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The HuffPo is biting the dust

While I have often noted that print newspapers are 18th century technology, the contraction of media outlets isn’t restricted to print.

BuzzFeed Announces Deep Cuts To HuffPost Staff After Acquisition

BuzzFeed acquired HuffPost from Verizon Media in February.

By Sara Boboltz | March 9, 2021 | 12:31 PM EST

BuzzFeed announced layoffs for the HuffPost newsroom on Tuesday, three weeks after acquiring HuffPost from Verizon Media in February.

Hillary Frey, the site’s executive editor, and Louise Roug, the executive editor for international, will be departing in the restructuring effort.

HuffPost Canada will also shutter operations later this month.

A deal between BuzzFeed, HuffPost and Verizon Media was first made public in November. Verizon Media stated at the time that BuzzFeed and HuffPost would operate as “separate, distinct news organizations” with their own websites and editorial staff while BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti led the combined company.

Translation: Verizon Media lied to them!

The HuffPost Union, organized as part of the Writers Guild of America, East, slammed the restructuring effort in a statement:

Today, we learned that 33 of our colleagues — nearly 30% of our unit — will be laid off. We are devastated and infuriated, particularly after an exhausting year of covering a pandemic and working from home. This is also happening less than a month after HuffPost was acquired by BuzzFeed. We never got a fair shot to prove our worth. These layoffs reiterate the importance of forming a union and advocating for our colleagues. We are glad that we are protected by a collective bargaining agreement and that our colleagues will receive severance. Our union will continue fighting to make HuffPost a more just and equitable workplace, including pushing for clear and accountable commitments to hiring and promoting more people of color and for transparency around pay equity.

It really is just so exhausting working from home! 🙂 It means that you have to make your own coffee in the morning rather than having a $7.25 per hour clerk at 7/Eleven doing it for you.

Now let me be clear here: I don’t like seeing anyone losing his job, but let’s be honest here: the HuffPost was as #woke and biased a ‘publication’ as any around. There was no special reporting there, and nothing you can see on their website front page is not available elsewhere — frequently with better writing — for free. And given the contempt the media have for working class men and women in ‘flyover country,’ it’s difficult not to feel some schadenfreude.

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Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw is really just the fall guy (fall gal?). The real problem is Mayor Jim Kenney

March 8th is the 67th day of the year. As of March 8th last year (which was actually the 68th day, 2020 being a leap year), the City of Brotherly Love had seen 67 homicides, or 0.985 killings per day. It was also the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, just before the lockdowns — you remember, 15 days to flatten the curve? — and the school closures and millions of people being thrown out of work.

But on the 67th day of 2021, 89 souls were sent early to their eternal rewards in Philadelphia’s mean streets, 1.328 per day. Doing a little math here, it should take only eight more days, until March 16th, for Philly to reach 100 homicides.

On the 8th, The Philadelphia Inquirer published an OpEd defense of Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw:

Danielle Outlaw put in an untenable position by Kenney administration

In order to ensure the overall safety of Philadelphia’s citizens and their neighborhoods, emergency management in Philadelphia County should be immediately reassessed.

by Joseph Certaine | March 8, 2021

Amid calls last month for Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw to tender her resignation for mishandling the response to summer protests following the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police, it’s important to consider that she is not the only person at fault here.

Commissioner Outlaw, who had only been on the job for a few months when the protests began, was put in an untenable position by this administration. From my view, as a former managing director, the Kenney administration allowed the new police commissioner to handle large-scale protests without some of the best practices and institutional knowledge that previously determined how the city handled crisis situations.

At that paragraph break, the Inquirer included the boldfaced blurb:

» READ MORE: Danielle Outlaw’s failure should push Kenney to ask for her resignation — but she didn’t fail alone | Editorial

Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw.

Well, of course the editors did that! But, as we noted previously, the editors want to punish the puppet, not the puppet master. The editors love them some Democrats, and endorsed Mayor Jim Kenney for re-election in the 2019 primaries, and if they endorsed a different candidate, Anthony Williams, for the Democratic nomination in 2015, it was still a close choice for them between Messrs Williams and Kenney.

The apparently odd notion that many of Philadelphia’s problems stem from Philadelphia’s poor leadership does not seem to have occurred to them. The apparently even odder notion that many of Philadelphia’s problems stem from Philadelphia’s leaderships leftist policies, well, they couldn’t say that, or they’d get another revolt among the #woke in their newsroom.[1]Apparently the idea of firing the forty employees who called out sick in protest, even though the inquirer could replace them all, within a day, from smaller newspapers across the country, is another … Continue reading

Mr Certaine continued, further down:

Why is it that the Kenney administration was not prepared for the uprising that occurred after George Floyd’s murder? Why aren’t questions being asked about preparedness in general? Why is the Fire Commissioner appointed as County Emergency Management Coordinator?

Why? I can answer that question, but the #woke won’t like it. The Kenney administration was not prepared because Mayor Kenney and his minions are far more concerned about leftist political positions than they are with protecting the city and its people.

The last Republican mayor of Philadelphia left office left office on January 7, 1952. Harry Truman was President at the time, and the last two Mayors, Mr Kenney and Michael Nutter, hadn’t been born yet! The City Council is controlled by Democrats, and the labor unions, and that has been the situation for decades. If the policies of the Democrats, if the policies of the liberals actually worked, Philadelphia ought to be an urban paradise, because the wicked ol’ reich-wing conservatives haven’t had any power to obstruct them.

Philadelphia is a disaster zone, a man-made disaster zone, and that’s not going to change anytime soon, because the voters of the city keep electing people who want to make the disaster even worse. Commissioner Outlaw is a convenient fall guy (fall gal?), but she’s still just a puppet.

References

References
↑1 Apparently the idea of firing the forty employees who called out sick in protest, even though the inquirer could replace them all, within a day, from smaller newspapers across the country, is another apparently odd notion which never occurred to the editors. The idea of telling the Special Snowflakes™ to buck up and do their jobs, or they’d find someone who would, that, too, never seemed to happen.
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NY Times Blames Heat And Humidity On You And Your Burger Fixation

See, before fossil fueled vehicles there was no such thing as heat and humidity at the same time. Surely, there was no issue with this during the Global Climate Optimum, the Roman Warm Period, etc, right?

Global Warming’s Deadly Combination: Heat and Humidity

Here’s one more reason the world should aim to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, a goal of the international Paris Agreement: It will help keep the tropics from becoming a deadly hothouse.

A study published Monday suggests that sharply cutting emissions of greenhouse gases to stay below that limit, which is equivalent to about 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit of warming since 1900, will help the tropics avoid episodes of high heat and high humidity — known as extreme wet-bulb temperature, or TW — that go beyond the limits of human survival.

“An important problem of climate research is what a global warming target means for local extreme weather events,” said Yi Zhang, a graduate student in geosciences at Princeton University and the study’s lead author. “This work addresses such a problem for extreme TW.”

The study is in line with other recent research showing that high heat and humidity are potentially one of the deadliest consequences of global warming.

“We know that climate change is making extreme heat and humidity more common,” said Robert Kopp, a climate scientist at Rutgers University who was not involved in the study. “And both of those things reduce our ability to live in a given climate.”

I thought it was making extreme cold and snow more common? Have these people actually been to the tropics? They’re already rather hot and humid. And humanity did just fine during previous warm periods which were actually much warmer than this one, and the didn’t have the luxury of air conditioning (which the climate cult wants to do away with for Other People, or at least force Other People to keep their AC at a much warmer level), or refrigerators (which the climate cult want to make way more expensive by changing the refrigerants), nor modern housing.

Work or exercise generates heat, and the body has to dissipate it. If the air temperature is higher than body temperature, the main source of cooling is through evaporation of sweat. But if the humidity reaches a point where sweat cannot evaporate, “essentially the body will gain heat,” said Dr. Kenny, who was not involved in the new study.

That stresses the cardiovascular system. “The strain that the heart is facing becomes progressively greater, especially if there’s successive days of heat exposure,” he said.

Kinda like always. Scientific studies mostly do not “suggest”, the offer proof. But, climate studies from the cult are about prognostication. Nothing more, nothing less, all about governmental power increases.

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Biden Refers To Sec Defense as “the guy that runs that outfit over there”

Is it any wonder that Joe’s handlers really won’t allow him to do a press conference? That he won’t do a state of the union? That every appearance elsewhere is tightly scripted and often features his wife Jill right next to him, which is a strange look for the POTUS. One has to wonder just how bad Joe’s supposed speech on the 1 year anniversary since lockdowns began will go on Thursday night, and if it will actually be 100% pre-recorded. Because things like this

Biden’s Incoherence Just Hit Critical Mass, This Is Scary Awful

As we reported two days ago, Joe Biden completely made no sense when he was trying to explain the Wuhan coronavirus relief bill.

It was really bad and it explains why they’re afraid to have him deliver an address to Congress or do any kind of a real solo press conference, because at this point they have to be afraid this is all going to fall apart if he does anything live and this all becomes too obvious to the American people.

But there’s only so long that they can hold this off. And it’s getting worse, as video today revealed. Biden was holding an event to announce the nomination of two female generals to be promoted to combatant commanders. You could even see he was reading a teleprompter. But it didn’t help, he lost it in the middle.

Let’s note that Sec Defense Lloyd Austin and China Joe took their masks off in violation of Joe’s executive order on wearing masks on federal property. You don’t get to take it off just because you’re speaking.

This is just scary awful. He literally forgets the name of his Secretary of Defense, forgets the position, as well as the name of the Pentagon, calling him “the guy that runs that outfit over there.”

“I want to thank the — former general. I keep calling him General — the guy who runs that outfit over there. I want to make sure we thank the Secretary.” Yikes.

Meanwhile you see Kamala Harris standing behind him in the wings – literally – looking like a minder, wondering whether she’s going to have to help him away. Why is she or his wife always having to be there to spell him if he needs it? Biden takes no questions and forgets his mask as well.

Trump made plenty of verbal gaffes, as did Barack Obama, George Bush, Bill Clinton, etc. These aren’t verbal gaffes, like Joe saying all 7/11s are run by Indians. These are not foot in mouth disease, which Joe is renowned for. This is something much, much worse, a man in serious mental decline.

At this point, it’s no longer a question. Whatever is going on with him medically, whatever you call it, it’s a complete train wreck. He looks in terrible condition and he looks worse every day. It’s horrible what Democrats have done here. They’ve put this guy in, all to hold onto power without giving a darn about how much that might endanger us all or even how it might hurt him. He’s having trouble just reading the teleprompter, let alone making any impromptu comments or responding independently or intelligently to questions. Shame on all the people involved in this and no, don’t even try to claim this is just a “stutter.” This is just despicable. We are all in big trouble now because of what Democrats did here. God help us all.

Remember how Democrats used to claim that Dick Cheney was the puppetmaster during the Bush 43 terms, that he was the one running things? Who’s actually running the White House? Those bets of Kamala replacing Joe at some point are shortening the time frame. I’d be surprised if the guy can last through the summer.

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NY Times Wonders If The Burger Is Nearing Extinction

See, I blame you quite often for your choice to cause the Earth to eat a tasty burger instead of having lettuce (raised organically without GMO’s, of course), beans, and water, or a plant based burger, which is pretty much the same thing, right? Along comes Frank Bruni, who wastes his opinion column with this

Is the Burger Nearing Extinction?
Meat has more competition — and less justification — than ever before.

I liked my patties thin and then I liked them thick. There was the Cheddar period, followed by the Roquefort interregnum. Sesame-seed buns gave way to English muffins as ketchup traded places with special sauce or even, God help me, guacamole, which really was overkill.

But no matter its cradle or condiment, the hamburger was with me for the long haul — I was sure of that.

Until now.

A few days ago I tripped across news that McDonald’s was testing a vegetable-based patty, coming soon to a griddle near you. The McPlant burger, they’re calling it — a McOxymoron if ever I’ve heard one. And McDonald’s is late to the game. Burger King has been selling a meatless Impossible Whopper since 2019. Dunkin’ has been serving a Beyond Sausage Breakfast Sandwich for nearly as long. (snip through other nasty meatless options)

This is the future: not a meatless one — not anytime soon — but one with less meat. I’m now sure of that. It’s the inevitable consequence of alarm over climate change, to which livestock farming contributes significantly. (Gates’s meatless musings were in the context of his new book, “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster.”)

When does the NY Times ban burgers at their giant building which has a massive carbon footprint?

Nature’s Fynd, which has attracted almost $160 million in funding, belongs to the third track: fermentation-derived proteins made from microorganisms, like fungi, that can be coaxed in a meaty, cheesy, creamy or milky direction. This track is arguably the most exciting — in terms of affordability, versatility, environmental gentleness and untapped possibility. There are microbes out there just waiting to feed us.

This opinion piece is actually looking more like an advertisement for Nature’s Fynd, because it spends a lot of time on the company.

Last month, Nature’s Fynd unveiled a direct-order breakfast combo of faux-sausage patties and a mock cream cheese for $14.99 and quickly sold out. It’s restocking and expects to have those products plus others — maybe the yogurt, maybe meatballs — on store shelves later this year. If all goes well, it will expand from there. A burger can’t be too far off.

Wait, what? $14.99? I can get a Big Breakfast (no pancakes) with a chocolate milk at McDonald’s or head to Bonjangle’s for a steak biscuit with egg, fries, and sweet tea, both under $5 before tax. This “eco-friendly” stuff looks expensive.

But given the long love affair that many humans, including this one, have had with animal meat, is there really a chance that these substitutes can make all that much headway in the near future? Thomas Jonas, the chief executive of Nature’s Fynd, said that a conspicuous change in America’s beverage-scape suggests so.

“Ten or 15 years ago, if you were looking at soy milk or almond milk, you were looking at something that was considered to be for health stores and tree-huggers and hippies, right?” he said. Now, both take up considerable space in every supermarket I visit, and there’s nary a coffee shop without one or the other. Nobody, Jonas argued, would have predicted that.

Both soy and almond, especially the latter, use immense amounts of water to produce their product. They’re fads. And, per the tenets of the Cult of Climastrology, bad for climate change. These people are all nuts. They’re aren’t eating or drinking this stuff because they like it but because their cult tells them to.

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Gun Grabbers Set To Vote On Two Gun Control Bills This Week

On the surface these two bills don’t look incredibly burdensome, and, if it wasn’t for knowing what the gun grabbers want to actually do they might have some GOP support. We know that these pieces of legislation are just steps, and might actually have some poison pills

U.S. House set to vote on bills to expand gun background checks

The U.S. House of Representatives is set to vote on Wednesday on a pair of bills to expand background checks before gun purchases, two years after a similar House effort failed to make it through the Senate.

The House Rules Committee on Monday will take up the two bills that Democrats, who control the chamber, say are aimed at closing loopholes in the background check system.

One of the bills under consideration would make it illegal for anyone who is not a licensed firearms importer, manufacturer or dealer to transfer a firearm to any unlicensed person without a background check. The bill has exemptions, including gifts from relatives and transfers for hunting, target shooting and self-defense. A version was introduced in the Senate last week.

Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said the bill, which would extend background checks to gun shows and other sales, would close “dangerous loopholes in the existing background check system to help keep all of our communities safe.”

The other bill extends the initial background check review period to 10 days from three. Under existing law, the sale of guns can proceed if a background check is not completed within three days.

For the first bill, it requires a background check for almost every single transfer, but, at this time there are no requirements to register a firearm, so, how would Los Federales even know? If I sell my gun to my friend, the feds would have no idea unless that friend went on a rampage, then I’d just say they must have stolen it. And, heck, this is already the law in North Carolina.

Raising the review period makes it that much harder for people to get a firearm in a timely manner. Even with the 3 day period it can still take up to two weeks to receive a pistol purchase permit here in Wake County, and that was when we had a Republican sheriff. Make it 10 days and it could take a month.

The National Rifle Association’s Institute for Legislative Action (NRA-ILA) opposes both bills, arguing the three-day requirement “ensures that the FBI carries out its background check duties in an expedient and responsible manner.”

The NRA-ILA argues the other bill makes it a crime “to simply hand a firearm to another person” and suggests exceptions “are overly complicated and create many traps for unwary gun owners.”

One big question would be “what will Democrats try to stuff into either of these bills? Could be pork, could be unrelated wish list garbage, could be something like requiring registration or ammo taxes.” Regardless, even if passed as written, these are just small steps to the Dems gun grabbing. And the gun grabbers are demanding that Joe Manchin help nuke the filibuster to make this happen. If you have to do that, it tells you all you need to know how partisan this is.

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Interesting: Mexican President Erects Barrier Around Presidential Palace

See, walls are fine for protecting political elites, just like we’ve seen in Washington, D.C., but, not good for protecting the border from unauthorized people attempting to cross illegally and sneak into the U.S. The Mexican president said he has “no opinion” of the wall, but, hailed China Joe’s halt of border wall construction

Mexican president defends 10-foot barriers to wall off women protesters

Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador on Saturday said a metallic barrier to wall off the presidential palace ahead of a planned women’s march on International Women’s Day was to avoid provocation and protect historic buildings from vandalism.

In a country where femicides rose nearly 130% between 2015 and 2020, critics said the decision to erect the 10-foot-high (3-meter) barriers was symptomatic of Lopez Obrador’s apathy toward the crisis of violence afflicting women.

Ahead of International Women’s Day on Monday, barriers were also installed around other emblematic buildings and monuments in downtown Mexico City where a year ago tens of thousands of people protested rampant violence against women and impunity.

“We have to avoid provocation of people who only want to cause damage,” Lopez Obrador said at an event in Yucatan. “Imagine, if we don’t take care of the national palace and they vandalize it. What image will this send to the world?”

Hmm, we have to avoid provocation of people who only want to sneak into the U.S. and take jobs from citizens, drive down wages, drive drunk, assault citizens, steal people’s identity, commit arson and rape and child sexual assault and murder.” Well, hey, it’s always some excuse to protect the elites, be it walls, excuse me, fencing, fossil fueled limos and private jets, you name it.

Lopez Obrador reiterated that women had the right to protest and cited his own movement in 2006 as an appropriate form of peaceful protest.

“The presidency was stolen from us … and we protested but never broke glass. … I walked two, three times all the way from Tabasco to Mexico City,” he said. Lopez Obrador has repeatedly accused opponents of electoral fraud over the years.

Interesting. The article doesn’t complain about Lopez Abrador saying an election was stolen from him.

Interior Minister Olga Sanchez Cordero said on Twitter that the barriers were “for the protection of the women.”

Oh, right, right. Sure thing, Sparky.

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Capitol Police request a two-month extension of National Guard deployment

Well, of course they did!

Capitol Police request extension of National Guard to protect Congress

By Dan Lamothe | March 4, 2021 | 9:15 PM EST

The U.S. Capitol Police have requested a 60-day extension of some of the 5,200 National Guard members activated in the District in response to security threats and the Jan. 6 assault on Congress, opening the door to a military presence in the nation’s capital into spring, defense officials said Thursday.

Acting chief Yogananda Pittman submitted the request to the Defense Department for an extension, the Capitol Police said in a statement on Thursday evening, without saying for how long.

You know what was known by Thursday evening? By Thursday evening, we knew that the alleged plot by purported militants to assault and breach the Capitol that day never happened.

The inauguration? That passed peacefully, without incident. The impeachment trial? Nothing happened.

The ‘new’ date for the assault which never happened is, supposedly, March 20th.

Now, did the attack not happen because of the troops and precautions, as the left will claim, or did it not happen because it was never a real threat in the first place?

The current National Guard mission ends on March 12th; the proposed extension would take the mission well into May.

At what point will the left decide that we do not want to have our nation’s capital looking like that of a banana republic?

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Surprise: Michael “Robust Debate” Mann Claims Hurricane Activity Is Your Fault

His big tree ring study leading to the “hockey stick” was a bunch of mule fritters, so, sure, let’s listen to him again as he fear mongers

Humans, not nature, are the cause of changes in Atlantic hurricane cycles, new study finds

It’s well known in science that for more than a century hurricane activity in the Atlantic Ocean has oscillated between active and inactive periods, each lasting a few decades. For the past couple of decades, meteorologists and climate scientists have believed that this ebb and flow was due to a natural warming and cooling cycle built into the climate system called the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, or AMO.

The term was coined in the year 2000 by world-renowned climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann, distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Penn State University and author of the new book “The New Climate War.” The concept of the AMO has become ubiquitous in explanations and forecasts of active or inactive hurricane seasons.

The image below, from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), shows how hurricane activity seems to flow in roughly 60-year waves — active for around 30 years when the Atlantic in its warm phase and inactive for around 30 years when in the cool phase.

But today, in a newly released paper in the journal Science, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation may have been dealt a deadly blow — by the very man who named it. Mann now concludes the AMO is very likely an artifact of climate change, driven by “human forcing” from rising carbon emissions in the modern era and “natural forcing” due to massive volcanic eruptions in pre-industrial times.

It’s just very convenient that Mann, along with the rest of the Cult of Climastrology, can say “see, back then it was all nature but now it’s Your Fault,” eh?

The finding — which is bound to generate significant controversy and pushback from the weather and climate communities due to how broadly accepted the concept of the AMO has become — may very well shake the foundations of understanding of what has been driving historical hurricane cycles.

Simply put, if true, this discovery means that during the 20th century and beyond, humans — not natural variability — have been the main driving force in the up-and-down cycles of hurricane activity in the Atlantic Ocean.

I wonder how many faulty premises and data points will be in this study? Meh, it matters little to the Cult, because this now gives them an excuse to call for more taxes and government Authority.