TIME is kicking off their 100th year and a reminder of history’s rhymes: On the cover of the first issue:

Quote:“Uncle Joe” Cannon, whose 1923 retirement set off the last instance of multi-ballot mayhem in choosing a Speaker of the House.

Joseph Gurney Cannon, grand old man of Congress, will retire from public life. At the age of 86, having served 23 terms in the House of Representatives, he feels that he has earned the right to spend the rest of his life in the quiet seclusion of Danville, Illinois. Uncle Joe is something more than a politician with an age-record. He is the embodiment of a tradition, a political theory, a technique of party government and discipline that is fast perishing. He represents the Old Guard in the very flower of its maturity, in the palmy days of McKinley and Mark Hanna, when " a little group of wilful men " did more than make gestures of government; they actually ruled Congress, shrewdly, impregnably, and without too much rhetoric.

Uncle Joe in those days was Speaker of the House and supreme dictator of the Old Guard. Never did a man employ the office of Speaker with less regard for its theoretical impartiality. To Uncle Joe the Speakership was a gift from heaven, immaculately born into the Constitution by the will of the fathers for the divine purpose of perpetuating the dictatorship of the standpatters in the Republican Party. And he followed the divine call with a resolute evangelism that was no mere voice crying in the wilderness, but a voice that forbade anybody else to cry out—out of turn.

On March 4 Uncle Joe will be gone and Henry Cabot Lodge alone will remain to carry on the banner of the ideal. To the American people, however, the senior Senator from Massachusetts must perforce seem a little too genteel, too cold, too Back Bay to serve as an adequate trustee for the Old Guard tradition. They will long for the homely democracy of Mr. Cannon, so often expressed by those homely democratic symbols—Uncle Joe's black cigar and thumping quid.

Quote:The Story Behind the First-Ever Fact-Checkers

Here's how they were able to do their jobs long before the Internet.

At TIME Magazine’s 20th anniversary dinner, in 1943, the magazine’s co-founder Henry Luce explained to those gathered that, while “the word ‘researcher’ is now a nation-wide symbol of a serious endeavor,” he and co-founder Briton Hadden had first started using the title as part of an inside joke for a drinking club. “Little did we realize that in our private jest we were inaugurating a modern female priesthood — the veritable vestal virgins whom levitous writers cajole in vain,” he said, “and managing editors learn humbly to appease.”

Luce’s audience nearly 75 years ago is not the only group to wonder about the origins of fact-checking in journalism, though the casual sexism of the 1940s would no longer fly. Today, especially amid concern over so-called “fake news” and at a time when it may seem inconceivable that checking an article would be possible without the Internet, it remains a natural question: How did this journalistic practice begin?
And, as it turns out, that story is closely linked to TIME’s past.

First Facts

In the years between 1923, when TIME’s first issue was published, and Luce’s speech, journalistic fact-checking had gone from a virtually unknown idea to standard practice at many American magazines. (These days, journalistic practices aren’t necessarily country-specific — Der Spiegel, for example, is known for having one of the world’s biggest fact-checking departments — but that wasn’t the case a century ago, and this particular kind of checking was an especially American phenomenon.)

Of course, well before any separate job of “fact-checker” existed, editors and reporters would have had their eyes out for errors — but it was around the turn of the 20th century, between the sensational yellow journalism of the 1890s and muckraking in the early 1900s, that the American journalism industry began to really focus on facts.

Quote:Research: Fact-Checking: History of Fact-Checking

An early use of the term fact-checker can be found in an ad for TIME magazine in 1938 which mentions the expansion of "its researchers and fact-checkers from ten to twenty-two."  Nancy Ford was the first Time fact-checker and she extensively consulted the New York Public Library Information Desk to perform her work.   By the 1930s, the "checkers" were entirely drawn from young women graduating from college.   Their research work was rigorous and involved the "process of surrounding a story", making sure every detail was correct and incorporated into the final story.  If errors were made, the female checkers were generally held responsible, not the male authors of the piece.

In 1971, after  the women at Newsweek filed a successful  complaint with the Federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against the sex-segregation of the magazine departments,  the TIME magazine research manual was rewritten to incorporate these workplace changes.  The fact-checkers were renamed "reporter-researchers" and  the job was opened to men.  In  later decades, the duties of the checkers gradually evolved: reporters did some of their own fact-checking and the checkers expanded their responsibilities to include reporting.

Fact-checking at other publications

 The  New Yorker has a longstanding reputation for its fact-checking department.  The German newsmagazine Der Spiegel once had the largest and most respected fact-checking operation in the publishing world.   But in 2018 , a celebrated reporter was exposed for fabricating stories which the fact-checkers never caught.

Near the end he has an excerpt about Trump's bloodline, esoteric ancestry, and occult roots that you will find of interest. If you wish, skip to @39:50.

California is like a virus that is now spreading to N.Y.
Ken Girardin reacts to New York state proposing a ban on new gas vehicles and other green energy policies.

Just some useless trivia I strolled across...

Couple pics of Chaya Raichik of Libs of TikTok at the DeSantis inaugural ball. I'd say her presence confirms (along with her Tucker Carlson interview) that the origin & promotion of DeSantis's Parental Rights in Education (Don't Say Gay) bill and all the anti-grooming LGBT stuff...



Sen Manny Diaz Jr. - Florida education commissioner.


I did not know Libs of TikTok LLC is registered to Seth Dillon, Babylon Bee owner & Elon Musk's pal who takes some credit for convincing Musk to buy Twitter. Dillon, a Palm Beach County resident, also has a relationship with DeSantis...




Key as to who's who in the group:



Libs of TikTok creator backed by Babylon Bee CEO of Juno Beach


 how had I not heard he got this incredibly cringe photo removed.



de Sade??

Found him...


comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.misc (Usenet/Google groups)

Someone asked AI to turn each country into a villain. Got confused on Russia. 

Here's a few...

The more you learn the more you realize this regime is one sick puppy.

The story of the net from ARPANET to privatization, political policies & selling of infrastructure, the first platforms, Microsoft lawsuits, through to Google, Facebook, Airbnb & Uber, up to today.



Chapters:

00:00 – Introduction to the History of the Internet
04:06 – Building the Net
20:37 – The Browser Wars (Microsoft vs the United States)
44:35 – The Californian Ideology (eBay, Yahoo, Google and the Libertarian Mind)
01:07:26 – The Raiding of Privacy (Surveillance Capitalism)
01:18:05 – Facebook
01:26:07 – The Theft of the Community (Airbnb & Uber)
01:40:31 – No Place (Utopian Dreams)
01:49:38 – Open Source vs Microsoft
01:59:24 – Conclusion: Politics, Policy, and Alternatives

The drone program gave rise to at least one crazy incident on August 16, 1956 where a Navy Grumman F6F-5K Hellcat drone went rogue and circled over the heavily-populated Los Angeles area for several hours, while a pair of USAF Northrop F-89 Scorpions scrambled to shoot it down safely.



The jets fired 208 rockets at the Hellcat, and all missed. Eventually it ran out of fuel and crashed, lighting a massive brush fire.

LOL, GO Navy!

I'm surprised this forum is empty. Ok, I'll add one, though not really a rant per say.

Quote:Former Harvard Prof. Martin Kulldorff: ‘Science and Public Health Are Broken
(Feb 2022, The Epoch Times)

“I was able to publish in Sweden, in the major daily newspapers there during the spring of 2020, so that was not a problem,” he said. “But the United States was not allowed to have a debate, which is very troubling.”

His early efforts culminated in the Great Barrington Declaration...“The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk,” the declaration states.

“It’s just the basic fundamental principles of public health that existed in the pandemic preparedness plan that was prepared many years before,” he said. “It’s sort of astonishing that it wasn’t followed from the very beginning of the pandemic.”

“The most important audience was the public,” he said, “because it’s the public that ultimately will end these misguided public health policies. It’s the public, regular people, who are suffering the consequences.”

He said the authors wanted to advise the average person that their intuition was correct, that the restrictions weren’t based on public health science—”so when you oppose them, you’re standing on firm scientific ground.”
“The key thing was to break the pretense that there was scientific consensus for these lockdowns—which there wasn’t.”

“This proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists … seems to be getting a lot of attention,” Collins told Fauci in the Oct. 8, 2020, email. “There needs to be a quick and devastating published takedown of its premises. I don’t see anything like that online yet—is it underway?”

Collins’s four-line email mentioned that the declaration included “even a co-signature from Nobel Prize winner Mike Leavitt at Stanford.”

Fauci appears to have been in full agreement with Collins’s proposal to take down the authors and their declaration, sending a one-line reply.

“I am pasting in below a piece from the Wired [magazine] that debunks this theory,” he wrote. Collins replied. “Excellent.”

Within a day of the Collins–Fauci exchange, Google began to censor search results for “Great Barrington Declaration.”

In a subsequent interview, Collins said the declaration “is not mainstream science. It’s dangerous.”

Fauci called the declaration “ridiculous” and “total nonsense” in an interview with ABC.

Kulldorff, when asked if he’d ever considered himself a “fringe epidemiologist,” said, “No I have not, but I guess, when the public health leaders get it wrong, then it’s an honor to be a fringe epidemiologist.”

“So these are all tragic consequences, collateral damage, of these COVID measures, restrictions that were imposed,” he said. “And you can’t just do that for a whole year or two and expect that it doesn’t have other enormously bad outcomes on public health.”

Kulldorff anticipates that many of the ancillary health impacts have yet to surface.

In January, a Johns Hopkins meta-analysis of lockdown data concluded that lockdowns didn’t save lives.

“It’s very clear that if we want to have vibrant science, and a vibrant scientific community, we have to reform the way science operates and the way public health operates,” he said.

But, Kulldorff said, it’s up to the public—the truckers, farmers, nurses, pilots, and parents—as well as rank-and-file scientists to effect real change.

It’s also time to compassionately help each other heal from the psychological and mental wounds, he said, especially those still living in constant fear of COVID and those who have been self-isolating for two years now.

“I think we shouldn’t blame those who were afraid, because they were major victims of this pandemic strategy,” he said.

“We shouldn’t blame people for believing Anthony Fauci and the CDC—that was the natural thing to do. We just have to help them realize that these measures were misguided so that never happens again.”

Quote:Cardiac Arrest in Athletes by Dr Robert Malone.

What is known and knowable

....

In thinking this through, I am going to take a different approach in considering how I can help this situation. How to make a small positive contribution. There has been lots of speculation, but not much education. So, today I am putting my “educator” hat on for a moment.

My friends Edward Dowd and Gavin de Becker have written an excellent book documenting the pattern of people dying suddenly.

The pattern of myocarditis in young men after vaccination is reproducible and known. Prevalence of clinical myocarditis post vaccination in young men is around 1/3000 - with a lot of variability between studies. A study from Thailand showed extremely high rates of sub-clinical damage in young men. Long-term outcomes from the vaccine are unknown in these cohorts. Five year mortality (including sudden death) post clinical viral myocarditis is absolutely not trivial. One would hope that the elite athletes required to be inoculated would have their physicians monitoring for signs of sub-clinical and clinical myocarditis. To not do so may place them at risk of legal consequences and medical board review.

That said, there is a good reason to speculate that Commotio Cordis could also have been the key event. In my opinion, there is also a (strong?) probability that there was a pre-existing heart condition or heart damage prior to the event (tackle).

Commotio Cordis is Latin for “agitation of the heart.” Commotio Cordis refers to when an unusual event happens whereby a mild to moderate physical impact or blow to the chest hits the heart during a specific moment of the heartbeat. This triggers a sudden and often fatal heart attack.

Commotio Cordis refers to the sudden arrhythmic death caused by a low/mild chest wall impact.  Commotio Cordis is seen mostly in athletes between the ages of 8 and 18 who are partaking in sports with projectiles such as baseballs, hockey pucks, or lacrosse balls.  These projectiles can strike the athletes in the middle of the chest with a low impact but enough to cause the heart to enter an arrhythmia. Martial arts is a sport in which a strike of a hand can also cause the heart to change it’s rhythm.  Without immediate CPR and defibrillation the prognosis of Commotio Cordis is not very good.  This condition is extremely dangerous with rare survival.

Read more: Cardiac Arrest in Athletes

Quote:You Don’t Have to be a Conspiracy Theorist to be Worried About the World Economic Forum

Samuel Greg, a Distinguished Fellow in Political Economy at the American Institute for Economic Research and author, most recently, of The Next American Economy: Nation, State, and Markets in an Uncertain World, has written a good piece for the Spectator about the WEF on the eve of Davos 2023.

He argues that if you care about liberty, democracy and national self-determination, it’s perfectly rational to be concerned about the influence of Klaus Schwab and his followers. Not because they are the puppeteers controlling politicians across the West, but because they’re ideas permeate the upper echelons of the global elite. In particular, Schwab’s belief in the top-down, technocratic form of government exemplified by the EU.

It wields no formal political power and can’t make anyone do anything. Nonetheless, since its founding in 1971, the WEF has become an organisation which embodies supreme confidence in the imperative of a particular type of person running the world from the top-down. In his famous 2004 essay entitled ‘Dead Souls’, the political scientist Samuel P. Huntington called this prototype ‘Davos Man’.

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