Society's ChildS


NPC

Washington Post does about-face on Covid-19 plasma treatment the moment Trump comes out in favor


RT
Tue, 25 Aug 2020 21:21 UTC
plasma
© Reuters / Lindsey Wasson
Media coverage of a promising Covid-19 treatment has flipped from supportive to negative, a US health official has revealed, suggesting the president's praise of the treatment might relate to it falling out of favor.

The Washington Post's outlook on using blood plasma from recovered Covid-19 patients to treat the sick has flipped from optimistic to skeptical following a Sunday announcement from US President Donald Trump that the treatment has received emergency approval by the Food and Drug Administration. The switch in coverage was noted by the spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services on Monday.

Despite promising preliminary results, including data from a large Mayo Clinic study suggesting plasma treatments can significantly reduce mortality, the newspaper appears to have done a 180 on what had been very positive coverage of the treatment, publishing a story on Monday headlined "Scientists express doubts about coronavirus treatment touted as breakthrough by Trump."

Comment: Maybe Trump can do us all a favor by coming out in favor of mandatory vaccinations, thereby forcing the Leftist Media to immediately denounce vaccines.

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X

Poll: Joe Biden gets no bounce after DNC but leads Trump by 9

Kyle Olson
Breitbart
Sat, 22 Aug 2020 00:00 UTC
Biden stare
© AP/Andrew HarnikJoe Biden's stare at the DNC convention
Joe Biden achieved no immediate bounce after the Democratic National Convention (DNC), a poll found.

Morning Consult reported that Biden went into the DNC with the support of 51 percent of likely voters. Biden ticked up only one point after the convention to 52 percent. Donald Trump remained at 43 percent in both polls. That was in contrast to a similar poll in 2016 that found Hillary Clinton at 40 percent pre-DNC and 43 percent after. Trump experienced the reverse: 44 percent before the DNC, 40 percent after.

In 2020, only six percent of voters said they were undecided after the convention. That number was 17 percent in 2016.

In 1992, Bill Clinton won a 16-point bounce after the DNC to catapult himself over incumbent President George H.W. Bush, according to Politico.

Biden's lack of any significant bounce is better than what happened to Mitt Romney in 2012 when Romney actually lost a point in the standings.

The RealClearPolitics (RCP) average of polls found Biden has led Trump since at least last October. RCP's average of polls found Biden is 7.6 percent ahead of Trump.

Comment: The results depend on who, how many and political orientation of the sample to determine the relative validity of a numerical tally. Let's see their promo, affiliations and to whom they cater:
About itself: Morning Consult is the official polling partner of POLITICO, Fortune, New York Times, and Bloomberg News. Morning Consult also has a news section that is centered around polling and trends. Typically, there is minimal bias presented such as this: Detroit Debates Deliver Meager Returns for Biden's Challengers. A factual search reveals they have not failed a fact check. In fact, their polls are frequently used by IFCN fact-checkers as evidence.

Overall, we rate the Morning Consult 'Least Biased' based on mostly neutral polling and low biased story selection. We also rate them Very High for factual reporting due to a proven polling methodology as well as being a reliable source for fact-checkers. (D. Van Zandt 10/31/2016) Updated (8/3/2019) Source: https://morningconsult.com/
RealClearPolitics: One of our most notable features, the RCP Poll Average, changed the way people talk about public opinion surveys during the election cycle. The most cited source for U.S. political polling information, the RCP Poll Average provides everyone from political experts and campaign consultants to amateur political junkies a more accurate read on the status of the election.

The accuracy of the RCP Poll Average is unmatched and trusted for use in Bloomberg terminals and campaign communication documents, as well as being widely cited by hundreds of news organizations including The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Financial Times, FOX News, CNN, USA Today, and MSNBC.
FiveThirtyEight, a company founded by Nate Silver (who published under the name Poblano for political blog Daily Kos), had been partnered with The New York Times, then passed to ESPN. The final prediction by FiveThirtyEight on the morning of election day (November 8, 2016) was at 10:41AM and had Hillary Clinton with a 71% chance to win the 2016 presidential election.

FiveThirtyEight, a company that rates pollsters for accuracy and bias, gives Morning Consult a B- for accuracy and a slight leftward bias of 0.6%. (as per source Morning Consult)

FiveThirtyEight was acquired by ABC News on Apr 17, 2018.
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Arrow Up

We need to be braver

Andrew Doyle
Spiked
Wed, 05 Aug 2020 00:00 UTC
BLM megaphoner
© UnknownBLM Scream
Standing up to woke intolerance isn't easy. But we must do it.

During a recent conversation about groupthink in the arts, a playwright friend of mine told me about his experience last year of rehearsing his latest drama. A director had been enlisted to take charge, and from the outset was determined to impose his ideological values on to the production. Before long he was cutting lines that he considered 'problematic', and policing how these topics were discussed in rehearsal. The characters as portrayed in the script were morally ambiguous but, to the frustration of the writer, this director was adamant that the show must convey the 'correct' message. For him, theatre was simply another tool to spread the word of social justice.

Anyone who works in the arts will be aware of the deleterious impact that woke politics has had on creative freedom, although few will be bold enough to admit it publicly. That this director was enjoying his power was obvious, and I did suggest to my friend that perhaps a more open-minded practitioner might have improved the process. 'That's the trouble', he said to me, 'we couldn't find one'. By the time the production's run had started, my friend was struck by a terrible realisation. He had been treating this director as one might a dangerous dog: overly anxious not to cause him any displeasure, and always aware that he could lash out and bite at any moment.
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Stormtrooper

Spain calls in its army 'to fight COVID-19 resurgence' (really, to suppress growing resistance)


Euronews
Tue, 25 Aug 2020 18:06 UTC
people waiting Coronavirus test
© AFPPeople queue to be tested for coronavirus in Guernica
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez announced on Tuesday he was making the army available to help regions fight a new explosion of coronavirus cases.

"The Spanish government will provide the regions with the strength of the armed forces to carry out the tracing" of cases, he said during a televised address, specifying that 2,000 soldiers would be deployed for this purpose.

Sanchez said the evolution of the pandemic in Spain is "worrying" but stressed it is still far from its height in mid-March.
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Star of David

Avoiding the P-word: How Palestine is being deleted

David Kattenburg
Mondoweiss
Mon, 24 Aug 2020 17:29 UTC
graffitte Qalandia checkpoint israel
© David KattenbergGraffitti near Qalandia checkpoint
The Israel-Palestine 'conflict' (a deceptive term, some say) is largely a war of words. Pitched battles have been fought over nouns, adjectives — even definite articles.

Last week, under pressure from a group that polices the Canadian media on behalf of the 'Jewish state', CBC Radio host Duncan McCue issued an on-air apology for using the word "Palestine" in an interview on the Public Broadcaster's flagship current affairs show, The Current. Like a real-life Winston Smith, a CBC digital editor swiftly excised the offending toponym from the online version of McCue's CBC interview and dispatched it down the memory hole.

Had Mr. McCue uttered the word "Palestine" in the course of an interview with a Palestinian politician or commentator, his objectivity may well have been faulted. In fact, his guest on the August 18 edition of CBC's The Current was the graphic novelist Joe Sacco, creator of a work called Palestine.
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Black Magic

On the rise of self-imposed racial segregation: Universities now offering black-only dormitories

Frank Furedi
RT
Tue, 25 Aug 2020 16:41 UTC
segregation signs black white
© Getty Images / Walter Bibikow
Martin Luther King would be appalled

When students return to university next week, many will need to prepare for living and eating only with people of the same color. Whatever happened to the dream of a desegregated country?

Racial segregation is a really bad idea. So it is not surprising that advocates of identity politics are demanding that black-only dormitories should be established on American campuses.

The Washington Square News, the undergraduate students' paper of New York University (NYU), recently reported that the university was willing to "help implement residential communities open solely to 'Black identifying students with Black Residents Assistants.'" NYU aims to establish such a segregated residential floor by autumn 2021.

Comment:

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Corona

KFC drops 'Finger Lickin' Good' slogan during coronavirus pandemic

Zachary Halaschak
Washington Examiner
Mon, 24 Aug 2020 16:30 UTC
KFC, Kentucky Fried Chicken, billboard
© KFC
KFC's chicken is "finger lickin' good," but it will no longer be using the slogan given the coronavirus pandemic.

The Kentucky-based fast-food restaurant chain announced the change on Monday in a playful news release where KFC declared itself the "winner of the award for the most inappropriate slogan for 2020."

"Think we can all agree, this year has been like no other and, right now, our slogan doesn't feel quite right," the company said. "So, for that reason, we'll be pressing pause on using it in our advertising, for a little while."

The change in advertising will affect its more than 20,000 stores worldwide, but KFC stressed that the slogan will return "when the time is right."

In the United States, there have been roughly 5.7 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 and at least 177,000 related deaths.

Comment:





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Briefcase

Mark Zuckerberg reportedly encouraged Trump to crack down on TikTok, and now it's planning to sue

Kathryn Krawczyk
Yahoo! News
Mon, 24 Aug 2020 16:25 UTC
TikTok, American flag, US flag
TikTok announced in a Monday blog post that it will sue the Trump administration.

President Trump has repeatedly tossed around the idea of a ban on the Chinese-owned video app, and earlier in August, ordered American companies to stop doing business with TikTok's parent company ByteDance. The order "strips the rights" of TikTok users "without any evidence to justify such an extreme action," TikTok said in its blog post, adding that it "strongly disagree[s] with the administration's position that TikTok is a national security threat. So it will file a lawsuit against the administration, arguing the order violates TikTok's due process rights.
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NPC

NYU student group demands Black-only student housing on campus

Evie Fordham
Fox News
Mon, 24 Aug 2020 21:32 UTC
New York University
© iStock
New York University officials signaled they are open to a student group's demands to create Black residence floors on campus next year, but the petition is already receiving backlash for proposing students segregate themselves.

"[Residential] Life staff have reached out to the authors of the petition to discuss how we might move forward with their goals," an NYU spokesperson told Washington Square News, NYU's student newspaper. "Given the COVID-related challenges to the student housing system for 2020-2021, these conversations would be aiming towards 2021-2022."

A "themed engagement floor" for Black students is being pushed by a group called Black Violets NYU. "Marginalized groups" like queer students and international students already have access to such floors, Black Violets told Fox News in a statement.

Comment: It's amazing how the new "progressive" line is exactly the same as that of racist American Jim Crow laws of a century ago. How is this considered progress exactly?

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Rainbow

Berlin Film Festival to make acting prizes 'gender neutral'


Breitbart
Mon, 24 Aug 2020 00:01 UTC
berlin arch pride colors
© Adam Berry/Getty Images
The organizers of the Berlin International Film Festival say they will stop awarding separate acting prizes to women and men beginning next year.

Berlinale organizers said Monday the performance awards will be defined in a gender-neutral way at next year's festival, for which a physical event is planned.

The festival awards a Golden Bear for the best film and a series of Silver Bears, which until this year included best actor and best actress honors. Organizers said those prizes will be replaced with a Silver Bear for Best Leading Performance and a Silver Bear for Best Supporting Performance.

Comment: They've been talking about not having separate categories for best actor and actress for years, long before the rise of wokeness. While it seems an egalitarian move, the problem is that they will be going from having two actors awarded for their performance down to one. The complaint from actresses in days gone by is that they would end up winning no awards for outstanding performances because there are more opportunities for award-winning roles offered to men. In the age of political correctness, however, we may see the roles reversed, with actors always missing out on deserved awards due to the presence of external genitalia rather than being outshined on the screen.

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