Elon Musk, Paul Pelosi and the low status of factual information

Elon Musk is one of those figures whose presence on my radar screen was incidental. I knew the basics of his life story, was aware that he was the world's richest person, and could see that he had a slew of eccentricities. But I never regarded him as crucial to the direction of the world, at least in the short or intermediate term. Maybe one of his big ideas would eventually have some kind of major impact on human history, but not in the foreseeable future. 

Then his purchase of Twitter became a thing, and speculation ran rampant as to where he'd take the company. 

Okay. That seems like a natural reaction when Moneybags Number One makes such a move. But I didn't see how it was going to affect my ability to interact with the friends I've made on the site, or use it to disseminate LITD posts, Precipice essays or my occasional writings elsewhere.

But then comes along this series of moves:

Twitter's new owner Elon Musk appeared to have deleted a tweet posted on Sunday referencing an unfounded theory regarding the attack on the husband of U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi at their San Francisco home.

The since-deleted tweet was in response to one by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who blamed the attack on hateful rhetoric by the Republican Party and linked to an L.A. Times story about how the suspect promoted far-right conspiracy theories online.

"There is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye," Musk replied to Clinton, linking to a site called the Santa Monica Observer that fact-checkers have described as a purveyor of hoaxes, including that Clinton herself had died and been replaced by a body double. The Observer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

It's hard to find details about the allegation in the tweet now, since self-respecting news outlets are reluctant to perpetuate the unsubstantiated gay-lovers'-quarrel angle. But Musk's taking time to fool with it raises the question of why, as the new chief executive of a major social-media company, he doesn't have more important matters on his plate at present. 

Another speculative tidbit ought to be mentioned here. Trumpist sites like Breitbart and Gateway Pundit raised the question of whether a third person was in the Pelosi home when the police arrived, but San Francisco police and Tom Winter of NBC News shot that down pretty decisively. 

Whataboutists had some legit fodder to chew on in asking why coverage of the beating of a Marco Rubio canvasser was scant compared to that for the Pelosi incident. 

There's also the rush among Dems, certainly, and the occasional Republican such as Mitt Romney, to show that they are Caring Human Beings by stating their hopes for Paul Pelosi's full recovery and their assertion that there is no place for this kind of behavior in a civil society. I don't want to ascribe anything but laudable motives to these people, but it just strikes me as a little icky, sort of a let-the-record-show-I'm-not-one-of-those-despicable-creatures-making-this-incident-worse gesture. 

But the Dems among this bunch aren't above making hay over DePape's Qanon rantings on social media, as if he had it together mentally enough to be on board with the ultra-MAGA movement. He didn't. The guy lived in a nudist colony, for cryin' out loud, and had a slew of problems such as hard drug use. This is a pattern that has been detectable at least since that nutter in Tucson beaned Gabbby Giffords in the noggin. Most 21st century gun-wielders who shoot politicians or their associates more closely fit the model of unhinged marginal types than ideologically focused assassins. 

The main point here is that this story's only three days old, and it's already covered in layers of pure speculation. And the new owner of Twitter isn't helping matters any.

This is what we get in a nation so badly polarized - no, make that fractured - and so unable to distinguish the trivial and silly from the grave and profound. Too few care about objective truth to muster the patience for that to be revealed.

It's not going to get better. It's very late in the day.

 

Here's where to get clarity on all the threads in the tangled mess that is Russia's role in the 2016 election

David French at NRO admirably and succinctly examines all the factors and figures in the cluster of controversies surrounding the current administration, its immediate predecessor, Russia, and US politics. He lays it out in Q&A style, with the italicized questions representing the various aspects of the entire scenario about which the everyday American is curious. He covers it all: Manafort, Page and Flynn, the fakes-news phenomenon, the historically dismal approval numbers for both of last year's final candidates, the notion of a "deep state," what is problematic with the way Devin Nunes has behaved, what we do and don't know about Obama-era figures trying to hobble Trump from early on.

The way to give you a taste is with a look at the final question and answer:

Wait a minute, after more than 2,300 words, are you saying that we know Russia tried to interfere with the election, but we don’t know if Trump officials helped or colluded in any way, if Trump himself was involved in any way, if Obama officials have improperly unmasked or surveilled Trump’s team, or who any unlawful leakers were? Is this the least-helpful Q & A ever written?

The answer to all these questions except the last (I hope!) is “yes.” We don’t know the most important facts of the case, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t know anything important. It’s important and troubling to know that members of the intelligence community are seemingly leaking with impunity to damage Trump. It’s important and troubling to know that Trump has lost key aides because of their Russia ties, and that Trump and his team continue struggling to tell the truth about their Russian contacts. And it’s important and troubling to know that huge swaths of the American political establishment are being exposed as purely partisan.

The FBI is continuing its investigation, and so are the House and Senate intelligence committees (though Nunes’s House committee is in a state of chaos). Every major media publication is feverishly chasing the various threads of the story. It’s entirely possible that we’re not at the beginning of the end of this scandal, but rather at the end of the beginning. It’s also entirely possible that the end, when it comes, will leave political casualties on all sides, from bureaucrats who may face prosecution for unlawful leaks to public figures who may face ruin for unlawful or inappropriate foreign contacts.

One thing is clear: The Russian government has run one of the most cost-effective and disruptive espionage operations in history. Through a few simple hacks of the DNC, some basic online trolling, and garden-variety propaganda spread by modern means, the Kremlin has turned a superpower’s politics upside down. Its chief geopolitical rival is divided, with leaders obviously more furious at each other than at the foreign power who created the crisis. Russia may well face a day of reckoning for its attack on our democracy, but for now it has won, and the magnitude of its victory increases with each petty and partisan turn in Washington’s most consequential drama. 

Indeed. One big takeaway is that Russia is our adversary at best.

As I said the other day, though, LITD is not going to get mired in the latest supposedly hot development and run the risk of getting distracted by matters of speculation.

Big picture, folks, big picture.

Fissure upon fissure

I wrote yesterday of the new layer of complexity that the Michelle Fields incident imposes on the network of deep fissures within the conservative movement. Breitbart, for which Fields was working when she attempted to ask Squirrel-Hair about affirmative action at his March 10 presser, is pretty clearly at least mightily impressed with S-H. Some of its writers are clearly in the tank for S-H. (Some aren't. Ben Shapiro is one of the good guys.) But the site is now in a bind, given that the Washington Post's Ben Terris backs up Fields's story.

And now this:

Breitbart spokesman Kurt Bardella is no longer working with the company in the wake of controversy over Donald Trump’s campaign manager allegedly roughly handling one of the site’s reporters.

Bardella told BuzzFeed News on Friday that he had informed Breitbart of his decision to drop them as a client earlier this afternoon.

“When you can’t give an organization 100% of your ability, the best thing to do is move on just for yourself and for them,” Bardella, a former spokesman for Darrell Issa, said.

Asked if it would be fair to say he was parting ways with Breitbart because he disagrees with its handling of the situation with Michelle Fields, Bardella said “It would be fair for you to say that” but that he wasn’t going to.

“What I personally feel is one thing, but as someone who’s supposed to represent them at the public-facing side of this, I was at the point where I couldn’t give 100% of myself and best thing to do was to let them know that,” Bardella said.

Breitbart posted a story on Friday that called into question whether Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski did yank Fields at a press conference in Florida on Tuesday, appearing to side with the Trump campaign over their own reporter.

Fields filed a police report against Lewandowski, Independent Journal reported. The Trump campaign has denied that Lewandowski manhandled Fields at the press conference and has publicly impugned Fields, despite eyewitness accounts, audio, and video that back up her version of events.

Bardella couldn't overlook the creepiness any longer:

And in a CNN interview on Friday night, Bardella said he objects to Trump and believes Breitbart is lying about their skepticism of Fields’ account.

“I think that they’ve been looking for a reason to disprove something when all the evidence from the Washington Post reporter’s first-hand account, to the bruises on Michelle’s arm, all the photos and video clips that we’ve seen strongly suggest that Corey Lewandowski, Donald Trump’s campaign manager, was the one who did this,” he told Don Lemon. “And there’s no reason to never support your own reporter.”

“Are you saying they’re lying?” Lemon asked.

“Yes,” Bardella replied. “I am.”

Lemon asked Bardella if he believed Breitbart staffers had lied “all along.” Bardella said he believed that in the immediate aftermath of the incident there was confusion, but “I think that as it progressed, and as the evidence became more clear, there seemed to be resistance from Breitbart in supporting Michelle, and it’s something I just couldn’t understand.”

Bardella then explained when asked why he thinks Breitbart would cast doubt on Fields’ account that the site is “very supportive of the Trump campaign” and that “there’s a desire to want to believe the Trump campaign.”

Whooeee, I'll bet he's getting some hate mail along about now.

Well, now . . .

Talk about a game-changer:

Breaking new revelations in the controversy over the police shooting of 18-year old Michael Brown have not only changed the narrative completely, they probably guarantee that the police officer in question, Dennis Wilson, will be exonerated.

If not for new video evidence showing a person who has been positively identified as Brown committing strong-arm robbery nearby (at the same store which was looted and burned in the aftermath of his death), and just prior to the shooting incident, officer Wilson might have been railroaded as George Zimmerman nearly was last year, and falsely convicted of a very serious crime.

Lo and behold; the key witness at the scene of the shooting was Brown’s companion, Dorian Johnson, now revealed by published police reports to have been positively identified as being involved in the robbery himself.  That means his account of what happened is not credible in the slightest, besides being logically impossible and absurd to begin with.

Still images released from the damning store surveillance video show the massive, giant Brown physically manhandling and shoving the much smaller store clerk when the clerk tries to prevent Brown from exiting the premises with stolen items, items which the official incident report (also just recently published online) describes having been handed off to Brown’s companion.

The leftist spin for this one will have to be mighty slick indeed to pass anybody's smell test.

MSM reporter nonplussed by the MEC's demeanor

CNN correspondent doesn't quite know what to make of the MEC's dispassionate, bureaucratic response to his meeting with Shinseki:

Drew Griffin, a CNN reporter who has followed and broken several stories regarding the Department of Veterans Affairs scandal, was in disbelief over President Obama’s inaction following his private meeting with Secretary Eric Shinseki. The president indicated that the administration would continue to look into the situation before doing anything.

“I was a little caught off-guard by what apparently is a disconnect by what’s happening out here in the country and what the president is talking about,” Griffin said after the president’s briefing. “I hate to be curt, but these GAO reports, these Office of Inspector General, these memos dating back to 2010 to 2008 — this problem is real, it exists, it really doesn’t have to be studied as to what’s going on.”

“The government has done its job studying these issues,” he continued. “To say that you are going to now wait for yet again for more studies to come back and more fact-finding to come back, I would think that the vets I’ve been talking to wanted much more direct action of what actually is going to happen going forward instead of, ‘Wait and see, and then we’ll decide what’s going to happen going forward.’”

I'm not sure why he is surprised.  The MEC's modus operandi has always been, "You guys conduct a  study on this.  I'll take my cell phone with me to the golf course."

Michael Sam's boyfriend is quite the little tart

Did you know this about Vito Cammisato?

Little Vito is not just some innocent design major that Sam happened to bump into at a Starbucks on the Mizzou campus. No, he is known as -- and I’m not making this up -- a “power bottom” in the celebrity gay dating scene.  He apparently had a very public affair with a known gay porn star. He and Michael Sam are now a power couple now in such circles. Amazing what you can find out on a search engine.

So what does this say about Sam? Obviously he prioritizes making a pro gay statement over all else. His very choice of significant other screams it. He is dating a gay celebrity, and now he is one too.

Will this noteworthy little factoid get covered on the Oprah-produced reality show, the deal for which was inked before Sam was signed by St. Louis, and the cameras for which were in the room to cover the kiss?

Why I haven't blogged about the Bundy cattle standoff

It was clear from the get-go that this was no hill for righties to die on.  Bundy didn't have a legal leg to stand on.  If a story involves sensational trappings such as armed government agencies surrounding some location, the lines had better be very clear.  That's usually not the case.

But just listening to the guy over the past couple of weeks gave me a pretty strong indication that there was a bit of yay-hoo-ism to his worldview, and now that's been pretty much confirmed.

Looks like this one did have an ideological angle

Sociologists, historians and cultural observers will be busy for years examining the underlying reasons for the rise in occurrences of public places getting shot up in the past few years.  Of course, the unhinged left has rushed forward after each one with shrill pronouncements of a "climate of hate" supposedly fostered by right-of-center opinion outlets.  And, of course, they've been proven wrong, every time.

This afternoon's mayhem at the Family Research Council in Washington, D.C. appears to actually have an ideological angle, but it would be the reverse of the one the Left tried to get us to buy before.  Obviously, we need to know a lot more details, but it seems the gunman shouted something about the FRC having hateful policies before he let loose.

Socialism and what the encounter with the delivery person on your porch will now set you back

Papa John's CEO says the cost of the company's pizzas is going to increase due to FHer-care.

The obligatory Aurora, Colorado post

Perhaps a post on yesterday's movie-theater shooting has been conspicuous by its absence.  The fact is, there's not much to say.

A lot of discussion I've been hearing about it, from all sides, has a tone along the lines of "Of course, the shooter is principally to blame, but what underlying factors do we as a society need to examine?"  Some want such a premise to lead to an argument for gun control.  Others want it to lead to reflection on the state of rot that characterizes the modern entertainment industry.

These are worthy discussions to have, but the fact of the matter is that awful random occurrences - natural disasters, plane wrecks, nut-case mass murders - are a statistical inevitability that, if we are going to be grounded in reality, must be factored into our worldview.

It looks like the case is pretty damn weak

Per ABC, witness and police reports from the night of the shooting corroborate Zimmerman's own account of the death of Trayvon Martin.

Truth, 1 race-baiters, 0

Medical and autopsy reports confirm that George Zimmerman had a broken nose and that Trayvon Martin had bloody knuckles.

And the attorney for Trayvon's family concedes that there was likely a fight.

And in the interest of getting all the facts before us . . .

George Zimmerman is a registered Democrat.