Tuesday, February 21, 2023

TLDR DIGEST FEB 13-20

HEADLINES



Canada to NYC: Stop Sending Us Migrants, Eh?


Why Russiagate was the media’s Vietnam

The press declared war on Donald Trump. They lost


U.S. State Department Funds a Disinformation Index That Warns Advertisers To Avoid Reason

Reason is listed among the "ten riskiest online news outlets" by a government-funded disinfo tracker.


How Did the Michigan State University Shooter Get a Gun? Blame Progressive Politics


Inflation Numbers Mock Optimists as Price Pressures Re-Emerge

The pace of price increases, running at levels not seen in 40 years, exceeded analysts’ estimates and is far above the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent annual inflation target.


U.S. Could Permit the Release of Billions in Frozen Funds to Iran as Part of Prisoner Swap


Joe Biden Is the Brezhnev of DEI


Why U.S. teens aren't getting their driver's licenses: Are they avoiding adult responsibilities?






QUOTES



“…it seems like progressive politics played a part in McRae obtaining the firearm in this shooting. In 2019, he was pinched on some gun charges that a soft-on-crime prosecutor dropped. To make matters worse, this prosecuting attorney had a policy not to push too hard on gun charges where those involved were people of color. Oh, and of course, this attorney had ties to George Soros. If McRae had been charged as any other person caught illegally carrying a concealed firearm without a permit, the shooting at MSU might not have happened.”


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"Social justice is word magic. …you can’t really have a definition of it, at least not one that limits the ambition of social justice activists, because the whole point is that social justice activists get to decide on the fly what is or isn’t socially just.  Social justice, as Friedrich Hayek argued brilliantly and at great length, is almost the opposite of actual justice. “[O]nly situations that have been created by human will can be called just or unjust. ... Social justice,” Hayek wrote, “does not belong to the category of effort but that of nonsense, like the term ‘a moral stone.’”


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“The exodus is real: California lost nearly 350,000 residents in 2022, while New York lost about 300,000 and Illinois saw more than 140,000 go elsewhere, per Census numbers. Other states, including New Jersey (-64,231), Massachusetts (-57,292) and Pennsylvania (-39,957), also saw large numbers of residents say goodbye.  But other states, such as Florida and Texas, saw large gains in population, with Florida adding an eye-popping 444,484 residents and Texas adding 470,708. Other population winners include North Carolina (99,796 residents added), South Carolina (+84,030), Tennessee (+81,646) and Georgia (+81,406).”


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“…the explanation that best explains her behavior is that letting go of her theory of the Revolution would undermine the central narrative goal of the 1619 Project, which is to rewrite the history of the American Founding so as to make it not a flawed thing but an affirmatively bad thing. If your ideological project demands that the Founding be bad from the outset, you can never admit that it was driven by anything but the worst possible motive. Certainly, Hannah-Jones has acted for the past three and a half years as if preserving that narrative is more important than the credibility of all the rest of the 1619 Project or of the New York Times as an institution. And nobody around her has deterred her from that course.”


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“So public health officials, federal agencies, and Columbia University professors are "unreliable" now that Senator Paul is highlighting their statements and findings that suggest tinkering around with viruses can have negative consequences. As for being "harmful," it's abundantly clear that the only harm done by Senator Paul's column is to the narrative Dr. Fauci tried to establish — along with the Big Tech overlords who will stop at nothing to protect him as Science itself.”


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“…in terms of how we tell the story of Black America, the board did the right thing, whether because of DeSantis’s threat or for more high-minded reasons. The take that I saw in the course’s original draft depicted the history of Black America over the past several decades as an unbroken stream of left protest against a seemingly unchanging racist hegemon. …But Black history has been ever so much more than protest and professional pessimism; note how hard it is to imagine any other group of people whose history is written with this flavor so dominant.  This is not education but advocacy.”


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“It was once America’s outlet for political and cultural rebellion, but now rock and roll has taken a disturbing new direction, endorsing censorship, Covid mandates, and, worst of all, predictability.”


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“Vanderbilt University’s education school has apologized after sending a condolence message to staff and students regarding a recent shooting at Michigan State University that was drafted by ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence-powered chat bot.”







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