Injury Rewired Facebook Founder's Brain?, Russia Easily Bypassing Oil Sanctions, School Shootings Are Down--Media Can't Read Data (01/14/25)
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Let’s dive into the important stuff you may not be seeing on
If you’ve got some lagging credit card balances from Christmas…have you considered making some side money by [checks notes] assassinating the illegitimate President of Venezuela? Cause the U.S. is paying cash money for that.
Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was sworn into office for a third consecutive term on Friday, as the United States, European Union and United Kingdom announced a new round of sanctions on the increasingly authoritarian government.
The US, EU and many neighboring countries have recognised the opposition candidate – Edmundo González– as president-elect and accused Maduro of fraud.
The Venezuelan president's swearing in ceremony follows last year's controversial election in July that sparked large scale protests in which thousands of people were arrested.
Even as he takes office for another six- year term, he finds himself increasingly isolated on the international stage.
On Friday, not only did the Biden administration issue new financial sanctions on eight officials from Maduro's government, they also increased a reward for information leading to Maduro's capture and arrest from $15 million, to $25million.
Maduro was charged with narco-terrorism in 2020 by U.S. prosecutors who accused him of backing a terrorist group in Colombia and facilitating cocaine shipments to the United States. Maduro denies the charges, which he has described as part of an effort to violently remove him from office.
I considered going after those 25 million greenbacks myself, but apparently being a six-and-a-half-foot-tall bearded white guy makes it rather difficult to move through South America inconspicuously. Ahh, what might have been…
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[two]
And speaking of being very tall…apparently I deserve to burn to death.
Los Angeles Fire Department Deputy (LAFD) Chief Kristine Larson is facing widespread criticism online after comments surfaced in which she appeared to shift blame onto fire victims for their circumstances.
Speaking as part of a video that aired during a commercial break for the FOX show 9-1-1 about firefighter capabilities, Larson said, "Am I able to carry your husband out of a fire? He got himself in the wrong place if I have to carry him out."
Her remarks, captured in a resurfaced clip now circulating widely on social media, have sparked outrage among community members and safety advocates, who view them as lacking empathy for victims of fires and emergencies. The comments were originally shared by the right-wing account @EndWokeness on X, formerly Twitter, garnering millions of views and heated debate.
Well, that’s certainly something…I guess I’d better go on TRT so I’m strong enough to escape a burning building on my own…
[three]
Over the weekend, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg
Biden officials phoned executives at Meta to “scream” and “curse” at them while demanding that they remove any negative posts about the coronavirus vaccine on Facebook, said Zuckerberg, rehashing the the admission he made in front of Congress over the summer.
“It was brutal,” Zuckerberg said during the interview on the “Joe Rogan Experience,” released Friday.
“The US government should be defending its companies, not be at the tip of the spear attacking its companies,”
When Rogan – who sparked controversy by questioning the efficacy of the vaccines — asked whether those phone calls were recorded, Zuckerberg responded that he didn’t think so.
Zuckerberg said Biden’s aides wanted Meta to remove posts that correctly stated that the vaccines could induce side effects.
“Basically it just got to this point [where we told them], ‘No, we’re not going to take down this thing that was true,’” Zuckerberg said.
He then went on to lavish a bit of praise on Trump.
“I think he just wants America to win,” Zuckerberg said.
Multiple pundits on social media were quick to point out that Zuck was put on TRT (Testosterone Replacment Therapy) by a doctor to recover from a torn ACL at the time when he started moving his companies (Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp) towards more open speech and away from censorship.
There is one study on TRT and moving to the right, which was summarized by Grok (Twitter’s AI).
One notable study conducted by researchers at Claremont Graduate University found that administering testosterone to weakly affiliated Democrats resulted in a shift towards more conservative political views. This study involved giving testosterone or a placebo to 136 healthy males during the 2011 U.S. presidential election season. The results showed that weakly affiliated Democrats who received testosterone had a 12% decrease in the strength of their party affiliation and reported 45% warmer feelings towards Republican candidates.
However, this effect was not observed in strongly affiliated Democrats or Republicans, suggesting that the influence of testosterone on political orientation might be more pronounced in individuals with less rigid political affiliations.
The Claremont University paper is a verified research project…and it’s an interesting theory.
That being said, boiling the business moves of a high IQ billionaire down to a simple hormonal treatment…strikes me as dramatically overly simplifying.
[four]
I could just five the News edition of The Five with examples of the corporate press dunking on itself, but that’s not really informative or helpful.
But in this case, The Hill’s reporting on “school shootings” is so bad…we have to dive into it. In particular, the publication took Everytown for Gun Safety’s stats at face value…in the same sentence the writer disproves those very stats.
The number of school shootings in a given year can be difficult to count as organizations use different definitions of such events and pull their data from different sources.
Education Week’s school shooting tracker, which only counts incidents that occurred during school hours or at school-sponsored events, found 39 shootings in 2024, with 18 people killed and 59 injured. Those incidents outpaced 2023 but were less than in 2022.
Everytown, however, looks at any time a shot is fired on school grounds, even if no one was injured or killed. The group recorded 219 incidents of gunfire on grounds last year, with 59 deaths and more than 160 injuries.
Included in Everytown’s statistics include when a gun was fired away from school grounds (such as a gang shooting or robbery) and the stray bullet hit part of the school—even at night when the buildings are unoccupied.
The Hill’s reporting is pretty laughable here, claiming it’s “difficult” to know what is a school shooting, and what isn’t….so let me help.
If a person shoots another person at a school, school shooting.
If a gang member shoots at a rival gang member at 2am, and a stray 9mm embeds itself in a brick that’s part of a school building two blocks away…not a school shooting.
[five]
Remember those sanctions the U.S. and our allies put on Russian oil?
Turns out those are pretty easily defeated. All Russia had to do was use aging ships.
The shadow fleet is made up of aging tankers bought used, often by nontransparent entities with addresses in non-sanctioning countries such as the United Arab Emirates or the Marshall Islands, and flagged in places like Gabon or the Cook Islands. Some of the vessels are owned by the Russian state Sovcomflot shipping company. Their role is to help Russia’s oil exporters elude the $60 per barrel price cap imposed by Ukraine’s allies.
Estimates vary, but S&P Global and the Kyiv School of Economics Institute have put the number at over 400 ships that can transport oil, or products made from crude such as diesel fuel and gasoline.
The shadow fleet in fact isn’t all that shadowy. The ships don’t hide their stops at Russian oil terminals. Some have direct connections to Russia, as with the vessels owned by Sovcomflot. In other cases, it’s often unclear who exactly is behind the listed owners, and what kind of safety practices and insurance the vessels have. What sets them apart is that they transport Russian oil and operate outside the jurisdictions of the sanctioning G7 countries.
Queue up the Pete Davidson meme:
Until the next one,
-sth