Friday, March 17, 2017

In the news, Wednesday, February 22, 2017


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FEB 21      INDEX      FEB 23
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from Arizona Capitol Times

Claiming people are being paid to riot, Republican state senators voted Wednesday to give police new power to arrest anyone who is involved in a peaceful demonstration that may turn bad — even before anything actually happened. SB1142 expands the state’s racketeering laws, now aimed at organized crime, to also include rioting. And it redefines what constitutes rioting to include actions that result in damage to the property of others.

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from BBC News (UK)

Most scientists 'can't replicate studies by their peers'
Science is facing a "reproducibility crisis" where more than two-thirds of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist's experiments, research suggests. This is frustrating clinicians and drug developers who want solid foundations of pre-clinical research to build upon.

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from The Christian Science Monitor

American Muslims raise money to repair vandalized Jewish cemetery
Muslim community leaders launched a fundraising campaign to help repair a historic Jewish cemetery that was vandalized over the weekend. Donors surpassed the initial goal of $20,000 within just three hours.

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from CNSNews.com (& MRC & NewsBusters)
[Information from this site may not be reliable.]

ISIS Car-Bomber Was a Gitmo Detainee, Received £1 Million from U.K. Government
It turns out the man who detonated a car bomb at an Iraqi army base bear the city of Mosul this week received £1 million from the U.K. government for how he told them he was mistreated at Gitmo, claiming that British agents knew of his mistreatment.

Nets Ignore Violent Immigrant Riot in Sweden After Mocking Trump
After spending literally days mocking President Donald Trump for inventing a “Sweden Incident” involving Middle East immigrants, the liberal Big Three networks were hanging their heads in shame Tuesday morning in the wake a violent immigrant riot that broke out in Stockholm the night before. “Police in Sweden are investigating a riot that broke out overnight in a predominantly immigrant suburb of Stockholm,” announced Fox News anchor Bret Baier during Special Report, yet it went unreported by the nets all day.

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from FEE (Foundation for Economic Education)
[Information from this site may not be reliable.]

Networking is Useless Unless You Do This
So you went to a networking event. You met a lot of new people, delivered your elevator speech a few dozen times, and came home with fistfuls of business cards. Networking accomplished, right? Not quite. You can’t forget the most important part of networking: following up.

Analog Age Laws Could Crush Digital Trade
The sharing economy flourishes because it is not subject to sector-specific regulation – yet by doing so it threatens the advantages that incumbents have developed in regulated industries. As a result, they try to use sector-specific legislation and apply it to a sphere where legislation is neither necessary or advisable. If regulation must come, it should be specific to the tech industry. Yet if Uber loses this court case, the result would be to try to squeeze tech industries into regulations that were developed in an analog era. This will be a defeat for consumers, for innovation, and for tech in Europe – at just the wrong time.

Which Country Punishes Productive People the Most?
High marginal tax rates, that impact the most productive earners, incentivize people to stay home from work to do household work, black market activities, and tax avoidance. Slovakia wins the prize for the least-punitive tax regime, though it’s  worth noting that Hong Kong easily would have the best system if it was included in the ranking.

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from First Things

ZWINGLI, MATTER, MIND
The stripped-bare churches of the Swiss Reformation are testimony not to Zwingli's belittling of matter but to his anxiety about its potency.

FAITHFUL UNTO DEATH
WHAT WE CAN LEARN TODAY FROM ST. POLYCARP
The ancient city of Smyrna, located on the site of today’s Izmir in Turkey, the gateway to Asia and stepping-stone to Europe, is sacred soil because of what happened there one Sunday, around 2:00 in the afternoon, in February of the year 155. On that day, Polycarp, the eighty-six-year-old leader of the Christian church in Smyrna, was cruelly put to death by fire and sword because he refused to renounce Jesus Christ. “For the blood of thy martyrs and saints shall enrich the earth, shall create the holy places,” wrote T. S. Eliot. “For wherever a saint has dwelt, wherever a martyr has given his blood for the blood of Christ, there is holy ground, and the sanctity shall not depart from it.”

SAINT PETER’S CHAIR
The feast of the Chair of Saint Peter is very ancient in origin, arising from the second century, amid persecutions and pagan festivals. It was originally called Saint Peter's Banquet. It's not about any individual occupying the chair, but the chair itself. St. Peter‘s Chair nourishes the faithful, heals the malignant, and partakes of the most glorious City of God through conformity to Christ's sacrifice. The feast is an exaltation of the Church militant, malignant, and triumphant.

THE BODY OF EVIDENCE
Transgenderism, rather like abortion, puts the law in a contradictory position on the nature of personhood in our contemporary world. Civilization may survive trasngenderism—but only at the cost of contradicting itself.

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from Forbes

Under the one-party Democrat rules, spending on fairness tops $100 billion every year. Meanwhile, the basic infrastructure of the state, so necessary for the economy long and short term, is collapsing.

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from The Guardian (UK)
[Information from this site may be unreliable.]

A tale of four skulls: what human bones reveal about cities
Has the great urbanisation of our species over the last 5,000 years been good for humanity or bad? It’s a story that can be told by examining ancient skeletons – which reveal incredible dangers, but also point to a bright future

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from The Heritage Foundation

Approach to The Law Makes Gorsuch Good Fit For Supreme Court
Judge Neil Gorsuch, President Donald Trump’s nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court, will be a worthy heir to the man he will replace: Justice Antonin Scalia. Gorsuch has served on the court with distinction and is highly regarded by his colleagues.

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from The Hill

McCain made secret trip to Syria
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) secretly visited the Kurdish-held region of Syria during a trip to the Middle East last weekend to meet with United States military officials, The Wall Street Journal reported. A spokeswoman for McCain later confirmed the trip in a statement to The Hill.

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from Intellihub
[Information from this site may not be reliable.]

Report: Massive advertising platform bans popular website over support of Donald Trump
“Direct politically motivated attack” on one of biggest independent news outlets on the planet
In a stunning display of political warfare, a major advertising platform has banned the highly popular alternative news website Infowars over the websites support of President Donald Trump. Advertising agency AdRoll notified Infowars that it has suspended its syndication of Infowars Life product ads across the millions of websites and platforms that use the massive ad network.

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from The Living Church
Magazine of The Living Church Foundation (Anglican)

RESTORING A SCRIPTURAL IMAGINATION IN A SECULAR AGE
We must learn to read the Scriptures again as a history of salvation that implicates our future. Only then will the Scriptures function as a balm against secularization rather than exacerbating the problem. And it is the liturgical prayer of the Church, in particular, where this narrative of salvation comes to be experienced hic et nunc, here and now.

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from Military Times
and Air Force Times, Army Times, Marine Corps Times, and Navy Times

Iraqi suicide bomber was ex-Gitmo detainee
A suicide bomber who attacked a military base in Iraq this week was a former Guantanamo Bay detainee freed in 2004 after Britain lobbied for his release, raising questions about the ability of security services to track the whereabouts of potential terrorists. 

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from Mises Institute
[Information from this site may not be reliable.]

Five Reasons for Central Banks: Are They Any Good?
In a time when Federal Reserve reforms are discussed more openly than ever before, it seems appropriate to also think about the more fundamental question of whether central banks are needed in the first place. Central banks are not the result of natural developments in the banking sector, but come into existence through government favors. No justification for central banks erases the fact that the central banks are creatures of power politics rather than economic reason.

Ten Great Economic Myths
Our country is beset by a large number of economic myths that distort public thinking on important problems and lead us to accept unsound and dangerous government policies. Here are ten of the most dangerous of these myths and an analysis of what is wrong with them.

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from Nature News and Comment
PRO-SCIENCE

Inside the Chinese lab poised to study world's most dangerous pathogens
Maximum-security biolab is part of plan to build network of BSL-4 facilities across China.
A laboratory in Wuhan is on the cusp of being cleared to work with the world’s most dangerous pathogens. The move is part of a plan to build between five and seven biosafety level-4 (BSL-4) labs across the Chinese mainland by 2025, and has generated much excitement, as well as some concerns. Some scientists outside China worry about pathogens escaping, and the addition of a biological dimension to geopolitical tensions between China and other nations. But Chinese microbiologists are celebrating their entrance to the elite cadre empowered to wrestle with the world’s greatest biological threats.


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from New Statesman
"The leading voice of the British left, since 1913."

The world has entered a new Cold War – what went wrong?
Peter Conradi’s Who Lost Russia? How the World Entered a New Cold War traces the accumulation of distrust between the West and Russia.

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from Reason Magazine

With Sales Depressed by Soda Tax, Philly Grocers Look to Cut Jobs as Mayor Blames 'Greedy' Soda Industry
One of the city’s largest beverage distributors is planning to cut 20 percent of its workforce; grocery stores across the city are also planning to shed jobs.

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from The Spokesman-Review

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from The Wall Street Journal

John McCain Makes Secret Trip to Syria in Midst of U.S. Assessment  The senator traveled to Kurdish-controlled Kobani, U.S. officials say
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) secretly traveled to northern Syria last weekend to speak with American military officials and Kurdish fighters at the forefront of the push to drive Islamic State out of their de facto capital of Raqqa, according to U.S. officials.

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from Yahoo News

Chinese president Xi Jinping has vowed to lead the “new world order”
Chinese president Xi Jinping has vowed for the first time that China should take the lead in shaping the “new world order” and safeguarding international security, one of the latest moves putting him in stark contrast to Donald Trump and the US president’s “America First” policy. Xi had on numerous occasions called for China to play an important part in building the new world order. But during a Feb. 17 national security seminar in Beijing, he indicated China should “guide” the international community in the effort. A Feb. 20 commentary (link in Chinese) by the Chinese Communist Party’s central party school, which trains officials, noted the distinction. It has since been widely shared by state-controlled media.

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