A Large Regular

More stuff I found interesting or amusing and thought I'd share.

- Noah Smith on economists and economic policy. Believe in industrial policy to a point but more in tune with reciprocity. If a country has free trade with us - we should have free trade with them. If they impose a tariff - we likewise impose a tariff.

- Jonathan Turley on advocacy journalism. Everything is biased and reflects the viewpoint.We tend to gravitate towards those which agree with ours but at the same time remember to "take nobody's word" for anything.

- American Bar Association considers crackdown on "disruptive conduct."  Simply make the next White House Council or head of the DOJ a member of FIRE and the message will be made.

- How to get more exercise without changing your normal routine. I've avoided elevators when I can since I heard Kirk Douglas explain its one of the things he does to maintain a healthy lifestyle.

"Masks have never worked. Testing has always been problematic. Kids were never high-risk. The past has never been altered. Welcome to the COVID consensus, circa midterms 2022."

"Now that the damage has been done, the old arbiters of truth and morality will not get back the trust or credibility they've squandered."

Read the whole thing! It has to be said that over the past 2-years some of the best journalism has come from The Tablet. Well done!

Here's the transcript of the Joe Rogan podcast with Dr. Robert Malone. I listened to the podcast and have made up my own mind (but remain open to new data).

Listen (the podcast is here) or read and make up your own mind. The one thing I'll comment on is how journalists preach "Follow the money" as a basic tenet unless "following the money" would be dangerous to their own careers or the media outlet that employs them. Strange - don't ya think?

Reason has a look at how the media is negatively portrayed in the Harry Potter universe. This is a drum I've been beating for a long time.

From 2005: Daily Prophet = NY Times and the MSM. The fifth book (which came out during the 2004 campaign) shows the Daily Prophet clearly taking sides against Dumbledore and Harry Potter, taking every opportunity to ridicule them. Of course The Daily Prophet has never admitted they were wrong for their blatant partisanship.

From this past July: Wonder if the generation(s) raised on Harry Potter books have a deeper and more willing distrust of the media because of the way The Daily Prophet was portrayed in the books? It didn't exactly paint journalists and newspapers in the best light.

Like the youths who grew up on the Harry Potter universe don't watch network news or read newspapers in real life, if there was an 8th book I'd guess that readership of the Daily Profit who probably be down by half because people no longer trusted them as a news source. 

"I'm not upset that you lied to me, I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you." - Friedrich Nietzsche 

Interesting post on how the mainstream media (brought to you by Pfizer) is losing the battle of credibility because of the way COVID has been reported. 

Joe Rogan gets a reported average of 11 million people listening to or watching his podcast. Compare that to the ratings of any show on CNN, MSNBC or Fox News. His most listened to episodes were the recent one with Dr. Peter McCullough and the one with Dr. Robert Malone - both about COVID and about how the public is being misled. People hear - and they know Rogan's guests are telling the TRUTH!

At the same time they think about how they've been misled by the media. They were promised that if they took the vaccine things would go back normal. They were told that getting the vaccine was a one time thing. They were told either lie upon lie or just one side of the argument so that they could not make an informed decision - and the principal reason to watch the news is to try to become informed.

People are upset that now they cannot trust the mainstream news outlets - so why bother watching or reading. We've seen the proof of this in the steep decline of their ratings and circulation numbers. Meanwhile Joe Rogan's ratings are exploding - because he's earned people's trust.

Some quotes I hope may resonate with you.

 "Jill Biden has the same degree as Bill Cosby." - Dan McLaughlin

"You get paid linearly for analyzing and solving problems and non-linearly for spotting and seizing opportunities." - Shane Parrish

"I'm not afraid of the media. Why should anyone listen to the media? Who are these people? What makes them experts? What have they accomplished?" - Dana White

"There's one thing worse than change and that's the status quo." - John Le Carre

Some quotes I hope may resonate with you.

"I don't want to believe. I want to know." - Carl Sagan

"The number of people who think US Senate seats are gerrymandered never ceases to amaze me." - Thomas Massie

"The press is our chief ideological weapon." - Nikita Khrushcev

"Never regret anything that made you smile." - Mark Twain

Some quotes I hope may resonate with you.

"Scientists who support silencing opposing voices are actually priests." - Naval Ravikant

"The truth is in the depths." - Democritus

"When one door closes another door opens; but we look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us." - Alexander Graham Bell

"The Internet evolved media from physical to digital, from paid to free, from editorial to social. Next up: from corporate to ownerless." - Naval Ravikant

Matt Taibbi on how the press tried and failed to hype a crisis into existence over Dave Chappelle's new Netflix special.

Agree with Taibbi that the "coverage across the board was ridiculously one-sided" and the press basically once again revealed themselves as being not only completely biased but also bereft of any sense of humor. Those in the media who argued that Chappelle "defended" the rapper DaBaby also probably thought he was defending Jussie Smollett in an earlier special.  

Dave Chappelle, himself, speaks out about the "controversy." And for the record - Hannah Gadsby is completely unfunny. 

VDH catalogs the disasters of the first nine months of the Biden Administration and how the Administration is playing them off as no big deal.

VDH's columns can seem repetitive at times but that may be because he seems to be among the few in the media who recognizes that these things are BIG deals. And people need to pay attention to them. For instance we still have many Americans stuck and seemingly forgotten in Afghanistan since their plight is almost universally ignored by the corporate media who seem to prefer to cover what Netflix will do about Dave Chappelle instead. 

If you were wondering if "Big media" and "Big Pharma" were working together.

You could probably do a "Congress brought to you by Pfizer" as well seeing how much of Congress is making money off their sudden investments in the company. In journalism and politics "follow the money" used to mean something completely different than how the media and Congress are profiting today.

Stuff I found interesting or amusing and thought I'd share.

- Literally laughed out loud when I saw this live on Sunday night's broadcast. Knew right away that it would be GIF and meme mana from heaven.

- Documents reveal Miami Mayor's struggle to make the city a Bitcoin utopia. It's not easy being crypto. 

- The COVID Panic Police. "If you must lie to make the story work, you're a propagandist, not a journalist." (HT Execupundit) 

- VDH: Revolution without the Middle Class.

More stuff I found interesting or amusing and thought I'd share.

- VDH: Orwell and the Woke

- Blue Origin Under Fire. Interesting but if Blue Origin was disregarding safety wouldn't they be launching rockets more frequently instead of moving at the snails pace (compared to SpaceX) that they've been operating under? (HT Meanderthal)

- Matt Taibbi: The News is America's New Religion, and We're in a Religious War. Very true!

- I'm ready to vote for Rand Paul for President right now (or at least support the idea of making him the Surgeon General right away!)

Stuff I found interesting or amusing and thought I'd share.

- The Future of Work (according to crypto experts) 

- Day of reckoning for the media handmaidens of war. It says reckoning but in the end nobody will be held responsible (unless that person becomes a scapegoat for something else).

- Everything they have told you is a lie. More evidence for this appears every day. (HT Borepatch)

- The Unstoppable Momentum of Outdated Science

Stuff I found interesting or amusing and thought I'd share.

- How the Pandemic is Changing the Norms of Science. We quickly went from Fake News! to Fake Science! and yet people still wonder why there's an erosion of trust.

- Trust in media hits new low. Speaking of Fake News!

- This seems to be the logic

- Hey Joe - is there anything you could do to weaken Union support for Democrats across the board? Why yes - I have just the thing!