Democracy Dies in Derpness™
So does economic viability.
WaPo Announces Layoffs Are Coming
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Tag Archives: Washington Post
Concerning Anonymity
Hogewash! isn’t an anonymous blog. When I started blogging in 2011, I had a discussion with the late Mrs. Hoge about whether the blog should be anonymous. I wasn’t looking for controversy, but I didn’t want her involuntarily sucked into any unpleasantness that might come along. She thought that I should blog using my real name. She even suggest the blog’s name, one that’s pretty hard for me to use anonymously, and she never expressed any regret for her advice.
If you click on the DMCA Contact tab in the menu, you can find my home address and cell phone number. I’m undoxable.
I do have some noms de cyber—for example, I’m @JohnnyAtsign on Twitter—but the vast bulk of my Internet scribblings are openly tagged with my real name.
OTOH, I understand not everyone can safely be as open as I can, so I allow anonymous comments here so long as they don’t involve the use of someone else’s identity and meet the other requirements laid out in The Fine Print.
The recent doxxing of @libsoftiktok by Taylor Lorenz and WaPo was pure cyberthuggery, and the flat out lying about having posted their victim’s personal information is shameful.
But I doubt they feel any shame. Oh, I’m sure they’re displeased with being ratioed on Twitter when they tried to first defend and then deny the doxxing. Discomfort, yes. Shame, no. Next, they’ll move on to claiming that they’re the victims and go on to more thuggery.
Democracy Dies in Derpness™
I’m Not Making This Up, You Know
FIFY.
WaPo is Not Having a Good Week
A federal judge has reconsidered his dismissal of Nick Sandmann’s defamation suit against the Washington Post, and has ordered that the suit should go forward into the discovery phase. More here.
Democracy Dies in Derpness
WaPo has published an extremely inaccurate opinion piece about the recent Virginia Beach shooting and suppressors for firearms. In her essay, Juliette Kayyem makes the ridiculously false claim that “a suppressed gunshot can sound like a chair scraping on the floor.” It appears that she’s seen too many Hollywood movies in which the sound of suppressed gunfire on films’ soundtracks were special effects added during postproduction and recordings of real gunfire and that she has little (on no) experience with real world suppressed firearms.
(BTW, based on my experience being involved in the development of theatre sound equipment when I was VP of Engineering at JBL, I doubt that many theatre sound systems can reproduce the sound of gunfire as loud as the actual muzzle blast without being damaged.)
When Hiram Percy Maxim began marketing exhaust quieting devices for internal combustion engines and firearms over a hundred years ago, his brand name for them was Silencer. That name stuck as a generic term in Europe for engines and worldwide for firearms. In North America, we call them mufflers on engines. The generic technical term of art for them is suppressors.
A suppressor is what we engineers call an acoustical low-pass filter. It permits exhaust gas to flow through (in the case of firearm suppressor to provide thrust for the bullet) but tends to reduce the level of high-frequency components in the impulse of the exhaust. If a suppressor worked “perfectly,” there would be nothing in the exhaust except a steady, non-varying flow of exhaust gas, but in order to become more effective at low frequencies, the suppressor must become larger to allow it to attenuate longer wavelength sounds.
An unmuffled engine on a lawn mower is roughly as loud as a series of gunshots, and the size of a lawn mower muffler is roughly the same as a suppressor that can be handled on the muzzle of a firearm. The Gentle Reader should not be surprised that suppressed firearms are typically about as loud as lawn mowers. My lawn mower is noticeable louder than a chair scraping across the floor.
While I’m on the Pro-Second-Amendment side of the gun control debate, I do recognize that there are reasonable points to be made on both sides of the gun control debate. Thus, neither side should have to resort to provably false claims.
Truth is a stronger foundation than a lie.
Democracy Dies in Derpness.
Punching Back
Nicholas Sandmann, the high school student from Covington, Kentucky, at the center of an incident at the Lincoln Memorial has filed a defamation lawsuit against the Washington Post, claiming the newspaper “vilified” him because he is white.
The lawsuit seeks $250 million in damages, the amount Jeff Bezos paid for the Post in 2013.
Stay tuned.
Defamation Thrives in Derpness.
UPDATE—The complaint can be read here.
Seize is the New Pounce
WaPo has a story up with this headline: Republicans seize on liberal positions to paint Democrats as radical. It begins with this paragraph—
Sen. Kamala D. Harris is raising the possibility of eliminating private health insurance. Sen. Elizabeth Warren and other prominent Democrats are floating new and far-reaching plans to tax the wealthy. In Virginia, Gov. Ralph Northam voiced support for state legislation that would reduce restrictions on late-term abortions.
A few days ago, Republicans were pouncing when they truthfully quoted Democrats. Now they are seizing. Whatever they’re doing, it seems to be getting under The Media’s skin.
The Newspapers v. Maryland
I’ve previously posted about a group of newspapers filing suit against Maryland to stop the state’s unconstitutional attempt to regulate political advertising on the Internet. The newspapers are seeking a preliminary injunction to stop the law from going into effect. The State has filed an opposition to the motion for a preliminary injunction.
There will be a hearing on the motion for a preliminary injunction. It was originally scheduled for early October, but the lawyers and Judge Grimm are trying to resolve scheduling conflicts. When the hearing is scheduled, I’ll make arrangements to attend and report on it.
Democracy Dies in Derpness
WaPo has published an oped titled God bless the ‘deep state’.
Plagiarism Du Jour
Here is a recent tweet from the Cabin Boy™—
And this is from a WaPo article published on 8 June, 2016, called How to Visit 48 State Capitals in Under Nine Days—
The Breitbart Unmasked Bunny Billy Boy Unread Editorial Board was unavailable for comment.
Punching Back Twice As Hard
This seems an appropriate response to the WaPo cartoon featuring the Cruz children as dancing monkeys—
No Pinocchios
WaPo‘s Fact Checker gets one right when he awards no Pinocchios to Marco Rubio for his statement that none of the recent “mass shootings” would have been prevented by any of the current or currently proposed gun laws.
Gun-control advocates often point to the experience in other countries that have enacted gun laws that heavily restrict gun ownership; as we have shown, quantitative measures of cross-comparative crime statistics, especially where the crime is not consistently defined (i.e., “mass shooting”), usually end up being apples-to-oranges comparisons. It is possible that some gun-control proposals, such as a ban on large-capacity magazines, would reduce the number of dead in a future shooting, though the evidence for that is heavily disputed. But Rubio was speaking in the past, about specific incidents. He earns a rare Geppetto Checkmark.
Read the whole thing.