Im-Politic: Parents Should Ignore this Over-the-Top Woke Guide to Pop Culture

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Al Qaeda, children, families, Im-Politic, movies, parenting, parents, Phillipines, political correctness, popular culture, racism, The Washington Post, white supremacy, wokeness

Even though the Washington Post has turned into a daily display of guilt-drenched, virtue-signaling wokeness and political correctness, I was still gobsmacked to read the following in yesterday’s edition of its weekly feature “Common Sense Media.”

These reports’ raison d’etre is helping “families make smart media choices” for their kids when it comes to “movies, games, apps, TV shows, websites and books,” and its latest group of reviews included this warning about a new action flick called Plane:

“[T]here are troubling aspects to how the film’s non-White characters are represented. Darker-skinned, Southeast Asian-presenting actors are cast as criminals, while lighter, more East Asian-presenting actors are cast as “good guys.” And Black characters are coded as heroic but violent.”

Now I actually consider “Common Sense Media” to be a great idea in principle. Who can doubt that popular culture offerings today are saturated with material that’s disgusting, perverse, and wildly inappropriate and even dangerous for the intellectual, social, and ethical development of kids of various ages? (The impact on grown-ups surely isn’t very beneficial, either.) So everyone should be all for alerting parents to this garbage.

But common sense – not to mention minimal logic and coherence – really is imperative, and if you think about it for more than passing moment, that’s exactly what this comment is missing.

After all, what’s the message that this review is trying to send? That Plane is a film created by folks with some major racial and ethnic prejudices. But they’re obviously bizarre kind of racists and bigots at best.

They don’t like “darker skinned Southeast Asians.” But they do like “lighter…East Asians.” And they seem to like “Black characters” yet more – even though people of subsaharan African descent are almost always darker skinned than Southeast Asians.

There’s no law requiring prejudice to be logical, but the assumptions evidently underlying this passage surely deserved at least some scrutiny. Like maybe by editors?

Nor do the review’s shortcomings stop there. For example, in real life, how much skin color difference is there between many East and Southeast Asians, especially since the population of the latter region contains large numbers of individuals of Chinese ancestry?

Maybe the writer is referring to the “dangerous separatists in the Phillipines” who are the movie’s villains? Well, according to this academic article, the archipelago is quite the demographic melange, having been peopled by at least five major migrations from all over Australasia, Southeast Asia – and Taiwan (which is located between East Asia and Southeast Asia). So exactly which of these numerous groups is allegedly being slimed?

Moreover, “dangerous separatists in the Phillipines” aren’t figments of some white supremacist screenwriter’s imagination. As explained here by the Congressional Research Service, separatism has been a long-standing problem in that country, especially in the southern-most islands. And these movements have included an organization with impressive-looking ties to Al Qaeda. Since that’s the group that planned and carried out the September 11 attacks, it sounds pretty dangerous.

In principle, one could ask why the film-makers decided to zero in on this country and this group. But the obvious, common sense answer is “Why not?” Should Filipino separatists – or any non-white groups – be exempted from the list of villains permissable in America? If so, why?

Or is the reviewer implying that American popular culture doesn’t regularly, and never has regularly, produced works featuring white villains? Just posing the question should reveal its absurdity.

In this vein, I also found myself wondering about the need to mention that “Black characters” are “coded as …violent”? Were Plane‘s white characters not violent, too? If so, that would be weird for a movie that “Common Sense Media” tells us from the get-go is “an action film” with lots of “violence.” Do such movies typically include characters seeking to resolve their differences through dialogue or role-playing or compulsory arbitration?

That this material made it into a leading American newspaper without a single editor apparently batting an eye –and does so again and again – makes you wonder what new lows in progressive pearl-clutching and sanctimony are just around the corner. But “Common Sense Media” also offers one reason for modest optimism: It includes no bylines, indicating that its contributors feel some sense of shame – even if unwitting -about purveying such divisive drivel.

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(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Everything You Wanted to Know About Immigration & the Economy — & Less

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economics, immigrants, Immigration, innovation, labor shortages, Open Borders, productivity, The Washington Post, wages, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Leave it to the zealously pro-Open Borders Washington Post. It chose as the reviewer of a book by two economic historians apparently unaware of the relationship in U.S. history between immigration levels and productivity improvement a business professor seemingly just slightly less clueless about this crucial link either historically and going forward.

Doubt that? Then take a look at this morning’s rave by Harvard business professor Michael Luca about a new study by Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan of Stanford and Princeton Universities, respectively, titled Streets of Gold: America’s Untold Story of Immigrant Success.

According to Luca, Streets of Gold “reflects an ongoing renaissance in the field of economic history fueled by technological advances — an increase in digitized records, new techniques to analyze them and the launch of platforms such as Ancestry — that are breathing new life into a range of long-standing questions about immigration. Abramitzky and Boustan are masters of this craft, and they creatively leverage the evolving data landscape to deepen our understanding of the past and present.”

And their overall conclusion (which rightly takes into account the non-economic contributions of immigrants to American life) is that (in Abamitzky’s and Boustan’s words): “Immigration contributes to a flourishing American society” – especially if you take “the long view.”

But there’s no indication in Luca’s review that the authors weigh in on a key (especially in the long view) impact of immigration on the U.S. economy – how it’s affected the progress made by the nation in boosting productivity: its best guarantee for raising living standards on a sustainable basis.

As I’ve written repeatedly, mainstream economic theory holds that one major spur to satisfactory productivity growth is the natural tendency of businesses to replace workers with various types of machinery and new technologies when those workers become too expensive. Most economists would add that although jobs may be lost on net in the short-term, they increase further down the road once these productivity advances create new companies, entire industries, and therefore employment opportunities.

By contrast, when businesses know that wages will stay low – for example, because large immigration inflows will keep pumping up the national labor supply much faster than the demand for workers rises – these companies will feel little need to buy new machinery or otherwise incorporate new technologies simply because they won’t have to.

And more important than what the theory says, abundant evidence indicates that businesses have behaved precisely this way in the past (when scarce and thus increasingly expensive labor prompted acquisitions of labor-saving devices that helped turn the United States into an economic and technology powerhouse), into the present (as industries heavily dependent on penny-wage and often illegal immigrant labor have tended to be major productivity laggards).  

Reviewer Luca demonstrates some awareness that this issue matters in the here and now and going forward, writing that “Compared with the rest of the country, businesses in high-immigration areas have access to more workers and hence less incentive to invest in further automation.”

He also points out that “This has implications for today’s immigration debates.”

But his treatment of the current situation is confused at best and perverse at worst (at least if you buy the economic conventional wisdom and evidence concerning the productivity-immigration relationship).

Principally, he claims that “the United States is expected to face a dramatic labor market shortage as baby boomers retire and lower birthrates over time result in fewer young people to replace them.” Let’s assume that’s true – despite all the evidence that more and more employers are filling all the job openings they’ve been claiming by automating. (See, e.g., here, here, and here.)

Why, though , does Luca simply conclude that “Increased immigration is one approach to avoiding the crunch. Notably, the other way to avert this crisis is through further automation, enabled by rapid advances in artificial intelligence. Immigration policy will help shape the extent to which the economy relies on people vs. machines in the decades to come.”

Is he really implying that a low-productivity — and therefore low-innovation — future would be a perfectly fine one for immigration (and other) policymakers to be seeking?

Just as important, although Luca clearly recognizes that these questions have at least some importance nowadays, he provides no indication of where the book’s authors stand.

So let the reader beware. Luca clearly believes, as Post headline writers claim, that Streets of Gold makes clear “What the research really says about American immigration.”  What his review makes clear is that this claim isn’t even close.

   

Im-Politic: What Michigan’s Surge is Really Saying About the CCP Virus

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Biden, CCP Virus, coronavirus, COVID 19, demographics, Grand Rapids, Im-Politic, Kent County, Michigan, New England, population, public health, The Washington Post, vaccination, vaccines, weather, Wuhan virus

The Washington Post has just unwittingly delivered some powerful blows to the widespread belief (propagated most notably by President Biden) that America’s latest CCP Virus-related woes are overwhelmingly a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” And all of them came in a single article focusing tightly on the recent surge of the virus in Michigan.

The first: The article’s stage-setting observation that “At least two dozen states have seen cases rise at least 5 percent in the past two weeks, with Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, New Hampshire and North Dakota each recording per capita jumps of more than 60 percent. Some highly vaccinated states, including Vermont and Massachusetts, were also seeing steep rises in cases.”

As I’ve said before, case numbers are about the worst available indicator of the pandemic’s severity, because of huge complications like its heavy dependence on testing, and the related massive numbers of asymptomatic infections, which of course hold down the numbers of test-takers. But they’re constantly touted by the public health establishment and other vaccine zealots, so they’re fair game.

And what’s instructive about that Post sentence is not only its mention of states like Vermont and Massachusetts experiencing “steep rises in case” (despite full vaccination rates of 73 percent and 71 percnt, respectively, according to the paper’s own very convenient CCP Virus tracker), but the fact that Minnesota (62 percent), New Hampshire (65 percent), and New Mexico (63 percent) also boast full vaccination rates notably higher than the national U.S. average of 59 percent.

The second blow against the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” meme: The Post‘s report that in Michigan itself, “The unvaccinated made up about three-quarters of cases, hospitalizations and deaths in the 30 days ending Nov. 5, according to the state health department.”

In other words, fully a quarter of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths (the latter two metrics being far better gauges of CCP Virus severity) have stemmed from vaccinated Michiganders. These figures indicate that breakthrough cases and really bad breakthrough cases are a lot more common than the nation has been told (especially given my previous point that Americans and their government have literally no idea of the share of their unvaccinated compatriots get sick enough from the virus to be hospitalized and die – as opposed to their absolute numbers – because of the testing/asymptomatic spread complications.)

A third blow against the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” narrative comes from the data for the Michigan counties depicted by the Post as being especially hard hit by mounting hospitalizations – which are a good leading indicator of mortality, and which of course threaten the health care system’s ability to provide its vital services against the full range of medical problems Americans suffer.

According to reporters Brittany Shammas and Paulina Firozi, one of the state’s regions where the hospitalization situation is especially dire is Grand Rapids. But Kent County, where the city is located, has one of Michigan’s higher vaccination rates – 57 percent.

Moreover, although the article adds that “A health-care coalition representing 13 counties in West Michigan [including Kent] warned last week that “hospitals and EMS systems were operating at extremely high capacity, describing the situation as being at ‘a tipping point,’ a look at these localities shows that vaccination rates look like pretty unimportant contributors.

Here are the relevant recent hospitalization statistics for these counties as of this past Friday. The left column shows the vaccination rates for their entire populations, the middle column the percentage change in daily new hospital admissions over the previous week, and the right column the seven-day change in absolute numbers of new admissions during that latest week-long period. (The county-specific vaccination rates come from The New York Times vaccine tracker feature and the hospitalization figures come from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s website.)

Clare:               44 percent           40.00 percent         7

Ionia:                44 percent         -20.83 percent       19

Isabella:            42 percent          42.86 percent       10

Kent:                57 percent          20.15 percent     328

Lake:                55 percent                  n/a                  0

Mason:             57 percent          18.18 percent       13

Mecosta:          39 percent         -12.00 percent       22

Montcalm:       39 percent         -35.09 percent       37

Muskegon:      51 percent           44.19 percent       62

Newaygo:        42 percent           40.00 percent      21

Oceana:           51 percent                   n/a                 2

Osceola:          40 percent         100.00 percent        2

Ottawa:           53 percent             7.69 percent      70

The anomalies should be apparent right away. There’s Kent County’s odd combination of high vaccination rates and strong (but not super strong) hospitalization increases. There are the identical and much lower vaccination rates of Clare and Ionia counties – and hospitalization rates going in the opposite direction, and dramatically so. There’s the equally strange pair of Mecosta and Montcalm counties, with their identical and really low vaccination rates, and their significantly falling hospitalization rates.

Anomalies like this can often be explained by differing demographic characteristics (e.g., more and more densely populated areas are typically worse virus hot spots). That’s one reason why it’s foolish to support a one-size-fits-all vaccination policy – let alone one that imposes major penalties on the unvaccinated. But even population doesn’t explain many of the all-over-the-place results for these mainly rural, thinly populated Michigan counties. (Michigan population-by-county data come from here, and the population density statistics from here.) 

For example, Kent is by far the most populous of the 13 counties, and by far the most population-dense – which surely accounts for much of its hospitalization increase. At the same time, its hospitalization situation proportionately is much worse than the next most populous county (Ottawa – which is also next door). 

Moreover, although Montcalm and Mecosta, as noted above, have identical (and very low) vaccination rates, the former is somewhat more densely populated than the former, but its hospitalization rate is falling more than three times faster.

And as always, very small absolute numbers can skew the percentage changes. Thus Osceola has the second smallest population of the 13, and its population density is one of the lowest – as is its vaccination rate. New hospitalizations have doubled in percentage terms over that last data week. But in absolute terms that means they’ve risen from one to two.

There’s still another way, though, that the Post piece — more wittingly — debunks the cookie-cutter approach to vaccinations, and that’s in the list of states, whatever their vaccination rates, where cases are up the most lately.  Except for New Mexico, they’re all in the upper Midwest and New England, and guess what happens in those regions at this time of year? Yes, it gets cold. And generally colder sooner than in other parts of the country.  Weather also is why, as the article reports, “previous southern state hot spots, like Florida and Texas, saw marked declines in cases.” 

The real message of the article, therefore, is that the CCP Virus, like most respiratory diseases, is a generally seasonal phenomenon, and where and when it’s not seasonal (as in Florida this summer), it comes (and goes) in waves regardless of changes in public policy. As a result, as has been clear once the first wave passed last year, the most public officials can do is concentrate on protecting the most vulnerable, keep the economy and broader society largely open for the rest (in order to minimize the collateral damage from sweeping lockdowns, school closings, stay-at-home orders, and other indiscriminate responses), and count on immunity from whatever source (vaccines as well as natural immunity) to become widespread enough to turn it into something like a bad flu.           

Following Up: The Latest on the Virus and the Border

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Biden border crisis, Border Crisis, CCP Virus, coronavirus, COVID 19, Following Up, hospitalizations, Immigration, migrants, mortality, Open Borders, public health, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Wuhan virus

This past Saturday, I upbraided New York Times editorial writers for claiming that the CCP Virus pandemic had eased enough to justify admitting into the country more illegal aliens who may be carriers and therefore spreaders of the disease. The basis for my criticism was data from the Times itself indicating that the pandemic wasn’t easing any more – and strongly suggesting that the paper’s Open Borders-like immigration policy stances had become extreme enough to rationalize worsening already serious dangers to public health.

Five days later, it’s clear that, although the paper still has a lot to answer for publishing this piece (like its insistence that there was never a compelling public health rationale for putting such virus-related immigration restrictions into effect), my use of the word “indicating” to describe the virus’ status was well chosen. For the latest figures paint an oddly contadictory picture of the pandemic threat.

When I wrote the November 13 post, nearly a week’s worth of statistics on virus deaths showed them on the upswing again after the seven-day averages (7DA) had been falling – often by double-digits percent per day – since late-September. But on November 9, they began rising again, and two days later the figure was again approaching double digits: 9.72 percent. By Friday, the 12^th, however, they’d started retreating again, and yesterday were down an encouraging 12.74 percent. So by that metric (which isn’t perfect), the situation is looking reasonably good. (My source, as usual, is The Washington Post‘s very user-friendly virus tracking feature.)

The same, however, can’t be said for virus-related hospitalization rates. These numbers aren’t pefect, either (see here for a good explanation why), but they’re probably the best available for gauging progress against the virus. Moreover, they tend to prefigure death rates (because hospitalized patients don’t die right away). But although they started trending down according to the 7DA numbers starting on September 6, that decline began slowing in late October, and the 7DA for daily new hospitalizations went back into growth territory last Friday. By this metric, therefore, a return of tough virus times may lie ahead. So does the return of winter.

This impressive case for pessimism doesn’t mean that I’ve changed my opposition to indiscriminate anti-CCP Virus policies like current mask and vaccine mandates, let alone sweeping shutdowns and lockdowns. But it also reenforces the case for preventing the situation facing Americans from becoming worse still – including by protecting the country from illegal migrants whose health status will always be at best uncertain (because of weak public health and record-keeping systems in most sending countries). That is, unless, like The New York Times, you think American and their health should come last when making immigration policy.

Glad I Didn’t Say That! The Washington Post’s Open Borders Deniers

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Alejandro Mayorkas, Biden administration, Border Patrol, border security, Department of Homeland Security, FoxNews.com, Glad I Didn't Say That!, Haitians, illegal aliens, Immigration, migrants, Open Borders, Republicans, The Washington Post, United Press International

“The numbers belie the Republican claim that Haitians have been

admitted into the country wholesale.”

– The Washington Post, October 13, 2021

“Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas said Sunday

that as many as 12,000 Haitian migrants who made their way to the

U.S.-Mexico border have been released into the United States.”

– United Press International, September 26, 2021

Number of migrants overall released into the United States since

August 6, according to leaked Border Patrol documents:  c. 72,000

– FoxNews.com, October 13, 2021

 

(Sources: “How the Biden administration can help Haitian migrants without sending the wrong message,” The Washington Post, October 13, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/10/13/how-biden-administration-can-help-haitian-migrants-without-sending-wrong-message/; “DHS secretary: Up to 12,000 Haitian migrants released into U.S.,” by Daniel Uria, United Press International, September 26, 2021, DHS Secretary Mayorkas: As many as 12,000 Haitian migrants released into United States – UPI.com; and “Leaked Border Patrol docs show mass release of illegal immigrants into US by Biden administration,” by Bill Melugin and Adam Shaw, FoxNews.com, October 13, 2021, https://www.foxnews.com/politics/leaked-border-patrol-docs-release-immigrants-us-biden-administration)

Following Up: Welcome Shrinkage of China’s Ties with U.S. News Organizations

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Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, China, China Daily, ChinaWatch, Following Up, Houston Chronicle, journalism, Mainstream Media, news media, propaganda, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Free Beacon, The Washington Post, transparency

Since Memorial Day is – or at least should be – a remembance and tribute to what’s best about America, it seems appropriate to report some good news: Some of the nation’s leading news organizations have cut some not-at-all-trivial ties with China.

These ties concern their decision to stop distributing with their print editions and posting on their websites a Chinese government propaganda vehicle called ChinaWatch. As I wrote more than two years ago, their decision to present ChinaWatch and the form of this presentation created two problems. First, although the Constitution’s First Amendment should authorize giving even possibly genocidal, increasingly hostile dictatorships the right to present their material in the United States, journalistic ethics and (I believe) the law should require the clear labeling of any such material as foreign government products.

I argued that neither the Chinese government nor the news organization’s carrying their material met these obligations.

Second, since ChinaWatch was paid advertising, it became a source of revenue for the news organizations that featured it, and because these news organizations covered the Chinese government, its appearance raised conflict of interest questions that at least should have – but weren’t – have been forthrightly acknowledged. Importantly, some news organizations have received millions of dollars from Beijing – not decisive sums in terms of the overall finances of some of them, but not trivial, either.

Happily, these problems have now been reduced, although not eliminated. The New York Times said about a year after my post that it had stopped accepting such material from all state-run media. According to this Tibetan dissident publication, the same goes for The Wall Street Journal. The Washington Post says it has not run or distributed ChinaWatch specifically since 2019.

Official U.S. government lobbying records show, however, that multi-million dollar relationships still exist between several major U.S. news organizations and Beijing’s propaganda machine. As reported last week by the Washington Free Beacon, over the last six months,

“China Daily [the parent organization of ChinaWatch] paid more than $1.6 million for advertising in Time magazine, the Los Angeles Times, Financial Times, and Foreign Policy magazine, according to disclosures filed with the Justice Department. The Beijing-controlled news agency paid another $1 million to American newspapers, including the L.A. Times, Chicago Tribune, and Houston Chronicle, to print copies of its own publications.”

And unlike the The New York Times, the Post, and the Journal, the Free Beacon observes,

“Many of the newspapers [still] working with China Daily face severe financial problems. The Los Angeles Times furloughed workers last year as advertising revenue cratered during the coronavirus pandemic. Papers like the Chicago Tribune and Boston Globe have failed to turn a profit for years.”

The nation’s news organizations have more than enough credibility problems these days (see, e.g., here and here). Severing all official ties with Chinese and other foreign government media, or at least making every effort to publicize them to their readers, could only help them regain some of that trust.

Im-Politic: Big Neglected Questions About Washington and the Virus’ Origins

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Anthony S. Fauci, Biden administration, bio-weapons, CCP Virus, China, coronavirus, COVID 19, Francis Collins, gain-of-function research, Galveston National Laboratory, Im-Politic, Josh Rogin, National Institutes of Health, NIH, perjury, State Department, The Washington Post, Trump administration, Wuhan Institute of Virology, Wuhan virus

There’s been lots of commotion in recent weeks about the decision by chief Biden medical adviser Anthony S. Fauci and National Institutes of Health (NIH) chief Francis Collins to use federal government moneys to fund research on dangerous coronaviruses at labs in China – and that’s good. As I wrote in January, there’s enough compelling circumstantial evidence that these resources helped create the CCP Virus to warrant detailed investigations and possibly their firings.

What’s less good is that much of the commotion is missing or obscuring other problems with the Fauci-Collins approach to scientific cooperation with China that are at least equally serious, and that could constitute comparable grounds for their dismissal.

To be sure, the current emphases on this matter aren’t exactly trivial. Clearly, if federal funding helped pay for research at one of the two major virology labs in the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the first virus cases have been reported, and that this research created the pathogen that has caused so much illness, death, and economic distress in America and around the world, that would represent one of the worst scandals in American history. There are also the questions of whether the feds funded what’s called gain-of-function research (which is unmistakably capable of producing such deadly pathogens) to begin with, and whether they’ve told Congress the truth about these programs in sworn testimony.

But however grave each of these potential offenses, the figurative jury is still correctly out on each. First, it’s not yet at all certain that the virus even came from either lab, as opposed to some form of natural origin. In addition, since there’s no hard-and-fast scienitific consensus on defining gain-of-function research (here’s an official federal summary of the debate), it’s not yet known whether such activity was actually financed by the federal government. It’s true that there’s a U.S. government definition that applies specifically to grants for such activity. But Washington has also given itself wiggle room in applying it.

As a result, it’s far from obvious that Fauci specifically perjured himself in telling Congress that he’s innocent of such accusations. More frustrating, because the term is so fuzzy, a fair and just conclusion may be genuinely impossible to reach. This holds in principle despite Collins’ claim (not under oath) that NIH has never “approved any grant that would have supported ‘gain-of-function’ research on coronaviruses that would have increased their transmissibility or lethality for humans” – which of course raises the question of what kind of gain-of-function work might have been approved.

Moreover, even if Fauci and Collins did actually approve gain-of-function research in China, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the particular project they subsidized produced the virus in question. And that may never be finally determined, either, because China may well have destroyed the evidence needed to provide a definitive answer.

When it comes, however, to making sure that U.S. international science cooperation policy adequately safeguards America’s health and security going forward, some crucial questions are being neglected so far.

For example, just before its term ran out, the Trump administration stated publicly that even though the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV – which received the controversial U.S. research grant) presents itself as a “civilian institution, the United States has determined that the WIV has collaborated on publications and secret projects with China’s military. The WIV has engaged in classified research, including laboratory animal experiments, on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017.” Nor has the Biden administration disputed this allegation – even when the President’s national security adviser was asked about it directly.

Further, virus research has always had obvious links to biological weapons research, and there’s no bright line in China (or anywhere in the world these days) between civilian technologies and innovation and military technologies and innovation. No one with any credibility has explicitly charged that Beijing intended the results of its virology research to be used militarily. But no one with a lick of common sense could dismiss this prospect, either. Did either Fauci or Collins consider it? If so, neither has mentioned it yet.

Then there are the secrecy and oversight issues. Fauci has claimed that “You never know” whether grant recipients are trustworthy. But even though governments in both China and the United States (and every other country) keep lots of secrets, military and otherwise, and even though all go overboard with the secrecy too often, who can doubt that China is in a class by itself for blocking transparency, and for lacking systemic means of exposing improperly kept secrets?

In other words, even assuming that the U.S. government can never completely ensure that grantees won’t lie, did Fauci or Collins ever consider that trustworthiness in China is a special problem, and required special monitoring procedures to be in place before any money was transferred – especially given the bio-weapons angle? Not only is there, again, no reason yet to believe that either of them did, Fauci has even told Congress that the Chinese recipients are in fact “trustworthy.” (See the above-linked CNBC.com post.   .

And don’t forget safety – an issue on which the available evidence indicates that lackadaisical attitudes weren’t confined to Fauci and Collins.

A Washington Post article has reported that in 2018 – that is, during the Trump administration – concerns about the WIV’s coronavirus studies led the State Department to send some of its China-based science specialists to the facility to check on its safety conditions. They found enough subpar standards and practices to warn about the risks of a leak causing a pandemic. And here’s where the story gets especially troubling, and where many more questions need to be answered.

According to the Post report, the WIV’s own officials asked for help in this regard, and the State Department inspectors concluded that the best U.S. response was providing assistance – both because they considered the work to be valuable and because the coronavirus research was being supported by “the Galveston National Laboratory at the University of Texas Medical Branch and other U.S. organizations.” That is, the NIH of Fauci and Collins wasn’t the only federal government sources of funding.

It’s not clear that they also got word of the slipshod conditions at the WIV. It’s not even clear that the Galveston lab did. But is it credible to suppose that they were left in the dark? (Its head, interestingly, gave a non-denial-type denial in this April, 2020 interview. To my knowledge, Fauci hasn’t been asked the question.)

All that’s known for sure is (1) that the Post article (and a follow-up Politico piece from the same correspondent, Josh Rogin) reported that the State Department inspectors’ request for more assistance wasn’t granted; and (2) that the NIH-funded research wasn’t suspended until April, 2020.

It’s vital that responses to all these unanswered and sometimes unasked questions be forthcoming.

At this point, therefore, it’s possible that Fauci and Collins are off the hook on the safety issue – and that others who served in the State Department during the Trump years are squarely hanging from it. Otherwise, however, it looks like this pair decided to support dangerous and potentially catastrophic biological research by a regime known for its disregard for the safety of its own people – let alone foreigners – in its pursuit of power, for its eagerness to turn scientific advances into military assets, for its obsession with secrecy and impressive capability for remaining opaque, and, last but not least, for its growing determination to challenge U.S. national security interests.

Finding out why on earth this idea ever entered or stayed in their heads seems a lot more important than haggling over whether in some technical or even legal sense they were or weren’t funding gain-of-function research.

Im-Politic: Our Dysfunctional Watchdog of Democracy

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Anthony S. Fauci, Barry Meier, Biden, Buzzfeed.com, CCP Virus, coronavirus, COVID 19, democracy, Donald Trump, facemasks, Im-Politic, journalism, lockdowns, Mainstream Media, masks, Russia, Steele dossier, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Thomas Jefferson, Trump-Russia, Wuhan virus, Yellow journalism

A New York Times article posted this past weekend strongly reinforces a suspicion that I’ve held for some time about the title of most worrisome – because largely neglected – existing threat to American democracy. It’s not demagogues who get elected to high (or even the highest) public office. It’s not white supremacists or Antifa. It’s not voter fraud or voter suppression. It’s not Russian leader Vladimir Putin. It’s not even the kind of disinformation and misinformation and even election interference that he and other foreign dictators (like China’s Xi Jinping) have engaged in.

Instead it’s our own Mainstream Media – including the gargantuan social media platforms that have come to play such a huge role in determining what news Americans see, watch, and hear.

Why are these news organizations so dangerous? For two main reasons. First, their democracy-subverting activities are much more subtle and therefore harder to identify than those of the above culprits. Second, their ever-growing partisanship and arrogance is destroying what has long been relied on as the nation’s fail-safe mechanism – a watchdog press.

To be fair, this idea has always been problematic, even though throughout U.S. history, prominent Americans have made statements like “Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost” (Thomas Jefferson) and “Democracy Dies in Darkness” (the Washington Post).

Yes, despite the bedrock Constitutional system of separation of powers, it’s been essential for some influential force outside government to “guard the guardians.” But embedded in the very consequent need for private ownership (to ensure that the press can independently monitor the government) is the danger that these owners will solely or mainly use their power to further their own particular interests, not society’s.

All of which is to say that we’ve long had a national conundrum to deal with. But it doesn’t seem unreasonable to conclude that, once journalism clearly exited its sensationalistic “Yellow” phase and (probably in the years following Wold War II), started acting like a profession that needed to embody and uphold standards of accuracy and objectivity, the major media met its watchdog responsibilities fairly well – over both government and the private sector.

What the author of the Times piece, former journalist Barry Meier, makes clear, is that there’s not only more reason than ever to fear that the commitment to objectivity is rapidly weakening (and these fears have been amply justified lately, as I’ve reported here). There’s also more reason than ever to fear that the kind of commitment to accountability watchdogs must accept – inevitably entailing an acknowledgement of legitimate outside criticism and the imperative of correcting mistakes – seriously is fading as well.

These worries have been triggered by two specific observations made by Meier about the Mainstream Media’s handling of the charges that former President Trump colluded with Russia to ensure victory in the 2016 election. As Meier recounts, these accusations were supercharged by reports that a former British super-spy had uncovered evidence that Trump’s personal misbehavior had exposed him to Russian blackmail, and resulted in his turning into a latterday Manchurian Candidate who would be forced to do Moscow’s bidding.

The infamous “Steele dossier” that supposedly made this case was published by a website called Buzzfeed.com in January, 2017 – shortly before Trump’s inauguration – and although no serious efforts at confirmation or even finding any supporting evidence were made, “countless articles, television shows, books, tweets and blog posts about it appeared.” (The dossier also formed part of the basis of the FBI’s request to a special U.S. court to spy on the Trump campaign in 2016, and Bureau Director James Comey’s March, 2017 disclosure that this investigation was continuing poured additional fuel on the Trump Russia fire.)

By 2019, Meier goes on, the Steele dossier had been exposed as a bogus hatchet job. But by that time, of course, the collusion firestorm had dominated the Trump presidency, along with equally offbase news coverage of his administration, and surely compromised its ability to govern effectively.

Why this prolonged media focus? In large measure, as Meier explains, because “It was easy for many journalists to believe that Mr. Trump would do anything to win, even — given his stance with…Putin — collude with Russia.” Indeed, as the author observes, they picked up this ball and ran with it even though “Steele said that his information needed to be confirmed….”

This flagrant anti-Trump bias was bad enough. Much worse, though was the media’s response once the dossier had been debunked. In Meier’s words:

“[A] few reporters who had written about the dossier had backed away from it. ‘Some people have wanted to maintain that the dossier is checking out when, as far as I can tell, it hasn’t,’ said Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News. He was in the minority. When Erik Wemple of The Washington Post wrote a series of columns about the media infatuation with the dossier, most journalists he contacted either defended their work or ignored his inquiries.”

Even though Meier, Isikoff, and Wemple all work for Mainstream Media organizations themselves, these revelations are more disturbing because they cast doubt on these news organization’s willingness, either individually or collectively, to admit that a major preoccupation of theirs that shaped American politics for years was an utter crock. And in a similar vein, they’re grounds for great skepticism that these same media will produce accurate post-mortems on the actual actions by governments or by individual politicians that conformed with this Get Trump obsession.     

The reason for this reluctance is obvious: Their credibility – their most precious asset, even in this hyperpartisan era – would be devastated. But if these powerful companies won’t self-correct or correct the records of others – and in some systematic, comprehensive way that can make a difference, not in dribs and drabs – especially on a matter of this importance, then their watchdog reputation gets thrown out the window.

And as far as I’m concerned, good riddance. But if the big national media can’t be relied on to play this role responsibly, who or what can? And can a democracy worthy of the name long survive without actors that can credibly set the record straight before the archives are fully open to historians years and even decades from now?

Moreover, we’re getting an example of how such flawed Mainstream Media performance could be a literally fatal flaw – and on mass level.  Specifically,  evidence has appeared throughout the CCP Virus pandemic that sweeping lockdown- and mask-wearing-centric mitigation strategy pursued in most of the country at the behest of the public health establishment was completely and tragically mistaken. (See, e.g., here.)  America’s major national news organizations have obviously bought in to the stay-at-home and mask-up claims, as shown, for example, by their near canonization of leading lockdowns proponent Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the federal government’s head immunologist and now President Biden’s top medical adviser. 

I’d like to believe that if conclusive evidence emerges invalidating this virus-fighting approach, and supporting measures with potentially greater effectiveness during future pandemics, the news would be trumpeted all over the Mainstream Media even if the federal government tried to hush it up.  But as of now, expressing the hope that the real story might become known looks like nothing so much as practicing quackery.  

Im-Politic: How Social Media Could Really Fight Misinformation

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censorship, Facebook, Fox News, Im-Politic, journalism, Mainstream Media, media bias, misinformation, NBC News, social media, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Twitter

During the last three weeks alone, major national news organizations have issued important corrections admitting that they’ve gotten two front-page stories completely wrong, and another has been caught red-handed in a comparably important misstep.

Contrary to two New York Times reports, the Biden administration has confirmed that there was never any credible intelligence indicating that Russia was paying Taliban-linked militants in Afghanistan bounties for killing American soldiers – and therefore no good reason for former President Trump to raise the issue with Russian officials. Contrary to claims in the Times, the Washington Post, and NBC News, the FBI never warned former New York City Mayor and Trump personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani that he was being “targeted” (i.e., “used”) in a Russian misinformation campaign. And contrary to Fox News, the Biden administration has no plans to require Americans to reduce their consumption of red meat sharply.

And it’s not like these are the only badly dropped balls by such news organizations in recent years – or even close. Moreover, since there are no evident penalties for such incompetence or bias (or both), there’s no reason to suppose that the media’s performance will impove significantly. Indeed, it’s clear that the most troubling kinds of “Who guards the guardians?” questions are being raised by these incidents, since it’s the news organizations themselves who – sensibly – are supposed to serve as our democracy’s watchdogs over its other main instit utions. Unless you want any government agencies, at any level, stepping in to play this role?

But perhaps not all hope is lost – at least in principle. For there are powerful actors in America who have tried to stop the spread of misinformation: Facebook and Twitter. As widely known, they’ve taken it on themselves to identify cases of misinformation, label them for users, and on a regular basis punish the perps by limiting their access to their enormous and influential platforms. Why can’t they apply the same policies and practices to journalists and even entire news organizations that admit major mistakes, or whose mistakes have been admitted by politicians or others who have made or benefited from consequent allegations?

Any number of criticisms can be made about how these social media giants currently go about fighting misinformation, ranging from their questionable expertise on subjects they rule on, to the biases they bring to these exercises, to the broader matter of whether most of the transgressions they’ve spotlighted are misinformation at all – as opposed to expressions of opinion or interpretations or analyses of events or data that are completely legitimate.

But when it comes to journalistic retractions or corrections, none of these problems should arise – because the error has already been acknowledged. Similarly, it should be easy for such technologically advanced companies to track and tag repeat offenders, whether individuals or entire organizations, with contemporary versions of (truly deserved) Scarlet Letters.

Equally easy should be justifying suspending them or kicking them off for good if they don’t mend their ways. Indeed, it would be a valuable service to the reading, viewing, and listening public, and because the use of social media is so crucial to news organizations’ business models, would create powerful incentives for journalists to use anonymous sources in particular much more responsibly.

Ideally, in a free market system, quality news would eventually and consistently prevail over the alternative by customers rewarding the good performers with bigger audiences that fattened their bottom lines, and penalizing the bad performers by tuning them out. But for whatever reason or combination of reasons (like growing partisanship or more general political polarization, and the resulting tendency of news consumers to follow only ideologically congenial news outlets), it’s not happening. And when news organizations do report on their industry critically, they rarely shine the spotlight on themselves – and wind up in “Coke versus Pepsi”-like dogfights, or thinly disguised ideological vendettas.

Since in theory, anyway (yes, I keep using this kind of qualification), the social media companies aren’t competing directly with either legacy or on-line news organizations, their misinformation monitoring needn’t be so self-interested. And if they stuck to calling out admitted corrections and retractions or other unmistakably debunked scoops, they’d steer clear of any genuine controversy.

Maybe just as important: If Facebook and Twitter won’t reorient their content policing to focus on or even simply add this relatively simple task, everyone will be entitled to wonder whether their main concern all along has been fighting misinformation, or simply the kinds they don’t like.

Glad I Didn’t Say That! Quickest Foreign Policy Study Ever?

Tags

Biden administration, foreign policy, Glad I Didn't Say That!, Kamala Harris, Mainstream Media, Politico, The Washington Post

“Harris gets a crash course on foreign policy.”

– Politico, February 26, 2010

 

“Kamala Harris is playing an unusually large role in shaping Biden’s

foreign policy.”

– The Washington Post, March 8, 2021 Politico, February 26, 2010

 

(Sources: “Harris gets a crash course on foreign policy,” by Eugene Daniels and Natasha Bertrand, Politico, February 26, 2021, Harris gets a crash course on foreign policy – POLITICO and “Kamala Harris is playing an unusually large role in shaping Biden’s foreign policy,” by Olivier Knox, The Washington Post, March 8, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/03/08/daily-202-kamala-harris-is-playing-an-unusually-large-role-shaping-bidens-foreign-policy/)