How our culture and our government gave
too much power to Facebook
Posted By: Garnet, 9/21/2021 12:55:43 PM
Capitalism offers an optimal paradigm to organize a virtuous society’s economic affairs. But virtue is a precondition for capitalism, not a product of it, and no modern phenomenon better highlights that distinction than the rise of addictive social-media platforms. This past week, The Wall Street Journal reported on Facebook’s knowledge of the harmful impact of its Instagram platform on teen girls; on Facebook’s role in promoting anger on its platform; on Facebook’s weak response to employee-reported drug-cartel and human-trafficking activity on its platform; on how the Facebook platform thwarted Mark Zuckerberg’s desire to promote COVID-19 vaccinations; and on Facebook’s “XCheck” program, which exempts high-profile accounts and VIP
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The whips and scorns of Del Rio, Texas
7 replies
Finally, after averting its eyes, the Left has found a reason to take an interest as Haitian migrants flood by the thousands across the Rio Grande into Texas. Naturally, what grabbed their attention is not the real issue, which is President Joe Biden triggering an irruption of illegal aliens by foolishly inviting them in and scrapping immigration policies that worked.
The thing that brought a new focus, and piqued outrage, was video footage of mounted officers trying to control the invasion. What detonated the Left’s anger and started another embarrassingly vapid round of hand-wringing is captured by a false report from Business Insider that wrote
President Biden’s remarks Tuesday to the U.N. General Assembly fell flat.Why? Because once again, Biden demonstrated weakness. He is pushing our allies away and cozying up to our enemies.
Biden said during his remarks, "We’re opening a new era of relentless diplomacy, of using the power of our development aid to invest in new ways of lifting people up around the world." And while we should value diplomacy, a strong America is what will enable that diplomacy, and not the promise of American tax dollars.
A strong, America first policy that ended years of dumping billions of U.S. dollars in an attempt to buy peace and cooperation saw successful
Capitalism offers an optimal paradigm to organize a virtuous society’s economic affairs. But virtue is a precondition for capitalism, not a product of it, and no modern phenomenon better highlights that distinction than the rise of addictive social-media platforms.
This past week, The Wall Street Journal reported on Facebook’s knowledge of the harmful impact of its Instagram platform on teen girls; on Facebook’s role in promoting anger on its platform; on Facebook’s weak response to employee-reported drug-cartel and human-trafficking activity on its platform; on how the Facebook platform thwarted Mark Zuckerberg’s desire to promote COVID-19 vaccinations; and on Facebook’s “XCheck” program, which exempts high-profile accounts and VIP
The United States of Fear
3 replies
We recently left the country for the first time since the pandemic began. I could say that we’d always wanted to go to Iceland, but the truth is, we’d wanted to go to Iceland ever since we heard how sanely they handle visitors. Even at the height of the pandemic in 2020, they didn’t require COVID tests for children. They still don’t.
Iceland is the world’s most vaccinated nation, with 86 percent of the country having gotten the jab. A recent ‘spike’ (they peaked at 170 cases per day in mid-August) led to an indoor mask mandate, but it doesn’t apply to kids. The mandate is also very loosely enforced.
Biden’s War on Red State COVID Patients
9 replies
For patients with moderate COVID-19 symptoms, monoclonal antibody (mAb) treatments have proven remarkably successful in decreasing hospitalization and death rates. Moreover, because states and health care providers could order mAb shipments directly from suppliers, they have been utilized to great effect in places that have experienced recent case spikes. In Florida, for example, the CDC indicates that daily COVID deaths plummeted from an August 26 peak of 356 to only 3 on September 17 (graph below). Such success in a red state was obviously galling for the Biden administration, however, so the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) seized the mAb supply ostensibly to achieve “equitable” distribution.
President Biden took to the airwaves last week to present himself as a hero in the fight against COVID-19. In a new high for political irony, his plan is to force employers to coerce their employees to take the vaccines developed under the Trump administration – the same vaccines he railed against as unsafe less than a year ago.
Let’s take a step back. The reality of any viral pandemic is that it continues until the population acquires a sufficient level of herd immunity, whether naturally or through vaccination. Until that happens, the best the government can do is mitigate the consequences of the disease while developing a vaccine as quickly
Biden’s Deflection Mandate
4 replies
President Biden’s Thursday speech to the American people about “the battle against COVID-19” had little to do with public health. Its purpose was to distract us from the unmitigated disaster he created in Afghanistan. What better way to accomplish this goal than to issue an imperial edict that would outrage anyone with a rudimentary understanding of the Constitution? Neither Biden nor any federal agency has the power to impose a vaccine mandate on private sector businesses or workers. If Biden fails to grasp this, the people who actually run his administration get it, but they want nothing more from Thursday’s speech than a change of subject.
A new Texas law that drastically restricts abortion didn’t just spawn outrage from progressives. It also created a Twitter hashtag — #TexasTaliban — that trended as liberal celebrities and their followers vented their outrage at the prospect of the end of legal abortion in the Lone Star State. They spared neither the state’s legislators nor the conservative US Supreme Court majority that declined to stop the law from being implemented.
Part of this is just business as usual in American politics in 2021. We’re long past the point where civility was a concern on either side of the aisle. Too many Democrats and Republicans tend to consider their opponents evil,
Joe Biden Is a Total Failure
12 replies
As cant and emotionalism subside, it is becoming possible to give a clear and fair assessment of the performance of the Biden Administration and of the president himself: a total failure.
The shortfall of 500,000 in the expected net new job figures for August shows that stagflation is upon us: employers are afraid to hire employees as they normally would coming out of the COVID recession because they don’t know if they will be able to afford them. Hourly pay scales are increasing at 7.5 percent, new car prices at 10 percent, rental accommodation at 12 percent, and new homes at 20 percent,
For people who call themselves “progressive,” leftists are astonishingly hostile to progress.
Seemingly mired in 1965, congressional Democrats bulldozed through the U.S. House of Representatives in a special session last month a so-called voting rights bill, H.R. 4, with no Republican support. Named after the late U.S. Representative John Lewis (D-Ga.), Democrats have lavished praise upon themselves for a bill they claim would address what they call “racial discrimination in voting.” According to the Wall Street Journal, the bill would “give the federal government new power over states’ voting procedures, a change Democrats say is needed to protect the political power of minority voters.”
While the unemployment rate for Americans dropped in August, there is a political time bomb buried in the statistics for President Joe Biden and a Democratic Party increasingly focused on equity: black joblessness shot up significantly.In other words, the president who fondly boasts of a domestic policy promising to leave nobody behind has an economic recovery that is leaving a key Democratic constituency in worse shape.
"The rise in black unemployment in August is certainly troubling, considering their unemployment rates were already much higher than any other group," Elise Gould, a senior economist
President Biden’s address to the nation concerning his surrender of Afghanistan to the Taliban was obviously a desperate attempt to convince the public that it wasn’t the disaster we watched in real time. The actual effect of his weirdly belligerent speech was to confirm his inability to grasp the military and foreign policy complexities associated with his role as Commander in Chief. This has sent his approval numbers into a nosedive from which it will be difficult to recover. A new Yahoo News/YouGov poll, for example, shows his approval rating at an all time low of 44 percent and that only a third of Americans believe he handled Afghanistan properly.
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A new analysis of President Joe Biden’s downward-trending approval ratings finds that his Democratic Party could hemorrhage as many as 41 seats in the House during next year’s midterm elections, or close to as many as then-President Donald Trump’s GOP lost in 2018.Glen Bolger of Public Opinion Strategies told the Washington Examiner that it is not difficult to tie presidential polling to election outcomes and because Biden’s approval rating continues to decline, he believes the president’s party will lose close to the 41 seats lost during Trump’s midterm, or 34 more than the GOP needs to regain control of the chamber.This, before states have even redrawn their congressional districts
Embattled Rep. Liz Cheney is betting on figures from the fading Republican establishment to help her win re-election — setting up a clash between two GOP former presidents.
Cheney (R-Wyo.), who has been sidelined by House Republican leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy for voting to impeach President Donald Trump, has invited President George W. Bush to hold a fundraiser for her next month in Dallas, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Trump is backing her challenger Harriet Hageman in the 2022 Republican primary for Wyoming’s sole House seat.
Homeland Security chief Alejandro Mayorkas said Tuesday on MSNBC’s “The ReidOut” that he was “horrified” by recent images of U.S. Border Patrol agents on horseback confronting Haitian migrants along the Rio Grande River.Mayorkas said, “I too was horrified by the images captured by photographers with respect to the activities of Border Patrol agents of horseback. We do not condone. We do not tolerate any mistreatment of any migrant. What we did is we directed an immediate investigation of the events captured in the photographs and on video. I have ensured that the top leadership of the office of professional responsibility lead that investigation and that it be conducted thoroughly
Joy Reid has been slammed for calling out the coverage of Gabby Petito's disappearance as "missing white woman syndrome." The MSNBC host said: "The way this story captivated the nation has many wondering, why not the same media attention when people of color go missing?" Calling out the "public fascination" of white women "while ignoring cases involving of people of color" Reid added: "Well, the answer actually has a name: missing white woman syndrome." She said the term had been "coined by the late and great Gwen Ifill to describe the media and public fascination with missing white women like
Vice President Harris on Tuesday condemned the treatment of Haitian migrants at the southern border after images circulated appearing to show Border Patrol agents on horseback grabbing individuals seeking to enter the U.S.
"What I saw depicted, those individuals on horseback treating human beings the way they were was horrible," Harris told reporters after an event to promote the White House's economic agenda.
"I fully support what is happening right now, which is a thorough investigation into what is going on there. But human beings should never be treated that way, and I’m deeply troubled about it," she said.
GM corn set to stop man spreading his seed
36 replies
Scientists have created the ultimate GM crop: contraceptive corn. Waiving fields of maize may one day save the world from overpopulation.
The pregnancy prevention plants are the handiwork of the San Diego biotechnology company Epicyte, where researchers have discovered a rare class of human antibodies that attack sperm. By isolating the genes that regulate the manufacture of these antibodies, and by putting them in corn plants, the company has created tiny horticultural factories that make contraceptives. 'We have a hothouse filled with corn plants that make anti-sperm antibodies,' said Epicyte president Mitch Hein.
Does anyone like living like this?This was the question presented to me by a friend of mine recently as we were discussing the current state of America under the Joe Biden administration and the deep malaise that has been ushered in by the man who promised over and over again to 'heal the soul of America'. No one is healing. Nothing is healed. The wound Donald Trump ripped open has done nothing but fester since Scranton Joe was inaugurated. Eight months since President Biden was sworn into office, the anticipation of a tone change and 'return to normalcy' has utterly disappeared.
Senators Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) and Mike Lee (R., Utah) personally investigated some of former president Trump’s claims of election fraud and concluded they were meritless, according to the book Peril by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Robert Costa.
After requesting proof of Trump’s fraud claims, Graham received a collection of memos on January 4 from lawyer Rudy Giuliani entitled “Voting Irregularities, Impossibilities, and Illegalities in the 2020 General Election.” The memos alleged various irregularities in voting in swing states, such as hundreds of dead people voting in Georgia and 12,000 “overvotes” in Arizona, when voters select more than the maximum number of choices on a ballot.
Former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb warned Wednesday that “we’re in for a whopper” of a flu season due to a lack of immunity in the US population. Gottlieb, who helmed the FDA under President Donald Trump and serves on Pfizer’s board of directors, made the chilling prediction during an interview on CNBC about workplace safety amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. “We haven’t seen a flu season last year—we’re in for a whopper because we haven’t put immunity into the population in at least one and maybe now two years. When the flu does come back, and it will come back, it’s going to come back
Joe Biden on Tuesday did not recognize any American reporters for questions during an Oval Office meeting with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his aides cleared out journalists as they tried to query the president. Biden did attempt to answer one shouted question from a CBS reporter about the crisis on the Southern border but his answer was unclear when White House staff shouted down reporters, covering the president's attempt to respond as they demanded journalists leave.(Snip)Johnson then took control, calling on three British reporters for questions that he and Biden answered. The president did not call on a single reporter. With no American reporter called upon
Sidelined? Hundreds of Navy SEALS told
they won't be deployed if they
refuse COVID vaccine 31 replies
they won't be deployed if they
refuse COVID vaccine 31 replies
Several hundred elite Navy SEALs are in danger of being blocked from deploying with their special operator teams by the Pentagon after failing to get a mandatory COVID vaccine, according to a lawyer and pastor counseling them.(Snip)"They are essentially being asked to make a decision between their commitments to the lordship of Christ and their careers as Navy SEALs. Our country should be very concerned about what this would do to military readiness. Losing hundreds of Navy SEALs because of their legitimate and sincerely held Christian beliefs could be devastating to us as a nation."
Black Lives Matter activists gathered near Carmine’s restaurant in New York City and slammed its ‘racist’ management after three black women visiting from Texas were arrested for allegedly assaulting a hostess who asked for proof of vaccination. BLM protesters chanted ‘[expletive] you, Carmine’s’ and ‘Carmine’s are racist’ outside the Italian restaurant on the Upper West Side of Manhattan on Monday night—four days after the altercation.(Snip)The women, all of whom are from the Houston area, were seated indoors, but they then left when three men who were part of their group arrived several minutes later and two of them could not produce proof of vaccination,