The Other Side of Objectivity

 

Another incentive to overcount comes from the American Rescue Plan of 2021, which authorizes the Federal Emergency Management Agency to pay Covid-19 death benefits for funeral services, cremation, caskets, travel and a host of other expenses. The benefit is worth as much as $9,000 a person or $35,000 a family if multiple members die. By the end of 2022, FEMA had paid nearly $2.9 billion in Covid-19 death expenses.--wsj

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Is the Pentagon becoming as unreliable as the White House Press Conferences?

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Most Common Country Of Birth For Foreign-born Residents In The US, Excluding Mexico

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The Other Side of Objectivity

Former executive editor for The Washington Post Leonard Downie Jr. and former CBS News President Andrew Heyward have released the results of their interviews with over 75 media leaders and concluded that objectivity is now considered reactionary and even harmful. Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, editor-in-chief at the San Francisco Chronicle said it plainly: “Objectivity has got to go.”

In an interview with The Stanford Daily, Stanford journalism professor, Ted Glasser, insisted that journalism needed to “free itself from this notion of objectivity to develop a sense of social justice.” He rejected the notion that journalism is based on objectivity and said that he views “journalists as activists because journalism at its best — and indeed history at its best — is all about morality.” Thus, “Journalists need to be overt and candid advocates for social justice, and it’s hard to do that under the constraints of objectivity.”

Downie recounts how news leaders today “believe that pursuing objectivity can lead to false balance or misleading “bothsidesism” in covering stories about race, the treatment of women, LGBTQ+ rights, income inequality, climate change and many other subjects. And, in today’s diversifying newsrooms, they feel it negates many of their own identities, life experiences and cultural contexts, keeping them from pursuing truth in their work.”

This is culled from a law blog by Turley (via Don). It's a peculiar position, as if math or geography were being used as debatable notions. Does the statement "Canada is north of the U.S." demand protection from another viewpoint? 

Words are meaningful. Synonyms for 'objective:' open-minded, detached, neutral, dispassionate. Antonyms: emotional, subjective.

The key point is hidden in the benign and sloppy line, "they feel it negates many of their own identities, life experiences and cultural contexts, keeping them from pursuing truth in their work.” There is a word left out: "their truth." Journalism, like art, has become a field of "personal truths." A work of art is meaningful only to the artist; the audience may get it, may not. But the artist's personal vision is unassailable. There is only one vision in the artist's Rorschach Test.

The horror of modern art is that it has become meaningful only to the artist and thus has become unimportant. That will be the legacy of journalism should this strange assumption of shared visions continue.

More Deficits

This balloon fiasco might emerge as a true symbol of these Washington people. Mendacity and ineptitude in the service of self-advancement.

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Do we have a political process that somehow excludes serious people?

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The world is a dangerous, messy place, but not particularly for America. The US is dominant at home, flanked by enormous bodies of water and bordered south and north by weak, peaceful neighbors. Washington’s overseas intervention is almost entirely discretionary, utterly disconnected from anything close to a vital interest. Instead, America has created a defense dole for the world, by which industrialized states uniformly shirk responsibility for protecting themselves and their regions.

The US economy no longer can sustain a policy of endless war. Rising interest rates highlight the dismal state of Uncle Sam’s finances. Fiscal reality, as well as good sense, tells the US to focus on its own security.--Bandow

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More Deficits

When President Trump entered the Oval Office, CBO projected the cumulative 2017–2027 budget deficits would be $10.0 trillion. When he left office four years later, CBO’s projected deficits for the same period were $13.9 trillion. The president signed or enacted $7.8 trillion in new initiatives, the costs of which were partially offset by $3.9 trillion saved from economic growth revenues and technical re-estimates of taxes and spending levels.

Economic and technical factors produced a substantial $3.9 trillion in actual and projected savings over this period. Of this amount, $2.7 trillion comes from falling interest rate projections, which reduced the projected cost of net interest on the national debt. Another $1.3 trillion comes from higher tax revenues produced by faster economic growth projections. Technical re-estimates have reduced mandatory spending projections but also tax revenues. Most of these savings are projected to occur later in the 2017–2027 period and thus may not materialize if economic growth slows or interest rates rise.

President Trump signed legislation and approved executive actions costing $7.8 trillion over the decade—compared to $5.0 trillion for President Obama and $6.9 trillion for President Bush, and he enacted these costs in just a single four-year presidential term, compared to his predecessors’ eight years in the Oval Office. The largest drivers were pandemic relief legislation ($3.9 trillion), the 2017 tax cuts ($2.0 trillion), and legislation raising the discretionary spending caps ($1.6 trillion).

President Trump’s four annual budget proposals were scored as reducing budget deficits by $2.4 trillion over the subsequent 10 years. Nearly all proposed savings came from repealing and replacing Obamacare, as well as vague promises to cut domestic discretionary spending nearly in half. Outside of the budget documents, President Trump did not aggressively push either initiative after 2017.

Trump left the White House with the largest peacetime budget deficit in American history and a national debt exceeding 100% of the economy for the first time since World War II. The failure to address unsustainable Social Security and Medicare costs leaves a projected 30-year baseline deficit of $112 trillion.

$112 TRILLION.

Sunday/Asimov and Logos

  

Where has Antifa been and why are they back?

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I saw a physician named Baden who said in an interview he was at the Epstein autopsy and he said it was a murder. I can't say why he had so little input.

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Bernie Kosar has been cut loose by the Browns for...gambling.

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Sunday/Asimov and Logos

John opens his gospel, and announces the birth of Christ, echoing Genesis: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."

Matthew, Mark, and Luke are grouped together as the ‘Synoptic’ gospels, meaning ‘seeing together’. These three accounts all reflect each other to varying degrees with similar stories and wording, implying a common primary source, the theorized "Q" gospel or document. But the Gospel of John is quite different. Right from those opening words, ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’, John signaled that his account of Jesus’ life will be treating Jesus as much more than a human being.

‘In the beginning was the Word.’ What does John mean by ‘the Word’? The original Greek text uses 'Logos,' for which ‘the Word’ is the English translation. But ‘the Word’ is only a partial reflection of this densely significant word. This term, ‘the Word," is not found in the Old Testament, and its use in the New Testament is limited to John.

In Asimov’s Guide to the Bible: The New Testament: 002, Isaac Asimov links John’s ‘In the beginning was the Word’ to the Greek philosophy of Thales of Miletus, who lived in the seventh century BC.

Thales argued that, contrary to the idea that the world was largely erratic and unpredictable in its operations, it was actually subject to rigid laws of nature, and that these laws could be discovered using reason and observation. This is the beginning of both rationalism and empiricism.

This argued that God – or, depending on which belief system you subscribed to, a whole pantheon of gods – created the world upon some clear and knowable principle, and that this principle is constant rather than changeable and arbitrary. One of Thales’ followers, Heraclitus, used the term ‘Logos’ to refer to this rational principle. So, while ‘Logos’ means ‘word,’ it also denotes the entire rational structure of knowledge as Thales and Heraclitus had theorized it.

As the term ‘Logos’ was taken up by more and more philosophers, it came to refer not to some abstract entity but to a thing, even a person: the person who had created this orderly system of knowledge and principle in the world. Logos became personified. This tradition spread beyond the Greek world and was taken up by the Jewish followers of Yahweh, or the Old Testament God. In Jesus’ time, a man named Philo the Jew popularised the term Logos as a reference to the rational aspect of Yahweh.

Thus spake Asimov.

So much for ‘In the beginning was the Word’; but what about the next part of John’s sentence? How was ‘the Word’ with God as well as being God?

According to Asimov, at the time John was writing, there were some philosophers who tried to keep God and Logos separate. Logos was not synonymous with God, but merely one element. God, being spiritual, was removed from the rational and scientific processes of the world: he could not be associated with material things, as an elision of ‘God’ with ‘Logos’ would imply. These philosophers and mystics were known as ‘Gnostics’, from the Greek meaning ‘ to know’.

I'm not so sure about the Gnostics, which is a general term applied to the anti-materialists from the Arians to the Cathars, but the concept and the division of materialism and anti-materialism have always existed here. And language can be uncertainly provocative as well as specific.

Mortality Rates

 

 

Among NASA's non-space-related inventions are the Dustbuster, scratch-resistant glasses lenses, athletic cooling fabrics, memory foam, and even elements of the modern laptop including fan-based cooling and a full-sized keyboard.

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The decision to scuttle the six-decade-old aircraft carrier “Sao Paulo” came after Brazilian authorities had tried in vain to find a port willing to welcome the vessel.
Though defense officials said they would sink the vessel in the “safest area”, environmentalists attacked the decision, saying the warship contained tonnes of asbestos, heavy metals and other toxic materials that could leach into the water and pollute the marine food chain. The NGO Shipbreaking Platform – a coalition of environmental, labor, and human rights organizations – had described Brazil’s planned sinking of the Sao Paulo as potentially a “state-sponsored environmental crime”.

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According to 'Wired,' as many as 60 percent of millennials are willing to pay more for truly sustainable products; two-thirds of people are more likely to work for a company with strong and meaningful environmental policies; and research by Amazon has found that as many as 83 percent of investors want to invest in more sustainable startups.

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Mortality Rates

A study on peacetime mortality rates shows the military is a safer place to be than civilian life.

Soldiers overall die at a rate of 109 per 100,000, while comparable civilians die at a rate of 215 per 100,000.

The greatest disparity was for homicides, almost six times less common among soldiers than civilians, followed by smaller Army rates of deaths caused by disease and suicide.

The most striking difference was among black men, who died in homicides almost 12 times less often in the Army than in the population at large. The homicide rate among black soldiers was nine per 100,000, compared with 100 per 100,000 for black civilians, said lead author Joseph Rothberg.

For perspective, in the United States, the fatality rate for the fishing industry in 1996 was 16 times higher than for fire-fighting or police work and 40 times the national average.

History as Snake-oil

Earth is biophilic only somewhat (volcanoes, earthquakes, viruses, etc.), and only briefly, as measured by the cosmos’s clock. But what distinguishes us from trees and trout and every known (so far) thing in the universe is what Webb exists solely to satisfy. The Webb Space Telescope speaks well of us precisely because it has, and needs, no justification beyond the purity of its service to curiosity.--will

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A recent investigation into the world’s largest carbon standard found that 94 percent of its rainforest offset credits did not actually contribute to carbon reduction. Worse still, it exaggerated the threat to forests included in its projects, while its conservation activities – which yielded some of these credits – involved serious human rights violations, including forced evictions and home demolitions of local people.

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In Washington, laws governing doctor/patient confidentiality and school-based health centers combine to mean a Washington-based 13-year-old girl can get testosterone injections at school, without any need for her parents to consent — or even know it’s happening. In Oregon, too, minors can access transgender interventions at taxpayers’ expense — and without their parents’ consent.

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History as Snake-oil

Here is part of an article by Magness:

"Welp, the 1619 Project Hulu series, is already a dumpster fire.

They filmed the part about the American Revolution on the grounds of the colonial governor’s mansion in Williamsburg. Nikole Hannah-Jones interviews Woody Holton, where they jointly make the case that Lord Dunmore’s proclamation of November 1775 was an “Emancipation Proclamation” of the slaves that roused the colonists to rebellion.

Throughout the scene, they give the impression that Dunmore issued his order from Williamsburg, with Holton even pointing at the building as he speaks. But this is an egregious factual error. In reality, the rebellion had already been underway in Virginia for almost 6 months. Dunmore fled Williamsburg on June 8, 1775 and had already lost control of the colony. He was sheltering in exile aboard the British navy ship William off the coast of Norfolk, and issued his order from there as a desperate attempt to regain power."

But accuracy and precision are not values of the Left. Instead, the Left's solutions are sort of over-the-counter responses to problems, cynically created with shrugging generalities rather than scrutiny, which at best are placebos, at worst poisons, some having a history of appalling failure.

One of a Thousand Cuts

 

“The perspective in question — that some sizable quantity of scientific research is causing undefined harms and must therefore be prevented on ethical grounds — has become widespread. It marks a significant departure from an earlier academic culture that celebrated the open-ended pursuit of truth as the fundamental value of higher education.”--Riley

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The former prime minister of the United Kingdom Boris Johnson said Wednesday that he is “appalled” by the influence Fox News host Tucker Carlson has on the GOP’s views about Russia.

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Japan's size compared: 

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One of a Thousand Cuts

The petty, multi-front climate war is designed to be wearying. For example, the White House is now allowing investment firms to invest their clients' money on the basis of political considerations rather than financial ones.  

Here is Strassel in the WSJ on the new Great Gas Stove Crisis:

"The reason gas stoves are in the news is simple: There is a coordinated, calculated—and well-funded—strategy to kill them off. It’s the joint enterprise of extremely powerful climate groups, working with Biden administration officials who have publicly stated their aim to eliminate all “combustion appliances” in homes. Only after the GOP called them out did anyone pretend otherwise.
…..

The stated goal of all these groups is killing gas to “save” the planet. Yet they also know Americans won’t give up their stoves in the name of climate. So several years ago this cabal hit on the idea of contradicting decades of science and ginning up hokey studies claiming gas stoves present a “health risk.” The twin goals: scare Americans and give government a pretext to ban gas cooking.

This is how you end up with climate outfits masquerading as health experts. One frequently cited study from the Rocky Mountain Institute—claiming to find a link between gas stoves and childhood asthma—was co-authored by two RMI staffers, neither of whom has a science degree. Another favorite study by New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity claims gas stoves cause “dangerous levels of indoor air pollution.” It was written by two lawyers, and it cites … the RMI study. Ah, science."

Deficits

I received an email telling me I was wrong about dietary supplements. It said I should learn the truth by reading a dog food bag to learn which supplements were added to it. I had to explain, once again, why a dog food bag is not a reliable source of evidence and why a scientific study with a control group can provide more accurate information.--Hall

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Supervisor Shamann Walton, who wrote the LA legislation that proposed a $5 million payment as reparation to Black people is actually “much less than a lot of the projections that people say black people should receive for reparations here in the United States.”

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Campaign finance records in the recent Georgia Senate runoff campaign showed more than 800 donations from Google employees to the Democrat, and only six to the Republican. (In fairness, the Republican was Herschel Walker.)

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Deficits

The Republicans are said to be--or, at least claim to be--the champions of fiscal discipline.

Donald Trump is one of three presidents with the biggest budget deficits in history.

The deficit topped $1 trillion in 2020.

By 2022, under Joe Biden's administration, the deficit has declined to some $900 billion.
The U.S. government has run a budget deficit for nearly all of the past 60 years.
A president's influence over a budget deficit doesn't start until after the fiscal year ends (September 20) during their first year in office.

Under Biden, Trump, and Obama, government federal spending almost doubled.

Hope for future spending responsibility is bleak. "Biden's 10-year outlook still would rack up $14.4 trillion in deficits," reports Bloomberg.

Now, one might say that Mr. Trump is a random occurrence on the national stage and not much of a Republican. Sort of 'philosophy-free.'

But the notion that one party or another has an interest in budget control is rooted in the mythology that there is a difference between these self-appointed leaders and experts other than their hair stylists.