Wednesday, April 27, 2022
Tuesday, April 26, 2022
Video: Fed-Up Commuters Drag Climate Protesters Off Highway
Video shows that drivers who had stopped for the protesters blocking traffic dragged them to the side of the road so that they could be on their way.
“I’ve got to get to work,” one commuter grumbles in a video posted to Twitter.
“There are bigger issues here,” a protester replied amid a scene of drivers dragging protesters by shirts, safety vests or whatever they could grab onto to get them out of the way. Protesters tried returning to the middle of the bridge, prompting one man to...
Why the Left Endorses Big Brother — I Mean, Big Tech
Pushing Back — Against Free Speech
Former President Obama, speaking Thursday for the Obama Foundation at Stanford University Cyber Policy Center, said,
The biggest reason for democracy’s weakening is the profound change that’s taken place in how we communicate and consume information…Our new ‘information ecosystem’ is turbocharging some of humanity’s worst impulses…Lies, conspiracy theories, junk science, quackery…[dramatic pause]…white supremacists, racist tracts, misogynous screeds — people are dying because of misinformation.Which “misinformation” is he talking about? I don’t suppose he means the vast amount of fake news that has been brought to us over the past half-dozen years or so, courtesy of the left. The few real journalists out there have been busy exposing their fake stories all this time and the work has not let up. I hardly even know where to start in re-enumerating all the pieces of misinformation that have come, uncensored, from the left.
No, he means the stories that get in the way of what the left wants to do. By and large, he’s talking about real stories, the ones that leftist-funded “fact”-checkers, or partisan letter writers, wrongly flag and censor as mis- or dis-information.
Defending Big Tech — in the Name of National Security
On Monday, a group of former intelligence and national security officials issued a joint letter warning that pending legislative attempts to restrict or break up the Big Tech monopoly — Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon — would jeopardize national security. Especially with Moscow posing such a threat, they say, this centralized power is crucial to advancing U.S. foreign policy.
When my research team and I first saw this story, the first thought we had was, “Hey, what do you bet the names on this letter are pretty much the same as those names on the letter saying Hunter Biden’s laptop looked like Russian disinformation?” And, guess what? It turned out...
Six years of BLM Killed More Blacks than 86 Years of Lynchings
The "excess" murder victims from 2015 through 2020 who were black -- that is, the additional black victims each year beyond the 2014 baseline -- add up to 11,005. Compare that to the number of lynchings during the heyday of Jim Crow. According to the Tuskegee Institute, the number of blacks lynched from 1882 through 1968 was 3,446.
Here are the numbers of black murder victims from 2014 through 2020:
| Year | No. of Blacks Murdered | "Excess" Victims |
| 2014 | 6,095 | -- |
| 2015 | 7,039 | 944 |
| 2016 | 7,881 | 1,786 |
| 2017 | 7,851 | 1,756 |
| 2018 | 7,407 | 1,312 |
| 2019 | 7,484 | 1,389 |
| 2020 | 9,913 | 3,818 |
The numbers come from the FBI, though the FBI report for 2020 was visible online for only a short time in 2021. Crime analyst Jeff Asher reported the 2020 figures before the FBI took the report down.
One might object that 2014 is an unfairly low baseline against which to compare the ensuing years. 2014 seems a natural starting-point for the analysis, as that was the year of Ferguson and the founding of BLM. But the homicide figures in 2014 represented an historic low, a fact that might make the "excess" death figures for the ensuing six years look artificially high by comparison. With the rise of "stop and frisk" policing, the number of homicides had been trending downward each year, with minor exceptions, from 1992 through 2014.
But even if one were to pick a more typical pre-Ferguson year, the analysis would not be much different. Take 2010, for example, the first full year of Obama's presidency, when the number of black murder victims totaled 6,470. If "excess" black murder victims from 2015 through 2020 were gauged against a baseline of 2010 instead of 2014, the number would be 8,755. That still vastly outstrips the 3,446 blacks killed by lynch mobs from 1882 through 1968.
Another objection might concern the inclusion of 2020 in the analysis. That year saw the biggest annual increase in the number of post-Ferguson murders. The 3,818 "excess" murders of blacks that year alone exceeds Tuskegee's 86-year tally for lynchings of blacks. But 2020 was also the first year of the pandemic. Many commentators argue that the big jump in the homicide numbers that year had more to do with the lockdown and the governmental shutdown of the nation's economy than with policy choices urged by BLM.
But 2020 was also the year of George Floyd. His death in police custody triggered a wave of protests and riots more widespread and violent than those seen over the four years before it. Only after Floyd's death did the push to defund police departments, an idea hitherto confined to the most radical margins of public life, become a mainstay of urban Democrats. The result was not a break with...
Widow: Florida Microsoft exec’s killing wasn’t random
Kirsten Bridegan’s life was turned upside down when her husband was killed in what she, and police, believe was a targeted attack.
Jared Bridegan, 33, was a father of four — two younger girls with Kirsten and a set of twins from a previous marriage — and worked as an executive at Microsoft.
On Feb. 16, Jared dropped off his elder kids at their mother’s Jacksonville Beach home, police said. He was driving home with his 2-year-old daughter in the back seat when detectives say he potentially spotted a tire on the road and pulled over.
Jared Bridegan was shot and killed as he exited his car, police said. His daughter, still in the back seat, witnessed the murder.
It has been more than two months, and there are still no arrests in the case.
In newly released security video from days after Jared’s murder, a suspicious person was spotted outside his home in the bottom of the screen.
“I was putting my daughter to bed, and I got a notification on my watch that said ‘person in the driveway’. So after I finished tucking her in, I went and grabbed my phone and clicked on the notification, and it showed me this clip,” Kirsten said.
Unfortunately, the quality of the video is blurry, so police haven’t been able to identify the person.
Police, however, are looking for a dark blue truck seen near or around the time that Jared was killed.
The killing was “too specific” to be random, she said.
“You know, that was his normal route every time he was coming home from dropping off the kids at their mom’s house. And it’s the only spot on that route that does not have cameras directly pointed there. So it’s too specific to be...
Billionaire Cat Fight: Jeff Bezos Trolled After Knocking Elon Musk’s China Connections
Following news that Twitter agreed to Elon Musk’s offer to buy the company and take it private, Bezos retweeted a post from New York Times reporter Mike Forsythe citing Musk’s multitude of not-so-secret dealings in China.
“Apropos of something: Tesla’s second-biggest market in 2021 was China (after the US). Chinese battery makers are major suppliers for Tesla’s EVs. After 2009, when China banned Twitter, the government there had almost no leverage over the platform. That may have just changed,” tweeted Forsythe.
Bezos said in response, “Interesting question. Did the Chinese government just gain a bit of leverage over the town square?”
While it is certainly no secret that Musk has dangerously set his sights on the Chinese market — Peter Schweizer profiled it in his book Red-Handed while Breitbart News has reported on it multiple times — Jeff Bezos criticizing him for it is probably the most pot-calling-the-kettle-black moment in billionaire history. Not only did his platform, Amazon, censor critical reviews of Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s book, a Foxconn factory in China was using child labor for manufacturing Echo and Kindle devices. As Breitbart News reported:
Over 1,000 students, as young as 16, were drafted from schools, hired by the factory as “interns,” and pressured to work overnight and weekend shifts for meager salaries. Chinese labor laws allow 16-year-olds to work, but not during either night or overtime shifts.Critics of Bezos did not let the billionaire off the hook for his own rank and file hypocrisy.
Student laborers said their work had nothing to do with their studies in school, the ostensible reason they were sent to the factories as “interns.” Nevertheless, their teachers told those who complained, also paid by the factory, that their grades and scholarship applications might suffer if they refused to work.
After enough criticism and hot takes, Bezos answered his own question and defended Musk.
“My own answer to this question is probably not,” tweeted Bezos. “The more likely outcome in this regard is complexity in China for Tesla, rather than censorship at Twitter.”
“But we’ll see. Musk is extremely good at...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)