Nina Totenberg? Isn’t she the reporter with NPR who in 1988 who published Brett Kimberlin’s false claim to have sold marijuana to Dan Quayle?
I’m Not Making This Up, You Know
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Category Archives: Main Stream Media
Then and Now
When I was working in radio in Nashville back in the ’60s and ’70s, there were only six effective daily news outlets in town: The NBC outlet (WSM-AM/TV), the ABC outlet (WSIX-AM/TV), the two separately owned and staffed CBS outlets (WLAC-TV and WLAC-AM), the morning paper (The Tennessean), and the evening paper (The Nashville Banner). Only one, the Banner, had a conservative point-of-view. In the early ’70s, the Nashville media market began to “diversify” when WPLN joined NPR. Nashville was not unique in left-wing dominance of its news media.
The Banner folded in 1998, but it was replaced by an online site of the same name in 2022 which says it “will be politically agnostic and will not include opinion pieces.” Things are still a bit lopsided in the media back home.
Several folks roughly my age at those news operations have gone on to other things. I’ve gone from WLAC-AM to working at Goddard Space Flight Center. Oprah Winfrey moved on from WLAC-TV and Pat Sajak from WSM-TV to other work in television. And Al Gore … well, being Bill Clinton’s VP was the high water mark of his career.
All The News That’s Fit To Print
That is—all the news that fits The Narrative.
Yep, that the most recent searchable story in the New York Times related to “FD-1023.”
Supreme Court Ethics
The AP (no, really, the AP) has this story posted.
I’m not surprised that the leftwing justices are coming under the same “ethical” scrutiny as the majority justices, but I wonder why a main stream media outlet is involved.
Hmmmm.
Team Kimberlin Post of the Day
It’s been a while, but some of the usual suspects actually provided sympathetic coverage of Brett Kimberlin. This post headlined Salon Publishes Pro #BrettKimberlin Piece ran eleven years ago today.
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Patterico responds.
Read both and decide for yourself.
UPDATE–Stacy McCain responds.
UPDATE 2—After you’ve read Patterico’s fisking and Stacy McCain’s discussion of the Salon writer’s background, be sure to read Mr. McCain’s analysis of Salon and its possible future implosion.
UPDATE 3—Bob Belvedere has more background on Alex Pareene, the Salon writer, at The Camp of the Saints [dead link].
UPDATE 4—
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Brett Kimberlin is still the Speedway Bomber, and he has become a liability to The Narrative.
Math Is Hard
CNN is correct that it would be theoretically possible to convert modern cargo ships to sailing vessels, but would it be practical.
Let’s do some math.
As a first approximation, let’s assume that the amount of force necessary to move the ship roughly varies in proportion to its displacement, the mass of water it pushes aside as it moves. The Cutty Sark clipper ship displaced about 900 tonnes when loaded and underway and carried just over 2,900 square metres of sails supported by over 17 km of rigging rope. The typical medium-sized oil tanker displaces 1,200,000 tonnes unloaded. That’s over 130 times greater displacement. Thus, we might expect that an unloaded tanker would need at least 380,00 square metres of sail area to achieve the performance of a sailing ship that was obsolescent in the mid-19th-century. Thousands of cargo ships are this large or larger. [Opps, see Update 3.]
BTW, 380,000 square metres is about 94 acres. It will take a lot of cotton (or, more likely, dead dinosaurs to make the kevlar) to make the sails for one ship. Thousands of sets of sails would be necessary to keep world commerce alive.
UPDATE—Where would the energy to run the motors needed to control such sails come from? They would be too heavy to be operated by human muscle power.
Also, how would such a ship maneuver in the confines of a harbor?
UPDATE 2—
UPDATE 3—Math is hard indeed. I slipped a digit. The mass ratio is 1,300:1 rather than 130:1, so the sail area required is 10X larger—940 acres!
Thanks to @WitCoHE_Bak for catching my error.
I’m Not Making This Up, You Know
This really is the headline on a post at the Daily Mail.
There’s a picture accompanying the article, but if I reproduced it here, I’d never be able to tease Stacy McCain about Rule 5 violations again.
Smog
I live on the fringe of the Baltimore-Washington metropolitan area and work just outside the Washington Beltway. The weather around here has been smoky and hazy this week. The smog has been caused by smoke from wildfires in Quebec.
The usual suspects such as Politico have tried to spin their reporting to follow The Narrative.
On the Hill: Lawmakers certainly took notice as a thick layer of smoke penetrated Washington and the Capitol.
Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso, the top Republican on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, called the plague of smoke “a sobering reminder that we must manage our forests to make them more resilient to catastrophic fires.” But he stopped short of making the connection between fires and fossil fuels.
Meanwhile, Republicans are still opposing multiple federal and state-led efforts to tackle climate change.
The senator didn’t talk about a connection between forest fires and fossil fuels because there isn’t any. Forest fires burn trees which haven’t been through the process of being buried and converted to coal or natural gas.
(I’m so old, I remember when heating with a wood stove was considered environmentally friendly because trees are a renewable resource. But that was before the EPA cracked down on the soot and other pollution caused by wood stoves.)
The underlying cause of the fires in Canada is the same as the fire problem in California—shoddy forest management caused by leftist environmental priorities.
Some Unindicted Coconspirators React
Found on The Twitterz—
BTW, the timestamps on these tweets is in GMT.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
Twitter Makes a Correction
After the CBC claimed to be “less than 70 %” government funded, Twitter made the following correction to the label attached to the (at)cbc account.
Heh.
True But Non-Sequitur
In response to Twitter labeling NPR as “state-affiliated media,” NPR CEO John Lansing has said, “NPR stands for freedom of speech and holding the powerful accountable. It is unacceptable for Twitter to label us this way. A vigorous, vibrant free press is essential to the health of our democracy.”
While the last sentence in Lnasing’s statement is true, I don’t see how it follows from the first two sentences. Further, his words don’t seem to relate to how NPR has operated since roughly the turn of the century.
Quote of the Day
A smart man only believes half of what he hears, a wise man knows which half.
—Jeff Cooper
Quote of the Day
Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.
—George Orwell
Quote of the Day
I became a journalist partly so that I wouldn’t ever have to rely on the press for my information.
—Christopher Hitchens
Team Kimberlin Post of the Day
I’m not the only person who’s written about Brett Kimberlin’s lawfare. Seven years ago, this post, Eugene Volokh Weighs In …, linked to coverage in the Washington Post.
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… on the Court of Special Appeals decision in Kimberlin v. Walker, et al. at The Volokh Conspiracy.
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Prof. Volokh’s article contains links to other coverage from sites around the Interwebz.
A Summary of Today’s News
Everything proceeded as I had foreseen.
I wish I’d been wrong.
Yelling, “Theatre!” at a Crowded Fire
At a crowded dumpster fire to be more specific, and by “dumpster fire” I mean the leftwing precincts of Twitter.
One of my pet First Amendment peeves is the misuse of a misquotation from line by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., found in the now overturned Schenck v. U.S. Supreme Court decision—
The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic …
Emphassis added. Schenck upheld the Democrats use of the Sedition Act of 1918 to suppress speech opposing the Wilson Administration’s use of the draft in WW1. The First Amendment holding in Schenck was overturned in 1969 in Brandenburg v. Ohio. The Supreme Court held in that case
[T]the constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.
The Brandenburg test is the current Supreme Court jurisprudence on the ability of government to punish speech after it occurs.
Yelling, “Fire!” (whether or not there really is a fire) isn’t illegal per se. Of course, it may be immoral if yelling it causes a panic, and if someone were injured or killed as a result of such a false warning, the yeller could be held civilly and criminally liable for his action.
But back to Twitter.
I find the dramatic whinging over the dumpster fire resulting from the self-inflicted ToS suspensions of leftwing journalists to be really boring theatre.
WaPo Announces Layoffs Are Coming
Democracy Dies in Derpness™
So does economic viability.
Learn to Weld
CNN has announced a round of layoffs. My podcasting partner Stacy McCain reports it’s a “mostly peaceful” end for the journalism careers of a lot of deadwood on the payroll.
Given the number of alleged programmers recently dumped on the market, learning to code may not be a useful addition to an unemployed journalist’s skill set.
I’m Not Making This Up, You Know
She was obviously making it up as she went along …
… and clearly demonstrating that she’s a Constitution denier.
Or does she think that 38 states would vote to repeal the 26th Amendment? Or amend Article 1, Section 2, which sets the minimum age for a Member of the House of Representatives at 25?
Fact Checking a Fact Chekist
Kessler is wrong on two points. First, the muscles which will grow to form the heart begin their rhythmic contractions (i.e., beating) around 22 days after conception.
Second, ultrasound systems detect sound not electrical activity.
Democracy Dies in Derpness™
FIFY
Quote of the Day
The narrow bandwidth of TV has made us think that we are stupider than we are.
—Jordan Peterson
WaPo and It’s Mean Girls
There’s no telling how long the mean girls drama will keep going at WaPo. You can use this link to stock up on popcorn.
Democracy Dies in Derpness™
Taylor Lorenz has a “scoop” over at WaPo reporting the Disinformation Governance Board (ДГБ) is being “paused,” and that Disinformation Tsarina Jankowicz in considering resigning from the Department of Homeland Security. When I tried to retweet (with a comment) Lorenz’s tweet, Twitter posted this:
However, her tweet is available. I screen capped this after my tweet was posted:
Gentle Reader, it would appear that Twitter is engaging in disinformation.
Hmmm.