American Power

Wednesday, January 5, 2022

Nice Young Lady

She's got a wrist tattoo that says, "Home is Where Mom Is."

Right. She barely looks old enough for college, man.

CDC Director Rochelle Walensky Defends COVID Guidelines (VIDEO)

There's no rhyme or reason to the latest guidelines.

First it was ten days isolation after a positive test, then corporations complained, especially the airlines. Then the CDC said after five days, if you have no symptoms, you can go back to work. Now you have to have to be tested, or something?

Who knows? And who cares at this point? People are so over it. Done. The Biden administration's handling of the pandemic has been a complete joke.

At NYDN, "CDC chief Dr. Rochelle Walensky defends COVID return-to-work guidelines amid widespread confusion."

And see Zeynep Tufekci, at the New York Times, "The C.D.C. Is Hoping You’ll Figure Covid Out on Your Own":

I have some good news and some bad news, and they’re both the same.
Seven independent lab studies have found that while Omicron’s mutations make it exceptionally good at causing breakthrough cases even in people who have been vaccinated or previously infected, they also render it less able to effectively infect the lower lungs, a step associated with more serious illness. Plus, in country after country where Omicron has spread, epidemiological data shows that vaccines are still helping prevent severe disease or worse.
Why isn’t that unalloyed good news? Because it’s just luck that this highly transmissible variant appears to be less dangerous than other variants to those with prior immunity. If it had been more deadly — as Delta has been — the U.S. government’s haphazard and disorganized response would have put the whole country much more at risk. Even with this more moderate threat, the highest-ranking public health officials are making statements that seem more aimed at covering up or making excuses for ongoing failures, rather than leveling with the public.
Nowhere are these issues more apparent than on the confusing and zigzag messaging around rapid antigen tests and N95 masks, both of which are important weapons in our arsenal.
With a barrage of cases threatening vital services, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced on Dec. 29 that people could return to work, masked, five days after they first learned they were infected, arguing that many people are infectious for only a short period. People could return to work even while still sick, as long as their symptoms were abating.
It’s not unreasonable to shorten quarantine for some, especially if they are vaccinated. Other countries have allowed infected people to isolate for a shorter time with the added precaution that they take rapid antigen tests to show they are negative two days in a row.
Why doesn’t the C.D.C. call for that added measure of safety? Its director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, has explained this by saying, “We know that after five days, people are much less likely to transmit the virus and that masking further reduces that risk.”
“Much less likely” isn’t zero, and the likelihood probably varies from person to person. All this means that some would continue to be infectious. So wouldn’t it be great if we could tell who was probably still infectious after five days, and took extra precautions, while allowing people who may be clearing the virus even faster than five days to stop isolating earlier?
Not according to our top officials.
“We opted not to have the rapid test for isolation because we actually don’t know how our rapid tests perform and how well they predict whether you’re transmissible during the end of disease,” Walensky said on Dec. 29. “The F.D.A. has not authorized them for that use.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the president’s chief medical adviser, argued the same, also on Dec. 29. Referring to antigen tests, he said, “If it’s positive, we don’t know what that means for transmissibility” and that these antigen tests aren’t as sensitive as P.C.R. tests.
Might the real reason be that rapid tests are hard to find and expensive here (while they are easily available and relatively cheap in other countries)?
Is it possible that rapid tests are a good way to see who is infectious and who can return to public life — and their lack of sensitivity to minute amounts of virus is actually a good thing? Let’s ask a brilliant scientist and public health advocate — Rochelle Walensky, circa 2020.
Walensky, who was then on the faculty of the Harvard Medical School and chief of the division of infectious diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital, was a co-author of a paper in September 2020 that declared that the “P.C.R.-based nasal swab your caregiver uses in the hospital does a great job determining if you are infected but it does a rotten job of zooming in on whether you are infectious.”
That’s right, the key question is who is infectious, who can pass on the virus, not whether someone is still harboring some small amount of virus, or even fragments of it. P.C.R. tests can detect such tiny amounts of the virus that they can “return positives for as many as 6-12 weeks,” she pointed out. That’s “long after a person has ceased to pose any real risk of transmission to others.” P.C.R. tests are a bit like being able to find a thief’s fingerprints after he’s left the house.
So what did 2020 Walensky recommend? “The antigen test is ideally suited to yield positive results precisely when the infected individual is maximally infectious,” she and her co-author concluded. The reason is that antigen tests respond to the viral load in the sample without biologically amplifying the amount and being able to detect even viral fragments, as P.C.R. tests do. So a rapid test turns positive if a sample contains high levels of virus, not nonviable bits or minute amounts — and it’s high viral loads that correlate to higher infectiousness.
What about the objection that rapid antigen tests don’t always detect infections as well as P.C.R. tests can?

The 2020 Walensky wrote that the F.D.A. shouldn’t worry about “false negatives” on rapid tests because “those are true negatives for disease transmission” — meaning that people are unlikely to spread the virus even if they have a bit of virus lingering. In other words, the fact that rapid tests are less likely to turn positive if the viral load isn’t high is a benefit, not a problem.
Rapid tests do have their own considerations. Since you can become infectious even a day or two after getting a negative result on a rapid test, the Walensky of September 2020 noted that rapid tests are most useful if they are used frequently. A paper she co-wrote in July 2020 found that if a test was used every two days it would allow for safely reopening colleges.
The brilliant explanations of Walensky in 2020 leave me at a loss to explain why President Biden said on Dec. 22 that “I wish I had thought about ordering half a billion” rapid tests two months ago. Indeed, why didn’t officials do so two months ago, or 10 months ago?
The administration needs to do more to ramp up production of what should be one crucial tool in controlling the spread of the virus and allowing people to return to normal...

I'll say.

More, at WSJ, "Biden’s Covid Death Milestone More Americans have died of the virus in 2021 than in all of 2020."

And at Newsweek, "Fact Check: Have More Americans Died From COVID Under Joe Biden Than Donald Trump?"

Discovery of Hundreds of Unmarked Graves at Canada School for Indigenous Children

Horrific.

And Canada's so "progressive."

At WSJ, "Records Could Shed Light on Canada Residential Schools for Indigenous Children":

OTTAWA—A trove of documents that could help identify children who died while attending boarding schools for indigenous children in Canada is set to be released after a yearslong battle.
Last month, the Canadian government said it would turn over about 12,000 documents to the country’s National Center for Truth and Reconciliation, which houses the largest repository of residential-school records.
The documents include historical records of some of the schools, which operated in Canada for more than a century and were attended by some 150,000 indigenous children, many separated from their families by force or coercion. A majority of the institutions were run by the Catholic Church.
The government came under increased pressure to turn over the documents, which researchers said may include attendance records and staff lists, after the discovery last year of more than 1,000 unmarked graves near former residential schools in western Canada.
The records weren’t made available earlier, the government said, because several Catholic entities that were involved with the schools had refused to consent to their release. The government believed consent was required because the records were collected in response to lawsuits against the government and religious groups.
Advocates say the documents could help offer some closure to survivors of Canada’s residential-school system, which a government-backed inquiry concluded was akin to “cultural genocide.”
Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission said in 2015 that it had identified about 3,200 deaths of indigenous children at the schools but said the death toll was likely higher as many student deaths went unreported, partly because records were destroyed and school principals didn’t log all deaths. More deaths have since been identified, bringing the recorded total to about 4,100.
A statement from the National Center for Truth and Reconciliation, or NCTR, which holds material that was collected by the Commission, said the records the government plans to release could help identify children who went missing while attending residential schools. The NCTR hopes the documents include attendance records, transportation manifests, staff lists and invoices.
The government expects to provide the records to the NCTR in early 2022.
The Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc indigenous community near Kamloops, British Columbia, last spring disclosed evidence of about 200 unmarked graves around a former government-funded and church-operated school for indigenous children. Since then, hundreds more unmarked graves at or near the sites of former residential schools have come to light.
The discoveries prompted some residential-school survivors and indigenous communities to redouble their efforts to gain access to certain historical records. Before the Kamloops discovery, religious orders and governments had stymied efforts to access them, indigenous advocates said.
The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops said all who played a role in the residential-school system must do more to demonstrate transparency. In September, the group issued an apology to indigenous people for the role of Catholic entities in the system and committed to providing records that could help memorialize those buried in unmarked graves.
The Canadian government said on Wednesday that it previously disclosed more than four million documents to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and is committed to taking steps to share more records while respecting survivors’ wishes, legislation, court orders and settlement agreements.
The Sisters of St. Ann, a Catholic group whose members taught at the Kamloops school, hadn’t consented to the records’ release to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission when its work was under way in 2014, according to the government. A spokeswoman for the organization said it now supports the government’s plan to release the records and is re-examining other records for further information about its role in residential schools.
Marc Miller, the Canadian minister in charge of indigenous relations, said last month that officials would be reviewing other records the government holds that relate to residential schools to see if more documents could be released.
Ry Moran, the former executive director of the National Center for Truth and Reconciliation and now associate librarian at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, said the promise to disclose more documents could mark a pivotal moment in understanding Canada’s history with indigenous peoples.
Mr. Moran, who also worked with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, said the commission realized near the end of its six-year inquiry into the residential-school system, which concluded in 2015, that not all necessary records were obtained and that some might have been withheld.
Separately, the NCTR said last month that the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, a Catholic organization that ran dozens of Canadian residential schools including the school in Kamloops, had offered to provide copies of any records about the schools that may currently be held in the Oblate archive in Italy. Some of the archival records could include letters sent by Oblate missionaries to leaders in France or Rome, the NCTR said...

The Escalating International War Against Israel

From Caroline Glick:

At the UN General Assembly last week, a large majority of member nations voted to lavishly fund a permanent inquisition against the Jewish state. The member states funded the operation of an “ongoing independent, international commission of inquiry,” against Israel.
The commission, run by outspoken haters of Israel with long records of demonizing the State of Israel and its people, was formed by the UN Human Rights Council in a special session in May. Its purpose is to deny and reject Israel’s right to exist, its right to self-defense, its right to enforce is laws, and its citizens rights to their properties and to their very lives.
The Human Rights Council’s decision to form its new permanent inquisition constitutes an unprecedented escalation of the political war the UN has been waging against Israel for the past fifty years. To grasp the danger, it is necessary to understand how Israel’s foes operate at the UN and how their partners in Europe and Israel itself operate.
We begin with the UN. In 2005, acting on pressure from the Bush administration, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan disbanded the UN Human Rights Commission. The Bush administration’s chief complaint was that the commission was endemically anti-Semitic.
The UN Human Rights Council was founded in 2006, and its members and UN staff wasted no time making clear that they intended for the new council to be even more anti-Semitic than its predecessor was.
Shortly after the Human Rights Council was established, it determined that demonizing Israel would be a permanent agenda item. Item Number 7 is the only permanent agenda item that deals with a specific country. And like the council’s nine other permanent agenda items, Item 7 is discussed at every formal council session. Item 7 enjoins the council to discuss, “Human rights violations and implications of the Israeli occupation of Palestine and other occupied Arab territories.”
Having a permanent agenda item dedicated to specifically demonizing Israel however, wasn’t enough to satisfy the Human Rights Council’s obsession with attacking the Jewish state. So since 2006, the council has convened nine special sessions to expand its focus on attacking the Jews. To get a sense of just how overwhelming the council’s focus on Israel is, in the same period, the council has convened just 19 special sessions to deal with every other country on the planet.
The council’s template for demonizing Israel has been fairly consistent through the years. Immediately after each Palestinian terror campaign against Israel comes to an end, the Holocaust denying, terror sponsoring PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas has his UN representatives ask for a special session to discuss the “war crimes,” and “crimes against humanity” Israel supposedly carried out against the Palestinians. No one ever mentions that ever single missile launched against Israel from the Hamas terror regime in Gaza constitutes a separate war crime. No one ever mentions Hamas at all.
In short order, the council accedes to the PLO’s request and convenes the special session. On cue the member nation’s representatives rise, accuse Israel of genocide, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, operating a killing machine, targeting children, and any other crime they can think of. Then a majority of the members vote to form a new “commission of inquiry,” led and staffed by “independent” investigators nearly all of whom believe that Israel has no right to exist and that Jews have too much power.
At the end of its “in-depth investigation,” the commission issues a report which determines that Israel conducted war crimes and crimes against humanity.
This brings us to the second arm of the international political war against Israel – Europe. Every Human Rights Council resolution to form a commission of inquiry, includes a call to non-governmental organizations and other parties to submit “testimonies” and “reports” that will substantiate the council’s blood libel that Israel committed war crimes and is inherently and incurably evil. NGOs registered in Israel, the Palestinian Authority and in Western countries answer the council’s call. And the final reports issued by each of the inquisitions include hundreds of citations from “testimonies” and reports submitted by these NGOs as proof of Israel’s inherent venality.
These organizations are not independent actors. European governments fund them and direct their operations. If they operated in the U.S., nearly every NGO involved in the Human Rights Council’s witch hunts against Israel would have to register as foreign agents of European governments. As MK Amichai Chikli put it, “Europe is waging a war against Israel.”
Last week, Chikli and MK Keti Shitreet were scheduled to hold a conference at the Knesset on European funding of radical NGOs. But in a sign of the depth of Europe’s commitment to its war against Israel, and to its power in Israel, the EU embassy in Israel placed massive pressure on the Knesset secretariat and the Knesset Speaker to cancel the conference. In the end, the conference was cancelled at the last moment, citing Covid-19 restrictions, even as the Knesset’s parliamentary operations went on unimpeded.
The reports the Human Rights Council publishes at the end of each fake commission of inquiry against Israel form the basis for various boycott efforts against Israel that European bureaucrats carry out. For instance, on the basis of one such report, EU member states stopped recognizing Israeli veterinary certificates relating to agricultural exports from Jewish farmers in Samaria.
This brings us to the third arm of the international political war against Israel – Israel’s European-influenced, progressive legal establishment. Last weekend, Haaretz published an interview with former attorney general and recently retired Supreme Court justice Meni Mazuz. Between the lines, Mazuz explained the legal establishment’s methods for transforming anti-Israel UN documents into “law.”
A significant portion of the interview dealt with Mazuz’s campaign from the bench to block military demolitions of homes of terrorists.
As Professor Avi Bell from Bar Ilan University’s Law Faculty explains, “The law explicitly stipulates that it is legal to demolish the homes of terrorists. And there are dozens of Supreme Court decisions that approve demolition orders, based on the law.”
Mazuz told Haaretz that for many years, including during his tenure as Attorney General, “I thought that house demolitions were an immoral step, in contravention of the law whose effectiveness was dubious.”
But when Mazuz served as attorney general, he lacked the authority to end the practice. As he explained, “I couldn’t tell the government that it is prohibited when dozens of Supreme Court decisions say that it is permitted.”

But the minute Mazuz was appointed to the Supreme Court, he began legislating his political views from the bench. To substantiate his position regarding the demolition of terrorists’ homes, Mazuz said that he relied on “the positions of legal scholars,” in Israel and abroad, and on the decisions of the UN Human Rights Council.
“The demolitions cause us international damage,” Mazuz said. “Do you think that these things stay here? That they don’t come up every year at human rights councils in Geneva and in international forums?”
In other words, Mazuz made clear that along with several of his colleagues on the bench, he used the anti-Israel reports generated by the obsessively anti-Israel UN Human Rights Council, to justify his rulings which denied Israel the right to act in accordance with Israeli law in a manner that the duly elected government, and the duly constituted leadership of the IDF deemed necessary in their efforts to quell Palestinian terrorism.
As Bell explains, aside from a limited category of UN Security Council resolutions, UN actions and decisions are all devoid of significance in international law. Decisions by the UN Human Rights Council, like those of all other UN bodies are political documents without any legal weight.
Mazuz and his colleagues in the legal fraternity exploit the public’s ignorance and the impotence of the government and Knesset to transform these political documents into “law” through their judgments and legal opinions.
And this brings us to the Human Rights Council’s permanent inquisition whose operations a large majority of UN member nations voted to fund last week at the General Assembly. As Prof. Anne Bayefsky explained in a detailed report published this week by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, the commission of inquiry’s mandate is effectively limitless. The commission is empowered to rewrite the entire history of the Arab conflict with Israel and determine that Israel’s birth was an original sin which must be undone. The commission is empowered to carry out an “investigation” on the basis of “testimonies” which EU-funded anti-Israel groups will supply them describing entirely fraudulent “war crimes” that will form the basis of indictments of Israeli elected leaders, IDF commanders and line soldiers, and Israeli civilians who reside in Judea, Samaria and unified Jerusalem. The UN’s political “courts” in turn will agree to try them for these made-up crimes.
Moreover, as Bayefsky noted, the commission is charged with making “recommendations on measures to be taken by third States to ensure respect for international humanitarian law in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem…[to ensure] that they do not aid or assist in the Commission of internationally wrongful acts.”
A similar statement is made in the resolution’s preamble regarding “business enterprises.”
The message in both cases is self-explanatory. The reports the inquisition will publish will serve as the basis
for economic boycotts of Israel to be enacted by both government bureaucrats and businesses.
Israel has no choice but to fight this commission and any business, government or judge that uses its reality-free reports. Israel must ensure that the anti-Semitic propaganda the commission puts out does not turn into “law” through the actions of radical justices and government attorneys. And Israel must reconcile itself to the fact that the EU bureaucracy and much of Europe is waging a war against it, and launch a vigorous counter-assault...

Tuesday, January 4, 2022

Dave Eggers, The Every

At Amazon,Dave Eggers, The Every: A Novel.

Drivers Stranded on I-95 Over 14 Hours (VIDEO)

In Virginia.

At WTVR CBS 6 Richmond, Virginia:

And more at CNN, "Hundreds of drivers stranded on I-95 overnight after severe winter storm."

Paige for the Holidays

I'm late on this, but better late than never.

On Twitter.

College, University Lockdowns Can't be Justified by the Science

Dr. Marty Makary, at Bari Weiss's Substack, "Universities' Covid Policies Defy Science and Reason":

Universities are supposed to be bastions of critical thinking, reason and logic. But the Covid policies they have adopted—policies that have derailed two years of students’ education and threaten to upend the upcoming spring semester—have exposed them as nonsensical, anti-scientific and often downright cruel.
Some of America’s most prestigious universities are leading the charge.
At Georgetown University, fully vaccinated students are randomly tested for Covid every week. Using a PCR test, which can detect tiny amounts of dead virus, asymptomatic students who test positive are ordered to a room in a designated building where they spend 10 days in confinement. Food is dropped off once a day at the door.
I spoke to several students who were holed up. One of them told me she would sometimes call a friend to come and wave at her through the window, just to see a human face. Another told me that the experience in quarantine “totally changed” her feelings about the school. “Everyone’s just fed up at this point,” she said. “People walk around the library and yell at you if you drink a sip of water. And it was during finals.” She told me she is thinking about “transferring to an SEC school just to have an in-person experience.”
Given the fact that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recently changed the official quarantine period from 10 days to five, I reached out to Georgetown’s Chief Public Health Officer, Dr. Ranit Mishori. She told me that Georgetown is still using a 10-day quarantine.
Students are the lowest risk population on planet Earth. Over the last six months, the risk of a person in the broader age group (15-24) dying of Covid or dying with Covid (the CDC does not clearly distinguish), was 0.001%. All or nearly all of those deaths were in a very specific subgroup: unvaccinated people with a medical comorbidity. But despite Georgetown’s strict vaccination, masking, testing, and quarantine requirements, the university announced late last month that “all University events, including meetings with visitors, will need to be held virtually or outdoors,” among many other restrictions.
At Princeton University, fully vaccinated students are not allowed to leave the county unless they are on a sports team. They’re also testing all students twice a week, usurping the scarce testing supply from vulnerable communities so that low-risk, young people can use them.
At Cornell, masks are still the rule—and even recommended outdoors. “Masks must be worn indoors at all times, unless in a private, non-shared space (e.g., dorm room or office); we strongly recommend masking outdoors when physical distancing is not possible,” the school announced in mid-December.

At Amherst, students must double mask if they don’t use a KN95. In nearby Boston, at Emerson College, students are tested twice a week and have stay-in-room orders. The college instructs students to “only leave their residence halls or place of residence for testing, meals, medical appointments, necessary employment, or to get mail.” Seriously.
At these institutions of higher learning and thousands more, science is supposedly held in the highest esteem. So where is the scientific support for masking outdoors? Where is the scientific support for constantly testing fully vaccinated young people? Where is the support for the confinement of asymptomatic, young people who test positive for a virus to which they are already immune on a campus of other immune people? The data simply do not justify any of it...

Tuesday Cartoon

Via Legal Insurrection:

More at Theo's, "Cartoon Roundup..."

BONUS: At CNBC, "U.S. reports over 1 million new daily Covid cases as omicron surges."

World's Hottest Charger Fan

Seriously.

Huge fan.

Here, "World’s Hottest Chargers Fan Rocks Jersey While Getting Nude to Celebrate Justin Herbert Setting Franchise TD Record (PIC)."

More here and here.

Monday, January 3, 2022

Elizabeth Holmes Found Guilty

A big conviction.

The Theranos founder was convicted on three counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud.

At NYT, "Elizabeth Holmes Found Guilty of Four Charges of Fraud":

The verdict stands out for its rarity. Few technology executives are charged with fraud and even fewer are convicted. If sentenced to prison, Ms. Holmes would be the most notable female executive to serve time since Martha Stewart did in 2004 after lying to investigators about a stock sale. And Theranos, which dissolved in 2018, is likely to stand as a warning to other Silicon Valley start-ups that stretch the truth to score funding and business deals.
The mixed verdict suggested that jurors believed the evidence presented by prosecutors that showed Ms. Holmes lied to investors about Theranos’s technology in the pursuit of money and fame. They were not swayed by her defense of blaming others for Theranos’s problems and accusing her co-conspirator, Ramesh Balwani, the company’s chief operating officer and her former boyfriend, of abusing her. They were also not swayed by the prosecutor’s case that she had defrauded patients.
On Monday, jurors told the court that they were deadlocked on three of the charges of defrauding investors. Judge Davila pushed them to continue deliberating, but they were unable to agree.
The verdict arrived in a frenzied period for the tech industry, with investors fighting to get into hot deals and often ignoring potential red flags about the companies they were putting money into. Some have warned that more Theranos-like disasters loom.
In recent years, tales of start-up chicanery, from the bungled initial public offering of WeWork to the aggressive boundary-pushing tactics of Uber, have not slowed the flow of money toward charismatic founders spinning tales of business success. Those downfalls captured the public’s attention, but did not result in criminal charges.
Yet the Justice Department under President Biden has renewed its focus on white-collar crimes. “We will urge prosecutors to be bold,” Lisa O. Monaco, the deputy attorney general, recently said in a speech. “The fear of losing should not deter them.”
Ms. Holmes’s conviction sends a message to other founders and executives to be careful about their statements to investors and the public, said Jessica Roth, a law professor at Cardozo School of Law and former federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York.
It “shines a light on the importance of drawing a distinction between truth and optimistic projections — and keeping that clear in one’s mind,” she said.
Ms. Holmes rose to prominence by mimicking the disruptive change-the-world chutzpah of Silicon Valley heroes like Steve Jobs — a playbook that has turned companies like Apple, Tesla, Google and Facebook into some of the most valuable in the world.
In the process, she captured the attention of heads of state, top business leaders and wealthy families with idealistic plans to revolutionize the health care industry. She traveled the world on private jets, was feted with awards and glowing magazine cover stories and lauded as the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire.
But she crossed into fraud when she lied about the accuracy, types and number of tests Theranos’s machines could do to raise funding and secure business deals.
“That’s a crime on Main Street and it’s a crime in Silicon Valley,” Robert Leach, an assistant U.S. attorney, said in opening statements at the trial’s start...

Still more.

Roethlisberger Era Comes to Close in Pittsburgh (VIDEO)

Very emotional night at Heinz Field.

At the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, "Steelers win Ben Roethlisberger's likely Heinz Field finale."

And video, "Ben Roethlisberger's Best Moments in Final Game at. Heinz Field."

For Pittsburgh 🖤💛 @_BigBen7 pic.twitter.com/aPq1GN3zEm
— NFL (@NFL) January 4, 2022

An emotional Ben Roethlisberger on his final game in Pittsburgh.

(via @ESPN) pic.twitter.com/lT898HjDeE
— NFL (@NFL) January 4, 2022

Wanting to Convince People to Support You is Not 'Popularism'

It's Freddie deBoer, "[I]t's just politics, it's just movement building, it's just power":

The “popularism” debate is, now, yesterday’s news, although I have a feeling it will crop back up around the 2022 midterms, particularly if the expected happens and the Democrats get walloped. Popularism is an awkward term that stresses the importance of, well, of politicians and political parties being popular with voters. (Crazy.) As Ezra Klein put it in a piece on these themes that centered on the pollster David Shor, “Democrats should do a lot of polling to figure out which of their views are popular and which are not popular, and then they should talk about the popular stuff and shut up about the unpopular stuff.” ...

Keep reading.

Sunday, January 2, 2022

'The NYT editorial today makes it sounds like the burning of the Reichstag...'

From Tana Geneva, on Twitter.

She's talking about this absurd piece at the New York Times, "Every Day Is Jan. 6 Now."

SOURCE: "New polling on January 6 is a MAJOR BUZZKILL to Brian Stelter and many other journos."

Ben Shapiro’s Hilarious Takedown of COVID Lies the Left Walked Back in 2021

Yes, it's an excellent takedown.

From Ed Driscoll, at Instapundit, "FROM THE HOME OFFICE IN WUHAN CHINA."

And here's Ben, "So once it became clear that covid was not in fact a pagan god visiting vengeance on the unwashed Trump voters alone, the media and Democrats are now willing to admit the following."

Still more, "KEVIN ROCHE: Get the Hell Out of Here 2021 and Oh, Shit, Here Comes 2022."

Facebook's Pushback

I just learned of this, but the "Facebook Files" are available for download, here.

It's actually a full-blown investigation and a massive amount of information, but nevertheless vital for understand what's going on in social media today, and especially Zuckerberg's very threat to civil order and the maintenance of society.

More, from last week, at WSJ, "Facebook’s Pushback: Stem the Leaks, Spin the Politics, Don’t Say Sorry":

Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg drove response to disclosures about company’s influence; sending deputies to testify in Congress.
he day after former Facebook employee and whistleblower Frances Haugen went public in October, the company’s team in Washington started working the phones.
To lawmakers and advocacy groups on the right, according to people familiar with the conversations, their message was that Ms. Haugen was trying to help Democrats. Within hours, several conservative news outlets published stories alleging Ms. Haugen was a Democratic activist.
Later, Facebook lobbyists warned Democratic staffers that Republicans were focused on the company’s decision to ban expressions of support for Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenager who killed two people during unrest in Kenosha, Wis., and who was later acquitted of homicide and other charges.
The company’s goal, according to Republicans and Democrats familiar with the company’s outreach, was to muddy the waters, divide lawmakers along partisan lines and forestall a cross-party alliance that was emerging to enact tougher rules on social-media companies in general and Facebook in particular.
Ms. Haugen’s revelations, and the thousands of internal documents she took with her when she quit Facebook earlier this year, showed the company’s influence on political discourse, teen mental health and other matters. The resulting backlash was emerging as the company’s biggest crisis in years. Pushing politics to the forefront was one part of Facebook’s response, in keeping with a sharp-elbowed approach driven by Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, according to people familiar with the matter.
The company conducted reputational reviews of new products. To deter further leaks, internal access settings for research discussions on topics, including mental health and radicalization, were restricted to those directly involved in the work, according to employees and others familiar with the restrictions. Company researchers said they have been asked to submit work on sensitive topics for review by company lawyers, who have sometimes asked for examples of problems to be excised from internal posts.
Mr. Zuckerberg later changed the company’s name to Meta Platforms Inc., to emphasize what he called a new focus on building the metaverse, an immersive digital world he has described as the next phase of the internet. He has been conducting meetings in virtual reality, with digital avatars standing in for the executives, according to people familiar with the meetings. He has encouraged other employees to do the same.
The implication is that Facebook should look toward the future and not get bogged down in the messy past.
Former executives said Mr. Zuckerberg has told employees not to apologize. In contrast to previous controversies, in which the CEO publicly claimed ownership of the company’s mistakes and typically addressed them head-on, Mr. Zuckerberg has spoken little publicly about Ms. Haugen’s disclosures and sent deputies to testify before Congress.
“When our work is being mischaracterized, we’re not going to apologize,” said Facebook spokesman Andy Stone. “We’re going to defend our record.”
Facebook has acknowledged changes to its research operations but pledged to continue the work to understand the impact of its platforms. The company has also said that it invests billions of dollars to protect the safety of its users.
Starting in September, The Wall Street Journal published a series of articles, called The Facebook Files, which identified harm caused by the social-media giant’s platforms, as identified by its own researchers, and its challenges in addressing them. Based in part on Ms. Haugen’s documents, the articles detailed such matters as how Facebook’s algorithm fosters discord and how its researchers concluded that its platforms, especially Instagram, could negatively affect teen mental health.
Ms. Haugen subsequently made the documents available to other media outlets, which published their own articles.
Since then, there have been four U.S. congressional hearings related to issues raised in the articles; a bipartisan coalition of state attorneys general launched an investigation into Instagram’s effects on children; and more than a half-dozen prominent Meta executives and other senior employees have departed or announced their departures.
“The documents speak for themselves,” said Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, the leading Republican on the Senate antitrust subcommittee and a member of the consumer protection subcommittee. He said he is pursuing legislation that would promote more market competition in social media and add more protections for children online.
Facebook has responded to criticism by citing billions of dollars of investments it has made in online safety, as well as partnerships with outside entities and experts. During a Sept. 30 hearing, Antigone Davis, Meta’s global head of safety, pointed to the company’s work with its safety advisory board, created more than a decade ago, which includes internet-safety experts from around the world.
Facebook has previously said it conducted its own research to identify issues and devise ways to address them...