Posting later in the day
You may have noticed that the timing of my posts has shifted to later in the day. That’s mostly because I’m on the west coast, and should be here for about the next two weeks.
It’s also, of course, because I’ve been distracted by grief and also by all the tasks at hand connected with Gerard’s death. His family is doing a lot of that, but there are certain things he delegated to me – such as tending to his blog for a while – and that’s part of what is going on right now. Actually, having extra tasks as well as writing my own posts isn’t such a bad thing, because routine is somewhat distracting and can even function as comforting for a while.
There is still a very surrealistic quality to what happened. Gerard was such a vibrant and vital force that it seems exceptionally strange that he could have died. When I type that thought out and look at it, it seems an absurd thing to say. After all, everybody dies. He almost died eleven years ago, and I was present. And yet…his departure from this earth seems nearly impossible. It takes a lot of getting used to.
Andrew Branca on the Tyre Nichols beating
I haven’t yet had time to watch this analysis by Andrew Branca. But I’m posting the link here because I respect Branca a great deal, based on his work in the past.
Consider COVID vaccines and myocarditis
I’ve written before on the incidence of myocarditis after vaccination. It’s rare, although troublesome. Please see this, this, this, and this, and that’s just a sampler of what I’ve written rather than an exhaustive list.
So I’ll not repeat myself here; I’ll just suggest you read the links. What I want to say here is something different. From the start of the COVID phenomenon I’ve been reporting on things and crunching the numbers, and one thing I’ve noticed (both in the official releases and in the people who don’t trust them) is a great deal of failure to acknowledge the fact that all diseases and all vaccines can cause rare and troublesome reactions. That’s part of the risks of life, disease, and vaccination.
For example, if you do a search for articles on non-COVID vaccines and myocarditis, you will learn that there’s always been such a risk even with more conventional vaccines. Take a look at this article reporting on myocarditis following smallpox vaccination (there are plenty of other articles in that vein), or DPT shots. There are more articles, way too many to analyze here.
But it’s illustrative of something I noticed early on, which is that all phenomena relating to COVID have been treated as somehow uniquely awful. And yet the evidence is that they are not uniquely awful. The distrust engendered by the lies and exaggerations told by the CDC and government around COVID has resulted in a backlash that in my opinion is also an exaggeration, although an understandable one.
The standard answer to what I just said is that no research can be trusted, but once you get to that point you are free to believe whatever you wish, and no research-based argument can dissuade you. Therefore it’s beyond the realm of factual debate and into the realm of a belief system.
And yes, you can always find some medical authority who is saying whatever it is you happen to believe. That doesn’t make it so. I’m an equal-opportunity skeptic, but I also think that anecdotal evidence is less trustworthy and meaningful than scientific studies, although I don’t reify the latter.
I am also very very tired of people ascribing every negative event that occurs after a COVID shot to the shot itself. When well over half of America is vaccinated, and a far higher percentage of the elderly and the already-infirm are vaccinated, then adverse events will be occurring on a regular basis. But even before we had COVID shots, some people died suddenly – even young people. And even before we had COVID shots, some people had cases of cancer that killed them so fast they’d barely had time to be diagnosed.
What I’m asking for – and probably won’t get much of – is some sort of realistic and moderate response to all of this. It’s what I’ve tried to present from the start, as best I can. I plan to keep trying.
But I was under the impression that “objectivity in the MSM” was already an oxymoron
We previously discussed the movement in journalism schools to get rid of principles of objectivity in journalism. Advocacy journalism is the new touchstone in the media even as polls show that trust in the media is plummeting. Now, former executive editor for The Washington Post Leonard Downie Jr. and former CBS News President Andrew Heyward have released the results of their interviews with over 75 media leaders and concluded that objectivity is now considered reactionary and even harmful. Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, editor-in-chief at the San Francisco Chronicle said it plainly: “Objectivity has got to go.”
Notably, while Bob Woodword and others have finally admitted that the Russian collusion coverage lacked objectivity and resulted in false reporting, media figures are pushing even harder against objectivity as a core value in journalism.
It is to laugh, as they say. A “core value”? Perhaps a core pretense, but not an actual value. That’s been true at least since Watergate, when advocacy journalism and speaking truth to power and reporters as iconoclastic (mostly anti-right) heroes took hold, and shaped later generation “journalists.” The change in nomenclature from reporter to journalist is not coincidental, either, and there was a concomitant change from the up-from-the-ranks hard-as-nails reporter to the English major graduate school journalist.
More from the Turley article:
Now the leaders of media companies are joining this self-destructive movement. They are not speaking of columnists or cable hosts who routinely share opinions. They are speaking of actual journalists, the people who are relied upon to report the news.
Saying that “Objectivity has got to go” is, of course, liberating. You can dispense with the necessities of neutrality and balance. You can cater to your “base” like columnists and opinion writers. Sharing the opposing view is now dismissed as “bothsidesism.” Done…
Downie echoes such views and declares “What we found has convinced us that truth-seeking news media must move beyond whatever ‘objectivity’ once meant to produce more trustworthy news.”
Really? Being less objective will make the news more trustworthy?
It’s all part of what’s been going on in academia for decades, as a result of a combination of post-modernism and hubris. After all, objectivity is, among other things, supposed to help counter the tendency of those in power (and the press does have power) towards the hubris of thinking their own beliefs and goals are the same as the truth. That’s all gone, with a few nearly-extinct individuals such as Glenn Greenwald hanging around as living fossils.
Open thread 2/1/23
Expensive eggs
Eggs used to be a great choice for an inexpensive meal. I happen to like them, too. Scrambled, over easy, deviled, egg salad sandwiches, you name it.
Eggs still cost less than meat these days. Or than scallops, one of my personal favorites which even in New England now range between twenty and thirty dollars per pound for the good stuff, the never-ever-frozen sea scallops. I buy a half pound now and then and make the whole thing stretch by cutting them in half.
But eggs? Eggs? What’s up with that? This article purports to explain:
Part of this is just the overall inflation we’ve experienced…
Egg prices were just $1.79 a little over a year ago, in December 2021. Were the corporations just more generous then? Did they suddenly become extra greedy all of a sudden?
Of course not. [Those who offer this] absurd conspiracy theory [are] ultimately motivated by the blind ideological hatred these types have for business.
The real reason for high egg prices, as is usually the case, has its roots in the basic economics of supply and demand. Unfortunately, an avian flu has wiped out more than 43 million egg-laying hens since February 2022, according to the US Department of Agriculture. That’s resulted in a 29% decrease in the US egg stock, aka the supply.
So, inflation plus reduced supply.
Speaking of which, because I’m here on the west coast where things are more expensive, yesterday I hit an all-time high for a grocery trip. I’d say that in general, groceries are about ten to 20 percent higher here than at home.
And I didn’t even buy eggs.
Mark Steyn had a health scare
He’s recovering and seems to be back to form, but Mark Steyn recently had two heart attacks. I wish him good health and long life.
COVID and the restriction of human freedom
It goes without saying that the government response to COVID restricted human freedom in the name of protection, and that there wasn’t nearly enough pushback although there certainly was some. And I’m not just talking about the US; I’m talking about the entire Western world and some of the rest of the world.
Here’s a piece about that. For me, it sparks a memory from nearly ten years ago, a series of posts I wrote on Sarah Conly.
Remember Conly, professor and author of a book entitled Against Autonomy: Justifying Coercive Paternalism? Just do a search on this blog for her name and you’ll get a host of links; she made a deep impression on me. Conly aims to justify an interventionist and paternalistic government based on “social science research” findings. Although the lockdowns were supposedly based on epidemiology, they were fueled by a very similar argument about the needs of the group over those of individual liberty.
Here’s a quote from the first post I ever wrote about Conly, almost exactly ten years ago, when her book came out:
They are interested in the collective—the hive, not the individual. And invariably, of course, they end up hurting the hive as well as the individual, in their attempts at “helping” us all.
I’ve not read the book, of course. But it does not sound as though Conly has any sense of the value of an intangible such as autonomy, although she purports to deal with that issue…
Does Conly really think that because (in her words), “We are too fat, we are too much in debt, and we save too little for the future,” we should surrender our liberty to a benevolent government that will always act in our best interests? Does she know anything whatsoever about government and power? As is so often the case, I’m not sure whether Conly is a fool or a knave, or both. I vote for both.
So please save the lectures, Professor Conly, and get your oh-so-helping hands out of my life. I’m not your little social science experiment. I have a more polite message for Conly as well: in the end, there are intangibles that liberty and autonomy afford us. Those things cannot be measured or quantified, but they are pearls of great price.
That anyone would defend the arguments in Conly’s book was a real wakeup call. And so here we are, ten years later.
The unanswered Tyre Nichols questions
When the Tyre Nichols beating video surfaced, I had some questions that were unanswered but important. And despite the reams that have been written in the days since, they remain unanswered but important. Here they are:
We don’t know why Nichols was stopped, nor do we know what triggered the beating and why it became so prolonged.
We don’t know his cause of death, although I would assume it’s likely it was the beating, which appears to be vicious and prolonged.
If we’ve learned anything from previous experience with such videos, we’ve learned that they must be seen in their entirety. “Appears to be” is good enough for a blog post. But ultimately it won’t suffice, and it shouldn’t suffice in a court of law, although the court of public opinion is very very different.
These days, though, those two courts tend to merge, and public opinion all too often dictates a verdict to a jury motivated by a combination of fear, threats, and minds that are already made up before a trial begins.
Don’t get me wrong. I have no interest in exonerating the officers here if guilty of the worst. I have an interest in their conviction if guilty, and also in their conviction of the precise crimes of which they are guilty. The goal of a trial is to find out if the evidence indicates a particular offense has occurred, to a “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard of proof. I will accept a slightly lower standard in my own mind as a basis on which to declare my own opinion, but it’s not okay for a court verdict and it’s not okay to render it before I know enough of the facts. If that makes me a dull blogger, so be it.
Commenter “sdferr” linked to this article of interest to me, which begins this way:
If Ben Crump, America’s No. 1 attorney in illiteracy, gets what he wants, kiss the right to due process — or what’s left of it — goodbye. If you’re suspected of committing a crime, particularly if you’re a police officer in the line of duty, pray you don’t see his face. It will be all but a death sentence.
That’s been true for a long time, and it’s also been true that if there is a racial angle – in other words, if the alleged victim of police brutality is black – you will see Ben Crump’s face and hear his voice. He is the Adam Schiff of these incidents, often telling lie and lie about them and suffering no bad consequences as a result, lies printed dutifully as truths by the willing MSM. Just do a search for Crump’s name on this blog and I think you’ll see what I mean.
More:
Crump last week said that the Memphis Police Department’s response to the death of 29-year-old black man Tyre Nichols is “the blueprint for going forward” in matters of police confronting black suspects. By that, he apparently means firing, arresting, and prosecuting cops based on whatever half-baked narrative Crump puts out with hopes of getting a multimillion-dollar settlement with the city — all before law enforcement has had a chance to release any materials in its own defense.
Please read the whole thing. It contains, among other things, a description of what the video shows and what it doesn’t show. And it contains the author’s own questions – which should be everyone’s questions at this point, but aren’t.
Open thread 1/31/23
When death comes for bloggers
It’s a daily voice, like a friend you talk to on the phone every day. The closest thing to this kind of writing prior to blogging was the daily columnist (when did those go out? or did they ever exist?).
You get to thinking a blogger is someone you know, and although the conversations are a mite one-sided, they’re not totally one-sided because many bloggers interact in the comments as well. And then there’s always email contact, which makes the blogger much more easily accessible than the olden-day columnist.
The writing voices of bloggers are highly idiosyncratic as well. It’s not newspaper reporting, after all, with its pretense of objectivity and impersonality. Also, there’s no middleman or editor. The blogger is all of that rolled into one.
Some bloggers are far more personal in their writing and disclosure than others. Gerard Vanderleun was that way, for example. I’m much more circumspect (remember that apple I hide behind). Then again, even what appears like openness is hardly full disclosure, and bloggers intentionally shape the personae they project. That’s why meeting a blogger in the real world usually causes some feeling of surprise, because the writer is not the person although the person is the writer.
So when a writer dies and that writing voice is stilled, it’s extra-noticeable for the readers. There’s often a pang very much like losing a good friend in real life, a friend with a major daily presence. The blogger has been churning out copy like a machine, usually every day and probably several times a day, often for years or decades. And then suddenly: silence. Utter utter silence.
It’s a very dramatic reminder that death is an abrupt and reluctant parting as far as our lives on earth go, and how powerless all of us are in its face.
[NOTE: For those of you who don’t know the story of why I’m writing about Gerard Vanderleun, please see this.]