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THE CURIOUS CASE OF DISINFORMATION
By Christopher Chantrill, February 6, 2024

Since the American Godzilla came down the escalator in 2015 our liberal friends have been obsessed with disinformation coming from the Far Right.

Did you know that “disinformation” was originally dezinformatsiya as practiced by the Soviet era KGB? But then other governments got in on the action. Wikipedia nobly asserts that,

After the Soviet term became widely known in the 1980s, native speakers of English broadened the term as "any government communication (either overt or covert) containing intentionally false and misleading material, often combined selectively with true information, which seeks to mislead and manipulate either elites or a mass audience."

So, in the 1980s, experts agreed that disinformation was a government thing.

But now all the best people at the Atlantic are worried about Substack, which is “unwilling to remove avowed Nazis from its platform.”

But are the avowed Nazis committing “misinformation” or “disinformation” or “malinformation?” How would we know? How could we tell?

Fortunately, the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency has the whole thing covered and defined with comprehensive and mandatory definitions of “misinformation” and “disinformation” and “malinformation.” And naturally, our liberal friends and their miasma of NGOs -- led by the noble ADL and the SPLC -- are doing their bit to winkle out the bad guys. The SPLC recently helped the FBI horn in on dangerous radical Catholics practicing the Tridentine Mass.

Back in the day, of course, our liberal friends were all worried about government propaganda, what with Joe McCarthy’s lies about Communists in the State Department and the U.S. government’s lies about Vietnam. Now they are worried about nongovernmental liars.

I call that a “tell.”

Back in the day our liberal friends knew that the United States was the great implacable force in the world that was the main obstacle to the Left’s fight for justice and peace. Back then the left saw itself fighting against government power. Today the tables are turned. Now it is “avowed Nazis” on Substack that are standing in the way of the progressive government’s multicultural movement for justice.

In other words, back then the Left experienced itself gazing up helplessly at the battlements of imperialist America. Today it is standing on the battlements of Working Class America looking out at the threatening swarm of annoying deplorables down below.

How dare those peasants appropriate the means of communication that, all good people know, should be reserved for the use of educated and evolved people! The idea of “avowed Nazis” polluting the means of communication with their racist-sexist-homophobia is simply “unsafe.”

In other words, the world has changed, and our liberal friends can’t stand it.

But what exactly has gotten our liberal friends into such a panic? I have an idea.

Back in the day only the best and brightest got to publish ideas -- in books, and newspapers, and magazines -- and there were gatekeepers all along the line to keep things under control.

But now it’s a complete free-for-all. Any local yokel can start up a Substack site. As the Substack About page says,

Substack is something new: a subscription network… A few hundred paid subscribers can support a livelihood. A few thousand makes it lucrative.

And there are no gatekeepers. You can be up and running on Substack in minutes. It’s a complete free-for-all. For the first time in history. Just ask Bari Weiss.

So let us tell the three ages of the History of Communication.

Age of Parchment: Writers write, monks in monasteries create illuminated manuscripts by hand in their monastic cells. Gatekeeper: The Abbot.

Age of Gutenberg: Writers write, printer’s devils convert the written word into print. Gatekeeper: The Editor.

Age of Free-for-all: Writers write, and press Publish. Gatekeeper: The… (oh no!)

Informed by my History of Communication, we now know what our liberal friends are feverishly working on today.

We need new gatekeepers! To keep the Narrative pure! To stop Disinformation before it destroys Our Democracy! To head off “avowed Nazis” at the pass! To prevent “harm” to traditionally marginalized peoples! To stop the Latin Mass before it destroys America! To call out “climate deniers!” To banish TERFs from the university!

I get it. How are we going to send the doughboys to Europe unless President Wilson can control the Narrative about German attacks on “passenger and merchant ships in 1917?” How can the U.S. prevail in Vietnam if left-wing and anti-war protesters get to disrupt the 1968 Democratic convention? How are we going to fight World War COVID if anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers spread distrust of government medical experts? And how are we going to save the world from runaway climate change unless “climate deniers” are well and truly deplatformed for their denial of The Science?

There is nothing more urgent, as the nation goes to the polls this year, than to stop the out-of-control Disinformation produced by far-right extremists and influencers on the free-for-all internet with licensed and bonded and DEI-approved Gatekeepers.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.

Reprinted with permission from the American Thinker: https://www.americanthinker.com

HOLLYWOOD'S FINANCES ARE COLLAPSING AND BROUGHT THIS ON ITSELF
By Andrea Widburg, February 11, 2024

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Hollywood is experiencing a disastrous winter. People aren’t going to the movies, opting instead to stay home. Obviously, part of the issue is streaming, which has upended the old business model. However, one cannot ignore the fact that today’s movies are awful, whether because they’re mechanical, recycled garbage, or because they’re preachy, painfully woke garbage. Watching a couple of movies from 51 and 50 years ago, respectively, will help you appreciate just how bad most modern movies really are.

Here’s the news from The Hollywood Reporter:

Domestic box office revenue year-to-date of $581.2 million is running 43 percent behind the average haul during the same time period in 2016-19, when movie ticket sales clocked in as high as $1.08 billion, according to data provided by Comscore for Jan. 1-Feb. 4.

Of that, January clocked in at $513.6 million, compared to $599 million in 2023 (a breakout hit last year was M3GAN, with more than $83 million in ticket sales domestically, while Avatar: The Way of Water contributed more than $210 million). Outside of the COVID-era years, $513.6 million is the lowest showing for January in more than 25 years.

These are not happy figures for Tinsel Town.

As noted, one of the obvious problems is competition from people’s own homes. They’ve already prepaid for Max (the old HBO), Paramount, Disney+, or any other streaming service to which they subscribe. Those are sunk costs, so staying home and watching movies on TV is much better than to shlep out to the theater. Add in the fact that two tickets are the same price as a one-month streaming subscription and that you don’t have to pay the babysitter, and going to the movies seems like an almost foolish thing to do.

And yet I went to the movies just two weeks ago because there’s a movie playing that I knew would be better on the big screen: Godzilla Minus One. This Japanese production, which cost only $10-15 million to make, has already raked in almost $110 million. That’s because it’s an absolute gem of a movie. Instead of focusing on ever wilder and more clinical special effects, this monster movie has actual character development. It’s no wonder that both critics and viewers on Rotten Tomatoes have given it a 98% rating. It’s the kind of movie that deserves to be seen in a big way and, obviously, people will pay for the pleasure.

The same was true a few years ago for Tom Cruise’s Top Gun: Maverick, which garnered a 96% Rotten Tomatoes rating from critics and a 99% rating from viewers. The movie had a huge budget compared to Godzilla Minus One ($170-177 million versus $10-15 million) but brought in almost $1.5 billion dollars!

What ties these two movies together is that their plots aren’t shoddy. The writers didn’t just dig into the recycling bin. Instead, they came up with fresh ideas, which the directors then presented in fresh, fun ways. And importantly, neither movie had a goal other than pure entertainment. They weren’t trying to shame or indoctrinate the audience. They weren’t posturing as important, “high brow” fare. Instead, they were clever, fun, and visually exciting films that benefitted from everything a movie theater can offer.

That’s really rare nowadays. The DC, Star Wars, and Marvel universes, like some giant fungi, have taken over Hollywood and sucked the life out of it. Big-budget movies have interchangeable actors, interchangeable plots, loud noises, and way too many computer-generated special effects. They are what artificial intelligence would do if artificial intelligence were making “blockbusters” (and that’s assuming, of course, that AI isn’t already doing the job). And the less said about the woke movies (whether comedies, dramas, or children’s fare), the better.

Hollywood was always about making money, but it once understood that it made money by offering a quality product that truly entertained people. I was reminded of that last night because The Sting is playing on TCM. It is a wonderful movie: The plot is remarkably clever, the actors are confident and without modern anguish, and the production values are just lovely.

Marvin Hamlisch’s score makes the movie, too. Nowadays, soundtracks are just mash-ups of pop songs, rap, screeching ballads, and really loud orchestral noises to bolster computer-generated action. Hamlisch, however, took Scott Joplin’s lovely (and, by then, forgotten) ragtime melodies and orchestrated them in unforgettable ways that tenderly or humorously support every scene.

The Sting entertains.

And then there’s Blazing Saddles, which celebrated its 50th Anniversary on February 7. That movie, more than any other artsy, intellectual, “meaningful” film, shattered the stupidity of racial prejudice. Mel Brooks had no fear about mocking everything, so there were no sacred cows. Within that context, he could freely ridicule the patently wrong idea that a person’s skin color is a value by which he or she should be judged.

The left, unsurprisingly, wishes Blazing Saddles would go away.

Incidentally, there will never be a “transgender” Blazing Saddles. Good comedy works because it exposes the truth behind our myths and prejudices. It’s what’s left once the sacred cows have been exposed as mere plastic idols.

Because “transgenderism” is itself a very fake cow (or bull), anyone who believes in it cannot mock it. That’s why, if you want to see a funny movie poking holes through that risible belief system, you need to check out The Daily Wire’s Lady Ballers. It’s not as good as Blazing Saddles (it’s a little too earnest), but for a first effort from a studio that’s ramping up, it’s pretty damn good.

Reprinted with permission from the American Thinker: https://www.americanthinker.com

LAKE SHASTA RESERVOIRS 'WELL ABOVE' HISTORICAL AVERAGE
 AFTER  'EXPERTS' PREDICTED GLOBAL WARMING DROUGHT

By Jack Hellner, February 13, 2024

Why did the so-called climate change experts predict a continued drought in California, instead of predicting the record snow and rain the state actually received? Precipitation that has caused the reservoirs to be well above the historical average?

See the article below, shared by Yahoo News:

California’s Lake Shasta rising from severe-drought levels in stunning before and after images

Lake Shasta, the largest reservoir in California, is on an unexpected—though welcomed—rise in water levels. Heavy storms in the state have saturated the area, with nearly 37 inches of rain falling in the Shasta Damn [sic] surroundings since October 2023. Recently, heavy rainfall has increased water levels by a foot in just one week, bringing the record to about 70% full, well above the historical average.

When looking at the timeline of the drought-riddled scene from just two years ago to now, there has been quite an impressive and dramatic change.

Why was it unexpected? Why should we believe they can predict climate conditions a hundred years from now when they can’t predict the current weather?

Why should we base policies on computer model predictions that have continuously been wrong?

How is Alaska reaching such extreme negatives when the Democrats and other green pushers tell us that everything we do and use are causing existential warming? From RedState:

Minus-30—Even for Alaska, That’s Cold!

The largest utility in Alaska delivered a record amount of natural gas this week as customers cranked up the heat to warm buildings and homes during a brutal cold snap that has lasted more than a week.

Enstar broke its record around midnight on Wednesday, delivering 268 million cubic feet of gas a day to its 150,000 customers, said Enstar president John Sims.

That beat the previous record of 254 million cubic feet, set on Jan. 19, 2017 during a frigid spell then.

How many times have we been told falsely over the last hundred years that the ocean currents are collapsing? Well again, just the other day from CNN:

A crucial system of ocean currents may already be on course to collapse, according to a new report, with alarming implications for sea level rise and global weather — leading temperatures to plunge dramatically in some regions and rise in others.

How does a warming climate cause temperatures to plunge dramatically in some regions of the ocean?

Why would any person with common sense believe that politicians, bureaucrats, scientists, or anyone else could establish policies that could change or control ocean currents with all the natural variables in the climate?

Does anyone believe that “complex and expensive” computer systems, that are programmed by people pushing the green agenda, could be unbiased and accurate?

Death Valley has essentially been in a 10,000 year drought that was/is clearly not caused by humans, CO2, or our use of natural resources. From Yahoo News:

California rainstorms brought — and kept — a lake at Death Valley

A temporary lake at Badwater Basin is rare, according to the park service. The basin is itself a former inland lake, called Lake Manly, which has long since dried up. It existed in two past periods, and most recently dried around 10,000 years ago, according to the park.

Here is a sample of things that have not caused (or even contributed to) reservoirs rising so rapidly in California, extremely cold weather in Alaska, ocean currents to change, or a Death Valley lake to temporarily return for the first time in 10,000 years:

moving from power produced by oil, coal, and natural gas to wind and solar power;

forcing people to buy vehicles powered by a highly flammable pollutant;

eating less meat;

burying carbon;

less breathing;

buying and selling worthless pieces of paper called carbon credits;

gabfests at the UN and Davos where elitists fly in their private jets to pretend they can control the climate;

the worthless Paris climate accord.

So what caused all these things to happen?

The natural cyclical pattern of the climate. The earth has gone through many warming and cooling periods throughout its history.

It is gratuitous for the media and other green pushers to denigrate those of us who tell the truth that the climate has always changed cyclically and naturally as “climate change deniers,” “anti-science,” and “stupid.” The purpose of such derogatory adjectives is to mislead the public and shame them into silence, to get people to capitulate. They are interfering in elections.

Reprinted with permission from the American Thinker: https://www.americanthinker.com

SUNRISE SIDE REPUBLICAN WOMEN'S CLUB.

The Sunrise Side Republican Club holds monthly meetings on the 4th Tuesday of the month.  The location and speaker will be announced for each meeting.  Unless otherwise stated, the lunch will be at 11:30 a.m.

The officers are:  Jane Hayward, President, 989-739-3126, Roxanne Rosenfeld, Vice President, 989-362-1259, Amy Merrick, Secretary, 989-747-0479 and Mary Riley, Treasurer, 989-305-6302.

The SSRWC next meeting will be in April 2024.

 You can send correspondence to SSRWC P.O. Box 234 Tawas City, MI 48764.  

THERE WILL BE NO MEETING OF THE IOSCO COUNTY REPUBLICANS IN MARCH

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