Friday, July 9, 2021

In the news, Tuesday, June 29, 2021


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JUN 28      INDEX      JUN 30
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from Breitbart
Western loggers, mill workers, and small communities were shocked when President Biden nominated Tracy Stone-Manning as the Director of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). Stone-Manning was part of the notorious domestic eco-terrorist group Earth First! when she was a 23-year-old graduate student at the University of Montana. As an editor of one of the group’s publications, she provided fodder to the faithful who opposed congressionally mandated logging on federal lands. On one occasion, however, she went beyond advocacy. In 1989, she was an accessory to an act of eco-terrorism called tree spiking in an effort to stop the sale of Idaho national forest timber.

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from Competitive Enterprise Institute

The Council of the District of Columbia today voted to ban the sale of flavored tobacco, including menthol, a policy opposed by CEI and coalition groups. CEI Senior Fellow Michelle Minton warned that such a ban would not improve health outcomes but would put communities of color more at-risk. Bloomberg-funded groups applaud the District’s prohibition of flavored tobacco as an ‘historic’ move to protect youth from nicotine. In reality, it is history repeating itself. Like every other prohibition before it, banning menthol cigarettes and flavored e-cigarettes will not convince anyone to stop smoking but will very likely increase smoking, as San Francisco recently learned. People of color and marginalized groups are harmed most by policies that employ punitive measures over harm reduction. Also, the prohibition will spur a massive illicit market for menthol cigarettes and flavored vapes, which, since street dealers rarely check ID, will make it easier for youth to get their hands on these products.   

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

President Joe Biden (D) and his administration faced intense backlash on Monday night after Fox News host Tucker Carlson accused the administration of spying on him. “Yesterday we heard from a whistleblower within the U.S. government who reached out to warn us that the NSA, the National Security Agency, is monitoring our electronic communications and is planning to leak them in an attempt to take this show off the air,” Carlson said during his show. “The whistleblower, who is in a position to know, repeated back to us information about a story that we are working on that could have only come directly from my texts and emails. There’s no other possible source for that information, period.”

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from Gizmodo

Air temperatures during record-setting heat wave in the Pacific Northwest were bad enough. But the ground was on a whole other level. Stunning new satellite imagery from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-3 satellite shows ground temperatures reached as high as 145 degrees Fahrenheit (63 degrees Celsius) in Wenatchee, Washington.

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from Mises Institute
RIGHT-CENTER BIAS, MIXED


Böhm-Bawerk: Austrian Economist Who Said No to Big Government
We live at a time when politicians and bureaucrats only know one public policy: more and bigger government. Yet, there was a time when even those who served in government defended limited and smaller government. One of the greatest of these died one hundred years ago on August 27, 1914, the Austrian economist Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk. Böhm-Bawerk is most famous as one of the leading critics of Marxism and socialism in the years before the First World War. He is equally famous as one of the developers of “marginal utility” theory as the basis of showing the logic and workings of the competitive market price system. But he also served three times as the finance minister of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, during which he staunchly fought for lower government spending and taxing, balanced budgets, and a sound monetary system based on the gold standard.

Because of past easy-money binges, the pool of wealth may be declining just as prices are increasing. And we're likely to see upward pressure on interest rates. This is bad news, and shows the limits of the Fed's power.

In On Liberty, John Stuart Mill advocated for minority opinion to be specially “encouraged and countenanced,”1 and thus that Mill was not an absolute free market thinker where opinion is concerned. Mill suggested that minority opinion should not only be tolerated but requires special encouragement in order to gain a fair hearing. Such special encouragement would amount to the subsidization of opinion, most likely by the state. Thus, Mill did not argue for a free and fair “marketplace of ideas.” ,,, We should be quite skeptical when states impose the opinion of minority groups on the majority through special programs in schools and elsewhere. Such programs likely involve “positive discrimination” against particular groups, consistent with state objectives.

HMS DEFENDER VERSUS THE RUSSIAN MILITARY: THE DANGER OF BELIEVING YOUR OWN PROPAGANDA
Less than two weeks after NATO members reaffirmed allegiance to Article 5 – that an attack on one member was an attack on all members – the UK nearly put that pledge to the test. In a shockingly provocative move, the UK’s HMS Defender purposely sailed into Crimean territorial waters on its way to Georgia. Press reports suggest that there was a dispute between the UK defense and foreign ministries over whether to violate Russia’s claimed territorial waters with a heavily armed warship. According to reports, Prime Minister Boris Johnson himself jumped in to over-rule the more cautious Foreign Office in favor of confrontation. As Johnson later claimed, because the UK (and the US) does not recognize Russian sovereignty over Crimea, the UK was actually sailing through Ukrainian waters. It was an in-your-face move toward Russia just weeks after the US and NATO were forced to back down from a major clash with Russia in eastern Ukraine

WITH INFLATION RISING, CAN THE AMERICAN RIGHT LEARN FROM EL SALVADOR?
El Salvador became the center of the bitcoin world recently with the announcement from President Nayib Bukele that the country will embrace a bitcoin standard. While criticisms may exist about details of this specific proposal, a state actor effectively challenging the dollar-based global monetary regime is a cause for celebration. While it remains to be seen if other countries will attempt to replicate Bukele’s handout to the bitcoin community, there are important lessons here for other political leaders trying to respond to the global uncertainty that has resulted from the Federal Reserve’s reckless abuse of the global reserve currency. Among those who would benefit from seriously engaging with the question “What has government done to our money?” is the American right. While the reckless fiscal and monetary policy that has eroded the security of the American dollar is unquestionably bipartisan in nature, the Biden administration may end up being the unfortunate winner of inflationary hot potato. With annual inflation reaching 5 percent, the Federal Reserve will face a level of scrutiny it has not faced in a decade—and inflation is a particularly problematic political hurdle given the daily toll it takes on average consumers. The corporate press will do everything it can to try to gaslight the American public about the costs of inflation, but not even the Communist Party of China has the power to prevent average consumers from feeling the pain of rising consumer prices.

The Fed announced the reportedly hawkish news that the central bank may raise rates, not this year, not next year, but by fifty basis points sometime in 2023. This tapering would slow the Fed’s buying of $120 billion of debt securities a month with money created from the ether to some lesser amount. People forget the central bank “kept its benchmark rate on hold for a 10th straight meeting after sweeping into emergency action amid the coronavirus pandemic in March of last year with a full percentage-point cut.” Yet again emergency government action has become permanent. This news sent the dollar screaming upward, with the DXY jumping from 90.54 to 92.32 at week’s end. The price of gold was, of course, bludgeoned. The yellow metal dropped 6.5 percent over the next five days. The ten-year Treasury bond finished the week at a paltry 1.44 percent. Meanwhile, financial basket case Greece saw its ten-year rate finish at seventy-nine basis points. Making no news was Lyn Alden’s tweet that the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet crossed $8 trillion in assets. Fed watcher Alden followed this with the news, “Reverse repos jumped $235 billion today to $755 billion.” 

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from MyNorthwest
Media/News Company in Seattle

The State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Chris Reykdal, says critical race theory isn’t being taught in Washington schools. This is a lie. Reykdal didn’t make an error; it’s trickery. He’s playing a dishonest semantics game he thinks he can win. Thankfully, we have plenty of documentation proving critical race theory is taught in Washington schools. It’s even being forced on staff during training. Just not in the way Reykdal aims to redefine the debate.

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

In a recent interview, the speaker for the schismatic Ukrainian organization openly acknowledged something that the canonical Ukrainian Church and representatives of other Local Churches have known all along: that other Local Churches would never recognize their group if not for the influence of Constantinople. Speaking with the DetectorUA Youtube channel, “Archbishop” Evstraty Zorya, the lead propagandist for Constantinople’s “Orthodox Church of Ukraine,” plainly admits that the Churches of Greece, Alexandria, and Cyprus were not inclined to recognize the OCU, but were worked on by the Patriarchate of Constantinople.

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from The Spokesman-Review
Newspaper in Spokane, Washington

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