“At best, objectivity curbs how impactful research can be, and, at worst, it irrevocably harms a community.”
10/11/21
“If I faced him, I’d beat him like I would everyone else.” — Former President Donald Trump, commenting on the possibility that if he ran for another term for president in 2024 that he would beat anyone in his path, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who he helped make it into the governor’s mansion in 2018. DeSantis has been viewed as a potential candidate for the presidency, though he has been downplaying the possibility.
“This is a really tough time in our country . . . we still have 20% of the country who’ve decided not to get vaccinated.” — White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, when asked “What do you make of these really terrible [Biden] polls?”
“Why Our Fixation on the Murder Rate Is Killing Us.” — Headline from a stunningly idiotic, convoluted Slate article arguing that people are focusing too much on last year’s 30% rise in homicides, which is leading to ‘investments in conventional policing strategies,’ and that the ‘near-exclusive emphasis on homicides downplays the risks a police-centered response to homicides poses to overdoses and other deaths—deaths that pose a far greater cumulative risk to human life than homicide.’ The writer, who is so impressively stupid that citing them by name would be uncouth of me, never acknowledges the obvious correlation between homicides and crime. Because when we’re talking about gun control, the murder rate is important, but if we’re talking about police funding, it’s just a distraction.
“President Biden’s poll numbers are, to use the technical term, not good. And for Democrats there are even more troubling numbers underneath the surface. The numbers here, they tell a clear story.” — CNN host John Berman. President Biden has lost support across the political spectrum, but his 19-point loss with independent voters has been the largest drop. Independent voters were important for Biden because they essentially were the reason he won the 2020 election (Trump won the independent vote against Hillary Clinton in 2016, which catapulted him to victory).
“We’ll look carefully at the context in which claims are made, differentiating between content that states a false claim as fact, versus content that reports on or discusses that claim.” — Google, in an announcement introducing its new monetization policy prohibiting any content contradicting “scientific consensus” or deemed as “misinformation.” Hmm. What could possibly go wrong, particularly in an odd post-modern-pre-modern moment in which nothing is true and nonbelievers are burned at the stake, and denial just means not accepting left-wing premises while “misinformation” means not expressing left-wing premises? It should be noted that under Google’s new “consensus” rubric, they would have banned non-Newtonian physics. This is not how science works; it’s a process, and dissent and skepticism are critical to that process.
“At best, objectivity curbs how impactful research can be, and, at worst, it irrevocably harms a community.” — The Urban Institute, which now claims that “objectivity,” “rigor,” and “exclusive funding” are “harmful values and research practices . . . rooted in racism, ableism, and classism.” This is what happens when equality and merit are replaced with the dogma of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” initiatives.
“We’re going to create an ecological paradise here around the Colorado River.” — Elon Musk. In a stunning announcement, the Tesla CEO revealed the company will be moving its corporate headquarters from California to Austin, Texas. Musk broke the news during the company’s annual shareholders meeting, which was held for the first time at the $1.1 billion manufacturing facility Tesla is building in Travis County, on a 2,100-acre property.
“Heads up! Conversations like this can be intense.” — The trigger warning that Twitter has apparently started attaching to pretty much every tweet on the platform.
“Anybody Fighting Joe Biden Is Helping Trump’s Next Coup.” — Headline of a New York Magazine article. Because in order to “save democracy,” you must take a solemn vow never to criticize the President or in any way question what he wants.
“I think 22% of the country is on Twitter. Probably Democrats — not country — Democrats on Twitter. 90% urban, under [the age of] thirty-five. Right? They don’t win elections. They drag you down and their votes don’t count. The votes are all in Boston and New York and Philadelphia and Washington and Los Angeles and San Francisco and Seattle. All right. They’re actually a drag on the party and are too stupid to see it.” — James Carville, Democratic political consultant and election expert, during an interview on The Bulwark podcast.
“An earlier version of this article incorrectly described actions taken by regulators in Sweden and Denmark. They have halted use of the Moderna vaccine in children; they have not begun offering single doses. The article also misstated the number of Covid hospitalizations in U.S. children. It is more than 63,000 from August 2020 to October 2021, not 900,000 since the beginning of the pandemic. In addition, the article misstated the timing of an F.D.A. meeting on authorization of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for children. It is later this month, not next week.” — A correction added to the bottom of an October 7th New York Times article. It was written by Apoorva Mandavilli, who is “a reporter focusing on science and global health. She is the 2019 winner of the Victor Cohn Prize for Excellence in Medical Science Reporting.” She also happens to be the reporter who said the lab leak theory has ‘racist roots.’1
$75,000: Price at which Hunter Biden has sold each of his first five pieces of art.
2.5%: The initial allotment of funds that states have spent so far from the American Rescue Plan ($350 billion) championed by Democrats and President Biden. More than half of states and nearly two-thirds of the roughly 90 largest cities reported no initial spending—even though earlier this year hundreds of mayors across the U.S. pleaded for “immediate action” on billions of dollars targeted to shore up their finances and revive their communities. Some government officials — still trying to figure out how to spend previous rounds of federal pandemic aid — simply didn’t see an urgent need for the additional cash.
36%: Percentage of Americans who trust the media to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly—the second lowest number on record, according to Gallup, and down four points since last year. 68% of Democrats, 31% of Independents, and 11% of Republicans trust the media.
$17.74: Cost to produce a five-day course of molnupiravir, the new pill-form medicine being hailed as a “huge advance” in the treatment of COVID-19.
$712: The price that Merck, the American multinational pharmaceutical company that created molnupiravir, is charging the U.S. government for each five-day course of treatment.
39%: Percentage of U.S. adults who think social media is bad for society.
$100.3 Billion: The valuation of Elon Musk’s SpaceX following a secondary share sale by insiders that was announced this week—up $26 billion since February. It’s now the second-most valuable private company in the world, according to CB Insights, behind only China’s supermassive internet juggernaut Bytedance.
9,090: Pieces in the largest Lego model ever released, which was officially revealed as a four-and-a-half foot long replica of the famed Titanic ship, which can be pre-ordered for $629.99.
690,000: Migrants that the Biden administration has deported using Title 42.
444,000: Migrants deported during the entire Trump administration under the same statue.
1,560,000,000: Estimated number of face masks that entered the ocean last year.
59.5%: Percentage of Americans who believe the direction of the United States is “off on the wrong track.”
Less than .0006 percent of the child population in this country has died of COVID-19 over the last two years. Less than 1 percent of all child deaths during that period are attributed to COVID-19. The New York Times is little more than partisan propaganda. Millions of people likely read the original article with the egregious “errors,” sharing it and polluting social media with it; a fraction of those people will ever come across the corrections.