Category: media and media people

Don’t Tempt Her

Scrolling down @realDonaldTrump’s prolific Twitter feed, I cannot help but wonder: when does the president find time to do his job?

I am not the only one to wonder.

Still, as President, Trump sure is a great . . . troll. “I think that Crooked Hillary Clinton should enter the race to try and steal it away from Uber Left Elizabeth Warren,” Trump tweeted on Tuesday. “Only one condition. The Crooked one must explain all of her high crimes and misdemeanors including how & why she deleted 33,000 Emails AFTER getting ‘C’ Subpoena!”

Mrs. Clinton responded curtly: “Don’t tempt me. Do your job.”

I wonder if she fumed, under her breath, “do my job!”

CNN, in its report on this Twitter exchange — yes, this is our reality, now, this is the news! — recalled Clinton’s assurance, in March, that though she will continue “to keep speaking out” and “is not going anywhere” (heh heh), she definitely will not run again. CNN did not take Trump’s bait about Clintonian corruption, instead mentioning that “Trump’s invocation of Clinton — whom he has attacked repeatedly in his role as President — comes as the Democratic presidential primary ramps up alongside a House impeachment inquiry into the President centered around his interactions with foreign leaders.”

CNN also neglected to mention that the Hillary Clinton campaign had interacted with foreign leaders — including Ukrainian, it appears — for election advantage.

Which I guess is why we need Twitter — to allow the president to push news the press won’t cover.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Twitter

media and media people responsibility

Science Isn’t Morality

“Scientist” — what an abused term! When a journalist needs an authority to write about some nutty, wildly improbable affront to common sense, a “scientist” will do.

Case in point, turn to Newsweek:

“Tanning salons are more likely to be located in U.S. neighborhoods with higher numbers of same-sex male couples,” writes Kashmira Gander, “according to scientists who fear the industry could be targeting the demographic.”

Well, since gay men — for a variety of reasons surely no one will dispute, and which we need not trouble ourselves with — are more likely to use such services than straight men, one might expect marketers to “target” a likely clientele.

But why the “fear”?

Well, don’t panic, but “[t]anning beds are dangerous. They double your risk of skin cancer. Over time, they also cause wrinkles, skin aging, uneven skin texture and dark spots, so even from a cosmetic standpoint, no one should be using them.”

Well, that latter is not a scientific finding. It is up to consumers to decide what acceptable levels of risk they will take to make themselves appealing for the opposite sex, or — in this case — the same sex.

If scientists made fewer moral and political pronouncements, sticking to statements that they can defend with facts and findings, not only would Newsweek and other magazines be easier to bear (I cannot guarantee more subscribers and newsstand sales, alas), but science itself might gain a bit more credibility.

As it is, it is teetering.

Or so some “studies have shown.”

As for me, I’m not gay, but I am married . . . and a former redhead. Tanning salons don’t profitably pitch their services to me.

Not because of science, but . . .

Common Sense. Which this is. I’m Paul Jacob.

Original image by Alexis O’Toole

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Tags economics, risk, science

media and media people political challengers

Twitter Abuse

Donald Trump, twitter, censorship, Kamala Harris threat,

“Look,” tweeted Sen. Kamala Harris, “let’s be honest. . . .”

When a politician talks about being honest — presumably “for a change” — it’s gonna be a doozy.

President Trump’s “Twitter account should be suspended.”

“What?” the reader will likely object, “Trump’s Twitter account is the second-best thing about the his presidency!”

The reader wouldn’t be wrong.

We may disagree about the actual best thing, but the presidential Twitter account is indeed one of the things that makes the current chaos bearable. Sure, it is the cause of much of the chaos, but, well, we take our chuckles where we can get them. At least Trump’s tweets are not articulated in standard insiderese.

So, what did Trump tweet that so upset the former California prosecutor?

This: he had come to the “conclusion that what is taking place is not an impeachment, it is a COUP, intended to take away the Power of the People, their VOTE, their Freedoms, their Second Amendment, Religion, Military, Border Wall, and their God-given rights as a Citizen of The United States of America!”

Harris publicly called upon Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s CEO, to “do something” about the tweet.

He did nothing.

Understandably.

Suspending the account of the United States President because a failing opposition candidate was offended by typical Trumpian hyperbole would br idiotic. Mr. Dorsey has a lot to answer for, sure. But complete and utter idiocy? Not that.

For he knows something: Donald Trump has it within his powers to command every federal agency to cease using Twitter. Trump himself could switch to Gab or Minds or even MeWe — perhaps he should.

The federal government is not required to use a particular social media platform over another, is it?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom media and media people

The Pumpkinification of Snopes

Post author By Redactor
Post date October 3, 2019
2 Comments on The Pumpkinification of Snopes

Satire exaggerates not just for a laugh, often employing the reductio ad absurdum for cutting effect — casting our attention on human follies and crimes.

While the classic literary satires include Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis (divi) Claudii — “The Pumpkinification of (the Divine) Claudius” — and Jonathan Swift’s 1729 “Modest Proposal for preventing the children of poor people in Ireland from being a burden on their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the publick,” we nowadays often turn to humor websites, like The Onion.

Or, increasingly, The Babylon Bee.

Last week, as I set out for the Far East, the Bee story that topped the page was “New Genderfluid Dolls Emit Blast Of Pepper Spray, Alert Authorities When Children Use Wrong Pronoun.” On the same date I caught “Man Sure Is Glad He Switched From E-Cigs To Regular, Healthier Cigarettes.”* And laughed until I coughed.

Worthy of The Onion, sure, but better than most recent Onion efforts.

How did the Bee leap to the forefront of modern satire? Well, it’s a Christian site, actually, which seems to help. The Bee’s writers do not accept any dominant strain of contemporary culture as an admirable norm — like today’s “woke comics” must — so it is easier to find the absurdities in this current epoch’s conflicted and contradictory politics and culture.

The Bee so effectively lampoons dominant culture that snopes.com, the progressives’ most popular (putative) fact checking site, warned that the Bee’s great Chick-fil-A satire confused some readers because it “altered some details of a controversial news story.”

Satire is funny. Not getting satire? Priceless.

The Babylon Bee’s biggest competition may not be The Onion.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Nick Gillespie of Reason mentions some titles that caught his attention: “‘Trump Is Being Influenced by The Russians, Screams Communist!’ and ‘Woke Polar Bear Apologizes for Being White.’ Classics include ‘Trump Proves He’s Not A Racist By Showing His Rejection Letter From The KKK’ and ‘Local Christian Would Do Anything For Jesus Except Believe Things That Are Unpopular.’”

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Tags Babylon Bee, fake news, humor, media, satire, Snopes

ideological culture media and media people

Cancel Culture Cancels Culture

Post author By Redactor
Post date September 26, 2019
2 Comments on Cancel Culture Cancels Culture

Cancel culture, writes Christian Britschgi of Reason, may have just “jumped the shark.”

Britschgi tells the tale of “Carson King, a 24-year-old security guard who achieved viral fame after he was spotted on ESPN’s College Gameday waving a sign that asked people to use the mobile payment app Venmo to send him beer money.” Mr. King got a huge number of responses, then decided to give it all to charity. This spurred on both Anheuser-Busch and Venmo to match the donations, and a hero was born.

Enter the shark.

I mean, legacy media.

The Des Moines Register chose to profile King, on Tuesday, with that special postmodern twist: dig up some ugly tweets by the man from back when he was a 16-year-old edgelord, saying the de rigueur racist things.

Next: apologies, backlash.

“Treating a person’s most intemperate tweets as worthy of public shame is an exercise in hypocrisy,” Britschgi not unreasonably asserts. “What’s worse is that we have graduated from using social media history as a way of divining a person’s true nature to deploying that history cynically and maliciously.”

The hypocrisy part was provided by the Register’s registered hitman, a recent hire who was himself caught on Twitter, having used the n-word and warning others never to talk to “strange gay men,” as Keith Mann regales us with on Heavy.

This is not the way civilized people behave.

Sure, don’t tweet ugly, vicious stuff in the first place. That’s a good takeaway.

But cancel culture shouldn’t cancel out cultural goodness.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies

Listen to the Warm

I like publicity stunts as much as the next activist. But haven’t we had enough of the whole Greta Thunberg bit yet?

On Wednesday, the 16-year-old Swede provided testimony on an apt stage, let us grant her that — the U.S. House of Representatives’ foreign affairs subcommittee joint hearing on the global youth climate change movement.

She didn’t prepare any remarks, though. She merely “attached” the IPCC Special Report on Global Warming “as her testimony.” Her rationale? “I don’t want you to listen to me, I want you to listen to the scientists.” And “to unite behind science.”

You know, for “real action.”

It was what happened right after she demanded “real action,” though, where the stark reality of the situation became clear: a grown man in a suit, elected to Congress, asked, “Could you expand on why it’s so important to listen to the science?”

And then the non-scientist spoke . . . not very expansively.

Forget that science qua science isn’t to be “listened to,” it is to be engaged in, with conjectures, research and refutations. (There was nothing like that at the hearing.) Forget also that the science is increasingly less clear on the severity of what warming we see. Remember only that an elected official used a girl to imbue a text (the IPCC report) with moral legitimacy, dubbing it “best available ‘united science’” — the better to push an unargued-for massive coercive government intervention into the life of our civilization.

Is no adult in the room ashamed of what they are doing . . . exploiting a cute youngster to subvert rationality?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags global warming, Greta Thunberg, science, socialism, testimony

ideological culture media and media people Popular

The Fifth Century Begins

When socialists and woke scolds talk about slavery, you can almost hear the chains and smell the leather of the slaver’s whip — and not always in a good way.

Project 1619 is the New York Times effort to acknowledge 400 years of Africans in America. Thankfully, the project’s page is more coherent and forthright than Matthew Desmond’s New York Times Magazine farrago of August 14, “In order to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation.”

Indeed, that piece (like others in the series) is such a tangle that there is no hope to unravel it in this limited space. Just note that Desmond does his darnedest to help the enemies of liberty tie slavery into the idea of free markets, private property, and free association.*

Project 1619, on the other hand, accepts the complexity of slavery in America without being idiotically tendentious. It recognizes that the captured Africans brought to Virginia shores in August 1619 were treated as indentured servants. Unfortunately, unlike the Englishmen arriving under indentured servitude, the first Africans in Virginia lacked explicit contracts. So negotiating their way out was . . . problematic. Still, one African, arriving two years later, was soon freed and became a landowner. And it was he who was awarded another African as a slave for life, in civil court in 1655, marking the real start of chattel slavery in America.

Which is to say, slavery in America was not exclusively a matter of race.**

Why is this important? Because slavery is wrong not because racism is wrong (as wrong as that is), but because people have a right to freedom.

Could it be that socialists emphasize racism regarding slavery because they fear that focusing on freedom might scuttle their socialism?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* See my discussion of slavery yesterday.

** This becomes clear once you read Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson, or learn how Thomas Jefferson’s wife was related to Sally Hemings

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Tags freedom, New York Times, slave, slavery, socialism

Common Sense individual achievement media and media people

Hate in Plain Sight

“Classy guy,” won’t be the moniker afforded comedian Bill Maher when his time on Earth comes to an end.

“I guess I’m going to have to reevaluate my low opinion of prostate cancer,” Maher told his HBO audience regarding the death of libertarian billionaire David Koch at 79.

“As for his remains,” continued Maher, “he has asked to be cremated and have his ashes blown into a child’s lungs.”

You get the tenor of his “humor.”

“[David Koch] and his brother have done more than anybody to fund climate-science deniers for decades, so f—k him!” Maher argued. “I’m glad he’s dead, and I hope the end was painful.”

The HBO celeb likely hoped his crass takedown of the already deceased would go viral. “I know these seem like harsh words and harsh jokes,” Maher conceded, “and I’m sure I’ll be condemned on Fox News . . .”

But perhaps not reprimanded more universally, since such political viciousness has become ubiquitous. For instance, when a questioner at the Minnesota State Fair mentioned Koch’s passing, applause erupted.

“I don’t applaud, you know, the death of somebody,” Sen. Bernie Sanders chided the crowd (to his credit). “We needn’t do that.”

Celebrating someone’s demise is sickening. Moreover, in the case of David Koch, and brother Charles, so many of the non-stop political attacks have been erroneous — condemnation for positions they do not hold, for things they have not done. Not to mention ignoring all the wonderful benefits they have provided our society.

Bill Maher is a professional punk, so I’m not shocked. But David Koch was a hero.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

N.B. Lovers of liberty lost another champion last week: Eric Dixon. For years, Eric has been a huge help to Common Sense in a myriad of important ways. He also assisted a number of other liberty-oriented and free-market groups, including U.S. Term Limits, the Cato Institute, Missouri’s Show Me Institute, the Atlas Network, the Libertarian Party, and more. A lot of people will miss Eric, not the least of whom will be me.

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Tags conservative, David Koch, death, donor, libertarian, obituary

media and media people

Suicide?

Jeffrey Epstein, murder, death, pedophile, conspiracy, paranoia,

Some news stories serve more as inkblot tests than as first runs at history. With the Jeffrey Epstein story we find sightings, Rohrschach-like, of both Minotaurs and unicorns, depending on the viewer.

I am not seeing the sad unicorn of suicide in his story. Are you?

Of course, there’s a maze of information to wade through, and we on the outside possess only the grossest of clues about whatever insider life Epstein lived.

And speaking of clues, maybe the key to the story can be found in how it plays in the headlines.

Before:

The question that must be asked: Was Epstein running ‘honey traps’ and blackmailing the power elite?
Alex Acosta Reportedly Claimed Jeffrey Epstein ‘Belonged to Intelligence’
‘IN DANGER’ Jeffrey Epstein’s life ‘in jeopardy’ as powerful pals ‘don’t want their secrets out’, victim’s lawyer claims
Jeffrey Epstein on suicide watch after accused sex trafficker is found injured in New York jail

After:

JEFFREY EPSTEIN DEAD BY HANGING IN JAIL … Taken Off Suicide Watch
Jeffrey Epstein Dead in Suicide at Jail, Spurring Inquiries
Former MCC inmate: There’s ‘no way’ Jeffrey Epstein killed himself
Jeffrey Epstein’s jail guards were working extreme overtime shifts, source says
Jeffrey Epstein was not on suicide watch before death, official says
Epstein suicide sparks fresh round of conspiracy theories
Jeffrey Epstein’s death is a perfect storm for conspiracy theories

Who doesn’t roll their eyes, just a bit, when a news story in a major media news source confidently labels Epstein’s demise “suicide”?

Who wasn’t making jokes about Epstein’s suicide (often with pointed mention of the Clintons) before his first attempt?

Now the joke is the news media’s blithe acceptance of the official narrative.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

N.B. All the stories, headlined above, can be found by searching DuckDuckGo, the safe and non-creepy search engine. No joke.

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media and media people meme national politics & policies Popular

Courage and Wisdom?

gun violence, gun control, law, mass shooting, 2nd Amendment, Donald Trump,

President Donald Trump responded to the weekend’s two shooting atrocities by decrying hatred and making five substantive proposals.

“They include tools to identify early warning signs in mass shooters, reducing the glorification of violence, reforming mental health laws, enacting ‘red flag’ laws to stop dangerous individuals from gaining access to firearms, and enacting the death penalty for mass murderers,” the Epoch Times summarizes.

But how useful are these?

The “early warning signs” of a criminal are often identical to grumpiness and even righteous indignation in others — “tools to identify” could easily serve as excuses for unwarranted meddling and worse.
Who would enforce lessening the “glorification of violence”? The federal government that is always at war?
Is it mental health laws that should be reformed, or the practice of putting whole generations of boys on Ritalin and worse . . . made especially ominous by the percentage of shooters on such drugs?
Denying “dangerous individuals . . . access to firearms” remains problematic under any semblance of due process and the ‘innocent until proven guilty’ principle.
Since “death by cop” is often one of the apparent goals of many would-be shooters, how much of a deterrent could death by sterile procedure actually be?

But if you are looking for even worse reactions, look beyond Trump. The Democrats took the occasion to raise funds.

And complain to the New York Times, which “changed a headline on its front page because it presented Trump in a neutral light,” reports independent journalist Tim Poole. “This was in response to far left activists and Democrats expressing shock and outrage and demanding everyone cancel their subscriptions to NYT over it.”

Ideological bias or old-fashioned market pressure?

If it is in tragedy that we find our greatest tests of courage and wisdom, the weekend’s shootings show a lot of political and media failure.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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