Conspiracy theories and headlines for later reading

I am busy today, so for later reading so I can figure out the nuances of WTF is going on:

AnnAlthouse on the purple prose in a NYTimes report on conspiracy theories.

So reports the NYT, sounding rather terrified, don't you think? "Russia’s brazen meddling"... "a power never before used"... "a dangerous effort to build a narrative"... "cherry-picked facts assembled with little or no context"... What's really the problem with a dangerous effort to build a narrative" and "cherry-picked facts assembled with little or no context"? Isn't that what we face every day when we read the newspaper?

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The Federalist on McCabe and leaking.

This story gives a glimpse into how that original Russia narrative may have been spread around to overly compliant journalists and other members of the “resistance.”

It was the hysteria surrounding this and other stories that led the White House to be frustrated with a law enforcement agency and chief playing games.

As Comey admitted under oath, he did tell President Trump three times that Trump was not under investigation. These private statements to Trump occurred while Comey publicly insinuated the opposite. This story above fits the same pattern.

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VDH: from conspiracy theories to conspiracies

What better way to derail a presidency would there be than to allow a blank-check special counsel to search out alleged criminal activity on the part of the president?

We have seen FBI Director James Comey confess that he deliberately leaked, likely illegally, confidential notes of a meeting with president Trump to the media, with the expressed intent of creating a “scandal” requiring a “special counsel”—a gambit that worked to perfection when Comey’s close friend, former FBI Director Robert Mueller was appointed.

To facilitate those efforts, the counsel would appoint to his team several attorneys who despised the very target of their investigation. In fact, many special investigators have given generously to the campaign of Trump’s past political opponent Hillary Clinton and in at least one case had worked previously for the Clinton Foundation.

or as we were warned in our psychiatry training: Yes, the guy's probably paranoid if he says the Mafia is out to kill him, but first check if the Mafia is really out to kill him.

headsup Instapundit
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Speaking of Instapundit: GlennReynolds has an editorial column in USAToday about the Supreme Court representing the "kids in the front row" (i.e. the urban elites).

There’s nothing wrong with thoroughbreds as such, and if the court decided only narrow technical issues of law none of this would matter. But some of the most important social issues of the day come before the court, and given its members’ insularity, the problem is not just that Back Row America’s values won’t be considered — it’s that the court might not even realize it’s ignoring them.

as Reynolds often quips: THIS is how you got Trump.

FYI: this has international implications: the US/UN/EU elites had the power to push poor countries to implement these values at the cost of losing aid.

Yet they didn't see how their liberal sexual agenda, which has decimated the family and the social cohesion in the west, would be even more dangerous to countries where families, not the state, are the source of caring for people.

Even the Pope has complained of this.

And speaking of fake news: The Pope complained of fake news, but it is hard to tell with him, because the reports are filtered through a Catholic press with a liberal agenda, or via the MSM who is clueless and also has an agenda... but reading the news reports, it seems that he (or more probably his minions) just want to ignore questions by thoughtful Catholic bishops and scholars who oppose those trying to morph Catholicism into a PC church that has little in common with 2000 years of Catholicism.

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 Heh. the Philippines has discovered a "new way of bribery".

no more payola, it's now called "demurrage":

When the release of a shipment is delayed, the importer is forced to fork out the amount they are asking to facilitate the flow of documents for their eventual release),” he explained.

in other words, a small gift to get the paperwork done. Nothing new about that: just a new word to describe a bribe to do the work you are supposed to do.

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Philippines is asking the French drug company to refund what they were paid for that risky Dengue vaccine that was pushed on us without mentioning that although it cut ordinary dengue, it could increase the rate of fatal dengue.

No report on whose palm was greased to push this, or if the Philippines was chosen to be the guinea pig to see if the vaccine worked as it was supposed to do (i.e. that it was still an experimental vaccine but we weren't told that) .

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