Will the MSM ever retract their old Russiagate stories, in light of the Durham revelations?

The New Neo Posted on by

The answer to that question asked here is: “no.” I suppose it’s within the realm of possibility that one or two might, although I doubt, it, but there’s virtually no chance of any substantial number of news outlets ever doing such a thing.

Long ago I assumed that sort of meaningful retraction would of course happen when media outlets had been wrong – but, I’m talking long long ago. It was also long ago that I reluctantly realized this wouldn’t be the case, and furthermore that most of the original reporting errors weren’t errors at all, but were actually part of a campaign by “journalists” to further a certain “narrative” that hurt the right and helped the left, offered with either regardless disregard for the issue of truth or actual knowledge of their falsehood (in other words, by fools or knaves).

For me the biggest turning point was Rathergate and the doubling down in the media and among Democrats after the hoax was revealed. The egregious nature of the error/falsehood involved in the entire story was easily proven, and yet they couldn’t or wouldn’t back off. Instead they doubled down and even made a mendacious movie about it in which they were the heroes.

That’s when I knew that this was more than an ordinary error by biased people. This was either an error by people so biased that they could not admit the truth if it hit them in the face, or a purposeful lie for propaganda purposes. Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference, and in practical terms it hardly mattered although it did in moral terms.

Over time I have come to think that the latter group – the conscious liars – is bigger than the former group, the mistaken partisans. There are a lot of ways they justify themselves, but justify themselves they do.

So, to get back to the Durham investigation, here’s an article whose author Charles Lipson writes this:

Last week, John Durham’s grand jury issued its third criminal indictment in the Trump-Russia collusion hoax. The person who was arrested may be obscure; the news may have been buried after Virginia’s bombshell election results; but Durham’s move is a big deal. It shows that the special counsel’s probe is methodically unraveling a huge conspiracy, seemingly engineered by Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and implicating James Comey’s FBI, either as a willing participant or as utterly incompetent boobs.

Note the ubiquity of the “knave or fool” question.

The latest indictment also damages the mainstream media, which is why so many news outlets have ignored or underplayed it. After all, they broadcast a false story for years and are none too eager to revisit it. Other losers are the prosecutors assembled by Robert Mueller, most of them Democrats, who had reams of this damaging information and ignored it.

What Durham and a few intrepid reporters are uncovering may well be the most ambitious dirty trick pulled in an American election and its aftermath. The question now is whether Durham can expose the full extent of this malfeasance and charge those who planned and executed it.

Yes, they indeed are burying it because if they didn’t it would indeed damage them. But I don’t think that’s the main reason they are burying it. The main reason is the furtherance of the ideology they embrace and their mission as they see it, which is to advance that ideology. The issue of truth does not concern them, in their post-modernist thinking.

[HOTE: The Lipson article is worth reading. It even may be worth sending to people you know who are unaware of the facts in it. Will it change any minds? Almost certainly not, especially in isolation. However, it depends where on the spectrum the reader might fall. Not everyone who votes Democratic is a true believer or a leftist. Some are merely misinformed and retain an open mind. The trick is figuring out who those people are, but you can usually tell from the way your previous conversations with them have gone.]

[NOTE II: If you want to see a good example of the continuing Rathergate spin, take a look at this Salon piece from 2015 entitled, “Rathergate and the dark magic of 2004: When the GOP learned how to subvert truth and alter political reality” and subtitled, “Long before Benghazi and Planned Parenthood, Karl Rove toppled Dan Rather, gutted CBS and proclaimed lies as truth.”]

Today’s Rittenhouse trial drama

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: commenter Barry Meislin.]

Here’s an article about what’s transpired today in the Rittenhouse trial. Pretty dramatic.

This witness is the third person shot by Rittenhouse, the one who survived:

My goodness. Apparently this is their last witness, and what Frei is referring to is that the judge should grant a directed verdict when the prosecution rests. I predict there is an extremely low possibility that will happen, although I think it should happen.

This really goes to show how hard it is to prosecute a case – even a political case – when the fact situation goes against you. You can prep a witness as much as you want, but now and then he’ll tell the truth.

Of course, the jury is free to disregard that truth, which they certainly seemed to do in the Chauvin trial.

Just to highlight the reaction of the prosecution today:

A more optimistic view of the infrastructure bill passage

The New Neo Posted on by

You can find it here, and I’ve read it elsewhere, too. I don’t think I subscribe to it – the cynic in me believes there will be some other surprises of the negative sort. But I’d like it to be true:

Whatever leverage the House side had over Manchin — and that other Democrat holdout, Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema — is basically gone now that the infrastructure bill is ready for Biden’s signature.

Manchin wanted (and got) the infrastructure bill. He doesn’t want the bigger bill, even after his fellow Senate Dems trimmed it down (not really*) to a “measly” $1.8 trillion.

Democrats leaned hard on Manchin, figuring that between him and Sinema, Manchin would be the first one to fold. Then they could go to work on Sinema as the lone holdout threatening to destroy Biden’s presidency.

Instead, House Democrats might just have done the job themselves…

So the Democrats scored an infrastructure bill victory on Friday night, but the casualties might just include the bulk of Biden’s agenda.

But if this makes Biden and the Democrats look more moderate than they really are, and if they therefore do much better than expected in 2022 (that’s a big “if”), then they will enact their leftist agenda after that. That’s the pessimist in me speaking.

The polls, for what they’re worth

The New Neo Posted on by

Down they go for the Democrats:

A year before the 2022 midterm elections, Republicans hold a clear lead on the congressional ballot as President Joe Biden’s approval rating sinks to a new low of 38%.

A USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll, taken Wednesday through Friday, found that Biden’s support cratered among the independent voters who delivered his margin of victory over President Donald Trump one year ago…

Among the findings:

Nearly half of those surveyed, 46%, say Biden has done a worse job as president than they expected, including 16% of those who voted for him. Independents, by 7-1 (44%-6%), say he’s done worse, not better, than they expected.
Nearly two-thirds of Americans, 64%, say they don’t want Biden to run for a second term in 2024. That includes 28% of Democrats. Opposition to Trump running for another term in 2024 stands at 58%, including 24% of Republicans.
Vice President Kamala Harris’ approval rating is 28% – even worse than Biden’s. The poll shows that 51% disapprove of the job she’s doing. One in 5, 21%, are undecided.
Americans overwhelmingly support the infrastructure bill Biden is about to sign, but they are split on the more expensive and further-reaching “Build Back Better” act being debated in Congress. Only 1 in 4 say the bill’s provisions would help them and their families.

Putting aside for the sake of discussion the usual caveat about polls and believing they are correct, there’s a lot to ponder there. I’m often astounded that any “Independent” voter in 2020 would have thought Biden would be anything but some strange combination of addled, pugnacious, mendacious, and way to the left, based on both his history and his performance during the 2020 campaign. Apparently wishful thinking is strong.

I also am rather stunned (although not really surprised, if that makes sense, given the media coverage) at the continuing animosity towards Trump. I would have thought more people would now be able to look back and see that mean tweets aren’t all that bad and that he actually accomplished a lot of good, plus that things like the Russian collusion hoax were pure garbage. But I realize that the anti-Trump propaganda was and remains strong, and then there’s his own abrasive personality that a lot of “nice” people just can’t get past.

Somehow many of them got past Biden’s nasty personality, however. But I digress.

I saw that poll yesterday and wondered why people would disapprove more of Harris than of Biden. To me, someone who does bad stuff (Biden) is worse than someone who does nothing at all except make vapid speeches and giggle inappropriately (Harris). I guess the difference is that leftists approve of Biden more than they approve of Harris, because he’s doing what they want and she’s more passive and uninvolved than they expected.

There also is a hint there of why some Republicans in Congress supported the infrastructure bill. Americans “overwhelmingly” favor it (2 to 1). Of course, it might be good to know whether many of those people know what’s in it in addition to infrastructure funds, how much it will cost, and what the consequences will be.

My guess is that the Democrats don’t plan to run either Biden or Kamala in 2024. Who they will run isn’t at all clear to me, but I don’t think it will be either of those two unless there’s a big upswing in the polls or unless their voting fraud apparatus becomes even better than before.

Gas prices going up? Winter coming on? Joe Biden has a brilliant idea

The New Neo Posted on by

Or some person or persons in the administration have a brilliant idea – let’s shut down a pipeline!:

The Biden administration is reportedly weighing the potential market consequences of shutting down an oil pipeline in Michigan, drawing criticism from opponents…

The administration has yet to decide on what to do with Line 5 and officials were gathering information only to present a clear picture of the situation, according to sources who spoke to Politico…

Jason Hayes, the director of environmental policy at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, blasted the Biden administration for its energy policies, telling Fox News that their work on Line 5 is “just one more example of being divorced from reality.”

“They’re planning to power an industrial nation like the United States on solar panels and wind turbines,” Hayes said, while noting that even the solar panels and wind turbines require “oil, natural gas, nuclear and even coal” to be produced.

Hayes presented a dire picture of what shutting Line 5 could mean if people are unable to get natural gas or the electricity it provides as the nation heads into winter.

Biden may be somewhat gaga, but I don’t think any of them are necessarily “divorced from reality,” at least not in the sense in which I believe Hayes means it. In other words, I think they know the consequences for ordinary Americans will be bad. Their motivation is connected to The Great Reset, not to making Americans’ lives better. And what they are “pondering” is how bad the political backlash might be if they make this particular move at this time.

All that jazz

The New Neo Posted on by

In Wednesday’s open thread this week I alluded to the fact that I don’t like jazz. I’ve tried; I’ve really tried, but it just doesn’t work for me. To my ear and brain it sounds like formless chaos, music dissolving into a wet puddle of glop.

Please don’t hate me for it, you jazz aficionados. I have nothing but respect for jazz musicians, and I know they’re highly skilled and just amazing, but I don’t want to listen to them.

When I thought about writing this post and tried to come up with some jazz that I enjoy, I remembered that years ago I owned the Miles Davis record “Sketches of Spain” and really liked it. However – as I suspected – when I looked the piece up, it says that it’s not really considered jazz by a lot of people:

The opening piece, taking up almost half the record, is an arrangement by Evans and Davis of the adagio movement of Concierto de Aranjuez, a concerto for guitar by the contemporary Spanish composer Joaquín Rodrigo. Following the faithful introduction of the concerto’s guitar melody on flugelhorn, Evans’ arrangement turns into a “quasi-symphonic, quasi-jazz world of sound”, according to his biographer.[

Hmmm – quasi jazz. Do I get half credit for that?

Probably not:

According to Davis’ biographer Chambers, the contemporary critical response to the arrangement was not surprising, especially given the scarcity of anything resembling a jazz rhythm in most of the piece. Martin Williams wrote that “the recording is something of a curiosity and a failure, as I think a comparison with any good performance of the movement by a classical guitarist would confirm”.

Davis had an answer for his critics:

Replying to suggestions that Sketches of Spain was something other than jazz, Davis said “it’s music, and I like it”.

Indeed. Me too.

Republicans: once again snatching defeat from the jaws of victory?

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s a familiar story. The Republicans are riding high and have the Democrats down on their luck, only to hand them a present: in this case, the House passage of the so-called infrastructure bill.

It’s easy to blame all Republicans, although it’s often just a few, as it is now: 13 out of 213 to the Democrats’ 220, of whom 6 voted against. That’s 6% of the Republicans – but ’tis enough, ’twill serve.

Here’s the list:

Adam Kinzinger of Illinois
Don Bacon of Nebraska
Don Young of Alaska
John Katko of New York
Tom Reed of New York
Andrew Garbarino of New York
Nicole Malliotakis of New York
Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania
Chris Smith of New Jersey
Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey
Fred Upton of Michigan
Anthony Gonzalez of Ohio
David McKinley of West Virginia

A couple of these – Kinzinger and Van Drew (the latter is a recent changer to the GOP) – are pretty much Democrats. A great many of the others are from New York or New Jersey, and my guess is that most (although not all) are from purple districts. This is the sort of argument they use:

“Most of the hard infrastructure bill is paid for by unspent COVID money that was already appropriated by Congress. This bill makes our nation stronger and more competitive for years to come,” Bacon said in a Friday statement. “Make no mistake. This is not the Bernie Sanders’ Socialist Budget Busting Bill, which would’ve cost American taxpayers their hard-earned money. When that bill does come to the floor for a vote, I will be a hard ‘NO.’”

He might even be correct, although I tend to doubt it. Politics is about a lot of things, and some of it is about not handing your opponents a victory. It’s a lesson the Democrats learned quite some time ago, but some Republicans haven’t.

Of course, if these thirteen had voted “no” with the other Republicans, I have little doubt that all of the six reluctant Democrats would have been bullied or threatened into submission and the bill would have passed anyway because they all knew they needed to pass something to show success and this bill was their best chance. But the thirteen Republicans gave them bipartisan cover.

The thirteen will almost certainly be primaried, which is not necessarily the best idea ever for those who come from districts in which a more conservative candidate is unlikely to win. That’s the dilemma, and it’s been the dilemma for a long time.

Seemingly stunning COVID news from Italy

The New Neo Posted on by

We’ve known for a long time that the COVID death figures are iffy because anyone who has COVID and dies is counted as a COVID-caused death. And yet that’s the way the numbers continue to be reported, which certainly gives the appearance of a purposeful inflation of COVID numbers. And I also would guess that most people are unaware of this.

We’re not the only nation that’s been doing it this way; another is Italy. But Italy has decided to correct its figures to eliminate those who died with rather than of COVID.

The extremity of the results appears shocking at first glance:

The Italian Higher Institute of Health has drastically reduced the country’s official COVID death toll number by over 97 per cent after changing the definition of a fatality to someone who died from COVID rather than with COVID.

Italian newspaper Il Tempo reports that the Institute has revised downward the number of people who have died from COVID rather than with COVID from 130,000 to under 4,000.

“Yes, you read that right. Turns out 97.1% of deaths hitherto attributed to Covid were not due directly to Covid,” writes Toby Young.

Of the of the 130,468 deaths registered as official COVID deaths since the start of the pandemic, only 3,783 are directly attributable to the virus alone.

But when you read the details, a different picture emerges:

“All the other Italians who lost their lives had from between one and five pre-existing diseases. Of those aged over 67 who died, 7% had more than three co-morbidities, and 18% at least two,” writes Young.

“According to the Institute, 65.8% of Italians who died after being infected with Covid were ill with arterial hypertension (high blood pressure), 23.5% had dementia, 29.3% had diabetes, and 24.8% atrial fibrillation. Add to that, 17.4% had lung problems, 16.3% had had cancer in the last five years and 15.7% suffered from previous heart failures.”

Here’s the problem with that: many of those things don’t ordinarily kill people for a long long time, although they might on average shorten their lifespan somewhat. Having a predisposing factor that makes a person more vulnerable does not mean that the disease isn’t the main actor in that person’s death.

To understand the figures, in a Western country such as the US or Italy, the percentage of the over-67 population with something like high blood pressure is odinarily enormous: for example, in the US, a whopping 70% of adults over 65 have hypertension, and I would guess the percentage of adults over 67 (as in that quote above) would be slightly higher.

So, if Italy’s hypertension figures are similar to ours, there is actually a slightly lower percentage of hypertensive individuals over 67 in the “death from COVID” category than would be expected by chance.

For diabetes in the US, the rate for the over-65 population is 26.8%, which is only a tiny bit lower than the figure in Italy of those who died with COVID and had diabetes. You get the drift, I think. However, I would guess that people with previous heart failure and recent cancer are probably more likely to have actually died from those diseases rather than from COVID, compared to people with pre-existing hypertension or diabetes who probably did die from COVID.

Therefore I would say I’m pretty sure that, although the 130,468 figure for Italy is almost certainly way too high, the 3,783 figure is almost certainly way too low.

Which leaves us pretty much where we started: not knowing how many people really died from COVID.

[NOTE: I didn’t find something recent on hypertension rates among the over-65 population in Italy, but this slightly older article indicates rates similar to those in the US, although it also depends on whether the definition of “hypertension” is the same in the two countries.]

Pfizer may have a game-changer COVID drug – so why isn’t the game changing?

The New Neo Posted on by

The rush to vaccine mandates isn’t really about COVID science. It masks little sense in those terms. If vaccines are protective, then those who are vaccinated are in no danger from the unvaccinated. And if vaccines aren’t protective, then why mandate them since anyone can catch it?

A small argument can be made that universal vaccination would reduce the potential burden on hospitals and the health care system, but we don’t mandate things (yet) for reasons such as that, especially with a disease that, though lethal in a very small percentage of cases, is fairly mild to moderate in the vast majority of cases (as opposed, for example, to smallpox, which killed one-third of those who contracted it and left many of the rest hideously scarred).

And of course these arguments against mandated COVID vaccination are even stronger where children are concerned, or where those who have already had COVID are concerned. And yet the mandate-advocates don’t seem to care.

Now we have what appears to be the most promising pharmaceutical yet to treat the disease:

When given within five days of the onset of symptoms, the antiviral therapy, called Paxlovid, prevented almost 90% of deaths from COVID-19 compared with a placebo, a Pfizer study found.

By the end of the year, the company plans to complete two other studies of the pill, which is given twice a day for five days. Pfizer plans to submit the study data as part of its rolling submission to the Food and Drug Administration as soon as possible…

Pfizer’s pill compares favorably with a similar one being developed by Merck and Ridgeback Biotherapeutics that cut in half the hospitalization and death rate for COVID-19…

On Thursday, Merck and Ridgeback received authorization to provide their drug, molnupiravir, in the United Kingdom to adults with confirmed mild to moderate COVID-19 who have at least one risk factor for developing severe disease.

It’s not being used in the US yet.

Hopefully, these results will hold up, and the results will be pretty clear fairly soon so that more lives can be saved. In the meantime, vaccine mandates seem even less sensible.

And wouldn’t it be nice if success of this drug would also mean that all the restrictive COVID madness will cease? I predict the latter will take a long time, and some of it will never go away. Meanwhile, our insect overlords have learned a lot about how far they can go – and in many places it’s pretty far.

Open thread 11/6/21

The New Neo Posted on by

I can assure you that about halfway to two-thirds of the way into this dance one’s legs turn to lead. It’s too gimmicky and Rockette-ish for my taste, but it’s usually a big crowd-pleaser: