Outstanding guitar work by Fogerty along with a scorching vocal guaranteed to peel the paint off your walls (honest, just play it loud enough). The guy bashing the drums so hard is Kenny Aronoff, long-time member of John Mellencamp's band.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's letter of August 26 to the House Judiciary Committee has gained a lot of attention and prompted much discussion about its contents, intent, and posturing, which you can read elsewhere. Other than noting the letter is very carefully drafted, there are two less discussed aspects I want to discuss, both contained in the fourth paragraph.
"In a separate situation, the FBI warned us about a potential disinformation operation about the Biden family and Burisma in the lead up to the 2020 election. That fall, when we saw a New York Post story reporting on corruption allegations involving then-presidential nominee Joe Biden's family, we sent that story to fact checkers for review and temporarily demoted it while waiting for a reply. It's since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation and, in retrospect, we shouldn't have demoted the story. We've changed our policies and processes to make sure this doesn't happen again - for instance, we no longer temporarily demote things in the U.S. while waiting for fact-checkers."
The first point is that, unlike the prior paragraphs, which refer to efforts by the Biden-Harris administration to get Facebook to censor information, the information in this paragraph refers to events occurring during the Trump administration. This paragraph refers to the Hunter Biden laptop story and, as we now know, both the laptop and its contents were really Hunter's. And not just now - the FBI had the laptop for over a year and knew its provenance and contents; the 51 former members of the Intelligence Community who wrote the letter denouncing those promoting its legitimacy knew it was actually legitimate. The media who reported it, the media who censored any mention of it (like NPR), and Twitter and Facebook which throttled the distribution of the story simply didn't care if it was true or false; their only concern was to ensure Trump's defeat and Biden's election. You can read more about how it was accomplished in The Robust Alliance.
The second point is the reference to fact-checkers as though they provide an objective evaluation of information. They don't. The fact-checking industrial complex is simply another layer of progressive control over the media. All of the leading fact-checking organizations enforce a progressive narrative, using a number of techniques developed over the past decade, including:
Fact check Right-coded statements, but ignore Left coded-statements
Subtly mischaracterize accurate Right-coded statements so they can be declared False, and inaccurate Left coded statements so they can be declared True.
If a Right-coded statement is literally true, but there is additional context casting doubt, reference the context and declare statement False.
If a Left-coded statement is literally true, but there is additional context casting doubt, do not reference the context and declare statement True.
If the Right-coded statement is accurate in all respects, cite to a Left-coded "expert" to declare it False.
Note: Giving credit when it is due, it took Snopes only seven years to declare the claims about Trump's "fine people on both sides" to be false.
The fact-checker web is even more rigged. For instance, if you Google something, usually the first reference is to Wikipedia, which is on the Left and is adept at changing its entries to meet progressive needs. Both Google and Wikipedia use as trusted references, reliably Left publications like the New York Times. The result is a virtuous circle in which the institutions of the Left continually reinforce the validity of their viewpoints.
This is just another example of the control of the institutions by progressives and another reason why, despite the hysteria and hyperventilating by Democrats over the supposed threat to democracy by anyone not following the party line, it is only the Democrats who pose a threat. They have become what they denounce. They are the only ones with the power to effectively end our democracy, and they've made no secret of their intent to crack down on dissent.
In November 2021, Margaret Hoover of PBS interviewed the Chinese dissident and exile Ai Weiwei. Based on his past writings critical of President Trump, Hoover asked Ai if he saw Donald Trump as an authoritarian, clearly expecting an answer in the affirmative. She was surprised at the response: (the relevant part starts at about 15:45):
If you are authoritarian, you have to have a system supporting you. You cannot just be an authoritarian by yourself.
Trump had, and has, no supporting institutional system.(1) Ai went on to say that in today's conditions you could easily have an authoritarian regime and that, in many ways, the U.S. is already in that state, pointing to political correctness and its similarities to the Cultural Revolution of Mao. Hoover quickly moved on to another topic.
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(1) In contrast, Kamala Harris is not just supported by a system, she is a system. Between Biden and Harris, what we've learned is it does not matter who the Democrats run as a candidate; the system will support whomever is that candidate, because the system is running things, not the candidate.
In the midst of this dismal and ridiculous election season, let's take a moment to remember a dark horse candidate for the Democratic nomination in 1844 who became an enormously successful one-term president. I give you James K Polk, immortalized by They Might Be Giants in their song of the same name.
What were his successes?
In four short years he met his every goalHe seized the whole southwest from MexicoMade sure the tariffs fellAnd made the English sell the Oregon territoryHe built an independent treasuryHaving done all this he sought no second term
Three months after leaving office James Polk was dead from cholera. Perhaps the most consequential of our 19th century presidents other than Lincoln.
Time for some baseball stats, old and new.
The new: Aaron Judge is not chopped liver.
On May 2, thirty three games into the season, Aaron Judge was batting .197 with a slugging percentage under .400.
In 94 games since, Judge is hitting .384, slugging .852, with an on-base percentage of .504. He has 68 extra base hits, of which 43 are home runs and has driven in 101, more than an RBI per game. He's been on base 207 times in those 94 games.
According to OpStats, which compiles esoteric statistical information, Judge is the first player in major league history to, over a 100 game period, bat above .375 with at least 45 homers and 100 RBIs.(1)
And he's a likeable guy, which is terrible for a Red Sox fan.
The old: Lefty Grove was pretty good.
Well, we already knew that. Lefty had a lifetime 300-141 record, leading the American League a record nine times in ERA.
But let me tell you about the time when Lefty was really good.
From July 1, 1930 through September 24, 1931, Grove pitched in 69 games for Connie Mack's Philadelphia Athletics. Those seasons were in the midst of the greatest offensive explosion of the 20th century in baseball. The A's won the pennant both years, and their record during the 69 games Lefty appeared was 62-7, with his personal won-loss record 49-5 with eleven saves, because Grove both started and relieved. During this same period, the A's were 99-64 in games in which Lefty did not make an appearance.
Lefty completed 40 of the 45 games he started, while picking up the eleven saves and seven wins in 24 relief appearances, including one relief stint of 9 innings and another of 8 innings. Grove appeared in 30% of the games played by the A's in this period.
Of his five losses, two were in relief and three as a starter. The losses as a starter: 1-0, 2-1, and 3-2 (in this game only one of the 3 runs against Grove were earned). The 1-0 loss was quite memorable. Lefty had tied the American League record with 16 straight wins, when on August 23 he faced the weak St Louis Browns lineup. In the 3rd inning rookie Jimmie Moore, playing in left field in place of the injured Al Simmons, misplayed a fly ball into a double scoring the only run of the game, a miscue not charged as an error. Grove, highly competitive and with a fiery temper, exploded in the clubhouse after the game, going on a long rant against Simmons and, according to his SABR biography, trying to "tear off the clubhouse door, shredding the wooden partition between lockers, banged up the lockers, broke chairs and ripped off his shirt, buttons flying. 'Threw everything I could get my hands on — bats, balls, shoes, gloves, benches, water buckets, whatever was handy,' he told author Donald Honig"
Over 447 innings Grove's ERA was 2.07. During this same period the league ERA was about 4.50.
In the middle of this streak, Grove appeared in three games during the 1930 World Series against the St Louis Cardinals. On October 1, starting Game One, Grove won 5-2. Four days later, he started and lost Game Four, 3-1, despite tossing a 5-hitter and giving up only one earned run. The next day, he pitched two innings in relief, picking up the win 2-0.
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(1) These composite stats are fun but can be misleading. If you change the .375/45/100 line to .375/40/100 you get other streaks that are as, or more impressive. Take Babe Ruth, for instance:
That's an old Soviet-era joke, based on the Communist penchant for deleting party members, determined not be aligned with current ideology, from Soviet encyclopedias or erasing them from photos, and disappearing inconvenient events or simply rewriting them in accordance with the current line of the revolutionary vanguard.
We have an increasing number of examples in the U.S. over the past decade. Here's a recent one. On March 13 of this year, the Minnesota Star-Tribune, the state's leading newspaper and house organ for the Democratic Party (the editor was in Walz's cabinet) ran this headline:
"Gov. Walz shares his family's IVF journey as Democrats look to guarantee access to treatments."
Within the past few days, the paper went back and edited, without any editorial note, the headline to read;
"Gov. Walz shares his family's fertility journey as Democrats look to guarantee access to treatments".
The stealth change was necessitated because Walz has wanted to emphasize IVF because it aligned with yet another misinformation attack from Democrats that Trump wants to ban it. It turns out that once his wife admitted IVF was not involved it became an embarrassment for the VP candidate.
It reminds me of USA Today's treatment of an op-ed by election denier Stacey Abrams. Remember when Georgia amended its election laws to make it easier for its citizens to vote compared to those racist restrictions in states like New York and Connecticut?(1) Remember when the Democrats and the media called the new Georgia law "Jim Crow 2.0"?
At the peak of the media frenzy over the law, Abrams published a piece in which she urged businesses to boycott Georgia until the law was changed. As the frenzy died down and the impacts of the boycott, including the ridiculous MLB decision not to hold the All-Star game in Atlanta, which had been designed to honor Hank Aaron, became more and more unpopular, a conservative wrote a piece pointing out how bad Abrams advice was, referring to the USA Today article. Abrams' people responded that she had never advocated for boycotts and, sure enough, the current version of the USA Today article did not mention it. Fortunately, someone had saved an archived version of the op-ed which did urge boycotts. Turns out that once boycotts became unpopular, Abrams, then running against Brian Kemp for governor, was allowed by USA Today to stealth edit her piece!
We constantly see this happen with Wikipedia, an organization run by the Left, where, within 48 hours of any controversy arising, entries have been rewritten to align with the new Democratic party line. It is why Wikipedia is completely untrustworthy as a source for anything with even a slight political or ideological connection.
It's even happening with on-line dictionaries. During Supreme Court nominee Amy Barrett's confirmation hearing, Webster's changed its definition of "preference" within 24 hours to conform with the new definition used by Democrats to attack Barrett.
Lately, it's happening at a dizzying pace. Six weeks ago we were told Joe Biden was fine, and attempts by the GOP to "pounce" on his physical and mental health were misinformation, while Kamala Harris was clearly not capable of stepping up to replace him. Today, we are told by the same people that, of course, Biden was in a diminished state, did the noble thing by stepping down (as candidate, not as president which, of course, where is he perfectly capable of performing his duties), while Kamala is the perfect candidate to embody the politics of joy, while running against her own administration, or more accurately to run as if Trump is the incumbent. They don't even try to make any sense of it all. With her incoherence, Kamala is Trump, except the press and the institutions love her.
When we talk about the capture of the institutions by the Left, and why trust in those institutions has diminished so much in recent years, this is why.
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(1) I voted in CT from 2000 to 2106. No one mailed me a ballot, and obtaining an absentee ballot was restricted to a limited set of circumstances. I also had to show ID to vote. One time, the person I checked in with at the polling place was my next door neighbor. She made me show ID!
Another one from Billy Strings from earlier in his career in 2017. The lyrics reflect on his childhood filled with family drug problems; his father died of a heroin overdose, while his mother and stepfather became meth addicts (both now recovered). This version is six minutes, but in concerts more recently he stretches Turmoil and Tinfoil into 15 to 20 minutes filled with improvisations and snippets of other tunes.
Through the turmoil and the tinfoilI could wait my early lifeI can see you in the darknessAnd I'm running through the nightI recall a silver morningWhen your face had turned to grayYou were standing right before meBut I missed you every dayThough you never said you're sorryI forgave you even thenBut I feel inconsequentialIn the current state I'm in
