4th June 2023
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3rd June 2023
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2nd June 2023
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2nd June 2023
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1st June 2023
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31st May 2023
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31st May 2023
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31st May 2023
Tim Graham at NewsBusters.
Democrats and Republicans reached an agreement to lift the debt ceiling, and nothing is going to change in the disturbing pattern of America’s national debt climbing by leaps and bounds. The best reason for pessimism? Our Democrat-messaging media. They can’t be bothered to offer the most basic facts in budget coverage.
What is the budget for the current fiscal year? What was the last budget deficit? How large is the national debt? These are questions that are rarely answered by news anchors. What we get is a lot of horse-race jockeying and finger-pointing instead of facts. They must think the viewers are too stupid to juggle numbers.
Rich Noyes of the Media Research Center studied all 74 evening-news stories on the spending debate from January 1 through May 27, when agreement was struck. It’s not pretty.
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30th May 2023
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30th May 2023
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29th May 2023
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29th May 2023
Read it.
The American Psychological Association (APA) does not yet consider it a pathology per se, although it is affecting more and more people; but it has already provided a definition: “Fear that can occur chronically from environmental cataclysm or from observing the seemingly irrevocable impact of climate change.” This is ‘eco-anxiety,’ a psychological condition related to the climate emergency.
Awareness of a hypothetical climate apocalypse is reportedly causing more and more individuals to fall into grief and despair, suffer panic attacks, and give up life projects, such as having children, because they see the planet’s overpopulation and a high quality of life as incompatible. And “if adults are extraordinarily worried, children are terrified,” warns Danish environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg.
To address this condition, in addition to recommending that politicians, media, and activists should stop incessantly trumpeting that we are on the brink of extinction, it would make sense to recommend cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) to eco-anxious people, in order to re-establish the balance between their perceptions and reality. However, many experts seem to believe that the problem lies not with the eco-afflicted but with the indolence of those who are immune to climate terror.
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27th May 2023
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27th May 2023
Immunologist Akiko Iwasaki: ‘We are not done with Covid, not even close’ (The Guardian) Not as long as there is grant money to be had by promoting PANIC!
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27th May 2023
Veronique de Rugy.
Whenever we have a national conversation about government debt, Democrats invariably respond that spending is not the reason the debt is now nearly equal to our national GDP. The real cause of our indebtedness, they inform us, is that taxes aren’t high enough and the rich don’t pay their fair share. From increasing the marginal tax rate to more than 70% for higher-income earners, to taxing 100% of income above $1 billion, to the president’s recent debt-ceiling plan, Democrats overflow with ideas about how to tax us more.
Not only do these ideas reflect incredible ignorance of economic reality, they’re also unlikely to have any meaningful effect on our debt levels and would surely slow the economy.
Let’s be clear: America’s debt problem isn’t the result of former President Donald Trump’s tax cuts. While I believe these tax cuts should have been offset by closing some of our many loopholes and reducing government spending, they didn’t cause our fiscal problems. The fiscal imbalance is not because of reduced revenues. Last year, federal revenue as a share of the economy was a full percentage point above the historical average.
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26th May 2023
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25th May 2023
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25th May 2023
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24th May 2023
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24th May 2023
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23rd May 2023
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23rd May 2023
ZMan peers behind the curtain.
Since the late Middle Ages, political thought in the West has started with the assertion that the point of social organization was to reduce coercion. The ideal society is one in which everyone naturally played their role without being forced into it. The assumption is that forcing people into roles for which they are not suited, or they do not wish to perform is both unjust and dangerous. It is also more costly to compel people to obey the law than if they voluntarily abide by the law.
If the goal of your political model is to reduce coercion to the absolute minimum, then you ideally want a society that agrees on everything. After all, if everyone agrees that society must have gong farmers and some people are better suited for the task than others, then everyone is going to agree on having gong farmers. Even the guy chosen for the task will agree if it is explained to him. He may not like the task, but he will understand he is playing a vital role in his society.
Straight away you can see the problem for individualism and the natural rights crowd when it comes to organizing society. If we start from the assumption that we are all unique individuals in control of our own destiny, then we are free to not go along with being the town’s gong farmer. Even if all the facts point to that role being best for the person and his community, he is free to reject it because he is an autonomous person free to live his life as he sees fit.
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22nd May 2023
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22nd May 2023
Charles C.W. Cooke at National Review.
Rich points to a column by Ezra Klein in the New York Times, in which Klein objects to President Biden taking the “14th Amendment option.” Rich notes that Klein has a practical objection to the idea — namely that “if the administration declares the debt ceiling unconstitutional, only to have the Supreme Court declare the maneuver unconstitutional, then Biden owns the market chaos that would follow.”
This is probably true. But it’s notable that, as usual, Klein and those who share his politics seem to live in a completely lawless world, in which there is no such thing as truth, in which ridiculous ideas that were arrived at yesterday by transparent political hacks are as worthwhile as centuries of universal understanding, and in which the only reason to avoid violating the Constitution is that one might get caught.
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21st May 2023
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21st May 2023
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20th May 2023
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20th May 2023
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19th May 2023
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19th May 2023
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18th May 2023
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18th May 2023
Scott Johnson at Power Line.
John Durham’s detailed report on the Russia hoax should destroy the (positive) reputation of the FBI. It is devastating. One has to go beyond the four corners of the report to assess the impact it should have on the (positive) reputation of the establishment press, though its positive reputation has been crumbling for decades.
The press was of course an integral part of the Russia hoax all along the way. You’ve got your New York Times. You’ve got your Washington Post. They’ve got their Pulitzer Prize for peddling the Russia hoax to gullible readers.
I’ve got the New Yorker and Jane Mayer. They make a cameo appearance at page 93 of Durham’s report. On July 26, 2016, Glenn Simpson wrote Jane Mayer an email with the subject heading “Carter Page.” He understood that Mayer was interested in Page. Mayer responded two days later to advise Simpson that her editor, among others, “was interested in setting up an off the record meeting to discuss and learn more about your research.”
In March 2018 the New Yorker published Mayer’s fawning profile of Christopher Steele. I mocked it in a five-part series I called “Jane Mayer’s Dossiad” in tribute to Alexander’s Pope’s Dunciad
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17th May 2023
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16th May 2023
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16th May 2023
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16th May 2023
Read it.
I’ve been interested in comments made by various public health officials reflecting total amnesia about events during Covid. The canard, actively promoted by the officials and known to be fictitious, that the vaccines prevented transmission, was a dagger in the heart of an already fragile social cohesion. And now these officials are pretending to be mystified by the suggestion that they had anything to do with lockdowns, mandates, contact tracing, school closures, etc.
The people at Grabien have compiled a helpful retrospective to keep actual events and media perspectives from being memory-holed. Worth watching.
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15th May 2023
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13th May 2023
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12th May 2023
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12th May 2023
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12th May 2023
The American Mind.
As evidence piles up indicating that President Biden’s family is at the center of a massive international bribery scheme, the mainstream media has been obsessed with documenting the alleged personal corruption of the conservative members of the Supreme Court. Justice Clarence Thomas, whom the liberal media has been denigrating since his nomination three decades ago, has come in for particular scrutiny, but he is not alone. The New York Times recently devoted a lead story to its latest exposé: the fact that the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University had made itself a “friend” of the Supreme Court by lavishing “perks” on its members, such as offering guest teaching gigs in exotic locations like Iceland and Padua, Italy. As explained in a confidential memo issued by a Scalia administrator that the Times obtained, inviting Justice Neil Gorsuch to teach at the school shortly after his confirmation formed part of a strategy that aimed to make it “A Yale or Harvard of conservative legal scholarship and influence.” Other justices invited to teach included Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas.
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11th May 2023
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10th May 2023
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10th May 2023
Read it.
Hadley Gamble, the CNBC anchor whose affair with NBCUniversal CEO Jeff Shell led to his ouster last month – and who was accused by Russia of being a “sex object” sent to distract Vladimir Putin – is leaving the network according to the NY Post.
Whose turn is it to be the ‘sex object’?
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9th May 2023
New York Times.
Executive summary:
- Foreign food is superior to American food.
- Ordinary Americans are ignorant rubes because they prefer ordinary American food.
- American Cloud People have been brainwashed to prefer foreign food, so American Dirt People are doubly damned because they don’t follow the example of their betters.
Bottom line: Americans suck, because you don’t like the kind of food that we Crustians like.
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