The Good, the Bad, the Uncertain

Making Sense of Recent News Stories. Big and Small 

GOOD: Good for China 

One of the advantages of having unchallenged central authority is that you can make big decisions quickly. And as I’ve mentioned in previous posts, that sort of power is something that China has that we in the US lack.

I take no position on that subject for the moment.

I believe the US is doing a great job of emulating China in many areas of control. But I don’t think the US is likely to do what China has done recently: It’s now illegal for China’s hundreds of millions of young people to spend more than a modest amount of time with online videogames.

The rules are strict: zero games during the school week, and only one hour a day on Fridays, weekends, and public holidays. Those are pretty much the rules that K applied for TV 30 years ago when our kids were little. It worked. They are all literate.

Prediction: Twenty years from now, China will not only have the world’s largest economy, it will have the world’s most literate population.

BAD: More Signs of Inflation 

The Fed’s inflation gauge, the so-called core PCE (personal consumption expenditures) price index, vaulted in the 12 months through July to levels not seen in 30 years. The Commerce Department said last week that the core PCE rose by 3.6% over the year in July, matching June’s level, which was an increase from 3.5% in May and 3.1% in April.

In a speech on Aug. 27, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell addressed inflationary pressures, acknowledging a “sharp run-up in inflation” driven by the rapid reopening of the economy, while reiterating his oft-repeated view that price pressures would moderate once supply-side shortages and bottlenecks further abate.

Click here.

UNCERTAIN: Vaccination Cards for Green Cards 

Foreign immigrants living in the US will now have to provide proof of vaccination against COVID-19 if they want a green card, the CDC announced.

According to US federal law, foreigners who apply for a green card are required to be vaccinated against other diseases, including mumps, measles, rubella, hepatitis B, polio, and pertussis. “COVID-19 vaccination now meets the criteria for required vaccinations and is a requirement for applicants eligible for the vaccine,” the CDC stated on its website.

Negative screening for COVID-19 doesn’t guarantee that “green card applicants won’t have the disease when they become permanent residents,” the CDC added.

Of course, getting a vaccine doesn’t either, as we all now know.

In any case, people can apply for exemptions, including seeking a waiver on religious or moral grounds. And the requirement doesn’t include children under 12 years old.

Click here.

GOOD: Moratorium Extension Overturned 

On Aug. 26, the US Supreme Court rejected a Biden-administration-supported, CDC-issued extension of its previous eviction moratorium. The justices sided with a group of realtors that brought the case to them, noting that without authorization from Congress, the CDC doesn’t have the authority to pass such rules in the first place.

“It would be one thing if Congress had specifically authorized the action that the CDC has taken. But that has not happened,” the court wrote. “Instead, the CDC has imposed a nationwide moratorium on evictions in reliance on a decades-old statute that authorizes it to implement measures like fumigation and pest extermination. It strains credulity to believe that this statute grants the CDC the sweeping authority that it asserts. If a federally imposed eviction moratorium is to continue, Congress must specifically authorize it.”

According to Census Bureau data from early August, about 3.5 million people in the country said they faced eviction in the next two months.

Click here.

BAD: Bernie Sanders Is Running Out of Billionaires 

Bernie Sanders has been holding rallies to promote his spending bill, suggesting that it would be paid for by increasing taxes on the super-rich. “We are living in a nation where the people on the top are doing phenomenally well,” he told a crowd in Iowa. “They have so much money they don’t know what to do with it.”

He does. He will tax them more to pay for his bill.

Two problems with this plan:

According to the 2021 Forbes billionaire list, there are only 724 of them in the US. Their combined net worth at the time the list was compiled was $4.4 trillion. Add the just-passed $1 trillion “infrastructure bill” to Bernie’s $3.5 trillion bill (which some estimate will cost $5.5 trillion) and what you have is arithmetic that doesn’t work – even if you raise billionaires’ taxes to 99%.

UNCERTAIN: The Escape Continues 

Americans continue to flee big cities. Many are going to the suburbs that surround them, but many, too, are going further, to the more rural, more bucolic counties beyond suburbia.

The Brooking Institute tracks 240 of the so-called “exurbs.” In 2020, according to US Postal Service permanent-change-of-address data, net migration to these areas rose 37% in 2020.

Click here.

GOOD: Police Chief Gets Suspended for Throwing a Pissyfit 

I am impatient on lines. I get upset when someone in front of me seems to be dithering away his time, unconscious of those behind him. And so, I can very much understand why this sheriff got upset. But his reaction was inexcusable. When you have a gun on your hip, and a virtual license to kill, you have to practice temperance. IMHO, he got what he deserved.

What do you think? Click here.

BAD: Twitter Suspends Alex Berenson Over Viral COVID-19 Tweets

Twitter “permanently” suspended former New York Times journalist and author Alex Berenson for “repeated violations” of its COVID-19 misinformation rules, a Twitter spokesperson told news outlets on Aug. 28.

Before his suspension, Berenson had often cited the results of an Israeli study that found that previous COVID-19 infection provides better protection against the Delta variant than any of the COVID-19 vaccines. In one such tweet, he quoted the study:

SARS-CoV-2-naive vaccines had a 13.06-fold increased risk for breakthrough infection with the Delta variant compared to those previously infected, when the first event (infection or vaccination) occurred during January and February of 2021.

“Information has never been more plentiful or easier to distribute,” he wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. “Yet we are sliding into a new age of censorship and suppression, encouraged by technology giants and traditional media companies. As someone who’s been falsely characterized as a coronavirus ‘denier,’ I have seen this crisis firsthand.”

UNCERTAIN: Video Channel Restored, but Not Completely 

After closing a bestselling author/journalist’s video channel on Aug. 24, YouTube restored it less than a week later.

Naomi Wolf is the author of such books as The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women. She’s also a former advisor to Bill Clinton and Al Gore. But when she published evidence in DailyClout, her video channel, showing that gain-of-function research had been funded by the US government, YouTube shut her down.

In closing her channel, YouTube sent an email saying, “YouTube doesn’t allow claims about COVID-19 vaccinations that contradict expert consensus from local health authorities or the World Health Organization (WHO).”

Wolf countered that the video was not filled with contentious material. It included information already disseminated by Public Citizen, Axios, and Vanity Fair.

In an email time-stamped Aug. 26 at 7:47 p.m. Eastern Time, YouTube advised Wolf’s website that it had made a mistake and resurrected the video channel. But when it was restored, more than 300,000 views were removed from the view counter and thousands of subscribers disappeared, Wolf said.

Wolf said she is concerned that a big tech company like YouTube can silence “any small business owner, or any news outlet, or any reporter… and damage can be done to their business or their reputation at any time…. It’s not American to police speech in this way.”

Click here.

GOOD: Language Master Tests His Yoruba on Nigerian Shopkeeper 

One of the benefits of speaking a second language is that it gives you access to people you would otherwise never get to know. Even in this small exchange, you can see how this White kid’s elementary efforts in speaking Yoruba light up the Nigerians he is speaking to.

Click here.