Here's something many people don't know about me -
Before I publicly dissected the long list of problems in the 1619 Project, I contacted the New York Times through their official channels to request a series of corrections to unambiguous factual errors in its content. The editor - Jake Silverstein - brushed me off and refused any correction - a pattern he also exhibited toward other critics from across the spectrum.
Before I publicly broke the story about Kevin Kruse's plagiarism in Reason, I contacted Princeton's academic integrity officer and alerted him to the problems I had found, giving them a chance to respond and address it internally. They ignored my email and later claimed to have lost my email after I went public.
Before I published my findings on Quinn Slobodian's habitual manipulation of source materials to alter its plain meaning through misquotation, I submitted an article to Contemporary European History (the journal where the worst examples appeared), highlighting the problems with the passages and asking for a correction through their official process. They desk-rejected it, brushed me off, and falsely claimed that Slobodian's piece had been thoroughly vetted in peer review. In fact, one of their own referees had flagged the same problems over a year earlier and recommended rejection of the article.
Before I published an expose on Nancy MacLean & Sandy Darity's similar manipulation of W.H. Hutt quotations in their article for History of Economics Review, I (along with 2 coauthors) submitted a response comment to this journal asking for a correction through its official processes. The editor gave us a complete runaround where he imposed an arbitrary length limit requiring us to cut the content, sent the trimmed version to a referee, then rejected the piece because the referee said we didn't sufficiently address the very same things we were forced by the editor to cut. When I then asked the editor to issue a simple corrigendum to the most egregious misquotation (one that transformed Hutt's explicit attack on the racism of white Afrikaners into a defense of Apartheid), he refused and tried to pass it off as a difference of "interpretation."
Before I published an expose of a leading covid masking model in the Wall Street Journal, I sent a comment to the medical journal that published it alerting them to a math error that changed their entire set of results. The journal acknowledged the error was real but refused to publish my piece on the grounds that the "next release" of the model would be updated to reflect it - even as politicians up to and including Joe Biden were trumpeting the erroneous results all over the news.
When your brother was head of CBS News he fired Scott Pelley as nightly news anchor and cleared out his office while he was away on assignment for 60 Minutes.
"It's not the correct way to treat the face of CBS News." https://t.co/ESDmp6Q9MA
Scott Pelley fired.
This commencement address last year was peak Pelley:
The drama. The theatrics. The self-important preening and performative outrage. The sermonizing. The propaganda.
Scott can now bring this kind of energy to Substack and hits on the Jim Acosta podcast.
Elon Musk said something that should keep every person on this planet up at night.
Musk: “I think we need to assume that life and consciousness is extremely rare, and it might only be us.”
13.8 billion years of physics. Trillions of galaxies. Billions of trillions of stars.
And one planet opened its eyes.
One.
The universe ran for nearly 10 billion years before anything looked up and asked what it was.
10 billion years of stars forming and dying with no one to witness any of it. No one to name it. No one to wonder why.
Then we showed up.
And for the first time in the history of everything, the universe had a witness.
Musk: “The image in my mind is of a tiny candle in a vast darkness. A tiny candle of consciousness that could easily go out.”
That’s not a metaphor. That’s a status report.
Stars don’t know they burn. Black holes don’t know they consume. Galaxies don’t know they spiral.
We do.
We are the only part of the universe that has ever experienced it.
Every law of physics we’ve uncovered was already running. Silently. For billions of years. With no one to find it.
We didn’t create meaning. We’re the first thing that could recognize it was missing.
That’s what makes Musk’s point so much deeper than most people realize.
He’s not arguing that humanity matters because we’re special.
He’s saying we might be the only reason “mattering” is a concept at all.
Without consciousness, the universe still runs. Stars still burn. Planets still orbit.
But none of it means anything.
Not because it’s meaningless.
Because meaning requires a mind.
And there might only be one.
Musk isn’t building rockets because he likes engineering.
He’s building them because he realized the only thing that ever gave the universe a name has a single point of failure.
One asteroid. One war. One century of wrong decisions.
And the witness goes silent.
The atoms keep moving. The physics keeps running.
But nobody is there to call it anything.
The universe doesn’t end.
It just goes back to not knowing it exists.
The most profound thing about what Musk said isn’t that the candle is small.
It’s that without the candle, there’s no such thing as darkness either.
Miracles do indeed happen 🤭
A young German female activist from the latest Gaza flotilla was filmed by media in a neck-brace with her face looking “bruised and battered”, her expression tearful and “traumatized” after being held for a few hours in Israel.
But then…. The Miracle 🤣
Just a couple of hours later, the same young German female activist was filmed perfectly fine, bouncing around, smiling and cheering… no bruises, no marks, no neck-brace, no injuries, no anything in fact.
It is simply incredible the superhuman powers of recovery she showed. Even Wolverine and the X-Men would be jealous 😂
𝗭𝗲𝗿𝗼 stories by AP on Henry Nowak
𝗭𝗲𝗿𝗼 stories by PBS on Henry Nowak
𝗭𝗲𝗿𝗼 stories by NYT on Henry Nowak
𝗭𝗲𝗿𝗼 stories by NPR on Henry Nowak
𝗭𝗲𝗿𝗼 stories by WSJ on Henry Nowak
𝗭𝗲𝗿𝗼 stories by CNN on Henry Nowak
𝗭𝗲𝗿𝗼 stories by WaPo on Henry Nowak
𝗭𝗲𝗿𝗼 stories by Reuters on Henry Nowak
𝗭𝗲𝗿𝗼 stories by MSNBC on Henry Nowak
Here’s a foreign vessel, bringing foreign parts, from a foreign employer, to Portsmouth, VA, to turn around and install an ugly windmill off Virginia Beach
The CVOW project, costing billions on Virginians’ energy bills… goes straight to foreign companies
In 2019, seven years ago, when he was 34-years-old, Graham Platner logged into reddit and posted a response to a video of an American soldier being shot by the Taliban.
Platner wrote:
"This video never gets old. Dumb motherfucker didn't deserve to live. At least his stupidity and fat ass wheezing are available for all future infantrymen to witness and hold in contempt. Poor marksmanship on the Taliban's part is the only reason this mouthbreather made it home, he managed to make every possible shit decision possible when it comes to small unit combat."
Think about each line. "This video never gets old." Platner's implying he's watched the video several times and enjoys it. "At least his stupidity and fat ass wheezing are available for all future infantrymen to witness and hold in contempt."
That's what Platner thinks about his fellow Americans at war. If they're not good at killing or broader tactics, he has contempt for them. He displays no empathy. The opposite, in fact.
The man that Platner is commenting on, by the way, is Pfc. Ted Daniels, who was a 37-year-old father of two serving in Afghanistan at the time of the incident (2012). The bad tactic Platner enjoys mocking? Daniels stepped into the open deliberately to draw Taliban fire away from his fellow soldiers so his squad could get to safety.
Daniels was shot four times in this video and, ultimately, earned a Purple Heart.
When the video was initially released (2013), Pfc. Daniels was critical of himself in interviews, saying, "It wasn't the most tactically brilliant thing to do." He described that he was embarrassed by the video; that people could hear him screaming for help. But, also, he said: "I put my ass on the line for other guys."
Then, we have, again, Graham Platner, logging into reddit, in 2019, to comment: "Dumb motherfucker didn't deserve to live."
For all those who say, "That's just how Marines talk," I'll tell you: Platner's comment got downvoted by the military community. Even if it didn't: We're not talking about the military anymore. We're talking about a 34-year-old man, years after service, logging in to mock another man who's being shot on video. We're also talking about the U.S. Senate, not boys-will-be-boys or Marines-will-be-Marines.
We're always told to view Platner as a changed man. 2013, when he made the rape apologia comments, was the "darkest point in his life," or so we have been told. So what was going on in 2019, such that Platner enjoyed watching a video of a man getting shot and mocking him? How many arcs of change are there in Platner's life? Was there a specific point where he discovered human empathy?
I couldn't help but think of that specific reddit comment while watching the video below. "Still sending young Americans to die thousands of miles away from home," Platner says. Didn't he log in to reddit seven years ago to say, "Dumb motherfucker didn't deserve to live" ?
I don't like being lied to.
Senate Republicans are livid with Trump. Just now, Sen. Wicker remained stone-faced (appeared to be intentional) for about 20 seconds as he walked into lunch and we asked him for his reaction
Sen. Murkowski says TX is all but lost to Dems now