Two very distinct news stories in my feed this morning seem to share something intrinsic. The first involves the challenge facing the (unelected) Federal Reserve:
Resolving “tension” between high inflation and still-elevated unemployment is the most urgent issue facing the Federal Reserve right now, Fed Chair Jerome Powell said Wednesday, acknowledging the central bank’s two goals are in potential conflict.
“This is not the situation that we have faced for a very long time and it is one in which there is a tension between our two objectives…Inflation is high and well above target and yet there appears to be slack in the labor market,” Powell said at a European Central Bank forum, an apparent reference to the 1970s bout of U.S. “stagflation” that combined high unemployment and fast-rising prices.
The worry is that the Fed might have “to make trade-offs between the two” metrics. Not sufficiently considered (to the degree it’s mentioned at all) is that those “trade-offs” are people’s lives. People around the planet are sending out market signals, and somehow we’ve put a handful of technocrats in the position of collecting the signals and deciding on the trade-offs themselves. How in the world do they presume to have sufficient information to make such decisions?
Remember, by the way, that this conversation was with other central-bank institutions. With this supranational cabal making decisions about its own self-selected metrics, turn to the second story:
YouTube says it has shut two German channels of Russian state broadcaster RT in a move centering on alleged COVID-19 misinformation, a decision that drew threats of retaliation from Russia on Wednesday.
YouTube, which is owned by Google, said RT’s German branch had received a “strike” for uploading material that violated YouTube’s standards on COVID-19 misinformation, and as a consequence was suspended from uploading new videos to its channel.
“During this suspension, RT DE tried to circumvent this restriction by using another YouTube channel to upload its videos,” which resulted in both channels being terminated for violating YouTube’s conditions of use, it added.
Put aside the fact that the malefactor, here, is Russia, because many of us could be (and have been) treated in like fashion whenever we’ve done anything worthy of Big Tech note. Putting the best light on YouTube’s action, the division of Google is simply making “trade-offs” between the value of free-flowing information and the value of accurate information (as defined by Big Tech).
In both cases, we see the same progressive urge toward dominance by an elite. The decision-making is consolidated, and a small, powerful group makes the call for everybody because people and natural communities cannot be trusted to make decisions for themselves.
The implicit catch, of course, is that the elite are both people, and no good explanation is on offer for why we can trust them uniquely. One suspects that their decisions will rarely be made at the expense of their own natural community.
Featured image by Andrew Stutesman on Unsplash.
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I can’t help but wonder whether the ideologies directing our domestic politics affect the amount of coverage this sort of incident gets:
[Open full post]An estimated 49 people, including women and children, were killed in a two-hour-long attack by Muslim Fulani herdsman who “came in large numbers and began shooting at anything on sight,” according to the priest, who spoke to Middle Belt Times on condition of anonymity because he serves in the region.
Horror of horrors! They have a clip of Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis actually saying that people should be able to make their own decisions! The imagery is especially laughable given that, as I noted earlier, crime has fallen below the national rate in Florida under DeSantis’s leadership.
[Open full post]Stop what you are doing and watch this immediately. If you are ready to remove Ron DeathSantis from office retweet this new ad and make sure everyone can see it. pic.twitter.com/AyaHQ77fqs
— Remove Ron (@RemoveRon) September 29, 2021
The mainstream media — represented for this post by Brian Amaral of the Boston Globe — may not know what is to blame for the increase in violent crime across the country, but they sure know who:
In 2019, a Rhode Island man released from a life crack-dealing sentence under the First Step Act, a criminal justice reform signed into law by President Trump, was accused of stabbing a man to death at a Providence bar. Joel Francisco has pleaded not guilty in the death of Troy Pine.
Oddly, the article doesn’t mention that progressives love to cite harsh sentences for crack-related crimes as evidence of systemic racism.
[Eric Bronson, dean of the School of Justice Studies at Roger Williams University,] points to a deep sense of anger in the country, part of which political leaders, like Trump, fostered.
“When you have politicians telling you to rough people up, that does have a direct effect on human behavior,” Bronson said.
By “political leaders like Trump,” presumably Bronson and Amaral mean Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters, and Barack Obama.
The truth is that a quick look at the relevant FBI data produces no easy answers. Some states where the “defund the police” rhetoric was strong saw below-average increases, or even decreases, in violent crime (like Oregon), while others saw above-average increases (like Minnesota). Meanwhile heavy-lockdown California saw no big increase, while heavy-lockdown Michigan saw a big jump. (Red-state bogeyman Florida, by the way, dipped below the national average for violent crime in 2019 for the first time since the earliest records in 1985 and didn’t see much increase in 2020.)
The most reasonable conclusion is that all of the various factors play a role and then intermix with local issues and local culture in different ways.
That makes it entirely unreasonable that Amaral’s article spends no time talking about Rhode Island policies. Note, for example, that the article does not contain the word, “gang,” much less the Community Safety Act that took effect in Providence in the summer of 2017. The timeline is conspicuous, because unlike the national bump in violent crime from 2019 to 2020, Rhode Island’s increase has been steady since 2018.
In fact, we can get more specific. “Violent crime” divides into two categories, with homicide and aggravated assault shooting up since 2018 in the Ocean State (the homicide rate doubled during that time) and rape and robbery dropping along with property crimes.
With that information, consider this paragraph striving to blame “national trends” and (of course) “guns” for Rhode Island’s increase:
Many crime experts and law enforcement officials point to the social disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and the wide availability of guns as contributors to the national trends that are playing out in Rhode Island. According to [Attorney General Peter] Neronha, when going to a shooting scene, it’s not unusual to see placards labeling upwards of 20 shell casings on the ground.
“Upwards of 20 shell casings” is not an indication that somebody did something reckless because his or her access to a gun was too easy. It’s an indication of a deliberate attack or a shootout. That probably means gangs.
Perhaps we’ll start seeing that word again when there’s a way to blame gang violence on a Republican, whereas anything Rhode Island–specific can only be blamed on Democrats.
Featured image by Maxim Hopman on Unsplash.
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When I wrote this yesterday, I was speaking from personal perspective:
… the price in a transaction between two people has to account for what they both value, and sometimes price and value can be inversely related. …
The purity of [Jordan] Peterson’s currency won’t suddenly lead him to pay five times as much for things that people are willing to give him at cost because they made them for love of the craft or to hand over an equal sum to somebody who gives him a gift for love of the giving.
From its beginning nearly 20 years ago, Anchor Rising has been a mission-driven labor of love. No matter what, it will go on in some form and at some level of effort.
That said, the Peterson conundrum mentioned above is real. We need this — Rhode Island needs this — to become something more than a labor of love. Because it’s a labor of love, every dollar you give us will be maximized and amplified through our efforts.
To clarify those efforts, our goal with Anchor Rising is to provide news, analysis, and perspectives that would otherwise not be voiced, but without which our state will surely fail. We’re not here to grab eyeballs with clickbait claims. We’re not here to jump on bandwagons because that will get us attention. We’re fully conservative and ready to fight the Left, but we want to make sure the information and opinions you see here are substantiated and contribute to improvement of the Ocean State.
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Featured image by Lucas Sankey on Unsplash.
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Mike Stenhouse, CEO RI Freedom & Prosperity, shares his perspective regarding the management by Rhode Island government of Covid19 money received from the federal government. The distribution of monies has been delayed and speculates that a struggle for control of the money between general assembly leadership and the executive branch is at the root of this delay. How the money is to be used is part of this struggle.
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You can insist it’s immoral or simply scoff as if these folks don’t count, but this is simply the sort of thing that happens when radicals seize control:
A potential lurch to the left in Germany’s election on Sunday is scaring millionaires into moving assets into Switzerland, bankers and tax lawyers say.
If the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), hard-left Linke, and environmentalist Greens come to power, the reintroduction of a wealth tax and a tightening of inheritance tax could be on the political agenda.
It’d be interesting to know whether financial advisors of various sorts have seen an increase in requests for an exit strategy since the last election and, in particular, Matt Brown’s latest announcement.
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To be honest, there isn’t much content to the topic, yet, but Rhode Islanders may find themselves triggered by the Epoch Times’ headline on a Reuters article featuring our former governor, Gina Raimondo: “US Commerce Chief to Push Investment in Domestic Economy.”
“For America to compete globally, we must invest domestically—in American workers, American businesses, and American innovation,” Raimondo will say at the Washington Economic Club, according to excerpts from the speech. …
Raimondo’s prepared excerpts say she will argue China’s R&D spending requires a response: “We must expand R&D investments and move innovations from the lab to the marketplace at 21st century speed.”
This may sound encouraging to conservative ears, but it requires some translation.
In the Ocean State, we know from painful experience that when Raimondo talks about “investment,” she means giving government more leverage in the economy. As an “investor,” a Raimondo-style government isn’t expressing confidence in you so much as confidence in bureaucrats’ ability to manage you.
She’s precisely that sort of progressive who thinks we must compete with China by becoming more like China, which is to say centrally managed. An “investment” in workers means telling them what jobs they should take. An investment in businesses means government picks favorites with whom to work (with a nice little boost taken off the top for the politicians’ careers). An investment in innovation means government officials will tilt the playing field in favor of ideas that they like or that interest them.
That is not and should not be how America functions. Moreover, it isn’t a strategy by which we’ll be able to compete. Even if (in theory) the Chinese Communist approach works for China, it won’t work for America because our culture and systems would require an impossibly radical change to make it function. The resistance alone will doom the effort, and time and propaganda spent cracking down on the regime’s domestic enemies will undermine the cause.
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The Democrat candidate for Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe (who is the former governor and a long-time Democrat Party insider going back to the Bill Clinton White House) said the quiet part out loud during a recent debate:
I’m not going to let parents come into schools and actually take books out and make their own decisions. … I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.
You see, that’s for teachers unions and radical activist groups to decide, not you foolish parents. You just pay the bills.
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Related to the controversy in North Smithfield over analogizing between mask mandates and the Holocaust, well-known conservative and Jewish writer Dennis Prager’s latest column is titled, “Who Would Hide a Jew If Nazis Took Over America?“:
So, then, here are two questions for American Jews to ponder:
If a Nazi-like doctrine took over America, and you could knock on the door of someone who obeyed all government orders regarding masks, regardless of their rationality, or someone who questioned government authority and obeyed few or none of its mask orders—on whose door would you knock? If you were given the choice between knocking on the door of an atheist professor and the door of an Evangelical pastor or a Catholic priest—on whose door would knock?
Two key points: 1. Most people will fail hard moral tests, but those who emphasize morality (e.g., priests) will be more likely not to, and 2. The kind of people who’ll fight against oppression are by definition going to be eccentrics.
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