I was well past 49 in 2010; I suspect the demographics today are not much different, although the audience will skew older now because of keeping those 2010 viewers and adding new younger ones.

    The synaptic connection: perhaps the True Believers of the Daily Show’s leftist spin were not sufficiently vaccinated by FST and Mad Magazine, and suchlike in the Sixties, as most of us were, and actually cannot perceive the difference between satire and news.

    Of course, there isn’t much difference now, or the Bee & Not the Bee wouldn’t be a thing on the internet. The additional data point lending credence to my hypothesis is that the younger staff of the NYT and Snopes keep trying to fact-check the Bee.

    BTW,
    https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/06/sting-like-a-babylon-bee-the-sequel.php

    I took a look at the New York Times’s drive-by defamation of the Babylon Bee last week in “Sting like a Babylon Bee.” The Times disparaged the Bee as a a “far-right misinformation site” that “sometimes trafficked in misinformation in the guise of satire.”

    The Bee is of course a site devoted exclusively to satire with a conservative bent. The Times’s reference to the Bee as a “far-right misinformation site” virtually defies belief. The Times compounded the error in a ridiculous update.

    Say this for the Times. When it comes to misinformation, it speaks with the authority of a perpetrator and hard-core recidivist. Were it not for the example of the Bee itself, we might think it impossible to satirize the Times.

    The Bee followed up with a threatening letter to the Times seeking a correction. As Tyler O’Neil relates for PJ Media, the Times has finally corrected its story.

    The correction will hold at least until they get a new washing machine to spin their news.

  24. I’m undercutting my own arguments, but it’s good to note that the Firesigns weren’t limited to the sixties.
    “They experienced a revival and second wave of popularity in the 1990s and continued to write, record and perform until Bergman’s death in 2012.” – Wikipedia

    Adding credence to my theory, however: “Broadcast by the BBC between 1969 and 1974, Monty Python’s Flying Circus…” – Wikipedia

    Interestingly, the Wik’s editors call both of those groups “surreal comedy troupes.”
    The adjective has its own entry, which was clearly written by the British branch of the ‘pedia.

    “Surreal humour (also known as absurdist humour or surreal comedy) is a form of humour predicated on deliberate violations of causal reasoning, producing events and behaviours that are obviously illogical. Constructions of surreal humour tend to involve bizarre juxtapositions, incongruity, non-sequiturs, irrational or absurd situations and expressions of nonsense.
    The humour arises from a subversion of audience expectations, so that amusement is founded on unpredictability, separate from a logical analysis of the situation. The humour derived gets its appeal from the ridiculousness and unlikeliness of the situation. The genre has roots in Surrealism in the arts.”

    FWIW, “Over 67 years, from 1952 until 2018, Mad published 550 regular magazine issues, as well as scores of reprint “Specials”, original-material paperbacks, reprint compilation books and other print projects.”

    Maybe some Daily Show viewers are also fans of the above, but I doubt there’s ever been a poll on it.

  25. Posts at Not the Bee today (that’s the one that prints actual news stories because they are past the parody point, but with some satiric snark just for good measure). Category: the Woke eat their own.

    https://notthebee.com/article/climate-change-protest-group-dissolves-itself-because-its-too-white

    https://notthebee.com/article/kamala-hosted-a-dinner-for-female-politicians-and-the-woke-mob-ate-her-alive-for-being-welcomed-into-whiteness-and-served-by-black-servants

    https://notthebee.com/article/victorias-secret-is-seriously-swapping-its-angels-for-lgbtq-models

    https://notthebee.com/article/oh-look-woke-apple-is-censoring-27-lgbt-apps-in-china

  26. Category: Trump Derangement Syndrome is a mental illness. These people need help.

    https://notthebee.com/article/scientist-on-why-it-took-a-year-to-investigate-the-wuhan-lab-at-the-time-it-was-scarier-to-be-associated-with-trump-and-to-become-a-tool-for-racists

    https://notthebee.com/article/the-mask-charade-has-become-deranged-superstition

    But some are showing the sense to fight back.

    https://notthebee.com/article/roger-waters-turns-down-facebooks-offer-to-use-one-of-his-songs-in-an-ad–calls-mark-zuckerberg-one-of-the-most-powerful-idiots-in-the-world

    https://notthebee.com/article/big-religious-liberty-win-scotus-just-ruled-unanimously-that-catholic-foster-agency-cannot-be-forced-to-work-with-same-sex-couples

  29. In UFO news–the repeated surfacing of information continues, with the appearance of official comment about various samples of unusual materials–supposedly debris from UFOs–that the government has been testing.*

    The picture that is emerging is of decade’s worth of seemingly uncoordinated and sporadic efforts by the government to secretly compile information on UFOs, and to study various things like the debris that they think might have come from UFOs, in the hope that they can gain some knowledge, and reverse engineer them.

    It may be that, over the decades, at any one time there have only been a relative handful of people in the government (people who apparently did not have the influence or ability to direct a lot of attention and funding to this subject) who have believed in the reality and importance of UFO’s, people who ran into a lot of “resistance,” thus explaining a lack of funding, and the lack of serious, sustained, and intense investigation of this subject.

    Of course, it might be the impression that these periodic releases of information are intended to create, and that the true effort has, in actuality, been quite focused, intense, and far more extensive than these releases of information make them appear to have been.

    What may have been a very successful government disinformation campaign about this subject has been so effective that it is hard to know.

    * See, for instance https://www.thewashingtontime.com/pentagon-admits-it-has-been-testing-wreckage-from-ufo-crashes/ and https://americanmilitarynews.com/2021/02/pentagon-asked-if-it-has-ufo-crash-materials-heres-their-cryptic-154-page-response/

  31. To quote former President Ronald Reagan, the most terrifying words in the English language are, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”

    I guess that how you judge the government’s response to the UFO issue—and to many others–depends on whether you think that, in general, the vast majority of federal employees making up the government are honestly trying to do a good job of being of genuine benefit to us citizens, or–to judge from the results of it’s actions–that the government is generally composed of a bunch of almost mindless rule-followers, mired in such rules, or of bumbling idiots–many functionaries often working at cross-purposes to the others–or perhaps, is generally competent, naturally anal-retentive and obstructionist, concerned about self-preservation, and often very Machiavellian, or is generally a bunch of bumbling incompetents, but has particular individuals and units—which from time to time and here and there–are influential, competent, and Machiavellian or, finally, is a confusing and increasingly dysfunctional mixture of all of the above.

  32. To quote former President Ronald Reagan, “the most terrifying words in the English language are, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.””

  33. Our galaxy – the Milky Way – has BILLIONS of stars (recall that the Sun is a medium sized star) and it’s crazy to think that the Sun is the only star that has a solar system.
    Atop of all this, there are many BILLIONS of galaxies.

    Are we to believe that earth is the only place in the known and unknown universe that has intelligent life?

    Intelligent life, by definition, does not include liberals, progressives, socialists, communists, democrats.

  34. Snow on Pine:

    It’s easy for people to make fun of the Roswell crash story — I’m not sure what to make of it myself — but one indelible fact remains.

    Debris of some sort was found on that ranch in New Mexico. The debris was carefully collected by the military and taken somewhere, but it has never been accounted for to the public.

    The official explanations were that the debris was from a weather balloon or a parachute for a high-altitude test dummy. All well and good, but if so — where is that debris, why can’t we see it, and what was the analysis from the lab boys?

    Something is being covered up.

  35. Re: Firesign Theatre…

    AesopFan:

    A classic Firesign line was “What is reality?” The classic structure to a Firesign album was a stoned person watching television and switching channels randomly. So it was hard to confuse a Firesign skit with reality unless one’s brain were entirely unmoored.

    Firesign’s politics were new leftish, but they weren’t spoon-feeding answers. They were suggesting questions, while pushing the limits of word play and surreal humor.

    Mostly, the jokes were not cheap. Their comedy is arguably the densest, most multi-layered ever created this side of James Joyce. Some of the references are dated, but IMO the main reason people don’t listen to Firesign is that it’s too different and demanding. It’s not the usual … beat, beat, punchline.

    The two remaining members are at work preserving the Firesign archives on DVDs and in books.

    I recommend new listeners start with Nick Danger side of “How Can You Be in Two Places at Once…” or the Sherlock Holmes parody, “The Tale of the Giant Rat of Sumatra.” They are detective parodies thus not quite so confusing at first.

  36. If the entire UFO story line is phony-baloney rubbish, why would the US govt. appoint / assign people to investigate it or even bother issuing “explanations” for “aircraft / balloon crashes (think Roswell, etc. ) ?
    Why would the US govt recently release those radar images taken by US Navy fighter pilots of unknown flying objects that perform “impossible” maneuvers?

    They wouldn’t .

    The common explanation is that if UFOs existed, they would have contacted us by now.
    Really?
    Why should they?
    The would be so advanced they would have nothing at all to learn / gain by interacting with humans.

    Further, the UFO people would most likely have knowledge of many planets where intelligent life exists.

    Billions of stars, billions of galaxies; and only ONE planet – EARTH – that has intelligent life?

    Sure.

  37. Billions of stars, billions of galaxies; and only ONE planet – EARTH – that has intelligent life?

    JohnTyler:

    Someone has to be first. Perhaps we, homo saps, just got lucky…

    Personally I don’t doubt UFOs as the consequence of some sort of intelligence. But as to intelligence in our galaxy, I would hardly rule it out, but I’m still haunted by Fermi’s question, “Where is everybody?”

  38. @huxley:

    “Where is everybody?”

    Every civilization eventually invents equivalents of FB, Instagram, Seth Rogen ‘Comedies’, Kardashians, and/or rolls the die with Indian Takeout one time too many.

    If they manage to survive the above horrors, there’s still the the Unknown Unknowns.

    As any good surviving Armenian (except for aforementioned steatopygian Armenian Hottentots) knows, Being Noticed is undesirable.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hello_Out_There!

    We may yet wish that we had learned to STFU.

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