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Sign of the Times When the media’s credibility collapsed, the New York Times led the way Batya Ungar-Sargon

Posted By on October 23rd, 2021

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/sign-of-the-times-new-york-times/

The New York Times entered the digital era under duress. In 2011, the Times erected a paywall in what it called a ‘subscription-first business model’. The gamble was that readers would want to pay for quality journalism. It was a risk, and at first it didn’t seem to be paying off: after a challenging 2014, the company shed 100 people from the newsroom in buyouts and layoffs.

A.G. Sulzberger, who was getting ready to replace his father as publisher, commissioned an in-house report, its title ‘Innovation’. The report made it very clear who was to blame. A journalist’s job, the report said, no longer ended with choosing, reporting and publishing the news. To compensate for the ‘steady decline’ in advertising revenue due to digitization, ‘the wall dividing the newsroom and business side’ had to come down. The ‘hard work of growing our audience falls squarely on the newsroom’, the report said, so the Times should be ‘encouraging reporters and editors to promote their stories’.

Of course, journalists have always been aware who their readers are and have catered to them, consciously and unconsciously. But it was something else entirely to suggest that journalists should be collaborating with their audience to produce ‘user-generated content’, as the report put it. ‘Innovation’ presaged a new direction for the paper of record: become digital-first or perish.

The Times invested in new subscription services like NYT Cooking and NYT Games, and introduced live events, conferences and foreign trips. The paper hired an ad agency to work in-house and began allowing brands to sponsor specific lines of reporting. Journalists were asked to accompany advertisers to conferences and were pushed to collaborate more closely with the business side, something many of the old-school editors were loath to do. The executive editor at the time, Jill Abramson, resisted strenuously. She was given the boot.

And then came Trump.

As a candidate, Trump attacked the press as ‘the enemy of the people’, used the term ‘fake news’ and called the Times the ‘failing New York Times’. But the relationship between the press and Trump was symbiotic: Trump capitalized on the widespread feeling that the journalists chronicling American life looked down on regular people (he was not wrong). As he trashed the class norms of politesse that the press expected from a presidential candidate, the liberal media couldn’t get enough of him.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

What We Lose When We Lose Thomas Jefferson New York City takes down the author of the Declaration of Independence. Samuel Goldman

Posted By on October 23rd, 2021

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/what-we-lose-when-we-lose-thomas?token=

After years of debate and a unanimous decision by New York City officials, the statue of Thomas Jefferson that has stood in the City Council chamber since 1915 is on its way out. Banished from official display, the seven-foot likeness will find its new home, likely in the New York Historical Society, by the end of the year.

The removal is disgraceful. Unlike monuments to Confederate leaders that display them in full military glory, Jefferson is depicted as a writer. Holding a quill pen in one hand and the Declaration of Independence in the other, he is clearly being honored for composing an immortal argument for liberty and equality. That is the accomplishment that the Council’s Black, Latino, and Asian Caucus, in a 2019 letter, called “the disgusting and racist basis on which America was founded.”

It is a fact known to all Americans that Jefferson didn’t live up to his own words. He owned more than 600 people over the course of his life. Unlike George Washington, moreover, he did not take even halting steps toward manumission. It’s little comfort that Jefferson recognized his own hypocrisy. “Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath?” Jefferson asked in his Notes on the State of Virginia. “Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever.” 

The removal of the statue isn’t just an attack on Jefferson, though. As Princeton historian Sean Wilentz put it: “The New York City Council hearing on Monday to remove a statue honoring Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence — a serious blow, especially to the most vulnerable among us, for whom Jefferson’s cry of equality is the last best hope.” 

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

SYDNEY WILLIAMS: FEDERAL DEBT

Posted By on October 23rd, 2021

https://swtotd.blogspot.com/

On September 30, 1981, interest rates on U.S. Treasuries peaked. The yield on the 20-year stood at 15.78%. Nobody recognized that the bear market in bonds had ended, and a new bull market had begun. (Coincidentally, this was ten and a half months before the stock market bottomed in mid-August 1982.) Jason Zweig wrote in the October 1, 2021, edition of The Wall Street Journal: “The inescapable lesson of September 30, 1981, is that markets can keep moving in the same direction longer than anyone can imagine – and then shoot explosively in the opposite direction when no one expects it, impelled by forces no one may ever fully understand.” The current yield on the 20-year is 1.9%. On March 9, 2020, the yield on the 20-year was 0.87%. Are we in the early stages of a new bear market for bonds? If we are, lower prices will mean higher rates and increased costs for the American taxpayer. I don’t pretend to have an answer, but the question is relevant given the amount of debt our nation is carrying and the speed with which deficits are building, with few politicians on either side of the aisle seemingly concerned.

We live in an age when debt is considered a good thing. As long as interest rates remain low and one’s income allows the payment of interest and the repayment of the principal, borrowing at today’s interest rate levels may be a sensible strategy. It allows one to purchase and use something today, like a home, car, dish washer or college education, without having to pay for it until tomorrow. Yet not all sources of income are secure and not all interest rates are static. Incomes can disappear and interest rates can rise. Debt can have unforeseen and unfortunate consequences.

Throughout most of history, debt was considered a form of servitude of the borrower to the lender, as suggested by Thomas Jefferson in the rubric above. Those of my generation remember Tennessee Ernie Ford’s 1955 hit song: Sixteen Tons, which begins: “Another day older and deeper in debt,” and ends: “I owe my soul to the company store.”

The Bible’s Proverbs 22:7 reads: “The rich rules over the poor/And the borrower is servant to the lender.” In Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit, Henry Ward Beecher (brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe) warned: “Interest works night and day, in fair weather and in foul. It gnaws at a man’s substance with invisible teeth.” A quote attributed to President Andrew Jackson is blunt: “When you get in debt you become a slave.” It was not only slave owners and Presidents like Andrew Jackson and Thomas Jefferson who equated debt to servitude, Frederick Douglass, who had escaped slavery in Maryland in 1838, wrote in his 1855 autobiography My Bondage and My Freedom: “I had a wholesome dread of the consequences of running in debt.” Today, with historically low interest rates, such concerns have slipped our consciousness.

BOOKS, P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

Progressive Craziness Of The Day: Transgender Orthodoxy Francis Menton

Posted By on October 23rd, 2021

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=c951b15f01

Perhaps I’m slow on the uptake. But somehow I’m just catching on that the latest tactic of the Left in the culture wars is to indoctrinate all the kids from K-20 in the latest insane piece of orthodoxy before letting the outside world, most particularly the parents, know what is going on. So, to use the example of the new racism going by the name “anti-racism” or Critical Race Theory, by the time you find Ibram Kendi’s “How To Be an Antiracist” on the shelf at your local bookstore, your kid has already without your knowledge undergone multiple years of instruction (if white) that s/he is an “oppressor” and a “systemic racist,” or (if black) that s/he is “oppressed” and a “victim.”

Is the same tactic pervasive in other areas? I had had some inklings that the ideology of transgenderism may be another such area, but I must admit that I hadn’t been paying that much attention. After all, what percentage of the population could this ideology apply to — maybe 0.1%? Then a few weeks ago I read a piece by Abigail Shrier at Bari Weiss’s Substack (“Top Trans Doctors Blow the Whistle on ‘Sloppy’ Care”), and I decided it was time to get Ms. Shrier’s book (“Irreversible Damage”) to learn some more about what is going on out there.

The short version is that we have what may have started as a perfectly reasonable request for respect for a group of people some of whom in the past have experienced ridicule or bullying. But over time the request became a campaign and and campaign fell into the hands of the most extreme activists and ideologues. These people recognize no limits on their demands, let alone any trade-offs in life generally, and are prepared to destroy all who get in their way.

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Anthony Fauci’s metaphysical get-out-of-jail-free card Roger Kimball

Posted By on October 23rd, 2021

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/anthony-fauci-nih-congress-gain-function-jail/

Anyone wishing to appreciate the nature of our two-tier society needs only to contrast the fate of St Anthony Fauci with that, say, of General Mike Flynn or any of the dozens of political prisoners who are, many of them, being held without charge in appalling conditions in a Washington, D.C. prison even as I write.

Fauci has been a carbuncle on the countenance of American life at least since he help spread the myth of heterosexual transmission of AIDS in the 1980s. The new Chinese flu was custom made for his brand of panic-mongering and totalitarian posturing.

Just a few weeks ago, he was saying that it was “too early” to say whether we would be allowed to gather for Christmas. We’ve known for some time now that he was involved with, and paid with taxpayer money for, “gain of function” research at the Wuhan virology lab where the novel coronavirus that has caused such upheaval was developed.

Yes, that’s right. Fauci was paid by your tax dollars to help weaponize a virus that he then went on to exploit as a means to enhance his lugubrious celebrity.

He lied, under oath, about his role in his testimony before Congress, most pointedly in his heated exchanges with Senator Rand Paul this last summer.

Now we have Dr Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, publicly challenging Fauci, charging that he is guilty of spreading “misinformation” about taxpayer funding of Fauci’s “gain of function” research at the Chinese virology laboratory.

Of course, “misinformation” in this case is just a polysyllabic synonym for lying — and besides wasn’t it Jen Psaki herself wanted people to be punished for spreading “misinformation”?

Yes, but she didn’t mean people like Fauci, who is on team A and is therefore exempt from public obloquy, not to mention federal prosecution.

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Ironies of the Rioting Youth of 2020  By: Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on October 23rd, 2021

https://victorhanson.com/the-ironies-of-the-rioting-youth-of-2020/

By August 2020, the protests, demonstrations, riots, looting, and arson that followed from the national outrage over the killing of George Floyd had spread to most of America’s cities. But the furor over Floyd’s death was not the only catalyst of the protests. The previously instituted national quarantine—roughly from March 20 through September—had emasculated the U.S. economy. 

Unemployment claims, in a prior economy of 3.5 percent near record low unemployment, now soared to 31,491,627 Americans out of work. The annual budget saw over $4 trillion in additional debt. Those who bore the greatest brunt were not coastal elites, but the recovering and once stagnant areas of the nation’s interior and inner cities. 

Forty percent of Americans making less than $40,000 were believed to have lost their jobs. But even the lockdown was not the only catalyst for the rioting. There were also more existential foundations of the hysteria. Many of those inner-city youth rioting and demonstrating, for all the political rhetoric, were suffering from a 21 percent unemployment rate during the quarantine, nearly three times higher than the rate of college graduates. Half those under 50 had lost their jobs, were furloughed or suffered pay cuts. 

Some of the urban single youth of all races, the foot soldiers of the more organized BLM and Antifa brigades—who were not mere opportunistic looters and rioters—were mired in tuition debt to acquire what were often nonmarketable degrees. They often added insult to injury by finding themselves nevertheless working in low-wage jobs. That paradox required the architects of Antifa and other purveyors of violence apparently to retreat to Marxist exegeses to explain their own lack of upward mobility and society’s culpability for not appreciating fully their woke genius and potentials. So veritable mass imprisonment within one’s homes, followed by an economic tsunami were the fuel for public rioting, should any spark, such as the killing of George Floyd, ignite the prior combustible fumes in our midst. 

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Biden’s Afghanistan Withdrawal Unleashes a Lethal Terrorist Cocktail by Richard Kemp

Posted By on October 22nd, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17871/afghanistan-withdrawal-terrorist-cocktail

Despite their promises to deny terrorists safe haven, the Taliban will do the opposite. They and Al Qaida are joined at the hip, with both Osama Bin Laden and his successor Ayman Al Zawahiri having sworn unbreakable allegiance, bay’ah, to the leaders of the Taliban.

The Islamic State’s Khorosan branch, with several thousand fighters in Afghanistan, will pose a similar threat. Many political leaders in the US and UK claim the Taliban are sworn enemies of the IS, with some even suggesting that we might form an alliance against IS with Taliban terrorists. But this abhorrent proposition is merely an attempt to help limit the political fall-out from their ill-judged actions that facilitated the Taliban’s conquest.

Today, all these actors know there is no prospect of further large-scale US intervention in the country, no matter how great their atrocities. The US remains capable of air strikes and even special forces raids against serious threats emanating from Afghanistan, but these require high-grade intelligence which, despite the powerful technical capabilities of the agencies, is extremely difficult to gain now that we have withdrawn all forces.

The prospect of a successful jihadist insurgency in Pakistan, with its nuclear arsenal, has been a long-standing concern for the US, which invested huge intelligence and military resources to help prevent it. Most of this capability was withdrawn with the exit from Afghanistan.

Like Pakistan, China supported the Taliban insurgency for many years. In return, the Taliban have frequently hunted down and killed many of the Uighur leaders — fellow Sunni Muslims — who took refuge in Afghanistan. Desperate for Beijing’s funds and political backing, the Taliban can be relied on to do all they can to prevent any export of jihadism into China.

But we can expect no such efforts from Beijing to prevent terrorist actions against the West. On the contrary, as the new cold war intensifies, China is more than capable of using its increasing cooperation with the Taliban to enlist jihadists from Afghanistan as proxies against the US.

Twenty five year-old Ali Harbi Ali has been arrested on suspicion of the murder last week of British Member of Parliament Sir David Amess in a church in Essex. Ali is a member of a well-to-do Somali family who were given refuge in Britain from the war-torn East African country in the 1990s. British authorities had previously been alerted to his radicalisation and he was referred to the UK’s “Prevent” anti-terrorist scheme.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

The government’s assassination of Israel’s character  By Ruthie Blum

Posted By on October 22nd, 2021

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/the-governments-assassination-of-israels-character-opinion-682760

Foreign Minister Yair Lapid outdid himself on Monday evening. Yes, the “alternate” premier slated to replace Prime Minister Naftali Bennett at the helm in September 2023, took the opportunity of a special parliamentary session commemorating the 26th anniversary of the assassination of former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin to insult the national camp.

“There is a [direct] line between Rabin’s murder and the past year,” he said. “Both are part of Israel’s great struggle, not between Right and Left, but between those who believe in democracy and those who are trying to destroy it.”

Rabin, he continued, “wasn’t murdered by the Right – the true right wing is democratic – but by anyone who isn’t willing to accept Israeli democracy. Anyone who tells himself that the majority doesn’t rule isn’t really in the national camp; he’s a dangerous, nationalist extremist. Instead of loving the country, he hates anyone who doesn’t think the way he does.”

He went on to claim that the “ideological heirs” of Yigal Amir – Rabin’s assassin, who is justifiably in prison for life – “are sitting in the Knesset today, and if not for the miracle of the change government, they’d be sitting in the government.”

“Do you mean the Joint [Arab] List?” heckled Religious Zionist Party leader MK Bezalel Smotrich, referring to the members of Knesset who openly oppose the Jewish state.

“Aren’t you ashamed?” added Smotrich, who knew full well that Lapid had been pointing a finger at him and his political allies. When he and a few other MKs from Shas and Likud exited the premises, Lapid resumed his inexcusable tirade.

“The coalition that we formed isn’t left-wing or right-wing,” he announced. “It’s a coalition of the majority of Israel’s citizens who decided to rescue Israeli democracy.”

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The Wreck Of The Global Warming Narrative

Posted By on October 22nd, 2021

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/10/22/the-wreck-of-the-global-warming-narrative/

Fox News plans to start a 24-hour weather channel, and according to the Guardian, probably the looniest newspaper in Great Britain, “climate crisis researchers worry about the channel’s reach to perpetuate misinformation and advance political goals.” The alarmists actually have more to worry about than that. Their narrative continues to crash into reality.

To start with, how do they explain that three new studies show warming from ​​2001 to 2019 “was driven by increases in absorbed solar radiation, not human emissions”? Sure, the eco-activists will do what they always do: obfuscate, dodge, change the subject, and call out the “science deniers.”

They will do the same when confronted with the news that the last six months were the coldest on record in Antarctica. Just one of those places in a warming world, they say, where it happens to be more frigid than usual. Apparently we’re supposed to forget all that business about the continent, along with the North Pole, being “the ‘canary in the coal mine’ for detection of global warming.”

“As Antarctica holds about 90% of all the ice on the planet, what happens in Antarctica will have major effects on the rest of the world,” Discovering Antarctica, a partnership of organizations that includes the United Kingdom’s Foreign & Commonwealth Office, said some years ago.

More recently we were told that “Antarctica is headed for a climate tipping point by 2060, with catastrophic melting if carbon emissions aren’t cut quickly.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Empire Lost America is at its weakest point in at least a century, and China, as well as the rest of the world, notices.  By Max Morton

Posted By on October 22nd, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/21/empire-lost/

According to Russia’s Interfax news agency, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov recently announced, “Just like the overwhelming majority of other countries, Russia views Taiwan as part of the People’s Republic of China. This is the premise we proceed from and will continue to proceed from in our policy.” At the time of this statement, Russian forces were conducting joint naval exercises with Chinese forces in the Pacific—culminating in a 10-ship joint formation sailing through Japan’s Tsugaru Strait on October 18. 

This, following a series of unprecedented Chinese military aircraft incursions into Taiwan’s airspace, has rattled Taiwan and America’s other allies in the region, namely Japan, the Philippines, Vietnam, Brunei and Malaysia. During the first week of October, over 150 aircraft, including advanced SU-30 fighters and H-6 heavy bombers, flew into Taiwanese airspace. An unprecedented 56 tactical aircraft penetrated Taiwan’s airspace in a single 24-hour period on October 4, the highest single day total to date. 

China has already taken control of multiple islands claimed by these allies in an effort to access vast oil and natural gas resources, as well as project its military power in the contested territorial waters of the South China Sea. China’s ongoing trade dispute with Australia has also ratcheted up tensions in the region. 

The U.S. foreign policy establishment has rushed to assure Taiwan and its other allies that the United States intends to honor its regional security agreements. Of late, Joe Biden has publicly pledged to defend the Japanese Senkaku islands, which China claims as its territory. 

The Wall Street Journal reported on October 7 that several small U.S. Special Forces and Marine Corps detachments have been quietly training Taiwanese special military units to bolster the island nation’s defensive capabilities . . . a move which has all the appearances of an intentional U.S. tripwire in Taiwan. 

Recent Pentagon estimates have warned that China could retake control of Taiwan by force as early as 2027, but current events suggest a much shorter timeline. Much of America’s foreign policy establishment is convinced that China wouldn’t put at risk the 2022 Beijing Olympics scheduled for February, and that it fears the international sanctions and pariah status that would likely result if China invaded Taiwan. 

The problem with this analysis is that it is based on a Western worldview, which is to say one that does not account for actual Chinese interests. There is no guarantee that China is using the same equation or making the same calculations that western diplomats and intelligence agencies are making vis à vis Taiwan, or for that matter, the geopolitical status quo in the Pacific.