Nice Time! Central Park Birder Guy Gets Own TV Show, For The Birds!
It will not actually be called 'For The Birds,' silly.
You probably remember Christian Cooper, the Black man who in 2020 was screamed at by a super privileged white lady because he asked her to please leash her dog in Central Park's "Ramble," a birding spot where dogs aren't allowed to run loose. He recorded her freaking out and phoning police to report she was being threatened by "an African American man," and falsely accusing him of threatening her life — while she also choked her dog by lifting it up by the collar. It was the Platonic Ideal of white panic that summer, a white person apparently trying to get police to come and get rid of — and maybe shoot to death — a Black person for the crime of being Black in public. Well, and for catching her breaking park rules, which is terrifying too.
In the aftermath of that horror, America also got to find out that not only was Mr. Cooper the target of racism, he was also just a hell of a nice guy who was as passionate about birding as the white lady was about trying to get that scary Black man arrested for existing in her presence.
He also turned out to be telegenic as all get out. A lifelong birder, environmentalist, gay activist, and nerd (he worked as an editor at Marvel Comics and introduced the first gay character in Star Trek comics), Cooper was boffo on camera, and before long he was doing guest spots on science shows, like this nifty vid from PBS's NOVA, in which he talks about the importance of diversity in outdoorsy stuff:
And now, hooray, Cooper has parleyed his many TV appearances into an actual job in TV. He'll be hosting a National Geographic series to be called "Extraordinary Birder," in which he'll basically share his love of birds and birding.
We bet it'll be way better than this press release from National Geographic, which is a bit too National Geographic press release-y for our taste:
Life-long birder Christian Cooper takes us into the wild, wonderful and unpredictable world of birds. Whether braving stormy seas in Alaska for puffins, trekking into rainforests in Puerto Rico for parrots, or scaling a bridge in Manhattan for a peregrine falcon, he does whatever it takes to learn about these extraordinary feathered creatures and show us the remarkable world in the sky above.
Well okay.
For a better sense of Christian Cooper nerding out about birds, watch this segment from ABC's "Good Morning America" (Yes, ABC and National Geographic are both owned by Disney) that aired a few weeks after his encounter with the racist lady. The only word to describe him here is "ebullient." This man doesn't just love birds, he loves talking about birds and birding to others, clearly in the hope that they will become infected with birding flu.
You can skip right past the clip of the video that made him famous; it's the birding stuff that feels like an audition for National Geographic. And as it happens, it might well have been, since he tells the New York Times he first heard from National Geographic about doing the show around a year and a half ago.
“I was all in,” he said. The six planned episodes will feature Cooper birding in deserts, cities, rainforests and the rural South.
“I love spreading the gospel of birding,” he said in an interview on Tuesday, adding that he was looking forward to encouraging more people “to stop and watch and listen and really start appreciating the absolutely spectacular creatures that we have among us.”
I've always liked birders, ever since that time around 1986 when my first wife and I went camping at a remote campground in the Chiricahua Mountains in Arizona, ages ago. We had a hell of a time getting our little Datsun 510 up the road, which was incredibly rough — a county road, but still probably better if you had 4-wheel drive.
We camped near an older couple who had somehow maneuvered a biggish RV up there, and from our campsite, we could hear them reading aloud to each other from birding books and talking enthusiastically about birds. They were marvelous sweet people who had clearly mated for life.
I haven't yet met any birders who've spoiled that impression, so please, if you know any asshole birders, don't introduce me.
Now, Christian Cooper and his six-episode show — no release date yet, sorry — may not make me want to take the plunge and become a birder. But he absolutely makes me want to watch him birding.
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Egad, A Dinesh D'Souza Movie LIED? Fetch Forth My Smelling Salts!
Next you'll say the movie's entire premise is bad just because it is.
Poor Dinesh D'Souza can't seem to get a break, apart from his pardon from Donald Trump, his constant appearances in rightwing media, and all the money he gets from adoring low-information fans. His latest documentary-shaped object, 2000 Mules, alleges there's evidence off rampant voting fraud in the 2020 election. But it's being ignored by Tucker Carlson and even Newsmax, and there's practically nothing too stupid or crazy for Newsmax.
Read More: No One Taking Dinesh D'Souza's Documentary Seriously, Except Other People Who Also Make Things Up
And now some snotty liberal fact checkers at NPR have confirmed that one of the film's central claims is just plain false. In the film, the bogus "election integrity" group True the Vote claims it used cellphone tracking data to prove massive voter fraud; to show just how reliable its methods are, the group claimed its data analysis even helped solve a MURDER that had police baffled.
But as NPR explains, hahaha LOL LMAO True the Vote didn't solve dick. (Slight paraphrase of NPR.) Also, have we mentioned D'Souza was himself convicted of election fraud? But he was pardoned, so now he's blameless.
The claim was so impressive that Donald Trump spokesperson Liz Harrington gushed that True the Vote
"solved a murder of a young little girl in Atlanta. I mean, they are heroes." Fans of the film have echoed that message on social media.
Unfortunately, that's a load of codswallop:
Authorities in Georgia arrested and secured indictments against two suspects in the murder of Secoriea Turner in August 2021.
In response to NPR's inquiries, True The Vote acknowledged it had contacted law enforcement more than two months later, meaning it played no role in those arrests or indictments.
That's not just NPR proving the claim is false; that's True the Vote admitting it didn't solve, as we say, dick.
Phone-y Business
The movie purports that True The Vote proved a massive vote fraud effort by analyzing a shitload of phone geolocation data purchased from companies what track location information from phones and other mobile devices. Supposedly, the data identifies around 2,000 people who made at least 10 visits each to absentee ballot drop boxes, many of them located in different parts of cities, as well as to a number of nonprofit groups. They're the "mules" of the title, because mail-in voting is just like drug dealing! (Yes, the movie refers to "ballot trafficking" and calls the nonprofits "stash houses," because of course it does. These may be terms Dinesh learned in prison.)
The phone data supposedly "proves" the nonprofit groups were paying people to pick up ballots and to stuff the drop boxes! But as fact checks by the AP, and by Politifact, and by the Washington Post have all pointed out, the tracking data can only indicate a general location. It isn't anywhere near granular enough to prove even that someone was standing next to a drop box, much less that they put ballots (legally or illegally) inside. And since elections authorities put drop boxes in places people are likely to find convenient, there are plenty of reasons one person might have been near those locations at various different times without going up to a ballot drop box. (In Atlanta, for instance, 28 of Fulton County's 36 drop boxes were at public libraries.)
Murder, They Vote
Now, back to the murder claim. In the movie, True the Vote's executive director Catherine Engelbrecht and board member Gregg Phillips (who also have executive producer credits on the film) claim their analysis was so good it helped solved not one but two murders, both of which were "ebbing on cold case status." But they only talk about one, the killing of eight-year-old Secoriea Turner in Atlanta on July 4, 2020.
Phillips says he and his team obtained device data from the area of the shooting, which showed "only a handful of unique devices that could have pulled the trigger...each of these devices has a unique device ID, and we turned the bulk of this information over to the Federal Bureau of Investigation."
"Now, I read they've arrested two suspects," D'Souza responds to Phillips.
"They have," Phillips says.
Also too, on a podcast flogging the film, D'Souza made an even more specific claim, that True The Vote gave its data to the FBI, and that the feds passed on the data to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.
"Shortly after that," D'Souza said, "boom" - there were two arrests and indictments.
NPR contacted the GBI to fact-check this claim.
"The GBI did not receive information from True the Vote that connected to the Secoriea Turner investigation," said Nelly Miles, the GBI's Director of the Office of Public and Governmental Affairs.
Aha. Neither Engelbrecht nor Phillips would give NPR an interview, but Engelbrecht did send an email saying that she
"called a contact at the FBI" and Phillips gave him the information about the Turner case "on or about October 25, 2021."
That would have been about two months after both suspects had already been indicted, on August 13. And contrary to Engelbrecht's assertion that the case was nearly "cold," police had arrested one of the two suspects within two weeks of the murder. Indeed, he turned himself in. The second suspect was arrested in early August. As WaPo's Philip Bump points out, "There is no indication that geolocation data played a role in either arrest, much less data provided by Phillips’s team."
So nope, True the Vote didn't solve dick. Like, maybe its data did include the two suspects' phones? But by the time that analysis was done, the alleged killers' names were already in the news for a couple months. Oh look, you found their phones somehow.
Antifa Super Soldier Vote Mules!!!@!
NPR points out other problems with the movie's assertions, debunking a claim D'Souza made in an interview that the phone data also matched up with another organization's data, to prove that some of the "mules" had also been Antifa rioters!!!!!
"There is an international organization called ACLED [Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project] that monitors the cell phones of all violent rioters around the world," D'Souza said on the Dan Bongino Show. "What True The Vote did was they took the cell phone data on the mules and matched it against the ACLED data on the rioters. And guess what? There's a pretty big overlap."
In the film, Phillips also cites ACLED, which is a nonprofit research organization.
"There's an organization that tracks the device IDs across all violent protests around the world. We took a look at our 242 mules in Atlanta and, sure enough, dozens and dozens and dozens of our mules show up on the ACLED databases," Phillips says in the film. "This is not grandma out walking her dog, these are, you know, violent criminals sometimes."
First of all, that Dinesh D'Souza quote right there -- "There is an international organization called ACLED [Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project] that monitors the cell phones of all violent rioters around the world" -- can only be spoken by someone utterly confident that their target audience is absolutely fucking clueless about how everything in the entire works.
Even so, Sam Jones, a spox for ACLED, said both claims were "categorically false," and that it's "highly unlikely that these conclusions have any basis in fact." ACLED's director of research and innovation, Roudabeh Kishi, noted that the company "does not track device ID" at all.
And while ACLED does track riots and other violent incidents, plus peaceful protests,
Their data do not include specific locations inside a city - such as neighborhoods or city blocks - where protests took place. ACLED does not track the time of day of those incidents or generally note individual participants, except for high-profile leaders.
Kishi said nobody from the film had contacted the company at all.
Engelbrecht had an explanation, though! When Phillips said, "There's an organization that tracks the device IDs across all violent protests," he didn't mean ACLED, although she wouldn't identify where the supposed data proving "mules" had also been rioting came from. As for D'Souza's statement that the data came from ACLED, she wrote, "If you have questions about Dinesh's comments, my suggestion would be to ask Dinesh." Conveniently, D'Souza didn't respond to NPR's interview requests.
Dinesh Explains It (Not At) All
Now, we should at least note that D'Souza, grumpified by an earlier article Philip Bump wrote about the problems with trying to use phone data to prove "ballot trafficking," did sit down for an interview with Bump to explain why, logically, the movie's conclusions are 100 percent true. As Bump puts it, the takeaway is that the hourlong interview "can be summarized fairly succinctly: D’Souza admits his movie does not show evidence to prove his claims about ballots being collected and submitted."
D'Souza can't even prove that the "whistleblower" the movie claims blew the lid off the fraud scheme even exists. He never met the guy, who wanted to remain anonymous.
But he frequently tells Bump it's really unfair and illogical to demand he provide evidence that any of the "mules" the movie talks about submitted even a single illegal ballot, so that's amusing. He also accuses Bump of "armchair theorizing" about his great big MAGA fanfiction of a movie.
Read it only if you want to burn one of your free WaPo reads this month; it's not worth using one of my "gift" linkies for.
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Say Goodbye To Lukewarm Coffee! Tabs, Thurs., May 19, 2022
Um. drink it faster? It's Tabs!
Federal health officials warn that a third of the American populace lives in areas with rising rates of COVID-19, and should consider masking up indoors in public again The riskiest areas are currently in the Midwest and the Northeast US. Why no, Republicans have not agreed to pass COVID funding. [PBS Newshour]
The Biden administration still has lots of free rapid home COVID tests for you, so you can request another eight free test kits at the easy to remember covidtests.gov. Yes, even if you already received four tests in each of the two previous rounds! [NPR]
Now that genuine insurrectionist and Big Lie promoter Doug Mastriano has won the GOP nomination for governor in Pennsylvania, you may want to go back and read Eliza Griswold's May 2021 New Yorker profile outlining his "Christian nationalist" beliefs, which boil down to Jesus made America to be a Jesus country, so let's do theocracy! Gahh! [New Yorker]
They're still counting votes in the Pennsylvania GOP Senate primary, but that didn't stop Donald Trump from jumping in with some advice for his endorsed candidate, Dr. Mehmet Oz. On his MAGA social network, Trump wrote that Oz "should declare victory. It makes it much harder for them to cheat with the ballots that they just happened to find," After all, why bother counting votes when you can just insist you won and other Republicans cheated? Hell, maybe Trump thinks the other primary candidates are Democrats. [CNN]
George W. Bush had a pretty terrible Freudian slip in Dallas Wednesday. While condemning Russia's authoritarian government under Vladimir Putin, he seemed to admit a hell of a thing:
Speaking in Dallas this afternoon, former President George. W Bush made a significant verbal slip-up while discussing the war in Ukraine. \n\nHe tried referencing what he described as the \u201cwholly unjustified and brutal invasion\u201d \u2014 but said Iraq, instead of Ukraine.pic.twitter.com/tw0VNJzKmE— Michael Williams (@Michael Williams) 1652918774
The result is an absence of checks and balances in Russia, and the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq ... I mean, of Ukraine.
Bush then joked "I'm 75," as the audience laughed.
4,431 US service members and several hundred thousand Iraqis, most of them civilians, were unavailable for comment forever. [Reuters]
The US Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), the government watchdog set up to monitor the US military adventure in Afghanistan, released an interim report on the collapse of the Afghan military last summer, concluding that the US decision to withdraw from the country and to make a deal with the Taliban led to a catastrophic collapse of morale. The Afghan military also relied heavily on US contractors for logistical support and maintenance for the advanced weapons systems the US provided, so the US withdrawal meant those awesome war toys were next to useless. As is typical with SIGAR reports, this one found plenty of fault to go around, from corruption in the Afghan government to a lack of coordination in the US agencies that were supposed to be preparing the Afghan military to fight on its own. [NPR]
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is being a butt, and has blocked bids by Sweden and Finland to join NATO. He accuses the two Nordic countries of harboring militants who belong to the PKK, the Kurdistan Workers Party, which seeks an independent Kurdish state in Turkey. He's demanding they be extradited (so he can execute them, one assumes) before he'll consider letting Sweden and Finland join NATO. So that's going to need some diplomacy. [CNN]
Now here's a thing that's never going to happen: An Apple autonomous car with no windows, also no steering wheel or pedals. It's all purely conjectural at this point, but hey, concept art:
Apple's self-driving car could feature VR technology and no windows: https://vrscout.com/news/the-apple-car-could-feature-vr-technology-and-no-windows/\u00a0\u2026pic.twitter.com/YCwrVrJRjc— VRScout (@VRScout) 1652821148
Thank goodness for smartasses with photoshop:
pic.twitter.com/0EPGr74uFt— Jo (@Jo) 1652906887
Grubhub has apologized for a boneheaded promotion that offered $15 off any order to customers in New York City for three hours Tuesday, which meant lunches costing less than that would be free. Just one little problem: Grubhub neglected to tell restaurants about the plan, so many were slammed and unable to meet the sudden deluge of orders that started coming in, causing hourslong backups. As many as 6,000 orders a minute were coming in to the hub of grub, which had its own server failures to add to the confusion. Thank goodness Grubhub is very sorry. [NBC New York]
LOLOL a group called the 65 Project has filed a complaint with the Texas bar association seeking the disbarment of Ted Cruz for his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election and keep Donald Trump in office. Couldn't happen to a nicer guy! Maybe make him ride in one of those windowless Apple cars, too. [Seattle Times]
Also, about that lukewarm coffee in the hed: it's one of those glass Chemex things, so maybe try a Chemex cozy, really hot water to start with, or putting it on the stove on very low heat. Or get a Mr. Coffee and drink coffee like it's 1975, as God intended. [NYT]
Looka this little dang Thornton and his little dang kittyhands!
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Steve Bannon Says His Kinder, Gentler Racist Nativism Different From Buffalo Shooter's Icky Murder-y Kind
If it quacks like a milkshake duck...
In the wake of the revelation that the 18-year-old white supremacist shooter in Buffalo was brain-poisoned by the Great Replacement Theory lie, Steve Bannon is flooding the zone with an epic quantity of shit.
"He’s Azov, a gay guy, he’s got all these insignias. He comes across – he said he’s a left-wing authoritarian, an eco-authoritarian," he babbled to Rudy Giuliani on Monday. "It’s in the manifesto, which they won’t release. I don’t know, just release it, it’s not gonna warp people’s mind. People can make decisions."
Speculating on motivations, Steve Bannon claimed the Buffalo shooter was \u201ca gay guy\u201d and asked where the shooter was attending church.pic.twitter.com/d6VK0PbFBu— PatriotTakes \ud83c\uddfa\ud83c\uddf8 (@PatriotTakes \ud83c\uddfa\ud83c\uddf8) 1652730424
Okay, first of all, Peyton Gendron's screed is a simple Google search away for anyone who chooses to read it. Is Bannon pissed that a mass shooter is being cancel-cultured by responsible media outlets who don't want to inspire the next massacre while giving free publicity to the bad ideas that inspired the current one? We don't know, but he's been flogging vile nativist ideas himself for years. And anyone who did read this demon's scribblings would immediately understand that, shitposting aside, he's not a gay eco-terrorist Ukrainian right-wing paramilitary trooper.
FFS, the man carried a gun with a racial epithet scrawled on it into a store he chose specifically because its clientele was predominantly Black, and shouted racist slurs as he went on a killing spree.
Azov? Fuck right off.
"Parents got to be on top of stuff. Why are the parents that – is this kid going to church? Is he in church?” Bannon wondered, as if being heavily churched has ever stopped a racist mass shooter before. Then he seamlessly pivoted to chastising the media for "inappropriately" blaming Tucker Carlson, who mainstreamed the very ideas about white replacement that inspired this attack.
Steve Bannon claims the media is \u201cinappropriately\u201d focused on Tucker Carlson in the wake of the Buffalo white supremacist shooting.pic.twitter.com/4dyROPBcYU— PatriotTakes \ud83c\uddfa\ud83c\uddf8 (@PatriotTakes \ud83c\uddfa\ud83c\uddf8) 1652728242
"This situation up in Buffalo stinks to high heaven, and of course the mainstream media's focused on the wrong thing," Bannon tut-tutted. As if the problem is the media's impropriety, not the 10 people dead because the country is awash in toxic racism.
Now watch this asshole try to distinguish his brand of poison from the low rent, generic version flogged by the racist killer.
Steve Bannon claims the "replacement theory" is a distraction after it was allegedly cited by the Buffalo shooter. The racist theory sprang from a book that Bannon has promoted.\n\n"We're not going to back off," he insisted today. "We are ascendant!"pic.twitter.com/V3H9MG7El2— David Edwards (@David Edwards) 1652713758
"We are inclusive nationalists, right?" he said, invoking "Hispanics in the Rio Grande Valley" and "African Americans in droves who are understanding the lies and misrepresentations of the Democratic party."
"We're winning. This is about the sovereignty of the United States and the citizens of the United States," he rambled, before going on a riff about ceding control of the country to globalists at the World Health Organization. Oh, hey, you know who else didn't like (((globalists?)))
Bannon credited his "inclusive nationalism and participatory populism" with the 80-to-100 seat gain he thinks the GOP will make in November. Although, we can't help but notice that the GOP's plan to achieve this relies on both a massive gerrymander and making sure that broad swathes of the population cannot participate in elections.
"We're not going to stop, we are ascendant," ranted the man who used to work at the White House and who now vlogs into a microphone all day, just 18 months after his party's standard-bearer was soundly rejected by the American people.
Look, it's all shit right now, no doubt. But Bannon's little freakout is because the media is finally learning to talk about his "movement" accurately. Because the bogeyman of the week is GRT, not CRT. Because nobody outside of Fox News is talking about a lone wolf — they're talking about young men getting radicalized by Bannon and Carlson and their ilk. Because mealy-mouthed euphemisms like "racially tinged" and "controversial" are getting replaced by "racism" and "white supremacist."
It's not going to happen all at once — shit, it took 'em four years to start saying Trump lied — but it is happening. Just ask Elise Stefanik. And that little tantrum there was Bannon trying desperately to regain control of the narrative.
No. Fucking. Way.
OPEN THREAD.
[Joe My God / Crooks and Liars]
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