May 21, 2025

OPEN THREAD: Hump Day.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds 295

#JOURNALISM:

UPDATE (From Ed):

I’m so old, I can remember when the entire left, including former President Obama, still believed in “speaking truth to power.”

MORE (From Ed):

ANOTHER UPDATE (FROM GLENN):

Posted at 8:35 pm by Glenn Reynolds 190

JEFF DUNETZ: Biden’s Dementia Was Obvious Before 2020 Election. The Media And His Staff Had To Know.

I am not angry at former President Joe Biden for covering up his mental decline. I AM angry at the press, his staff, and his family for covering it up because it was painfully honest. Even though I desperately wanted Joe Biden to lose, I sometimes felt sorry for him.

Since Biden debated Trump, the media and the White House staff have started exposing the coverup, sort of. Some said they did not realize Biden had a diminishing mental capacity—a lie. Others say they didn’t know he was beginning to lose his mental capacity until the last two years of his Presidency—another lie.

Joe Biden’s mental capacity was diminished before he won the Democratic Party nomination in June 2020.

I began to write about his affliction in June 2019 and begged his family to send him to a doctor. Below is a summary of the posts that ran on this summary from that first post up to the election. The words in italics came from the post written on the date shown at the beginning of each section.

As Charles Cooke asked in February: Which Way, American Journalist?

At this stage, the only person in America who believes that the media faithfully follows a series of neutral rules is Brian Stelter — and he’s paid to say as much.

Which is to say that my view of the affair remains exactly the same as it was in the immediate aftermath of the presidential debate that tore away the curtain: There is simply no way of looking at this “failure” that does not indict everyone involved. If the press genuinely did not know, then it is staffed by people who cannot see what is in front of their noses. If the press had suspicions but did not want to investigate them for fear that it would help Donald Trump, then it is staffed by people who are corrupt and who ought never to work again as a result. And if the press knew, but felt pressured or obliged to stay quiet about it, then we are dealing with a conspiracy of world-historic proportions. I do not know what is in Tapper and Thompson’s book, but if it is not primarily an indictment of the media — coupled with some white-hot rage at the federal government for having orchestrated such a dastardly conspiracy — then it will represent a missed opportunity. At present, the media’s approval rating is about 20 percent. If, over the next two years, the press elects to forget its complicity in the ruse and dispassionately cash in on its own failure, I suspect that its popularity will soon be pushing single digits — if that.

Those are rookie numbers. The media seem determined to punch those numbers down as far as they can.

Related: The ‘cabal’ that bragged of foisting Joe Biden on us must answer for his failed presidency.

Posted at 4:30 pm by Ed Driscoll 121

NOAH ROTHMAN: Yet Another Gaza Famine That Wasn’t.

Maybe you can spot the fallacy in the following:

If you can, you should congratulate yourself on possessing the capacity for critical rationality even when evaluating claims that cast Israel in a bad light. That faculty renders you more perceptive than much of the Western journalistic establishment.

Such was the commitment of the international press to the notion that Israel is deliberately engineering a famine in the Gaza Strip that it accepted at face value a claim so logically deficient that an elementary school student should be able to identify the sophistry in it.

“Around 14,000 babies could die in the next 48 hours if many more aid trucks do not reach Gaza, the U.N.’s humanitarian chief says,” read the claim promulgated by a variety of news outlets, including a since-deleted social-media post promoted by NBC News.

The first tell readers of this piece will encounter is that the initial 540 words of the report accompanying the post are devoted not to the imminent humanitarian catastrophe that is about to befall the Palestinian population. Rather, it is replete with quotes from critics of Benjamin Netanyahu insisting that the resumption of Israeli combat operations against Hamas risks consigning the Jewish State to “pariah state” status. Indeed, for the prime minister, “killing babies is a pastime,” one of his domestic critics charged.

When it eventually gets around to exploring the allegation it broadcast on social media, NBC News couched the claim: “Around 14,000 babies face severe malnutrition if a lot more aid trucks don’t reach the Palestinian enclave soon, U.N. humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher told the BBC on Tuesday,” the report read.

That was a “clarification” from the original claim that NBC News and many other journalistic enterprises promoted. Their mistake was to trust the BBC’s reporting and their source, a U.N. functionary. “There are 14,000 babies that will die in the next 48 hours unless we can reach them,” Fletcher told the British media venue — a claim that horrified and inflamed the civilized world. The BBC ran with it. Only later did the outlet ask him “how he had arrived at that figure.” Fletcher “said there were ‘strong teams on the ground’ operating in medical centers and schools — but did not provide further details.”

As Rothman wrote above, NBC really had the airbrushes on high today, ultimately deleting the following tweet:

The photo is from Yemen, you say?

In the London Spectator, Brendan O’Neill writes: The UN’s claim about babies dying in Gaza is unravelling.

The story originated in comments made by a UN official on the Today programme. ‘There are 14,000 babies that will die in the next 48 hours unless we reach them,’ listeners were told. The UN’s man was pressed – gently, one should note – about how he arrived at this figure. He said something about how the UN’s ‘strong teams on the ground’ are feeding back such chilling predictions.

It went viral. It ignited some of the worst Israelophobia – and outright anti-Semitism – I’ve seen since 7 October 2023. Social media’s cesspit of bigotry bubbled even more furiously than usual. ‘Evil’, cried leftists whose entire personality is hating Israel. ‘Satanic demons’, said hard-right cranks who hate the Jewish nation because they hate Jews.

And then the claim unravelled. Belatedly the BBC offered some clarification. The UN has now said, it reported, that it’s possible there will be 14,100 ‘severe cases of malnutrition’ among Gazan kids ‘aged six to 59 months’ over the next year if more aid does not get through. We need to get aid in ASAP, the UN said – ‘ideally within the next 48 hours’.

In short, there is no calamitous prospect of 14,000 babies starving in the next two days – thank God. Rather, the UN is concerned that there might be that number of acute cases of hunger among very young kids if nothing changes, aid wise, over the next year. This is a wholly different claim to the one that whipped up such a storm of frothing anti-Israel animus.

It’s good the BBC has offered clarification. Now we await the UN’s explanation for why one of its officials made such a thin and incendiary claim on live radio. The Spectator has contacted the UN to ask. Perhaps it was an honest mistake. But whatever their answer, I feel it’s too late. The damage is done.

I’m pretty sure the UN makes very few “honest” mistakes when it comes to who they take sides with in the Middle East.

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll 138

AS KENT BROCKMAN WOULD SAY: “I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.”

Posted at 3:43 pm by Charles Glasser 13

“BABBLING.”

More:

Maybe these folks should try reading the news.

Posted at 3:36 pm by Stephen Green 120

WELL, GOOD: World moves away from ‘green gospel of scarcity’ and now embraces ‘energy abundance,’ experts say.

This shift away from the de-growth fervor that was popular for over a decade was the overriding topic at the RealClear Energy Future Forum Monday. Panels of experts in engineering, data centers, mining, oil and gas, and the electricity grid discussed how this change of views has impacted various aspects of the world’s energy picture.

“I think we’ve gone from scarcity to abundance — from the green gospel of scarcity and its Trinitarian ESG god — to the promised land of abundance guided by the values of affordability and reliability,” David DesRosiers, conference co-chair and founder of the RealClear Foundation, said.

Mark Mills, conference co-chair and director of the National Center for Energy Analytics, discussed the role of increasing energy demand as a result of the growth of data centers and artificial intelligence. While many tech companies, such as Microsoft, embraced net-zero goals, Mills explained that the energy demands of data centers forced companies to contend with the reality that although fashionable in some circles, intermittent wind and solar power are not adequate.

“Eventually, reality rears its ugly head, and we recalibrate around what reality permits,” Mills said.

It generally takes concerted government action to create a shortage of things that people want.

Posted at 2:48 pm by Stephen Green 55

DOJ TO INVESTIGATE BRANDON JOHNSON AFTER HE BIZARRELY EXPLAINS WHY HE INTENTIONALLY HIRES BLACK PEOPLE:

In this episode of “Imagine the Hysteria if a White Person Had Said That”…

Embattled Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson — who accomplished the Herculean task of becoming an even worse mayor than former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot — stepped into it big-time on Sunday while explaining to a predominantly black church why he exclusively hires black people for key jobs in his administration.

For a guy who generally only opens his mouth to change feet, Johnson’s explanation was not only bizarre, it was also 100 percent textbook racism and 100 percent illegal — in my not-so-humble opinion, that is.

Speaking to the congregation at the Apostolic Church of God in the Chicago neighborhood of Woodland, Johnson proudly said:

Detractors will push back on me and say ‘The only thing the mayor talks about is the hiring of black people.’ No, what I’m saying is when you hire our people, we always look out for everybody else. We are the most generous people on the planet. … That’s just how we are.

And so Business and Economic Neighborhood Development, the deputy mayor, is a black woman. Department of Property Development, a black woman. Infrastructure, the deputy mayor. Chief Operations Officer, is a black man. Budget Director, a black woman. Senior Advisor, a black man.

I’m laying that out because when you ask, how do we ensure that our people get a chance to grow their business, having people in my administration that will look out for the interests of everyone, and everyone means you have to look out for the interests of black folks, because that hasn’t happened. That’s how we ensure long-term sustainable growth.

* * * * * * * *

As reported by The New York Times, the administration said on Monday that it has opened a civil rights investigation into the city of Chicago to see whether Johnson or others have engaged in a pattern of discrimination by intentionally hiring a number of black people to senior positions.

America’s Newspaper of Record reports that Johnson responded quickly to the DOJ’s accusation:

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll 118

TYLER O’NEIL: Democrats Compared Parental Rights Groups to the KKK While Passing a Transgender Law. Now, Those Groups Are Suing.

“HB 25-1312’s sponsors confirmed that the law’s speech prohibitions are designed to push those with traditional views about sex and gender out of the public conversation,” the lawsuit notes. It cites The Daily Signal’s previous coverage of state Rep. Yara Zokaie, a Democrat sponsor of the bill, comparing parental rights groups to the Ku Klux Klan. When Zokaie faced criticism over the comparison, she doubled down, citing the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The Southern Poverty Law Center brands parental rights groups “anti-government extremist groups” and puts them on a “hate map” with chapters of the Ku Klux Klan. The pro-transgender SPLC has long branded as “anti-LGBTQ hate groups” conservative and Christian organizations that oppose its activism on social issues.

Klan-admirer Woodrow Wilson (D-NJ) could not be reached for comment.

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll 37