Friday, December 11, 2020

In the news, Saturday, November 28, 2020


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NOV 27      INDEX      NOV 29
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from The Spokesman-Review
Newspaper in Spokane, Washington

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

Changing the occupant of the White House will not affect Washington's major strategy towards Turkey and the Middle East in general, say Turkish observers, explaining why Ankara can no longer be reliant on the US and its model of democracy. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was the last president of a NATO nation to congratulate Joe Biden after the US media declared the former vice-president's victory on 7 November. In contrast, Turkey's main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) rushed to commend Biden immediately, prompting a rebuke from the Justice and Development Party's (AKP) Group Deputy Chair Bulent Turan. According to Axios, the potential Biden administration may share a lot of aims with Ankara on a number of issues, including Turkey's relations with Russia, Iran as well as Erdogan's Syria strategy. Meanwhile, the US State Department has announced a programme aimed at "reinforcing democratic values" in Turkey and fostering US-Turkish ties in 2021 among other issues.

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Monday, December 7, 2020

In the news, Friday, November 27, 2020


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NOV 26      INDEX      NOV 28
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from The Inlander
Media/News Company in Spokane, WA

In a 5-4 decision late Wednesday, the court struck down an order by Gov. Andrew Cuomo that had restricted the size of religious gatherings in certain areas of New York where infection rates were climbing. The governor had imposed 10- and 25-person capacity limits on churches and other houses of worship in those areas. The decision seemed to signal that some governmental efforts to stem the pandemic had overreached, impinging on protected freedoms in the name of public health. If unconstrained religious observance and public safety were sometimes at odds, as the governor and other public officials maintained, the court ruled that religious freedom should win out. Cuomo accused the court of partisanship, suggesting the ruling reflected the influence of the three conservative justices who have been nominated by President Donald Trump in the past four years.

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

As thousands of athletes get coronavirus tests, nurses wonder: What about us?
This month, registered nurses gathered in Los Angeles to protest the fact that UCLA’s athletic department conducted 1,248 tests in a single week while health-care workers at UCLA hospitals were denied testing. Last week National Nurses United, the country’s largest nursing union, released the results of a survey of more than 15,000 members. About two-thirds reported they had never been tested. Since August, when NFL training camps opened, the nation’s most popular and powerful sports league — one that generates more than $15 billion in annual revenue — has conducted roughly 645,000 coronavirus tests.

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from The Spokesman-Review
Newspaper in Spokane, Washington

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

A cyber-crime expert who recently was praised by the New York Times declared in a sworn affidavit in a Sidney Powell lawsuit that hundreds of thousands votes were shifted from President Trump to Joe Biden in battleground states.

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In the news, Thursday, November 26, 2020


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NOV 25      INDEX      NOV 27
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from CNN

May the emptiness at our tables and in our hearts be filled with memories of love and laughter. May we cherish our traditions, even when they are out of reach, and hold on to the hope of what's still to come. We're going to get through this together, even if we have to be apart.

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from HumanProgress.org
Education Website

The cost of living in the United States is an increasingly salient topic in public-policy circles today. As Mark J. Perry from the American Enterprise Institute documents, child care, education, and health care have become more expensive relative to wages over the last two decades. Conversely, cars, clothing, food and beverages, household furnishings, housing, software, and toys have become cheaper. In light of today’s holiday, we will focus on the cost of a Thanksgiving Day dinner between 1986 and 2020. The positive picture we paint certainly does not detract from the real hardship American families have faced during the COVID-19 pandemic. But it may make us more grateful for the U.S. farmers and free enterprise that make food historically superabundant.

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from The Living Church
Magazine of The Living Church Foundation (Anglican)

HOW WE TELL THE STORY (OR, HOW CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM MAKES RACISM INVISIBLE)
People often qualify as "good Americans" by accepting a myth of American greatness which also denies American complicity in evil -- a habit which also seems to go hand-in-hand with being white.

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from Maclean's
Canada's national current affairs and news magazine

There were once at least 3,000 Pentlatch people living in more than 90 large villages and small settlements around the [Union Bay] area. They spoke a Coast Salish language related to K’ómoks, but carried on a technologically elaborate and culturally complex way of life down the centuries that was quite unlike anything the first anthropologists and linguists encountered among the Indigenous people around the towns of Courtenay and Comox in the late 1800s. The only way to get a glimpse of the former life of the Pentlatch is from what they left behind, from the archaeology. The story of what became of the Pentlatch people is an unavoidably sad one, and it isn’t easy to tell.

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from The Spokesman-Review
Newspaper in Spokane, Washington

Being called a Pollyanna is usually not meant as a compliment. But being optimistic doesn’t mean ignoring things which are dreadful or discouraging, it means controlling what you can and not wallowing in what you can’t. Focus on dread and all you have is less joy.

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In the news, Wednesday, November 25, 2020


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NOV 24      INDEX      NOV 26
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from NBC News (& affiliates)
LEFT-CENTER BIAS

As South Dakota takes hands-off approach to coronavirus, Native Americans feel vulnerable
In the early weeks of the pandemic, the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe in South Dakota enacted drastic measures to fend off the spread of the coronavirus across its stark and sprawling prairie land. The tribe installed checkpoints in April on roadways cutting through the Cheyenne River Sioux Indian Reservation to limit drivers without official business — part of a robust contact tracing program. "We are doing this to save our residents, their lives," tribal Chairman Harold Frazier told NPR in May, when there was just one case of Covid-19 on the reservation, where about 12,000 people reside. The efforts are in sharp contrast to how South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem has overseen the pandemic in her state of nearly 885,000 residents.

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from The Spokesman-Review
Newspaper in Spokane, Washington

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In the news, Tuesday, November 24, 2020


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NOV 23      INDEX      NOV 25
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from BBC News (UK)

British Columbia’s Gulf Islands are testament of an era when, during a period of internal strife, Hawaiian royalty left their tropical home for distant islands. The Gulf Islands are comprised of dozens of islands scattered between Vancouver and Southern Vancouver Island. With a mild climate and bucolic landscapes, it’s been the continuous unceded territory of Coast Salish Nations for at least 7,000 years. The Spanish visited in 1791 and then Captain George Vancouver showed up, claiming the Gulf Islands for the British Crown. Not long after, settlers began arriving from all parts of the world. Many of them were Hawaiian, while black Americans, Portuguese, Japanese and Eastern Europeans also settled on the islands.

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from HumanProgress.org
Education Website

As Thanksgiving approaches, it can be easy to feel as though in a year like 2020 there is little reason to be thankful. The world is in the midst of a pandemic, and many families will not be spending the holiday together as they practice social distancing. Although your Thanksgiving holiday may look rather different this year from years past, there are still reasons for gratitude. Those include record-breaking progress in COVID-19 treatment and vaccine development.

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from National Review  RIGHT BIAS

Almost every national Election Night reveals the same old red/blue map. The country geographically is a sea of red. The coasts and small areas along the southern border and around the Great Lakes remain blue atolls. Yet when the maps are recalibrated for population rather than area, the blue areas blow up, expanding to smother half the country — a graphical metaphor for the dominant cultural influence of city over country. Ideological differences are now being recalibrated as rural-urban on issues from guns and abortion to taxes and foreign policy. Red/conservative is often synonymous with small-town and rural. Blue/progressive is equivalent to urban/suburban.

Many Americans have lost patience with a new normal that has, at times, been arbitrary and poorly thought through. The backlash is coming. It already seems clear that the first major political and cultural eruption of the Biden years will be a roiling populist backlash against the next round of COVID restrictions. We saw this sentiment play out in sporadic anti-lockdown demonstrations last spring, and it has driven ongoing resistance to masks, but it is, in all likelihood, about to reach an entirely new level — fueled by exhaustion with the virus, elite hypocrisy, and the shattered credibility of the public-health establishment. The ascension of Joe Biden will add force to the reaction. It is an iron law of American politics that whichever party doesn’t control the presidency will suspect the other of plotting to impose a tyranny, so the fear and loathing of COVID restrictions, somewhat muted on the right while Donald Trump was president, will deepen and intensify. The Right’s populism and limited-government impulse, which separated in the Trump years, will presumably be reunited in the push against lockdowns in a way that they haven’t been since the Tea Party.

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from The Spokesman-Review
Newspaper in Spokane, Washington

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In the news, Monday, November 23, 2020


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NOV 22      INDEX      NOV 24
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from CNBC
TV Network in Englewood Cliffs, NJ

The CDC must be transparent about the side effects people may experience after getting their first shot of a coronavirus vaccine, doctors urged during a meeting Monday with CDC advisors. Dr. Sandra Fryhofer said that both Pfizer’s and Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccines require two doses and she worries whether her patients will come back for a second dose because of potentially unpleasant side effects after the first shot. Both companies acknowledged that their vaccines could induce side effects that are similar to symptoms associated with mild Covid-19, such as muscle pain, chills and headache.

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from The Columbus Dispatch

According to the Centers for Medicaid Services, more than 63,000 nursing home patients have died from COVID-19. But these numbers will never be able to calculate the elderly who die in nursing homes during this pandemic from loneliness or a broken heart. How ironic is it that the restrictions put in place to protect nursing home patients from COVID-19 ultimately ended up killing many of them.

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from The Spokesman-Review
Newspaper in Spokane, Washington

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from Tri-City Herald
Newspaper in Kennewick, Washington

If you are concerned about Dominion Software use in Washington State, don't be.

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from We the Governed

7,228 voting dead Washington State “voters” voted from the grave this November. A miracle of sorts. People joke about the dead coming back to life to vote, but this may be happening more often than anyone realizes, and not just in Michigan, Chicago and Pittsburgh.  Washington State, it appears, is no exception to creating a safe environment for the voting dead.  Based on a recent “social security” scrub done on the Washington State Voter Registration Database dated November 5, 2020 voter data (right after the election), it appears that 7,228 dead people voted.

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In the news, Sunday, November 22, 2020


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NOV 21      INDEX      NOV 23
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from The Spokesman-Review
Newspaper in Spokane, Washington

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

The researchers noted that although some of the awakening microbes are actually known to science, a percentage of them might have “unpredictable behaviour after release”. With the ongoing thawing of glaciers and permafrost in various parts of the Earth, it remains unclear what consequences there might be as dormant organisms, which had remained encased in deep layers of frozen ground, begin to wake up, warn researchers who have written an article published in Scientific American magazine. Noting that permafrost covers about 24 percent of our planet's surface, the scientists point out how "Arctic lands offer unexplored microbial biodiversity and microbial feedbacks", with some layers possibly harbouring "ancient frozen microbes, Pleistocene megafauna and even buried smallpox victims".

The ongoing dispute over the potential election fraud has exposed an apparent long-term strategy of the Democratic Party to gain a competitive advantage over the Republicans, suggest former Reagan administration official Dr Paul Craig Roberts and Wall Street analyst Charles Ortel. The Republican and Democratic parties are bracing for the 5 January Georgia runoff races that will determine which party controls the Senate. Despite losing several House seats in the 2020 elections, the Dems are still holding the lower chamber and hope that their nominee, former Vice President Joe Biden, will assume the Oval Office in January 2021. The margin between the Republican and Democratic Senate candidates in Georgia is razor-thin, adding to partisan tensions simmering around the political battle.

The Trump administration announced its intention to withdraw from the Open Skies Treaty in May, accusing Russia of violating its conditions. Moscow dismissed the allegations. With the scrapping of Open Skies as far as the US is concerned, the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty is now the last major arms control agreement between Russia and the US. The White House National Security Council has formally confirmed that the United States is no longer a party to the Open Skies Treaty, announcing the decision on Twitter.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said he was not guided by ulterior motives when he withheld congratulations for Joe Biden on his projected presidential victory amid Donald Trump's refusal to concede. "Formalities must be followed based on established practices and legal standards. There is no ulterior motive or anything that could serve to further degrade our relationship. It is a purely formal approach," Putin told the Rossiya 1 broadcaster. The president added he took the wait-and-see approach as he expects the post-election dust to settle in the United States. "It is not that we like or do not like someone — we are simply waiting for an end of this internal political confrontation," Putin said, adding he had equal respect for both Trump and Biden. "We will work with any person, who holds the trust of the US people. But to whom this confidence is given — it must either be indicated through political convention when one of the parties recognizes the victory of the other, or the final results of the election should be summed up in a legitimate, legal way". Putin also said that everyone understands that the US election system has drawbacks. "It is quite evident - it is clear for everyone in the world - it seems to me that it is clear for Americans, there are problems in the US election system...A candidate, who wins in this or that state, he gains all votes of the electors. For example, there are 20. Gained 11, but took all 20. But it may be that there are fewer voters behind these electors...Is it democratic? In my opinion, the question is obvious," the president said. 

Innovators behind the "Ouroboros Steak" offer those concerned about consuming animal meat to try the lizard lifestyle of consuming your own flesh. However, new technologies would allow it to be done much less violently. A team of scientists in the US has developed a DIY-meal kit branded "Ouroboros" which allows a consumer to grow edible meat from their own human cells, in an attempt to question the ethics of eating meat of any kind.

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In the news, Saturday, November 21, 2020

 

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NOV 20      INDEX      NOV 22
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from The Spokesman-Review
Newspaper in Spokane, Washington

The Democrats’ most interesting conflict isn’t moderates versus the left. It’s the never-Trump Republicans versus the left. The never-Trumpers, best embodied by The Lincoln Project, romped through the last campaign with verve and wit. They lasered in on crushing Donald Trump. The Democratic left, by contrast, is deep into grievance. Yes, its members wanted Trump defeated but were too much into their humorless selves to go for a clean kill. Prominent voices treated the campaign to save the democracy as an appropriate time to, in effect, threaten Joe Biden if he didn’t do their bidding. Never mind that he needed to get elected first.

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