Why Is ‘Russian Disinformation’ More Trustworthy Than the Liberal Media?

Posted on | March 28, 2022 | Comments Off on Why Is ‘Russian Disinformation’ More Trustworthy Than the Liberal Media?

Last week, Russian officials claimed that Hunter Biden had bankrolled biological research laboratories in Ukraine:

The Russian government on Thursday accused Hunter Biden’s investment fund of helping bankroll the Pentagon’s alleged biolabs in Ukraine.
Igor Kirillov, the head of Russia’s Radiation, Chemical and Biological Defence Troops, said the investment firm Biden is connected to, Rosemont Seneca, has been implicated in financing the biological program in Ukraine, Russian state-owned news agency Sputnik reported.
“Incoming materials have allowed us to trace the scheme of interaction between U.S. government bodies and Ukraine’s biolabs,” Kirillov said. He added that Rosemont Seneca attracted attention due to an alleged “close relationship” between the fund and key suppliers for “Pentagon biolaboratories around the world.” According to the Ministry of Defense’s information, the fund has at least $2.4 billion in investment capital, Sputnik reported.

This was immediately dismissed by the Daily Beast, among others, as conspiracy theory crazy talk aimed at the QAnon crowd, even before Tucker Carlson picked up the story.

“Tucker Carlton Echoes the Kremlin,” they headlined it, as if the story were self-evidently false. But guess what? Can you guess, huh?

Russia’s assertion that President Biden’s son Hunter was “financing … biological laboratories in Ukraine” was based in truth, according to e-mails reviewed by The Post.
A trove of e-mails on Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop — the existence of which was exclusively reported by The Post in October 2020 — found that he played a role in helping a California defense contractor analyze killer diseases and bioweapons in Ukraine. . . .
Rosemont Seneca Technology Partners [the investment firm founded in 2009 by Hunter Biden, Christopher Heinz, and Devon Archer] invested $500,000 in the San Francisco pathogen research company Metabiota and raised millions more through firms that included Goldman Sachs, according to the e-mails found on the computer, which was abandoned at a Delaware repair shop in April 2019 as Joe Biden ran for president.
Hunter introduced Metabiota to officials at Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company where he was a board member, for a “science project” involving biolabs in Ukraine, the e-mails show.
A memo from a Metabiota official to the then-vice president’s son in 2014 said the company could “assert Ukraine’s cultural and economic independence from Russia.”
Metabiota vice president Mary Guttieri also wrote to Hunter about geopolitical issues involving the company’s research in the former Soviet republic in April 2014, two months after Russia invaded and annexed the Crimea region.
“As promised, I’ve prepared the attached memo, which provides an overview of Metabiota, our engagement in Ukraine, and how we can potentially leverage our team, networks, and concepts to assert Ukraine’s cultural and economic independence from Russia and continued integration into Western society,” her memo read.
Days later, Burisma executive Vadym Pozharskyi wrote to Biden about a “as you called ‘Science Ukraine’ project.”
“As I understand the Metabiota was a subcontract to principal contactor of the DoD B&V [engineering firm Black & Veatch],” his e-mail read. “What kind of partnership Metabiota is looking for in Ukraine?”
The US awarded $23.9 million to Metabiota later in 2014, with $307,091 allocated for a “Ukrainian research projects,” government spending records showed.
The younger Biden bragged to investors that his company organized funding for Metabiota and helped it “get new customers” including “government agencies,” according to e-mails.

Well? Is the Daily Beast just going to pretend this isn’t newsworthy? Are the rest of the corporate media going to continue pretending that this is just crazy QAnon stuff and “Russian disinformation”?

Keep in mind that our government funded research in Communist Chinese labs that may have produced the COVID-19 virus. We are told, however, that the research our government was funding in Ukraine was entirely benign, and if we express skepticism about this project (which, oh, by the way, just happened to help make money for Joe Biden’s worthless crack-addicted son) well, our skepticism is proof that we’re a bunch of kooky right-wing conspiracy theorists. Wouldn’t it be nice if our government and our media would tell us the truth once in while, so they could have more credibility than the Kremlin?

(Hat-tip: Ace of Spades.)

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!

Category: Corruption, Media Bias, Russia, Ukraine

Rule 5 Sunday: Mariah Carey

Posted on | March 28, 2022 | Comments Off on Rule 5 Sunday: Mariah Carey

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Whatever one might thing of Mariah Carey’s singing talents, or lack thereof, there’s no question that she’s a cutie.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam.

NINETY MILES FROM TYRANNY: Hot Pick of the Late Night, The 90 Miles Mystery Box Episode #1666*, Morning Mistress, and Girls With Guns.

ANIMAL MAGNETISM: Rule Five Evil V. Stupid Friday, and the Saturday Gingermageddon.

EBL: Julie Andrews, Alina Kabaeva, Lust, Black Crab, My Brilliant Friend, Little Birds, and Connie Francis

A VIEW FROM THE BEACH: Kandace Harbin, Fish Pic Friday – Amanda CA, New Maryland Musky Record, Black Magic Woman, Wednesday Wetness, Tuesday Tanlines, Justice Thomas Give Liberals a Thrill, The Monday Morning Stimulus, and Palm Sunday.

Thanks to everyone for the luscious links!

*The Millennial Number of the Beast Episode!
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Visit Amazon’s Intimate Apparel Shop
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Category: Rule 5

FMJRA 2.0: Burn Witch Burn

Posted on | March 27, 2022 | Comments Off on FMJRA 2.0: Burn Witch Burn

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Well, I was mistaken about the Senators’ schedule. After taking two out of three from the Yankees, we have three games against the Orioles and three more against the division-leading Injuns before it’s all over. So we have a shot at .500 after all, it seems. As for tax season, there’s 22 days left, and I still don’t know if I’ll be hitting the road for Reno to do the last two weeks of the season up there or whether I’ll be left to sit and home and keep working on various drop-off returns in between stints of online assist work.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam.

Sunny skies and cheerful music waft over RFK again this week.

Rule 5 Sunday: Alla Kostromichova

Animal Magnetism
Ninety Miles From Tyranny
A View From The Beach
EBL
Proof Positive

UKRAINE: Most Shocking News So Far
Al Fin Next Level
The Laughing Wolf
EBL
357 Magnum
Proof Positive

Is Ace of Spades ‘Cruel’?
EBL
357 Magnum

‘Well, Those Ukraine Girls Really Knock Me Out, They Leave the West Behind’
EBL

FMJRA 2.0: “Don’t Know What I’m Gonna Do”
A View From The Beach
EBL

The Jan. 6 Witch Hunt Committee
The Pirate’s Cove
EBL

Can You Say ‘Hate Hoax,’ Boys and Girls?
EBL
357 Magnum

The Problem With ‘Equality’
EBL

From Bad to Worse for Russia in Ukraine
Hogewash
EBL
357 Magnum

Key Victory for Ukraine?
EBL
357 Magnum

What Counts as ‘Russian Disinformation’?
EBL

In The Mailbox: 03.22.22
A View From The Mailbox
EBL
357 Magnum
Proof Positive

In The Mailbox: 03.23.22 (Afternoon Edition)
A View From The Mailbox
EBL
357 Magnum
Proof Positive

The Death of ‘Black Rabbit’
EBL
357 Magnum

Russians Surrounded in ‘Bucha Pocket’?
EBL
357 Magnum

In The Mailbox: 03.24.22 (Afternoon Edition)
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum
Proof Positive

In The Mailbox: 03.24.22 (Evening Edition)
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum
Proof Positive

Tax Dollars: ‘Six Porsches, Six BMWs, Two Mercedes-Benzes, a Ferrari, and a Tesla’
EBL
357 Magnum
Proof Positive

Ukraine: Fighting in Nemishaeve?
EBL
357 Magnum

In The Mailbox: 03.25.22
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum
Proof Positive

Top linkers for the week ending March 25:

EBL (21)
357 Magnum (14)
Proof Positive (8)
A View From The Beach (7)

Thanks to everyone for all the links!

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Category: FMJRA Award

Aspiring Rapper Update: ‘Baby Cino’ Gets Out of Jail, Immediately Gets Shot Dead

Posted on | March 27, 2022 | Comments Off on Aspiring Rapper Update: ‘Baby Cino’ Gets Out of Jail, Immediately Gets Shot Dead

Timothy Starks, a/k/a “Baby Cino,” was only 20 years old when he died Wednesday, shortly after getting bailed out of a Miami jail:

Minutes later, as the red Nissan he was riding in turned onto the Palmetto Expressway, he was suddenly ambushed by a gunman in another car in a wild daylight shooting in the middle of traffic.
Starks died in the hail of gunfire, shot in the head. He was still wearing the wristband given to inmates at the Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center.
Miami-Dade police on Thursday publicly identified Starks and a friend who picked him up from jail, Dante’ Collins Banks, 20, who also was wounded in the attack. Detectives have not identified a suspect, but did say “a dark-colored vehicle was seen fleeing the area at a high rate of speed.”
The shooter fired at least 40 times.
Multiple law-enforcement sources say the shooting is being probed for links to a series of public ambushes in recent months believed connected to Miami street gangs. That includes the January ambush murder of rapper Wavy Navy Pooh, who was shot to death in his car near Zoo Miami, and the murder of Brianna Sutherland, who was ambushed while driving on Interstate 95 on Valentine’s Day. Investigators do not believe she was the intended target.
As for Starks, he was associated with a Little Haiti area gang known as “Boss Life,” according to one source.
Online, where many local rappers can rise to fame quickly, Starks did not have a major presence. His main song, entitled “Big Haiti Shottas,” features him and a crew rapping about violence at an apartment building on Northwest Third Avenue and 56th Street.
The video, which has over 21,000 views, is also dedicated to Gary “Melo” Laguerre, an 18-year-old gunned down in a drive-by shooting in 2020 outside a Brownsville market.
Starks had been arrested in Opa-locka on Tuesday night by members of Miami-Dade Police’s Robbery Intervention Detail unit.
According to an arrest report, a RID detective pulled Starks over on Opa-locka Boulevard and Northwest 19th Avenue, for having an obstructed tag. When he was stopped, he was moving “as if he was concealing an object consistent with the shape of a firearm,” the report said.
Officers searched the car and found a fully loaded Glock 32, the report said.
According to jail records, Starks was booked into TGK just before 2 a.m. Wednesday. After posting bond, he was recorded as released at 2:10 p.m. The shooting happened within the hour, starting on the Palmetto near Hialeah, with the Nissan slamming into a concrete barrier wall.
Investigators are now trying to determine if Starks and Banks were followed from the jail — and how the attackers knew they were being released.

Maybe if you keep these hoodlums in jail, they won’t be getting shot dead on the streets. Just a suggestion. Not that I actually care.

Category: Aspiring Rapper Update, Florida

Ukraine: Combat Reported at Borodyanka

Posted on | March 27, 2022 | Comments Off on Ukraine: Combat Reported at Borodyanka

Just a single mention of fighting in a key crossroads town 45 miles northwest of Kyiv in this report from regional police, and we have no further details. However, as I mentioned Friday about reports of fighting at Nemishaeve, if the Ukrainian counter-offensive that recaptured Makariv were continued successfully, we would soon hear about fighting at Borodyanka, about 15 miles north of Makariv.

The same regional police report also mentions that fighting continues at Makariv, which may mean that Russian forces are dug in near there and trying to hold on, but if Ukrainians are also attacking at Borodyanka, the Russians remaining near Borodyanka would likely be cut off from supplies and reinforcements. Last night after we did our podcast, I was grumbling about the difficulty of getting timely accurate reports about the tactical situation near Kyiv, and John Hoge made the observation that the Ukrainian command could be limiting this information because of operational security concerns. Apparent confirmation of that can be found in this New York Times report, where several journalists made a tour of villages near Kyiv where the Russians had been driven out: “Russian forces were still just four miles away, but the commander asked that the village names not be published to safeguard his positions.” So we don’t know what areas the journalists toured, but if I had to guess, I’d point to Myla, 20 miles west of Kyiv on the E40 highway, and 8 miles south of Irpin. We know the Russians are holed up in a “pocket” around Irpin, Bucha and Hostomel, all of which are still contested, although the Ukrainians claim to have recaptured most of Irpin.

The battles in the east and south of Ukraine — Kharkiv, Mariupol, Kherson — may be larger than the ones near Kyiv, and in some ways equally important, but the fight to drive back the Russians near Kyiv is crucial to the war’s ultimate outcome. Putin and his commanders expected in the beginning (and many Western intelligence estimates agreed) that the Ukrainian capital would fall within a week, after a “shock-and-awe” attack that included an airborne capture of the Hostomel air field. Those expectations of a quick capture of Kyiv proved misguided, because the Ukrainians fought with more determination and skill than anyone had thought they would, and because the Russian army was so surprisingly inept. As recently as a week ago, however, it still seemed that the Russians might be able to bring forward their heavy artillery and begin raining down shells on Kyiv.

Now, however, it seems the tables have turned. The Ukrainians are now counterattacking, the Russians are on the defensive, and if Ukraine can maintain the momentum, they could either force a Russian retreat or perhaps even surround and destroy the invaders near the capital.

Category: Russia, Ukraine

Podcasting World War III

Posted on | March 26, 2022 | Comments Off on Podcasting World War III

Tonight on The Other Podcast (7 p.m. ET), my good friends John Hoge, Dianna Deeley and myself will be discussing the news of the week, including the latest blunder by Bumbling Joe Biden:

The White House was forced to once again clean up highly problematic remarks made by Democrat President Joe Biden during his trip to Poland this week.
“A dictator, bent on rebuilding an empire, will never erase the people’s love for liberty,” Biden said on Saturday at the Royal Castle in Warsaw. “Ukraine will never be a victory for Russia, for free people refuse to live in a world of hopelessness and darkness. For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”
The White House had to quickly clean up the president’s remarks after they were widely interpreted in reports as him calling for regime change in Russia.
“The President’s point was that Putin cannot be allowed to exercise power over his neighbors or the region,” a White House official said. “He was not discussing Putin’s power in Russia, or regime change.”

(Hat-tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.) It seems to me that Biden was reading off the teleprompter and just decided to add the “For God’s sake” thing, as part of his tough-guy take-’em-out-behind-the-school act. This was the second time in two days that the White House had to clean up Joe’s mess; on Friday, he told troops from the 82nd Airborne, stationed in Poland, that they were going to Ukraine.

In other World War III news, yet another Russian general has been killed in Ukraine, bringing their total to seven. We’ll talk about all this and more, so please tune in to The Other Podcast.

Category: Joe Biden, The Other Podcast, Ukraine

‘Alexa, What Is an Ideologue?’

Posted on | March 26, 2022 | Comments Off on ‘Alexa, What Is an Ideologue?’

This week’s Judiciary Committee hearings for Ketanji Brown Jackson were eye-opening in a lot of ways. Sen. Marsha Blackburn — whom I’ve considered a 2024 presidential contender for a long time — managed to embarrass Jackson with a very simple question:

Blackburn: “Can you provide a definition for the word ‘woman’?”
Jackson: “Can I provide a definition?”
Blackburn: “Mhmm, yeah.”
Jackson: “No, I can’t.”
Blackburn: “You can’t?”
Jackson: “Not in this context — I’m not a biologist.”

The “not in this context” part has been somewhat overlooked in the general point-and-laugh reaction to her “not a biologist” reply. As someone said, I’m not a veterinarian, but I know what a dog is. Nevertheless, as Byron York notes, the “context” is important because Blackburn prefaced her question by referencing the 1996 Supreme Court case of U.S. vs. Virginia, which declared that the all-male status of Virginia Military Institute was unconstitutional on Fourteenth Amendment grounds. It so happens that I believe that case was wrongly decided — a legal travesty, as the authors of the Fourteenth Amendment obviously had no such intent at the time the amendment was ratified.

In the hands of ideologues, the Fourteenth Amendment becomes an omnivorous predator that swallows whole the rest of the Constitution, like a great white shark gobbling up baby seals in shallow water. If you want to know how we got to the point that Will “Lia” Thomas is NCAA women’s swim champion, you can look back to U.S. v. Virginia as a milestone on the road to this madness of “equality.”

Anyone who directly opposes the radical egalitarian agenda can expect to be smeared as a “racist,” etc., as I remarked earlier this week (see “The Problem With ‘Equality’”), and it is therefore scarcely surprising to hear Democrats attacking Marsha Blackburn (“Can we just go set Marsha Blackburn on fire?”). Neither should we be surprised that academic “gender experts” rushed to defend Jackson.

Cited as “experts” by USA Today were Rebecca Jordan-Young, “a scientist and gender studies scholar at Barnard College,” Sarah Richardson, “a Harvard scholar, historian and philosopher of biology,” Juliet Williams, “a professor of gender studies at UCLA who specializes in gender and the law,” and Kate Mason, “a gender studies professor at Wheaton College who studies social inequality.”

The prestige of their positions as professors is thus thrown into the balance on Jackson’s side, and we are supposed to be so awed by this display of academic prestige that our critical faculties simply cease to function and we mutely accept the assertion that only “experts” are qualified to tell the difference between male and female. This consensus of academic “experts,” however, is an artifact of the ideological conformity that prevails in our nation’s education system which, in turn, is enforced through federal Title IX authority. Any university employee who expressed skepticism toward contemporary “gender theory” would face severe career repercussions, and might even become unemployable in academia. An ambitious young scholar is not going to find many opportunities to publish research that doesn’t support the prevailing gender theory narrative, so the artificial consensus of “experts” is maintained by the simple mechanism of silencing (or excluding from membership in the professorial guild) any would-be dissenters.

This regime of conformity has been enforced with increasing rigidity for the past three decades. Back in the late 1980s and early ’90s, there were still university professors who were outspoken in opposition to the ideology of radical egalitarianism, but those dissenters have retired, and the growing conformity of the academic system has prevented them from being replaced by like-minded scholars. Meanwhile, the fanatical beliefs that once were shocking when expressed by elite university professors (e.g., Judith Butler at Cal-Berkeley) have trickled down and become pervasive among nearly all college-educated young people. This is why, for example, you have elementary school teachers promoting LGBTQ ideology and telling them to keep it secret from their parents.

It is almost certain that the Senate will vote to confirm Judge Jackson’s nomination to the Supreme Court. If Joe Manchin won’t vote against her, that more or less guarantees her seat on the court. But we have learned something valuable about the beliefs of those who would rule over us.