Monday, April 29, 2019

In the news, Thursday, April 18, 2019


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APR 17      INDEX      APR 19
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from Beekeeping Basics

Bees Kept on Notre Dame’s Roof Have SURVIVED The Fire!
200.000 bees that were living on the roof of Notre Dame have survived the fire blaze! These three hives were put on the cathedral’s rooftop in 2013 for a biodiversity project by Nicolas Géant. He said that the bees were going in and out of their homes this morning.

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from The Heritage Foundation
RIGHT BIAS,  MIXED  American conservative think tank based in Washington, D.C.

The Fight Over Trump’s Tax Returns Will End Up in the Supreme Court – Here’s Why
Should elected officials be allowed to gain access to the federal income tax returns of American taxpayers? When President Nixon tried to do this to get dirt on his political opponents he was deservedly condemned and Congress passed a law in 1976 to bar the practice. But now Democrats want to ignore that law to get their hands on President Trump’s tax returns. Section 6103 of the Internal Revenue Code guarantees the confidentiality of all our tax returns – yours, mine and even President Trump’s. The court fight over whether Congress can get the Trump returns is complicated, as I will explain below. It’s virtually certain to wind up in the Supreme Court. There will be a long court battle ahead with important implications about the protections for the privacy of all tax returns – including your own.

Ignore Medicare for All Advocates’ Claims on Life Expectancy in U.S. Here Are the Facts.
Ponder this: If self-styled “progressives” in Congress impose total government control over health care, will ordinary Americans enjoy a longer life span? Waiting in line for medical care is no prescription for a longer life.  In fact, American medical outcomes for the most serious conditions—for example, lower mortality from heart attacks and strokes, as well as survival rates from a  variety of cancers—are generally superior to those of other advanced countries.

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from Idaho Statesman
Newspaper in Boise, Idaho

This Idahoan’s team feeds 20,000 people after cyclone destroyed Gorongosa. Here’s how to help
Sun Valley philanthropist Greg Carr and the 260 rangers of Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique were preparing for another season of restoration and renewal for the park’s 1 million acres, its wildlife and the people who surround it. But Cyclone Idai had other plans. One of the biggest tropical cyclones to hit southeast Africa in more than a century, Idai brought winds of 120 mph and floodwaters to most of Mozambique. Heavy rains began March 4 and continued through mid-March, with the cyclone hitting March 14-15. The storm killed more than 1,000 people and spread havoc across Mozambique, Malawi, Zimbabwe and Madagascar, leaving 3 million people affected by the flooding — or worse, homeless.

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from Inland Northwest Business Watch
blog about business in the Spokane and Coeur d Alene area

New renderings are out for The Falls Tower project
Via the Spokane subreddit we've uncovered an exciting new rendering of The Falls project in the North Bank area just north of Downtown Spokane. Currently the developer LB Stone Properties has demolished the former YWCA building to make way for the construction of the first tower. The project now includes a 3rd tower which was mentioned in a recent article in the Journal of Business.

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from Mises Institute
RIGHT-CENTER BIAS, MIXED


Yes, Julian Assange Is a Journalist — But That Shouldn't Matter
Julian Assange was arrested last week in London, and he awaits legal proceedings designed to extradite him to the United States to be tried on hacking charges. At least, those are the charges currently known. Experience suggests that US authorities are likely to add additional charges once they have Assange in the US. Given Assange's role in exposing government lies, corruption, and abuse, one would think that most journalists — most of whom fancy themselves as warriors against government abuse — would call for his release. That's not what happened. Instead, many self-described journalists have claimed that Assange isn't a journalist at all. The Bill of Rights doesn't mention that freedom of speech is restricted to a special class of establishment journalists. Freedom of speech is a universal property right, regardless of what the establishment-media gatekeepers say.

Krugman Needs a Lesson on Why Truckers Are Paid Less Now than in the 1970s
One of the first lessons I give my economics students in the principles courses I teach or in my MBA classes is the famous Diamond-Water Paradox, or what economists historically have called the Paradox of Value. Why are diamonds more expensive than water? Why are professional athletes paid better than teachers or soldiers?  can understand why teachers and politicians misunderstand the Paradox of Value. The former, for the most part, never have been presented with such lessons, especially since the concept is a bit technical, while the latter (politicians) do not like anything to be in the way of their demagoguery, especially when they are putting something over on the public. (As for socialists like Bernie Sanders or Alexandra Occasio-Cortez, I doubt seriously that they even are intellectually and morally capable of learning about such paradoxes, especially since such knowledge undercuts their own political narratives.) It is quite another thing when economists and especially Nobel-winning economists such as Paul Krugman fail to understand economic fundaments, and especially the D-W Paradox. Marginal utility is at the very heart of economic analysis and one cannot understand economic concepts of value without knowing that marginal utility means. In a recent column and blog post , Krugman lamented the fact that income for transfer truck drivers has fallen in the past 40 years, and he used that as “proof” that overall payment for labor services is lower than it was in the 1970s. He claims that the decline of organized labor in the USA is the main reason for this “injustice,” in which (according to Krugman) almost all of the productivity gains in the economy have accrued to a tiny number of people, thus, appealing to the urban legend, “The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer.)

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from Orthodox Christianity – orthochristian.com
Religious Organization in Moscow, Russia

PRIMATES OF 4 ANCIENT AUTOCEPHALOUS CHURCHES MEET TO DISCUSS UKRAINIAN ISSUE
The Patriarchate of Constantinople’s creation of a new ecclesiastical structure in Ukraine in December-January continues to be the most burning issue facing the universal Orthodox Church today, and today it brought together the primates of four of the Church’s five ancient autocephalous Churches. His Beatitude Patriarch John of Antioch, His Beatitude Patriarch Theodoros of Alexandria, His Beatitude Patriarch Theophilos of Jerusalem, and His Beatitude Archbishop Chrysostomos of Cyprus gathered in Cyprus to discuss the issue at the invitation of Abp. Chrysostomos.

4,500 ancient manuscripts being digitized at St. Catherine’s Monastery
Although it is the world’s oldest continually operating library, dating back to the 6th century, the collection of manuscripts at St. Catherine’s Monastery at the foot of Mt. Sinai is no stranger to the latest technology. In 2012, they began spectral imaging on many of the manuscripts to discover the texts beneath the texts. Many of the manuscripts are palimpsests, meaning a previous text had been erased so the scribe could reuse the valuable parchments. Traces of the original texts remained, however. Now the monastery has begun a high-tech process of digitizing its 4,500 manuscripts—a process that could easily take up to a decade. The work on the ancient parchments, including the earliest surviving copy of the Gospels, the Codox Sinaiticus, dating to the 4th century, is being undertaken by a team from Greece that takes images in red, green, and blue light and merges them together with computer software to make one high-quality color picture. The monumental task of digitizing the monastery’s entire collection began last year with around 1,100 particularly rare Syriac and Arabic-language texts. This first stage is expected to take around three years and will cost a projected $2.75 million. The monastery will start publishing the newly-digitized texts online in the fall of this year.

ST. JOHN CASSIAN’S INSTITUTES: ON VAINGLORY
How our seventh combat is against the spirit of vainglory, and what its nature is.

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from The Spokesman-Review
Newspaper in Spokane, Washington

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from University of California Press

Exploring the Transcontinental Railroad in Photographs
by Glenn Willumson, author of Iron Muse: Photographing the Transcontinental Railroad

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