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from Asia Times
LEAST BIASED, HIGH; News & Media Website based in Hong Kong
Upstart tech companies outperformed established mega-cap stocks in China’s stock market during the first five weeks of 2021, after Chinese regulators proposed a set of measures to prevent the tech giants from stifling up-and-coming competitors. It’s much too early to gauge the economic impact of the new Chinese regulations, which include measures to prevent Big Tech from hoarding data, manipulating e-commerce platforms to suppress competition, and predatory takeovers. But the equity market evidently believes that the new regulations improve the outlook for new market entrants.
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from The Christian Post
RIGHT BIAS, MIXED, American nondenominational Evangelical Christian newspaper in Washington, D.C.
New research has revealed what doctors critical of transgender medicine have been saying for years, that puberty-suppressing drugs given to gender dysphoric youth stunt their bone growth. Published in PLOS One last week, the study, "Short-term outcomes of pubertal suppression in a selected cohort of 12 to 15 year old young people with persistent gender dysphoria in the UK," found that puberty blockers do not alleviate psychological distress regarding one’s gender by any measurable benefit. ... When the children completed chemical puberty blockade at age 16, the researchers found “reduced growth” in both height and bone strength. Additional research is necessary to say whether the weakened bones are irreversible, researchers said.
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from Competitive Enterprise Institute
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) on Monday reaffirmed something we already knew but that bears repeating: Higher minimum wages costs jobs. The CBO’s number crunchers found that Democrats’ current proposal to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, up from the current rate of $7.25, would cost workers 1.4 million jobs. Workers lucky enough to keep their jobs will see their take-home pay eroded by higher prices.
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from First Things
BIDEN’S CHOICE IN CHINA
Eleven million persecuted Uighurs and other Muslims in China’s Xinjiang autonomous region got a first taste of justice on January 19 when then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared that the Chinese government is committing genocide against them. History has shown that condemning genocide is an essential initial step to stopping it and preventing it from happening again. Although some media figures downplayed the Uighur genocide determination as merely Pompeo's “parting shot” at China, this is the single most important U.S. human rights measure of the past four years. It came after a monthslong deliberative process by the State Department’s Office of Global Criminal Justice. The determination was based in critical part on new information showing that forced birth prevention measures inside Xinjiang reeducation camps are aimed at suppressing Uighur demographics and are part of a destructive state campaign against minorities in the region. Both President Biden and Secretary of State Blinken expressed agreement with the genocide determination. But whether they will keep pressure on an angered China remains to be seen. The Uighur genocide is an inconvenient fact for the administration’s foreign policy climate change priorities. Barely a week after Pompeo's statement, U.N. Secretary General Guterres pleaded in the interest of “climate action” partnership for a U.S.-China “reset” to put aside “different views” on human rights—including, presumably, the U.S. genocide determination. By his sights, the U.S. will have to make hard choices about its China policies.
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from Hoover Institution
Nonprofit Organization in Stanford, California
Who Was The Warrior King At Sutton Hoo?
The newly-released movie The Dig starring Ralph Fiennes and Carey Mulligan, based on the superb novel of the same name by John Preston, has focused attention on one of the great mysteries of Anglo-Saxon history: who was the great warrior who was buried in his warship under the mound at Sutton Hoo?
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from MedPage Today
— Vinay Prasad weighs the two competing targets
There are two schools of thought for the future of COVID-19. #ZeroCOVID is an emerging idea that all nations can nearly eliminate SARS-CoV-2 transmission, and occasional outbreaks can be rapidly dealt with by public health services. #HarmReduction is an alternate philosophy that emphasizes that the goal of policy is to minimize the harms of the virus, but #ZeroCOVID may not be possible. Imperfectly pursuing perfection can be worse than steadily pursuing good. Which is the best path forward? Does it vary by country?
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from Mises Institute
RIGHT-CENTER BIAS, MIXED
RIGHT-CENTER BIAS, MIXED
The opening pages of the new decade feel like we’re living through a combination of George Orwell’s 1984 and Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. On the day the 2020 election results were to be certified in the Senate, a mob from the losing side surrounded and actually breached the Capitol. The outgoing president was accused of inciting a riot, threatened with impeachment, and banned for life on Twitter. Despite the chaos, stocks shrugged it all off and rallied to new highs.
Most people have managed to get through life without ever seeing Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The New Generation. It currently stands at a 16 percent score with critics and an 18 percent score with audiences on Rotten Tomatoes, so most people, we can conclude, have dodged a bullet by not seeing it. However, this production does have two very interesting features: Matthew McConaughey and Renée Zellweger. That’s right, two of Hollywood’s biggest names are in a movie that not even one in five people think is passable. McConaughey’s net worth currently stands at $150 million, while Zellweger’s stands at $90 million. So, what is the leap from a direct-to-video flop and multi-award-winning, highly paid actors? Well, it has to do with how capitalism approaches inefficiencies. Markets can take bad products, learn from them, and turn them into great products that give the public what it wants and needs.
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from The Ormsby Review
British Columbia's online book review and journal
The Fraser: River of Life and Legend
by Carol Blacklaws and Rick Blacklaws
Reviewed by Peter Grant
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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.
President Biden is pushing for a gradual increase in the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2025, after which it would be indexed for inflation. The wage was last raised in 2009, to $7.25, though more than half of the states now have set even higher minimums. Since the late 1960s, the value of the minimum wage has eroded over time and it has been infrequently boosted. But $15 would be even higher than the minimum wage’s high point in 1968, about $12.25 in 2020 dollars.
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from 21st Century Wire
Radio Host Patrick Henningsen
Achtung Baby! (It’s Cold Outside) – Germany’s ‘Green’ Energy Fail Rescued by Coal and Gas
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Achtung Baby! (It’s Cold Outside) – Germany’s ‘Green’ Energy Fail Rescued by Coal and Gas
Barely a week after Davos luminaries met with world leaders and Silicon Valley oligarchs to plot their latest phase of the Great Reset, the underlying provenance of their entire ‘climate emergency’ thesis is still struggling to correspond with reality. Their much-celebrated “Zero Carbon” agenda which virtue-signaling leaders like Justin Trudeau, Boris Johnson and Joe Biden are currently advocating for – is proving to be a lot more difficult to achieve in reality than it is on their elaborate UN Agenda 2030 Powerpoint slides, computer modeled projections and Zoom calls. No one is being hit with this sobering reality more than the Europe’s premier green trailblazer, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose country is currently in the grips of Europe’s record-breaking freeze this winter. Its millions of solar panels are blanketed in snow and ice and breathless, freezing weather is encouraging its 30,000 wind turbines to do absolutely nothing, at all. [Note: don’t forget about the constant supply of electricity from the grid that these things chew up heating their internal workings so they don’t freeze up solid!]
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