Category: Media

Seems? Nay it is. I know not ‘seems’.

Op-ed writer seems to misunderstand data on guns

One reason I cannot be accused of living in a pro-gun echo chamber is that I have to ready a lot of anti-gun op-eds in the course of my work here. I know all the arguments they’re going to make and where they’re coming from because I read their words on a daily basis.

But when it comes to guns, many just don’t understand the topic as well as they’d like to think.

They regurgitate talking points and used biased data from gun control groups and pretend that they’re well-versed on the topic.

However, a writer with the Philadelphia Tribune took the discussion of gun control in a bizarre direction.

While new gun control laws such as strengthening background checks for gun buyers and raising the age to purchase a firearm to 21 are needed, it would be misleading to suggest new gun laws alone will reduce gun violence.

That’s because most gun crimes are committed by those who illegally possess guns, according to a study of inmates in federal and state prisons, conducted by Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research.

Since most violent crimes are not committed by legal gun owners and there is little chance of significant new gun laws passing anytime soon in the state Legislature or Congress, local officials must focus on cracking down on illegal gun possession.

More effective policing, vigorous prosecution and stricter sentencing of violent criminals using illegally obtained weapons will be needed to reduce crime.

The last three paragraphs look pretty sensible. The author is right, for example, that most criminals possess their firearms illegally. He’s right that there’s little chance new gun laws will pass anytime soon. While I’m not sure that increased enforcement of current gun laws will produce the results he desires, I can at least accept that’s a potentially viable path.

By his own words, though, lawful gun owners aren’t the problem, so why should we pass more gun control laws in the first place?

Even if we dismiss the fact that this is a constitutionally protected right we’re talking about here, just what reason would we have to restrict who can buy guns by age even further than we already do or increase background checks?

Perhaps the author is concerned about the 647 “mass shootings” reported by Gun Violence Archive. If so, he should be aware that most of those were criminals shooting people in the first place, not 19-year-olds buying AR-15s and shooting up schools. Gun Violence Archive doesn’t differentiate between gang warfare and active shooters killing everyone in a crowded movie theater, for example, so the vast majority of those shootings aren’t what people think of when they hear the term “mass shooting.”

Either way, the author is somehow failing to comprehend the information clearly in front of him.

Honestly, I’m amazed he finished the piece, what with the cognitive dissonance that had to be tearing at him. Or, maybe he just didn’t understand it enough to feel such a thing.

Either way, he discredits his own claim that more gun control laws should be passed and it sure looks like he knows it.

What AP calls ‘turmoil,’ we call ‘about time’

The Associated Press, or AP, is supposed to be unbiased, though we’ve all seen countless examples of them being anything but.

That’s especially true regarding matters pertaining to the Second Amendment.

These days, the right to keep and bear arms may have a firmer foundation on which to rest following the Bruen decision. It’s rather clear that there can be no total gun ban and that any restriction has to conform to a particular framework that won’t be easy for any law.

It seems this has led to what the AP calls “turmoil” in the courts.

A landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision on the Second Amendment is upending gun laws across the country, dividing judges and sowing confusion over what firearm restrictions can remain on the books.

The high court’s ruling that set new standards for evaluating gun laws left open many questions, experts say, resulting in an increasing number of conflicting decisions as lower court judges struggle to figure out how to apply it.

The Supreme Court’s so-called Bruen decision changed the test that lower courts had long used for evaluating challenges to firearm restrictions. Judges should no longer consider whether the law serves public interests like enhancing public safety, the justices said.

Under the Supreme Court’s new test, the government that wants to uphold a gun restriction must look back into history to show it is consistent with the country’s “historical tradition of firearm regulation.”

Courts in recent months have declared unconstitutional federal laws designed to keep guns out of the hands of domestic abusers,felony defendants and people who use marijuana. Judges have shot down a federal ban on possessing guns with serial numbers removed and gun restrictions for young adults in Texas and have blocked the enforcement of Delaware’s ban on the possession of homemade “ghost guns.”

In several instances, judges looking at the same laws have come down on opposite sides on whether they are constitutional in the wake of the conservative Supreme Court majority’s ruling. The legal turmoil caused by the first major gun ruling in a decade will likely force the Supreme Court to step in again soon to provide more guidance for judges.

“There’s confusion and disarray in the lower courts because not only are they not reaching the same conclusions, they’re just applying different methods or applying Bruen’s method differently,” said Jacob Charles, a professor at Pepperdine University’s law school who focuses on firearms law.

Sure, there’s a bit of confusion. The Bruen decision has set a stage most courts have never seen before. They now have to consider whether the Founders would have approved of such a law by looking at whether or not they approved of something similar during their own time.

But is it really a bad thing?

The only downside is that it’s taken us this long to get to this point. While the AP is apparently concerned that the status quo has been upturned, I’m more upset that the status quo was allowed to become the status quo in the first place.

It’s just insane that it came to this.

Yet here we are. We now have an opportunity to right the ship and put the onus on things back where they were. No longer can courts just claim it’s in the government’s interest to restrict our rights – something they’d never say about the First or Fourth Amendments, it should be remembered – but must instead look at the matter objectively and compare it to historical precedent.

The AP may lament this “turmoil,” but I only lament that we didn’t have this upheaval a long time ago.

AP less than thrilled over Missouri gun bill’s defeat

When somewhere like the AP or any news organization starts talking about gun control stories, there’s always some level of poor understanding involved. That’s almost to be expected. After all, even under the most charitable interpretation of what’s going on, the reporters covering these stories and commentators discussing them aren’t exactly experts on firearms.

So, it’s not shocking they’d get some things wrong here and there.

Yet a recent story by the AP about a gun control measure being voted down in Missouri raises more questions than it can possibly answer.

The Republican-led House in Missouri on Wednesday voted against a proposal to ban minors from openly carrying firearms without adult supervision in public.

The proposal failed by a 104-39 vote, with only one Republican state representative voting in support of it.

Democratic state Rep. Donna Baringer told the Associated Press that police in her district were concerned about “14-year-olds walking down the middle of the street in the city of St. Louis carrying AR-15s,” and are demanding change.

“Now they have been emboldened, and they are walking around with them,” Baringer said regarding concealed carry by children in Missouri. “Until they actually brandish them, and brandish them with intent, our police officers’ hands are handcuffed.”

Now, to start off with, it seems pretty straightforward. A bill banning minors from carrying openly without adult supervision is something that even many gun rights advocates might consider supporting. Many won’t, though, and mostly because such a law is way too broad. Many of us went hunting on our own as kids and such a measure may restrict one’s ability to do that.

But then things get wonky with where the AP goes next.

Missouri lawmakers in 2017 repealed concealed carry requirements in most situations.

What does that have to do with anything?

Open carry and concealed carry are very different things, though neither should be restricted. What does a 2017 concealed carry measure have to do with a refusal to pass a blanket prohibition on teens carrying firearms without an adult right there with them?

Nothing.

Then again, this is the AP. There’s absolutely no reason they wouldn’t mention such a thing, likely in hopes of people conflating the two.

However, there are reasons why this bill didn’t go anywhere, and it had nothing to do with some strong desire to see 14-year-olds marching down the streets of St. Louis with AR-15s.

Not that I’d legitimately expect there to be any significant reporting on just why that is.

After all, in that entire piece, there’s exactly one quote from anyone who opposed the bill, despite the story being about the measure’s defeat. Instead, it’s all about how hard it is to pass gun control in Missouri.

And the AP thinks we still believe they’re unbiased? That’s downright hilarious.

Look, if parents are doing their job, the chances of Junior carrying a gun openly in public without their permission is effectively nil. It’s just not going to happen. If they’re not going their job, there’s no law in the world that will stop it from happening. That’s just the hard facts of life.

Too bad the AP didn’t mention that, either.

The nomenklatura is real. It sprang to life with the first law Congress passed that restricted the people and exempted goobermint.

American Nomenklatura.

A few weeks after Elon Musk formally acquired Twitter in October 2022, a senior official at the company who quit in the wake of Musk’s arrival took to the New York Times to pour cold water on Musk’s vision for the social-media platform. Yoel Roth, whose title had been Head of Trust and Safety, sought to assure his fellow progressives. Roth wrote that even if Musk wanted to remove the web of content-moderation rules and procedures Roth had helped create and enforce, the tech billionaire would be unable to achieve his aim. “The moderating influences of advertisers, regulators and, most critically of all, app stores may be welcome for those of us hoping to avoid an escalation in the volume of dangerous speech online,” he wrote.

What Roth meant was this: No Internet platform is an island, and Musk simply didn’t have the power to do what he wanted despite his 100 percent ownership of the social-media platform. It wasn’t merely that Musk would have to contend with Twitter’s progressive workforce, which believes that some political speech is so awful that it should be throttled or banned. He would also come into conflict with European regulators, the Federal Trade Commission, and Congress, all of whom also seek to limit what can be said online. And what about the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, a trade organization of some of the world’s biggest consumer brands that advocates for “online safety”—a euphemism for protecting social-media users from accounts that may offend, harass, or trigger them?

He would also be dogged by advocacy groups such as the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League, which have found a new and lucrative mission monitoring social-media platforms for hate speech. They work hand in hand with elite journalists and think tankers, who have taken to tracking the spread of misinformation and disinformation online. In Washington, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security have personnel whose job it is to alert social-media companies to foreign propaganda and terrorism. In Atlanta, the Centers for Disease Control seeks to quarantine dangerous information that might lead Americans to forgo masks or vaccine boosters. And perhaps most important, there are other Silicon Valley giants—Apple and Google—that provide the digital storefronts or app stores that Twitter needs to update their software and continue to run its service.

Call it the “content-moderation industrial complex.” In just a few short years, this nomenklatura has come to constitute an implicit ruling class on the Internet, one that collectively determines what information and news sources the rest of us should see on major platforms. Talk about “free speech” and “the First Amendment” may actually be beside the point here. The Twitter that Musk bought was part of a larger machine—one that attempts to shape conversations online by amplifying, muzzling, and occasionally banning participants who run afoul of its dogma.

The existence of this nomenklatura has been known for a few years. But thanks to Musk and his decision to make Twitter’s internal communications and policies available to journalists Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and others, more detail is now known on why and how this elite endeavors to protect us from all manner of wrongthink.

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Gun Wars: An Interview with Larry Correia

Larry Correia is a bestselling author of thriller SF/fantasy fiction.  He’s also a gun enthusiast.  Now he’s written a nonfiction work on gun rights and the Second Amendment.  I read an advance copy and found myself flying through the pages – it’s super-interesting and engaging, even to someone like me who’s been a shooter and gun-rights supporter and part of this world for many years.   The book is In Defense of the Second Amendment, and it comes out on Tuesday.

I thought it would be nice to ask him some questions, which are featured below. As usual, the article is free to everyone, but comments are limited to paid subscribers.

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Der apfel fält nicht weit vom baum (The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree)

Klaus Schwab’s Father Ran ‘National Socialist Model Company,’ Exploited Nazi Slave Labor.

Davos frontman Klaus Schwab’s daddy, Eugen Schwab, while the Third Reich was ravaging Europe in the 1930s and 40s, served as managing director of Escher Wyss Ravensburg, an engineering firm that constructed turbines and fighter plane parts for the regime.

While the elder Schwab worked in this capacity, the Nazis awarded Escher Wyss Ravensburg the prestigious title of “National Socialist Model Company” for all of its hard work in the service of the Führer.

To achieve this recognition, Escher-Wyss Ravensburg, under Eugen Schwab’s leadership, utilized Nazi slave labor and prisoners of war in its facilities.

Ravensburg itself, aside from the slave factory, was the site of numerous Nazi crimes against humanity, such as forced sterilization for the purpose of “racial improvement.” But to Eugen Schwab, that was just the cost of doing business with the Third Reich.

You want to make an omelet, you gotta break some eggs, right?

Klaus Schwab’s sanitized Wikipedia page contains none of the gruesome details of his daddy’s wartime activities, other than to say “his parents had moved from Switzerland to Germany during the Third Reich in order for his father to assume the role of director at Escher Wyss.”

Newsweek ran a corporate “fact check” in which they cherry-picked a falsely attributed image of Eugen in a Nazi uniform as a way to seem to disprove his connection to the Third Reich entirely. But deep into the article, Newsweek subtly admits that it’s all true — which almost no one will get to, thanks to short attention spans:

The posts shared online in May, 2022, claim Klaus Schwab’s father, Eugen Schwab, was a close ally of Hitler, and include a photo of the World Economic Forum leader alongside a man in Nazi uniform… the photo shared online is not of Eugen Schwab, but of Nazi general Walter Dybilasz… Klaus Schwab’s father, on the other hand, was the managing director of a subsidiary of Zurich-based engineering firm Escher Wyss. 

The history of Eugen’s relationship with Nazism in general is complex… Eugen Schwab was a member of some National Socialist organizations, but that alone does not prove any relationship to German high command or a belief in Nazi ideology. While the Escher Wyss branch in Ravensburg, Germany, (which Eugen managed) used prisoners of war and forced laborers, it is not clear whether the company was forced to do so by the Nazis or because of a lack of workers.

So, Eugen Schwab was an avowed National Socialist, and yes, okay, his firm did use Nazi slave labor. But, you see, that doesn’t mean he was a Nazi. And maybe Escher Wyss had to use slave labor to make their products for the Nazis because of a worker shortage.

This is a common tactic in corporate media: Take a false claim that circulates on the web (in this case, an image incorrectly identified as Eugen Schwab) and use that single post to discredit the entire factual connection between Schwab and the Nazis.

BOLD-FACED LIE: Gun Control Groups Twist Heritage Foundation Data Out of Recognition in Court Documents

A conglomerate of gun control groups has filed a brief in federal court supporting the District of Columbia in a lawsuit challenging the city’s prohibition on civilian possession of magazines capable of holding more than 10 rounds.

This was not at all surprising.

What was quite perplexing, however, was the gun control groups’ citation of two of my recent monthly articles for The Daily Signal on defensive gun use. The groups claim the two articles “support” the premise that the District’s ban doesn’t negatively affect law-abiding gun owners, because none of the cases I cited “involved the use of anywhere close to 10 rounds of ammunition.”

Worse, the gun control groups spun this as The Heritage Foundation, among others, having “acknowledged that the ability to fire more than 10 rounds of ammunition without reloading is not necessary for defensive purposes.” (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s multimedia news organization.)

These are incredible claims in the most literal sense: They lack any credibility.

At best, the legal brief’s characterization of my monthly articles on defensive gun use is lazy to the point of recklessness and wrongly attributes to my employer, The Heritage Foundation, a policy position that it doesn’t hold. At worst, this constitutes an intentional effort to manipulate a federal court with a blatantly misleading representation of Heritage’s work on defensive gun use.

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Well, it isn’t often referred to as ‘Peoples Public Radio’ (as in how commie China’s calls everything “peoples”) for nothing. And I don’t like my tax money funding either.

PBS openly pushes gun control agenda

American taxpayers help fund PBS. We don’t pay for all of it, but a non-trivial sum of tax dollars go to the network. Any attempt to cut that funding is met with consternation. “How dare you cut funding to [insert innocuous PBS show here]!”

They ignore that this is a network that continually pushes an agenda. Part of that agenda is gun control, and they’re not even really trying to hide it.

On Friday’s Amanpour & Co., fill-in host Sara Sidner devoted a segment to promoting the agenda of a gun control advocate and made no serious effort to challenge her liberal guest’s claims.

In the pre-recorded interview with Dr. Joseph Safran which aired on PBS and CNN International, Sidner promoted such misinformation as claiming that mass shootings are “uniquely American,” and she also overstated the number of mass killings in 2022.

Sidner misleadingly began the segment:

2022 will go down as the second highest year for mass shootings in the United States on record. That means more than 600 mass killings in the past 12 months alone, according to data compiled by the nongovernmental organization, Gun Violence Archive. The shootings come at a disturbing pace, often too fast to grasp — people going about their day suddenly gunned down in schools, supermarkets, night clubs, movie theaters, in the streets, you name it.

She soon added: “Are these tragedies preventable? And why can’t we stop this uniquely American problem?”

But, according to the website she cited, there have been 36 cases of gun-related “mass murder” in 2022, which would also include killings in private residences in addition to public places. Additionally, there are certainly plenty of other countries where homicide numbers are high.

On the subject of mass shootings in public places, Europe has had a worse problem than the U.S., which, unlike the U.S., has even included fully automatic machine gun attacks.

In other words, this isn’t a “uniquely American problem” and it never has been. We just think that because we tend to be far more focused on what’s happening here than elsewhere in the world. I mean, sure, we know that Ukraine and Russia are at war, but do we know who the major opposition members are in Belgium?

Not so much.

So, we focus on American mass shootings because they’re closer to home, then delude ourselves into thinking that these kinds of things just don’t happen anywhere else.

We’ve seen numerous mass shootings outside of American borders. Thailand, for example, or Russia. Those are just two right off the top of my head, and I don’t see all such shootings by any stretch of the imagination.

The idea that this is a “uniquely American problem” needs to be challenged, but PBS didn’t. They advanced it. They present it uncritically as if this is so self-evident that it doesn’t require challenge.

Yet it does. It’s not a factual statement, and the fact that it’s treated as such is a big chunk of why we can’t solve the issue.

If people acknowledged that these shootings were far from unusual in places like Europe, they’d be forced to face the facts that gun control isn’t an answer. They’d have to look elsewhere for a solution, and that could be difficult and potentially messy.

So, they blame guns, pretend it isn’t happening in other places, and get PBS to help push that agenda.

Well, this is why some of us want to cut off taxpayer funding for them. You want to keep them afloat? Then you pay for it. I’m sick of it.

Putting Clothes on the Emperor.

I have been watching the release of the Twitter files. As someone who was shadowbanned, I am watching with interest. I was early to Twitter and my original account got to 10k followers, then never went higher. I got so ticked I finally killed my account. I tried other social media platforms, but they were echo chambers.

Parler was coming on strong to challenge Twitter, and Big Tech used its power to kill it.

I am back on Twitter @pointsnfigures1 and I am paying Elon’s $8 fee for a blue check. I am happy to pay it since you know advertisers will try to leave the platform. It’s a small show of support for what he is doing for the platform. Feel free to follow me if you want.

When you are in a bubble, or you need to perpetuate a bubble, you consciously ignore data that would pop your bubble. For example, people still think Trump colluded with Russia to steal an election despite reams of data showing the contrary. People still think that Hunter Biden’s laptop is a nothing burger and the mainstream news media still hasn’t reported on it. It’s amazing.

Today, Elon tweeted that and the left-wing reacted with predictable outrage.

My guess is this is a hint as to what is coming. It’s already clear that the US government worked closely with Twitter employees to turn Twitter into a mouthpiece for leftist causes and the Democratic Party. The “Twitter Files” are the receipts.

Is Elon doing this stuff to drive engagement to the platform? You bet. I would too if I were Elon.

As an aside, Musk is kind of an amazing guy, isn’t he? He has SpaceX, Tesla($TSLA), The Boring Company, and Twitter. He must be able to recruit some pretty top-notch people to work for him at those companies because it would be impossible to be CEO and “hands-on” at all of them at the same time. It might be fun to work in a corporate culture that is guided by Musk.

My bet is that Twitter will get bigger, and somehow enter the payments industry. Combining cutting-edge information with payments will be fun to watch.

Should people go to jail, especially former Twitter employees? I am not an attorney but law professor Jonathon Turley thinks the former employees of Twitter ought to be lawyering up. My guess is they have about as much chance to go to jail as Sam Bankman Fried. I’d love to see people like John Brennan charged since they intentionally mislead the American public as well. But, that would be a hard case to prove.

What is sort of amazing to me is the willingness of the sheep on the left to continue to blindly follow the narrative despite clear and transparent releases that show exactly what everyone has been up to.

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Twitter Files Expose Dangerous Deep State-Big Tech Revolving Door

It’s not just the Forrest Gump of Russiagate — ex-FBI General Counsel James Baker — who is core to the conspiracy to crush the First Amendment

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This weekend I was pleased to appear in print in the New York Post to discuss the cozy and corrupting ties between the U.S. government — particularly the security state — and Big Tech revealed in the Twitter Files.

I connect the dots in the Post — dots that I believe collectively depict a key piece of the overall War on Wrongthink picture: A Ruling Class conspiracy to crush the First Amendment in pursuit of total ideological and therefore cultural and political power.

Read the whole thing here.

The Twitter Files were also one subject of our latest “NatCon Squad,” which you can check out below or wherever you get your podcasts.

NY Times Says Most Gun Owners are Law-Abiding, AR-15s are in Common Use, and Confiscation is Futile…Then Calls for 1st Amendment Limits on Gun Makers

It is important, of course, to distinguish between the large majority of law-abiding gun owners and the small number of extremists. Only about 30 percent of gun owners have owned an AR-15 or similar rifle, a majority support common sense gun restrictions and a majority reject political violence. …

Democrats, while they may hope for stricter gun laws overall, should also recognize that they do share common ground with many gun owners — armed right-wing extremists and those who fetishize AR-15s do not represent typical American gun owners or their beliefs. That’s especially true given the changing nature of who owns guns in the United States: women and Black Americans are among the fastest-growing demographics.

This summer, for the first time in decades, Congress passed major bipartisan gun safety legislation — a major accomplishment and a sign that common ground is not terra incognita. It should have gone further — and can in the future: preventing anyone under 21 from buying a semiautomatic weapon, for instance, and erasing the 10-year sunset of the background-check provision. States should also be compelled to pass tougher red-flag laws to take guns out of the hands of suicidal or potentially violent people. Mandatory gun-liability insurance is also an idea with merit.

States and the federal government should also pass far tougher regulations on the gun industry, particularly through restrictions on the marketing of guns, which have helped supercharge the cult of the AR-15. New York’s law, which allows parties like victims of gun violence and the state government to sue gun sellers, manufacturers and distributors, is a good model for other states to follow.

Federal regulators should also do more to regulate the arms industry’s marketing practices, which are becoming more deadly and deranged by the year. They have the legal authority to do so but, thus far, not the will to act.

Americans are going to live with a lot of guns for a long time. There are already more than 415 million guns in circulation, including 25 million semiautomatic military-style rifles. Calls for confiscating them — or even calls for another assault weapons ban — are well intentioned and completely unrealistic. With proper care and maintenance, guns made today will still fire decades from now. Each month, Americans add nearly two million more to the national stockpile.

But even if common-sense regulation of guns is far from political reality, Americans do not have to accept the worst of gun culture becoming pervasive in our politics. The only hope the nation has for living in and around so many deadly weapons is a political system capable of resolving our many differences without the need to use them.

— New York Times Editorial Board in America’s Toxic Gun Culture

 

original:

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Reworked to fit the narrative:

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Cue the shocked meme…..

BREAKING: New Twitter Files Dump Exposes Blacklists, Secret Cabal Censoring High-Profile Conservatives.

Independent journalist Bari Weiss took to Twitter on Thursday night to unload a second trove of internal memos and documents exposing how Twitter officials silenced the voices of prominent conservatives on the platform. Radio host Dan Bongino, Stanford professor Jay Bhattacharya, and activist Charlie Kirk were among those Twitter censored or blacklisted, along with the popular “Libs of TikTok” account.

“A new #TwitterFiles investigation reveals that teams of Twitter employees build blacklists, prevent disfavored tweets from trending, and actively limit the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics—all in secret, without informing users,” Weiss, a former New York Times reporter, wrote. “The authors [of the Twitter Files] have broad and expanding access to Twitter’s files. The only condition we agreed to was that the material would first be published on Twitter.”

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BLUF
The larger objective of U.S. involvement in social media has always been monitoring and surveillance of the public conversation, and then ultimately controlling and influencing public opinion.

It’s All Making Sense – Elon Musk Has No Idea What He Purchased with Jack’s Magic Coffee Shop…

… And if he does, the outlook is worse.

According to both the Senate Intelligence Committee (SSCI), via Chairman Mark Warner, and the House Intelligence Committee (HPSCI) via Mike Turner, the Chinese social media platform TikTok represents a “national security risk” to the United States.  South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, soon to be the vice-presidential candidate for the DeSantis-Noem 2024 ticket, has also called TikTok a national security threat and banned it in the state. Now, think about that carefully.

What is it about a social media app that allows short video sharing that would constitute a national security risk?  The answer is not about dog and cat videos, or dancing diatribes or funny, weird or goofy content; nor is the national security risk attached to any data of the app users or content providers.  The national security risk is found in the ability to influence public opinion that is not under the control of the United States government, or more specifically the Dept of Homeland Security (DHS).

The need for control is a reaction to fear.  TikTok, as a social media platform, is not considered a national security threat because the Chinese government can control it.  TikTok is considered a national security threat because the United States government does not control it.

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Matt Taibbi

1. Thread: THE TWITTER FILES

2. What you’re about to read is the first installment in a series, based upon thousands of internal documents obtained by sources at Twitter. 
3. The “Twitter Files” tell an incredible story from inside one of the world’s largest and most influential social media platforms. It is a Frankensteinian tale of a human-built mechanism grown out the control of its designer. 
4. Twitter in its conception was a brilliant tool for enabling instant mass communication, making a true real-time global conversation possible for the first time. 
5. In an early conception, Twitter more than lived up to its mission statement, giving people “the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.” 
6. As time progressed, however, the company was slowly forced to add those barriers. Some of the first tools for controlling speech were designed to combat the likes of spam and financial fraudsters.
7. Slowly, over time, Twitter staff and executives began to find more and more uses for these tools. Outsiders began petitioning the company to manipulate speech as well: first a little, then more often, then constantly. 
8. By 2020, requests from connected actors to delete tweets were routine. One executive would write to another: “More to review from the Biden team.” The reply would come back: “Handled.”Image

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I’ll paraphrase Mussolini:
“All within the narrative, nothing outside the narrative, nothing against the narrative.”

Controversial Take: It’s Bad To Put Words In The Mouths Of Murder Victims
On Ben Collins and the scourge of opportunistic post-tragedy commentary

On Tuesday’s Morning Joe, Ben Collins, who “covers disinformation, extremism and the internet for NBC News,” gave what I found to be a very strange soliloquy about Club Q, an LGBT nightclub in Colorado Springs where five people were killed and about 18 injured by a man named Anderson Lee Aldrich on Saturday night.

Collins subsequently tweeted a link to it (archived here):

Collins starts by asking, “Am I doing something wrong here?” Then he runs down his and his colleagues’ tireless coverage of anti-LGBT rhetoric on the right, reading a bunch of headlines that are splashed on-screen:

He then says, “And I’m just wondering — what could I have done different? Seriously. As reporters, what can we do different?”

To be blunt, I found this obnoxious and solipsistic. Not everything is about journalists. The probability that any mass murder has anything to do with anything Ben Collins or his colleagues did (or didn’t do) is approximately nil. This is just a very strange, self-absorbed way to understand the world.

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MEDIA LOSES ITS MIND OVER “RAMBO STYLE KNIFE” USED IN IDAHO QUAD-MURDER

That the media is prone to hyperventillation over anything weapon-related should hardly come as a shock. Our friends in the firearms community face it all the time when the media label what to many is just a light range trip worth of guns and ammunition an “arsenal”. Well they are at it again, and this time it is the knife community’s turn in the barrel, as the media frenzy over the quadruple homicide in Moscow, ID rages.

If you haven’t tuned into the news this week, 4 University of Idaho students were brutally stabbed to death over the weekend, and the Police seem to be at a loss. Their decision to focus on the potential murder weapon, looks to this reporter like an attempt to give the media anything in the face of very few public leads. The murder weapon remains undiscovered.

I am not a forensic expert by any means, though I took a few forensic anthropology classes in graduate school and I understand how the coroner reached their conclusion as to the nature of said weapon. The wound channels from the stabbings would have particular characteristics in terms of size and shape, and from this they have deduced that they match the characteristics of one of the most, if not the most mass-produced and iconic American fixed blade knives, the USMC Mark 2., commonly known as the KA-BAR.

KA-BAR USMC MK. 2 (from KABAR.com)

From Idaho Statesman:

Moscow police appear to be searching for a “Rambo”-style knife involved in the killing of four University of Idaho students, a store manager said Wednesday. Scott Jutte, general manager of Moscow Building Supply, told the Idaho Statesman that police have visited the store more than once to ask whether the retailer sold anyone Ka-Bar brand knives, which are also known as K bar knives. Idaho State Police spokesperson Aaron Snell told the Statesman on Thursday that detectives visited several local hardware stores that may carry “fixed-blade type knives,” but that they weren’t solely asking about Ka-Bar knives.

Ka-Bar, of Olean, New York, manufactures military-grade blades that were originally designed for use by American troops in World War II.

Jutte said a police officer stopped by the home improvement store and lumber yard off North Main Street in Moscow to speak with him on Monday. “They were specifically asking whether or not we carry Ka-Bar-style knives, which we do not,” Jutte said in an interview. “If we did, we could’ve reviewed surveillance footage. But it wasn’t something I could help them with.” Jutte said he is familiar with the military-style weapon, even though his store doesn’t sell it.

He says he is “familiar with the “military style weapon””…

I am trying to figure out what is specifically “military” about the KA-BAR, other than its history of course. The name of the Mk. 2 in Government-bureaucratese is “Knife, Fighting Utility”. Fighting is a verb, something you could do with it, not a description. I can fight you with a stapler. An entrenching tool is a devastatingly effective melee weapon. We don’t call a “Fighting Shovel”, no matter how efficiently it can be used as such.

Utility is a good descriptive word, as they are used for everything from prying open crates to opening ration cans. The “KA-BAR” (originally made by Camillus, PAL, and others under WWII contract) was much better at these tasks than the WWI era M1918 Trench Knife, with its more fragile, less utilitarian stiletto blade and single grip knuckle-duster hand guard.

The USMC Mk.2, now manufactured by KA-BAR Knives Inc. of Olean, New York, remains one of the most popular fixed blade outdoor knives in existence. A good portion of this is due to its military heritage. Many a serviceman or has carried the knife on deployment, even into combat just like their grandfathers before them. They are an heirloom quality tool, and it is entirely possible that someone actually carried their Grandfather’s own knife in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Of course plenty of civilians, this writer included, own one as well. It is an extremely robust and useful knife to have in the woods. It can shave, baton, drill, and all of the other tasks one might need in the field. I imagine that there is at least one in 20% or more of households in Idaho given the lifestyle and demographics. And that doesn’t count other fixed blade hunting knives as well of which Idaho most certainly has an abundance.

I feel for KA-BAR, which is being dragged by the media online. They slant their coverage to imply that anyone who owns this most common of fixed blades is some sort of survivalist nutball. It is expected, but disheartening.

Where they have made a heck of a jump is to apply the “Rambo” label to the knife. Rambo carried two different Jim Lile custom knives in the First Blood Movies:

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The Government Can’t Fix Social Media Moderation & Should Not Try

Washington, DC – -(AmmoLand.com)- Despite their increasingly bitter differences, Democrats and Republicans generally agree that content moderation by social media companies is haphazard at best. But while Democrats tend to think the main problem is too much speech of the wrong sort, Republicans complain that platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are biased against them.

The government cannot resolve this dispute and should not try. Siding with the critics who complain about online “misinformation” poses an obvious threat to free inquiry and open debate. And while attempting to mandate evenhandedness might seem more consistent with those values, it undermines the freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment in a more subtle but equally troubling way.

Under a Texas law that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit declined to block last week, the leading social media platforms are forbidden to discriminate against users or messages based on “viewpoint.” The “censorship” that Texas has banned includes not just outright removal of content and cancellation of accounts but also any steps that make posts less visible, accessible, or lucrative.

That means platforms are obliged to treat all posts equally, no matter how objectionable their content. With narrow exceptions for speech that is not constitutionally protected, Facebook et al. are not allowed to favor tolerance over bigotry, peace over violence, or verifiably true historical or scientific claims over demonstrably false ones.

While such neutrality is constitutionally mandatory for the government, imposing it on private actors violates the First Amendment right to exercise editorial discretion.
The companies that challenged the law cited a line of Supreme Court decisions recognizing that right in a wide range of contexts, including a newspaper’s selection of articles, a utility’s control over the content of its newsletter, and a private organization’s vetting of participants in a St. Patrick’s Day Parade.

Even assuming those cases established a general right to exercise editorial discretion, the 5th Circuit said that is not an accurate description of what social media platforms are doing when they decide that certain posts are beyond the pale. Because they rely heavily on algorithms, do not review content before publication, and take action against only a tiny percentage of messages, Judge Andrew Oldham declared in the majority opinion Facebook et al. “are nothing like” a newspaper.

Writing in dissent, Judge Leslie Southwick objected to that characterization. While “none of the precedents fit seamlessly,” Southwick said, a social media platform’s right to curate content is analogous to “the right of newspapers to control what they do and do not print.”

That right has never been contingent on whether editors do their jobs thoughtfully, consistently or fairly. As the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit observed when it blocked enforcement of Florida’s social media law in May;

“private actors have a First Amendment right to be ‘unfair’ — which is to say, a right to have and express their own points of view.”

Oldham rejected the argument that social media companies are expressing a point of view when they make moderation decisions based on “amorphous goals” like maintaining “a welcoming community” (YouTube), fostering “authenticity, safety, privacy, and dignity” (Facebook), or ensuring that “all people can participate in the public conversation freely and safely” (Twitter). Yet the conservatives who want the government to restrict moderation decisions take it for granted that social media companies have an ideological agenda — one that is hostile to people on the right.

If social media platforms pursued that agenda more explicitly and systematically, Oldham’s argument implies, the government might be obliged to respect their decisions. The more proactive and heavy-handed they were, the stronger their First Amendment claim would be.

Should the Supreme Court resolve the split between the 5th and 11th circuits by endorsing Oldham’s reasoning, platforms that want to escape Texas-style regulation might decide that broader and tighter content restrictions are the way to go. By trying to mandate a diversity of opinions, the government could achieve the opposite result.

 

Now even the Washington Post, eternal suck up to anything demoncrap, is fact checking SloJoe……….

Biden Earns ‘Bottomless Pinocchio’ from Washington Post Over Multiple Misleading and Debunked Claims

President Joe Biden earned a “bottomless Pinocchio” from the Washington Post on the eve of the midterm elections in a roundup highlighting multiple recent misleading and debunked claims.

The “bottomless Pinocchio” category for fact-checks from the Post was actually created under former President Donald Trump in an effort to push back on “false or misleading statements repeated so often that they became a form of propaganda,” Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler wrote.

According to the Post:

A statement would get added to the list if it had earned a Three or Four Pinocchios rating and been repeated at least 20 times. By the end of the Trump presidency, 56 claims made by Trump had qualified.

Now Biden has earned his own Bottomless Pinocchio.

A debunked claim Biden has repeated is that he’s traveled 17,000 miles with Xi Jinping. Despite Biden repeatedly pushing the claim, it has never been proven.

“There is no evidence Biden traveled that much with Xi, the president of China — and even if we added up the miles Biden flew to see Xi, it still did not total 17,000 miles,” Kessler noted.

The fact check roundup included plenty of other misleading statements, including claiming gas prices were over $5 dollars a gallon when he took office. Only days after making this comment in New York, however, Biden made a similar statement about bringing gas prices down, but said prices were $5 dollars a gallon in June, rather than when he took office.

Biden also recently celebrated the fact that seniors are getting an increase to their Social Security checks.

“On my watch, for the first time in 10 years, seniors are getting an increase in their Social Security checks,” he said in Florida.

The White House sent out a celebratory tweet about these increases too, seemingly crediting Biden for the act. The tweet was quickly deleted after Twitter provided “context” to the statement, explaining the bump is part of a program launched in the ’70s, and it is only in response to high inflation.