Category: Media Assholes

Jackals Of The Press #1,254

Media Assholes, Numbers & Statistics

I know, I know:  if you want fair and balanced reporting, don’t read Britain’s Daily Mail.  Yet I persist, despite nonsense like this, because I am weak.

This particular article starts off well, showing people getting their last kicks in before the latest totalitarian bollocks from H.M. Government, in the usual Daily Mail  fashion:

 

All well and good, and nothing puts me in a good mood like Train Smash Women (like I said, I am so weak).

However, the DM then eschews standard journalistic principle — I know, I know — and turns a general-interest piece into a study of the Chinkvirus re-emergence in Britishland.  For reasons best known to themselves, they publish some scawwwwy-looking graphs with the usual crap predictions from Doom & Gloom Inc.:

…although they do have the grace to give some actual numbers:

…which of course shows that even though hospitalizations are increasing, the death rate (which is the important number) isn’t doing anything alarming.

But non-alarms don’t boost readership, so the JOTP publish two graphs which show how scawwwy things could get, only they use Spain and France — no doubt because those two countries’ experience bolsters the alarmism:

Of course, what gives this bullshit away is the way the graphs are scaled.  Note that the right-hand graph (of daily fatalities) has a very fine scale, which despite the steep climb, simply means that the Spanish fatality rate has gone from much less than 1 to just over 2 deaths per million population  (0.2 per hundred thousand = 2 per million), while the Frogs have gone from pretty much zero to 5 per ten million.

I don’t have access to those countries’ accident stats, but I imagine that 2 per million and 5 per 10 million respectively are rather less than the death rates from, oh, falling down stairs or drowning in a bucket of wine.

So the DM took a perfectly okay article about people getting their last unfettered drinks in, and added all that pseudo-scientific bullshit.  Of course, those are really subjects for two different articles (one of the prime journo principles being:  don’t try to tell two stories in a single article).

Were it not for daily pics of the skinny Amanda Holden and the not-so-skinny Kelly Brook, I’d give them up altogether.

 

But did I already mention how weak I am?

Wah Wah Wah

Eco-Crap, Media Assholes

I love reading articles like this one:

The Trump administration is seeking to fast track environmental reviews of dozens of major energy and infrastructure projects during the COVID-19 pandemic, including oil and gas drilling, hazardous fuel pipelines, wind farms and highway projects in multiple states, according to documents provided to The Associated Press.
…
More than 60 projects targeted for expedited environmental reviews were detailed in an attachment to a July 15 letter from Assistant Interior Secretary Katherine MacGregor to White House economic advisor Larry Kudlow.

That’s actually quite restrained (for the AP), but they soon start squealing butthurt:

Environmentalist Brett Hartl said the move to expedite major projects represents a “giveaway” to industries that curried favor with Trump.
“Building an LNG (liquefied natural gas) plant is not going to solve the problem that’s happening in the country,” said Hartl, government affairs director with the Center for Biological Diversity. “This is where we’re potentially going to see environmental harm down the road, because they are skipping steps in the process.”

…as opposed to all the long-term problems caused by Green policies (e.g. banning controlled burns, eventually causing wildfires), but nemmind.  To continue:

Interior Department officials did not answer questions from the AP on how the environmental reviews are being expedited and whether any rules were being waived. The bid to speed up reviews is in line with the Trump administration’s greater emphasis on reduced regulatory burdens for corporations.
…
“For far too long, critically important infrastructure, energy and other economic development projects have been needlessly paralyzed by federal red tape,” spokesman Conner Swanson said.

But my favorite part comes towards the end:

The president’s June order directed federal officials to pursue emergency workarounds of bedrock environmental laws, such as the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act, to hasten completion of infrastructure projects to speed economic recovery.

Yeah… those “bedrock environmental laws” have been used for far too long to prevent or otherwise delay much-needed development — but the Trump administration is walking around or else blowing straight through the bullshit to get things done, and the Greens (as well as their lickspittles in, say, the Associated Press) are horrified.

I love the fact that for the Left, laws they don’t agree with (e.g. parts of the U.S. Constitution) can be ignored or overturned, but all their laws (most of which are, of course, un-Constitutional) are “bedrock law” and immune from change or even scrutiny.

Fuck ’em.

Not A Murderer

Anarchist thugs, Heroism, Media Assholes, Righteous Shootings

Seems as though the Jackals Of The Press (JOTP©) may have jumped the gun, so to speak, once the charges against Kyle Rittenhouse are examined in detail:

The story of Kyle Rittenhouse is more than a gripping piece of news, it is a telling philosophical Rorschach test.  A lone individual stood up to a mob of violent felons, abusers, and pedophiles, asserting his right to live over their lust for his blood, and won.  While the American public, generous in their deference for human life, and may have paused in horror at the shootings, the tide of public opinion is turning for Kyle as the deluge of exculpatory facts break through the dam of misinformation.  Americans should take note at which institutions were quick to back Kyle, which condemned him, and the cowards in between.
Considering the facts of the case and the state laws governing Wisconsin, it becomes clear that Kyle’s actions were not reckless — the prosecutor’s decisions were.

In fact, given the the circumstances and the nature of Rittenhouse’s attackers, we might even, and justifiably term this a Righteous Shooting.  Follow the link to the story and the links within, and you’ll see why.

Let’s hope this turns out well for the boy, although when it comes to asshole, thuggish prosecutors I have little faith in the legal system.

Background Books

Lies and Untruths, Media Assholes, Politics

With the Chinkvirus lockdown and associated Zoom-y nonsense, we’ve all become familiar with people filming themselves with bookcases in the background.  What used to be the standard backdrop for lawyers’ vanity pics (with tomes and tomes of legal texts behind them, as though they’d ever read one, the bastards), now seems to be the norm, especially with politicians.  Here are a couple of examples:  BritPM Boris Johnson:

…and some other BritGov flunky:

Now I’m quite aware that most of the displayed books were probably chosen by assorted political handlers and PR flacks [vast overlap], so their appearance can probably be discounted.

But it gives me an idea for a game entitled:  “Suppose You Were To Appear On A Zoom Live Feed, Which 12 Books Would You Want To be Displayed Behind You?”  (I know, the title may need a little work, but you get my drift.)  Assuming such things were important to you, and you wanted to Send A Message About Yourself (e.g. if you were being interviewed by some Lefty TV show host or similar), which books would you display?

The difference between the above poseurs  and yourselves, O My Readers, is that you can only nominate books that you actually possess, i.e. that are already on your bookshelves (no cheating).

My dozen, in no specific order, are:

           

(The last is:  Leo: A Tribute to Leo Burnett.  It’s handed out to all new employees at Burnett on their first day, and the agency is still run on the same principles.)

Those are mine.  Yours?  (You can select fewer than twelve, but no more.  Multi-volume compendia such as Churchill’s History Of The Second World War  count as a single selection.)

Not Racism

Celebrities, Media Assholes, Two-Minute Hate

Here’s another example of the stupid calling out the equally-stupid:

Bette Midler faced an angry backlash last night after ridiculing Melania Trump’s accent and calling her an ‘illegal alien’ while the first lady spoke at the Republican National Convention. The award-winning performer, 74, launched a tirade against Melania on Twitter in which she said: ‘Oh, God. She still can’t speak English.’
Midler was immediately branded a ‘racist’ and ‘xenophobe’ by critics including Piers Morgan, and accused of ‘dunking on an immigrant’ who became a US citizen after emigrating from Slovenia in the 1990s.

When faux  outrage is uttered, can Piers Morgan be far behind?  Let’s attack this quantum stupidity on all fronts, starting with the woman who got her start singing in the Turkish baths of New York.

Dear Bette:  after you reach a certain age, your vocal cords stiffen, becoming less and less able to speak in different tongues, so to speak, without retaining your original accent.  (The cut-off age seems to be about age 18 or so.)  That’s why it’s best to teach young children a foreign language as early as possible rather than attempting to do so as adults.  After nearly a quarter-century of living in the United States, for example, my own accent is irretrievably that of my native Johannesburg — for the simple reason that I was in my early 30s when I embarked on the Great Wetback Episode and my vocal cords were as stiff as boards by then.  I can imitate the occasional Joyzee or Texan phrase, but not carry on an entire conversation in the patois without sounding like an idiot.  (When speaking Afrikaans, however, my accent is perfect — no South African can tell if I’m Afrikaans or “English” — simply because from birth I grew up speaking both English and Afrikaans.)  So if the First Lady — who emigrated Over Here in her 20s — still has much of her native Slovenian accent, that’s why.  It’s not stupidity, Bette, and certainly nowhere near the level of yours.

Let’s move on to Our Piers and his ilk.  If I make fun of an Irish or Scottish accent, or (to be even less microscopic) a French or German one — which I frequently do — how can it possibly be “rayciss” when all members of the above, including myself, are of the same (sorta-Aryan) race?  It’s a simple matter of confusing “race” with “ethnicity”, unless we’re going back to the time when talking about the Irish or Spanish “races” when meaning ethnicity.  The problem for these dweebs is that there’s no pejorative term for ethnic mockery or chauvinism, so they have to get sloppy  and use the “eeeeevil rayciss” epithet.  It’s not only imprecise but incorrect;  but I don’t expect morons like Morgan to understand that.

And finally:  making fun of other people’s accents is about 50% of all humor, and maybe still more in my case.  I mock, with equal frequency and ferocity, the various accents which make up these United States and Europe — whether Joyzee, Texan, Frog, Kraut, whatever —  and that’s all fair game and funny;  but as soon as I be makin’ fun of Ebonics, nigger, or mock an actual African expression like “Aiiiisssshhhh, yehbo Bra!”  that’s suddenly OMG Beyond The Pale [sic] ?

Fuck that for a tale.  All these Wokesters and scolds can kiss my lily-white African-American ass.

Afterthought, for Bette Midler:  Melania Trump speaks five languages, while you speak only one, stupidly.

Missing Boolets

Media Assholes, Military, Mocking Furriners, The Gun Thing

Reader JD sends me this little snippet:

Germany’s armed forces, the Bundeswehr, has confirmed it is missing more than 60,000 rounds of ammunition.

…or, about the same number of rounds we expended in a single afternoon at a Nation Of Riflemen shoot a dozen years ago.  But here’s the not-so fun part:

Another 48,000 rounds from an elite special unit with links to right-wing extremism are also unaccounted for.

Just so we’re all clear on what these media assholes are implying:  a study taken a while ago showed that a few members of Krautland’s G9 Special Forces group were — gasp! — of a conservative bent.  None were actually ever proven to be members of any right-wing extremist groups, it’s just that some of their opinions were the same as those of the BLM (Kraut wing — they’re a neo-Nazi crowd, not Commies like our version).

What DW  is implying, therefore, is not that their army and SF are careless with ammo, or that they’re not accounting for their ammo properly;  they’re hinting that some of their soldiers may be shipping ammo to neo-Nazi groups.

There’s fuck-all evidence that any of this is happening, of course:  it’s just part of the leftwing media agitprop.  As the Emperor Misha has so rightly stated:

Rope.  Tree.  Journalist.  Some assembly required.