We've gotten to the point where we now have a category called "People of Color minus Asian." This is a true story.
I suspect (but don't know) that if Asian students stop studying so much and start getting worse grades, they might be allowed back into the category "People of Color."
I see two possible paths forward from this madness. A) We decide that there is one human race and that we are all shades of brown, or B) We keep dividing people up into smaller and smaller groups until we notice that we have 330 million Americans, each one of them being its own individual "race."
Three alleged specialists in communications who wrote this article at Scientific American could not be bothered to look up the easily available text of a Wisconsin bill that they are falsely criticizing. This is deeply troubling. This is magazine that purports to celebrate science, yet this article, which has nothing to do with science, blatantly misrepresents the facts (the text of a Wisconsin) bill in order to score political points. Here's the false information:
A bill passed by the Wisconsin Assembly, for instance, bans any books, educational materials, or classroom discussions that include terms like “racial prejudice,” “patriarchy,” “structural inequality,” “intersectionality” or, ironically, “critical self-reflection.”
I'm not taking a position on the above Wisconsin bill. Rather, I'm criticizing well-educated people in high places who deceive others from their perches in order to feel better about themselves.
This is not the first time Scientific American has run off the rails on cultural issues. See here, here and here.
RIP Scientific American. I used to read and admire you because you tried to get your facts right and you wrote about science.
What if, when you get to heaven, they tell you that everything costs money and that your earthly bank account has been converted into “heaven-dollars” as of the moment you died? What if you find out, however, that there is a cloud rental fee and a daily fee for the manna food bar and everything else heavenly costs money too?
What if you complain and those in charge tell you to go get a job? “There’s a lot of work that needs to be done up here. Go make yourself useful.”
You start belly-aching again, telling them how hard you worked while on Earth, blah blah blah.
They aren’t impressed. They tell you: “This is heaven, not paradise.”
At Breaking Points, hosted by Saagar and Krystal, Glenn Greenwald explains the early warning signs that the Steele Dossier was fraudulent: 1) It was regurgitated cold war/McCarthyism BS, and 2) the narrative was supported only by anonymous sources touted by the spy state. Now we know the Steele Dossier was absolute bullshit concocted by the campaign of Hillary Clinton and that it went far and wide thanks to a credulous "news media," leading to the Mueller investigation.
The same news media outlets that enthusiastically pushed the Steele Dossier and all the subsequent Trump-Russian connection falsehoods have almost entirely been silent given the blockbuster news that they were pushing major falsehood for several years and that these falsehoods likely affected the way many people voted in national elections. As Greenwald notes, the legacy news media does not care that it got things so wrong, which is evidence that they were intentionally misleading their audience. This conversation begins at about the 1:20:00 mark:
But we have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been. In some cases, information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged. Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged -- or failed to emerge.
The problematic articles varied in authorship and subject matter, but many shared a common feature. They depended at least in part on information from a circle of Iraqi informants, defectors and exiles bent on ''regime change'' in Iraq, people whose credibility has come under increasing public debate in recent weeks. (The most prominent of the anti-Saddam campaigners, Ahmad Chalabi, has been named as an occasional source in Times articles since at least 1991, and has introduced reporters to other exiles. He became a favorite of hard-liners within the Bush administration and a paid broker of information from Iraqi exiles, until his payments were cut off last week.) Complicating matters for journalists, the accounts of these exiles were often eagerly confirmed by United States officials convinced of the need to intervene in Iraq. Administration officials now acknowledge that they sometimes fell for misinformation from these exile sources. So did many news organizations -- in particular, this one.
. . . We consider the story of Iraq's weapons, and of the pattern of misinformation, to be unfinished business. And we fully intend to continue aggressive reporting aimed at setting the record straight.
The new version of the NYT has not learned any of the lessons from the WMD disaster. The now well-recognized collapse of the Steele Dossier is damning information regarding the Clinton campaign, the DNC and the news media. The left leaning legacy media at out of the hands of the U.S. spy state, failing to track down real information. They wanted to believe the Trump-Russia connection and that was good enough for printing stories they failed to vet.
I resisted using the term "fake news" when I first heard the phrase, but there is no getting around the fact that the left-leaning legacy media engaged in journalism malpractice--fake news--regarding most, if not all--Trump Russia stories that it produced.
Do I need to add that I despise Donald Trump? Even since he appeared on the political stage I have found him arrogant, narcissistic, corrupt and incompetent. I voted for two severely compromised candidates, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden because I concluded that they were far less dangerous than Trump.
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