Chillin’ with the gods
…as you ponder the works of Pythagoras of Samos (or perhaps you’re more in tune with Anaxagoras of Clazomenae), but we would be remiss if we didn’t let you know that our pal Burr Deming has his best of the web post up, complete with wry commentary!
You better see what he’s been up to.
(This post will remain on top and fresher posts —if any!— will be below today.)
H/T @NamelessCynic on the electrical tweeting device
Breaking CNN!
It couldn’t happen soon enough.
File his career under nepotism. It’s not that different from hiring Meghan McCain at The View.
“Star-spangled boner.”
That is all.
(Hat tip: Scissorhead MDavis)
Welcome to Missouri!
H/T Scissorhead Jimmy-T
Missouri’s health department conducted an analysis that found that mask mandates saved lives and prevented Trump-Virus from spreading in the state’s biggest cities, but never made the report public.
Weird, innit?
The study was conducted in early November at the request of the Republican Governor Mike Parson’s office, presumably to back up his opinion that local mask mandates are, you know, “WRONG.”
Whoopsie! The analysis showed that those four jurisdictions averaged 15.8 cases per day for every 100,000 residents, compared to 21.7 cases per day in unmasked communities. Mask mandates worked as designed! Yay, crisis averted and lives are saved as Missouri… wait, what’s that you say?
Rather than correcting course and saving the lives of his constituents, the governor’s office never released those findings to the public and instead Missouri AG Eric Schmitt has sued St. Louis, St. Louis County, Kansas City, and Jackson County to block enforcement of their mandates.
“I’ll be back”
Faceberg is in the news again this time for assisting anti-vaxxers using Nazis to discourage getting vaccines:
Facebook sold ads comparing vaccine to Holocaust
New York (CNN Business)Facebook has sold ads promoting anti-vaccine messages, comparing the US government’s response to Covid-19 to Nazi Germany, casting doubt on the result of the 2020 election, and even pushing political violence.
…Facebook has made more than $280,000 from ads run by “Ride the Red Wave” since May, according to data reviewed by CNN.
The page has fewer than 10,000 followers, but by paying Facebook the people running the page can potentially reach millions of Americans.
“Next Level Goods,” another page, run by a different company, has spent more than $500,000 on Facebook ads since 2019. The company regularly uses Facebook to advertise anti-vaccine t-shirts.
How could this happen, you ask?
A spokesperson for Meta, Facebook’s parent company, said the ads comparing the US Covid-19 response to Nazi Germany, comparing vaccines to the Holocaust, and the ad suggesting the vaccine was poison went against Facebook’s vaccine misinformation policies.
However, considering these violating ads ran on its platform, Facebook’s detection systems seemingly missed them.
CNN also asked about the ad that read “Make Hanging Traitors Great Again,” but Facebook did not say that ad broke its policies.
Delete your Facebook accounts, Scissorheads. Facebook is a malignant company that is SELLING YOUR DATA TO NAZIS.
You are rationalizing why you are still members.
“Hamberders, anyone?”
You cannot make up merde like this:
Hair Füror’s standard order consists of two Big Macs, two Filet-O-Fish, and chocolate malt, according to Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie. An order like that totals nearly 2,500 calories, which is about a full day’s worth of calories for a shitgibbon of his age.
Oh Death, where is thy jolly old sting?
The beatings will continue until the press quits writing stories about Democrats in Disarray.
Guys, it is NOT your imagination: our Failed Political Press ™ has been more negative on President Handsome Joe Biden that it has been on the twice-impeached insurrectionist Hair Füror.
Artificial intelligence can now measure the negativity with precision. At my request, Forge.ai, a data analytics unit of the information company FiscalNote, combed through more than 200,000 articles — tens of millions of words — from 65 news websites (newspapers, network and cable news, political publications, news wires and more) to do a “sentiment analysis” of coverage. Using algorithms that give weight to certain adjectives based on their placement in the story, it rated the coverage Biden received in the first 11 months of 2021 and the coverage President Donald Trump got in the first 11 months of 2020.
The findings, painstakingly assembled by FiscalNote vice president Bill Frischling, confirmed my fear: My colleagues in the media are serving as accessories to the murder of democracy.
After a honeymoon of slightly positive coverage in the first three months of the year, Biden’s press for the past four months has been as bad as — and for a time worse than — the coverage Trump received for the same four months of 2020.
And then the WaPo does something extraordinary, something that only us lowly bloggers ever do: they put that conclusion in context:
Think about that. In 2020, Trump presided over a worst-in-world pandemic response that caused hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths; held a superspreader event at the White House and got covid–19 himself; praised QAnon adherents; embraced violent white supremacists; waged a racist campaign against Black Lives Matter demonstrators; attempted to discredit mail-in voting; and refused to accept his defeat in a free and fair election, leading eventually to the violence of Jan. 6 and causing tens of millions to accept the “big lie,” the worst of more than 30,000 he told in office.
And yet Trump got press coverage as favorable as, or better than, Biden is getting today. Sure, Biden has had his troubles, with the delta variant, Afghanistan and inflation. But the economy is rebounding impressively, he has signed major legislation, and he has restored some measure of decency, calm and respect for democratic institutions.
So who are you gonna believe, your lying eyes (and the WaPo) or Fox News and Wingnuttia?
We need a skeptical, independent press. But how about being partisans for democracy? The country is in an existential struggle between self-governance and an authoritarian alternative. And we in the news media, collectively, have given equal, if not slightly more favorable, treatment to the authoritarians…
…Too many journalists are caught in a mindless neutrality between democracy and its saboteurs, between fact and fiction. It’s time to take a stand.
If you want a real shocker, that opinion piece was authored by the ol’ Dick-Whisperer hisself, Dana Milbank.
UPDATE 1: Milbank updated it with a link to the data.
I’m particularly fond of the paper cut finder.
(Hat tip: Scissorhead MDavis)
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Mock Paper Scissors 