Friday, September 22, 2017

In the news, Tuesday, August 29, 2017


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AUG 28      INDEX      AUG 30
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Information from some sites may not be reliable, or may not be vetted.
Some sources may require subscription.

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from BBC News (UK)
LEFT-CENTER BIAS

Sharks, underwater airplanes, bragging looters: The fake news about Harvey
As rescue operations continue in Texas and Louisiana, a number of fake stories and false rumours have circulated online about Tropical Storm Harvey. BBC Trending has spotted some of the most viral fakes.

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from Co.DESIGN (fastcodesign.com)
Magazine in New York, New York

How Houston’s Urban Planning Made A Catastrophic Storm Even Worse
Houston was never designed to quickly bounce back from storms like Harvey.

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from FEE (Foundation for Economic Education)
RIGHT-CENTER BIAS, HIGH, non-profit organization

We Should Divorce Football from College
Amidst the beginning of the 2017 college football season, UCLA quarterback Josh Rosen made a statement about student athleticism that shook up the world of collegiate athletics. In an interview with Bleacher Report, Rosen said that, "Football and school don’t go together, they just don’t. Trying to do both is like trying to do two full-time jobs. There are guys who have no business being in school, but they’re here because this is the path to the NFL. There’s no other way. Then there’s the other side that says to raise the SAT eligibility requirements. Ok, raise the SAT requirement at Alabama and see what kind of team they have. You lose athletes and then the product on the field suffers.” Rosen isn’t the first football player to make this point. Back in 2015, Seattle Seahawks’ three-time All-Pro cornerback Richard Sherman spoke about the difficulty in balancing a life as both a college football player and full-time student. But could there be a way out of this difficult situation? If so, what would it look like?

You Can't Justify Violence Because You Don't Like What Someone Says
A recent incident of violence against a Trump supporter reveals a disturbing explanation to justify such violence. Such justifications are ultimately an assault against freedom of speech and our wider set of liberties. There are many other and better responses than to resort to the violence that jeopardizes liberty.

A Presidency about Nothing Might be Good for Markets
It’s hard not to turn on CNN each day without some headline announcing the irretrievable decline of Trump’s presidency. While right-wing media regularly chronicled the no-growth, disastrous Obama presidency (mostly based on the worthless Keynesian measure that is GDP), CNN and other media outlets known to swing left are feeding their viewers a daily diet of the disaster unfolding under Trump. Yet investors plainly haven’t been bothered by the alleged Trump implosion, much as they weren’t fazed by Obama’s economic illiteracy. A presidency about nothing might be the path to the popularity that Trump craves.

Why It's Useless for the Federal Reserve to Target Inflation
One of the leading guideposts for today's monetary policies is the idea of “inflation targeting.” Major central banks around the world, including the Federal Reserve in the United States, have set a goal of two percent price inflation. The problem is that central bankers are targeting a phantom that does not exist. Changes in the quantity of money do not bring about a general rise in prices.

Both Lincoln and the Confederacy Were Awful
We’re fighting the Civil War again. Whenever both major parties drop any pretense of addressing the real problems facing American taxpayers, their constituents revert to having at each other in “the culture wars.” And no culture war would be complete without relitigating what should now be settled history: the reasons for the Civil War. 21st century Americans shouldn’t pick a side in the Civil War.

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from Houston Chronicle

Rumor watch: The hoaxes and fake news debunked during Harvey
Before then-Hurricane Harvey made landfall on the Texas coast, rumors and hoaxes began flying around social media. And while some, like the viral photo of the freeway shark, were harmless, others could have had more serious consequences than making a Fox News host look silly.

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from Intellectual Takeout

Antifa & Neo-Nazi Propaganda: Are you susceptible?
It’s worth digging into the psychology of people attracted to totalitarian ideology, though we might not like what we find.

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

Distraction as Political Strategy
Is it a coincidence that while we are fighting about Confederate monuments, we are not focusing on the real plight of the poor and middle class?

Give Sanctuary Cities What They Want
The battle over sanctuary cities is not just a matter of pitting some cities against federal policy. The conflict is also pitting cities against state governments. More than 30 states have moved with varying degrees of success to rein in so-called sanctuary cities that have pledged to not assist federal agents with rounding up and prosecuting suspected illegal immigrants.

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from NBC News (& affiliates)
LEFT-CENTER BIAS

Mistakes, miscommunication and mismanagement: The VA organ transplant system
Mistakes, miscommunication and mismanagement within the Department of Veterans Affairs have repeatedly delayed one Colorado veteran from getting a life-saving lung transplant, 9Wants to Know has learned.

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from Open Culture
Education Website

The Powerful Messages That Woody Guthrie & Pete Seeger Inscribed on Their Guitar & Banjo: “This Machine Kills Fascists” and “This Machine Surrounds Hate and Forces it to Surrender”

Dictionary of the Oldest Written Language–It Took 90 Years to Complete, and It’s Now Free Online
It took 90 years to complete. But, in 2011, scholars at the University of Chicago finally published a 21-volume dictionary of Akkadian, the language used in ancient Mesopotamia. Unspoken for 2,000 years, Akkadian was preserved on clay tablets and in stone inscriptions until scholars deciphered it during the last two centuries.

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from PBS (& affiliates)

After decades of pushing bachelor’s degrees, U.S. needs more tradespeople
So much effort has been put into encouraging high school graduates to go to college for academic degrees rather than for training in industrial and other trades that many fields face worker shortages. Now California is spending $6 million on a campaign to revive the reputation of vocational education, and $200 million to improve the delivery of it. The United States has 30 million jobs that pay an average of $55,000 per year and don’t require a bachelor’s degree, according to Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce. People with career and technical educations are actually slightly more likely to be employed than their counterparts with academic credentials, the U.S. Department of Education reports, and significantly more likely to be working in their fields of study.

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from Reason Magazine
[Information from this site may not be reliable.]

Border Patrol Sets Up Immigration Checkpoint in New Hampshire; Nearly Twice as Many Drug Arrests Result
The Fourth Amendment-destroying powers of the Border Patrol continue to harass Americans.

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from The Spokesman-Review

Houston’s lack of zoning left city vulnerable to catastrophic floods
The famously “un-zoned” city has allowed developers to pave over natural areas that provide resilience to floods, and build homes in the way of cataclysm. According to a 2016 analysis by ProPublica and the Texas Tribune, 166,000 acres of coastal prairies have been destroyed by development since 2001.

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from Zero Hedge
CONSPIRACY-PSEUDOSCIENCE,  MIXED,  financial blog with aggregated news and opinion

North Korea Fires Ballistic Missile Over Japan; S.Korea Military Raising Alert
Three days after North Korea launched three short-range ballisitic missiles, a move which was met virtually without any response by the US administration and which we said would embolden North Korea to proceed with further provocations, Kim Jong Un has done just that.

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