Saturday, February 27, 2021

In the news, Friday, February 19, 2021


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FEB 18      INDEX      FEB 20
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from AlterNet

As Texas battles a severe snowstorm and mass power outages this winter, Tim Boyd, the now-former Republican mayor of Colorado City, revealed his party's plan for the deadly extreme temperatures linked to climate change. In a lengthy Facebook post that was deleted soon after it went viral, then-Mayor Boyd told his residents that they were entirely on their own as the brutal winter weather caused mayhem and deaths across the Lone Star state.

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from Daily Kos

It's already doomed, which is why Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina is the perfect person to head south on a mission to soothe the mangy ruffled feathers of Donald Trump. Here's how CNN frames the mission: "Graham plans to spend his time on the golf course with Trump -- ideally convincing the former president that regaining congressional majorities for Republicans will help bolster his own presidential legacy. This person said Graham wants to be 'constructive,' urging Trump to use his influence for the party's good."

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from Daily Mail
RIGHT BIAS, QUESTIONABLE SOURCE, tabloid newspaper in the UK

Dr Marty Makary made the bold claim that the  US will be effectively free of COVID-19 by spring 
He estimates that by then prior infection and vaccinations would will bring the  US to herd immunity 
Dr Makary noted that daily US infections have fallen more than 70% in 6 weeks
He compared the decline of illnesses to a 'miracle drug' and said public health officials are 'hiding' the promising signs that the pandemic is ending 

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from Huffington Post
LEFT BIAS, MIXED, news and commentary site headquartered in New York City

“Trump said It’s gonna be wild!!!!!!! It’s gonna be wild!!!!!!!” one defendant wrote. “He called us all to the Capitol and wants us to make it wild!!!”
Six additional people associated with the Oath Keepers organization were arrested this week in connection with the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol after a federal grand jury returned a superseding indictment that laid out a conspiracy to block the certification of Joe Biden’s Electoral College win. The superseding indictment, which replaced a Jan. 27 indictment returned against three defendants, also lays out how members of the right-wing group saw then-President Donald Trump sending them clear messages to fight to overturn the November election results on his behalf. The new indictment cites an article on the Oath Keepers website that tells members it is “CRITICAL that all patriots who can be in DC get to DC to stand tall in support of President Trump’s fight to defeat the enemies foreign and domestic who are attempting a coup, through the massive vote fraud and related attacks on our Republic.” 

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from The Spokesman-Review
Newspaper in Spokane, Washington

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In the news, Thursday, February 18, 2021


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FEB 17      INDEX      FEB 19
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from AlterNet

Like Gregor Samsa, the never-to-be-forgotten character in Franz Kafka's story "The Metamorphosis," we awoke on January 7th to discover that we, too, were "a giant insect" with "a domelike brown belly divided into stiff arched segments" and numerous "pitifully thin" legs that "waved helplessly" before our eyes. If you prefer, though, you can just say it: we opened our eyes and found that, somehow, we had become a giant roach of a country. Yes, I know, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are now in charge and waving their own little limbs wildly, trying to do some of what needs to be done for this sad land of the disturbed, over-armed, sick, and dying. But anyone who watched the scenes of Floridians celebrating a Super Bowl victory, largely unmasked and cheering, shoulder to shoulder in the streets of Tampa, can't help but realize that we are now indeed a roach nation, the still-wealthiest, most pandemically unmasked one on Planet Earth.

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

More than 15% of the money allocated goes to long-standing partisan policies, including some shocking allocations that have nothing at all to do with the pandemic.
‘Only about 1 percent of the entire package goes toward COVID vaccines, and 5 percent is truly focused on public health needs surrounding the pandemic,’ the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget warned on Wednesday. At least $300 billion of the bill’s spending, 15 percent, is allocated toward partisan policy priorities that have nothing to do with the COVID-19 pandemic.

If we’re lucky, Bezos's example will inspire millions of more entrepreneurs in the 21st century.
Jeff Bezos announced earlier this month he'll soon step down as the CEO of Amazon. As he leaves his perch from atop one of only two trillion-dollar companies that have ever existed, it's worth reflecting on his legacy—a consumer revolution that empowered billions of individuals.

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from HumanProgress.org
Education Website

Introducing the city at the heart of the first Industrial Revolution.
Our twenty-second Center of Progress is Manchester during the first Industrial Revolution (1760-1850). Sometimes called “the first industrial city,” Manchester epitomized the rapid changes of an era that transformed human existence more than any other period in history. Manchester was among the earliest cities to experience industrialization. The city’s metamorphosis wasn’t easy, as it entailed working and living conditions far below those that we are used to today. But Manchester ultimately helped to uplift humanity by paving the way to the post-industrial prosperity that so many of us now enjoy.

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from Mises Institute
RIGHT-CENTER BIAS, MIXED

The Problem with the "Robber Barron" Narrative
The purge of conservative and libertarian voices on social media was, as Ron Paul put it, "shocking and chilling, particularly to those of us who value free expression and the free exchange of ideas." People from the conservative side of the aisle, but also others, have called for solutions like antitrust laws regulation of social media even to downright nationalization of Big Tech companies. Comparisons are made with the so-called robber barons in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. According to popular "wisdom," people like John D. Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and others made profits due to immoral and unethical competition practices that granted a monopoly status to their companies. Now, just like in the past, government needs to step in to protect the consumer, who is being exploited. These comparisons don't help the case for government regulation of Big Tech if we take a close and honest look at the history of antitrust laws. 

China has not been spared heavy criticism about its growth mode since it joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001. Leading the choir of discontent, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) claimed that “high savings are at the heart of China’s external and internal imbalances.” Other mainstream pundits also believe that China’s mercantilist policy was the main contributor to a global savings glut that depressed international interest rates and inflated asset bubbles all over the world, including in the US. This convenient shift of blame for the root cause of the Great Recession is actually misleading. China has indeed piled up large current account surpluses and international forex (foreign exchange) reserves, but they were not financed with a transfer of real savings from the rest of the world. It was the lax monetary policy of the Fed and other major central banks that financed the purchase of Chinese goods, drove down interest rates to record-low levels, and fueled an unsustainable boom, triggering the Great Recession.

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from The Spokesman-Review
Newspaper in Spokane, Washington

When Congress passed the original CARES Act in March 2020, “free” money for COVID relief flooded across the country for distribution by states, counties and municipalities. Facing “use it or lose it” deadlines, it was a struggle to figure out how to spend it in time. It’s hard to give away money without irritating someone. When it’s government money, it’s impossible – the best test of doing it well is probably if there’s something for everyone to be mad about.

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from Vox
LEFT BIAS, HIGH, Media/News Company based in Washington, D.C. 

People have applauded local organizing efforts in cities like Austin, Dallas, and Houston, in the face of a lacking government response.

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In the news, Wednesday, February 17, 2021


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FEB 16      INDEX      FEB 18
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from CNN

President Joe Biden took questions from Wisconsin residents and from Anderson Cooper at a CNN town hall event in Milwaukee on Tuesday night. We're still looking into some of the claims Biden made, so this article is not comprehensive. But we can tell you now that he made at least four false claims -- all of them involving statistics -- about the minimum wage, undocumented immigrants, China's economy and Covid-19 vaccinations. Biden also made claims that could have benefited from some additional context, that he acknowledged he might not have gotten right or that there is not solid evidence for.

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

Most young Americans today understand that Social Security won’t provide for their financial needs in the future, even though their payroll taxes are likely to continue to rise.

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from Hoover Institution
Nonprofit Organization in Stanford, California

Is Nord Stream 2 Penance For World War II?
Military history burst onto the news last week with the statement of President Frank-Walter Steinmeier of Germany justifying the controversial Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to Germany as an apology for Operation Barbarossa, Hitler’s invasion of the USSR in 1941. “June 22 will be the eightieth anniversary of the beginning of the German invasion of the Soviet Union,” the German head of state said. “More than twenty million people of the former Soviet Union fell victim to the war. … We can’t lose sight of the bigger picture. Yes, we now live in a time of difficult relations but there was a past before that and a there will be a future after it.”

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from Intellectual Takeout
Nonprofit Organization in Bloomington, Minnesota

It has become common to say that the United States in 2020 is more divided politically and culturally than at any other point in our national past. As a historian who has written and taught about the Civil War era for several decades, I know that current divisions pale in comparison to those of the mid-19th century. ... To compare anything that has transpired in the past few years to this cataclysmic upheaval represents a spectacular lack of understanding about American history.

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from Mises Institute
RIGHT-CENTER BIAS, MIXED

If America Splits Up, What Happens to the Nukes?
Opposition to American secession movements often hinges on the idea that foreign policy concerns trump any notions that the United States ought to be broken up into smaller pieces. It almost goes without saying that those who subscribe to neoconservative ideology or other highly interventionist foreign policy views treat the idea of political division with alarm or contempt. Or both. They have a point. It's likely that were the US to be broken up into smaller pieces, it would be weakened in its ability to act as a global hegemon, invading foreign nations at will, imposing “regime change,” and threatening war with any regime that opposes the whims of the American regime. For some of us, however, this would be a feature of secession rather than a bug. Moreover, the ability of the American regime to carry out offensive military operations such as regime change is separate and distinct from the regime’s ability to maintain an effective and credible defensive military force.

Negative rates are the destruction of money, an economic aberration based on the mistakes of many central banks and some of their economists, who all start from a wrong diagnosis: the idea that economic agents do not take more credit or invest more because they choose to save too much and therefore saving must be penalized to stimulate the economy. Excuse the bluntness, but it is a ludicrous idea. Inflation and growth are not low due to excess savings, but because of excess debt, which perpetuates overcapacity with low rates and high liquidity and zombifies the economy by subsidizing the low-productivity and highly indebted sectors and penalizing high productivity with rising and confiscatory taxation.

A sitting US president is suspended from Twitter, Facebook, and email service provider Campaign Monitor. A pillow entrepreneur not only loses his personal and business Twitter accounts but also ten retail stores for believing that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. Bank of America (BOA) gave federal law enforcement authorities records of 211 of its customers who made purchases with a BOA credit or debit card in Washington, DC, around the time of the January 6 capitol riot. These and myriad other revelations have sparked a fury among conservatives, conservative pundits such as Tucker Carlson, nationalists, and Trump supporters. But what do many of them think is at root responsible?

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

An Interview with Priest George Maximov, Part 1: On young people, “protest Christianity”, the Church in our times, and the pandemic
"Recently a man snowed me under with letters that wearing masks is a sin. I am personally not keen on wearing a mask, but when I hear that it’s a sin, then, forgive me: Which commandment is violated this way? What is sinful in this? The man writes, “It’s a sin because we conceal the image of God in this way!” But that’s heresy! Is our face an image of God? It certainly isn’t! Read about what the image of God is in man—it’s not our face! So, which commandment is violated here? There is no commandment that states, “Thou shalt not cover your face!” We may not like masks, sometimes we may make some other decision, but to regard those who wear masks as sinners is a sort of delusion in my opinion!"

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from RANGE

When a farmworker nearly died from COVID-19, Spokane’s Latinx community stepped in where the system failed.
While Eduardo Muñoz Lara was working in an apple orchard in Othello on an H-2A farmworker visa, his wife, Laura Sandoval, was more than 2,400 miles away in their hometown of Ciudad Victoria, Mexico. Separated by that distance and wanting to see her husband’s face, Laura video chatted Eduardo early the afternoon of October 11, while he was in isolation due to COVID-19 protocols. He hadn’t taken a COVID test because he was asymptomatic and because, according to Laura, workers were told tests would cost them $200. When Eduardo, 38, answered the call, Laura immediately realized something was wrong. Her husband was having a stroke. With Eduardo alone in his room, Laura says she felt helpless. “I was on the other side of the phone, and there wasn’t much I could do except scream for somebody to help him.” She says it took hours before anyone found Eduardo and called an ambulance.

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from The Spokesman-Review
Newspaper in Spokane, Washington

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from The Washington Post
Newspaper in Washington, D.C.

Grocery giant Kroger plans to close two stores in Seattle after the city passed a $4-an-hour hazard pay mandate for grocery workers, drawing sharp rebukes from local officials and worker advocates who point to the company’s booming sales as the pandemic continues to claim more than 2,000 lives a day. Kroger, which recorded one of its more profitable years due to strong demand during the pandemic, blamed the closures on the city’s new mandate, saying it would raise costs at the two Quality Food Centers (QFC), which were already underperforming.

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In the news, Tuesday, February 16, 2021


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FEB 15      INDEX      FEB 17
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from ABC News (& affiliates)
TV Network in New York, New York

The suit alleges that Trump and others violated the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act.

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from Competitive Enterprise Institute

The Biden administration is poised to start reversing Trump administration policies that were designed to ensure farmers have continued access to critical pest control tools. As a result, pest control will likely become more difficult, leading to increased crop damage and higher food prices.

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from Daily Wire
RIGHT BIAS, MIXED, American news and opinion website

Billionaire and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has called upon the rich nations of the world to switch over to synthetic beef to better combat climate change. Speaking with MIT Technology Review about his new book “How to Avoid Climate Disaster,” Gates discussed his views on improving the “food sector,” and lamented that the political scene may keep first-world nations from going fully synthetic in the beef department.

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

President Biden is hitting the road and traveling across the country to pitch his $1.9 trillion COVID-19 stimulus and relief spending proposal to voters. The legislation includes $1,400 relief checks, a further six-month expansion of “temporary” super-generous unemployment benefits that often pay more than work, $350 billion for bailouts for state and local governments, partisan provisions like a federal $15 minimum wage, and much more. Economists interviewed by FEE warned the package was an “economically unjustified” plan that “incentivizes unemployment.” Yet with his road trip and ongoing lobbying efforts, Biden hopes to persuade voters and members of Congress that his stimulus proposal is necessary for long-term economic recovery. But a new Ivy League analysis suggests the opposite. 

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from The Hill
LEAST BIASED, MOSTLY FACTUAL, News & Media Website in Washington, D.C.

As nation freezes, fossil fuels are keeping the lights and heat on
Much of the Midwest and the Mountain States are seeing subzero temperatures and blizzard conditions sweep through. As far south as Dallas, a polar vortex has caused temperatures to dip into the 20s, with ice and snow. In parts of Minnesota, temperatures dipped to near their lowest levels in a century. There are now rolling blackouts in some parts of Texas because of power supply shortages at a time when the deep freeze causes peak demand. Many states are at a dangerous point of running out of energy at any price to meet demand as the cold spell rolls on. This story isn’t so much about the weather as it is about a grand failure of public policy. Because of the political left’s war on fossil fuels, and “renewable energy mandates” that require 20 percent to 30 percent of a state’s power supply to come from wind and solar power, the power grid is squeezed to the brink. Wind and solar don’t generate much power when temperatures plummet.

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from INFOWARS
CONSPIRACY-PSEUDOSCIENCE,  LOW,  radio program and website run by Alex Jones

Shocking footage out of Austin shows long lines of desperate Texans queueing up to enter grocery stores, as extreme cold weather conditions stretch into their third day and many are without power.

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from MedPage Today

— Not the research or the headline we needed

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from Mises Institute
RIGHT-CENTER BIAS, MIXED

Racism has, tragically, raised its ugly head throughout history. And American has certainly seen its share. But after all the other things that have been called racist, with everything connected to them bearing guilt by association, it is nonetheless stunning that some are now calling mathematics racist, often inheriting ascribed guilt from the fact that some seem to be better at it than others. And the condemnation is far broader than most people imagine. For instance, I just did a Google search of “racist mathematics,” and it generated more than 70,000 hits. ... Rather than representing “white supremacy,” the evolution of mathematics has been a globe-, race-, and culture-spanning collaboration of advancements, an ongoing development of more effective tools for anyone to use. And that history shows that all of those involved wanted to get the answers right, where having to show your work has been a millennia-old strategy for mathematics education. To turn mathematics into an effort to “identify and challenge the ways that math is used to uphold capitalist, imperialist, and racist views” offers poor compensation for undermining the development of skills and knowledge that benefit all of us, even when we as individuals don’t have those skills. And those who will be most harmed are those who already struggle most with the basics of getting the mathematics right, which precedes more advanced understanding. Without learning the precision that higher order mathematics requires, putting “ethno” in front of mathematics will ensure that doors to careers in aerospace, physics and other sciences, engineering, economics, finance, and more will be closed to entire generations of learners, for they will never meet the demands those fields require. In other words, advocates of ethnomathematics are proposing to harm the group they claim they are supposedly trying to help.

According to some commentators such as economics Nobel Laureate Paul Romer, technical knowledge is key to economic growth. But if this is the case, why do third world economies continue to experience poverty? After all, individuals in these economies have access to the same technical knowledge as the developed world. Careful examination, however, shows that a key driver of economic growth is the pool of consumer goods, or the subsistence fund.

This year has been interesting for Wall Street, to say the least. After hearing that hedge funds had shorted the stock of the dying retail chain GameStop by over 100 percent of shares, Redditors banded together to buy up the stock, knowing that short sales do not expire, so the hedge funds will eventually be forced to buy it all back at a drastically raised price.

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from The Spokesman-Review
Newspaper in Spokane, Washington

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from Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

Omitted from audit are the computer files created to count votes and the activity logs documenting that process.

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from Washington Policy Center
Educational Research Center in Seattle, Washington

HB 1399, to remove occupational license barriers for people who have finished prison sentences
A bipartisan bill giving people getting out of prison a shot at returning to productive society.
As Washington prepares to re-open its economy, legislators should remove barriers that make it difficult for many low-income workers to find jobs. Of particular note are restrictions for those with criminal records who have finished their sentences. Currently, Washington state puts licensing barriers on those who are trying to put their past behind them and begin a new career and chapter in their life.

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In the news, Monday, February 15, 2021


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FEB 14      INDEX      FEB 16
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from FEE (Foundation for Economic Education)
RIGHT-CENTER BIAS, HIGH, non-profit organization

February 15 marks birth of Frank Chodorov, one of the intellectual giants of the 20th century and former editor of "The Freeman, who Aaron Steelman described as someone who offered an “unwavering defense of individualism and the minimal state,” and “viewed the state as the greatest threat to individual liberty and human happiness,” whose writings, in the “intellectual war against the omnipotent state,” libertarians “would be wise to consult.”

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from Forbes

The massive blast of Siberia-like cold that is wreaking havoc across North America is proving that if we humans want to keep surviving frigid winters, we are going to have to keep burning natural gas — and lots of it — for decades to come. That cold reality contradicts the “electrify everything” scenario that’s being promoted by climate change activists, politicians, and academics. They claim that to avert the possibility of catastrophic climate change, we must stop burning hydrocarbons and convert all of our transportation, residential, commercial, and industrial systems so that they are powered solely on electricity, with most of that juice coming, of course, from forests of wind turbines and oceans of solar panels. 

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from Mises Institute
RIGHT-CENTER BIAS, MIXED

The Left long ago figured out how to get ordinary people interested in economic policy. The strategy is two pronged. The first part is to frame the problem as a moral problem. The second part is to make the fight over economic policy into a fight over something much bigger than economics: it's a fight between views of what it means to be a good person. The Left knows how to make the war over economics into a war over culture. Yet when it comes to economic policy, some opponents of the Left's economic views—views which are, of course, very wrong—don't seem to understand the rules of the game. For example, a typical left-wing economic scheme might call for a higher minimum wage, declaring this policy to be a matter of simple decency, and by extension, the moral policy. In response to this, some defenders of laissez-faire and free markets often concentrate exclusively on bloodless clinical explanations of “efficiency” or “incentives” or demand curves. The element of moral righteousness is often omitted. But given that most people want to do “the right thing,” the debate often ends with a sizable portion of the public concluding that they’ll side with doing the right thing, even if some arcane economic free market theory claims the right thing is “inefficient.”

The modern institution of the presidency is the primary political evil Americans face, and the cause of nearly all our woes. It squanders the national wealth and starts unjust wars against foreign peoples that have never done us any harm. It wrecks our families, tramples on our rights, invades our communities, and spies on our bank accounts. It skews the culture toward decadence and trash. It tells lie after lie. Teachers used to tell school kids that anyone can be president. This is like saying anyone can go to Hell. It's not an inspiration; it's a threat.

Last summer, infectious disease experts at the University of Washington wrote what they called an “[o]pen letter advocating for an anti-racist public health response to demonstrations against systemic injustice occurring during the COVID-19 pandemic.” It is essentially a letter explaining that white supremacy is a public health issue, especially in light of covid-19. The letter was signed by 1,288 “public health professionals, infectious diseases professionals, and community stakeholders.” ... Thankfully, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has not yet labeled white supremacy a public health emergency, yet leading medical schools have signed on to support the letter and are actively teaching their medical students that things like white supremacy can be dealt with in the realm of health.  

On Friday, February 6, the Pennsylvania (PA) state legislature gave the final approval to put three state constitutional amendments on the ballot for a popular referendum scheduled for May 18. Two of these amendments address the power of the state governor to declare and renew emergency declarations and are both a direct result of conflict between the Republican-controlled legislature and the Democrat governor, Tom Wolf.

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from Newsmax

In 2010, the U.S. Department of Defense found thousands of its computer servers sending military network data to China — the result of code hidden in chips that handled the machines’ startup process. In 2014, Intel Corp. discovered that an elite Chinese hacking group breached its network through a single server that downloaded malware from a supplier’s update site. And in 2015, the Federal Bureau of Investigation warned multiple companies that Chinese operatives had concealed an extra chip loaded with backdoor code in one manufacturer's servers. Each of these distinct attacks had two things in common: China and Super Micro Computer Inc., a computer hardware maker in San Jose, California. They shared one other trait; U.S. spymasters discovered the manipulations but kept them largely secret as they tried to counter each one and learn more about China’s capabilities.

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from The Spokesman-Review
Newspaper in Spokane, Washington

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from Yahoo News
LEFT-CENTER BIAS, HIGH, news website owned by Verizon Media

A few days ago, the New York Times quietly “updated” its report, published over a month earlier, asserting that Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick had been killed by being struck with a fire extinguisher during the January 6 riot. According to the update, “new information has emerged regarding the death of the Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick that questions the initial cause of his death provided by officials close to the Capitol Police.” As I detailed in a column last week, what the Times calls “new information” actually began emerging the same day the paper filed its January 8 report.

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In the news, Sunday, February 14, 2021


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FEB 13      INDEX      FEB 15
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from FEE (Foundation for Economic Education)
RIGHT-CENTER BIAS, HIGH, non-profit organization

Many Americans today continue to talk past each other in their discussions of justice. Progressives often see conservatives as insensitive and lacking compassion for the poor and oppressed. They march and protest in the streets for justice and view conservatives’ lack of protest as signs of their racism and privilege. Meanwhile, many conservatives cannot understand how progressives can see their tactics as just. They watch the protesters loot and burn cities and gape at the lawlessness of these social “justice” warriors. The reason why there can be no actual conversation between these groups is that they do not share the same definition of justice. No one explains this better than Thomas Sowell in his book, The Quest for Cosmic Justice.

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from The Seattle Times
LEFT-CENTER,  HIGH,  Newspaper in Seattle, WA

Washington state’s COVID-19 vaccine planning fell short on logistics, sowing disorder and mistrust
In the months leading up to the first COVID-19 vaccine shipments, Washington state health officials agonized over which residents should be vaccinated before others. They surveyed 18,000 people and convened focus groups, debating race, age and essential occupations. But unlike some other states, the state Department of Health (DOH) neglected to plan for basic logistics that would have allowed for quick vaccination of those most vulnerable to the disease.

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from The Spokesman-Review
Newspaper in Spokane, Washington

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from Times Colonist 
Media/News Company

When Michael Williams undertook his first ­restoration project, the William Grimms Carriage ­Factory on Johnson Street, partway into work on part of the building the entire front façade collapsed. Architect Peter Cotton designed a new one, based on old photographs of the 1870s original. So, the building is not original. It’s new. The original design has been reconstructed.

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from WND (World Net Daily)
QUESTIONABLE SOURCE, LOW, EXTREME RIGHT

Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa – the one-time communist spymaster who would later become the highest-ranking Soviet bloc defector during the Cold War, and a true American patriot praised by President Reagan and countless others – died Sunday morning. He was 92. Pacepa, who had battled various health issues in recent years, had been in the hospital for a while and in intensive care the past couple of days before succumbing to COVID-19. He is survived by his wife, Mary Lou, and his daughter, Dana.

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Posted by at No comments:

In the news, Saturday, February 13, 2021


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FEB 12      INDEX      FEB 14
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from ABC News (& affiliates)
TV Network in New York, New York

Exactly a month and a week after insurrectionists incited a riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, former President Donald Trump's second impeachment trial came to a climactic end on Saturday afternoon, with Trump being acquitted for his alleged role of inciting the deadly event. A majority of senators voted to convict the former president, but failed to reach the super majority threshold needed for a conviction. "This has been yet another phase of the greatest witch hunt in the history of our Country. No president has ever gone through anything like it, and it continues because our opponents cannot forget the almost 75 million people, the highest number ever for a sitting president, who voted for us just a few short months ago," Trump said in a statement.

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

If given a chance, the market will eventually provide solutions to many of the grievances stemming from Big Tech's clumsy efforts to control user content.

The fact that even the New York Times is finally beginning to discuss unintended consequences of COVID-19 'hygiene theater' is a sign we may be moving in the right direction.

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from Mises Institute
RIGHT-CENTER BIAS, MIXED

The covid-19 pandemic we are living in has showed how much power states and governments can exercise on our lives. Several daily activities which we all considered as perfectly normal just one year ago—e.g., meeting friends at the pub, throwing parties, etc.—are now prohibited or discouraged by many governments around the Western world. However, we should ask, Is it legitimate for governments to coerce their citizens into whatever (the former believe) it takes to contain a pandemic? Take, for instance, the issue of state-mandated vaccinations: Is it legitimate for government to force its citizens to take vaccines? I think it’s not, and I will argue why I think so—even though I have nothing against vaccination per se.  I simply maintain that whether to take a vaccine—or any other substance, for that matter—should be a free-willed individual choice, something government should have no concern with.

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from The Orca
News & Media Website in B.C.

Daniel Marshall and the curious story of how a native artifact ‘devastated’ those who possessed it.
Ancient artifacts have always held my fascination, especially those accompanied with curious stories that have been seemingly lost to time. Ever since the Spanish first explored the Northwest Coast, Indigenous artifacts were either gifted or traded with Europeans – and in far too many instances simply stolen. And these antiquities can be found throughout museum collections both locally and around the world. In particular, the centuries-old argillite carvings of Haida Gwaii (formerly the Queen Charlottes), such as those produced by the legendary artist Charles Edenshaw (1839-1920).

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from Reason Magazine
Magazine in Los Angeles, California

If there is a multi-billionaire club in Washington state, a large portion of the legislature is apparently looking to drive the wealthiest members of the club out of the state. The legislature calls this effort H.R. 1406. Everyone else calls it a wealth tax. ... The Tax Foundation's Jared Walczak, using Forbes data, estimates that of the Washington residents who would be subject to the wealth tax, four people would provide about 97 percent of the tax revenues: Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, and Mackenzie Scott (Bezos' ex-wife). ... Bezos, for example, would represent just under half of Washington's estimated wealth tax revenues. As a result, if Bezos left Washington or died, half of the tax's projected revenue would disappear. There is basically zero chance of his lost revenue being replaced by a new resident moving into the state. Further, if there was a decline in the price of Amazon stock to its lowest price in the last year, that would reduce estimated wealth tax revenues by about 37 percent.

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from The Spokesman-Review
Newspaper in Spokane, Washington

A federal judge in Seattle blocked the sale of Seattle’s National Archives and Records Administration facility, which would have moved a vast collection of historically significant documents from the Pacific Northwest to other parts of the country. Attorney General Bob Ferguson joined 40 other plaintiffs in filing a lawsuit against the federal government in early January hoping to block the sale, which he said had been accelerated in recent months and had not included conversations with local, state and tribal officials. A judge will issue a preliminary injunction next week that will say Ferguson’s coalition was likely to prevail in its lawsuit, according to a news release.

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Saturday, February 20, 2021

In the news, Friday, February 12, 2021

 

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FEB 11      INDEX      FEB 13
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from FEE (Foundation for Economic Education)
RIGHT-CENTER BIAS, HIGH, non-profit organization

With the growing chorus of free-market economists calling out the president’s proposal, hopefully the public will soon realize that there’s no economic justification for Biden’s political spending push.
President Biden has abandoned bipartisan compromise and pushed full-steam-ahead to pass his entire sweeping $1.9 trillion COVID-19 spending package. The president’s proposal includes $1,400 “stimulus” checks for more Americans, $350 billion to bail out state and local governments, a renewal of super-charged unemployment benefits through September, money for vaccine distribution, a federal $15 minimum wage, and much, much more. Democrats in Congress are determined to mark up the bill over the next few weeks and pass it by early March. But the state of the economy doesn’t support this spending bonanza—not even close.

A $7,500 investment in bitcoin in 2015, when economist Paul Krugman described it as "bubble" rooted in "libertarian ideology," today would be worth $1.2 million.

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from First Things

THE GLOBAL CHRISTIAN RIGHT
The Religious Right that rose and flourished during the 1970s and 1980s has been pilloried for some time and from all sides. Secularists attack it for trying to erect a theocracy in the US of A, forgetting that Baptists like Jerry Falwell were heirs of Roger Williams. Some Evangelicals criticize its blinkered focus on moral and sexual issues—abortion, school prayer, gay rights—and its indifference to systemic injustice. Others equate the Religious Right with white supremacy, charging that it was a rearguard effort by white Christians to shore up their eroding status. Some of these critiques have some force, but all ignore the crucial role that world evangelism, international and multi-ethnic networks, and activism to protect religious freedom played in the Religious Right’s agenda.

TOWARD A FAMILY WAGE
Family policy has assumed center stage on the American right. Lawmakers are focused on the impending passage of a COVID relief bill that could include, for the first time, a national family benefit for parents. Sen. Mitt Romney has put forward his own version of a pro-family policy, which promises to fund a child allowance for years to come. How should Christians react to such proposals? ... While policy debates are often arcane disputes, the question of family allowances is quite simple. In a world where a wage that could sustain a family is a distant memory, generous family allowances provide one of the only ways to support family life. Romney's plan no doubt needs careful scrutiny. The devil of policy is always in the details. But the basic idea points us in the right direction. Injecting purchasing power into the heart of the home will turn our economy further in the direction of the family—the economy's starting point and its ultimate measure.

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from Mises Institute
RIGHT-CENTER BIAS, MIXED

How the Fed Helped Pay for World War I
Governments can pay their bills in three ways: taxes, debt, and inflation. The public usually recognizes the first two, for they are difficult to hide. But the third tends to go unnoticed by the public because it involves a slow and subtle reduction in the value of money, a policy usually unarticulated and complex in design. In this article, I will look under the hood of the Federal Reserve during World War I to explain the actual tools and levers used by monetary authorities to reduce the value of the public's money in order to fund government war spending. This example will help readers better understand the more general idea of an "inflation tax," and how such a tax might be used in the future to fund the state's wars. Just as kings debased coins to help pay for their wars, the Fed used inflation to help pay for US participation in World War I. It did so by creating and issuing dollars in return for government debt.

In late January and early February, protestors took to the streets of lower Manhattan to “re-occupy Wall Street.” Protestors were there to draw attention to the efforts by Wall Street elites to use their political influence with Congress and the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) to crush the traders—many of whom had rallied around certain groups within Reddit—who had embarrassed hedge funders and cost them billions through the now infamous GameStop short squeeze. Except in this version of “Occupy Wall Street” Republicans and conservatives are the chief participants. 

Populism May Be on the Rise Again in Europe
Following former president Donald Trump’s election defeat, the legacy media and Swamp creatures glowingly declared that populism is dead and buried, never to be resurrected on a massive scale ever again. But were the victories of Trump and Brexit matches that ignited the flames of populist movements? Despite the rest of Europe essentially dismissing figures and parties who championed comparable antiestablishment, anti-immigrant policies in 2017, voters might be giving these same forces a second look now that “the experts” have failed tens of millions of people in the age of the pandemiconomy. From France to Portugal to the Netherlands, the populist wave may rise once more.

The World Needs a Gold-Backed Deutsche Mark
The seeds of sound-money destruction were sown at the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference, which established that US dollars could be held as central bank reserves and were redeemable for gold by the US Treasury at thirty-five dollars an ounce. This was the so-called gold exchange standard, but only foreign central banks and some multinational organizations, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), enjoyed this right of redemption. The system depended upon the solemn promise by the US that it would refrain from issuing unbacked dollars. The watershed event that ushered in a new malignant, pure fiat money era occurred on August 15, 1971, when the US abandoned the gold exchange standard in order to stop the drain on the US gold stock. American money printing had begun in earnest in the previous decade in order to finance Lyndon Johnson's "guns and butter" policy. The Fed monetized government debt to fund LBJ's Great Society welfare programs while the government fought a war in Southeast Asia at the same time. Dollar claims in the form of government bills and bonds built up at central banks around the world. At the recommendation of French economic advisor Jacque Rueff, a free market economist and gold standard proponent, French president Charles de Gaulle ordered the Bank of France to redeem 80 percent of its US dollar holdings for gold, per the solemn promise made at Bretton Woods. Thus began a run on the US Treasury's gold reserves that culminated in President Nixon taking the dishonorable action of abandoning the gold exchange standard. This set the course of unfettered fiat money expansion that has led the world to the precipice of monetary destruction. This end to the Bretton Woods system—itself already deeply flawed—ushered in the age of competing fiat currencies worldwide. We are now headed toward the chaotic destruction of this system as well.

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from New York Magazine

In the late 1940s and 1950s, Hollywood studios — under pressure from the right — promised they would not “knowingly employ a communist.” This blacklist eventually became notorious, especially in Hollywood, which came to lionize its victims in several films. And yet it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish the blacklist policy from the emerging current treatment of right-wingers. Earlier this week, Gina Carano, an actor in The Mandalorian, was fired from her job after a controversy over an allegedly anti-Semitic social-media post. In short order, UTSA, her talent agency, dropped her as a client. Many media accounts have taken the anti-Semitism charge at face value (USA Today: “… an anti-Semitic Instagram Story that she shared from another user.”) The post in question, which triggered a social-media firestorm that quickly led to her firing and loss of representation, was not anti-Semitic by any reasonable definition. The post simply argued (uncontroversially) that the Holocaust grew out of a hate campaign against Jews, which it then likened (controversially) to hatred of fellow Americans for their political views.

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from The Spokesman-Review
Newspaper in Spokane, Washington

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from TLS Times Literary Supplement
Newspaper · Publisher · Arts & Entertainment in London, UK

Why modernity led to secularization
Why do so many people in the modern West self-identify as atheists? What lies behind our growing tendency to place our faith and trust in something other than a transcendent deity? In different ways, both of these stimulating and provocative books address this cluster of questions. Written alongside and in partial dialogue with each other, they represent fresh attempts to grapple with the longstanding problem of why the rise of modernity has been accompanied by the decline of religion.

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In the news, Thursday, February 11, 2021


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FEB 10      INDEX      FEB 12
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from The Christian Post
RIGHT BIAS, MIXED, American nondenominational Evangelical Christian newspaper in Washington, D.C.

Ravi Zacharias International Ministries issued an apology Thursday as it announced the results of a monthslong independent investigation in which victims claimed the late Christian apologist engaged in “sexting, unwanted touching, spiritual abuse, and rape” during his life. Atlanta law firm Miller & Martin, independent investigators hired by RZIM, released an in-depth report this week detailing serious allegations of sexual misconduct by Zacharias. In a statement accompanying the report, the board of RZIM said it was “shocked and grieved by Ravi’s actions” and feels “a deep need for corporate repentance.”

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

In big and diverse countries, it is important that smaller units adapt their laws to the local peculiarities and specifics of the economic and public health situation. That is why Donald Trump, when announcing the plan to get America back to work, allowed for states to decide when to reopen, for a single nationwide lifting of restrictions will prove to be too early in some areas and too late in yet others. ... However, the problem stemming from the centralization of decision-making power is not limited to the inability of bureaucrats in a distant capital to understand the peculiarities of a local situation. It is that civil servants in centralized states deal with abstract and theoretical numbers rather than interact with real people; they are detached from reality.

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from First Things

THE MERITS OF ROMNEY'S PRO-FAMILY POLICY
Sen. Mitt Romney’s “Family Security Act” has come at precisely the right moment. The epidemic of loneliness is intensifying, and rates of marriage and fertility are plummeting. COVID-19 has put a spotlight on the social and economic insecurity of the poor and working classes, as well as on the shrinking middle class. Romney's act proposes transforming the existing child tax credit into a larger monthly child allowance for parents—$350 per month for children ages 0–5, beginning when the child is in utero, and $250 per month for children ages 6–17. This would spread the significant financial costs of child-rearing to the community at large, so that parents are not economically disadvantaged vis-à-vis childless adults in their efforts to raise the next generation. The proposal has many merits as a response to the bleak trends highlighted by the pandemic. More important still, it would serve as an overdue corrective to liberalism’s devastating effects on the family.

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from HumanProgress.org
Education Website

Progress is inevitably related to the number of people who are connected and have a certain freedom to innovate and imitate.

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from KHQ Local News (NBC Spokane)

After vaccinating all phase 1B tier 1 eligible people who wanted the vaccine, Whitman County was ready to move on to the next group, teachers. But that plan was stopped in its tracks after a call from the governor’s office. This is an excerpt of an email from the Whitman County department of health: "Unfortunately I have some bad news to share with you all. Late last night Dr. Bowman and I were pulled into a conference call with the governor’s office regarding our plans to vaccinate teachers and staff in our clinics this week and weekend. On that meeting they made it very clear that if we were to proceed with that plan, we would be jeopardizing our current doses and any future allocations. ..."

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from Mises Institute
RIGHT-CENTER BIAS, MIXED

How Not to Argue against the Minimum Wage
Among the hotly contested list of Joe Biden’s promises is an increase of the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. There are plenty of sound reasons to oppose government minimum wage laws, but there is one objection making the rounds that is based on bad economics and should be avoided, and that’s the "businesses will pass on the costs to consumers" objection. ... Like so many other harmful state interventions, minimum wage laws need to fought and repealed. To be successful, however, opponents must avoid falling into weak and easily refutable arguments.

Public Health Measures like Mask Mandates Lead to Unintended and Unpredictable Outcomes
After months and months of covid tyranny, nearly forty states and many more localities continue to push mandatory mask wearing in the US. Shortly after his inauguration, President Joe Biden signed a set of executive orders that require mask wearing on all federal lands, as well as in airports, buses, and trains. This brand of state paternalism should be cause for much concern—not only because it infringes on man’s natural rights, but also because the state has proven incapable at making people any safer. In fact, it has invariably made them less safe.

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from Newsweek
LEFT-CENTER BIAS,  HIGH,  American weekly news magazine

Anew report highlights the hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths in the U.S. under former President Donald Trump, noting that some 40 percent of COVID-19 pandemic deaths in 2020 would have been averted if America's mortality rate was equivalent to other wealthy peer nations. The report—published Thursday in one of the world's oldest and best-known medical journals The Lancet—explains that even before the pandemic, the U.S. saw 461,000 unnecessary deaths in 2018 when compared to the death rates in other G7 nations (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United Kingdom). Comparing the U.S. COVID-19 mortality rate to this peer group, the U.S. would have seen 40 percent fewer deaths in 2020 if its mortality rate was comparable.

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from The Spokesman-Review
Newspaper in Spokane, Washington

Free speech is fundamental in a free society. It’s how we process our thoughts, refine our positions and battle for policy. It’s why Congress is forbidden to make any law “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” Doesn’t matter if the press uses paper or pixels. But what if it’s not a federal law but the actions of a private company suppressing speech? After skeptically listening to friends complain for several years of conservatives being shut down on social media, it finally happened to me. On Jan. 6, both my personal and public Facebook accounts were blocked for 30 days for posting “in violation of community standards.”

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from Sputnik
RIGHT-CENTER BIAS, MIXED, Broadcasting & Media Production Company out of Moscow, Russia

The UK government has already revoked China Global Television Network's (CGTN) licence to broadcast. The reason was that China Global Television Network Corporation (CGTNC) - which controls CGTN - cannot hold the licence because it is controlled by the Chinese government.
The BBC World News has been banned from broadcasting in China, the China Global Television Network (CGTN) has reported. The National Radio and Television Administration (NRTA) said the BBC's broadcasting licence was withdrawn over grave violations committed in the channel's China-related reports. The NRTA pointed out that the BBC specifically violated the provisions of the country's media regulations demanding news reports to be "true and impartial". According to the regulator cited by the Xinhua news agency, the British broadcaster undermined China's national interests and "ethnic solidarity" with its actions.

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